Pure Barry. Or Not.

On Friday I started the day with three hours of substitute-host-level Excellence in Broadcasting on America's Number One radio show. You can find a few moments from my guest-hosting stint here. Thank you as always to Mr Snerdley, Ali, Mike and the rest of the gang: the best team in radio, no question, and I treasure my many years in their expert hands.

~Although the grounded Nancy Pelosi and the underbussed Steve King predominated, we also found time to pose a few questions about my upcoming appearance with the great Dennis Miller in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - like, how do you pronounce the name of the town? Opinions differed throughout the three hours. The "pure barry" of our headline is, of course, a Scottish expression. But I'm thinking of introducing it to Pennsylvania just to add another variation. At any rate, you can book for Dennis and me at the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Bar, Wilkes-Bear, Wilkes-Berry, Wilkes-Burrah, Wilkes-Berra or any proximation thereto here. And, with VIP tickets, you not only enjoy the best seats in the house but get to meet me and Dennis after the show.

~Speaking of Pennsylvania, earlier in the week I checked in with our bigtime Rush affiliate WPHT. Always fun to be on "The Big Talker", as I still think of it, and in this case with Rich Zeoli, who follows Rush every day at 3pm Eastern. We shot the breeze on various topics of interest. Click below to listen:

My grip on the Keystone State is getting more tenuous the more pronunciations of Wilkes-Barre I try out, but I think Philly is about an hour from Reading, which is where Dennis and I will be starting our Pennsylvania/New York mini-tour next month, at the Santander Arts Center. Tickets are available here, but don't leave it too late: the loges are gone, and there are only a few seats left in the orchestra.

~Today, Saturday, is the fifteenth anniversary of one of those rare episodes that, unbeknown to the fellow at the time, is the hinge moment of his life. January 19th 2004 was the date of the Iowa caucus. Vermont governor Howard Dean had been the avowed darling of leftie Internet-savvy youth. Alas, come the big night, they didn't realize you had to leave the house and go to this thing called a "polling station". Apparently, they thought you could leave your vote in the uptick of the chatroom on his blog, or whatever it was back then. So Governor Dean came up a bit short warm bodies-wise. That need not have proven fatal were it not for what became known as his "I have a scream" speech.

A few years later, appearing with Dean and Fred Thompson in Calgary, I saved my "Gotcha!" question for the end - when I asked the president-that-never-was to do an all-Canadian version of "I have a scream", with provinces rather than states. It's about a minute before the end here:

A chap has to be rather secure about himself and relaxed about the vicissitudes of life to reprise the moment when all ambition crashes to the ground ne'er to rise again. So I think the above speaks well of him.

~If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club please feel free to weigh in below. Dennis and I hope to see many of you at our live shows; and I'll be back this evening for another edition of Mark at the Movies.