File under "Now I've Seen It All"

The Oconaluftee Trunpike Company is a Japanese oldtime string band. This footage was taken live at The Honky Tonk in Kyoto.



They sound great.

Scenic Roots @ MBL

Today I created a youtube channel for Marianna Black Library. This is the first video added to the channel - Erin and Amber Rogers, of Scenic Roots, who played here at MBL last night. They were great and the crowd (and I mean crowd) loved them! Here's a little montage I put together for the MBL youtube channel.



More music videos to come. Also, possibly story times, SRP footage, library tours, etc.

Thing #21 - podcasts

Like youtube, I've been familiar with podcasting for some time now. NPR was probably my first experience with podcasting, as "On the Media" as been offering mp3 downloads of it's show for years (Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, by the way, has just started offering mp3 downloads - YES!). I've owned an mp3 player for only a short time, but I love down loading podcasts. The New Yorker, which I subscribe to, has been offering a great series of contemporary fiction writers reading their favorite short stories out load and then discussing them at Fiction Podcasts. One of my favorites is Jhumpa Lahiri reading and discussing William Trevor’s short story “A Day.”

I also go to the New York Times Podcasts often. There you hear NYT topstories, book reviews, music reviews, science news, business news, the Ethesist and more.

I went to Podcast Alley to see what I could see (or, I guess, hear what I could hear). I first searched the term "library" and 147 podcasts came up. I semi-randomly chose #66, Library of the Living Dead. This is "A Podcast dedicated to discussion and reviews of all things Zombie. Zombie novels, Zombie short stories, Zombie graphic novels, Zombie comics, Zombie science and last, but not least, Zombie movies." Each podcast is about 2 hours, you read that right, 2 hours long. I only lasted about 9 minutes, but hey, I'm just reporting my findings here. Here is a photo on the the webpage:

Another library related podcast is that of Sarah Anne Long, who does "Long Shots." Sarah is the director of the North Suburban Library System in Wheeling, IL and in her podcasts she "explores the world of libraries through interviews with key library figures and commentary on issues that matter to libraries." To this day there are 103 podcasts, here's the latest one.

I've also seen story time podcasts in the past and I think that would be a wonderful thing for FRL to persue in the future.