Serial

How nice to have some like-minded friends. Like John, who has made me aware of Serial, a season-long, once-a-week episodic series of podcasts from This American Life, the wonderful public radio (and online) program of true stories.   The host of This American Life, Ira Glass, even made this video to help anybody who doesn’t understand podcasts or how to deal with them:


serialpodcast.org

thisamericanlife.org

Once a Farm Boy …

Brother Dennis sends this along, reminding me of how we would bring the cows in from pasture each night after school.  Our usual method would be to stop when we caught sight of them in the distance, then call them until they approached us. Or we might start calling if we couldn’t see them or find them at all.  Failing that, we would have to get behind them and chase them home.  This took place in the late 1940s well into the 1950s, from probably age five or six onward.  Here is a novel approach to this task:

Charlie and the Pod Tree

Actually, there is no connection.  To speak of.  The pod tree has been growing and leaning  in some kind of a fit of arboreal koyaanisqatsi to the extent that some large upper limbs have broken and were hanging tenuously.  So I come home last night to find that the arborist had pruned back the damage, declaring it to otherwise be a healthy tree.  And Charlie looks on, seemingly oblivious to the danger the limbs had posed to his running sprees before they were removed.  All Charlie seems interested in is to nibble his quince.