Hearing Voices from NPR®
069 Pen to Paper: Charles Bowden & Isak Dinesen
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-09-08 (Originally: 2009-08-26)
Writer Charles Bowden reports from the US-Mexico border about the drug wars, the poverty, and the environment. His writing is harsh but unflinchingly accurate. Host Scott Carrier portrays Bowden in the words of the people he has written about.
NPR host Susan Stamberg revisits the world of Karen Blixen, aka, Isak Dinesen, when she lived in Kenya and wrote Out of Africa (produced for NPR by Larry Massett; mixed by Barrett Golding.)
The band The Gregory Brothers are turning newscasters, pundits and politicians into “unintentional” pop-singers by auto-tuning their spoken voices into sung melodies. Their “Auto-Tune the News” series are videos on YouTube and songs on Amie Street.
Michael and Evan Gregory tell us about artificially (art-officially?) interacting with the media’s talking heads. Aired on PRI Studio 360; by producer Barrett Golding, “Auto-Tuned News (edit)” (6:26 mp3):
S360 was a bit time-constrained, so couldn’t present the whole piece, including the G-Bros series Songified History (free d/l at Amie Street), w/ JFK, MLK, & Churchill. Here’s the full vers…
We want to thank the following companies which provide us with excellent in-kind services thru their discount and donation programs for non-profit organizations. So thanks to:
Scenes from the Health Care controversy: President Obama and the WH press corps flew into Belgrade, Montana last Friday, for a Town Hall, held in an airport hanger.
The event lasted an hour. The president spoke, took a few questions, then POTUSA and posse headed off to the next stops in their weekend media invasion of the West: Yellowstone, Grand Junction Junction, Colorado, the Grand Canyon, then back to DC.
Meanwhile, one half mile away, those who didn’t have or didn’t want Town Hall tickets began gathering at dawn in a farmer’s field, the designated a free speech zone. Thousands showed up: protesters and Tea Party-ers next to pro-health care reformers and single-payer proponents. They stayed for hours, thru rain, hail, and thunder. They shouted slogans. They listened to speakers. They listened to the President over the radio. Occasionally, they listened to each other. It was a day of division, debate, and democracy.
Here’s another blog full of priceless-pix blog found at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the domain name sez it all: Awkward Family Photos.com. They’ve been “Speading the Awkwardness” since April of this year.
Fuck You, Penguin is “a blog where I tell cute animals what’s what. Lotsa crazy critter pix like the aye-aye to the right (title of post: “Slow-burn cuteness: the silent killer”), and the zonkey below.
Jean Shepherd used words like a jazz musician uses notes, winding around a theme, playing with variations, sending fresh self-reflective storylines out into the night. Marshall McLuhan called Shepherd “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.”
Shep inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer (Le Show), who hosts this two part tribute to Jean Shepherd. Shearer interviews Shep’s co-workers, friends and fans, including Robert Krulwich, Joe Frank, Paul Krassner, and Jules Fieffer.
Thanks to Mr. Shearer, KCRW– Santa Monica (and Sarah Spitz), NPR, and Art Silverman for production support, and for allowing us to re-air this two-hour tribute. This is part one; part two is next week.
One time I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to explain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with such characters as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture. Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.”
–Paul Krassner (from “How the Realist popped America’s cherry“)
The Realist: series of Jean Shepherd essays, Radio Free America, issue #42, #44, #48, #50.
Jean Shepherd – The Great American Fourth of July – PART 1
Ad agency Wieden+Kennedy has, what I consider, a rarity: a well-implemented Flash site. Their front-page timeline works very well, and tho it could have been done in AJAX, is probably better in Flash.
An MS dev guy wrote BlindSearch, a simple web-s’ware page to compare the Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines:
Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query. The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?
Your search results appear in three unlabeled columns. You then vote for the one with the best results and the search engine for each column is revealed.
They had to turn off the totals for now (“Some douche is gaming the system, I’ve removed the ability to see the results until I sort this out.”), but at last tally it was: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%.
The Mapping Main Street crew has come marching thru Montana. They stopped by HV HQ recently: We solved all the world’s problems over a bottle of Buffalo Trace, then headed for the Elkhorn Mtns, Helena National Forest.
Here’s Kara airborne, midway thru her 42-foot flight into Crow Creek Falls. Jesse’s below (w/ rescue dog?); and Ian’s above, next up on the runway, yelling “I can see Main St from here”:
Collin Cunningham of Make Magazine sonically induces some strange behaviors in puddles of water and a non-newtonian fluid. The rippling waves in his DIY cymatic (study of visible sound and vibration) experiments are kewl. But do stay tuned for the wild cornstarch rave, and the recipe for creating your own “pet cymatic blob.”
“…aims to examine the feasibility of implementing cargo bikes made of bamboo as a sustainable form of transportation in Africa…
The bicycle is the primary mode of mobility for millions of people throughout many poorer parts of the world. In addition to individual transport, they see a vast number of applications including moving goods to market, the sick to hospital, and even the distributing medicines.
In Africa, very few people can own cars or even motorcycles and people without bicycles have to rely on inadequate and relatively expensive buses…
In this project, we will examine the feasibility of employing native bamboo for the bicycle frames, instead of the expensive and technically demanding carbon fiber material, or even the less expensive but also technically demanding aluminum or chromium-molybdenum steel that is commonly used to build bicycle frames… One key to a sustainable business is that the bamboo grows locally.”
Hearing Voices from NPR®
066 Desert Air: Audio from the Arid Regions
Host: Ben Adair of American Public Media
Airs week of: 2011-09-28 (Originally: 2009-08-05)
Host Ben Adair heads down to the ghost towns, Opera Houses, century-old abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.”
The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.
Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada”s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more Desert Solitudes.
Desert Gallery
Photos by David Matherly’s of deserts in the American West:
These were taken July 14 2009 in southern Alberta, Canada. Still trying to track down the photographer; for now, here’s the info we have:
The pictures were taken around the Medicine Hat area after a windstorm last week. The bales apparently weigh up to approximately 1600lbs and some were reported to have rolled up to 5 miles.
After the Calzetta family returned from their 4K coast-to-coast bicycle trip, they compiled these Rules for returning to civilized society (from their Shut Up and Pedal blog):
1. No spitting.
2. Daily bathing is highly recommended.
3. Wear underwear. Preferably clean.
4. No eating food off the ground.
5. No made-up songs that contain profanity.
6. No bacon double cheeseburgers with ice cream sundaes.
7. No sleeping in your sleeping bag on top of the bed.
8. Use “inside voices” when inside.
9. No belching the words on road signs.
10. No shouting “A tour bus is coming” when your mother is peeing by the side of the road.
11. No peeing by the side of the road.
12. And please, no yelling “Fire in the hole” just before loudly farting.
At the new series Snap Judgement, Glynn Washington (a PRTQ winner) posted the story of Kevin and Brian Fisher-Paulson. They become foster parents to medically fragile triplets, nurse them thought extended, expensive hospital stays to health, then are told the mentally unstable birth mother wants them back.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
The band 
Google Grants
VerticalResponse
Dreamhost
TechSoup
Scenes from the Health Care controversy: President Obama and the WH press corps flew into Belgrade, Montana last Friday, for a Town Hall, held in an airport hanger.
Here’s another blog full of priceless-pix blog found at WFMU’s 
HV goes on 
The 
After the Calzetta family returned from their 4K coast-to-coast bicycle trip, they compiled these 
