MC Coolidge On the Radio … Wednesday July 22

Hey folks, I’ll be on the radio in a couple of days … Wednesday, July 22 between at 6 p.m. The show is called the Creative Loafing Half-Hour Variety Hour, hosted by CL editor Cooper Levey-Baker, writer-at-large Tim Sukits, and I think food critic Brian Ries also joins in.

I’ll be on the show because, as many of you know, I contribute a monthly freelance column for Creative Loafing. So, the editor has invited me, along with another freelance contributing columnist, to be on the show and talk about, well, whatever crosses out minds, I guess.

The show airs Wednesday, July 22 at 6 pm on radio WSRQ 1220 am. It’s not a live show, so you can’t call in and pepper me with questions … but I am doing a live (free) gig this Thursday at Sarasota News & Books, where I’ll be reading some of my more recent work, and a few snippets from my book, Sideways in Sarasota, and then opening the floor to questions from the audience. That starts around 7 pm — there’s another writer who will be speaking before me, Theresa Rose, author of Opening the Kimono, and I’ll probably begin talking around 715/720. If you miss the radio show and want to listen in at any other time — just listen to the podcast by clicking here — MC on Creative Loafing’s Half-Hour Variety Hour.

Sovereignty, self, and suicide

Sir Edward Downes, 85, one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, and his wife, Joan, 74, who was ill and dying, assumed sovereignty over their own mortal beings as their ultimate right when they chose recently to end their lives together via assisted suicide. But they had to leave their UK homeland, where such suicide is not legal, to find that sovereignty in a Switzerland clinic.

Albert Camus wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” (more…)

Every girl’s crazy for a Sharp-Shinned Hawk

This morning, I fed my backyard birds, as I usually do. The cardinals, bluejays, a couple of tufted titmice, some house wrens (at least that’s what I think they are). Came back inside — and went back to work. A while later, must have been about 645, I heard a ruckus and ran to the window. (more…)

Sarasota sky shots

The view from MC’s Walden. (more…)

MC Coolidge snags second place in Florida Press Awards

A while back I reported that I’d won a Florida Press Award for a humor column (Ben & Jerry Take a Hike) I’d written back in my Pelican Press/Reality Chick days. Well, I just found out what place I took (there are four places — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and honorable mention.

I have to give a major THANKS to the editors at the Pelican Press — I wouldn’t have this award if it weren’t for Rachel Brown Hackney and Anne Johnson taking the time to submit this work from my 2008 column-writing days for them.

Boomer and the butterfly

And all men kill the thing they love . . . — Oscar Wilde, the ballad of reading gaol

Tonight, the story of Boomerang and the Butterfly.

I was walking Boomer, as I always do. Taking him out for his evening air, his nightly stretching of the legs, sniffing of the air, the remembrance of his life before adoption by the woman who keeps him inside. Away from his beloved nature.

And he did, and does, love his nature. When he was wild, he would sit a few feet away from me as I worked in the yard pulling weeds or digging up old tree stumps. He’d go to the pond nearby and try to catch turtles. He’d climb trees. He even killed baby birds in those months before I moved him indoors. (more…)

Blacklisting blackberry-heads and canceling cell phone companions

The next time a client or an editor or a so-called friend, or god forbid a man who has asked me out, or anyone who is sitting at a table or barside with me for whatever reason even THINKS about answering a cell phone (at the table) or even MAKES A MOVE toward a frickin’ Blackberry, I will get up and walk out. (more…)

Cash cows … free milk … and where’s the beef? The written word woes of Sarasota media.

Sarasota’s print pubs are no longer the cash cows they were in the halcyon boom days … and everybody from writers to readers are paying the price …

That’s my story — my new story in Creative Loafing newspaper — out on newstands next week (July 15), but already live and rantin’ on the paper’s website at: Written Word Woes.

Here’s a snippet in case you’re interested … and feel free to comment either on the CL website or back here — I blog back on both.

Fewer reporters are actually going out and covering live and in-person the news as it happens, he says, and that could mean Florida returns to its “good-ole-boy, backroom-deal roots because nobody’s around to cover its Government In The Sunshine meetings.”

Dogs and their peeps … in MC’s ‘hood

I have a love/hate relationship with most of my neighbors. Nearly all of them have dogs.

I love dogs.

It’s their owners I sometimes hate. (more…)

Pugnacious pitbull no more … Palin plays the petulant pooch

Sarah Palin is a big ole crybaby. Her whining press conference (poor, poor pitiful me with all my legal woes and people being mean!) and her complete abandonment of her responsibilities as governor … .

Nonsensical? Check.

Boorish? Check.

Utterly narcissistic? Double check. (more…)