I’ve started appreciating Saturday mornings a bit more thanks to the NPR news quiz program Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! It’s an interesting diversion from the usual collection of TV and radio programming that I eagerly anticipate each week. Peter Sagal has hosted the most popular hour on NPR from its base in Chicago (when the show is not on the road) since 1997.

I used to be a regular listener of Car Talk with Click and Clack, a humorous auto advice program also on NPR, but that one seems to have been deprecated from that time slot when one of the brothers passed away a few years ago. I didn’t realize until just now (though I should have known) that archives of the program are still available online here.

Saturday mornings used to include a stop at Concannon’s Bakery for donuts, but common sense and the bathroom scales have convinced us to make it a much less regular occurrence than in the days of my youth. Still, if you’re ever in Muncie, Indiana it’s the finest bakery you will find. Their sign in the window says they were founded in Muncie in 1959 and as it happens, I was too.

A friend recently alerted me to the good news that vinyl record sales eclipsed digital CD sales last year. I know how I feel about that, and hope that maybe, just maybe, a lot of folks are getting weary with cheap imitations of genuine things.

That same weariness caused me to reconsider something I once thought I was certain about. Digital publishing. I’ve been a fan of the Kindle since its inception, but have had a change of heart about it. The Kindle was never better than a printed book, it was simply more convenient. I could carry my entire digital library everywhere I went with it. But honestly, how many books do you need with you at any one time?

The format diminished the book reading experience in every other way. So going forward, I’m a print book guy again and I’m looking for genuine bookstores to shop as opposed to that great big one.

That music sounds better on vinyl or that book reading is more enjoyable when holding an actual printed book could just be the bleating of an old goat, I’m not impartial in this regard. But life is about so much more than always striving for the newest, cheapest, fastest, most convenient methods for everything.

Like the simple joy of peaceful Saturday mornings…