A major publisher files for bankruptcy protection…

By Vick Mickunas | Monday, May 21, 2012, 05:04 PM

Times are tough for some book publishers. Today the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filed for bankruptcy protection. According to the trade publication Publishers Weekly:

“Houghton Mifflin Harcourt officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy Monday morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring of its finances that will cut its debt by $3.1 billion largely by having its lenders exchange debt for equity.”

Hopefully the publisher will survive. They put out a lot of good books. To read more click HERE:

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His father was William F. Buckley…

By Vick Mickunas | Friday, May 18, 2012, 09:40 AM

they do?!

Christopher Buckley has led a charmed life. He spent a year as a member of the crew of a Norwegian tramp steamer. He was an editor for Esquire Magazine. At quite a young age he wrote speeches for Vice President George H.W. Bush. He has had a long and successful career as a humorist and he has written a whole stack of very funny books. Oh, and he is the son of the late William F. Buckley, the conservative icon.

I spoke to Buckley the other day. Our conversation was recorded to play on your radios. We talked about his time on the tramp steamer and his speechwriting for the Vice President. We talked about his friendship with the late Christopher Hitchens. We talked about his father. Buckley called his parents “Mum and Pup.”

Oh, and we talked about his new book. We laughed a lot during this interview. I hope that you will, too. Tune in to WYSO (91.3fm) today (Friday) at 1:30 to hear it.

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New book on Bruce Springsteen

By Vick Mickunas | Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 10:10 AM

darkness on the Internet

Things are finally getting back to normal. I’m back on-line (did you miss me?) and the mail just arrived. I can always count on the US Postal Service. Today I received the new book about Bruce Springsteen. “Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock and Roll” (WW Norton) by Marc Dolan will be published next month.

That is another thing that I can count on, book publishing. The mail arrives. The books are released. Now if I could only count on the Internet. I certainly depend upon it. What did we do before we had it?

Last Thursday afternoon my DSL high speed connection to the world stopped working. I called the 800 number to attempt to restore my service. Key word: attempt. The young man who answered the phone seemed really far away like he might not even be on this side of the planet. His voice was almost inaudible. And I could barely understand him. He suggested the usual fixes: reconfigure my modem. Turn stuff off. Unplug things, etc. Which did nothing.

Then I was informed that someone would come out to my location the next day (Friday) to check out the phone lines. That was supposed to be between noon and four. So I stayed around waiting during those times. Nobody showed.

Around suppertime a service truck was spotted in the vicinity. I went out to talk to the gentlemen. He climbed up a ladder and attached his monitoring gear to things inside the phone box on the side of my house.

Then he went to the junction box for my line out by the road. I began to wonder about him when I watched him plunging his hands right into the poison ivy. This fellow spent quite a bit of time in my area but he didn’t fix anything. Oh, did I mention that in addition to the failure of my DSL line that my phone line also went out on Friday afternoon? No dial tone. If you called my number you got a busy signal.

Saturday dawned and nothing had changed. I called and spoke to another person who sounded like they were on the other side of the planet. I remained calm although I was feeling a bit peevish. Every time I called I was forced to wait in the holding zone while I was bombarded by recorded announcements which assured me that most of my connection problems could be solved by simply going on-line and…. I tried not to scream as I waited.

Over the course of time (and multiple calls) I had already spent hours on hold. Each time I called I was asked to identify myself and reiterate exactly what was the matter. After my phone line went out I was now forced to call from other locations since my cell phone service is spotty out here. There’s nothing quite like waiting on hold for 20 minutes and then having your call get dropped.

Late on Saturday afternoon I spoke to a very efficient sounding woman and I explained my frustrations with the situation. She acted like I was yelling at her. I wasn’t. She told me that I would need to be here between 8am and 8pm on Sunday to wait for another line technician to arrive. I’m not making this up. Of course like most people, I had no plans whatsoever for Sunday. NOT! I told the woman that I could not possibly set aside the entire day to wait for someone who might not even show up during those hours. So I made an appointment for someone to come out on Monday morning.

At 9:30 on Monday a fellow showed up. I had finally gotten so deep into their system that I was getting rewarded. This man was incredibly competent (actually, I recognized him-I’ll explain in a moment). He found the problem, a short somewhere down the road where two lines had apparently gotten bound too closely together? I don’t know, if I did maybe I could have told them how to fix it days before. He had the whole thing up and fixed in less than 30 minutes. I told him about the agony I had been enduring. I mentioned that one helpful person in the Philippines or somewhere had told me to stick a paper clip into my modem. The technician chuckled knowingly and said that when they start telling you to throw your modem in the bathtub that you should probably ignore them.

Later that day I got a phone call from my DSL provider asking if my service was working now? I said that yes, the problem was now fixed and that the fact they were able to call me to ask me that question on my actual phone line should have been a good indication that things were improving since my phone service had also been off for several days. The fellow on the phone seemed puzzled. Apparently they had no indication in their records that my phone line wasn’t working.

Oh, and the technician who finally fixed my problem? I recalled seeing him a couple of weeks ago. There was a central phone junction box about a half mile away down my road. It had taken a direct lightning strike one afternoon. When it happened I tried to call in to report the exact location of their problem. Phone service had been knocked out all along our road. But I could not contact a real person through their system. It would only allow me to file an automated report in their system that my personal line was knocked out. The next morning I spotted four guys with four service trucks repairing the fried circuit box. I stopped to speak to them. One of them was Mr. Efficient, the guy who finally fixed my problem yesterday. Then I explained that I had tried to report the location of that crispy junction box but that their system would not allow me to do so. They said that they would have appreciated it since they had supposedly spent two hours that morning driving around searching for the problem location. Supposedly. Here’s the clincher; I spoke to a neighbor afterwards and he told me that he had also called in that day to report the exact location of the lightning strike and that he had spoken to a real person who wrote down that location. Which makes one wonder? Did those guys not receive that report? Left hand, meet your right hand. Glad to introduce you after all these years…

What did we do before the Internet? Before phone lines. Before phones?

We read books. I think I’ll stick with the old reliables: books with pages that I can turn manually by candlelight if need be. Now I just need to stock up on candles. And matches…

(filed on my high speed DSL line through my modem via my phone line through some sort of crazy miracle….)

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This war hero lived in Dayton

By Vick Mickunas | Thursday, May 10, 2012, 02:39 PM

” Lost in Shangri-La - a True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II” (Harper) by Mitchell Zuckoff was a best-selling book when it came out last year in hardcover.

It just came out in paperback. Have you read it? If you have then you know that the hero of this amazing story was a man named John McCollom. John and his twin brother Robert were lieutenants on board a plane that crashed into the remote jungle of New Guinea. That crash occurred on May 13. It was Mother’s Day, 1945.

There were 24 members of the military on that plane. Only three of them survived the crash and the treacherous journey down a mountain side. John’s twin brother was one of the fatalities. John and his two severely injured companions made it down to the valley below. There they encountered Stone Age tribes. These were cannibals, actually.

This is an incredible story. The late John McCollum was a civilian employee at Wright Patterson Air Force Base for many years. He was married to B.B. McCollum. She still lives in the Dayton area. In fact it was B.B. who told me about this book last year.

More recently she informed me that the author Mitchell Zuckoff will be in Dayton this coming Monday, at Books & Co. at The Greene in Beavercreek at 7 p.m.

I just interviewed the author. You can hear our conversation tomorrow (Friday) at 1:30 on WYSO (91.3fm).

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Remembering Maurice Sendak

By Vick Mickunas | Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 12:14 PM

he was unique

Maurice Sendak, the legendary illustrator of books for children, has died. He was 83.

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”― Maurice Sendak

Here’s more from the New York Times…

click HERE:

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Remembering the Ivory Billed Woodpecker

By Vick Mickunas | Friday, May 4, 2012, 12:44 PM

The Lord God Bird

Tom Gallant has just published a wonderful new novel called “The Lord God Bird” (Quantuck Lane Press). The two main characters are the man and an Ivory Billed Woodpecker. These magnificent birds are supposedly extinct. But what if they aren’t?

You can hear my interview with Tom Gallant at 11 a.m. this Sunday on WYSO Public Radio (91.3fm).

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Champaign County Library Book Sale

By Vick Mickunas | Thursday, May 3, 2012, 03:59 PM

If you are in the Urbana area on Friday or Saturday you should check out this fabulous book sale:

The Friends of the Champaign County Library sent me this press release:

“We need help. We have too many books, DVDs, and VHSs. We also have CDs, magazines, music, puzzles, music cassettes, vinyl record albums, train magazines going back to the 1940s, a few computer games and software, and audio books.

Thanks for reading this and supporting our library.”

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