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Weekend EditionCheck out the listings for a subset of the myriad of commemorative 9/11 programs, not including the live coverage of ceremonies that will blanket the airwaves for a significant chunk of your Sunday. I'm avoiding these programs as all this footage has been on an endless repeat for the past 10 years, and the day is still fresh in my memory as I was living just a couple hours outside of NYC and talked with several people that day who witnessed the attacks in person. Being in Western Massachusetts, I literally could have looked up to see the planes make their detours to New York I heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on NPR and got to work just in time to see the second plane hit the tower on a TV broadcasting CNN in the office. The West Coast slept through most of the attacks that morning but if you were in the Northeast you had probably seen the footage of the attacks 100 times by noon and were already trying track down friends who may have been in lower Manhattan or DC, and getting your spare room ready for refugees fleeing the city.
About 20 times a ay I walk by a photo I took of the WTC in 1995, I'm not going to kid you that I notice and absorb it every time, but that place and that day are vivid for me. I can appreciate the sense of detachment some might feel about the place and the day, after all, it was a continent away from Los Angeles, and the footage still looks surreal - it's about as real as the Apollo missions to the moon for some people, and thus deniable. Perhaps the detached need a weekend of TV specials to reattach, I respect that, this is the weekend for it. This really isn't my 9/11 story, but my unwillingness to review these images, transcripts, phone calls, and radio transmissions is shared by a lot of people. By watching these shows we won't learn anything new about the day we will never forget.
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I'm choosing instead to enjoy the weekend by watching the final stages of the Vuelta a Espana (Tour of Spain) which will come down to the wire with the top two contenders separated by a mere 13 seconds as of this morning. Sunday night will be the season finale of "True Blood" and we'll be having a few cocktails inspired by the series (see below). I've seen a lot of criticism about this season of "True Blood" but if you were looking for depth in this show you are delusional - it's meant to be cartoonish and provocative and that's why it's fun. If you can't get ahold of the actual True Blood beverage, just use juice from blood oranges which you can probably get at one of those fancy Whole Foods places: