July 9, 2008
Is there any celebrity Jamie Reno hasn't met? Turbula's resident pop culture critic shares a meeting with George Carlin in looking back at the great comedian's life and work ...

January 2, 2008
You need spend a total of, oh, say about 14 seconds with Jamie Reno before he manages to work the fact that he's from Iowa into the conversation – and never mind what the conversation was originally about! So it's only right and proper that Jamie give the Iowa Caucus its just due ... and our own John Whalen checks in with the story of how he came to give up his cab-driving ways ...

October 14, 2007
As reported in his previous column, John Whalen's fave San Fran watering hole, the historic John Barleycorn, has lost its lease. After a brief reprieve, the bar has finally and permanently received its death date. In From the Log of Badge No. 54131 ...

June 8, 2007
One of San Fran's most venerable working-class watering holes is getting shut down, and our own John Whalen lays it out for us in his latest installment of From the Log of Badge No. 54131 ... we also weigh in on Gary Sheffield's supposed violation of all things good and decent in From the Bleachers ...

March 10, 2007
Where did the time go? Has it really been months since Whalen last checked in with one of his cabbie stories from San Fran? He's back, this time at the airport. Cops are involved, so things might get ugly ...

January 13, 2007
It was a year ago that some idiot burned down the Compleat Angler, a Hemingway shrine and working bar on the island of Bimini. Turbula's editor spent a happy few days on Bimini some years ago, and wrote up a little travelogue piece about it – but sadly got himself fired from the magazine that sponsored the trip before the story was published. The burning down of the Compleat Angler, where a group of us had played on the same leather backgammon tables as the Great Man himself, motivated Turbula's editor to finally finish the story and publish it, some 17 years after it was originally written. And special thanks to best-selling mystery writer and South Florida denizen Tim Dorsey for providing a photo of the Compleat Angler's bar to accompany the story.

January 7, 2007
It's usually someone else's idiocy that finally overwhelms our innate laziness. In this case, it was "professional peace mom" Cindy Sheehan's journey to Cuba to protest prison abuse ... at the U.S. base on Guantanamo Bay, ignoring the far more widespread and pernicious human rights abuses in Cuban prisons. Such ideological gymnastics have caused us to resuscitate The Smoking Section ...

October 5, 2006
John Whalen has another entry in his From the Logs of Badge No. 54131 column – a not-so-loving memoir of a former boss ...

August 23, 2006
While most of us contented ourselves with exploring the back yard, Jamie Reno and his siblings had the run of the set of "The Mike Douglas Show." Jamie says goodbye to the late talk-show host ...

July 22, 2006
Some years ago, Turbula's publisher/editor Jim Trageser was a regular contributor to the pages of Living Blues magazine. In the early 1990s, a new editorial direction was decreed at LB: No more would whites be treated as serious blues musicians; to do so, it was ruled, was to engage in cultural thievery of the worst sort. Only blacks could legitimately play the blues. Going through some old boxes recently, Jim came across a rebuttal to that policy he wrote and submitted to LB. It's finally being published here.

July 9, 2006
Whalen is back ... reminiscing about his skirt-chasing, pot-smoking days as a young cabbie on the streets of San Fran ...

April 8, 2006
John Whalen sends in another dispatch from the Log of Badget No. 54131, with a tale of a Hollywood celebrity gone mad ...

January 9, 2006
A new book claims to capture the dark underbelly of San Diego's culture. Turbula's Jim Trageser reports, however, that it's just more of the same old same old ...

November 13, 2005
Resident cabbie John Whalen has a new installment in his "From the Log of Badge No. 54131" column ...

November 12, 2005
Jamie Reno checks in with a wistful look at the Baby Boomers and their impending exit, stage left from the national scene ...

October 14, 2005
John Whalen will be known to Turbula regulars for his tough-edged saga of his days as a cabbie in San Fran, the "From the Log of Badge No. 54131" column. This time, though, he's gone ... well, almost sentimental on us in his tale of a high school reunion. And the rest of Turbula Nation learns that Whalen and longtime Turbula fiction contributor and jazz critic Dan McClenaghan were high school buddies. We're not sure why, but we're pretty certain that ought to frighten us ...

September 25, 2005
Longtime Friend of Turbula Jamie Reno has contributed a splendid essay extolling the virtues of political moderation. We at Turbula generally consider ourselves to be radical centrists, and so find much to like in Jamie's thoughts.

September 19, 2005
Brad Fikes weighs in with a piece taking to task efforts to assign "intelligent design" status as some sort of intellectual alternative to evolution.

August 2005
As summer winds down, John Whalen checks in with another installment of From the Log of Badge No. 54131 with a tale of human pinballs – with cabs as the flippers.

Turbula Home Page

Copyright © Turbula.net