I know a lot of folks up north envy people down south during winter.  Here’s a reality check:  while winters down south tend to be nice with very little snow by comparison, summers are miserable.
Every year.
At its hottest month, which is usually August, the South offers you the opportunity to step one foot out of your house and immediately feel drenched in sweat as soon as the humidity hits you.
That’s worth moving down here for, isn’t it?

No one wants to hear that a Monday happens to be the “longest day of the year.” But today’s the day of the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere, so you’ll be hearing it on TV and on the radio.
That’s practically a guarantee.  And here’s the thing: whoever says it will be wrong.

When you work in television, you get used to people who complain.  In fact, you get so used to people who complain that when you find someone with something nice to say, you immediately suspect that they’re being insincere for the purpose of setting you up for an even bigger insult just moments away.
A friend of mine found this clip on YouTube of what is apparently a real viewer call to a Texas television station.  Since it mentions the season finale of Criminal Minds, it’s logical to assume that we’re …

Any time a major disaster happens, many people ponder what it would have been like if they had gone through the terrible misfortune they see victims going through. For many believers, they also consider whether the tragedy is a reminder that the Biblical end times are that much closer.
A friend of mine from church sent an email yesterday that centered on the recent earthquakes recorded in Haiti, Chile and Taiwan.

Twenty-five years ago this year, a group of musicians calling themselves USA For Africa gathered in one recording studio and created a song to raise money for famine relief.
A mix of more than a dozen solo performances mixed with a choir, these musicians donated their time for the effort and has raised more than $63 million.
Even back then, if I had been handed a pen and pad and asked to watch the video and list the names of at least ten musicians I recognized, I think it would literally have …

Well that didn’t last long.
There was probably close to two inches of snow here in Charleston when I got up this morning. It was really beautiful, and it reminded me of those rare occasions when I was little where there was enough snow the night before that you walk outside and see everything familiar completely transformed into, pardon the cliché, a “winter wonderland.”
On the other hand, my dog wasn’t particularly excited: to her, it just means that her feet get wet and she’s not a fan of that. …

Snow isn’t something you see all that often in Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, the last time snow of any significant accumulation fell here was back in January of 2000.
It looks like there’s at least an inch of accumulation so far. The forecasts call for the snow to continue overnight and into the morning, so we could wind up with up to four inches before it’s over.
That depends, of course, on how long it takes this system to move out.

Snow is coming.
Some of you who’ve been under a blanket of the stuff for weeks now are probably saying, “Yeah? Cry me a river.”  But having grown up in South Carolina, I must point out that snow isn’t all that common here in the central and southern coastal areas.
I remember the “Blizzard of 1973,” when there was significant snow in Columbia.  In fact, there was so much snow that the entire area was pretty much paralyzed.  There was a big snow some time in the 1990s, as I recall, that …

If you’ve reach the point of “disaster fatigue” and don’t want to hear anything tonight about the crisis in Haiti, tonight will be a good night to keep the television turned off.
That’s because a mammoth number of networks are airing Hope for Haiti Now, a global telethon designed to raise money for relief efforts.
You’ll find it at 8:00pm tonight on — ready for this list? —

Charitable groups trying to help earthquake victims in Haiti are concerned about a drop in giving, and one week after the disaster, the timing seems just about right.
Charities call it “donor fatigue,” but as MSNBC suggests, a better name might be “disaster fatigue.” 

The word tragedy doesn’t really do the situation in Haiti justice.  Now, days after the massive earthquake that has already been blamed for tens of thousands of deaths, there are areas where shock and sadness are giving way to frustration and anger.
And, in some cases, violence.
It’s understandable, I suppose, given the conditions these people are facing right now.  But it’s not exactly helping their plight.

Once upon a time, there was a network called MTV dedicated to music videos.  I don’t know if MTV shows any music videos these days.  I haven’t watched it in years, but the last time I did, all I saw was stupid reality shows that had absolutely nothing to do with music.
There was a time when GSN stood for Game Show Network, rather than just GSN, and played only classic game shows we grew up with, before trying to add a lot of its own cheap, bad shows into the …