New Blood

Wil Hansen dropped by the station yesterday just in time to hear the latest birth announcement--Baby Boy Ahlfeld had arrived, son of Shelly, our operations manager, and our occasional sports maven, Bob. Wil reminded us of an NCPR newsletter cover photo from more than twenty years ago that bore the caption "We'll do anything to increase our audience!" It showed staffers Ellen, Martha, and Jackie, all with their new crop of kids. We're audience building again, with a new generation. As we speak, NCPR baseball commissioner, bilingual music host and reporter David Sommerstein is sweating out extra innings with his wife Lisa. And while much of the rest of the staff are reaching the age where we are unlikely to be doing cannonballs into the gene pool, Kelly, our development assistant, has become the first to don the grandmother hat (like Queen Elizabeth's, only not made of diamonds). It's all pretty exciting. Even Joel, whose home sports a pillow labeled "We had to get rid of the kids; the dog was allergic," has been heard to say repeatedly: "Children—they ARE our future." I’m not quite sure what to make of the WC Fields accent he puts on when he says it. So the future looks bright at North Country Public Radio, even if it is a little bald and smelly.

Strange Meat

The hot weather perks some people up, but I must have a touch of the reptile—I downshift and dawdle, distracted from my labors. I wander off into odd byways of the web, looking for snack fare. From before the glory days of the "Hamster Dance," similarly disinclined technorati have left behind a trail of low-calorie and completely pointless websites. I drag this strange meat back to the ncpr.org cave complex in the occasional feature called BITIL—Breathtakingly Inane and Totally Incomprehensible Links.

There’s must-hear audio ranging from Dolly Parton singing Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven" to the alt-Christian performer Yodeling Theresa. And music video nuggets, such as Leonard Nimoy singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." For the macabre there is The Death Clock, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the compelling but cruel Yeti Baseball. There are animated gems such as Muffin Films and my sullen favorite, Strindberg and Helium. The three newest BITIL entries are Improbable Research, Crank Dot Net, and the endlessly fascinating Zen Toy. While the warm weather lasts, submit your own delicacies to BITIL. Mmmm—tasty.

Food sports

After six weeks of kitchen renovation, I had revisited most of the North Country restaurants in easy commuting distance, and was heartily sick of dining out. Not that you can’t get good food in the North Country, it’s just that most of the really top-end cuisine comes out of personal kitchens. Especially since fast food chains have ground down the heights formerly, if erratically, reached by the mom and pop establishments that used to abound. You can still transcend the merely nutritional in places like Donnelly’s, the seasonal ice cream stand near Saranac Lake that gives me an excuse to visit the Adirondacks as soon as Memorial Day rolls around, or the pie palace of Keene Valley--the Noon Mark Diner. And there are bright spots still throughout the region. But the average is—pretty average.

While I’m sure that Boston (where I spent the weekend) also has its share of average food, the good stuff is pursued with religious zeal. Tracking down the best little spots is the urban substitute for bloodsports—long walks, long waits, high overhead: nothing deters the enthusiast. And everyone has their own secrets, the way a fly fisherman knows the river, or an elderly uncle hides the spot where he always bags his buck. But the rewards! Divine chicken-potato curry consumed beneath a benignly beaming portrait of the Dalai Lama. Top cooks from a hundred nations appear to have washed ashore in the harbor. For Mother’s Day brunch we took a long ride on the T and waited over an hour for a table in Zaftig’s, a Coolidge Corners deli. The line outside was so impressive, I thought it was a bus stop. You could build a shrine to the crunchy and creamy potato pancakes, the melt-in-the-mouth pastrami. I could go on, but I would want to be alone with my memories. Now that I’m home, I’m thrown back on my own devices, albeit with a much classier kitchen. And now that I have been to the mountaintop, as it were, it’s harder to please myself, like picking out a tune on the guitar after listening to a Django Reinhardt CD. I know how it is supposed to be.

Geek pride

The leaves are halfway out, the black flies are all the way out, and lightning is driving the golfers off the course behind the station the way the angel with the flaming sword evicted humanity from the Garden. A perfect May day in the North Country. But it can do its worst outside, as long as the power holds out—I’m deep in the guts of ncpr.org and might as well be in a mine for all I care about the weather. Tweaking screenloads of gibberish to make infinitesimal improvements in the community calendar, rendering down volumes of old static content for the few drippings that will add to the savor of the database. I may not be able to move mountains, but I can move domains--clicking away in the half-light and chuckling to myself.

Aside from the somewhat rarified pleasures described above, yesterday brought a long-awaited satisfaction. A public version of NCPR’s homebrew web content management system, Public Media Manager, has long been on offer to other stations in the public broadcasting system. And I was beginning to feel like a guy who puts all this good stuff out by the road, and weeks later, no one has taken a thing. No more. First dibs goes to the Bloomington, Indiana community station WFHB, who filed off the software’s serial numbers, installed a roll bar and Hollywood mufflers, painted it all metalflake purple, and took it out on the road. Check it out: http://news.wfhb.org.

It’s like watching the kids grow up. I think I’ll print out a screen shot and tape it up on the refrigerator.

Five ounce bag

Ever since I was a kid, everything has been getting smaller—phones, computers, stereos, my old neighborhood, the dollar—everything except soft drinks and baseball players. So one of the pleasures of working online is the seemingly infinite expansiveness of the work space. I think of my twin monitors as viewscreens on the bridge of the Enterprise, peering into vast domains as I bark orders and warp my way through galaxies of cyberstuff.

NCPR Online is entering the seventh year of its voyage to explore strange new worlds, so I’ve been doing a complete fresh backup onto the studio computer: tens of thousands of files, gigabytes of audio, video, and pictures, whole library stacks of text. Six years of work by a hardworking bunch. All this vastness squeezing down the tubes of the internet into what? A bite-size corner of a five-ounce hard drive. It just doesn’t seem right. The sucker must be made of dilithium, or neutronium or something. Right under my desk. It’s a wonder it doesn’t collapse into itself like a black hole. Or reach some critical mass and explode, blasting out the windows with the long lost voices of Jody Tosti and Gregory Warner, blowing off the roof with old news and art exhibits, festooning toxic blog debris miles downrange. It scares me just to look at it.