Coming to a Website Near You

From the beginning, we at NCPR have seen great opportunities for building a new public broadcasting audience via the Internet. Not just through endless, shameless self-promotion--but the old-fashioned way--by using the new medium to deliver new kinds of programs to an audience that might never find us on-air. One example is this newsletter--it delivers our online programming to you, rather than bringing you to our site. You may also begin to run across NCPR on a number of other websites across the region. Adirondack Life's site has begun to carry a daily news page delivered by us. Adirondacks.com carries a headline feed from NCPR News. Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY), our senior partner in the Meet the Masters of North Country Folk Life series, carries that series on their website as a feed from our online production. We create a special Teen News page for the North Country Teen site YAK. We can offer news tailored by subject or by community and will soon be offering a regional calendar that can be similarly customized for use on our site or on any other site. I'm psyched.

Get on the Bus

Nice town, Ottawa. It was one of the first places my family discovered when we moved to the North Country during the Seaway boom. I've been returning regularly ever since, and have never run out of new things to do, or old favorites to try again. Canada is a great reality check for a US citizen, demonstrating as it does that high culture does not need to be coupled with arrogance, that prosperity is not inextricable from rapacious greed, that cities don't require "combat zones" to achieve skyscrapers, and that civility looks pretty good on most people. If you have lived this long in northern New York and have never been to Ottawa--give NCPR a call. Our February 9 bus trip should be a great time. See "In Your Community" below for more details.

From the Frozone Layer

I was in grade school for the dawn of the Space Age. NASA sent exhibits around the schools to pump up science education. One of the most vivid memories of my student years was of a white-jacketed tech dunking a banana into liquid nitrogen, then using the fruit to drive in a nail. It came back to me this morning, as I stepped out into the heart-stoppingly lunar cold to see if the car battery had survived. Frigidity Base: the Snowgoose has landed.

Come Hell or Ice

The morning we abandoned our house, we lay in bed and listened to the surrounding trees come down. I went out on the back porch and looked at my watch while the woods collapsed all the way back to the river. When the rate of fall reached one tree every thirty seconds, we ran for it, the car weaving drunkenly around the snags that choked the road to Hannawa Falls. Friends took us in, no questions asked, for a whole week. That's the way the North Country is--nice, come hell or ice.

Much Miscellaneous

Bill Haenel, my partner in cybernautics, had been working the kinks out of a new Community Calendar database for the website. Among fantastic features too numerous to mention, it will classify events by category. This has led to interesting exercises in the creation of arbitrary distinctions. Does "Music" cover both performances and workshops? What is a "Community Event?" What isn't? Borges created a mythical ancient Chinese encyclopedia titled the "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge," which divided all species of animals into such categories as "Those that belong to the Emperor," "Those that tremble as if they were mad," and "Those that resemble flies from a distance." We hope to do a little better. You shouldn't find categories such as "Goat ropings," or "Events where beer is served in cans." At least not once we shake the bugs out.