Greetings from South Jersey!

Nina and I are in town for the weekend to give my father a sort of proper, if belated, Irish Wake at a local restaurant that was a favorite of his. About 30 family and friends are scheduled to arrive there on Saturday.

We spent all of yesterday in airports, airplanes and cars, not getting to the hotel until 2:30 in the morning. But prior to leaving California, I received an email from Tammy Bruce’s producer, wanting me to appear on her radio show on Thursday, to discuss my podcast interview with Alvin Toffler, which went live earlier this week.

I told him that as much as I’d love to (and greatly enjoy Tammy’s contribution to the Pajamas podcasts), I’m flying. Would Friday work?

Friday would work. So we drove to my mom's house, where company is already arriving from afar, and had lunch at 11:30. And then from 12:30 until 1:15 PM Eastern time, I appeared on the Tammy Bruce show. I did a fair amount of radio in the last years of my previous life, but none since, so while I know the behind-the-scene mechanics and understand my role in them, I have no idea how I sounded today to listeners.

How I sounded to me was basically like one long 45 minute cutting edge technology espousing run-on sentence:

ThankyouTammygreattobehere! TofflerpodcastThird Wave, prosumers,Revolutionary Wealth, JohnKennethGalbreath! BlogosphereInstapunditMalkinHot Air,Vblogs! FreelancejournalistNRO, TCS, PC WorldPajamas Media! thanksit’sbeenfun!

It’s amazing what adrenaline, flop sweat, and that fear of dead air can do to make sounds come out of a mouth. Fortunately, I didn’t blurt out anything remotely similar to this, so I think the show went well, and the fact that Tammy had me over for something like three segments, including the first segment after the on-the-hour newsbreak, was a good sign that I wasn’t completely bombing.

What made it even more surrealistic was to be doing the show in my old room in my mom’s house, pacing the floor with a cell phone and headset, discussing high tech topics with a national radio show host. On the other hand, that’s one of those Army of Davids/Third Wave sorts of things: as a kid, I daydreamed in that room the standard, hey kids--let's put on a show! sorts of fantasies. This week, I recorded, edited and uploaded a podcast (and wrote a magazine article) from my den in California on Wednesday, and then did a radio show on Friday from old bedroom in New Jersey.

And then afterwards for complete reverse Future and Culture Shock, drove my wife to the local McDonald’s so that she can download email, as that’s one of the few sources of public Wi-Fi in this small town. As opposed to the suburbs of Silicon Valley, where it's practically the law that every restaurant and coffeehouse have Wi-Fi service.

Of course, trying to explain all this to my mom and my late father’s sister is virtually impossible. Internet? Blogs? Wi-Fi? Podcasts? Forgetaboutit! But the radio, of course, they do understand, and I think that was enough to make me look good in their eyes.

More this weekend, time permitting.