CALL ME SNAKE

I heard this on the radio while I was doing other things (sock drawer, etc.), which means the details are sketchy. The basic story is that a woman gave birth while driving in the carpool lane of Interstate 5 in California. It's a marvelous tale--bringing a new life into the world and all that. But the curmudgeon in me has to wonder: Is it OK to drive in the carpool lane if you start out with just one person in the car and end up with two? Just wonderin'...

Maybe it shouldn't bother me. But as a person of modest means who makes an annual contribution to my local NPR station, it bothered me to learn that some NPR reporters earn more than $300,000 a year (and I'm not talking about some of the biggest name windbags/fatheads; who knows what they make?) Those salaries are not astronomical compared to the TV network news anchors, I suppose, but when they tell us: "Your contributions help bring us NPR, and coverage like that does not come cheap," I had no idea until now (upon reading Alex Beam's column in yesterday's Boston Globe) exactly what they meant by "not cheap." I don't know about you, but I wouldn't call $300,000 a year "cheap," and I have to assume that quite a few NPR reporters/commentators make that and more. I don't want these people to starve. Many of them do an excellent job and some, like those covering the war in Iraq, put themselves in harm's way. Still, to me, the revelations about those cushy salaries took some of the luster off so-called "public radio."