Sunday morning in Stonehaven
Sundays are an odd day. Since being given the Sunday Breakfast show over a month ago now, my weekends have completely changed.
I’m rubbish with early mornings, which isn’t the best of starts when you are being asked to host a breakfast show. No matter how tired I am, trying to get to sleep before mid night isn’t an option for me. In fact trying to get to sleep full stop when I know my alarm is going off at stupid o’clock isn’t an option for me. I have this fear I will sleep through it, or my phone (which I use as an alarm) will magically stop working in the middle of the night (given the state of my phone that is highly likely).
Because of this I end up going to work on a Sunday morning having had about 1 hour of really light sleep.
So once I’m off air at 10am, I tend to head home and have my full 6 hours sleep and wake up at about 5pm in a complete daze, and my breakfast show feeling like it took place the day before. As a result, my sleeping patterns are completely messed up for the rest of the week. It’s a vicious circle and before you know it, it’s Sunday again and I’m once again getting up when the rest of the world is asleep (or at least that’s what it feels like).
I am enjoying the Sunday breakfast show though. It is a hard show to do. I like to put 110% in to all my shows, but Sunday breakfast is just that little bit more demanding than the Monday to Friday evening show (which seems to role along for 3 hours a day quite happily).
On this mornings show I was quoting Bushisims. One of the worlds favourite comedians, George Bush, stands down this week to be replaced by a new president. While I don’t doubt Barack Obama’s ability to run America, I do feel American politics won’t be as funny as it once was (and I can’t help but feel sorry for the writers on Have I Got News For You).
Some of my favourite:
“For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it.” –Philadelphia, Penn., May 14, 2001
“They misunderestimated me.” –Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” –Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000
Good luck Obama, you’re going to have a hard act to follow!
David
The Superbowl, 5 Live and Twitter
February 2, 2009Taken by jdebner on Flickr.
Superbowl XLIII took place last night. If you have the slighest interest in American football (or if you are indeed American) you’ll know that already. I hold a bit of an interest. Not enough to watch the whole season prior to the event, but enough to sit down and pay attention for one night a year.
I eventually opted to listen to the commentary on BBC Radio 5 Live, while lying in bed. What I like about 5 Live is that they are fully aware that a lot of the people listening will be regular listeners who may not fully ‘get’ American football, but hold a bit of an interest (I was pretty much target audience then). They explain it in layman’s terms (again, I was target audience).
The best bit… next door were having some sort of Superbowl party, with a few folk round for drinks and watching it on the telly. Radio audio is always slightly ahead of telly audio, so I got to hear what was happening in the Superbowl, and then get their boisterious reactions 5 seconds later.
What was also fun was listening in my ears while watching the continuous stream of comments regarding the Superbowl on Twitter.
I’ve spoken about Twitter before. It’s a what’s called a “microblogging” service. You have 140 characters to say whatever you want, and your ‘followers’ then get to read what you are saying (or tweeting as it is known). Its popularity over the last month or two has risen consisderably after the media have picked up on Twitter’s famous users such as Stephen Fry and Barack Obama. I’ve had an account with Twitter for year and a bit now. At first I thought it was a bit daft, who’d want to read what other people were eating for lunch? But over the last month or so I have really begun to understand its potential.
I understood it as soon as I had discovered the Twitter search facility. As the name may suggest, it allows you to search Tweets based on certain rules. You could search for all the Tweets coming out of Aberdeen. You can also search by subject, like what I was doing last night, searching bythe subject ‘Superbowl‘.
So now not only was I listening to the Superbowl and hearing the thoughts of the commentators, I was also listening to the Superbowl and getting instant reaction on the game from thousands of people around the globe. Every touch down and fumble of the game, somebody had something to say. The Twitterverse were massive fans of the half time show with Bruce Springsteen, me included!
What was also fascinating to watch was the continous stream of tweets about the snow which is hitting the UK at the moment. People in London commenting on the status of their street, how Boris had cancelled all the buses and the tweets as people slowly realised they weren’t going to make it to work. Despite being 1,000 miles away in a snowless Aberdeen, I almost felt I was a part of it.
I know next time something, god forbid, major happens I’ll be logging on to Twitter so get a better understanding of what’s going on.
It even lets me know what minor celebrity Richard Bacon had for lunch, a vegetable biryani if you’re interested.
David (or @drl if you have Twitter)
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Tags: 5 live, bbc radio, commentary, superbowl, tweets, twitter