Here are some recommendations for podcasts and videos that have lately become available. First up is a recent episode of Wanging On with Graham Norton and Maria McErlane. Graham has an anecdote about his first show on the BBC being interrupted when the pope died, and then he and Maria field dilemmas from a mother who … Continue reading Dilemmas, Diets, and Dick
Books
Every Day a Little Death
I bought this book last year and I realized that I never wrote about it. It’s an anthology of short crime stories, each one of which is related in some way to a Stephen Sondheim song. But not simply related to a song, most of the stories are filled with sly and not so sly … Continue reading Every Day a Little Death
Book Recommendations Galore
In Saturday’s Q&A at E-V.com there were several questions about books and the answers returned a wealth of book recommendations. Here they are. Please note that I have not altered the book links which take you to Amazon without any accompanying associate ID, so nobody earns a fee if you end up buying any of … Continue reading Book Recommendations Galore
November 3, 1956
In November 1956 we were living in the Great Stone House on my grandparents’ farm just outside Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, but as my mother had been brought up in Richland and my father on a farm just outside Richland, and my mother’s parents still lived in Richland, we visited that borough frequently. On November 3 Richland's … Continue reading November 3, 1956
Where’s Norman?
Here’s an excerpt from Geoff Emerick’s book, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, where he talks about replacing their longtime sound engineer Norman Smith, who had left to produce Pink Floyd. Emerick was only eighteen years old at the time and was apprehensive that the Fab Four might not … Continue reading Where’s Norman?
Newton’s Apple
One of Apple’s most famous bombs was the Newton. Released to much hype, it simply didn’t live up to its expectations. It was able to recognize one’s handwriting, whether one wrote on it with printed block lettering or cursive, but it did this by comparing what you wrote to a list of 10,000 words stored … Continue reading Newton’s Apple
The Woz Plan
I’m enjoying David Pogue’s book Apple: The First 50 Years, as it’s bringing back a lot of memories. Not that I was an Apple fan during its first 25 years or so. When I first discovered computers in the early 1980s, I pretty much avoided Apple and found them annoying. Unlike Microsoft, which I hated … Continue reading The Woz Plan
Terry and the Parents
When we were doing the morning program over the PA system in Elco High School as The Irregulars during our junior year (1965-66), we sometimes did book reviews. So it was that when I noticed that a new James Bond movie was being released, I decided to review the novel it was based on a … Continue reading Terry and the Parents
The Subway Vigilante
When I was going to New York City fairly frequently during the 1970s and into the early 1980s to see Broadway shows, concerts, and operas, the city was going through one of its worst eras. Street crime was rampant and the murder rate was climbing practically every year. Two of the worst areas for crime … Continue reading The Subway Vigilante
Withering Heights
I noticed that there is a new movie version of Wuthering Heights being released shortly. I’ve never read the novel, nor have I seen any of the previous movie adaptations, not even the classic 1939 film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The year 1939 was such a stellar year for films, wasn’t it? My favorite … Continue reading Withering Heights