People & Life
People & Life on Weekend America
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Grunt It Out
Tennis fans have migrated east this weekend to watch the U.S. Open. If you listen closely, you can hear the chair umpire at Arthur Ashe stadium try to calm down the New York fans. Maybe a Bronx cheer would work a little better than the standard "Quiet, please." Of course, there are other sounds that come to mind whenever gladiators of the court gather.
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One Delegate
John McCain, Sarah Palin, loads of other Republicans and approximately five billion members of the media are heading to St. Paul. It's the Republican National Convention. Delegates will be casting their votes and nominating the McCain-Palin ticket. Delegates are expected to unite behind the candidate since dissension could be seen as politically toxic. This was the case in 1972 as well, when the Republicans were united behind Richard Nixon. Well, almost united.
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"Dancing With Tears In My Eyes"
It's time to listen to your weekend soundtrack - the songs that bridge the gap from Friday to Monday. Our latest story comes from Greta Sproul. Greta is the editor of the Penobscot Times in Old Town, Maine. She told us the soundtrack to her weekend is "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" by Ruth Etting.
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Veeps, Fastballs, and Slow Death.
Republican John McCain has chosen as his running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Is that Good News, Bad News or No News?
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After the Floods
It was three years ago that Katrina made landfall in the southeastern corner of Louisiana. Within a day, New Orleans was filling with water. But small towns along the coast were also devastated by Katrina, and by Hurricane Rita, which would follow less than three weeks later. We take a road trip to the hurricane-ravaged bayous along the Southern Louisiana coast to see how the recovery is going.
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Instant Novel
When Nancy Janoson tells people what she does for a living, the answer is usually "jazz musician." But this weekend, it's "writer." She's a participant in the Three Day Novel Writing contest. For contestants like Nancy, this weekend is all about self-exile. The choices for things to do are limited to drinking pots of coffee, sleeping only long enough to keep your eyes from blurring, and writing until your hands cramp.
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Getting Back to the Mainland
Labor Day provides another three-day weekend. Some people take advantage of that extra day in unique ways. Rob Schroeder loves to travel, and over one recent three-day weekend, he satisfied his bug with a trip to Culebra, a tiny island just off the coast of Puerto Rico. Schroeder hiked, snorkeled and just plain old relaxed. Everything went according to plan. That is, until he got to the airport.
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Searching for Pig's Eye, Minn.
As the Republican Party gathers in St. Paul, Minn., few people following the convention will realize that "St. Paul" is not the city's original name. It was originally "Pig's Eye Landing" after French settler and bootlegger Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant, then later changed to the more pious and proper sounding "St. Paul." It's kind of like what happens to a city when a big event comes to town; things are tidied up and made to look sharp. But what about those old Pig's Eye elements to St. Paul?
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Biloxi's Luck
It's been three years since Hurricane Katrina. The damage to flooding and botched response to the flooding in New Orleans has gotten the most attention. But it was actually Mississippi that received the full brunt of Katrina's 120 mile-per-hour wind and 27-foot storm surge. In Biloxi, Miss., the casinos that sat on huge barges in the bay were washed inland and destroyed. But the coastal casinos are now making record profits, more than one-billion dollars in revenue last year.
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Letters: Share Your Harvest
We received a few scoldings from listeners for our story about backyard gardeners selling their extra produce to grocery stories and restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were reminded that food banks need your extra veggies. It turns out the food bank movement was launched on just this idea.
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How To Ride A Bike
The 1970s and '80s were a more laissez-faire parenting time. When leaning how to ride a bike, adults pretty much stayed out of the way. You try, fall, try, crash, try and succeed. Not anymore. As technology brings us car seats, padded playground surfaces, and Web pages devoted to bad nanny sightings, we do the modern urban-parent thing when it comes to teaching bike-riding: we outsource it.
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Fun at the Cemetery
Maybe it's the kind of summer day in your part of the country that inspires you to pack a picnic and go listen to an outdoor concert. Or take in a nature walk. Where would you go? How about the cemetery? Historic cemeteries like Brooklyn's Green-Wood host live dance and music performances. Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles has been a popular site for movie showings.
