Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Charla Bear and Tamara Keith continue trying to find their way home.  They reach civilization, only to realize they still have no idea where they are.  On this edition of B-Side, we’re finding ourselves.

Finding People: Dan Bobkoff
Have you ever had a cool experience of running into someone in an unexpected place?  Dan Bobkoff says it happens to him all the time in the most unlikely of places. New York City.  He calculates the odds of these chance encounters.

Courtesy of amateurgourmet.com

Finding Yourself, an Interview with Adam Roberts
Today Adam Roberts is a food blogger, the man behind the incredibly popular Amateur Gourmet. He has a show on Food 2 and wrote the book: The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table Hop Like a Pro. But there was a time, not that long ago when he was lost…not physically, but metaphysically in Law School. He talks about how he changed his career and found his true calling.  Special thanks to Jody Avirgan for recording the interview.

If you want the recipe for Adam’s Janet Jackson Breast Cupcakes, click here.

Addicted to Junk: Mwende Hahesy
You can get a real thrill from an unexpected find.  Some people get hooked on that feeling and look in unexpected places to keep it going. Reporter Mwende Hahesy introduces us to a man who finds his thrills at storage unit auctions.

The Wren’s Nest: Katy Shrout
Our last story is about the author of the Brer Rabbit book. You might know the story from the Disney movie Song of the South…and the ride at Disneyland Splash Mountain. Well, it has quite a back story complicated by issues of race. Katy Shrout has the story of the great great grandson of the author and what he’s found as he explores his family’s legacy.

On this edition of B-Side, Tamara Keith and Charla Bear get lost on purpose.  They are dropped off in a mysterious suburban location and have to find their way back to downtown Washington, DC.  Think of it as a low budget version of one of those survival shows on the Discovery Channel.  The show is all about losing things from a diary to a stream.  Enjoy!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Liner Notes:

A hollow in Hueysville, KY that's been filled with mining waste. Photo by: Kristin Espeland.

Lost Streams: Kristin Espeland
Some things seem easy to lose.  But a stream?  Reporter Kristin Espeland has this story from Appalachia, where residents have seen hundreds of miles of streams disappear under piles of coal mining waste.

Hearing Loss: Judah Leblang
Judah had a life-long connection to the deaf.  Then he lost most of the hearing in his left ear.

Music reviewer Dave Segal. Photo by Andrew Walsh.

Lost Collection: Andrew Walsh
Some things get lost and you barely miss them. But when music reviewer Dave Segal lost a huge chunk of his record collection, he lost part of himself.  Dave wrote about his ordeal here if you’d like to read more.

Dear Diary, Where Are You?: Anna Sachs
A lot of girls when they reach a certain age start keeping a journal, a diary. Anna Sachs had a diary when she was younger and she spoke to Tamara about how she discovered she had lost it.

We’re learning the hard way. This edition of B-Side is about a group of people struggling to learn, to make it in college. And we’re not talking about the usual too many units not enough time kind of trouble. These students are undocumented immigrants – most brought here by their parents when they were too young to have any say in the matter. And now they’re dealing with the consequences.

There are all kinds of difficulties those of us who were born here would never even think about. Tam Tran, a graduate student at Brown University in American Studies helps us navigate the issue. Tam is undocumented.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »

While we work to rebuild our website, we’re going to bring you some of our favorite past B-Side episodes.  Father’s Day is this weekend, and we hope you’ll enjoy our hour-long show about family and dads. 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

On this edition of B-Side we’re offering a little unsolicited advice, and some fatherly humor as we explore our relationships with people we’re tied to by blood or common history.

Good news!  The B-Side guide to making great radio has been rebuilt.  Lots of people use this resource as they begin working in audio and we wanted to make sure it would be available as quickly as possible.  Please share the guide with others who you think might be able to use it.

Link: Tuning Your Work: A Guide to Creating Great Radio

Dear Dedicated B-Side Listener:

Our site has been hacked, which is a total bummer. Our technical team is hard at work trying to repair the problem.  But, basically, the website has been wiped out.  We’re rebuilding now and when we’re done we hope it will be a much better site than it was before.  At the moment, though, it’s pretty ugly.

You can still listen to past shows on our bare bones podcast site:

http://bsideradio.libsyn.com/

Or by visiting us in Itunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=79941797

You may also be wondering when the heck we’re going to have a new show for you. Well, that’s a good question. The answer is soon. And that’s not all. We’re actually working on three hour-long shows that we’re sure you’ll enjoy.

Here’s a preview:

IN LIMBO – The story of a man who went to Afghanistan to make a difference but found a more complicated reality than he could have imagined. And the stories of undocumented immigrant students trying to go to college and the obstacles that they face – legally, emotionally and fiscally.

LOST & FOUND – From a lost diary, to lost hearing to finding oneself in a batch of”Janet Jackson Breast Cupcakes,” this episode of the show is about various forms of being lost and found. Host, Tamara Keith is looking for suggestions for where to tape the show. Do you know of an awesome lost and found, maybe at a museum? Do you know a nature guide who would be interested in getting lost with the host? If you have better suggestions, please send them to Tamara.

BOUNDARIES – There are physical boundaries and psychological ones. On this episode of B-Side, we explore a lot of them. We patrol the border on the open seas in Grease, visit a tiny European town divided between two nations. We take a ride in the Berkeley casual carpool where some people just have no boundaries and talk to a new mom who describes pregnancy like an alien invasion that doesn’t improve one the child is born.

See, we’ve been hard at work. We swear! In the meantime, please check out our old shows on itunes an Libsyn.

Again, we are sorry about our minor technical disaster.

Sincerely,

The B-Side Crew

We started out putting together a show we were planning to call “Nerd Alert.” But soon we realized that most of our stories were really about games…nerdy games, but games nonetheless. So, B-Side’s Tamara Keith went to the E For All video game convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center in search of both games and nerds. They weren’t hard to find.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »

We started out putting together a show we were planning to call “Nerd Alert.” But soon we realized that most of our stories were really about games…nerdy games, but games nonetheless. So, B-Side’s Tamara Keith went to the E For All video game convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center in search of both games and nerds. They weren’t hard to find.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »

In zoology, crepuscular refers to animals becoming active at twilight or before sunrise, as do bats and certain insects and birds. On this edition of B-Side we look at what humans do between the hours of 4 and 6 AM. B-Side’s Tamara Keith and Rene Gutel visit a 24-hour big box super center to see who works and shops before dawn.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you cope with a rough day? Perhaps some comfort food? On this edition of B-Side we’re talking about food and coping.

First: B-Side’s Tamara Keith cooks up a pot of her mom’s vegetarian lentil soup and explores food and our relationship to food.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Then: We visit a bar. It’s the kind of place where you can get a strong drink a disappear. And it seems the appropriate location to do a show about coping.  B-Side explores the things we do to deal with the unexpected, the unpleasant, the sometimes miserable parts of life.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »