Done, hon …

It doesn’t get any more Balwmer than this. So it ends here, at Honfest!

Workin' girls need a drink ...

Honfest is a B’more tradition that takes its name from the local term of endearment, “Hon,” celebrating the classic working woman from the 1950s — hence the beehives and horn-rimmed glasses everywhere:

A gaggle of Hons hamming it up ...

Honfest is also an homage to the kitsch of blue-collar culture, which is still very much alive in Baltimore …

Notice the tasteful head shot of Pee Wee?

As always, the two-day, retro street fest is held in the Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden (pronounced HAM-den) … I just got back to my air-conditioned rowhome. And thank gawd: It was close to 100 degrees out there this afternoon, with about 40 percent humidity …

Another Bawlmer tradition: stabbing a lemon with a hollow candy cane ... Now suck!

Lastly, Baltimoreans love their food … delicious, artery-clogging local cuisine:

I couldn't bring myself to do this ... any of this.

Might have dived in ... except it would've sat in my gut like an anchor in today's heat.

But this - beefalo? - I simply could not resist ...

Just finished a sloppy joe of this stuff - might've just been pulled pork ... And who cares?

So this post is my swan song …

The famed flamingo above the Hon Cafe on "The Avenue" ...

To see all the pictures I took, visit my Facebook album … And from now on, all my blogging will be for work — about the bioethics cut of select stories in the mainstream news.

Thanks for following … and farewell!

~ mike

A bony Seabiscuit, pedal-powered pink poodle and dolphin boy …

What can I say? Been very busy. But there was no way I would’ve gotten any work done today, when Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum put on its annual Kinetic Sculpture Race:

Yep: around the harbor, into the drink, up to Patterson Park, then ...

… let me cut to the chase: Look left of the big green block that represents Patterson Park … Lombard Street? Yeah, that’s where I live. So I hosted a house party, “Front Row to the Freakness,” and before these amphibious, pedal-powered floats paraded by my front porch, we trekked out to the pagoda — which made for an entirely appropriate backdrop for the random array of entries entertaining us on this fine spring day:

Go Seabiscuit! ... Kick in the extra bone!

... and lumbering not far behind.

It would’ve been more appropriate if the elephant was pink — because I took a pretty strong and refreshing roadie, and by the time we walked down the block back to my house, I was feeling pretty toasty … I mean, it did reach into the upper 80s ;^p

But then, as we sat in lawn chairs lining Lombard, and on our front porches, something even more random than giant pink, pedal-powered poodles appeared on our street: 14-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps:

Taken for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Vanity Fair ...

He looked way more incognito than that today — behind bug-eye shades, with a beard, his bulgy bulldog and his white Mercedes Benz jeep. The golden boy is indeed a Baltimore resident, and apparently, he’s friends with the frat boys across the street from my house. But no, I didn’t go paparazzi over our local Olympian … The closest I got was a shot of his ride as I filmed the aforementioned pink poodle speeding past my block. Look for his white, boxy Benzo at 10 and 30 seconds in this video:

Click the picture to take you to YouTube!

Folks said his ride didn’t sport a front license plate … Half jokingly, I said it should be “DLFNBOY” … and that was before I found that “My Little Mermaid” photo! … And yes, part of the video was sideways. But it was just that kind of a day ;^)

TGIF? More like TGFO …

That would stand for Thank God Friday is Over — more than 80 e-mails, not including phone calls made to London first thing in the morning, all the way out to Berkeley, Calif., in the afternoon. Fired off about five e-mails over breakfast, and followed up on two or three stragglers over dinner … at 10 p.m.

It’s now just after 2 a.m. in Baltimore. But I can look back and say one of my press releases got picked up by a blog for the Los Angeles Times, the Toronto Star to the north, a roving writer in England for the New Scientist and many, many papers and websites in between …

... because it was a study about bioethics in TV medical dramas.

The other release will result in more coverage for another study out of my institute, and an interview with the pediatric oncologist who led the research on the national broadcast for CBS Radio News on Monday … That’s when the embargo lifts. So can’t tell you more till then.

Oh, and then on my institute’s own website, we posted a bioethics issue piece today that reflects the type of digital content I’ll be cranking out on a regular basis to explain just why bioethics matters to us all:

"Send us your saliva, a thousand bucks and we'll tell you more!"

Tomorrow: critique our design team’s mock-ups for the new website where these stories will be featured … that, and fine-tuning a communications plan for another item you might’ve been hearing about in the news lately: health-care reform … My March madness continues.

My March Madness

All I’m hearing about are the numbers. But when you don’t watch TV and only listen to public radio, they have to do with the number of votes the Democrats need to pass health-care reform. I can’t speak very knowledgeably about the bill being voted on tonight in the House, but what is unacceptable is that opponents in Washington (lawmakers and lawn protesters) can’t either. They can’t get past the same old fear-mongering arguments in their bid to block reform:

• It’s going to subsidize abortions (untrue, according to this Christian ethics professor, on the Huffington Post)
• It’s going to gut Medicare and Medicaid (yeah, of inefficient spending)
• Health-care insurance will cost more and mean fewer choices for those who currently have it (more political lies)

And besides, what will be the cost if we don’t overhaul our health-care system now? Health-care premiums are rising three times faster than earnings, and whereas 17 percent of our economy is currently devoted to health care, at the current rate, that will balloon to almost one-third in 20 years — and leave less for job creation, environmental protection and support for schools, cities and families across America.

Really? Politics is more important that averting that demise?

After you’ve watched a full-day of college basketball, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to devote a few minutes to some footage of real consequence:

“We Can Afford Reform, We Can’t Afford the Status Quo”

(click below for more videos)

Making the news …

On Thursday, an article in the Baltimore Sun on the latest unemployment numbers mentioned my odyssey from the beautiful, but economically dismal Bay Area, to The Wire-d but welcoming city of Baltimore. I was happy to oblige my new hometown with this happy ending:

Michael Peña, 36, decided to move to Baltimore from another high unemployment state – California – because he got a job offer here. He lost his communications job at Stanford University last May as part of recession-driven layoffs and knew it would be difficult to find something similar nearby. California unemployment shot past 10 percent early last year and kept going, hitting 12.5 percent in January.

“I applied just as heavily during my job search in the Bay Area as I did with the select markets like Boston and Baltimore or the D.C. area, and it was just a lot tougher in the Bay Area to get an interview,” he said. “Everybody was out of work. Everybody was willing to be underemployed.”

So, the lifelong Californian left San Jose for Baltimore just after Christmas, starting his job as a science writer at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in January. He doesn’t regret the move, despite getting snowed in the next month.

“It’s a fascinating job,” Peña said.

Oh, and shortly before I left California? Another communications specialist who got laid off from Stanford said she saw me being interviewed on the Bay Area’s top-ranked newscast one evening … Even if the segment were still online, I certainly wouldn’t link to it here ;^p

By the way, also on Thursday, I was shooting video with — and escorting around — a film crew from the CBS Sunday Morning program. The segment airing this weekend on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will consist of footage taken at Johns Hopkins that I facilitated, as well as interviews I arranged.

Sunday's segment will be about the much-more photogenic Rebecca Skloot.

The show starts at 9 am … And be sure to stay tuned to this station for more updates.

This American Life …

In honor of the 51st birthday of Ira Glass, host of WGBH’s This American Life, I figured it would be appropriate to post several photos from the public-radio god’s hometown … Below is the National Katyn Memorial, which is dedicated to the memory of the Polish who died in the Katyn massacre during World War II. It is the centerpiece of the roundabout where Felicia Street comes out as Albemarle Street …

Walked by this sculpture on my way back to the office from a lunch meeting ...

I don’t have stories of flaming squirrels, although back when I was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, I was confronted by a gang of really fat ones that overtook the Berkeley Marina …

For now, it's off season for the dragon paddle boats in the harbor ...

And I can’t offer up any tales as ridiculous as the first segment of episode 380 of This American Life – about the police standoff with a crazed chimpanzee that hijacked a van (you have to hear it to believe it) … although I did report on the California State Department of Fish and Game arresting a pair of chimps from a couple in the otherwise not-very-newsworthy suburb of Alamo when I was a cub reporter … The male chimp actually spit on me at one point.

I've come a long way since my days in the newsroom ...

Nor can I talk about being gored by the cloned descendant of a docile bull — although, at the closed-door meeting I had yesterday, we spoke about bioethical issues that would blow your mind … And then again, I guess I can talk about running away — and then after (yes, as in chasing) — a bunch of bulls in Pamplona during my wild and crazy days as a youth ;^)

The USS Constellation, the last Civil War ship still afloat ...

Yeah, now that’s old … I hope that puts passing the half-century mark in a little more perspective, Ira.

Happy birthday! You’ve given all of your loyal listeners more than we could ever repay you … and yes, I have donated ;^p

On cards and crabs …

You learn a few things when you work at a place like Johns Hopkins, and not necessarily scholarly stuff like neuroethics or public health policy analysis. More like, when the disgruntled desk jockey in the ID office tells you to take a seat in front of the camera, request a countdown – like, from three or four — so you know when he or she is going to take the picture.

The ID office staffer's revenge for having such an awful job ...

I know. Their knack for the Kodak moment makes the folks at the DMV look like they’re Ansel Adams … Anyway, here in the crabby state, the office is called the MVA (Maryland Vehicle Administration). That’s where I was this morning, to get my new driver’s license.

Unfortunately, one of the requirements is turning in your out-of-state license. So, while the picture on my California driver’s license wasn’t anything great either, I was sad nonetheless to part with it. That card has gotten me drinks at some of the swankiest (and seediest) bars in the country, and in all the years I had carried it around, it’s been presented to snowboard-rental stoners up in the Rockies, a skydiving instructor before we flew up to 10,000 feet, and more than a few friends and flirty girls who were like, “You are not thirty-(bleep!) … Gimme your ID!”

Over the years, my ID kinda grew on me -- like the facial hair I used to sport above my upper lip.

So now it’s official. Although I moved to Maryland exactly two months ago, there was something symbolic about handing over my California driver’s license today.

But while we’re on the topic of symbols, I do like the crabby mascot on my new state ID. As you can tell from my birth date, I am a cancer: strong domestic instincts, with a highly protective shell on the outside, but pathetically sweet and mushy once you crack the shell:

My new ID on ice ...

So there’s the flop. I can’t deal a full five cards. But let’s consider this Texas Hold ‘Em anyway and get to the turn …

Now it's your turn. You have all my contact info ...

Feel free to call anytime — just not my BlackBerry. I hate that thing …