Nope. Not Tennis Balls.

Pretty Good Week

In the last week, I enjoyed smash success with a side business project, had an original song of mine play on the radio, and learned that a Sunday newscast I anchor more than doubled its viewership in the last year.

First, I delivered a completed video biography for a customer of my documentary production company. Comments from the client included, "This is outstanding! I feel like I am watching an A&E Biography." And, after the film showed at a family gathering Friday to celebrate the subject's 70th birthday, "The Documentary was a HIT! Words like 'awesome' and 'unbelievable' were used to describe it."

That same night, a co-worker at the station who hosts a show on Sarasota's community radio station, WSLR played my instrumental tune Pulse and then used it as his background music for the rest of the show.

This happened because of another co-worker's breakup. When he left his live-in girlfriend, he stashed his guitar in the photographer's room at the station. One night, after I had finished my story, I went in and started playing for the first time in months, thanks to the all-consuming effort on the documentary mentioned above. Another co-worker walked in and made the mistake of not asking me to stop. So I serenaded her for a while until I ran out of songs that I — and my fingers — could remember.

That was a Friday. After the early newscast Saturday, the woman who runs our studio cameras on the weekend newscasts told me that she heard that I played and asked me to strum some songs for her.

By the next week, the legend had grown. On a computer in the photog room, I pull up the a video of me playing Pulse I had posted to YouTube.



The guy who also has the radio show played the song for his wife at home! She suggested that it would make a good music bed for his monologue. He decided to play it all the way through once before looping it in the background behind him.

Yeah, I know. It's only community radio, but it's still radio. And it was cool.

Then today, we got a memo with our November ratings results and the Sunday early evening newscast I anchor more than doubled its viewership compared to last year ‐ with no on-air promotion.

I am, of course, far too elegant to do something like a touchdown dance. But so elegant that I would not write and record a song in which I sing about doing a touchdown dance.

Reliving Old Glory

Glory is an overstatement. I anchor news on the station where I work. So that our station's sports guy could stay and cover the entire Buccaneers game in Tampa, I volunteered to do the sports for our early newscast tonight.

I did sports for years before switching to news so it's not new — except the part about doing sports in addition to doing the news. Sparing you the details, my split attention combined with technical trouble set me up for disaster, which I think I marvelously avoided.

I'm Back! And I Didn't Have to Get Fired First!

It has been more than a year since I last wrote here. The fine and kind people who agreed to pay me to write stories made me agree to stop writing here.

But I just got emailed an addendum to my contract about social networking. It says, "the Station recognizes Employee may use websites and blogs and social networks." It even capitalized "Employee."

Of course, it also says that if I say anything disparaging about the station, its sponsors, its vendors, or puppies¹ that they can toss me and my contract off the roof of the building.

As you can imagine, this doesn't leave me much material left to work with. You know there is no end to my loathing of puppies². But where I come across something that warrants my commentary that won't risk my paycheck, it appears that I am allowed to post it here.

I don't know how often that will be, if at all. But I wrote this, didn't I?

¹ I am not really prohibited from disparaging puppies.
² I do not really loathe puppies.