I watched Mom lock the door after the policeman left and ducked out of sight so she wouldn’t see me. I was supposed to be upstairs in bed, but when she went to the bathroom to take her shower, I came down to the kitchen to get a drink of grape Kool-Aid, my favorite. I was on my way back upstairs when he knocked on the door. I froze in the middle of the steps, thinking “Oh crap, I’m gonna get it.”

“Sara! Get the door please.” Mom yelled at me, thinking I was still in my bedroom. Before I could turn around to go back down the stairs to open the door, he knocked again.

“Sara! Open the door, I’m in the bathroom girl!” Mom yelled louder.

“OK Mom, I’m getting it.” As I got to the last step, he started banging on the door all hard and everything, and I knew that Mom was gonna come out of that bathroom and handle this person because she hated it when people knocked hard on her door. Said people needed to learn how-to knock-on people’s doors like they had some sense. Only people that knocked that hard she said had “better be the police or have a damn good excuse for knocking like that on my door.” Sure nuff, Mom came storming out of the bathroom towards the steps. 

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the Forum – I mean Geffen Playhouse: A motorcade of truly presidential proportions waylaid traffic, with siren-blaring, orders-giving motorcycle cops squealing via loudspeakers and SUV-type vehicles tying up traffic, so some self-important high-muck-a-muck could impose a mini-police state over Westwood in order to reach some destination. The thought crossed my mind: Either Trump has launched his pig putsch or is Kamala going to watch POTUS on the boards? Through some deft maneuvering I managed to make my way through the pig-created traffic jam (your tax dollars at work!) and reach the Geffen in time for the curtain, with, thankfully, no White House pompous bigwig in sight. (Ironically, a POTUS press release I received had this in the subject line: “POTUS is Now in L.A. (Without the traffic.)” Can I sue for false advertising?)

The first “alt rock” song to ever travel Columbus radio waves was Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Rescue.” Sure, it may not have been the very first progressive rock song played locally. But let’s just call it the truth because this story harkens back to a more fun, more weird, and more cool Columbus. 

The year was 1989. The Berlin Wall was crumbling, and in America, alt rock or progressive rock was making the cool kids lose their freakin’ “I can’t listen to this glam and classic rock anymore!” minds. The station playing Echo & The Bunnymen was 107.1 FM WLRO out of Circleville, an adult contemporary station and able to reach Columbus. It was a Sunday night, and the 31-year-old radio personality who played “Rescue” was a former Ohio State campus kid looking to bring a full-time alt rock station to Columbus. 

“The second I played that first song, the phones went absolutely crazy,” says the now 60-something Gary Richards. That’s him in the suit in the above black and white photo. “The show was an instant sensation.” 

The “Doomsday Clock” of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was kept at 90 seconds to midnight this week—the closest to midnight that the clock has been set since it was created in 1947. Midnight is defined by The Bulletin as “nuclear annihilation.”

The hands of the clock were initially moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight last year. In moving the clock forward in 2023, The Bulletin, founded by Albert Einstein and scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, issued a statement declaring it was: “A time of unprecedented danger.”