Debate Tips:

Each time the country goes through the quadrennial exercise of presidential debates, they become more ritualized and opaque. Mining useful data from the process becomes increasingly a matter of art, the way journalists used to have to divine who was in and who was out in the old Soviet Union by studying banquet seating charts or who stood next to whom on military review stands. With 32 pages of bipartisan agreement on rules designed to eliminate any chance of an uncomfortable surprise, this year's series of debates should be especially hard to decode. But still, they remain "must-see TV," despite their many flaws. Unless you happen to run a corner cafe in a battleground state, this will be the only chance most people will have to see the candidates for more than a few seconds at a time. I have found it useful, on past occassions, to tape the debate, then replay it with the mute button on. Listen to the body language. If you catch the debate on NCPR, try ninety minutes of silence afterward. You may not glean any useful knowledge from the air, but you can at least get your blood pressure back to normal.

Public Service Engineering:

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of the virtual-reality tank. The audio streaming server had keeled over, extruding a pathetic silicone tongue, gone at the tender age of four. And the calendar software suffered a seizure--which I was able to cure--just before deleting the entire event database. So I was pacing short circles in the parking lot, muttering to myself and gesticulating, when I saw Joel, our production manager, messing with heavy equipment on his tailgate. Having nothing better to do, other than commit seppuku, I offered him a hand. But no, actually, he was jury-rigging a soundboard, a CD deck, and a set of PA speakers to run off the truck's cigarette lighter. The NCPR softball team was facing their bitter faculty rivals, and he wanted to be able to play a walk-on theme for each of our players as they stepped onto the field. The Ivory Tower Nine would discorporate with envy.

In Good Company:

200 years now since the new United States snapped up these northern hunting grounds of the Mohawks and opened them to European settlement. A gaggle of land speculators, farmers, woodsmen, veterans of the Revolution, Christian Utopian socialists, potash burners, millers, trappers, blacksmiths and merchants poured in and built in less than a century all these towns, roads, churches, schools, hospitals, farms and factories. In their spare time they made baskets and boats and quilts and songs and rugs and stories and paintings. Pitched half-naked out the windows of the Old World straight into the snowbanks of the New. Gives one a different take on the notion, hard work. Seeing the sagging barns and bricked-up mills of today, and given our isolation from the main currents of "culture," it's good to remember those roots, and to honor the people who still keep wisdom in their fingers and history in their tongues. Traditional Arts in Upst ate New York honors a few such each year with their North Country Heritage Awards. This year's honorees are: Parishville rug braider Helen Condon, Saranac Lake Adirondack guideboat builder Ralph Morrow, and the New Bremen Fire Fighters. And NCPR is honored to be included, receiving TAUNY's Evergreen Award for our own contribution to keeping alive the traditions and culture of the region.

Thermodynamics 101:

High school physics tells us that if you put more stuff into a confined space than comes out, eventually it will explode. No--not my head, my house. In order to accomodate the influx of goods and memorabilia from my mother-in-law's condo, a great outchucking has commenced. But each candidate for the flush must be fondled one more time--so many decisions. Dunning letters--out, third invoices to people who assumed that my 1980 printshop fire consumed my accounts receivable--I forgive you, SHRED. Pre-1994 deposit slips--b-bye. 34-inch waistline pants--never again, I fear, in this life. The many family photos in which I appear to be drooling, deformed or insane--gafloosh! Ugly furniture, (which unlike wine or men, does not improve with age)--I disown you. Personally, I plan to leave nothing behind when I go, except a robe, a bowl, two sandals, and a Dale-shaped hole in the spacetime continuum.

What They Don't Tell You in Earth Science:

The cool nights and the rising blush of the leaves, the students' reluctant returning and the summer folks' reluctant leavetaking--the season labors on toward Labor Day. Still summer, but long past the illusion of endless summer. And each year it seems, a day or two less of it, in contradiction to global warming. In my youth, I swear, summer was at least 200 days long--lying on a dock with a wet towel for a pillow while all those great summer songs poured out of the radio like grill smoke. But some time ago we traded in all that kick back and tan, neck with your baby music for ice-cool postmodern angst-ridden song-shaped objects. And so the summer has dwindled, becoming the season of West Nile and melanoma. These songwriters need to get out more--in the daytime.