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.