Driving through southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio yesterday, having run through the last disc of Victorian Britain, I had to resort to the radio. Scan scan scan.

Near Detroit, this resulted in several Urban Contemporary (or whatever the genre is called these days) hits, quite a bit of talking about politics, some of the “only alternative” genre [when did "The Only New Music" come to imply "...That You Heard in 1995"?], a couple of Classical stations, one or two large-format Christian ones, a couple of “College” stations that are in fact national NPR affiliates, and one Old and one New Country station. Maybe a Latin one in there somewhere.

In Findlay, which is down south of Toledo, we have a very different mix: Classic Rock has appeared and come to dominate; the one or two College stations sound like college kids are running them; no Classical; no Latin; five or six Country stations of various denominations; Christianity as staticky rumbly witnessing, preaching and ranting, not as polished national networks.

Suppose you sampled the complete radio offerings along cross-country transect. Say the entire length of US 6. What you would do is record every channel a standard car radio could receive, full-time, continuously in time and space.

How would you measure the diversity of the results? How might that measure be distributed? What would you expect? What might surprise you? What patterns, in other words, would arise?

And to get back to my thoughts from around Findlay, Ohio yesterday: where along the path might you expect to hear modern American-style Country [what do they actually call the new music video stuff?] sung in a foreign language?

I found myself wanting to hear it in Arabic. Or Farsi. Or French, even. I find the music catchy and the lyrics cunning — containing some of the best of modern light verse — and not at all hackneyed if you try pay attention. The best candidate for export (since rap), in other words.

I await the multilingual result with interest. And I am curious to know where along my transect it will first appear.