On the day I was born three different doctors noted my breathless blueness and pronounced me dead, dead, dead—as they were taught to do in pronouncement school. Luckily a nurse grabbed me and plunged me into tubs of cold and hot water—as she was taught to do in the school of hard knocks—thus shocking me into life. Other than instilling me with a lifelong appreciation for nurses and a fear of water, my unusual arrival left me with a gift for seeing everywhere the uncommon and the curious.

I spent 26 years as a newspaper reporter with The Baltimore Sun and The Denver Post, and a score of years beyond that as a freelance journalist. Along the way I taught news writing, reporting, fiction and creative non-fiction writing at several Maryland universities and published five books on aerospace science, medicine and public health.

In 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press published a book I co-authored with Dr. Peter Beilenson called "Tapping Into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis." (see tappingintothewire.com). The book examines scenes from David Simon's HBO series "The Wire," analyzing the impact on public health of poverty, inner city crime and the failure of the war on drugs.

But serious is not my only mode. I write a twice weekly blog of humor, satire and, um, humorous satire. Check it out at AHintOfLight.com I'm also a five-string banjo picker and a singer-songwriter. Three of my tunes have earned honors from the Songwriter’s Association of Washington, D.C.