On the TeeVee
By Today, thanks to Kim Jong Il, I got to be on the TV. I talked about North Korea on the 12:30pm (27 Newsfirst), and on the 5:30pm (36 Action News). Each station interviewed me for about two minutes, asking similar but not identical questions. The situation had developed across the day (in particular in reference to the possible failure of the test), so the answers were a bit different, too.
The experience, certainly, was kind of cool. Of course, that North Korean bastard decided to blow up a bomb on the day that I wasn’t exactly dressed for success, so I had to run home, unrumple my jacket, and put on a tie. Both station crews had the kind of casual professionalism that I really like, regardless of the profession. It’s weird; I was of course paranoid about saying or doing something stupid (picking my noise or launching into an obscenity laden tirade against Mickey Kaus, for example), yet they do this every single day, and don’t seem to worry about it at all. In one of the newsrooms, a discussion of Anchorman broke out during the station break. It was fascinating just watching how the newsroom operated; how the weatherman, for example, wandered across the room chatting while the satellite photo was up. The funniest parts of both interviews were the segment segues; in the first, they went from discussing a rogue state with nukes to “Why can’t men and women just get along when it comes to watching football?”, while the second followed up with a bit on the house from A Christmas Story. Nevertheless, both interviews were enjoyable.
In between I talked for about half and hour on the radio, a discussion which was obviously a lot more detailed and, to me, interesting. Talk radio catches a lot of flak, but done correctly it can convey quite a bit of information. Of course, fewer people listen than watch, fewer still read the newspaper, and very few indeed read the relevant books and blogs, so we have to start somewhere.