You ever read Nelson Algren? As I say in my latest Huffington Post piece, the late Chicago novelist is taking over my mind these days, and I'm not entirely pleased.
You know you’ve made it when you turn down a radio appearance
A couple days ago a local radio producer saw my HuffPo piece on the Ugliest Car in Chicago and got in touch to invite me to do a radio show that evening.
The host, she explained, "wants to do a segment on cars, specifically why he can't find a U.S. car maker that makes a COMFORTABLE car. He was disappointed when he went to the Chicago Auto show a few weeks back and only found foreign cars that he felt truly comfy in."
Of course I was more than eager to play foil to the host's grave lamentations about the domestic dearth of true vehicular comfort.
But I turned down the golden opportunity because the show was between midnight and 4:00 a.m., a time slot whose demographics my onetime overnight radio host nephew Dan Friend once described: "truckers passing through, and old people who are in too much pain to sleep."
From the pen of the writer Lou Engleman, age 14 …
Working his way through the first draft of a school assignment, the young son of my friend Paul apparently began to realize his ideas were too pithy for the page requirement.
And he began to pad, at one point writing, "As I said near the end of my last paragraph …."