Uncategorized – Audibly Speaking: A Site of History and Memory

Twitter Facebook What in the world is Part D?  My personal experience learning what I appreciated to find out about Medicare Part D coverage is the subject of this this brief podcast episode. Disclaimer: These are my opinions and what my impressions were. This is no substitute or necessarily as accurate as your doing your own research on Medicare.  It is just an opinion piece on my reflections of my own experience. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Medicare is confusing– what an understatement. Two years out from retirement I decided to try to understand it, suspecting that it might take me that long.  I was not wrong!  Now that I am retired and am now on Medicare, I tell this slightly autobiographical tale of what I think I have learned about Medicare in hope that it will either be interesting to or helpful for others, whichever the case may be. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, was both a product of, and epitaph for, the Jazz Age of the Roaring ’20s.  Journey to West and East Egg again, as your host Rick Reiman narrates one of the great American novels of the twentieth (or any other) century. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook This is your host on “Audibly Speaking,” Rick Reiman. Today, March 31, 2023, is the 60th anniversary of the taking of the famous backyard photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, holding the rifle he would later use to kill President Kennedy and the pistol he would use to murder Officer J.D. Tippit forty-five minutes after that awful act in American history. This is a classic case of how historians untangle facts from allegations, and how the facts in the JFK assassination are imagined away and replaced by the will-of-the-wisp of “What-Ifs.” Let this year, the 60th anniversary of that dark day be the year we start listening to most historians, rather then the inhabitants of “Dallas in Wonderland,” with their absurd conspiracy theories. Thanks for listening–and please share this with others if you like it! Oswald in the back of his house on Neely Street in Oak Cliff, March 31, 1963. Picture taken by his wife, Marina Oswald. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In this unabridged audio narration, I read my article for The Journal of Perpetrator Research (2019) Vol: 2 Issue: 2. There were only three actual “shots” in Dealey Plaza on that dark day, of course. They were the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. But photographs are also metaphoric “shots,” and three were captured in the same seconds that the rifle blasts rang out, by the Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder with his 35-millimeter Bell and Howell Zoomatic camera. Three frames from this 26-second film represented the key photographs in this case, and they were to reverberate throughout American culture for decades to come. They were at once reflections, projections and evidence, as this article reveals. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook This is my audio narration of my book review of Paul R. Gregory’s The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee, a newly published account of Gregory’s brush with Lee and Marina Oswald in 1962, a year before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Listeners can read the full review, of which this is an unabridged recording, at http://www.washingtondecoded.com. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Join Holmes and Watson, and a sound show of horses hooves, Watson typing, and a crackling fire on a stormy night in Baker Street, as Holmes and Watson embark on one of their creepiest mysteries of the Sherlock Holmes canon! Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In 2006, Prof. Aleida Assmann, the premier authority in the field of Cultural Memory, explained how memory works at different levels and in different formats. Here is a summary of her 2006 article, “Reframing Memory,” which dissects the different kinds of memory and how it is a special view to argue, as some academics have, that there is, and can be, no such thing as collective memory. This is my summary of her argument. Any errors in “translation” are mine alone. –Richard Reiman Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Capital and Labor This is a reading of Chapter 16, on Capital and Labor, of The American Yawp, a free Open Educational Resource U.S. History textbook. This reading is by Dr. Richard Reiman, Ph.D., History. Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Reconstruction This is a reading of Chapter 15, on Reconstruction, of The American Yawp, a free Open Educational Resource U.S. History textbook. This reading is by Dr. Richard Reiman, Ph.D., History. Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook n this brief essay we review your textbook’s list of causes of the French Revolution. Twitter Facebook

Arthur Conan Doyle intended this story to be his final official entry in the Holmes canon. He later added “The Adventure of the Second Stain” (also in this narrated collection) to serve that distinctive role. Holmes and Watson spar over the latter’s dramatic depiction of Holmes’s detective methods and Holmes uncharacteristically gets on Watson’s nerves. Holmes’s brilliance is nevertheless on full display in this entry. Watson should have remembered that Sherlock Holmes is a package deal; if you want the genius, you must accept the eccentricity. As the final entry in my series of narrations of the Holmes stories (for awhile) this one naturally is the most skillfully done. Since one learns to improve with each effort, how could it not be? On a personal note, as I now know, the first half of the recording was made on the eve of my first positive test for Covid-19. The second half of the recording was made while emerging from the ordeal. I could not allow Covid to stop me; after all, “the game was afoot,” in the words of Sherlock Holmes! From "The Adventure of the Abbey-Grange"

Read by Rick Reiman. In this story, one of Doyle’s favorites, Sherlock Holmes must avert a European war by solving a mystery absolutely befuddling to all but this greatest “consulting detective” of all time. At once full of high tension and broad comedy, the autistic Holmes must navigate through the tangling murky politics of sexual relations, diplomacy and, yes, international politics itself. Holmes uncovers the mystery

Read for you by Rick Reiman. This excellent addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon contains many of the aspects that delight his readers. It is set in a macabre and romantic setting, the moors of Cornwall; it has Holmes pitting himself against the common feeling that there must be something supernatural afoot. These traces of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” are not all that recommend it. People go from normal to mad in a matter of minutes. The villain of the story wastes Holmes’s time with an attempted diversion that the detective must dispose of through his amazing talent for ratiocination. The story is slyly autobiographical as well, because Doyle has Holmes attempt a possibly-fatal experiment that Doyle himself had practiced at the risk of his own life. In this story, Holmes and Watson come as close as they ever do to calling each other by their first names. This was a conceit that the Granada TV series (1984-1994) employed when it had Holmes cry out to Watson, “John!” From "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (1910)

READ FOR YOU BY RICK REIMAN. In this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes must represent a client being blackmailed by the notorious criminal, Charles Augustus Milverton. Once again, Holmes uses the practices of the criminal himself, something he seems all too eager to employ in more than one of the stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Watson joins in the effort and the result is an action story piled upon a mystery tale. Holmes and Watson confront Charles Augustus Milverton, the notorious blackmailer.