A lot of us had our first taste of remote medical care during the pandemic — telemedicine checkups performed right in our own homes. It has its advantages — no travel time, no waiting room germs, no need to find a babysitter or change out of our jammies. And it can help doctors reach more patients without creating more strain. Health systems across the country are thinking about bringing care right into patients’ homes, with ideas that go way beyond virtual visits — including everything from primary care check-ups to chemotherapy, and even hospital-level care. On this episode, we explore what it takes to bring medical services into people’s homes. We hear stories about a new push to provide chemo at home, what it would take to provide high-level care, and what it’s like working as a home health aide.

Baseball slang collected during the 1930s includes fishing trip for "taking a swing at a bad ball," pour the pine for "to hit a good ball solidly," and the derisive term collisions for "college players."


You bet your sweet bippy! meaning "Definitely!" comes from a large cache of catchphrases from the TV variety series "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," which was wildly popular in the late 1960s. The bippy in this case was a euphemism for "butt." Other phrases made famous on "Laugh-In" included The devil made me do it, Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls, and Sock it to me!, the last of which was famously uttered on the show in a cameo by President Richard M. Nixon.


A longtime baseball umpire wonders why the slang phrase can of corn refers to "an easily caught pop fly ball." Another term for "a high fly ball" is rainmaker, suggesting that the ball goes up so far that it's capable of causing a cloudburst.


In sports slang, a horse-collar is "a score of zero," and to horse-collar an opponent is "to hold them scoreless."


Quiz John Chaneski's brain teaser this week is much ado about nothing. For example, a TV series was originally pitched as a sitcom about how a comedian gets his material, but later an  in-joke led people to believe the show was about nothing. Which show is it?


At a Seattle, Washington, tech company, Vivian finds that she and her fellow employees are continually vexed by this question: Does bimonthly mean "once every two weeks" or "once every two months"?


Following our conversation about listeners' favorite independent bookstore names, a Massachusetts listener shares hers: Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Massachusetts.


In southeastern Virginia, a come-here is "an outsider" or "someone who recently moved to the area."


Mark from Chicago, Illinois wonders: Why do some people use the term backslash to refer to a forward slash when giving a website address? Terms for that mark in other contexts are virgule, from the Latin for "twig," and solidus.


As a noun, respair means "the return of hope after a period of despair." As a verb, respair means "to have hope again." Although both forms are rare and obsolete, they seem ripe for reviving. Respair is among dozens of uplifting terms collected in Paul Anthony Jones's new book The Cabinet of Calm: Soothing Words for Troubled Times. (Bookshop|Amazon) Other heartening words include meliorism, "the belief that the world, or society, may be improved and suffering alleviated through rightly directed human effort," and cultellation, originally a surveyors' term, which denotes "the solution of a problem by dealing with it piecemeal," from Latin cultellus, meaning "knife." 


Two close friends from Richmond, Kentucky, call to share their hilarious dispute about how to correctly describe the one of them who's always to blame for something. Is she the fault default or the default fault?


The Cabinet of Calm: Soothing Words for Troubled Times (Bookshop|Amazon) includes the term worldcraft, meaning "the unique skills, wisdom and experience that an older person has amassed in their lifetime."


Nick from San Antonio, Texas, says his father used to use the word tiffin to denote a meal or snack made of leftovers. It's a word borrowed from Indian English which was itself borrowed from the English verb tiff, which means "to eat or to drink, or to drink slowly."


This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, a boisterous bounty of Bluegrass bands both regional and international recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park.  Also, interviews with these peppy pickers.

In the 1940’s, Kentucky mandolinist Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys band coined a brand new sound onto the American popular music landscape.  Named after Monroe’s band, this new “bluegrass” music was an evolution of the traditional old-time music of Appalachia.  Drawing its roots from the same English, Scottish and Irish ballads and dances as early Appalachian folk music, bluegrass also utilizes the same type of acoustic stringed instruments.  Banjo, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, dobro, and upright acoustic bass are the standard tools for bluegrass.  Add to those a ferocious driving tempo, brilliant virtuosity, and a style of singing that Bill Monroe described as a “high lonesome sound” and you’ve got bluegrass!

Featured in this episode of Ozark Highlands Radio are:  Nashville based multiple IBMA award winners the Becky Buller Band; Grammy nominated Austin, Texas progressive bluegrass sensation Wood & Wire; Ozark Original ACMA award winning family bluegrass band The Keisler Brothers; Pikeville, Kentucky IBMA award winner and the most soulful voice in bluegrass today, Dave Adkins; Newark, Arkansas’ own three finger banjo Jedi Adam Fudge; Ozark Original mandolinist and Acoustic Music Talk podcast host Brad Apple; Bethesda, Maryland progressive bluegrass icons Seldom Scene.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1980 archival recording of bluegrass legend Buck White performing the traditional song “More Pretty Girls than One,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

Author, folklorist and songwriter Charley Sandage presents an historical portrait of the people, events and indomitable spirit of Ozark culture that resulted in the creation of the Ozark Folk Center State Park and its enduring legacy of music and craft.  In this episode, Charley speaks with Ozark Folk Center wood worker Joe Roe about the subtleties of bow making.

After Billey Joe Johnson Jr. died in 2008, the state of Mississippi outsourced his autopsy. Al Letson and Jonathan Jones travel to Nashville, Tennessee, to interview the doctor who conducted it. Her findings helped lead the grand jury to determine Johnson’s death was an accidental shooting. However, Letson and Jones share another report that raises doubts about her original conclusions.

Host Mat Kaplan has wanted to reshare his first conversation with the great Sally Ride for years. Sally talks about women in space, the loss of space shuttle Challenger, and her devotion to sharing the wonders of science with young girls through Sally Ride Science. Planetary Society editor Rae Paoletta takes us to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Is it shrinking? We also celebrate the return of the space trivia contest.

This week on the show: we have stories of environmental concerns colliding with symbols of cultural importance. We venture to the spot in Italy where marble for Michelangelo's sculptures once came from. Controversy is also stirring on some mountains in Greece, as wind turbines anger locals. And we hear from a journalist who tracked an endangered leopard through war-ravaged territory.

ClassicalWorks (Episode 006)

The CRISPR challenge is back—first to grasp, then how to apply the biggest scientific breakthrough of our century so far. You remember CRISPR: nature’s own repair kit, guarding your genetic code, cell by cell, tuning up your DNA. Biologists had learned before CRISPR how to read the coded map of genes that make you a one-of-a-kind human being. What CRISPR shows them is how to write the code, as well, and rewrite yours, for this lifetime and all the generations that come after you. Then come the questions: change what, and why? Risks, side-effects, and mysteries: does anyone know enough about the infinitely complex human brain to tweak it?

CRISPR, since we last talked about it, has won a Nobel prize for the two scientists who first figured out how to apply the miracle molecule to the human genome and the human condition. And just this week, from our guest, the tireless biographer Walter Isaacson, CRISPR gets heroic treatment in hard covers for the same breakthrough biologists. For most of us, the acronym CRISPR is code for the deepest issues we don’t know how to talk about. But Walter Isaacson could change that some, as the irresistible storyteller about the kinds of people Apple puts on its “Think Different” billboards: Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein, Apple’s own Steve Jobs, and back a few centuries Leonardo da Vinci, the original Renaissance man. The new Isaacson epic, titled The Code Breaker, centers on the first woman and only the second living person in Isaacson’s Hall of Fame. His subtitle is Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. 

What do you turn to when a loss is so great that you can't put your grief into words? For many people, it's music – but such music isn't strictly sad. In this Deutsche Welle Festival Concert featuring sacred music for mourning, there are chords that ring out with hope in Garbiel Fauré's requiem, dynamic rhythms in Igor Stravinksy's Symphony of Psalms, and surprising instrumentation across the board, including a trio for trombone by Anton Bruckner. Philippe Herreweghe leads the Collegium Vocale Ghent and the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées in intense and uplifting performances at the Beethovenfest in Bonn.