We saw the Blue Scholars at the TBTL Live show in Seattle a few weeks ago….

I can’t remember the last time I blogged.  I’m not talking about tweeting, iditablogging, or baby progress announcing – I mean actually sat down and wrote a blog entry about what’s going on in my life.

It’s the beginning of Memorial Day Weekend and I’ve been doing lots of thinking as I trudge around in the rain getting a few things ready for family camp this weekend.  Memorial Day has been oddly memorable for a while now; here in the northwest there is always a strong sense of the seasons changing from spring to summer at the end of May. The last two years has held some very special weddings, and it’s always about now with the first event of the summer at camp that I begin the final stretch to get things done at work and preparing for staff to arrive in a few short weeks.

More often however, I always think about Memorial Day weekend 2004 – 6 years ago.  On this afternoon six years ago Lydia and I packed up our car and headed out to camp for our last summer on summer staff.  We had quit our jobs and put most of our things in storage and we would be heading to Nome for a year at the end of the summer.  I remember coming from my last day at work that morning, finding myself a few hours later welcoming campers and feeling like I had entered a different world.

I can’t believe that was six years ago.  God’s been good to us every minute since.  He gave us an amazing year in Nome, and then brought us back to Cascades to work and live.  We’ve gotten dogs, moved into houses and trailers, and Lydia’s went back to school and received her master’s.  We’ve gone on amazing vacations and had all the adventure you could ask for, we’ve grown and have been stretched, our marriage has had highs and lows and we’ve been blessed with an amazing little baby boy.

So, Memorial Day Weekend might have a totally different meaning for me than it does for most people, but this will always be a time to look back and reflect on the provision of God in our lives.

There, I did it – added a new blog entry.

P.S.  Thanks so much to all of you who contributed to my “Birthday for a Cause” fundraiser last month.  We were able to raise over $700, which means seven women in the Congo will be given the skills needed to start their own business and provide for their families.  Awesome.

I think you’ll like this.
 Something similar happened to me once when I was on a bus going from Kent to Seattle…. only instead of being a internationally famous rock band, it was a crazy guy with a harmonica.

Phoenix – Lizstomania / One time too many – A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Recently I ventured into the world of “Adult Degree Completion” taking 2 classes this quarter at a local community college after many years of being removed from higher education. Driving 45 minutes to class immediately after work 4 days a week is just as crazy as I always thought it would be, but I’m glad I took the plunge and started this process. I think it was during Lydia’s graduation party last spring when I realized that twice a week during the evening while she was getting a Masters degree, I was probably watching TV.

Evening classes at your area community college are probably pretty similar to what you’d expect – a mix of 19 year olds right out of high school, grandparents who are changing careers late in life and everything in between. In fact, this type of scenario would make an excellent sitcom – oh wait, NBC is already all over it…. I’m just waiting for Chevy Chase to show up in my Political Science class.

By Tom Tangney

post from: http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=382&sid=211222

The KIRO radio show TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has attained its own apotheosis. The show whose very title dared to foretell its demise has now completed its mission. TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has indeed died.

I am not here to bury TBTL however, but to praise it. Its 396 shows now constitute the complete “TBTL Collector’s Series” of programs and, in retrospect, the most compelling question may not be “Why is it suddenly gone?” but rather “How did it last as long as it did?” I’d like to believe we live in a world in which something like TBTL could survive but the evidence points to the contrary. So instead, I’ll just appreciate the fact it existed at all.

TBTL was the most original, innovative, and intelligently off-the-wall show I’ve ever heard on radio. Where else are you going to hear butchered impromptu readings of famous movie scenes, regular visits from a grammarian, an in-house a capella re-enactment of a modern opera, an Oscar show in which food from a nominated film is cooked and consumed live on air, a week’s worth of Spanish and Latin lessons, a spontaneous dance-off to music designated as impossible to dance to, in-studio imitations of Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs, and hundreds of other wacky ideas. And who else but TBTL would organize a listeners’ prom, a roller skating party, and nights out at the Opera AND a Mariners game?

Often described as the radio equivalent of the TV series SEINFELD, TBTL really was a show about nothing. And in its seemingly haphazard investigation of “nothing,” it proved to be, more often than not, about “everything.” The genius of TBTL was that it recognized the profundity of the mundane. We all have to live in the mundane world, of course, but articulate dissections of our mundane lives can actually produce clever and entertaining insights. The personal stories shared each night by host Luke Burbank, producer Jen Andrews, and board-op Sean De Tore were more humorous than earth-shattering but the point was they were always very human – the kind of daily victories and embarrassments that make up our everyday lives.

TBTL often hurtled headlong into the inane preoccupations of pop culture as well. Their WHY IT MATTERS segments would debate everything from the silly to the sublime (e.g. an early show took on the significance of those Karate Kid movies, a late show examined the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino.) But no matter how deep it dove into the superficial, it would always, or almost always, emerge with a smile and a wink. After all, this was a show run by smart and culturally savvy people. Burbank is an especially quick and literate host who can drop off-the-cuff references to Tenzing Norgay, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jeff Koons as readily as he can to Zooey Deschanel and Jemaine Clement and he often does so in a single conversation. And Andrews was always more apt to cull material for the show from, say, THE NEW YORKER than she was from TMZ. For me and much of the TBTListan nation, I suspect, it’s that high art/low art tension that best defines the show’s appeal.

TBTL always reminded me of a slice of lemon meringue pie. At its best, it was the perfect combination of sugar-spun fluff and tart flavor. When taking a bite out of TBTL, you had to make sure you tasted both the meringue and the lemon, or you’d miss the point. Too many people, I’m afraid, couldn’t get past the meringue in the show to taste the lemon. But if you stuck with the show long enough, the lemon would always out.

Rawr.

- Tom Tangney, KIRO 97.3

josh’s note: it’s not too late to experience the full lemon meringue, TBTL will live on as a podcast (which is how I listened to the show 90% of the time) head over to tbtl.net on Monday afternoon for the first online-only edition!

We all remember the “Blair Witch Project” which is now famous for it’s shaky camera antics that produced hundreds of parodies in a pre-YouTube era. What most of us aren’t as quick to remember was the creative way in which the movie helped pioneer viral marketing. The Blair Witch Project was quietly, and slowly sold as a true documentary about a film crew. By the time the movie came out it wasn’t taken with much skepticism when it presented itself as using real footage from the making of the documentary. Eventually we all learned it wasn’t real – none of it….

NBC Universal is hoping to fool Americans into theaters again this fall by releasing another movie that is trying to virally bill itself as being a true story, when really its all made up once again. “The Fourth Kind” starring Milla Jovovich comes out in November and according to the recently released trailer “dramatizes actual events” surrounding disappearances in Nome Alaska….blaming the disappearances on alien abductions. Jovovich even introduces herself at the beginning of the trailer as an actress and tells the camera that “every scene in this movie is supported by archived footage.”

It’s true that there have been a handful of disappearances in Nome, and its true that they were investigated by the FBI a few years back – but the problem with this movie is that tragic stories, often of Inupiat and Siberian Yupik villagers from neighboring communities are used to fool the audience and these true stories are distorted into events that never happened. Melanie Edwards a Vice president of the regional non-profit Kawerak, which helped push for the FBI investigation into 50 years of disappearing Native Alaskans in Nome tells the Anchorage Daily News that “It’s insensitive to family members of people who have gone missing.”

I’d encourage you to read the excellent ADN article by Kyle Hopkins, here are a few highlights:

• Despite an FBI conclusion in 2006 that no serial killer was to blame, emotions over the missing and dead are still raw in the region.
• The movie trailer shows victims as being all caucasian, when most unsolved cases in Nome usually involve Native Alaskans.
• The film is framed around a psychologist named Abigail Tyler who interviewed traumatized patients in Nome. But state licensing examiner Jan Mays says she can’t find records of an Abigail Tyler ever being licensed in any profession in Alaska. No one by that name lived in Nome in recent years, according to a search of public record databases.

Additionally it appears that NBC Universal is planting evidence on the internet to persuade anyone who is skeptical of the film’s premise and tries to google search for some clarity.

• The websites: http://alaskapsychiatryjournal.org/, http://alaskanewsarchive.com/, and http://www.knomarchive.com were all been registered on Aug 13th (the day the trailer came out) to anonymous organizations and have posted bogus articles pertaining to the plot of the movie.
• One article on alaskanewsarchive.com appears to be an archived “Nome Nugget” piece written by editor Nancy McGuire, however she tells the ADN that it’s baloney and she never wrote it.
• Ron Adler is CEO and director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. They said this week they’ve never heard of the Alaska Psychiatry Journal.

Finally, as Kyle Hopkins points out, the movie which is supposedly full of “archive footage” is clearly not even filmed in Nome, in fact IMDB says it was shot in Bulgaria.  Having lived in Nome it was one of the first things I noticed, it didn’t look anything even close – producers probably haven’t even been there!  Houses looked way too nice, and trees….. Nome doesn’t have trees!

If Universal was planning on this type of viral marketing for “The Fourth Kind” and posting fake news stories on the internet to begin with, they should made the *entire* thing up not just most of it. Instead they are intentionally exploiting the unsolved mysteries of real people in a real community and are attempting to deceive the rest of the country at the same time.

After a short visit over a 3-day weekend both this spring and again now in late August, Portland has become a new favorite destination for mini-vacations.  While we aren’t usually in town for very long we manage to do lots of relaxing, our trip this weekend was so enjoyable it rates among some of our best week-long vacations over the years.  We rediscovered the beauty of the “urban happy hour” and adjusted our meal schedule to complement….theres nothing better than a $2 1/2 pound cheeseburger!  If you’re looking for some Portland recommendations we’d be glad to help as our list of favorite places has grown once again.

To replicate our fantastic weekend, first get a screaming deal at “The Nines” hotel from hotwire.com, then check out: Jake’s Grill, Escape from New York Pizza, Portland City Grill, any McMenamins, Mio Gelato, the Living Room Theaters, or Dragonfish.  Finally, spend the rest of your time at the Japanese or Rose Test Garden, Magpie, other vintage shops, or riding the MAX.

See other pictures of our trip by clicking the link below

(more…)

Apparently there’s a bunch of health care stuff making everyone act crazy toward each other. I look to this man, who asks the President for reform we can all get behind:

(post via TBTL & photo via the Huffington Post)

Babies…. the world is full of them.  I guess we all have to do our part.

We also have a fancy new “Rogers family Website”……. check it out!

http://family.northslope.net – there’s also a link at the top