Tonight I came face-to-face with mortality and it has nothing to do with yesterday’s visit to a doctor. Driving home from work I saw approaching headlights and I just kept motoring along. Then I realized it was a snowplow in need of some space, some of my space. I pulled over in a pile of slush and braked. My third winter here and my first encounter with a plow and not a big beast of a plow like you would’ve seen in Upstate New York but a smaller plow but still with a wide blade. That it snows here isn’t a surprise. That it has snowed as much as it has this winter is news to me and many of my friends.

This morning I dropped by the Long Neck Diner for breakfast with Colonel Hyle, his wife Linda, and their friend and political activist, Donna Gordon. Donna’s husband may be the most distant relative I’ve ever met, likely connected a dozen generations ago with a common ancestor. Unlike Clans Donald, Gant and Carmichael, the Gordons have been described as a “Department”. The description came from my buddy, Jim Grant, a leader of Clan Grant in North America. Yet some websites say there is a Clan Gordon. The dispute may have origins in Normandy, where the Gordons appear to have migrated from a millennium ago. Of migrations, the Hyles have been in Southern Delaware 7 years and the Gordons for ten. They insist this is the worst winter they’ve experienced since immigrating. As it’s my third I can say number two was worse than one and three is worse than two.

How quickly the media members have also forgotten about “climate change”. From my perspective we’re witnessing it and while it isn’t warmer I’m just as alarmed when I get the Cooperative’s heating tab in the mail.

I’ve been collecting some thoughts from friends the last few days. My pal, Gene Morski, formerly of the New York Jets and a formidable philosopher, if not football player, offered this Monday about the Tim Tebow controversy. You know of Tebow? Football star, Christian and all around good guy, his mother made a choice to give him life 23 years ago against the advice of doctors. Mom and son are scheduled to make this point starring in a 30 second commercial during the Super Bowl. The women in comfortable shoes (a line from Robin Williams, describing N.O.W.) are pitching a fit because Mrs. Tebow made a choice but a choice they don’t like.

Meanwhile a man performing in the halftime show once was accused of trafficking in child pornography. While he wasn’t convicted this is the third show in recent years with such a cloud hanging over a performer. The late Michael Jackson and a band mate of another headliner had lived with some uncomfortable allegations. We operate under a presumption of innocence but maybe N.O.W. and the NFL could find someone else? We must also note many of the performers appearing at the Super Bowl have or have had issues with substance abuse. Some even promote or have promoted substance abuse for the young. Gene asks why not any outrage here. My answer, friend, the women in comfortable shoes have something far more sinister in mind for babies in mommy’s wombs than substance abuse.

Another observation from another friend, named Rick, suggesting President Obama has different accents for different audiences. Rick wonders why a Southern Dialect when in New Hampshire. For the President, Rick says, the south is Wrigley Field. Mr. Obama also likes to drop the “g’s” in his “ing’s”. Or to offer a “We’re gonna” instead of a “We’re going to”. First, school kids are recruited into the cult and then he talks like a labor thug in Chicago. Great! There’s an old sketch form the Rush Limbaugh Show about the 2008 Presidential sweepstakes. It was noticed by many even in the loyal liberal media that Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s accent was chameleon like to suit regional audiences. In the sketch it’s amusing to hear her speak as a Jewish mother or aboriginal American.

I guess the politicians migrate much like the rest of us. The difference for Mr. Obama is when faced with a snowplow, he can part the road.

Some more folks have asked me what my thoughts are about this tempest in a teapot at Mary Landrieu’s office. You had some folks trying to get to the truth of a matter with some underground methods.

Remember ABC’s 20/20 investigation of Food Lion? ABC got reporters hired to work at Food Lion in hopes of finding dangerous practices in the store’s butcher shops. When Food Lion sued the “good” liberals the network contended the means justified the ends. In other words, someone could eat poisoned meat and die and the chain wasn’t going to open its doors for Diane Sawyer. ABC claimed it had to go underfround.

I’ll put you another higher case. It’s 1944 and you live in Eastern Europe. Next door is a large camp and there is a terrible and constant stench. You fear the worst and believe you’ve an obligation to find out if a death camp is operating next door. You don the uniform of the SS and enter the camp. Are you wrong? You aren’t SS and you’re entering the camp on false pretenses. In effect, you’ve lied in hopes of saving lives.

Over at MSNBC the deviants are condemning the actions in Louisiana. Another example of the left’s sick and twisted attempts to create a double standard.

What is the price of national survival? As I write this the post-mortems are being scribbled about the “Baltimore Summit”, the dog and pony show produced by the Republicrats in a crumbling city where Francis Scott Key scribbled The Star Spangled Banner. A few miles down the road the debating society continues going through the motions like so many priests performing ritual after long forgetting the faith.

This week Scott Brown parleyed with the appeaser, John McCain, and Brown pledged he would sometimes vote with the Democrats. So what is new with the latest hope and change? He’ll get a driver, a staff of sycophants and assurances of a future lobbying if the voters of Massachusetts in turn throw him to the curb. Brown “got his”. He’s now set for life. Sarah Palin “got hers” as well. A book, the keys to Fox News and 100,000 dollars to speak at a contrived Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

What have you gotten? Go stand over there and wait for the humiliating questions about why you were downsized.

Somewhere in my collection of holy books a Fellow says something about sacrifice. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, John 15:13. Many of my friends like to tell me the United States is a Christian nation. Whoa, nowhere in our founding documents is any reference to Jesus, however. These founders were influenced by what we call Judeo-Christian culture and they were, per capita, much more familiar with faith than our current society, fueled by sex, money and advertising. Our founders were primarily libertarians but the Judeo-Christian culture they were immersed in recognized sacrifice and service to others.

How many people do you know now serving in government with any resemblance to the earlier ethic?

We don’t have the time for some ethereal long term change. In a few short years the

Chinese will surpass us in the last area where we still lead, military might. Google discovered the Chinese espionage efforts and informed your government that our business interests, security and military secrets were being purloined. What have you heard from your government in response?

This week you heard about tax credits for small businesses. Very nice but the government won’t spend any less when these are adopted. You’ll make up the difference or the folks in Washington will borrow more from the, you guessed it, Chinese. Those people chain schoolchildren as young as six to desks and have them make fireworks. Occasionally the school and its human contents explode. Those deviants condemn anyone disagreeing and the political prisoner immediately joins an organ donor list. If there is a need for a kidney on the politburo the trial is expedited. Those deviants have no shame about picking the few remains of corporate America, the Pentagon and Congress clean through savvy high tech computer attacks. It’s because the Chinese graduate 60,000 engineers every year and we’ve got Princeton offering courses in Sixteenth Century cross dressing (I’m not making this up).

Where does this leave us? You know, it’s going to cost me a lot but some sacrifices have to be made. Shock therapy and changes in government are necessary. Anyone with any experience in elected office must be banished from the ballot box. We need to start over and we need to go back to the day when the Constitution was ratified and there were no departments of Energy, Education and Labor. All social programs and I know this hurts a great many people, all social programs must for now cease. No greater love has a man for his country than to sacrifice his/her, “I got mine”. If you need something for the family, see your pastor or get involved. Better we suffer now for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.

Someone in Washington needs to tell the Chinese they owe us for saving their bottoms in World War Two. Then we call the balance sheet even. The next time the Chinese start poking around where they don’t belong we slap them silly while we still can. We slap the naughties in Pakistan and Afghanistan silly as well and we wrap up the wars and bring the troops home. Then we build some new nuclear plants and extract the natural gas from the Marcellus Shale and tell the corporate world there is cheap energy in the United States. Then we tell the corporate world it gets a tax credit for exporting any goods made in the USA. And we won’t ask you to make up the difference. Government will cut spending.

There are 536 no good S.O.B.s in Washington and hundreds of thousands in support staff refusing the buy in to this project. They either get out of the way or we get out the tar and feathers.

I met Steve Hyle when he was helping to organize Tea Party brigades in Delaware. Less than a year ago and now it feels like I’ve known him for years. Steve is retired from the Air Force, used to be an academic and worked for Corning Glass. He even apparently once met my dad and his cronies at the McDonald’s in Cuba, New York. It was while Steve was trying to save his pet fish between his then home in Cleveland and his apartment in Corning. A story for another day. Lt. Colonel Hyle was the Executive Officer with the Thunderbirds and then later worked at the Pentagon, being the middle man between Congress and the Air Force. He even knew of Tiff’s stepfather, the legendary Colonel Harold Sutton “Bud” Coyle, Jr.

You can describe my life briefly. A well read blowhard from Western New York with a resume amounting to a travelogue of small rust belt cities. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn Steve was a member of the commission that investigated the first space shuttle disaster. We were filling up on cholesterol one morning at the Long Neck Diner when he casually made a mention. On this 24^th anniversary of the tragedy he came on-air for an hour to talk about the experience. During a break I showed him an old book from the Army Air Corps’ efforts in the South Pacific. It was from the unit of a relative who lost his life when downed by the Japanese. The telegram, informing the family of the loss, had been signed by a young Major who later commanded Strategic Air Command. Steve was the one surprised today. The man who signed the telegram is still alive and lives here!

The unusual threads that connect 308 million Americans…

I’m blessed with an amazing array of friends here. And it usually turns out we have a mutual acquaintance somewhere else. It’s how I landed here 2 and one half years ago. My friend, Kenn, has a brother, Mark, who lives in Ocean Pines. Mark has a friend named Walt who worked at ABC and knew a talk show opening was available. Within a couple of weeks on the job I realized Bruce Hermann was a friend. Like Steve Hyle, Bruce is a Midwesterner. It generally means honest. This is why they fit in so well in Lower Delaware and Maryland’s Lower Shore. Believe me, nobody native to this place is shy about saying what they’re thinking.

Driving to work today I almost felt embarrassed about what I do for a living. Some people work very hard. Some people would work very hard if they could find work. Me, I read some newspapers, watch some TV and then drive to work and spend 4 hours talking about what I’ve watched and read. Then every couple of weeks I get a check.

Life, by the way, is a series of diners, seafood shacks, pretty women and very little snow, with the exception of this weekend. Our reward, wouldn’t you know, for a couple of weeks of spring like weather. Did I mention I’m setting my alarm for Friday morning? Broadcasting from a pig roast in Bishopville, Maryland, and do so because as you all know someone has to do it. I suspect I set an alarm no more than one half dozen times each year.

I haven’t gotten rich in life. I haven’t enjoyed the long term love of one good woman and my health is starting to show signs of middle age. Lord, it could’ve been much worse.

From time to time I open a website or a newspaper and see the words of a respected friend.  It happened today and Craig Shirley makes some great points about our political divide:

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/28/no-confidence-in-obama/

When I was a boy I was exposed to the teachings of at least half a dozen Christian denominations. Mainly through Vacation Bible Schools, which my parents used as a free babysitting service. It was at one of these “schools” where a teacher told my brother, “God only answers the prayers of Christians”. My parents were so incensed they never sent us back to the same independent Baptist Church. For the record, my parents didn’t work for MSNBC and while they weren’t regular church goers they’d grown up in families where Christianity was always hanging like a heavy cloud of fog. Then they grew up and became modern people.

The reactions of mom and dad to Mrs. Bixby’s statement would today be called the politically correct approach. We don’t wish to denigrate anyone else’s choices, judge their decisions and hurt their feelings, however. “I am the way”, are words most Christians and religious scholars have with at least a passing familiarity. I suppose we could say the Lord (mine, maybe not yours) was speaking only to a small group of dedicated followers. A Jewish man speaking to a Jewish culture and he didn’t really go into details about this applying to the indigenous people of Africa, East Asia or North America. Yet I would argue the stories about his ministry involve people of different cultures who offer Him deference and great faith. He often rewards the outsiders for recognizing Him. Evidence, perhaps, of God speaking to all.

Recently the televangelist, Pat Robertson, invoked the wrath of the media and Politically Correct Police when he suggested Haiti suffers because of an old pact with the devil. It’s fact that Haitian slaves, desperate for freedom, conducted a voodoo ceremony not long before breaking their bonds. It’s estimated as many as 50,000 slaves were dying every year under the French lash but what Robertson is talking about does have a Biblical foundation. If you turn away from God, he removes his protection from you. See captivity in Babylon and Egypt. Hollywood assures us if you abandon God under duress you’re off the hook. See John Derek taking his woman back from Edward G. Robinson. Hollywood sees the Bible through the prism of English speaking parliamentary culture. Elections and liberty were rare when the Bible was being compiled. Liberty was what you gained through a faithful relationship with God, even if not during life in this temporal realm.

A guest on my program Monday raised some serious questions about the bounds of faith. The man and his brother are promoting what they believe will be a Christian “Woodstock”. They suggest one million people will come to Delaware next summer for a Christian music festival. They’ve been labeled confidence men, naïve or delusional. They’ve been praying for one million and they challenge our faith because if we dismiss their devotion to prayer do we also dismiss a major underpinning of our faith? Only hours before I had read these words: “Then he asked them, ‘Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?’”, Mark, Chapter 4, verse 40. You’ll excuse me if I’m using my Catholic Bible?

When I was home from work I turned on my television to find a show about the plague as it ravished Europe during the age of England’s Edward III. A distraught populace believed it couldn’t enter heaven without last rites. A point arrived when there were few available to minister to the sick and dying. Some turned away from God and sought answers elsewhere. A majority, it would appear, found even more solace in faith. Culturally it was a radically different time from that we now live. I’m also reminded of the Western military commanders in more modern times battling Islamic insurgents. A century ago some of these commanders spread gossip that bullets were being soaked in pig fat. The enemy fear factor grew exponentially, never mind the fat would’ve ruined some well designed firearms. The generals found a way to successfully conduct psychological warfare. The Muslim world according to our prism is behind the times. It dismisses Darwin, atom splitting (unless it vanquishes enemies of Islam) and doubts about God and His judgment. Islam encompasses races of men from around the world but only if these races have adopted the faith, which combines religion, government and culture. There isn’t any room for multiculturalism.

So much for our modern condemnations of Mrs. Bixby, Pat Robertson and many of the books comprising our faith and it may ultimately explain why political correctness loses the war of ideologies. The result being carnage far worse than anything ever witnessed by Haitians. May God have mercy on our souls?

There are times when I write about some events past and I get a reaction from old friends and family. Some will tell me I’m all wrong about something that happened and I’m reminded of something I saw a few weeks ago. A literary critic, Dr. Stanley Fish, blogged about differences between biography and autobiography and offers there is a key difference. The first deals with facts. The second is our recollection of events, our impressions and the effect the past has had on living. Research scientists confirm we construct memory in ways almost as unique as snowflakes fall. No two people perceive shared experiences quite the same way.

Yes, I remember childhood. There was Maureen O’Hara, Walter Pidgeon and Roddy McDowall. O.K., wrong story.

I spent a lot of time listening to the old folks when I was a kid. Now I do the writing and the talking, I guess, because I did so little when younger. The story that follows is based on recollections gathered from previous generations of my mother’s family. This time I would welcome corrections and additions. I had a great-grandfather of Irish ancestry. I don’t know if he came from Ireland or for how many generations his family had been in the United States, but at some point when he was very young his parents died. Not at all unusual in an era when mortality was very high. The boy was adopted by a farm family. Evidence suggests he wasn’t adopted out of love but because the family needed more labor in the fields. You could say he became an indentured servant. You could also say he had no such thing as a childhood.

When he grew older he ran away from the farm. Later, he would continue farming, married and raised many, many children. Many girls among them and the children left school following the 8th Grade to help the family on the farm. It wasn’t an easy life. My grandmother shared a story one day some 25 years ago. She sat at her kitchen table, smoke curling around her fingers from an ever present Kool, and she told me about the winter of popcorn. The family had so very little but an abundance of popcorn. Handfuls would be popped before bed and the following morning it was breakfast. Popcorn with some milk poured over it and this saved the family from starving one cold Upstate New York winter. We talk about our current economic hard times and forget we aren’t far removed from some very, very difficult days.

Eventually most of the children grew up and left the farm. It was the point where my great-grandfather made a decision. He packed up and left. He wasn’t a drinker. He wasn’t a womanizer. He just packed some clothes, went to town and rented an apartment, where he lived until death. I’m told my great-grandmother spent many years begging him to come home. He never did. He never took up with another woman and he stayed away from the sauce but he never went home.

Many years ago I was walking some streets when I suddenly stopped and was hit by a feeling. It said, “It was here”. For all I know it wasn’t the spot where he spent his last years but something within me told me I was very close. I looked up and surveyed the apartments above Main Street. And I wondered.

Psychologists could dissect this far beyond anything I can offer, however. I believe there was a man who’d known great and tragic loss. He kept it at bay while raising children and then the day arrived… His sense of what might have been gripped him. It had always been with him. He spent his last years with his thoughts and he didn’t share them with others. I don’t know, as you can see I’m using “closure” to fill in the blanks. I live in a different and confessional age. Email, the Internet and Facebook allow us to bare our souls and our wounds. For all the criticism of technology, if it allows us to lance some psychological boils I can’t object.

The radio station I work at isn’t a production studio.  Or at least I’m not.  The station has such a studio and it’s where we record the messages you hear from many of our wonderful merchants.  This is how the company makes money.  A radio station is a business, as is a diner, a hardware store and a bookshop.  People will appear on a show and then three days later telephone and ask for a copy.  Here’s a thought:  Buy a blank cassette and have your wife/husband/sister roll on the show on your home stereo.  FYI, we no longer use cassettes.  If I honored every request for a “tape” I wouldn’t be able to host a show.  See volume one called “Radio”.  You don’t ask the bank if you can get a copy of the security video every time you cash a check and the banker would logically explain he or she has to count money and file transactions for other people.  I do make some copies for folks.  Our paying customers and I’m happy to help as they help keep the lights on. 

Two, as I said in a previous blog post, why do people insist on bringing their kids along to see the radio station?  Again, if I worked at a steel mill you wouldn’t.  And the staffers here actually are doing more than performing as background extras.  The folks in the business office are here because they’ve got jobs.  Modern business has no need for the superfluous.  Quick notes to visitors, the hardworking people in our office aren’t babysitters.

My fellow hosts may have a different set of standards for guests and that’s fine, but I perform best in my own personal comfort zone.  I’ve got two guest chairs.  When you tell me you’ll be coming for a studio interview with a friend and then arrive with four, excuse me, but why?  I explain to people that for me two is pretty much the limit.  They tell me they understand and then show up with a marching band. 

While I speak only as a representative of myself and not as a representative of workplace policy I need to also note I’m not a reference librarian and not a social worker.  Someone called me today with a problem that could easily be addressed by the constituent desk of an elected politician in less than 5 minutes.  Which is what I did, I called Mr. Carper’s office and talked to a member of his staff and gave the telephone number of the person who originally called me.  Problem solved and you really didn’t need me as middleman.

Do you know I’ve told people about these constituent desks and then they ask me for the Senator’s telephone number?  Hey, I’ve got the same telephone book you do.  I host a show.  Dial zero for the operator. 

A priest I know was swapping stories with me about our families. This must have been quite some years ago and when I rattled off some events in my personal history he smiled and shook his head. “It’s amazing you turned out as well as you did”, he explained. It brought a chuckle at the time but it’s only now I realize my family was providing me with a gold mine for understanding the modern world.

My dad liked to play cards. He went to the point of building a room off the back of the garage where he and his friends could play some pretty high stakes poker. He did this not once but at two different homes we lived at. When I was but a wee lad at 21 Prospect Street I could wander into the backroom and smell the stale beer and the odor of cigars wafted far beyond the garage. There was an old refrigerator for storing the Genesee Beer and speakers wired into the main house pumped in the “Boots” Randolph, Johnny Cash and Theresa Brewer the men liked. They wouldn’t chase me away but instead ask me to get them a bottle from the refrigerator. “Hook” Tewilliger sometimes let me take a sip from his Schmidt’s. At some point some guy would fold and exclaim, “Too rich for my blood”.

The old man also took me to taverns. On weekends he would work odd jobs for extra cash and he had an old pickup, I believe it was a 54 Chevy but the old pickup trucks blend in memory at my advancing age. There were days he would take me along to pass him tools. On one such Saturday there wasn’t much work and we ended up at the Bradley House, or as my dad called it, Basil’s. The Bradley House was a Cuba, New York institution and Basil Congdon was the publican and long time friend of my old man.
We had some time to kill that Saturday, I guess, and it was likely my mom was just happy we weren’t in her way at home. Dad had a few pints of beer and Mrs. Congdon gave me a 16 ounce bottle of Orange Crush, which I promptly sucked down in short order. She warned me to be careful. I got sick. Tossing my cookies in a bar for the first time at the age of four or five I learned the meaning of eyes bigger than stomach.

Then some older kids walked in with a kitten. The cat needed a home. My dad was in pretty good spirits at this point and told me I could keep the little ball of fur. “Fang” became the newest member of our family on that day. Later we discovered he’d been weaned on booze by Basil’s regulars. This may explain the withdrawal symptoms and why Fang attacked my sister a few weeks later in order to get a bite of a Sloppy Joe Sandwich she was eating. Dad took Fang for a long ride down a short road and we never again saw the cat.

These are stories I shared today on the radio and just before sharing some of the words of Richard W. Rahn, a man currently writing a series about government for the libertarian Cato Institute. Two paragraphs were all I had the time to mention.
“Congress justifies all of this additional spending by claiming it increases jobs. This past week, the White House claimed that the stimulus bill “saved 2 million jobs,” but just before the stimulus bill was passed, the administration said the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent with the stimulus bill and 9 percent without it. Now, we have both the stimulus bill and an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent, which shows that the White House is developmentally challenged when it comes to basic arithmetic.
Suppose you over exercised and tore a muscle. The doctor performs a minor operation to repair it and then charges you $2,000 for the surgery, which you pay out of your own pocket. Now assume that there is a national medical care system in which the doctor is paid directly or indirectly by the government for the surgery. If the doctor is going to receive the same $2,000 fee, the government will have to tax you (or someone else) an additional $2,000, plus the cost of the paperwork and all the government procedures, which could be as little as another 30 percent, or $600. But the total price of the operation has gone from $2,000 to $2,600. The Washington politicians will say not to worry, because the government is only going to pay the doctor $1,700 and tax you an additional $2,300 (rather than your having to pay the doctor $2,000) and will claim the additional cost of the paperwork creates more (government) jobs.
More government jobs may be created, but both you and your doctor will have less money to spend in the private sector, thus killing at least an equal number of private jobs”, wrote Mr. Rahn.
What does this have to do with Orange Crush and kitties? First, the results from Massachusetts tell us the freewheeling spending in Washington is too rich for our blood. Eyes bigger than saucers represents our desire to take a supposed “gift” without realizing the cost can be unsettling.
Fang, well, we didn’t know anything about kitty. We didn’t know where kitty was from or whom kitty associated with. We just liked pretty kitty and voted for him in droves one Tuesday in November of 2008. Only later did we discover kitty wasn’t very social and disrupted the family.
Yeah, like voters my family was dysfunctional but we weren’t stupid and we could correct earlier mistakes. Scott Brown is just the beginning.

There are strange people hanging around radio stations and some of them don’t even work there. There was the night I walked into the parking lot and saw a strange car. A guy jumped out and started coming at me. He did no harm, well, aside from talking my ears off for 45 minutes when I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t surprised when the same person saw me leaving early a 9/12 Patriots meeting a few weeks ago. He raced down the stairs, across a street and two parking lots before he caught me and gave me a clipping from the Wall Street Journal, which I mentioned on-air two days earlier.

Dick Cavett recently shared a memory of Jack Benny. They were riding in a public elevator and Benny just got peppered with inane questions from people. Questions he had heard thousands of times. He smiled and answered them all. When the crowd was gone he turned to Cavett. “Kid, sometimes you just want to tell them to go **** off”, he said.

Somehow it doesn’t occur to people I get paid to talk between 3:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. and before the show I actually prepare things I’m going to talk about. I’ve really, really remained calm when someone calls at 2:55 and says they thought it would be the best time to call me. Please, give me your number; I’ll call you back at 2:55 A.M. When I hosted morning radio there were people who just couldn’t understand why I was awake at 2:00 A.M. Some of them would telephone me at 11:00 P.M. I was awake early because it takes me half an hour to drive to work following half an hour or more showering, shaving and brushing my teeth and sometimes I like to eat breakfast. And there were days the little elves didn’t show up and clip the stories and highlight the lines I need to quickly reference.

Then there are the people who want to come on and talk about some event they’re involved with and I know it’s just going to put people to sleep but I want to be a good community minded guy and I say they can come in at 4:00. They arrive at 3:30 with their kids and want to sit-in and watch. First, if I worked at a steel mill would you bring your kid? Secondly, I’m not a zoo exhibit. Then there are the folks who know better how radio works than I do. You can tell them there are two guest chairs and no one can see them, so two is the limit because people can’t keep track of all the invisible voices. Then these folks show up with an entourage and insist everyone must talk. Glad you know more than me about my business. In about five minutes you’ll be talking to no one else but the host and it may be hours before the audience returns. Again, thank you.

Tonight I was in my last commercial break and looked out into the parking lot and spotted a strange car. When I wrapped up the show it was still there with lights on. There was work for me in commercial production and when I next checked outside the car was gone. There was a piece of paper under one of my truck’s windshield wipers. It was a scatological cartoon. I still haven’t figured out of it’s the government applying a suppository to us or if it’s the Tea Party movement applying a suppository to the government. Yep, someone drove all the way to our rural and remote location to leave me a hand drawn cartoon.

When my patience is tried I think of the patience of Jack Benny.