Odds and Ends, Bits and Pieces, Flotsam & Jetsam

Some things I’ve smiled about recently … some that happened to me, some that I found. Enjoy …

The other day, my phone buzzed with a text message from my youngest grandson, Ryan. He asked, “How do you say coffee in German?”
I replied, “Kaffee.”
He sent back thanks, and that was that.
Later, while having a conversation with my ex-wife (we are friends), she told me that Ryan had been sitting near her at their home and he looked up from what he was doing and asked, “Mimi, does Grandpa speak German?”
My ex said, “Yes, he does.” (And I do, though not fluently.)
So he sent me the text, and I answered.
The point here? Ryan is just like any other typical American 9-year-old, and he knows how to use the Internet.  In fact, I am told, he was online when he asked.
He could’ve done what every red-blooded American kid does when they have a question – he could’ve Googled it.
He didn’t.
He asked Grandpa instead.
There is hope for the young in our country yet.

Last week, I made a trip to see my sister in Wisconsin, and got to spend a few days away from everything.  I didn’t take any work with me for any of my jobs (newspaper, radio, Safari tour guide).  I just went and rested and relaxed on what I realized was my first real vacation in nine years. Don’t call what I went through last year a vacation, even though I wasn’t at work.
I got the chance to visit one of my favorite places on the planet, the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. It’s the former home of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (which I am happy to note is back in business), and it is a wonderful place to visit if, like me, you’ve ever dreamed of running away to join the circus.
Nothing of special note happened during my visit; I just had a few hours of happy times. I’m something of a museum junkie anyway, and a circus museum brings together two things I love.

Did I tell you the joke about the man who’s allergic to alcohol?
Every time he takes a drink, he breaks out in handcuffs.
Feel free to steal that joke if you want to.  I did.

I keep a monitor at my desk linked to a YouTube channel which shows views from various webcams all over the world, and the cameras change from time to time. One of the newest cameras to come online with the service is from Umhausen, Austria, of a huge waterfall on a tree-covered mountainside.
I am a sucker for waterfalls.

And finally, a note that life does, indeed, imitate art.
Back in the late 1970s, when I was working full-time in radio, one of my favorite television programs was WKRP in Cincinnati. That show was all about a radio station, and in a lot of ways the show mirrored things that happened at the station where I worked (which, coincidentally, was WTRP).
Much of what went on at that fictional, comedic station also took place on a smaller scale at our station, and I’m given to understand that it was common in the industry at the time.
I wondered, though, why some station in Cincinnati didn’t just acquire the call letters WKRP for the sheer audacity of it. A bit of investigating showed that those call letters were “restricted” during the run of the show by the FCC, and after the show went off the air a low-power station in Dallas, Georgia, applied for those call letters.
Then, they went to a public radio station in North Carolina.
Today, though, life does imitate art, as there really is a WKRP in Cincinnati.
On May 4, a station based in that city formerly known as “The Oasis” rebranded after acquiring the call letters and – most importantly – getting the rights to use the words from Shout Studios, owners of the original series. They even have station promos recorded by actor Gary Sandy, who played station program director Andy Travis on the 1970s show.
The most delightful part of the whole thing is, they use the theme song from the show every hour, on the hour, when the station identification has to air.
Life imitates art, and I am happy about that.