Why are Mark & Brian still on the radio?

Adam Carolla isn't doing himself any favors by running a week's worth of weak repeat segments and labelling it The Best of The Adam Carolla Show. Stripped of the extraneous chatter of morning radio and laid bare in all their thinness, his monotonal improvised "rants" and sophomoric "bits" don't play out well at all, and he's especially exposed when he tries to parody a professional AM deejay (a switch that Howard Stern would do with frightening skill when he was still on the radio) or strip club announcer (in a recurring segment), showing that despite his years as second banana on the "Loveline" program, Carolla's never mastered the vocal techniques or quick-witted improvisational skills that a radio pro relies on. We await the elevation of "sidekick" Danny Bonaduce.

But forget Carolla. Here's the question: What are Mark & Brian still doing on morning drive radio in Los Angeles?

The pair have obviously thrown in the towel. For more than a year now, they've wasted hours of valuable airtime, killing time by playing question-and-answer games with people on the phone and the studio crew. Hours.

Question: What links Lake Erie and The Hudson River?
Answer: The Erie Canal.

This goes on every morning: hours spent playing Trivial Pursuit with outdated Who Wants To Be A Millionaire sound effects, as if they're in a prison cell or bus station-- anywhere but a radio studio connected to a powerful transmitter. And this morning, they upped the time-killing ante, announcing they'll soon waste even more airtime with a version of Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader!

This pair of insincere old-school jocks from the Deep South got a mention in Tabloid Baby as the type of soft maudlin morning radio that was swept aside by Stern's arrival in the LA market. But now, with Stern in obscurity, M&B, like a two-headed version of Inside Edition, linger on toward their 20 year anniversary on 95.5 KLOS Radio, obviously sitting out til the end of their contract.

We haven't even mentioned that the final hour of each morning's show is often taken up by a replay of an interview they did in the Nineties (including a recent talk with dead man Don Knotts)!

Who's allowing them to kill time like a couple of retirees on a park bench?

Give the slot to Johnny Wendell. Let him go up against Bonaduce. That would make LA a morning radio town again.