by Reason of Sanity Read Online Free PDF Page A

screen that constantly displays the date, hour, minute and second of the taping. I’ve been told they call it time-code.
    This is all the fault of a guy named Harry Lillis Crosby, who was a great old-time crooner nicknamed ‘Bing.’ You should remember him from a bunch of old ‘road’ movies he made with a comedian named Bob Hope. There’s also an old song called White Christmas he recorded that sold quite well. Bing was a golf nut, but his game was interrupted quite often because he had to do his weekly television show twice during each broadcast day. The second show for local stations; the first one was show earlier, and broadcast from California to the East Coast, to allow for the time difference. Everything was shot ‘live’ in those days.
    Bing came across a guy named Jack Mullin, who had an idea for a new invention called ‘videotape.’ With the help of Bing’s fifty thousand dollar investment, a process was started in the 1950’s that resulted in me now having an entire week’s worth of crime-scene videotapes to watch. Good work, Bing.
    I leave the videotapes on the boat’s din ette table and start to read the file on Vinnie’s drunk driver case. Maybe I’ll have more luck with a broken tree than I had with my reluctant murderer.
    I can read a book in one sitting if it’s something that I’m really interested in. I usually can usually get through about fifty pages an hour if it’s a ‘page-turner,’ so the average four-hundred-page paperback takes me a full day. There’s no break necessary for eating because I’ve mastered the art of doing both of those enjoyable tasks at the same time.
    Unfortunately the same doesn’t a pply to anything other than a suspense thriller or some mystery written by Arthur Conan Doyle or Rex Stout, so after about five minutes with the police report, my eyelids are starting to get heavy. It’s such a beautiful day in Southern California, it seems like a good time to take a walk up and down the dock. Maybe I’ll bump into George Clooney. I’ve been told he bought the huge mega-yacht that’s parked on our dock’s large end-tie from the estate of Johnny Carson.
    A friend of mine who’s about my age, told me that after he turned forty, he started to feel old when the cops started looking like high-school kids to him. They look young to me too, but my introduction to the aging process happens now as I see a young mother carrying a baby in her arms and holding the hand of second youngster walking next to her. They’re obviously coming to visit a boat-owning friend or relative on our dock.
    As they pass by me, the eyes of the young one walking bulged out as he looks down the dock and sees that mega-yacht parked on our end tie. He looks up at his mother and asks her whose it is. She tells him that she doesn’t know, but that he should ask the nice man standing there (me). The kid, shy at first, looks up at me. “Mister, do you know who lives on that big boat.” Cute kid. He’s got his eyes on Johnny Carson’s former boat, now owned by George Clooney I look down at him and answer his question.
    Not wanting to violate George’s privacy, I tell the kid that huge yacht once belonged to none other than Johnny Carson.” The kid looks at me with a blank stare on his face. I don’t want to leave him completely confused, so I try to help him out. “Your mommy will tell you all about Johnny Carson.”
    That’s when my age creeps up on me. As I smile and look into the young mother’s face, I realize that she doesn’t know who Johnny Carson is either! How can this be? The most famous talk show host in history – the greatest interviewer who ever lived – a guy who spent thirty years entertaining people – and she doesn’t know who he is? She must be from a foreign country. And then it dawns on me: If this young mother is now in her twenties, which it looks like she is, then Johnny Carson retired when she was still in elementary school, when she had to be in bed