Recovering journalist living in California's Sierra Nevada
I met a crop duster pilot one really hot, pretty dusty afternoon on the west side of the Central Valley. You have to see these guys, working at the way unglamorous end of the airplane pilot business, dressed in jeans and dirty shirts, but with the spiritual swagger of a Top Gun. Anyway, the west … More Dusters
One May night in 2003 the Today Show sent me to a veterinarian‘s office in Clear Lake to deal with a dog. Dosha, the rasputin dog. Dosha had escaped from her yard, been hit by a truck, shot (that is, put down) by a cop, put in the animal morgue and left for dead. (Her … More A Dog Story
Virtually all World War II film was shot silent, MOS is the insider term. So when you watch movies of dogfights and so forth, the burning plane trailing smoke heading for earth, the whining sound is faked. Sweetened is the insider term. I owe this wisdom to Chris Koch and don’t think about this much. … More Airplane Noise
There was loud shouting and banging from the stairway inside. On the 2nd floor balcony of the apartment building a man and an elderly couple stood, she crying, the young man — her son, it turned out — talking almost continuously to the people, including half a dozen police officers, below. This is in Banja … More Law and Order
In Beban’s Coral, a bar in Chowchilla California, a guy offered me a thousand dollars to kill a lawyer, one he didn’t know. The lawyer was defending a kid who had helped kidnap a bunch of local children from a school bus. The kidnappers stashed the children in a buried truck body and frankly the … More Guy Owes Me a Thousand Bucks
I am looking for network news I can watch — without screaming. I’ve given up on my old employer NBC. Way too ‘local’ and foolish. There’s the Lehrer Report, I know, but I don’t get a good PBS signal in Mariposa… and I don’t need the depth. I already do a lot of reading and … More
Tom DeVries 