The Terrible Catsafterme

I don’t usually just relate simple anecdotes, but this one is much too good to pass up. This little pleasantry belongs in the annals of Farmers Almanacs the world over. It all begins with Marty Brennaman. I had once noticed the odd juxtaposition of Marty when seated next to his frequent broadcast partner, the late Joe Nuxhall, in which Marty just looked awful-darn small – almost like a ventiloquist dummy on Joe’s lap. I commented on this to my co-worker Garry, who naturally took the next step of enlarging Joe even more, creating quite a funny photo in which Marty really did look like a puppet next to Joe.

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The first thing that I thought about when I popped out of bed at 6am was that I wasn’t at home. The second thing was that…if I were at home, it would have been midnight. So I scraped myself out of bed, grabbed a shower, and prepared for the busy day ahead. The Mercure Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany did not have breakfast waiting for us, but it would be the last place in which we stayed that didn’t have a huge European-style buffet breakfast until our final two days in Europe. I stopped off at the lobby computer briefly on the way out and then headed to our car. Read the rest of this entry »

Although he’d never being accused of being our greatest Commander-in-Chief, our nation’s 38th President entered the arena at a time when it seemed like the government was falling apart. Appointed the 40th Vice-President by Richard Nixon after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, it was a mere nine months later that he ascended to the Presidency as the only President to never have been elected to a National office. During his abridged single term of office from 1974-77, he became noted for the pardon of President Nixon, the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, his attack on inflation (W.I.N. – Whip Inflation Now), the occasional embarassing pratfall, but most importantly as a good and decent man who capably filled the vacancy in the White House after the Watergate scandal had rocked the nation and our President resigned his office. Read the rest of this entry »

It had been eight years since I had been on the west coast, but it had been even longer since I had seen Penn & Teller perform live, ten years having passed since I last saw them locally at the Fraze Pavillion in Kettering. So the one request I made of Jimmy was that we go to Las Vegas and catch the bad boys of magic live at the Rio – and he obliged. In fact, when Bob heard that we were going to head out to Vegas, he decided to forego his weekend at Lone Pine and go along with us. Maybe he didn’t like his friends venturing out onto his turf without him, or maybe he thought the city would swallow us alive – but nonetheless he decided that we would all go to Vegas together. Read the rest of this entry »

As I walked the ramp from the airplane to customs on the morning of Saturday, July 5, 2008, the first thought that entered my mind was that Germany must be a dunghole. The whole area had been ripped apart for construction and it looked like I had just entered a third-world country. As it happens, this was the only area of the country that made me feel this way. Of the eight European countries I visited, Germany was the nicest of all. Ahead of me were two weeks of traveling via planes, trains, and automobiles (as well as boats, taxis, buses, and subways) throughout the European continent. I had finally popped the pond after 36 years of remaining on the North American continent. Read the rest of this entry »