My Own Cartographia

Napoleon's March to Moscow.

Scott Cameron

In our conversation yesterday with Vincent Virga about his wonderful book, Cartographia, we talked a bit about one of the maps I have on my wall, the poster of the 1976 New Yorker cover by Steinberg, but I didn't tell some of the important parts about the big map of Europe I mentioned. It is, in fact, a Cold War era Soviet map of Europe - among other interesting points, it shows a unified Germany - that was used as a prop in a London production of The Accidental Death of an Anarchist - my wife worked at that theatre at the time and rescued it after the run ended. It still shows the pencil lines that an actor drew on it, from Rome to Moscow, for example, at various times in the play.

After the segment ended, I also mentioned to Mr. Virga another map, a statistical graphic by a French engineer, Charles Joseph Minard, that brilliantly describes Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Before I mentioned Minard's whole name, Mr. Virga said it was among his favorites, too, and one he bitterly regretted had to be left on the cutting room floor - another of his movie analogies. It tracks the invasion and the retreat so brutally that it utterly alters your view of the campaign for all time.
I also have a huge map of the Chesapeake that carries none of the emotional, political or cultural freight of the three above. So far as I know.

Neal Conan

10:37 AM ET | 12-13-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

One Across

A week ago - I was on vacation last Wednesday - I opened my email account, to be inundated with messages from colleagues, family, long lost friends and complete strangers, all of them saying that I REALLY needed to check out the crossword puzzle in that morning's New York Times. It took me awhile to actually locate a copy, but when I opened to the puzzle page, the very first clue - One Across - read "NPR Broadcaster _____ Conan."

Wow.

It's a good thing no one was there to see me blush. I remember many years ago, when Red Holtzman, the great coach of the New York Knicks, found his name as a clue in the Times crossword (if memory serves, the clue was "Holtzman and Trotsky" and the answer of course - "reds") and said, "Now I can die happy." And I have to say, I'm almost there. Everybody knows that yesterday's paper isn't used for anything but fishwrap, but compared to the ephemeral nature of radio, this amounts to immortality. And it suggests that the Times puzzle editor regards my name as general knowledge.

That'll make your head spin.

Some of you know that I know Will Shortz, the Times' Puzzle Editor (and Puzzlemaster on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday with Liane Hansen) as I do play-by-play at the finals of his annual crossword puzzle tournament, captured on film in the documentary Word Play. After I emailed him to say thanks, he replied that he had played no favorites - the clue was provided by the constructor.

A week later, the euphoria has subsided a bit, but it's nice to think that I'm up there with "Cuban refugee boy," "Xavier Cugat singer" and "Cheers regular."

I'd change my name to "One Across," but that would screw up my chances of making the Sunday puzzle.

Neal Conan

9:17 AM ET | 11-21-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

A Long Cold Winter

I guess I have no choice but to accept the facts.

Baseball season is over.

And while I'm still upset that my team lost in the first round of the playoffs - AGAIN - I'm more disconcerted by the loss of those wonderful voices. For seven months, they kept me company, just about every day. John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman when the AM signal from WCBS New York boomed across Delaware Bay and into my SuperRadio. Jim Hunter and Fred Manfra, when I would listen to the Orioles games to get the score of the Yankee game. And, best of all, once the post season got underway, the great Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, must-hear listening even when the radio signal is out of whack with the TV pictures.

Then, after the Red Sox completed their sweep of the Rockies on Sunday night, they're all gone. I feel bereft.

Baseball, especially on the radio, may have been designed for people who have to do a lot of reading. The rhythms of the game allow a diligent reader to concentrate on the page, while keeping an ear cocked for the tell tale shift of the crowd response and the excitement in the play by play man's voice. The game swims into consciousness for however long is necessary - the brief triumph of a strikeout, the extended celebration of a homer, or - and I get to use best of all twice in one post - that moment when the play by play shifts down to build tension as the game is suddenly on the line.

There is no dearth of baseball news and the annual spate of awards starts next week, I guess, but it's going to be a long, cold winter.

Neal Conan

10:42 AM ET | 11- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Sounds of the City

Back yesterday after two weeks on vacation, and I have to admit that it's a bit of a struggle to resume the usual schedule. The alarm clock seemed especially insistent this morning.
Part of the problem is temporal displacement. To celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary, my wife and I traveled to Venice. Robert Benchley once sent a telegram from the city that married the sea to a friend: "Streets full of water. Stop. Please advise." And indeed, the day after we arrived, a deluge combined with the high tide of a full moon swamped many of the streets that are supposed to remain dry. In the event of aqua alta, squadrons of men place duck boards on aluminum braces on pre-arranged routes, but most of the locals simply don pairs of high gum boots and slosh their way through.
The city is as beautiful as advertised, the museums wonderful, the food mostly terrific -- because Venice is so saturated with tourists, it IS possible to get a bad meal -- but the thing that most surprised me, was the sound of the place. Because there are no cars, the steady thrum of traffic that obscures the audio track of every other city I've visited simply isn't there. With the window open in our third floor hotel room, we eavesdropped on animated conversations that were mostly, but not exclusively in Italian, and every time a woman in high heels came down our little Calle, we knew it. The tenors of the gondoliers wafted in, and the bells of the city argued over the time.
The construction site across the street from my apartment building is just as musical when the dump trucks beep their back up song at six this morning. Sure it is.

Neal Conan

8:45 AM ET | 10- 9-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

My Memories of Anbar

As noted elsewhere, we will talk today about Anbar Province, which President Bush, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have all held up as the model of their new strategy in Iraq.
If you glance at a map of Iraq, there's a road that runs west from Baghdad and the Tigris, passes through Fallujah, crosses the Euphrates at Ramadi, the provincial capital, then divides. One branch runs northwest to the Syrian frontier, the other due west, to Jordan.
Sixteen years ago, just after the end of what we now call the First Gulf War, it was my road to freedom.
As some of you may remember, I was among a group of reporters captured by the Iraqi Army just after the fighting ended. The whole story is too long and complicated to relate here - shameless plug, I tell much of the story in a chapter of my book Play by Play - Baseball, Radio and Life in the Last Chance League - but, after a week or so that included some scary moments, we were released to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, piled onto a bus, and spent much of the day driving across Anbar, across the border and on into Amman.
It's a desert, but does not match the shifting sands Lawrence of Arabia image. Most of what I saw is flat, hard stony ground that stretches away forever. Unimaginably vast, with just a few villages scattered here and there. I remember seeing a communications tower in Fallujah toppled by a smart bomb, and being amazed that the buildings nearby appeared almost undamaged. In 2004, of course, Fallujah was largely destroyed. Back in 2001, there were dozens of charred trucks littered on the side of the highway - attacked by U.S.A.F. fighter bombers in the belief that they were mobile launchers for the Scud missiles Iraq fired at Israel. It later emerged that none of the mobile Scuds was hit, and that the wreckage I saw was of trucks driven by brave or foolhardy men willing to take the risks of the highway in hopes of great profits in Baghdad.
It all seemed so awful and so sad. And it's hard to fathom how much more awful, and much sadder it is now.

Neal Conan

10:40 AM ET | 09-20-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

The GOAT

The acronym stands for the "Greatest of All Time." I was struggling to stay awake when Barry Bonds blasted that 3-2 pitch over the wall at the deepest part of the ballpark last night... just about midnight, Eastern time. And, as he surpassed what many regard as the most treasured record in sports, GOAT seemed about as apt a description as possible, in both senses of the term.

There's another word you can take both ways with Mr. Bonds. Incredible. The moment that ball landed in the seats for home run 756, there could be no dispute that baseball had a new home run king. By any measure, this represents a phenomenal accomplishment. But the fact remains that a lot of people simply don't believe it. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, him.
I'm glad we were able to talk yesterday with Al Downing, the pitcher who surrendered #715 to Henry Aaron, when he surpassed the record of the great Babe Ruth and overcame taunts and death threats to do it. The pitcher who throws the pitch is forever a footnote, but, as Mr., Downing said, most major league baseball players aren't remembered, even very accomplished players (he was a very good pitcher for most of his 17 seasons in the majors), so even if you're remembered as a footnote to history, at least people know your name.

By the by, USA Today ran a nice short piece this morning, which notes the home run champions in other leagues...Sadaharu Oh in Japan, for example.

Funny, I thought I'd see Crash Davis's name there somewhere.

Neal Conan

10:41 AM ET | 08- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Play Ball!

Later today, we talk with former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent, who wrote an Op-Ed piece yesterday (the first day of the mid-season All-Star break) on the most under-appreciated men on the field, the umpires. Standing stolidly amid the multi-millionaires, the men in blue are working class heroes. When they do their job properly, they're supposed to be invisible, utterly impartial arbiters and are expected to remain stoic amid the ego storms of ballplayers, coaches and managers.
On one hand, the decisions they make are pretty simple - ball/strike, fair/foul, out/safe. In a world colored in shades of grey (and some more unattractive colors), many of us would happily embrace such professional clarity. To an outsider, the job appears to involve no more than three to four hours a day (except for now-rare doubleheaders) in the glorious surroundings of Yankee Stadium or Camden Yards and get paid pretty well, especially for seasonal work. As we'll hear, it ain't that easy.
And consider their apprenticeship. We all know that almost every ballplayer spends four or five years riding the buses in the minor leagues. The umps, too, toil for years, traveling endlessly across the country. Think, just for a minute, about the crew that works a series in El Paso and heads out to their next assignment. There is nowhere close. And these younger men (almost all of them are male) have to master their craft and their emotions under what sometimes approaches a state of siege. Remember the incident last season, where a player upset with a called strike three threw his bat at the ump? Extreme, perhaps, but, except in degree, not all that unusual when highly competitive and very young men respond to what they feel (sometimes rightly) are outrageously bad calls. And, like the players, the umps have no assurance of promotion.
So tonight, when the anthem ends in San Fransisco, take a moment to nod to the umpires.
Play Ball!

Neal Conan

10:11 AM ET | 07-10-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Play by Play

Our main segment in our second hour today is on The Show, a new TV series that follows the fortunes of six baseball players for the Tuscon Sidewinders, the AAA affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. As some might remember, I have some experience in minor league baseball -- in 2000, I took the season off to broadcast play by play for a team in Maryland called the Aberdeen Arsenal. And while there's a huge gap between the Sidewinders and "the Bigs," there's an even wider gap between teams in the independent leagues, like the Arsenal, and AAA. The facilities, the equipment, the transportation (they FLY in AAA!), the trainers, the pay, even the post-game spread in the club house. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a lot of places. And, I have to admit, the food in the press box. After that year, I vowed never to eat another hot dog again -- there were parks where nothing else was available -- and I'm proud to report, so far, so good.

But there is one great similarity -- hope. In a book I wrote about that experience, I described the Atlantic League, the independent circuit in which the Arsenal played, as "the Last Chance League." It was for players who washed out of affiliated, or organized ball for one reason or another. Too old, a step too slow, a fastball that needed to be five miles an hour quicker, too many surgeries, good hit/no field or vice versa, and all the varieties of troublemaker. Some had risen as high as AAA, a few had even made it to the big leagues, but there was a reason they were in independent ball. And, almost to a man, they believed that if they could finally learn to throw that good slider for strikes, or corrected the tendency to chase pitches out of the strike zone, or just got the full range of motion back in the knee or the elbow or whatever it was... and a few, a very few, actually made it all the way back and played in the Majors.

Though the odds are still long, the players profiled in The Show have a much better chance to make it to the ultimate level, and face the next challenge. Staying there.

Neal Conan

11:09 AM ET | 06- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

An Intro By Any Other Name...

Every business develops its own specialized language, (even NPR); linguists say we have an innate need to baffle outsiders, but it can be useful shorthand. For example, the show we did yesterday with Bela Fleck and Chick Corea is known as a "performance chat," a form pioneered at NPR by Weekend Edition Sunday. Or, more usually, a "perf chat," started by WeSun.
Even within the same business, "dialects" change. Those who've toiled at other radio operations will be confused by Nipper's argot. An intro is an intro everywhere, I think, but what is known elsewhere as a "tag" we call a "back announce." Why? Who knows.
The musical interludes played between segments don't really have an industry equivalent -- commercial radio stations play what they call "sounders" -- but we call ours "buttons." In production, a sound bite is known elsewhere as "SOT" -- which stands for "sound on tape" (no, nobody uses tape anymore) and pronounced as if it was a habitual drunk. We call it an "actuality" or an "act" for short. An NPR reporter will go into a studio to record remarks ("voice tracks") to go in between the actualities, and that type of story ("piece") is known as "acts and trax." And nobody at NPR would understand what the rest of the business calls a ROSR (pronounced "roser"), which stands for "radio-on-scene-report," which is a semi-spontaneous description of, oh, say a fire that runs about thirty seconds or so for use in newscasts.
We don't have commercials in public radio, but we do insert "funders" -- those underwriting announcements read by Frank Tavares. Some especially cheeky directors call them "ads."

Gotta run.

Neal Conan

6:59 AM ET | 05-23-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

The New Newseum

Almost finished!

Source: Mr. T in DC

Some lucky window washer in Washington is about to get a tremendous contract.

An enormous amount of glass has been incorporated on the front of a magnificent new building that rises on Pennsylvania Avenue. The view from the Newseum sweeps up to the Capitol to the left and gazes over the great Smithsonian museums and the Mall. You can't quite see the White House, but on a crisp spring morning, the vista from the sixth floor portico is just fabulous. It's destined to become the site of a million TV stand-ups... With the Capitol dome glowing in the background, a windblown correspondent concludes, all we here in Washington can do, is watch, wait, and wonder.

I was lucky enough to get a preview of this exciting project yesterday and walk through a construction site where, come next fall, thousands of visitors will tour galleries devoted to the history of journalism -- somebody made reference to Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes -- up to the internet. You'll be able to do your own TV standup in front of a blue screen with any backdrop you want, there's a digital newsroom, you can have your choice of photographs critiqued by a virtual picture editor and make some of the ethical decisions that reporters face... if you're wrong, there's a big blank spot on the front page of the newspaper.

But the initial impression is likely to be the fifty tons of Tennessee marble that hangs on the front of the Newseum, where the First Amendment has been carved in stone. That's about a ton a word.

Gotta run.

Neal Conan

5:50 AM ET | 05-16-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

The Dawn Patrol

The newspaper is late. For the second day in a row. And I worry that this is a new pattern that I'm going to have to learn to live with. I hate new patterns.

Listeners sometimes ask how I manage to keep up with all the different subjects we cover on the show every week. Part of the answer is that we have a terrific staff; here on the Blog you guys know that, since you read Barrie, Sarah, and Scott all the time. But another part of the reason is sheer, persistent habit. A less generous soul might describe it as obsessive. In short, I am a creature of habit. I read two newspapers very morning before I go to work, I try to read one or two more when I get there, and I read the wires all day long. Even during the show, I have the AP ticker (that's a word that betrays my age) up on one computer screen and CNN on the TV. After 9/11, I don't want to be surprised. I guess I don't read so much as scan from 2-4 ET, but you get the point. The subway rides to and from work are precious half hours of solid reading time. I jigger my schedule to try to ensure I can get a seat, take out whatever book is up next on the show, uncap a pen, and plunge in. Evenings, after dinner, the book and the pen come out again, which is one reason I love baseball season. Games on TV appear to have been designed to allow for multi-tasking as most everything of interest is replayed, and there's plenty of commercial time to keep the pages turning.

But it all breaks down if the newspaper is late. The great A.J. Liebling once wrote, "Like any coward, I read the newspaper from back to front." He referred, of course, to the tabloids that splash sports across the back page, and both of the papers that arrive at my front door every day, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are broadsheets. The Post comes first -- AHH, I just heard it thump! 35 minutes late, but still in time for me to follow Liebling in spirit... I begin with the funnies. How's Spidey going to get out of this one?

Gotta Run.

Neal Conan

6:36 AM ET | 05- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Ripken - Full Disclosure

Full Disclosure:
In a round about way, I worked for Cal Ripken one summer.
As some listeners may know, I took a year off from NPR in 2000 to do radio play by play for the Aberdeen Arsenal, a team in the independent Atlantic League that was half owned by Ripken Baseball (the other half owner was Maryland Baseball).
Aberdeen, Maryland is an unlovely city in Harford County, squeezed between the rail lines of the Northeast Corridor and I-95. Farther east lies the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, which cut the town off from the Chesapeake Bay. While parts of the residential areas are very nice indeed, much of downtown consists of the kinds of facilities familiar to any town adjacent to an army base. And the Ripken Museum.

Continue reading "Ripken - Full Disclosure" »

Neal Conan

6:43 AM ET | 04-16-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

A Final Footnote

I first met Kurt Vonnegut at an anti-war demonstration I covered many years ago, across the street from the United Nations in New York. I approached him with my tape recorder and microphone, and was promptly struck dumb with awe.
My best friend had loaned me a copy of The Sirens of Titan in high school, and we reveled in all of his novels as they came out, or as we discovered them in second hand book stores. In some ways, I still like The Sirens of Titan the best...

Continue reading "A Final Footnote" »

Neal Conan

10:00 PM ET | 04-13-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Keane

As President Bush prepares for a news conference this AM -- he will reportedly have a statement on War Funding -- our timing couldn't be better. Dumb luck -- we'd scheduled Gen. Keane for last week, but he had another appointment and we had to postpone. In any case, the President can be expected to hammer the Democrats again to "support the troops" and threaten to veto any funding bill that contains deadlines. He can also be expected to follow up on the visit to the Baghdad market over the weekend by Sen. McCain (R-AZ) and others -- Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) remarked that it was like a summer stroll through a market in Indiana -- and argue that the Democrats want to hamstring the commanders in the field just as their plan to secure Baghdad is showing signs of progress. A story in today's New York Times cites merchants in that market as saying that the area is far from safe, pointing out that the congressional delegation was accompanied by 100 US troops, rooftop snipers, and attack helicopters hovering overhead. Worse, one pointed out that whenever any one thing is touted as a sign of progress, it immediately attracts an attack.

After considerable thought, we decided to have Gen. Keane on by himself to take your questions about the troop build-up in Baghdad and Anbar ... Is it working? Can it work? If the goal is to provide a breathing space for politics, is the Iraqi government taking advantage of it? Aren't attacks just shifting elsewhere? Are the Shia militias, the Mehdi Army in particular, just lying low, waiting, and letting the US loose against its internal (renegade Shias) and external (Sunni insurgents, Al Qaida elements) rivals? And what's all this doing to the Army and Marine Corps? Post your questions here, if you'd like, or call in or email during the show.

Neal Conan

8:01 AM ET | 04- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Opening Night

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack ...

Source: dbking

Mets at Cards, Tom Glavine vs Chris Carpenter, the first of 162 x 16, Jon Miller (the best!) and Joe Morgan on ESPN2.
I take Opening Day off every year -- human resources has yet to accept this as my personal religious holiday -- but the O's open on the road this year, so that's next Monday. THIS Monday, we have Alan Schwarz on the show (and give him a cheer -- our regular baseball pal is, as of today, no longer a contributing writer to The New York Times, but a full-fledged staff member!) to preview the season, yes a bit, but mostly to talk about his new book Once Upon A Game, Baseball's Greatest Memories. He gets a slew of great players (Berra, Clemens, Ripken, Garciaparra, Griffey, Jr etc. -- and check out the picture of Yogi reading 3-D comics) and some famous fans (Kevin Costner, George H.W. Bush) to write brief accounts of their most vivid memories on the field. Yes, a few game-winning dingers, but many more personal moments. I especially liked (and will ask the author of The Numbers Game about) Dom Dimaggio's parenthetical note that he batted .298 for his career, and would have reached that magical .300 with twelve more hits ... one a year over his career.
So OK. Last summer, Camden Yards, Yanks-O's, in the fantasic seats of a friend just past the visitor's dugout on the third base line, seats so fantastic that the pitcher's mound blocks your view of part of the infield, when the immortal Craig Wilson rolls a dribbler foul. I've attended a lot of major league games -- I was going to say a million, but I'll settle for hundreds. Many hundreds. And never got a sniff of a foul ball. (I've attended hundreds of minor league games, too, and got two -- one a liner back into the broadcast booth -- Calvin Pickering -- another a pop fly chased down in near-empty stands in Portland, OR off the bat of Jack Howell. Both future major leaguers, and I still have them both.) But now, there's this twenty-seven hopper heading RIGHT AT ME. So I elbow a small child and a gradmother out of the way, lean over AND I GOT IT! And prompty dropped my cellphone out of my shirtfront pocket. Larry Bowa, the Yank's third base coach comes over and picks it up and hands it to me. MY CELLPHONE HAS LARRY BOWA'S FINGERPRINTS!
I got a new cellphone a week later, but I still have that ball, too.
So, what's your story?

Neal Conan

9:20 PM ET | 04- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Farewell to Stamford

By chance, we had both the Indigo Girls and Ken Jennings on the show last week, which gave me the chance to shamelessly plug the American Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, Connecticut. They are tangentially associated - Amy Ray and Emily Saliers are among the celebrity solvers featured in the documentary Wordplay, which builds up to the dramatic 2005 championship final, and Ken Jennings was the guest speaker -- and whizbang rookie contestant -- at last year's annual. I've been there every year since 2001 (I think) to do the play by play of the finals with color man and well-known puzzle constructor Merl Reagle.
After thirty years (!), Will Shortz, the (you have to say this all in one breath) puzzle editor of The New York Times and Puzzle Master on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, is moving his tournament. The Stamford Marriott is simply too small to accomodate the burgeoning crowd, now more than 700 strong. After all these years, "Stamford" had aquired a special cachet in the puzzle world. Under certain circumstances, "Stamford" would be whispered with the same kind of reverence that baseball fans reserve for Cooperstown. Though it annually failed to order in sufficient copies of the Sunday Times, the hotel became a place where, once a year, legends strode the corridors. I'm told that the contest in the ballroom is but a small part of Stamford's real story, but sadly, I don't get invited to those parties. Will says it will be bigger and better in the new place, but he says it with a tear in his eye.
Next year in Brooklyn!

Neal Conan

5:52 AM ET | 03-26-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

The Dawn Patrol

I don't get out much on school nights, but I was asked to emcee an event yesterday evening to honor Medal of Honor recipients on Capitol Hill. And I ran into retired General Jack Keane on the way into the Russell Building -- he's the former Army Vice Chief of Staff who's among the intellectual architects of the "surge" -- a term he hates. He's been on the show several times. He said he was just back from another visit to Iraq and that, while it was early days yet, there were encouraging reports from Baghdad. I asked if the reduction in violence wasn't largely a function of the decision by the Shia militias to lay low and wait things out. "Exactly what we wanted them to do," he replied. "Much of their leadership has headed east and south (Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of the Mehdi Army is reported to be in Iran, and by "south" I suspect he means Basra), the guys in Baghdad have orders to stand down, not to fight the Americans, which has made it possible for us to got into neighborhoods where we've never been able to sustain activity before. We could have fought our way into Sadr City if we had to, but nobody wanted to do that. We arrested a few dozen to show that we were there (there's suspicion that those arrested are renegade elements of Sadr's forces and that he's using American troops to eliminate internal rivals). But it's a tactical mistake on their part. By the time they try to resume operations, we -- the US and the Iraqis -- will be established in those neighborhoods and if we can keep it quiet, relatively quiet, we'll have eliminated a lot of the cause of their support."
It's so tempting to believe that things are going better -- just this morning I heard the BBC report on the 'dramatic' reduction in violence in Baghdad over the past month -- but it's also very diffficult to believe that this time, really, not like all those other times, we've actually turned a corner that doesn't lead into a blind alley. I couldn't book a show right there and then on the steps of the Russell Building, but we'll ask General Keane and a skeptic to come on to take your questions soon.

Neal Conan

5:45 AM ET | 03-22-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Brook Park

We had a hectic schedule yesterday for the remote broadcast in Cleveland, but the folks at WCPN kindly provided a guide with a car to take me out to Brook Park, the suburb that's home to the Marine Reserve Battalion that was the centerpiece of our first hour show. I didn't realize it at the time, but I'd been through a bit of it the night before, in the cab from Hopkins Field. Well, I'd probably seen more of it illuminated by lightning as the plane circled the airport for forty-five minutes before we landed.

Just about everywhere we went, you could see the smokestacks of the Ford engine plant that's at the heart of the city's economy and identity -- there used to be a Chevy plant, too, and I mentioned a huge convention center that's been adapted from a factory that built B-29s during WWII and tanks in the fifties. A lot of the housing was originally built by the government for workers at the bomber plant ... neat bungalows and ramblers, many with American flags secured to the front porch. A noticeably high percentage of American cars ... the kind of largely white ethnic blue collar town that's been hit so hard by de-industrialization, and a rock solid republican part of Dennis Kucinich's congressional district.

The Marine headquarters is across the street from a Catholic school. There's a chain link fence outside that, in August 2005, was festooned with signs and prayers and flowers and teddy bears ... a 9/11 kind of memorial that happened spontaneously after 19 members of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines were killed in a week. All that stuff was collected and preserved inside ... there's a courtyard memorial outside now, with the names of the 48 men from the battalion killed so far in this war.

The visit helped me understand the area a little bit, and the grief and the loss, but I realize now I should have taken a camera to show you all some pictures. Sigh. I'll get this digital stuff someday.

Neal Conan

3:23 PM ET | 03-16-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Secret Friday

My two favorite words in the English language are "Science Friday." Sometimes, after just five years or so on the show, I feel like the new kid. There have been several TOTN hosts, beginning with John Hockenberry, and many long-time listeners regard Ray Suarez as the definitive voice of the program, but Ira has been here since the start. The rest of us come and go, but Flatow rules!
The fact that there's a separate host and production staff on Friday resolves one of the most difficult problems of a daily news program.

Continue reading "Secret Friday" »

Neal Conan

11:30 AM ET | 03- 9-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

The Dawn Patrol

The alarm sounds at 5:30. The radio goes on first, then coffee and the first newspaper of the day arrive shortly thereafter. A bomb in Baghdad, Obama and Clinton in Selma, skittish markets, the death of Tom Eagleton, Yanks over Phils in the Grapefruit League, and I just don't see how Spiderman is going to work out of the mess he's in with this new "wife."

Continue reading "The Dawn Patrol" »

Neal Conan

11:57 AM ET | 03- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Welcome to Blog of the Nation!

OK; given the name of the show, perhaps the name is predictable, but we hope this blog will take us in unexpected directions. It's to be more than an adjunct to the daily program, though what we do and why we do it will be part of the discussion. It gives us a way to expand the conversations we conduct every day, to talk about some of the things we couldn't squeeze in, or wondered whether we should do at all. And in part, this will be a free-flowing exchange with listeners and readers on the worlds of interest that wobble the orbits of our days.

And, as usual, we need your help. As a radio lifer, what I know about blogs fits neatly into a thimble. Callers and e-mailers provide critical course corrections during the show, and will prove even more important here. We like to think we know something about radio programs, but blogs are new, at least to me. So, to paraphrase a memorable question, "How are we doing?"* Do we have the right idea, the right approach, and, if so, are we doing it right? We figure that if you're as shy and unresponsive as you are on the radio, we'll find out.

I expect to be here once or twice a week or so, and one of the best parts of the Blog of the Nation is that we'll bring several members of the staff out from behind the curtain. Sarah Handel, Barrie Hardymon, and Scott Cameron comprise our first line of bloggers and, while they are all much younger and hipper than me, they're radio folk, too, and all of us will be learning on the fly. You can find guidelines and procedures elsewhere on the page, so please, write and tell us.

*Yes, Political Junkie fans, the citation refers to Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York.

Neal Conan

11:37 AM ET | 03- 5-2007 | permalink | e-mail post