The Dinicola family of Scotch Plains, New Jersey is used to having lots of dogs around. They provide a foster home for dogs awaiting adoption, a specialized commitment that requires patience and a love of animals. One particular dog was a hard sell because of his skittish personality. So, they got special permission to adopt Jordan and he's now a family member. Their story is immortalized in the children's book Jordan and the Fosters, written and published by dad Joe Dinicola and illustrated with the help of AI. Joe, a software tester who works from home, juggled his full-time job, his three kids and four dogs and somehow found time to write the story and create the illustrations with the help of the Midjourney platform. The result is a sweet story with beautiful illustrations. Our conversation digs into the process of fostering pets, writing and using AI as a tool of story telling.

Video version

Find the book:

https://hfg.jordanandthefosters.fun (a portion of the sales price supports Home For Good Dog Rescue, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey)

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Joe's book website

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A cocaine addiction, two burglaries that cleaned him out and a fraught recovery have shaped Sam Gladu's music. Performing as DjRetsam, Sam has been sober for ten years and only a few months into his new career as a rap artist. But he has attracted the attention of Busta Rhymes and a streaming audience that has grown to thousands. His music is raw and real with messages of recovery, loss and optimism. He also hates to see used books go to waste, so for the last three years he's been gathering used books and stuffing them into sidewalk kiosks in the suburbs of Montreal to bring the gift of reading to people who might not have access to books. Listen to this unique artist and his story of survival and success.

DjRetsam's socials:
YouTube
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn

DjRetsam's podcast:
Rumbling Facts

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Your support of Type. Tune. Tint. for a few bucks a month is highly appreciated!

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A near-death experience inspired professional musician Andrew Schulman to create the Medical Musician Initiative, teaching musicians to become part of the care of critically ill patients in ICUs. Having benefitted himself from the healing power of music, Andrew is on a mission to bring a dose of medical music to every ICU around the world. The autobiographical account of his life, death and rebirth Waking the Spirit has attracted attention globally and remains a compelling story of survival and inspiration.

Music selections performed by Andrew Schulman:

Here Comes the Sun by George Harrison
Little Theme in D by Peter Williams

Websites:
Andrew Schulman
Medical Musician Initiative

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Wasps are not our friends, usually. However, Chris Alice Kratzer has found redeeming qualities in wasps, dedicating an entire book to them called The Social Wasps of North America. She was also inspired by a specific type of wasp to design a new kind of home insulation that could go into production sometime in 2024. We'll find out when Yellowjacket Insulation will be coming to a Home Depot near you. Alie's fascination with nature informs her creativity and a moral imperative to find solutions to some of the problems created by humans.

Alie's website: https://owlflyllc.com

Video episodes:

Youtube

Vimeo

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Three authors, three books, three ways to enjoy your summer reading!

I invited three of my returning authors to tell us about their new books, all coming out during June, 2024. There’s something for everyone here, to wit:

• Fork Social Media! (And the algorithm it rode in on). Sudi “Rick” Karatas returns for his third visit to Type. Tune. Tint. with stories of social media users who ended up booted, suspended, tossed because the algorithms can’t take a joke. We agree that it’s necessary to guard against hate speech and posts/comments that advocate violence and crime. Bravo! Unfortunate, the policing is done by little pieces of AI programming, algorithms, that don’t know that misinterpret you and a friend “shooting the breeze” as advocating violence. Or the guy who needed to “bomb” his basement for fleas. Or the Dolly Parton impersonator, legit and approved by Dolly herself, who is frequently banned for impersonating someone. Maybe you have a story of being tossed into Facebook jail!
• I Like Black People...The Good Ones! Author Marklyn “Mr. Direct” Johnson prides himself of speaking plainly and honestly about everything from gender to race. As a 50-ish Black man, he’s lived a life of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning people saying things he calls “microagressions,” little things that marginalize or insult people of color. “You’re one of the good ones,” is a classic, along with “You’re a credit to your race,” and “You speak so well” are just a few. He also has a modern and sobering take on Black history.
• Island Serenade. Charles Wiedenmann’s first foray into fiction is a light and airy romance novel that pairs a sweet hotel housekeeper with a high-powered rock star at a luxury resort on a tropical island. The story has no sharp edges, a perfect beach read designed to be pure escapist fare for summer. Charles unleashes his imagination to all of our benefit resulting in an easy story to fall in love with.

I brought all three authors on board for this special summer episode.

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Dr. David Weill spent 20 years as one of the world's pre-eminent heart and lung transplant surgeons. Some of his exploits are detailed in his memoir, Exhale: Hope, Healing and A Life in Transplant, which he wrote to preserve the amazing nature of transplant surgery, its successes and failures.

But as many authors have found, writing fiction from fact is incredibly freeing. Thus, his first novel, All That Really Matters, is a fictional account of Dr. Joe Bosco, a transplant surgeon based broadly on himself with clear differences--Dr. Bosco loses himself in his own arrogance fueled by alcohol and self-destructive behaviors. A disastrous operating room mistake almost ends his career but forces him to confront the question facing so many of us: What really matters in our lives?

This was a rare opportunity for a chat with a doctor who has seen the extreme highs and extreme lows of one of the most demanding and rewarding areas of medicine. Listen up!

Watch the video

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidweillmd/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidweillmd/
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/David-Weill-MD/author/B08MQTR645?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

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Australia’s pre-eminent recovery guru brings his positive energy to the world. It took sheer exhaustion from a 17-year heroin addiction to simply stop the madness. And in 2009, he cleared his head and began living a life devoted to better health and commitment to helping other addicts.

"I'm incredibly blessed to be where I am today,” he says.

At age 48, Danny Shannon is a college graduate, an expert on helping addicts get and stay sober and the developer of an online program and mobile app designed to allow addicts to create video journals to help chart their progress. And thus was born Encapsulator, an easy way to record a video journal, born of his early use of video during sessions with other recovering addicts.

This is Danny’s remarkable story of recovery and rebirth.

https://encapsulator.io
http://dannyshannon.com.au/
https://www.facebook.com/sobersquaddannyshannon

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