50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
As day two of the Big Wait draws to a close, I still haven’t heard anything. After a lifetime in this industry, I have learned that the chances of booking a job drop logarithmically with each day that passes, and I’m less optimistic than I was yesterday. The glass still appears half-full, but there is now a chance that it could be filled with deadly poison.
To put the waiting into perspective, please enjoy this picture of Mustard Man:
Well, Monday is pretty much over, and I haven’t heard anything yet about the possible hosting gig.
This waiting to hear thing? Yeah, it’s never any different than this. I could either obsess that the lack of new information means they’ve gone with another Kimmel cousin, or the lack of new information means that nothing has changed since last week. It’s a very Schrödinger’s Cat situation, and I’m happy to leave the job in a superposition until I get a chance to observe the results.
To help pass the time until I hear something, here’s a picture of a squirrel with huge nuts:
This comes from the Headlines-I-Never-Thought-I’d-Write department.
Last week, a reporter from the Augusta Chronicle in Augusta, Georgia contacted me and asked if I was performing at the James Brown Soul of America Music Festival on Memorial Day down in Georgia.
For years, I’ve been confused with Will Wheaton, Jr., the well-known soul singer, so I told the reporter that he was probably confusing the two of us (it happens all the time, especially when James Brown or Russian stacking dolls are brought up, for some strange reason.) The reporter told me that the festival made it clear that it was Wil Wheaton, the actor, which is weird because until the reporter’s inquiry, I hadn’t heard about the festival at all. In fact,I was surprised
to hear that I’d been mentioned in association with this event, because
I am solidly B or even C List right now, and not exactly the kind of person who would be a big draw at the James Brown Soul of America Music Festival on Memorial Day down in Georgia like, say, Will Wheaton, Jr., the well-known soul singer.[1]
I forgot about it until today, when Google News sent me one of those "Hey, Wil, you wanted to know when you were in the news, so now you know, and knowing is half the battle," alerts.
The entire story requires outrageously annoying and intrusive registraton, but here’s the part that mentions me:
Also, actor Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek fame, said he had no plans to
come to Augusta. He seemed amused when he responded to inquiries last
week."I respect and admire the godfather of soul as much as anyone else,
and though I’ve been known to get on up like a sex machine from time to
time, I will be paying tribute in my own not-coming-to-Georgia way."
The whole story left me with the impression that there are a lot of questions about the event, and it all seems kind of shady, so now I’m actually happy that I may have been mentioned in conjunction with the event, because it could be sort of edgy, now.
[1]Note that it’s common for event organizers to invite a ton of guests
to an event, knowing that not all of them will show up, and advertise
those guests as "invited" or "scheduled to appear." This often happens because organizers have ambitions that aren’t practical, and you should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to something more benign, like an overly-ambitious promoter. I don’t know what the case is, here, but what’s important is that I have an italicized footnote to this entry.
I‘m working on WWdN today (about to stop and walk my dogs; the rain has broken, and it’s quite beautiful outside right now) and I thought I’d share a couple of links for any readers who found me in Exile, rather than following me over from WWdN.
The first is something I wrote a long, long time ago, when WWdN first started. I knew people would be coming to my site with lots of preconceptions, and I wanted to take a shot at challenging them. I also had a tragic-but-true story which started this whole blogging thing for me, and is one of the first narrative non-fiction things I ever wrote:
If this is your first time here, you should read this.
The second is a couple of links to a reading I did from Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot at Gnomedex a couple of years ago. It’s not the best performance of all time, and I tossed in a couple of ad-libs that in retrospect don’t work (see if you can spot them!) but
You can now see or hear me read from my books Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot! If you like what you hear, you may want to pick up a copy of Just A Geek: Teh Audiobook. Or not. Whatever. I’m not the boss of you.
Oh! And even though I’m putting my photos into flickr these days, I have an extensive gallery that’s filled with really great stuff, including a HAWESOME series from a road trip Anne and I took a few years ago. Man, I really love WWdN. Working on it brings back a flood of memories, and I can’t wait to get back home.
I’ve been working on a new episode of RFB most of this morning, and I’m incredibly sad to reach the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen.
I don’t have anything original or interesting to say, but I figured it wouldn’t be the biggest deal, because the bulk of the show would be audio from the Star Trek convention and my audition on Tuesday. The big problem is, that audio is just for shit. It’s so blown out that listening to it gave me a headache and actually made me feel a little sick to my stomach by the time I gave up trying to clean it up in garageband.
I’ve been using an iRiver 795; I’ve noticed that the last few times I’ve used it, the built-in mic is so sensitive, that with the encoder set at 44 kHz and 160Kbps, unless I’m speaking very quietly or there is absolutely no ambient noise, the audio is useless at best, and painful at worst. I’ve tried the line-in with a clip-on mic, but without some sort of pre-processing, the levels are too low.
So, can any of you experienced radio people or podcasters out there suggest an extremely portable, very affordable solution to my audio problem?
(Thanks to Matt D. for catching a picture of the official RFB truck in action!)
