A few weeks ago, Thomas Lennon visited Oak Park. He and I have Oak Park in common -- he grew up there and I work there now, writing for the local Oak Leaves Newspaper. Lennon works in Hollywood, most recently portraying Lt. Jim Dangle on the Comedy Central show "Reno 911!" You know, the guy in the short-shorts.

Knowing that I'd interviewed Lennon before, the producer of the village's local television channel, VOP-TV, asked if I could arrange an on-camera interview. Before I knew it, I was mic'd up and standing next to Lennon in a hallway at Oak Park-River Forest High School. I purposefully didn't prepare any questions so it'd be extra-casual. You can see it here:

So yes -- my first steps toward becoming an anchor on Inside Edition.

No, no. That won't happen. But it was quite an honor, because Lennon was an original member of the early '90s sketch comedy group The State. Their show pretty much defined my sense of humor in high school. 

I've done lots of other video interviews before, but always for the web. I have to admit, it was pretty cool knowing my first foray into television was alongside someone I'd watched on TV as a kid.

I performed with my friends in Dianogah for a couple songs at the Pitchfork Music Festival. Here's a video of I found on YouTube of our George Harrison cover, "What is Life." I'm on the far right, playing tambourine and singing background vocals. (Rebecca Gates, formerly of the Spinanes, is singing lead...)

Here's a photo, courtesy of Jeremy Farmer:

I recently got back from sunny San Diego. My good friend and distinguished cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier was scheduled to sign autographs for two hours a day at Comic-Con 2009. I decided to tag along, enjoy the nice weather and see all the geekdom first-hand. This event is a four-day blowout of all things comic books -- where publishers, artists, video game programmers and filmmakers gather to allow the fevered masses to fawn over them. It's a little bit of mayhem.

Now, I must point out that I know very little about comic books. Or comic book culture, for that matter. Probably less than the average person, and I’m assuming the average person doesn’t know The Green Lantern’s real name either. (It’s Hal Jordan, but I didn’t know that until midway through the weekend…) So while I couldn’t really enjoy the convention for the same reasons as the tens of thousands of other people who attended, I decided to document the trip while Paul fulfilled his duties at the Fantagraphics booth.

I made three videos and posted them to YouTube. The second one is my favorite, and you can see it below. (If you want to see the others, check out my YouTube site.) Within minutes of this video hitting the web, it started receiving comments from convention-goers. One person (thus far) even pointed out that I caught him and his costume with my camera.

 For my work blog, The News Peg, I sat down with Peter Sagal, host of NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me," the news-trivia show.  Thought you might like to head over to my multimedia section and watch it.

 Pictured above is us during the interview.

I have a blog post over at the South Bend Power Nineties today.

A few weeks ago they featured an article I wrote in 2000 about The Butterfly Effect. This time, they asked me to reminisce about my college band The Transoms. While you can hear a couple clips from the CD here on my site, you can go over there and read EVEN MORE about it and download the ENTIRE THING!

Now I'm stuck trying to explain to Lars Ulrich why that's not a terrible thing.