¿De que color es el autobus? Back when the thinly budgeted Kansas City Transportation Authority started the MAX express line from the City Market to Waldo, there was a lot of talk about the magickal properties that distinguished it from, for instance, the smelly old 57 line your grandparents are always going on about between defibrillations. One of the more fanciful Tolkien-grade claims about the MAX route was that sensors on downtown traffic lights could detect the buses and hold a yellow ligh
☃☃☃ HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND A WIENER-SHRINKINGLY FREEZING NEW YEAR!☃☃☃
This has been Daily Briefs with the Pitch inaccu-weather forecast. The pipes froze up in my house yesterday, but the projected temperatures for later in the week are up in the 20s. That's pretty good! As a measure of how far we've lowered our standards, I thought Garrison Keillor was pretty funny this weekend, with that ketchup commercial or Powdermilk Biscuits song, or jokes about English majors or whatever. I guess
In the past few days, thousands of radio listeners have heard the poetry of Linda Rodriguez, vice president of the Latino Writers' Collective in Kansas City, thanks to public radio star Garrison Keillor.
Earlier this month, Northwestern University Press sent a review copy of Rodriguez's new book, Heart's Migration, to The Writer's Almanac, a nationally syndicated public radio segment of poetry and literary insight from the famous Prairie Home Companion host. To Rodriguez's surprise, Keillor q
After three straight nights of shows last week, it was nice to spend my Saturday evening doing nothing more than watching DVDs while my wife worked on the laptop for NaNoWriMo. While I quite enjoyed working my way through the complete series of Spaced, as well as The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, the American Masters portrait of Garrison Keillor, I wasn't quite as entranced with You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk, 1977-1984.
Regressive Films has made a nice history of the
In Mitchell Zuckoff's Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 560 pages, $29.95), Altman tells the author that his motto is "Giggle and give in." But this thick, frustrating book -- rich in anecdotes and grudges, richer in defenses of its subject, but only intermittently revealing of Altman's technical mastery -- offers little evidence that the iconoclastic director, who died in 2006, did much of either in his long career.
The Boston University journalism professor doesn't ex
