My previous post was meant to be the introduction to this book review. It detailed how I first got interested in television and broadcasting. I was a small cog at a one-camera, small-market, television station in North Dakota. John Malone is a giant in the global television and broadcasting industry.
So, picking up from where I left off, herein is a review of John Malone’s recently published book, Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the...
I have been interested in television since I was five or six years old, since KFYR-TV began broadcasting from Bismarck, North Dakota in 1953. I can remember – I am not sure why – sitting in front of my parent’s first black and white television, watching the “test pattern” (the one with the Indian chief), before the station began its abbreviated broadcast day (in the late afternoon).
In those days, I lived in Riverdale, North Dakota, about 60 miles north of KFYR’s temporary transmitter, which...
In my last blog entry, I wrote about some similarities that I observed between how Tucker Carlson reacted to the Capitol “Insurrection” – and how Sir Francis Burdett reacted to the Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, England, 1819). The following blog entry contains an excerpt from Sir Francis Burdett: His Last “Make Believe” Interview, which goes into more detail on the Peterloo Massacre.
The excerpt is from a transcript of the fictional interview that I (RCB) had with Sir Francis Burdett (SFB)....
This is the last article (of four) on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in the topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025. In this excerpt, I strayed off the topic of Tucker Carlson a bit when I wrote “A Trump Aside.”
+++ The Start of Excerpt 4 +++
The Tucker Carlson Paradox and Conundrum
It was bound to happen. Tucker was too outspoken and visible just to comment on the news. He has become part of the news. In a sense, he has become as much of the story as...
Tucker Carlson – Excerpt 3
This is the third article (of four) on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025.
In this excerpt, I will introduce one of my ancestors, Sir Francis Burdett. Sir Francis was a member of the English Parliament from 1796 to 1844. He had established a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer. He was imprisoned by Parliament in the Tower of London in 1810 for libeling the House of...
This is the second of four articles on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025.
I ended the first article (excerpt) by noting I was a fan of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. I will continue from there.
+++ The Start of Excerpt 2 +++
The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink
That (above) is the phrase that Tucker periodically used to describe Tucker Carlson Tonight. If I were...
This is the first article (of four) about Tucker Carlson. In my book BS3: Etcetera (the third book in my Burdett/Senger genealogical series), I devoted a chapter to Tucker because I admire him as a writer, and because he seemed to share some admirable traits with one of my ancestors – Sir Francis Burdett. I will elaborate on these two points later.
The four excerpts, included in this series, contain ALL of Chapter 6 (Tucker Carlson) in BS3: Etcetera. I have, however, made a few format changes...
Verse 1: Hum or singalong
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
There is nothing like a trip to Lake Superior and the upper peninsula of Michigan to get...
On Sunday, October 5, 2025, while returning from a Great Lakes vacation, I found myself at the 7:30 AM Mass at St. Mary Immaculate Parish, in Plainfield, Illinois (near Interstate 55 and Joliet). That Sunday was the last day of our 13-day road trip; after Mass and breakfast, we would begin the long drive back home to Omaha.
St. Mary Immaculate Parish (Smip.org) was a mega-church, almost as large as my Catholic parish in Omaha. As I walked through a hallway leading to the sanctuary, I came...
I observed my 77th birthday on October 14, 2025, the birth date I share with Dwight D. Eisenhower (per my previous blog article) and Charlie Kirk. Charlie, alas, was not alive this year to celebrate his 32nd birthday - with his wife, children, and the rest of us. But on that date, President Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie – a well-deserved birthday gift.
Microsoft, the giant software firm, celebrated my birthday by discontinuing its support of Windows...
If Dwight David Eisenhower had lived, he would be 135 years old today (born October 14, 1890). I know this because Eisenhower and I share the same birthday. He is also the only president that I may have seen in person (details sketchy). Eisenhower was the 34th president of the USA, serving from 1953 to 1961. Almost everyone “liked Ike” in the years after the Allied forces were victorious in Europe in 1945 – in the years leading up to his election.
An excerpt from BS: The Burdett Senger...
In my previous article (A Michigan Vacation), I described the first part of the road trip my wife and I started in the waning days of September 2025. Michigan and Mackinac Island had been our primary destinations and that part of the trip had been relatively easy to plan. The harder part was to figure out how to get back to our home in Omaha – what route to take, what sites to see, maybe more Upper Peninsula and/or Minnesota? My son suggested that we might want to include Door County,...
I have long had the goal of visiting each of the fifty states. In the fall of 2022, I checked off my last two unvisited states – Maine and Vermont. But I always felt a little guilty, in that I had “barely” visited three of the fifty states: South Carolina, New Mexico, and Michigan.
In the case of South Caolina; while visiting Savannah, Georgia, I drove across the Talmadge Memorial Bridge to get into South Carolina – before doing a quick U-turn and driving right back into Georgia. I was in...
Today is the second anniversary of the coordinated incursions by Hamas into southern Israel. During the initial incursions approximately 1200 people were killed, including 350 civilians who were attending a music festival. About 250 civilians and soldiers were also captured and taken into Gaza as hostages, which escalated the initial attacks into an ongoing war. The peace and love, noted in the above photograph, is difficult to find in southern Israel and Gaza today.
My Holy Land Trip (2017)
...
Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Glendale, Arizona has just begun. I wrote about Charlie in my previous post, including about his love for the youth of this country. In July of this year, Charlie sat down with Tucker Carlson for a wide-ranging interview that lasted almost two hours. I listened to that interview then and replayed it in the days after he was killed.
The interview on the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) website has the lengthy title: Charlie Kirk: How Debt Has Radicalized Young...
Some time last year my first issue of The Nation came in the mail. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember subscribing to the magazine. I may not have been paying attention when looking over some kind of trial offer; I may have been overly impressed by The Nation’s stated belief in intellectual freedom (more later), or maybe a friend ordered the magazine for me, suspecting that I would benefit from it. Who knows?
In any case, the magazines started to arrive in the mail, and I would dutifully...
Note: This article contains an excerpt (at the end) from my book A Catholic Prays Scripture (Volume 2): concerning the sacraments.
My wife and I go to different churches. I go to St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church; she goes to Lifegate, which per their website is “an interdenominational church, which means that people from all faith backgrounds (or no faith background) are welcome!” I would describe my church as religious; Lifegate’s website claims that their church is not “religious” because “...
The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, edited by M. L. Wine, was published in 1973, as part of a series known as Revels Plays. At that time, M. L. White was a Professor of English at the University of Illinois (Chicago). In the book, White wrote about a play entitled The tragedie of Arden of Feuersham & blackwill, which was registered in London on April 3, 1592, by the London bookseller Edward White. When the play was initially registered the author of the play was not listed. The...
I picked a bad time to become an author. At a time when it is easier than ever to write and publish (or self-publish) a book, fewer people are reading books. The law of supply and demand is working against me. Mary Harrington (more from her later) wrote that “only 54 percent of Americans read even one book in the last year.” Reading (e.g., total words) may have increased but today’s reading tends to be more digital, random, and disjointed.
I am reminded of this trend every time I get on an...
Pictured above (on the top shelf in my study) are my World Book Year Books for years 1981-2018. My earlier 1963-1980 yearbooks are tucked away in my study’s closet: that’s 56 books in total. The books on the shelf are so high that I cannot reach them unless I haul in a ladder from the garage. They are mostly for décor – to make my study appear more studious.
World Book Encyclopedias
As best I can remember my parents – in the 1960s, probably 1962 – purchased a set of World Book Encyclopedias, to...