It happens occasionally...in 241 episodes — more than 4 years of podcasts! — you've got to expect some "thread drift!" LOL! Seriously, I can only be what I am, and whatever I am has been built on the things I have done. That includes a popular music critic, a card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media (sigh), something of an expert in high-risk sports, a martial artist, a business consultant specializing in world-class performance, a haphazard novelist and, above all, a shooter.
To a large extent the podcast is a journal of what's rattling around in my head on a given week...since my profession is guns, that's a lot of guns. But that's usually not the only thing that catches my attention.
Something that has been very important to me in my career as a journalist and in television is to give the people who read, listen or watch what I produce some sense of where I'm coming from, my own prejudices, my thought processes, the twists and turns in my own life that shaped me and, by extension, what I produce or create. Part of this drive is that I "came of age" as a journalist in the great "new journalism" explosion of the mid-1970s (the standard reference is Tom Wolfe's 1975 book THE NEW JOURNALISM...there are subsequent learned texts on how badly we failed, too). At its best, the journalism of those times acknowledged that the "reporter" was always a part of the story and ultimately shaped the narrative based on his or her insights, background, mindset, etc...the presence of the reporter changed the story, a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for media...revolutionary for the times...of course, it backfired. At its worst, new journalism produced an outpouring of self-indulgent crap (and I'm as guilty of that as anyone else) and led to the current destruction of the MSM the primary media in the U.S., replaced by the Internet.
What I took from that experience, though, is the thought that if I present my thoughts to an audience, the audience has a "right" to know at least some of the backstory.
I also readily acknowledge that I have the attention span of an 8-year-old...Oh look! A kitten!. The ability to focus quickly and intently, then drift away in 5 minutes, makes one a good journalist and a less-than-good person.
So all of this is a long, sometimes random explanation of why you will occasionally get recipes instead of 1911s on the podcast (to say nothing of the blog!). It all boils down to...I can't help it!
Thank you for hanging on for 241 episodes...if you get bored, I'll always be happy to welcome you back!
Michael B