Homeless man with awesome radio voice reunited with mother

1/7/2011

"...as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience."

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

HAPPY TIMES: By now you've probably seen the video of the homeless man from Columbus with the freaky good radio voice. He was reunited with his 90-year-old mother Thursday and the results were touching (although they probably would've been more touching without all the cameras hovering around.) Here's hoping that Ted Williams can hold it together and be a true rags to riches story thanks to his newfound fame. And kudos to the Columbus Dispatch for doing good journalism and finding this man's story and sharing it with the world. It took professional journalists -- not bloggers or amateur "citizen" journalists -- to bring this story to the rest of the world. Nicely done. RL

THE WORLD OF IDEAS: If you send lots of text messages -- and these days, who doesn't? -- then this story is a must-read. Imagine a texting world in which you don't peck away at a tiny keyboard, but instead have a smooth interface with your keyboard as it kind of reads your mind to determine what you want to type. Plus, this dude wants to talk to dolphins and what could be cooler than that? RL

GRAB BAG: Ever wonder what the Monday Night Football guys are thinking about when they're in the middle of one of those interminable upsets that seem to never end? Well, here's a glimpse from an unedited broadcast feed that indicates these games are just as dull to them as they are to us. And Alec Baldwin will be on Eliot Spitzer's show today saying that he might consider running for office. We find this kind of interesting, if only because Baldwin's not exactly been a poster boy for good behavior over the years. Something tells us that little phone exchange where he lambasted his young daughter might come back to haunt him. RL

CH-CH-CHANGES: The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is this week and it's an event that generally pulls back the curtain on how we'll be watching TV, surfing the 'Net, and talking (or texting or watching videos or whatever) on our phones in the coming years. On the horizon: disrupting the living room so that the family TV is connected to the Internet, and that could mean disconnecting from cable and satellite TV. Sometimes we here at Thin Slices kind of wish there'd be a five-year moratorium on all things technological so we could just sit back with our remote control and wallow in the now. Sometimes. RL

THIN SLICES IS BACK: And better than ever, kind of. We kick off the year with this sad note about one of our heroes, Chuck Berry. Still going strong at 84, the rock legend and one of the genre's inventors had a rough go of it on New Year's Eve and apparently is suffering from exhaustion. We say, hail, hail to a musical genius and here's hoping he's better soon. Here he is raking poor old Keith Richard over the coals in a fascinating clip that shows just how cantankerous he could be. And whatever you do, don't mess with his amp. RL

Rod Lockwood


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