Thursday, 2/5

You know what? I'm thinking it might be a pretty accurate description.

Over the past few months, as you well know, I've been putting out all kinds of content—these things every day, my TV-19 work every week, 12 “Pieces of the Past” videos, and a whole bunch more. I was speaking with someone who's seen most of it, and whether or not they intended to, they gave me a compliment that, as I think about it, describes what I seem to be these days.

They told me I'm a great “Two Minute Storyteller”.

It's a strange sobriquet, but you know what? It fits perfectly. The TV pieces I do every week? 2 minutes. These things, if you were to read them out loud? About 2 minutes. The history videos? Some are 90 seconds, some are a bit longer, so that averages to (around) two(ish) minutes.

I've never actually even considered it, but I do seem to have a talent for getting a point across in two minutes. I guess I really AM a “Two Minute Storyteller”.

It's funny, because I'm guessing that if you were to go back in time (which, as we know from yesterday, is pretty much impossible) and ask the younger me what title they would end up with, I can pretty much guarantee the younger me would NOT have guessed “Two Minute Storyteller”. In fact, I'm pretty sure the younger me would either laugh the laugh of the ironic at that suggestion, or just shake his head, make a sarcastic comment, and walk away.

But you know what? The younger me would have been quite shortsighted in that reaction.

I'd be curious to know if I've always, deep down, been a “Two Minute Storyteller”, or if it's a talent I've developed over the years, thanks to the type of work I've done (like writing these for 20+ years). Maybe it's a chicken or egg thing, or maybe there's just something in my brain that suited to short spurts of lucidity. I guess it doesn't matter; all I know is that it's a title that I never knew I had, but it's one that I'll proudly carry for the rest of my life.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll have to see if I can come up with a business card that says “Jim Koski: Two Minute Storyteller” on it.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Wednesday, 2/4

It's probably the closest I'll ever come to fulfilling an impossible dream.

I think I've written in here before about a fanciful dream I have that was actually inspired by a real dream, a dream from a couple of years ago where I was walking through downtown Marquette with a camera. That's something I actually do quite a bit in real life, but in that dream I was walking through the downtown Marquette of the 1930s with my 21 megapixel Nikon DSLR, taking pictures (and hi-def video) of a Marquette long-gone, of buildings no longer there and businesses consigned to history.

It was an amazing dream. Sadly, I know a little bit too much about physics (and the impossibility of time travel) to know that it's a dream that will never come true.

Or...so I thought.

When I was doing prep work for the season of “Pieces of the Past” that we just finished, I came across a treasure trove of photos of Marquette of 1929. They were taken by Robert S Platt, a sociologist working for the American Geographic Society. He was working on an article for the AGS's magazine, and spent a week in Marquette that summer just taking pictures. Now, aside from being a sociologist, Platt also had an amazing eye for photography, shooting some of the iconic pictures of Marquette of almost 100 years ago.

He shot many of the same things I shot in my dream, and that I would like to shoot if I could break every law of nature and head back in time.

I used a few of his pictures in various videos, and then saved the lion's share—some of his best work—for the final episode of the season. I also made them into the last segment of mine during “Legends & Lore III” at Kaufman last month, and I still have people coming up to me to talk about a particular shot of Platt's that has stuck with them.

So, while I know that I'll never ever be able to go back in time and take those pictures and videos, I'm thankful that someone at the time actually did.

And because of that, I will forever be in awe of Robert S. Platt.

(jim@wmqt.com) 

Tuesday, 2/3

Today, whaddya say we have a little fun with numbers?

The first number is 45. In a rare instance of something the predates even me (and that's saying something these days), Q107-WMQT became Q107-WMQT 45 years ago this past Sunday (the 1^st). In a move that I'm pretty sure was borrowed from “WKRP in Cincinnati” an elevator music station flipped things on its head one afternoon, when the elevator music stopped and the rock music began, hosted by a very..unique individual named “Marcus Marquette” (in reality, station co-owner Bob Olson). The older people of Marquette County (including, if I remember correctly, my grandfather) weren't too happy, but a station was born.

And it's been around ever since.

A couple of years later, the rock music left and the station switched to pop music, where it's pretty much been ever since. I've been lucky enough to be the steward of it for over three decades now, and I'm always humbled when I think about the awesome staying power of this place. Very few stations are able to become “:legacy” stations—ones that multiple generations of a family grow up listening to—but this is one of them. Credit for that goes to Joe Blake and Marcus Marquette's alter ego, Bob Olson, as well as Tom Mogush, who picked up the baton from them, and passed it along to the people now entrusted with the legacy, the KBIC.

Of course, to celebrate the milestone we have a contest all this month, our “Hot Rockin' Flame Throwing 45^th Birthday Bash”, in which we're giving almost $2,500 in prizes to one lucky listener. So if you feel like it, listen for your chance to qualify.

It's our birthday, but you might walk away with the gifts. After all, that's one thing at which we've excelled the past 45 years.

And, hopefully, will excel at for the next four and a half decades.

*****

The other number I mentioned at the beginning of this? Well, that would be 18.6.

Why? The reason is right here--

(jim@wmqt.com)

Monday, 2/2

This is going to be a weird week. After tonight, I don't have anything out of the ordinary going on.

As we all know, I've had an amazingly hectic past few weeks, with multiple episodes of “High School Bowl”, my weekly TV 19 appearances, a big History Center show at Kaufman, and the Noquemanon all pecking away at my time, my voice, and my sanity. Well, after I share a few numbers and make fun of Kevin tonight, I then have a week—a week—of nothing out of the ordinary.

Unless, of course, you consider radio as “out of the ordinary”.

I'm not quite sure how I'll handle it; after all, I've spent the past couple of weeks preparing for and then rushing from one thing to another that a few days of down time, a few days when there will be absolutely nothing pressing on my schedule, will seem strange. I can see myself waking up in the middle of the night, thinking that I forgot to do something or have a deadline to meet.

When that happens, I just hope I'll be able to get back to sleep.

How did all this happen? Well, after doing three episodes in the past ten days there will be no “High School Bowl” tapings until next Friday (the 13^th!), thanks to the schedules of the remaining schools in the competition. There's no big sporting event that requires my participation, and after dropping the last episode of “Pieces of the Past” last week I now have no official History Center duties for the next couple of months, when I have a new walking tour on the schedule.

See? It's gonna be a weird week, isn't it?

It's actually coming at a pretty good time, although between you & me it would have been better if it wasn't the beginning of February. In fact, can you imagine what I could do with a free week in, say, July, when there's actually no snow on the ground?

That would be magnificent. But seeing as how I could tell the strain on my voice was growing after shooting “High School Bowl” last Friday, I'll take what I can get.

Because, as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum, which means that before I know it, something—or many somethings—will soon be filling up my schedule and I'll be once again rushing from place to place wondering (as I did several times in the past few weeks) where I am and what day of the week it is.

(jim@wmqt.com)

Friday, 1/30

I have to go shoot yet another episode of “High School Bowl” in a few minutes, so I'm taking the cowardly way out and leaving you with a few more examples of what I do in one of my other jobs, that of historical storyteller. As you know, we've been dropping a new season of “Pieces of the Past”, and if you wanna check them out, here are three stories from the past few weeks.

The first? How Marquette's two “suburbs” actually have something in common--

The next is the tale of an event that people STILL talk about, 67 years after it happened--

And finally, the story of three generations of a family, three generations that could not be different than the other. I told the first part of the story on a walking tour a couple of years ago, Beth Gruber from the History Center then did a little genealogical research, and voila.

An epic story we didn't even know existed came into being--

With that, I really do need to get over to NMU. Hope you have a great weekend, and you know what? There's one more history video I do have to share, and I will some time next week.

If only because it's probably the closest I'll ever come fulfilling a dream I have, a dream that physics says will never come true.

(jim@wmqt.com)

Thursday, 1/29

I made a discovery yesterday. And I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable with what I found.

This was a discovery I never thought I'd make, nor one that I ever assumed would have to be made. But after getting to work after shooting an episode of “High School Bowl”, and getting myself into my daily routine, I made a discovery that—hopefully--will not change my life as I know it.

I discovered I may be getting tired of eating chocolate.

I know...mind blown, right? Yet for a moment yesterday morning, right as I reached for my first piece of the day, that flash did cross my mind—did I REALLY want to eat it? For several seconds, I pondered the thought, holding the chocolate that really, in that immediate moment, didn't seem all that appealing.

Then I ate it.

I ate several other pieces that morning, too, proving that (I guess) I'm really not tired of eating chocolate. And as I ruminated on this bizarre reaction, I all of a sudden realized that I probably wasn't getting tired of eating chocolate so much as I was getting tired of eating chocolate with bits of candy cane crushed up inside, the kind I was holding in my hand when I had that strange feeling of not wanting any more chocolate.

And just between you & me, I'm okay with that.

As we entered the holiday season a few months ago Loraine and I may—may--have gone a little overboard in buying seasonal chocolate. And a lot of that chocolate, especially the dark chocolate of which I am a little too fond, had crushed up candy canes or some other peppermint flavoring inside. Those bars consist of the majority of the chocolate I've been eating recently, and yesterday morning just must have been a kind of breaking point, a way of my body reminding me that there ARE other kinds of chocolate, not just the kind with crushed up candy canes in them.

So that's why I thought I was getting tired of eating chocolate. And that's also why I spent a chunk of the day eating more chocolate. It just wasn't the kind with the candy canes in it.

Of course, I still have several various bars of chocolate containing candy canes or peppermint flavor lying around. I'm now kind of curious. If I let them lie around for a few months, will I still be sick of them? Will I be able to eat them with as much gusto as I usually attack chocolate, or will I be forced to, say, stick them in cookies and give them away to someone? I have no idea. We're in uncharted territory here, so we'll just have to see.

I'll let you know the answer in three or four months.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Wednesday, 1/28

I can not believe it's been forty years.

For those of us who were born in the 1960s and 1970s the first time we had a “generational” moment, a moment where we know exactly where we were when it occurred, occurred 40 years ago today. Much like people older than us know exactly where they were when John Kennedy was shot, we as a generation know exactly where we were when we heard that Challenger blew up 74 seconds after liftoff from an icy Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The event that occurred forty years ago today.

In one way, it's been amazing that it happened forty years ago, because it sure doesn't seem that long, at least to me. I don't if that's because I'm just getting old(er) and time flies by a lot quicker than it used to, or if it's because NASA was still flying shuttles a quarter century after the accident and that kept it at the forefronts of our brains, but if doesn't seem as if it happened four decades ago. It's really doesn't.

But then when you look at footage about the accident (something I really don't like to do, always covering my eyes at the words “Challenger, you are go for throttle-up”), you see grainy, standard-def video, you see spokespeople with big 80s hair, and you see computers that, while advanced for their time, probably have less processing power than the phones you hold in your hand. The evidence is there. It really DID happen 40 years ago today.

Since Challenger, of course, there have been two other “generational” moments that have occurred. And I think it's surprising that the loss of another space shuttle, Columbia in 2003, wasn't among them. I don't know if that's because we already had a spaceflight “trauma”, or because by that point people just didn't care, but for most people Columbia didn't mean a thing. Or at least it didn't mean as much as the other two “generational” events that occurred after Challenger.

What were those two events? Well, September 11^th is one of them. Everybody know where they were when the planes hit the towers. The other generational event might surprise you, but it's true. Everybody knows where they were the night O.J. Simpson took a ride in that white Ford Bronco. It's wasn't as earth-shattering of an event as Kennedy or Challenger or 9/11, but everybody seems to know where they were that Friday night. And some might even argue that since O.J hired an attorney named Robert Kardashian and gave he and his family their first access to fame, it's the most influential of the generational events.

And that's a scary thought.

But for many of us, the first “generational” event of our lifetime was Challenger, which occurred forty years ago today, whether you want to believe it or not.

(jim@wmqt.com)