[Kzyxtalk] The little man in the boat, and other stories.

[Marco McClean]

  "The mother was hugging the daughter and the daughter started stabbing 
her mother in the back. Authorities think the daughter --who the mother 
said had some mental issues-- was upset about something."


The recording of last night's (2016-02-19) KNYO (and KMEC) Memo of the 
Air: Good Night Radio show is ready to download and keep or just play 
with one click at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com


A little over an hour in, Stuart Cohen arrived and talked and sang and 
played guitar for maybe an hour and ten, and then Alex called from a 
parked car in San Diego and that went on for awhile. But I stayed until 
after 4am and ended up reading almost everything I brought to read, so 
it's kind of an experiment in letting things happen the way they seem to 
want to happen and seeing how it turns out. One thing I learned, 
something I have to learn over and over again, apparently, is the 
importance of checking everything before I start at all; as the show 
goes out from the studio to the various transmitters I record it at the 
source, where I am, by running a line from the headphone output of the 
monitor amp to the sound input of my old video camera. And someone 
before me in the studio had left the amp's tone and balance controls 
cocked oddly -who knows why?- so afterward, today, I had to massage the 
recording so I wouldn’t sound like a supreme court justice talking 
through the pillow he's being smothered by, and while the file was open 
I took the opportunity to replace the music I'd played in the first hour 
with fresher music (Louis Prima, Thomas Dolby).


Oh, and when I was talking with Alex, when he read his new story I 
turned my microphone off so not to interfere, and then when we were 
talking again I forgot to turn it back on (!), and during that time my 
voice was picked up only thinly but piercingly by the telephone's mic, 
and nothing can be done after the fact to make that sound better. No 
great harm done, but then Alex and I hung up, and over a minute of 
real-time dead air resulted when I was sitting there blathering about 
Sophie Madeleine and her project and introducing her music. (I cut the 
dead space out of the recording.) At worst it's mildly embarrassing. I 
always get an avuncular schadenfreudistic kick out of examples of the 
incompetence of other radio people, so I suppose it's only fair to 
return the favor.


All that said, also at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find 
thousands and thousands of links to not necessarily radio-useful but 
nonetheless interesting things to see and do and learn about, such as:


Year of the Fire Monkey gala.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBbKoG3XRKs


"If there’s a hero in this story, it’s going to be [the wedding 
videographer]."
https://vimeo.com/155648346


And 6 years on the sun in 6 minutes. The explanations and close-ups of 
particularly energetic eruptions start at 2:50.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MImmQvqCSg


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Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com