Year: 2007/Archives

PHW = NPR Story of Day

The 1st in our series Project Healing Waters is the NPR Story of the Day podcast.

Project Healing Waters- NPR

A new series daily this week for NPR Day to Day: Retired Navy Captain Ed Nicholson is an avid fly-fishermen. He realized fishing would be good therapy for disabled veterans. So he hooked up with Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers, and with private donations and volunteer guides, they began teaching wounded vets, including many amputees, how to fly-fish. Project Healing Waters, now regularly takes vets on these therapeutic fishing outings. Captain Eivind Forseth spent a day catching trout at Rose River Farm in Virginia.

Tequila Warning

Please, someone tell me who produced this gem:

It’s a mock ad (radio-safe) extolling the virtues of Tequila, and listing in standard pharm-ad fashion “Side-effects may include loss of money, loss of clothing, loss of virginity, delusions of grandeur, table-dancing…” The mp3 is all over the web with filename: AlcoholWarning_MMH.mp3, but no site credits an author. Anyone?

Ricky Gervais- Kenya?

Ricky Gervais Comic Relief 2007 Red Nose Day. Like the previous post, this one’s also from Africa… sort of:

Thembi’s AIDS Diary

The site for Thembi’s AIDS Diary, A Year in the Life of a South African Teenager (Radio Diaries– The AIDS Diary Project) now has a blog, lotsa Flash, mp3s, and is preparing an AIDS Action Toolkit for .edu and avocacy.

Tin Can Orchestra

Weekend America ran the HV story “Tin Can Orchestra” by Ann Heppermann & Kara Oehler: Bobby Hansson is a phtogrpaher, filmmaker, blacksmith, and tin can artist. He’s created an orchestra of musical instruments from them, and other dumpstered materials. They’ve never been played all together before. Until now, for this radio piece. His book is The Fine Art of the Tin Can: Techniques and Inspirations.

This is Bobby Hansson with his friend Andrew Hayes holding the “sascatuner,” a musical instrument made out of a bicycle seat, two horns, plastic tubing and a trumpet mouthpiece.

This is where Bobby fires the coals for his blacksmithing work. He built the coal forge himself.

Bobby’s blacksmith shop. He built it himself out of old tires, recylced wood and bottles for the windows. To the right,
you can see the speaker where he rigged up a record player to blast
opera music.

Bobby sitting in the kitchen table with his own rendition of American Gothic hanging above him.

Bobby Hansson playing “Big Gray Elephant” on an instrument he made out of a giant maple syrup can (0:29):

“Die, Mediocrity!” sez Nancy Updike

The NPR Liaison To Independent Producers, Paul Ingles, has transcribed some of Nancy Updike’s excellent 3rd Coast Conference session called “Die, Mediocrity, Die!.”

Nancy says the enemy of most producers is not “badness” but rather, “O.K.-ness.” She says, “Have you ever noticed how easy it is to ignore a radio story?” After a few minutes, “it’s just noises and voices and you’re cooking or whatever and it’s hard to get back into it. So you just say, I’ll wait until the next story to tune back in and pay attention.”

This mental drift is our “enemy,” says Nancy. And we have to challenge ourselves to continually ask, “Is there a better way to tell this story? Is there a better piece of tape to get in there?”

You can listen to the whole hour at Third Coast, or:

(Full disclosure: Nancy has produced a lot of stories for HV, and Paul has also worked with us.)

C-Span Pink

I always tell people: I’m never unrewarded for watching C-Span. Proving the point was yesterday’s Valerie Plame Speaks Before Congress. The testimony turned to live theatre as the audience flashed signs in front of the cameras. The funniest was a guy (I think) dressed in pink as a woman, with a t-shirt that read: “Impeach Bush”:

But forget politics, I like C-Span for its raw undedited information. After Ms. Plame came Bill Leonard, National Archives director of Security. He gave clear, concise testimony on how a document gets classified, and how long it stays classified, and how it gets declassified — procedures I and, I’d guess, most folk never knew. Edifying and entertaining — who sez C-Span is boring?BTW, I read a conjecture that Pink Man above might be Code Pink. Or maybe he’s Pink Bloque; Jonathan Menjivar and I did a story on them a while back.

And she fell…

Holocaust museum, Jerusalem, March 15th.

She fell before the exhibit of the Treblinka Death camp where 870,000 Jews lost their lives. Not a dramatic fall, just standing one moment, gone the next. “Open up! all asleep!” The German commander would yell after listening at the gas chamber door, said the video interview playing over a model of the camp; it was the job of this old man — no, boy — speaking to us on the screen to pull out the bodies. Elijah Rosenberg. “Someone would examine the teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to demonstrate, “pulling out any gold.”

The woman — no, girl — who collapsed onto the museum floor before the first death camp was very young, only 18, but in Israeli army uniform. A pack of brown clothes and red eyes sobbing and shuffling through the museum. “Every moment someone would collapse in a faint,” said one video survivor of the Warsaw ghetto firestorm of 1943. The TVs are not just monitors, they are also mirrors, reflecting the viewer’s image — we have become ghosts of the present watching history.

“Why do the trains go full and return empty?” half a boxcar in front of us, “it makes no sense,” asks a Polish resident long, not long, ago. The tour buses, huge padded coaches idle outside the museum; they come full, and leave full. More…

Royalty at the Crate and Barrel

Last night I drove to the local Crate and Barrel to buy sheets. Normally I don’t buy sheets or anything else at that overwrought emporium, but it’s nearby and it was Time, time to buy some damn sheets.

The clerk was sad to learn I wanted plain white sheets. “Perhaps the Clarendon?” He suggested, pointing out a lime-green fabric with cherry stripes “Or the Ogelthorpe?” Mustard with pistachio rhomboids. “Or….”

And then he shut up. Everyone did. Because a little old Japanese woman walked into the room. She moved slowly, on account of her age, also because she was bearing the burden of great wealth. You could tell. Impeccably dressed in shades of black- a bit too much jewelry-but still- this wasn’t just the wife of some millionaire. This was an Ambassador’s wife at the very least. Or even one of the Royals…

She eased Herself onto a display couch and began to speak. Her English was correct but indistinct, she spoke in a whisper so everyone around had to strain to understand. She was used to this. She spoke of rugs:

“We have these…sort of white….carpets…you know …that were made for us …and sometimes they get a spot on them…and that’s all right….you just spray them with a can of that wonderful Ovo…” (Novo? Blovo? ) “….you just spray them… and the spot comes out….so that’s all right…”

But now it seems her daughter has a carpet and it got a spot on it and the Wonderful Brand Name doesn’t want to work. So that’s not all right. So what she’s wondering is, what do you spray on a carpet so it doesn’t get spots in the first place?

“Jesus Christ, lady, this isn’t a hardware store!” the clerk screams.

Oh no he doesn’t. He thinks it for a second, we all do, but then of course we realize a Lady can’t distinguish a hardware store from a flower shop from a dog pound. To her they’re all just

Places-of-Commerce-Where-People-are-Helpful.

So, helpfully, the clerks calls over the other clerks and they put their heads together and somebody remembers there’s a web site called SpotBeGone.com or something and they get on the computer and surf around till they find it. There’s no indication Herself is going to get off the couch to look at the computer, so the clerk writes the address on a card and hands it to her.

She’s ever so slightly miffed. “Well….that’s all right…” she murmurs “…but I’ll need two cards…since….of course…. my daughter doesn’t live with me.”

When I left with my plain white sheets (the Ku Klux Kla) she was still sitting on the couch. Just waiting. Waiting, apparently, to see if there was going to be anything else on her mind tonight…

StoryCorps- Judge Joe Pigott

Great StoryCorps® this morn on NPR-ME. Judge Joe Pigott of Jackson, MS talks about his favorite criminal.

Oakbog – ProTools Troubleshoot

Oakbog studios has posted ProTools Troubleshooting Techniques, w/ reference topics: Know the Major Components of your System, Isolate the Problem: Questions to Ask, Common Problems and Solutions, and When All Else Fails.

And do check their mashup medley mp3 Tokens (Tokens, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Manu Dibango) of Wimoweh– The Lion Sleeps Tonight:

Shared Public Integrated Digital Media Mission Distribution Association

There’s been a congestion of conferences lately striving to save our sorry pubradio asses. Their themes range from the grand From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy to the mundane Making the Transition. They’re put on by groups with amorphous promises in their names: Beyond Broadcast Digital Distribution Consortium Integrated Media Association — mix & match to create your own exciting organizational combos.

Once conferences were safe excuses to get away from spouses and commune with co-workers. Now they’re powerpoint infested face2face fests, where people stare at their computer screens. Once there was a time-honored tradition of spending conference nights genuinely interacting with real folk, i.e., chasing hookers and hootch. Nowadays, everyone runs back to their hotel rooms to blog, stream, cast, and flickr.

You must post your opinion, preferably at length, prodigiously linked to all other opinions, and prefaced with urgent proclamations of bullet-pointed self-perpetuation:

• Crisis Management – Why your organization needs to Blog
• Mobile the 7th Mass Media is to internet like TV is to radio
• National Public Whatsis.

And don’t forget to mention Web 2.0, even tho you’ve no notion wtf that means. I, however, know exactly what Web 2.0 is, and I’m willing to share this insight; as soon as I’m invited to give the keynote at the next conference.

Listening to Northern Lights- Vid

Using our NPR story “Listening to Northern Lights” (NPR Lost and Found Sound), Joel Halvorson of NASA Earth-Sun Museum Alliance made a video for the Minnesota Planetarium (for use in dome, thus the circular frame of the images):

Get Rich on Diarrhea

There’s a story in the Wall Street Journal about some guy in Georgia making a fortune selling sub-prime mortages. The link may not work unless you subscribe but never mind, here’s the money quote:

As a teenager, Mr. Barnes says, he paid local farmers $1 apiece for calves suffering from diarrhea, then fed them a mixture of powdered milk and flour to “gum them up.” The ones he saved, he says, could be sold for more than $100.

Such an un-public-radio notion! Yet how many local stations could improve their lot by buying up sick animals and feeding them, say, CPB grant applications…..

Kevin Kelly- The Big Here

Gotta see if I can actually answer all of these for my locale:
http://www.kk.org/helpwanted/archives/cat_the_big_here.php

Some are obvious, others quite challenging…or I just forgot. Is Helena at 3800 feet? Some you don’t have to answer if you’re landlocked.

Jake in Jerusalem

Israel, East Jerusalem, March 14th.

They did not huff. They did not puff. The Israelis simply tore the house down. The Palestinians did huff and puff, threw a rock and some words, but they were no match for the police carrying our M-16’s.

From the neighbor’s rooftop I watched the destruction below. An Arab man cried next to me. Across the valley was the opposite: construction, of Israeli settlements. They say there should be a road where we stand, and where the house once stood, and where 17 more should fall. Though there is already a road on each side.

In yet another house I had coffee, a hospitality in every Palestinian home. I am wired after so many visits, the walls buzzing, shaking in fear. I am always welcome, the children offer me candy. The TV was on when I entered, Bush was talking, but there was no sound. They clicked it off.

Palestinian living rooms have a fondness for silk and plastic flowers. Unnatural colors, brilliant, florescent, like ones you find at grave sites left by a devout but busy family.

Their order has come. They tremble the paper at me, it is written only in Hebrew. They have less than a month to leave the house. The flowers will survive, they survive anything, that is the nature of plastic. They house will not. Maybe they can be laid on top after the walls become jagged tombstones of their former selves.

A child, one of three in this house smiles at me, I smile back. Her nose is stained a strawberry-red color, I figure she had been eating some. I looked at her dad. “She fell,” he said. Some wounds you need only to wipe the blood away, one more wash and she will be clean again. It will only remain hurting somewhere in her memory. She will discover that other wounds take longer to heal. And sadly, that some wounds never heal.

The destruction crew, in an odd display of care, stretches red caution banner tape around the fresh rubble next door. It flutters angrily in the wind after the last soldier has left.

Pedestrian Fanatic cast

This week’s HV cast is “Pedestrian Fanatic” (mp3) by Abner Serd: The paving of America as seen from the shoulders and sidewalks of our country’s roads. Musings-in-motion recorded during a 5000 trek from Arizona to Georgia to Maine. “It is becoming illegal to travel this country by foot.” Music by Jeff Arntsen of Racket Ship. (9:55):

Has Success Spoiled NPR?

From the latest issue of the Washingtonian: Has Success Spoiled NPR?

"It would be an immense source of pride for me if NPR could find in its heart new beats and new sounds -- not radically different ones, just different enough that they would belong to the people who are now 17 but who are going to be listening 40 and 50 years from now." --Robert Krulwich

"[NPR is] the retirement community of the air. What was once an insurgent radio movement now sounds like Chet Huntley reading the evening news.” --Alex Beam, Boston Globe

"NPR is run by newspaper people. Sometimes I think they don’t even like radio." --Bob Edwards

Big Stone Heads- Vid

Images and sound from Jack Chance‘s trip to Easter Island (radio broadcast: Nov 14 2004 on NPR Day to Day):