now posting regularly

It's Wednesday again, and now that my for-my-pleasure-only bnl project has come to an end, it's the perfect time to resurrect a somewhat forgotten semi-regular feature. Yes, my personal odes to the bringers of 99% of my news and radio experiences- my love for NPR. My hope is to break up the week of book posts and other randomness that makes its way from my brain through my fingertips and onto the keyboard with a mid-week feature highlighting some stories I heard that week that stuck with me.

But, I was worried, because as of this morning, I couldn't think of one particular story from the very recent past that was memorable enough to go searching for. I'm frustrated with the health care bill stuff that is dominating the news now, and I really don't feel like writing about my feelings about the whole rigmarole. And then I remembered that fantastic radio bookmark that I received last year when we made a donation to our local station, WAMU. I keep it near the kitchen radio so I can easily reach over and hit the button when the kids' decibel levels reach the point where I can no longer decipher what my beloved radio personalities are saying anymore.

So, I decided to check out what was still on my radio bookmark, and I was quite surprised at how many times I hit the button in the last few months and never went back to listen to the story. (Yeah, that's real surprising, right?) There were fifteen total bookmarks, four of which were old and had actually already been listened to, so they were quickly deleted. Of the remaining eleven, four were of the same story, recorded within seconds of each other, which is a clear sign that someone had gotten a hold of my RB and went berserk pushing buttons until it was taken away from him. (Wonder who that could be??) Three other listings may have been mistake bookmarks as well, because I have no memory of hearing the stories in the first place.

What was left were four bookmarks that truly represent my favorite NPR shows:

• A segment of The Kojo Nnamdi Show from back in July (must check radio bookmark more often!) that I thought would interest lovely hubby since it was all about places to be outdoorsy in the DC metro area,
  
• A Weekend Edition interview with Paul Rudnick, whose memoir/book of essays I Shudder was a book that I was reading at the time and eventually reviewed on 5 Minutes for Books,
• A recent Diane Rehm Show Reader's Review segment that discussed Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. I haven't listened to this entire show yet, but I'm keeping it on there for when I have a spare 51 minutes, 20 seconds to blissfully ignore the outside world. I don't know if they talk at all about the new movie, but this is certainly worth listening to for anyone who is a children's lit fan.
• A segment from All Things Considered about Pete Dexter and his new novel, Spooner, which I'm currently reading and having somewhat mixed feelings about, which is causing me to take forever to plow through. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about it by the end, which might mean that I don't actually review it on 5M4B (since we only post positive reviews), but I was incredibly interested in hearing more about the author who could create such an odd-so-far novel.

Hopefully with some self-imposed discipline, I won't have any months-old bookmarked stories anymore, and I'll actually make myself listen to the stories that I missed the first time around. I'm also thinking that I might find some more NPR fans among you all than with the previous Wednesday feature... will this three letter acronym spark more interest than the other?


Turning up the radio volume,