My good friend and co host on The Morning Report is off to Merlefest for the long weekend. John Roten has played a role in Merlefest for a quarter century plus one. I'll miss him for a few days, but hope he has a wonderful time. I'm sure he will. Merlefest celebrates the kind of music that sets the perfect score for this part of the country… western North Carolina in particular. It's named after country star Merle Haggard. Have fun, John….

Its been a week and a few days since Boston suffered an act of terror. "Marathon Day" in Boston has ironically always been an innocent event, a rite of spring. The kids are out of school, the spring blooms first become apparent, The Red Sox play an 11am matinee game. What a shame the date has now been marred in our memory. Nerves will be raw for sometime I think, also resulting from the manhunt and near martial law police presence the city endured last Friday. Boston is the city of my birth…. many fond memories there. Have a look and send 'em your well wishes to heal the wounds:

Aldous Huxley once wrote a book titled "Brave New World." Here is a short rant which I have titled "Bold New Underlined Caps." About a week ago I was fit to be tied over the inconvenience of auto - complete via email and smart phone technology. It’s a pain in the proverbial aardvark. If I want to type a certain word, I'll type it. I don’t want to delete suggestions from the modern day equivalent of HAL 9000, the computer in "2001 A Space Odyssey." What am I whining about now ? It seems Hal is taking up the habit of deciding what kind of font I should use. Sometimes I'll choose italics or an underline, or bold print to call my attenton to something. The computer thus decides I must want everything in italics or underlined. I go back to the top of the page and I remove the selection, only to have it remain in place. Again, good thing these computers aren't in charge of the missile silos and drones… not yet anyway. Enough technology for one day… instead, lets hang out with the apes and the goofy inexplicable thing that has 'em in an uproar…. you remember the scene:

A week ago Sunday was my brothers birthday. April 14th. His name was Tighe.. pronounced like neck tie, but not spelled the same. It was the first birthday he missed, as he was killed in a car accident last summer, in August. In many ways he raised me. To say I miss him just doesn’t cover it. Anyway, he was a pilot, and he was happiest at about 5 thousand feet, or above. He used to do these crazy maneuvers called hammerhead stalls in a Cessna 172 single engine plane. He was an excellent pilot. No doubt. I felt safe with him even as he did his best to scare me as brothers are wont to do. This is what such a maneuver looks like in this video looking out the front of the same type aircraft. The buzzer on the cockpit dash goes off to let you know you are going to die if you don’t correct the stall. Ironically, my brother lost his life on the ground. I wish so much he could be here in Asheville with me, meet y'all and enjoy the mountains… maybe fly over them. He would be downright volatile if I let his death get to me… so I remember him in joyous times, always.

The Tourists are back in Asheville ! Yes, Ed and Myrna from Ohio. Ed with his Hawaiian shirt and new digital camera and Myrna with her maps, straw bag and sunglasses. But those aren't the tourists I'm talking about. I'm Talking about the baseball team… the baseball players … you can see them right ? (A little joke there from Field Of Dreams, one of the best baseball movies ever made.) It's great to have a minor league ball team in town. If Major League Baseball is the national pasttime, minor league baseball is the neighborhood pasttime. It’s a slice of "Americana" right out of The Saturday Evening Post as painted by Norman Rockwell. We're happy to be giving tickets away on WWNC's Morning Report when we have them and are enjoying some of the games ourselves from time to time. McCormick Field and The Tourists remind me of another favorite baseball movie, set in North Carolina: "Bull Durham"