Today’s Blog Action Day. This year we’re to focus on poverty and what we can do to help others. It’s much closer than you think.…
Musings of a Bronxite Living in the South
Today’s Blog Action Day. This year we’re to focus on poverty and what we can do to help others. It’s much closer than you think.…
I was on the radio yesterday morning here in Birmingham – 960 AM WERC to be exact. I was the first guest of a segment looking at area bloggers on the station’s new morning show hosted by Steve Shannon and Leah Brandon. It’s not the first time I’ve appeared on the air in town, but the first since I’ve become a web publisher.
As I was reminded by one of the volunteer contributors to The Terminal, talk radio really is the first and at times still purest form of engaging a lot of people in a conversation. Bloggers could really look at themselves as hosts and personalities, with the comments section serving as a slightly more hidden way to “take calls from the audience.”
I went on about an hour after Jay Saxon did (I will say that I’m convinced that Jay is one of those “adventure follows me everywhere” people…) and his appearance made me a little more relaxed about mine. For those that didn’t know, Jay was the “local Birmingham resident” in the midst of the devastation caused by the natural disaster that struck Myanmar recently. He’s also someone who previously appeared on this site as we followed his adventures in Beirut almost two years ago.
Anyway, it was fairly painless going on and both hosts were quite nice. They knew as much about me as I did about them, though I knew that I recognized both names from elsewhere in my travels and knew that for us to land both of them in this market says a lot about how far we’ve come from the days of The Radio Carousel, though I’m sure that many are waiting for the inevitable next rounds of moves.
I consider Alice one of my best friends. I first met her in Savannah nearly 16 years ago when both of us were students in SCAD‘s Rising Star program. Both of us started at college there and both of us ended up taking slightly different paths. When we first met, we kept in touch that following school year not by phone, but through letter writing. The result was a collection of letters that still give a snapshot of how much fun it was trying to figure out where to go to school and what else was going on. Now, we just catch each other on Facebook while she’s getting her second masters at Florida State… Ah, the joy of Web 2.0.
When she first moved to Jacksonville after living up in Columbia, SC, I’d head on down and hang out for the weekend as a way to escape the rat race that was “try surviving in Savannah.” Considering that I now live in Birmingham and that drive isn’t as simple to get to Tallahassee (much less Jacksonville) it’s a lot to even think about driving (forget the cost of the trip in gas money); not to mention the fact it had become harder to catch up by phone. Enter Facebook.
I’ll go ahead and post the one that I really wanted to do to get this thing started again later on today. But first, since…