Our little town has a new magazine (JC Metro), and they were nice enough to do a little story about The Living Healthy Podcast. The governor’s wife beat us out for the cover by agreeing to be photographed wearing a suit made of aluminum foil. I’d give the new rag a little link love but it doesn’t appear they have a website.
Speaking of LHP… two more shows in the can: Poison Ivy and Ticks goes up on April 8th and Toenail Health on the 15th (would I kid you?).
I have a new favorite podcast. Keith and The Girl makes me laugh out loud. In the car. Alone. I’m not even going to try to describe this thing. You gotta be there. Okay, I’ll describe it a little. Very New York. Very Jewish. Crude, rude with lots of ‘tude.
Thanks (once again) to Charles Jolliff for the local 411 on the tornadoe(s) that hit the Bootheel (and western Tennessee). Some really good images on the blog of a local TV weather guy. Not sure who took the photo above (Stephens Gin off Hwy 412). It was sent to me by several people.
I’m a little fuzzy on this but I think these pix were taken by Charles, who provided the following descriptions:
One of the images is from the theatre downtown (Kennett), looking southward down Slicer street. It’s a very dark shot. Tornado was on the ground behind the neighborhood that is beside McDaniel funeral home. One of my moms neighbors (she has house in that neighborhood) told me they watched the tornado on the ground for a long time. It actually was just north of Scobeyville down old 25 highway and then headed east crossing Johnson Island road before hitting Braggadocia (1 woman dead there) then hitting Deering, then Caruthersville before crossing the river into Dyer county Tennessee.
The neighbor of my moms told me that it was two tornados that were dancing back and forth that they saw, till it combined and got bigger. Marmaduke, Arkansas got hit hard. Over half the homes destroyed or badly damaged, according to news reports. I drove through (Highway 49 was closed till noon today to clear the road of debris) late this evening but could not stop, traffic was incredible. I suppose a lot of folks were sight-seeing or looky-looing. I had the camera and just guessed on the shots in my album link. All taken from a rolling/driving truck by a guy not looking.
While all this was going on in this area, another violent storm hit Wynne Ar, and destroyed several homes including 3 that belonged to some of my racing friends. Totalled their race cars as well. All in all, everyone in Kennett is very lucky, if this thing had come up a mile and a half, it would have gone thru this little town like the proverbial hot knife thru butter.
This brings back vivid memories of crouching in a dark, dank “storm cellar,” just like the one in Wizard of Oz.
I just finished my second Michael Gruber novel (Valley of Bones) and liked it as much as his first (Tropic of Night). But I confess I’m having some trouble getting over the revleation (a couple of years ago) that he ghost-wrote 16 of the Butch Karp novels for Robert Tannenbaum. I’ve posted on this before (the “can’t get over it” part) but, damn! Sixteen books?! I loved the Buth Karp novels and feel …betrayed… that they person I thought wrote them, didn’t. A littlle googling revealed that Gruber and Tanenbaum are first cousins and when Gruber decided to go solo, they had a serious falling out. If you’re a Butch Karp fan, you feel my pain. If you’re not… you don’t know or care what the mellon farmer I’m talking about.
The company I work for (22 years in June) competes with –and partners with– a company called International Sports Properties (aka ISP). ISP has the rights to UCLA who plays in the second game of the Final Four semi-finals tonight. Which brings me to a story I found on the Winston-Salem Journal website. A well-done profile on ISP and the “elite-college multimedia-rights niche.” (Alternate link) I learned some things about collegiate sports marketing which is now, far and away, the largest part of our business. For example, corporate spending on college-athletics programs is expected to reach $458 million this year, up from $415 in 2005.
When I joined Learfield in 1984 we had the rights the Missouri and had just acquired the rights to Iowa State and…Kansas? Anyway, sports was a small piece of what we do. No longer.