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Thursday, August 14, 2003
Back-on 
| | Fell asleep in a hospital waiting room tonight to the sound of TV reporters interviewing people coming out of dark subway tunnels. I think CNN set a new record. |
| | I'm old enough to remember the 1965 blackout. So old, in fact, that I was in college in North Carolina at the time. As fate has it, I'm in North Carolina again, thirty-eight years later. |
| | And I feel the same way about it this time that I did almost two generations ago: it sucks that I'm not there. |
| | Kind of reminds me of what I did at Woodstock: drove some hitchikers there, then went home. |
| | By the way, it sounds like the big news/talk radio stations fared at least as well with no electricity in '03 than they did in back '65. I've been listening to coverage from New York on WABC, WFAN, WCBS, WOR and WINS; from Philadelphia on KYW, from Cleveland on WTAM, from Boston on WBZ, from Pittsburgh on KDKA, and from Detroit on WJR. They all sound like they're having a great time. The only exception is WABC, where a couple hours ago the host went on about how the blackout proves how terribly our governments have prepared us for a terrorist attack. |
| | Looks to me like things are pretty much okay, considering. |
| | Fun: Conan O'Brien is improvising a show with no audience. It'll be hard to ignore it and get some sleep. |
| | Bummer: I can't sleep. So I'm listening to Joey Reynolds on both WOR and WWKB. That station was WKBW back in the early 60s, when Joey was a disc jockey at night there. I am still, I suppose, a card-carrying member of RONP: Joey's Royal Order of the Night People. (Yes, the club issued real cards. They were purple.) When he was fired from KB, Joey famously hung his shoes on the manager's door, saying "Fill these..." Four decades later, Joey is back in the same shoes. |
| | Bonus link: The Blackout — a collection of phonecam shots. Backthanks to Xeni for the pointer. |
Priorities
| | Yes, I've been less prolific lately, and not just on the blog. That's because my mother is in the hospital, and when I'm not with her (which is most of every day since Sunday), I'm doing other supportive family-type stuff. |
| | The good news (as of today) is that it looks like Mom is getting better (a cautiously optimistic statement, given her age and the medical gauntlet she is still passing through). So I hope to be heading home a few days from now. |
| | That's the plan, anyway, provided the prayers keep working. |
| | Bonus link: "jeremiad." That's the word Mom used this afternoon to describe the story of her current hospitalization. Asked to describe how she felt at one point today, she said "surreal." Both were good signs. |
Stuff that matters
| | But I'll take just enough to bring up one topic that puts the rest in perspective, at least for me. It's the case of Amina Lawal, a 30-year-old woman found guilty of adultery and sentenced by a religious court in Nigeria to be stoned to death. An appeal is coming up on the 27th of this month. Here's more from Amnesty International. |
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