uncommon ambience

We are time-traveling back to 1934 to celebrate Baseball in Baltimore! Wait. Baltimore! Hometown of Spiro Agnew, Michael Phelps, and Spankrock. The place where Edgar Allen Poe disembarked a train and then died. 
Wait, stop — you don’t get to intro with this cute cultural smattering, "next we’ll visit Cleveland, Dreeeew Carey!" 
Cards out, I wanted to have a baseball game presented to an audience and have it be a historical setting. As if we were standing in the venue, time traveling dudes… and ladies. But I didn’t want the insane challenge of a baseball radio broadcast set in a historically accurate saloon. Vintage fans carrying on in historically accurate ways would be an extreme challenge and so I chose the 1934 All Star Game (in a wealthy person bar). 
Time travel? Baltimore? Baseball? Did the Orioles even exist at this point?
Ok so there was a minor league Orioles— oh! they had this pitcher Lefty Grove. A Marylander, (minor league) Oriole, Future Hall of Famer… Lefty was traded for an outfield fence in Martinsburg. Lefty Grove was very much a way I could have tied Baltimore to the 1934 All Star Game… if he was in that All Star game. ****. Lefty Grove was an All Star in ’33, ’35, ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39.  
I tried to find the 1933 All Star Game broadcast — a game which native son Babe Ruth clobbered a two run shot and Lefty Grove secured the save. That totally would have strengthened my case for presenting the All Star Game in Charm City...And I failed to find it in full.
So… 1934! Baltimore! Look I promise I found us a neat place to listen to the game. Behold, the structurally beautiful Hotel Rennert, one of the city’s early skyline darlings (now a parking lot). It was the place for area titans to smoke cigars and bro it up the super formal way dudes did back then.
Digging into the hotel’s history turned out to be as complicated as I should have anticipated. The Hotel Rennert’s fine dining reputation rested on chefs like Henry Cummings, a formerly enslaved man who moved to Baltimore and became a fixture as chef and caterer. He was an “expert in the preparation of terrapin… and all kinds of rare games in famous old Maryland style.”
I found some Hotel Rennert menus (lunch and dinner) with plans to make a lazy inflationary joke (¢15 lobster?!) until I read on the back: “…From the very inception of the hostelry in 1885 it has employed only colored chefs and colored waiters." And being way out of my depth, I wondered how to digest that. Everything has been silly and light so far.  Do I ignore and move on? 
So Old Line Plate, a blog of Maryland culinary history, helped shed some light on why a place like Hotel Rennert might advertise its employment practices on the menu. Old Line Plate cites Afro-American’s December 1915 edition: “The French chef has been tried in the south, but, except in a few rare instances, they have failed to satisfy the peculiar demands of the southern epicure or even of the tourist who, coming south, expects dishes peculiarly southern... The demand for capable colored cooks is greater than the supply." 
Smithsonian Magazine detailed how American recipes in the 1800s shifted from “puddings, pies, and roasted meats” to include dishes like “pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya” as African foodways were woven into American cuisine.
Was this about serving better food, or were there broader forces at play? This is 1934—thirteen years before Jackie Robinson. We will only hear the All Stars that were allowed to play (IE: no Willie Wells, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson). 
Tom Manning, Ford Bond and Graham McNamee had the call for NBC. McName got his start in radio announcing by walking into a radio station and asking if anyone needed an opera singer. 

PS: Baseball is the only bit of athletic escapism I cling to — born of those magical summer nights in the 80s watching Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken slap the **** out of a baseball (Earl Weaver, heads, mount up). Go O's.

Interior of a new (preowned) Chevy Spark during heavy rain and wind. With a composite of nautical weather forecasts, engine tone, and drifty notes.
And I don't have much else… Oh yo, if I had a time machine I would go back to 1989 and ask Debbie Gibson out for dinner somewhere; an extremely professional dinner… I’m married (although technically, if I went back to 1989, I would be in a space before I was married, technically). And I would be kind of famous myself as Mr. Time Traveller. But yeah, married, and no chace anything other than a meeting with an ’80s pop icon (I could tell her who shot JR).
Regardless… When was the Cheesecake Factory founded? I could’ve been like, “Don’t worry, I know a good spot, Ms. Gibson. The original ****** Cheesecake Factory. It’s huge where I come from in 2026. There’s an everyday brunch menu. Every day.”
Also, the future isn’t “Electric Youth”; the future is unfortunately an abundance of war crimes. But… try the Chocolate Tuxedo Cream Cheesecake—it’s amazing and probably 7000 calories.
"Out of the Blue is your magnum opus" I would say, "it's not the flashiness of Electric Youth." And my hands would be gesticulating wildly because I would be ****** nervous. "Every Out of the Blue song would win the six-man award if they could play elite basketball and were in the NBA. Excellent songs, without the max contracts—" actually let's cut this short as it's getting weird.
Instead, let's just focus on the Cheesecake Factory, my near-ish location has weird fused glass plates affixed to towering wooden beams that split the booth tables. And the glass looks like the Eye of Sauron. So you walk in and there are like fifty Eyes of Sauron staring at you. And you pass throngs of people to exchange your name with the wait staff for a brick-sized pager coated in ancient soda syrup grime. And while you wait the forty-five minutes for a table, you take in the decor—this ancient pastiche of columns fused with cherub faces and flamingos. It’s as if the designer was tasked with imagining what an Applebee’s might look like on the island of Dr. Moreau.
Speaking of waking nightmares... the present—and look, I won't tell you where to get your news, but if a pillow or military subcontractor or pharmaceutical commercial runs between programming, skip that garbage. Listen to the rain... the rain won't lie to you.

We’re headed overseas to Sète a small coastal town in the South of France, “the Little Venice of Languedoc.” A ville known for Octopus Pie, Georges Brassens, and some interesting history (pretty famous anarchist lived there) for such a young European town. My hometown of Albany, NY (1686) is nearly as old as Sète (1666). Very neat.
So my twin was recently in Sète and was wonderful enough to bring my microphone (my mic has now been to cooler places than me). The microphone was positioned just outside of her hotel room window and takes in the quiet coastal surroundings with intermittent fan noises. I guess over there they call their HVAC “la clim” — essentially a PTAC (I think? I don’t know much about HVAC).
You don't know how geeked I am for French fans! I hope y'all enjoy and maybe find some peace (if only for a few).

There's a lot of news to take a break from — so another visual ambience bonus. Get up in the clouds and look how manageable things look from up here.

This week’s episode includes rain recorded from the center of a lean-to with some added drift. A lean-to is structure some folks park cars under, or picnic tables. Basically it protects people and things from airborne elements (not asteroids).
Does anyone remember the aughts? Fat Joe had a really popular song that I assumed was about the Rockaway Peninsula, but maybe not. I always assumed it was a Fat Joe beach-adventure thing where he leans back in his car, lowers the boom on the sound system, and strokes his chin like he’s assessing upcoming chess moves as he weaves through traffic on the BQE. (Directed by Hype Williams)
So, one New Year’s Eve in Burlington, VT I got completely wasted at Rasputin’s, and in the car ride back to our spot I shouted at pedestrians, “DO THE ROCKAWAY!” And more than one yelled back, “**** you!” And I was like, “Yo, you say that **** to Fat Joe’s face!”
Bluh, I'm struggling here folks...
At least hints of warmer weather are in the air — actually strike that, I don’t know why I need to attempt some poetic horse****. "Hints...” I should just—guys, there was a warm day last week with rain and I recorded some of it. And I added some drift because it feels nice to have a hobby.
Spring! Tune out, ignore the commercial news, and for heaven's sake do the Rockaway.
Also subscribe (and share)! We have a historical major league baseball episode opening day!