Category Archives: Personally Speaking

I got to see “Nebraska” over the weekend in the Omaha theater that director Alexander Payne helped establish. He wasn’t there, though he was part of a couple of events helping open it. It’s a great film, by the way. Though its black and white stock lend it a needless artiness, there is power in [...]

I have a perfectly good reason I didn’t make it to the station tonight for my Friday night show on Radio CPR. I got mugged on the way there. I had a pretty good show planned, honest. Full of Halloween songs, psychobilly and old audio ads for horror movies. But I had barely gotten down [...]

The weather has been odd this summer on the Outer Banks. In a season when heat and humidity doesn’t quite describe the intensity of summer in Washington D.C. (where the newly purchased porch furniture went pretty much unused), the week began warm out here on the edge of North Carolina too. Then it got real [...]

Just over a week ago, a big full moon traveling a few thousand miles closer than usual made a big worldwide impression, especially from photographers with long lenses that made it seem like the orb would crash into Earth’s major landmarks. The moon also rose the next night. A much better job in creating a [...]

For any of those who may concerned about our time in Istanbul during its unrest, first reported here and now migrated to the Washington Post, I’m happy to say we’ve retreated far into the country’s interior by now. By that I mean caves. In a charming town named Goerme in the central Turkish region known [...]

The explosions sounded ominous. From mile marker 25.5, it could have been a confetti cannon going off at the finish line. Except that the leaders finished hours ago and there would be no reason to celebrate now. Maybe it was one of those metal-on-metal crashes that occasionally occur on  construction sites. But in the Back [...]

Close watchers of the blog may have noticed some changes in this site this week. Ads, once deflated on the site, have popped up again. Things look a little different. There is no splash of spam on the edges. And like the gaping hole in city street excavation, for one minute yesterday, the blog was [...]

Do tragedies have to become more horrific for them to register at all? Already this week there had been one mass shooting in a mall, now the kind of thing that goes forgotten after a few days. There’s no chance that the 27 dead in Newtown, Conn., will fade from memory. That 20 of the [...]