Sunday, September 17, 2006

I Miss Ruby’s

Why can’t I find good barbeque in this town? How hard can it be? After the meal I had last night, I don’t know why people aren’t rioting in the streets. Here’s an excerpt from my restaurant review:

“While waiting for your meal, you can carefully consider five flavors of barbeque sauce laid out at a serve-yourself plunger bar: regular, sweet, and spicy versions of the house sauce and sauces that supposedly hail from North Carolina and South Carolina. Although the copious array of choices indicates that the makers of Soulfire at least understand the basic philosophy of barbeque—the sauce makes or breaks the meal—the sauces themselves disappoint. For the house sauce, think baked-bean-juice with a little chili powder, and the sweet and spicy versions having only a little more sugar or a little more chili. While the careful labeling of the Carolina sauces conjures up visions of feuding redneck-family codgers, glaring from either side of a state line, barrel of precious BBQ sauce in one hand and protecting shotgun gripped in the other, don’t be fooled. North Carolina tastes suspiciously like apple-cider vinegar thickened with chili powder and South Carolina like yellow mustard cut with same powder. And, the sausage plate comes with a mysterious sixth sauce, which appears to be the love child of the two dueling condiments.”


[Image from: http://www.rubysbbq.com/]

Friday, September 15, 2006

New...uhm…Job

Yesterday I was woken up by a phone call with an offer for a part-time job: Associate Producer of a science podcast. They actually offered me a similar pay to what my first job was straight out of college! This may seem like a step backward, but it feels like progress after a summer of making $25 a day. Also, I took it as a sign that I’m finally trained enough to be a professional journalist. (Can you smell the new job optimism? Surely, this won’t last.) On my first day, I spent 9 hours editing audio for the podcast, which was actually quite fun. Editing audio is a strange activity. It uses some parts of the brain that you use for editing print--you have to think about what the people are saying and keep their content intact--but it also feels a bit like needle-point or some other crafty, fine-handiwork thing. You get into a groove in which you become a physical extension of the keyboard-mouse-software system. You develop shortcut moves, reflexes almost. You hear a sound, deal out a series of strokes, and then the sound is improved. After trimming and cleaning up different tracks, I spent most of the day removing people’s uhms and ers and repeat mumbles. Now they all sound like polished spin doctors of science. By all means, have a listen: Go to the New Scientist podcast website and download today’s show.


[Image from: http://alts.homelinux.net/task.php?task=multimedia&view=alt]

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Medium

Here are the results of my first day of photojournalism class where we actually got to hold a camera:

Eric



Pat and Liz


Kirk


Kate