Quantum Lump

So there I was, shooting the hell out of some tornado wreckage when it happened again. I ... uh ... transported. Don't ask me how, 'cause I couldn't tell you. All I know is one moment I was zeroing in on a pile of jagged lumber and the next I'm sniffin' Starbucks. If that weren't alarming enough, the people suddenly sitting before me were engrossed in conversation. I'm pretty sure the blonde lady noticed me but I was too wigged out to acknowledge her - so I just kinda stood there. Luckily they were too engrossed in their iPhones to notice the old media vulture over their shoulder and eventually they wandered off. How DO you get guy-liner out of yellow plastic?

(Photo by Vincent J. Brown. My delusion in no way representative of actual shot.)

Twisted Vista

So how sexy is storm-chasing? The producers of Twister put Helen Hunt in a sports bra and it still kinda sucked. Which is why I dodge such assignments as if they were flying shards of sheet metal - which they frequently are. Take last night for instance. While dedicated chasers like, say, Weaver were out pointing their their news units into hundred mile an hour winds, I was hiding under my bed at home reading #tornado tweets. Was I 'laying low'? Like a corpse! Besides, as I burrowed my way under a few old blankets, I was comfortable in the knowledge that if the powers that be really needed me, they wouldn't hesitate to all. Which they did - er, didn't - about an hour before midnight.

Sunday night a a series of storms ripped through central North Carolina, spawning at least three tornadoes and destroying dozens of homes but not resulting in a single death.

All of which goes to explain why, - while you were still dreaming of lottery tickets and cheerleaders - I was nosing a loaded live truck past an unmanned barricade, driving slow to avoid downed power lines and seriously adolescent quest for free time. Ya know, if I hadn't been such a champion truant, I might be somebody by now; maybe a well-dressed and rested executive - instead of a wrinkled schlub with a station cap jammed over a bad case of bedhead; a beleaguered sort of chap with a sticky trigger finger and a penchant for parables. Still, would a well-heeled slicker know what it feels like to tiptoe through other people's broken hearts, to poke your lens in what used to be the living room of a stranger and ask them how their day is going.... I have - though I'd like to forget.

In Guilford County, an EF3 tornado with 148 mile per hour winds touched down in northern High Point, destroying homes, tossing autos and downing power lines.

A word on tornado damage. Hailing from Eastern North Carolina as I do, I'm well familiar with the footprint of traveling winds. Down there, tornadoes and trailer parks mutually attract each other. Thus every flat land touchdown looks the same: like Godzilla ran loose on the set of Hee-Haw. But here in the Piedmont, tornadoes strike upscale communities as well, For whatever reason, that's always strikes me as strange, as if Mother Nature forgot to charge her GPS and plowed into the wrong neighborhood. Does that make any sense? Probably not, but when you've slept three hours and worked twelve, you're lucky the syllables stick together. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a cryogenic lean-to in my bedroom that needs my attention. It's constructed of old logowear, duct tape and a few sports bras I found in my run-bag.

That's not weird - is it?

The Phantom Grimace

Ahh, the dreaded cross-lateral elbow clutch; makes my thorax throb just thinking about it. Now, I don't know about the guy in the green ( I don't even know who he is), but if you ever see ME slowly reach over and support my camera-arm, you can rest assured I'm about to A) pitch forward completely until I'm just a quivering mass of word-nerd there on the floor, B) gently set down the Sony and embark on a life of panhandling or C) demand the person being interviewed stop congratulating himself and get to the $#&@% POINT! Then again, I'm less than patient than most. (Twenty years of dragging around glass and mannequins will do that to a fella.) As for other phantom pains, I get 'em all...

Inflamed Scanner Acid Reflux - I get this in the afternoon a lot. There I'll be sitting at my desk in the newsroom and the bile in my throat begins to rise. That's when I look up and see three managers hunched over the police scanner and looking my way. Luckily, the hives don't break out until they start fondling their map books.

Live Truck Sleep Apnea - No sooner do I settle in behind the wheel of a parked TV truck for a little shuteye when it happens: My mouth hangs open and I begin to choke on a combination of exhaust fumes, Cheezy poof dust and failed ambition - until I've broken the reporter's wi-fi connection and train of thought. Pardon while I wipe this up...

Pavlov's Phone Call - There I am, spraying bird crap off my drive way when a familiar buzzing begins radiating off my right hip. Absentmindedly, I'll reach down to answer my ever-present cell phone only to realize it's upstairs on its charger. If I new it was gonna vibrate from afar like this, I'd pretend it's in my pocket

Widow's Porch Wooziness - That's the sour feeling I get in my soul whenever I have to climb some widow's porch and invite myself into her darkest hour. Try as I might, even hiding behind the tripod and staring at the floor offers no relief whenever her tears begin to fall.

Amateur Hour Migraine - What? You want me to drive around in circles while you decide who to call? Hold my breath while you spray on your face? Write your package while you think up new Tweets? Explain an issue so you can feign your way through yet another interview? Fine - but I'm warning you - my head is killing me!

...Good thing the wife's a trauma nurse.

God Save the Queen!

Don't tell the Missus, but there's a new lady on my radar. And would you believe it - she's Royalty! Or so she claims. Truth is, I don't know much about the Local News Queen - other than the fact that she's brilliant and most definitely a TV News reporter. Come to think of it, that narrows it down quite a bit - but hey, I didn't come to expose this Mistress of the Snark, but rather to praise her. From the moment Doug Richards hipped me to her regal decrees, I've been hooked. Perhaps it's due to her acidic prose, her trenchant opinions or the fact that her every other sentence is something I wished I'd written. Consider her entry regarding on protesters: a scathing take on the eternally indignant that tells me the Queen has covered a picket line or ten:

"Our local protests always consist of the same people. It’s like they toyed with the idea of becoming a Rotarian, but instead opted to start a disapproval club... My favorite is the anti-war protest. I’m just guessing, but I don’t think the President of the United States is going to pull troops out of Afghanistan because a bunch of unemployed hippies, who haven’t showered since the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, are waving their Spin Doctors knit hats in the July sun."

I read that this morning and have been chuckling over Spin Doctor hats all day. I've also thought about just how much I detest protesters, a deeply-held opinion resulting from years of pointing a camera at the same ten unwashed dill-weeds. Hey, I'm all for freedom to dissent, but your little demonstration would carry more weight if the guy shrieking about the evils of forced busing wasn't the same dreadlocked goober who threatened to chain himself to the golden arches if Ronald didn't bring back the McRib FOR GOOD this time! But I digress; something you'll never catch the Local News Queen do. She's way too busy issuing epistles at a rate she may one day have a hard time maintaining (Trust Me). In the meantime, swing by the Palace and give the Queen her due. Tell her some scruffy serf named Lenslinger sent ya...

I, Phobot

SHHHH! Word has it The Pentagon is working 'round the clock to create a new race of ...(wait for it)... Photog-Robots! You heard me: autonomous camera-beings with enough spatiotemporal reasoning to interpret what they see; you know, tell a story about it! It's thought that such a sentient being would prove invaluable in combat zones, where a state of the art 'smart camera' could roam behind enemy lines unmanned - not just recording everything in its path - but using artificial intelligence to recognize scenarios, deduce possible outcomes and provide nuanced reporting --along with blistering visuals. Now, I'm all for national defense and I enjoyed the first Terminator film as much as the next pubescent, but there's just something about this latest quantum leap that leaves me a little jumpy. See, those old guys with the scrambled eggs on their hats got nothin' on the chiselers in charge of your average TV affiliate. One scintilla of success on the battlefield with these kind of 'Eyeborgs' and stations everywhere will fall in, until each and every overworked and underpaid human news-gatherer is replaced by a 'droid with an over-the horizon zoom lens and a penchant for similes. Sure, that might be a step up from the dreck your local station serves, but I ask you ... can it last?

Sure, you can create a machine that'll marry images with ideas, but can you design one that will regurgitate press releases in heavy mascara and hump-me pumps until they snag the eye of the area's most eligible bachelor? Well, yes - but it would probably be illegal in a few of the flyover states...

Okay, so you can probably teach a robot to aim, record and edit - but can an android find new places to hide in the same old building every day? Can it memorize whole fast food menu boards from three sperate counties? Can it sit around and brag about how cool they were back in film school? I guess you could, but why would you want to?

Say you did gussy up some metal cuss with an IQ suited for electronic news-gathering. What would it look like? Square jawed and overdressed? Scruffy and rusted? Curvy, flirtatious and vaguely Asian? Tattered and clad in a tropical top? By the way, do these metal chaps make my ass look fat?

Even if you could program some cyborg to shoot, decide and report, wouldn't it just compare everything to only the scenarios it knows,before boiling it all down to oversimplified tripe and delivering the data using only keywords, cliches and catch-phrases?

Hold that thought - The News is on...

Have Wedgie, Will Travel

Once (or twice) in a generation, a man, his machines and a moment come together to define the very times. Such was the case with Marvin, whose life finally came into focus the day he scored the coveted 13 News gig. Before then, life had had been less than swell. Chicks didn't dig his mothball collection, his Mom's jalopy always left him stranded and the fellas on the corner threatened to burn the wool slacks off him whenever he grew too nosy. But now, all that was about to change... he could feel it. With a flashy new fancycam, a logo'd muscled car and a totally chief new Madras jacket, this Chinese Checkers champion of 1959 was about to make his mark on the not so fruited plains. If he was lucky, an exclusive or two might earn him a raise and he could get that new seersucker suit off lay-away. After all...

...you can't look this good on a photog's salary.

Attack of the Show

I'll grant Pat Tomasulo this much: Dude's got grapes. While most notably a sports anchor for Chicago's own WGN, this mild-mannered reporter is serving as an avenging angel of sorts for frustrated news crews the world over. See, no matter what populated spot you set your camera up in, somebody's gonna stomp into your shot and act a fool. Spastic arm flailing, extended shout-outs, the occasional gang-sign: there's no telling what even the most sophisticated pedestrian will do when he or she spot a fancycam in action. (Remember, they don't call them 'asshole magnets' just 'cause it sounds cool.) Now, St. Pat is collecting payback and the results are both cringe-inducing and hilarious (depending on which side of the lens you find yourself)...

The set-up is simple: Erect a fake live shot, wait for the gawkers to invade your frame, then pounce. At this, Tomasulo is masterful. He, spins, he cajoles, he berates. More times than not he invites the overly curious to join him on camera, where he seamlessly begins quizzing them on their incontinence, unwanted body hair or average looking babies. On paper it sounds like some infantile Howard Stern skit, but our man Pat delivers the goods with such a straight face, such reporter earnestness, you can't help but laugh along (an hope he doesn't get his microphone shoved down his gullet). Then again, perhaps I'm biased. Those folks were only being friendly! They didn't deserve the shame, the castigation, the unsolicited advice on erectile dysfunction...

Then again, I didn't deserve that awkward rebel yell on the overpass the other day, the unmistakable finger messages, the half filled Slushee cup hurled my way...

A Gift for It

(VIA Ashvegas) Two months after a young photojournalist fell to his death, the community college that helped shape him has established a scholarship in his memory. John Billingsley earned his Broadcast Production degree from Isothermal Community College before advancing to Appalachian State University. After interning at the WLOS Rutherford County Bureau, he gained employment at the station itself and quickly proved himself a favorite of his new coworkers. All of which made his sudden death one of the most shocking news items his friends ever processed. Now, they - along with John's parents - have started a scholarship in his name. The scholarship will cover tuition for a second-year Broadcast Production Technology student at Isothermal. Administrators hope Billingsley’s family and friends will help fund the scholarship for years to come. It's a fitting tribute to a young man on the cusp of his career. John's time behind the lens was short, but he quickly proved he could do a lot more than just carry a camera...

“John had a passion for videography, a zeal for photography and a very good eye,” said Coomes, a Broadcast Production Technology instructor at Isothermal. “One of John’s greatest talents, though, was his ability to put people at ease when he was interviewing them. You can’t really teach that – how to make someone comfortable when there is a camera in their face, often in stressful situations. He had a gift for it. Hopefully, this scholarship will help students follow in John’s footsteps for years to come.”

Contributions may be made to the scholarship fund by sending a check to Isothermal Community College, attention: John Wallace Billingsley Memorial Scholarship, P.O. Box 804, Spindale, NC 28160. For more information, call 828-286-3636, ext. 491.

The Awkward Waltz

Ever frog-march a grieving family to their car? I have - and on occasion, felt bad about it. The latest case occurred on Friday, when some (super) friends of mine at the Hall of Justice needed help covering the door. For two weeks live trucks of every stripe squatted on the lawn of that Winston-Salem structure as a high profile murder trial roiled inside. It's a sad circus I avoided joining, until a late Thursday verdict set the stage for some end of the week sentencing. Our crack bureau crew was all over it, but between manning the pool camera and making dubs, they were a little short in the door department. Thus I was summoned to The Dash to practice a not so sacred act of lenslinging. See, if you wear a camera on your shoulder you gotta be prepared to point it at anything. That includes schisms, collisions and its staggering parade of victims. I don't enjoy running people down, I'd rather lift them up. But if the light was right, I'd browbeat a mime troupe 'til I captured a reaction. But Friday's assignment demanded no such TMZ; it simply required balance, situational awareness and comfortable shoes. It could be called 'afflicting the stricken'. I like to think of it as The Courthouse Swarm.

When the family stepped off the ground floor elevator, I was plastered to the glass outside. Unsure as to just who might emerge, I scanned the crowded lobby for familiar forms, openly profiling faces for signs of distress. One look at the clutch of loved ones shuffling toward the door told me these were indeed persons of interest. Perhaps it was their body language. They were, after all, holding each other up. No doubt they were the defendant's kin; cousins and such of a young man just given 16-21 years in a case that left a local policeman dead. Now they were headed my way and the very sight made my trigger thumb itch. As they pushed on the door, I raised my glass and felt the presence of other cameras around me. From there, time slowed and I struggled to fit them all in my tiny TV screen. At first they didn't say a word, choosing instead to stare right through the pack of jackals backpedaling before them. I too was silent, closing in all quiet-like for a tight-shot before scampering ahead of them for a complimentary wide. All around me, other lenses did likewise, until passers-by paused to see who the cameramen were chasing. I would have stopped to tell them, but I didn't know where to start.

So I stayed in close pursuit, until the man in brown started to talk. To be fair, he was speaking to my competitor, but I didn't let the lack of invite stop me from sticking my lens into the chit-chat. Hey, all's fair in love and on the courthouse steps. While we stood there, other cameras caught up, until the man who called himself the family's Bishop had a small congregation. 'God ALWAYS has a plan' I can still hear him say, but the real muscle memory is saved for one of the lady's at the center of the pack. Bent at the waist and short of voice, the defendant's grandmother answered the reporters' queries with a throat ravaged from regret. 'The truth will come out!" she said with a tone that made me think she believed it. When asked about the slain cop's family, the old woman blanched the way my own Grandmother would. "We've said from the beginning how sorrowful we was!" When a reporter threw another question her way, she threw her hands up and declared she 'was through'. With that, her family dragged her toward a waiting car and as I watched her through my viewfinder, my own heart ached for the old woman's loss...

It would have hurt a lot worse had I missed the shot.

Fear and Bromance at the ACC

As a heterosexual Southern male, I should be glued to a sports channel right now. But at the risk of getting my regional man-card revoked, I gotta tell ya: basketball bores me. It shouldn't. I've huddled with the son of the man who invented the game, scrunched under the bucket as airborne athletes tried to decapitate me and my camera, even chased Michael Jordan himself through a few celebrity golf tournaments. Still, my eyes glaze over like a spent junkie whenever I wander on the court. All of which made me the perfect person to drag reporter Shelby Baker through her very first ACC Fan Fest. That's what they're calling the area outside the Greensboro Coliseum this week. Beer vendors, rock climbing walls, soul food tents and enough Budweiser Girls to start a hundred bar-fights proved a suitable distraction for the masses as they filed inside for four days of the best basketball Tobacco Road has to offer. Shelby and I entered the coliseum complex before the first game even started. It quickly proved a target-rich environment.

We didn't go inside, mind you. No, to enter the coliseum itself required patience and credentials I didn't have. Those weighted lanyards no doubt hung around the collective neck of our crackerjack sports teams. As they used them to score free M&M's and life giving wi-fi deep inside the complex's bowels, Shelby and I skirted the edges of the pavilion and parking lot. There we found the props and characters needed to file a report on the manufactured bedlam surrounding this point of pilgrimage. Beer swilling He-Men, coupled buddies, whole families clad in horrid hues and one dude with his beard painted blue. Happily each fanatic submitted to an interview, telling us how far they'd traveled, where work thought they really were and why the opposing team's head coach was a noted sociopath and possible pedophile. Why, it was enough crazy talk to make this cameraman keep both eyes open. At one point, I broke away from Shelby and manned the ramp leading to the coliseum. A steady stream of sycophants filed past, pointing to the logos on their chests and nodding knowingly to my up and running lens. You there - in the day-glo seat suit and disco wig - just because I got a big TV camera on my shoulder doesn't mean we're pals. Back off!

Soon enough, Shelby and I had all the clamor we could distillate and we fled the grounds without so much as a longing look at the sleek black buses spewing future millionaires and their current coterie of hangers-on. I suppose we could have climbed the fence and bum-rushed the players for some fresh sound, but I wouldn't have know what to ask them - let alone what cliches to use. Besides, my reporter and I had achieved our objective and were due back in the newsroom to log, write and edit. In fact, we would have been through with the venue altogether had we not had to return for the invariable live shot. When we returned a few minutes before showtime we brought a secret weapon: Weaver. With little assistance from yours truly, the Mighty Weave erected our wireless hop, enabling Mrs. Baker and I the ability to wander the parking lot LIVE(!) and unencumbered by pesky drunk-tripping cables. Not only that, he watched by back as I one-eyed it across the lot, holding his crackberry up high and recording my thinning hair from every unflattering angle. It's a bit painful for me to watch but it does showcase how utterly mundane live television can be.

Thanks for the help, pal. Next time can you photo-shop in a few more follicles before sharing it with the world? I'll gladly throw in a few forged press-passes and some old soul-food bones to make it worth your while...

I Was a Teenage Werewolf...

Actually, I was a 20 something TV geek with a mullet the size of a satellite dish. What can I tell ya? It was the dawn of the 90's and I'd yet to receive the memo that hair-metal was dead. How was I supposed to know I should dress in flannel and stare at my shoes? If I remember correctly, those shoes were a pair of glistening white Nike high-tops, which begs the question: Did no one tell me I looked like a tool? Well, perhaps some did, but I wouldn't have listened anyway. I was having too much fun. And while my boss was probably wondering what happened to that clean cut car salesman she hired, I felt I was onto something - if not ON something... Clearly, I was under the influence ... the influence of television. When this video still was captured, I was pretty new to the biz, giddy over the gear and more than happy to shoot another used car lot spot. The last thing I wanted to be was one of those overly earnest news dorks down the hall.

Eventually I altered that view, but it took a bartender with a gun to convince me it was time to point my lens at something serious. In that process a haircut ensued and I join you today a father of two with thinning hair and a dwindling string of Polaroids depicting my once proud Kentucky Waterfall. Too bad youthful exuberance is no excuse for lookin' like a putz...So why do I post these photos? Is it to send to my site meter spinning? To give my coworkers something to chortle over? To drive my own poor kids deep into therapy? Naah, I do it for YOU, young news shooter. Yeah you - the guy with the knit skull cap and sequined peacock t-shirt. You may feel like the very essence of hip now (you probably are), but we're here to tell you: that look won't last. Before you know it, you'll be flipping through old snapshots and wondering what the fudge you were thinking when you shaved your sideburns into lightning bolts. I just hope when that time comes, you'll have the grapes to share your shame.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pile of old wrestler pants I need to burn...

Hale to Pay

Whatever you do, don't turn your head... he's watching us. Who? Him! Dude with the toothpick; the one who looks like he's ready to rip somebody's lips off. I don't trust him. He seems kinda ... foreign. On second thought, I DO know him: He's Keith Hale, El Ocho's Chief Photojournalist and one of my many bosses. Thirteen years ago this British ex-pat took a downtrodden photog out for cobbler. We talked about storytelling and when dessert was done I felt a wee bit better about a possible return to the world of news. A few weeks later, I arrived home one night to find my wife all excited about a message on the machine. She hit PLAY and an strangely familiar voice filled the kitchen. It was an English accent (by way of Florida) and it said my tape was 'frightfully good'. The rest I don't remember. All I knew was Crocodile Dundee was throwin' me a bone. The very next day, I resigned my hated Promotions gig and a news shooter was reborn. Since then, the man some call 'Hale-Bop' has done me a string of solids: teaching me how to make a soft-box sing, why logo-wear is for losers, and how to properly say the word "right" (ROIGHT!) While I don't want to use my blog to grovel, I did want to give big ups to the man who helped me rediscover my special purpose...

On second thought, hold my camera. I'm gonna go rip his lips off...

Forced Perspective

I was gonna unload... drop a pile of bile so vile even innocent pedestrians would smell the funk I'd fallen into. How else was I to explain my absence from this space other than to detail the vagaries of the chase? See, carrying a camera around everywhere I go has left me draggin' glass. Maybe it's the dirty weather, the dying gear or all the chicanery I framed of late. Whatever it is, the rub of a hundred thousand newscasts has left me feeling raw. It's a fact: exposure to so many transmissions can dull the senses, until you find yourself stumbling from palace to massacre with the same pained expression. No, it's not backaches or bunions or even (drive-thru) botulism that takes so many shooters down. It's Burn-Out: that hollow feeling you get after shoving too much mayhem and minutia through a tube. Most days I can shake off the sensation by working harder than I have to, but lately I've been forced to play with others and their inattention to detail has left me teetering between apathy and apoplexy.

Don't get me wrong. It's my nature to grapple with existentialistic angst one moment and search for a camera battery I hid from myself the next. But lately the usual sturm und drang has left me more frenzied than fatigued and it's quite possible I 'showed my ass' at work a time or two last week. By around Wednesday I was reminding those who hadn't even asked how I've carried enough debutantes across the finish line to qualify as a parade float, how I'd keelhaul the next cur that called in sick, how a man of my vintage simply had no time for amateur hour... After some time my colleagues tired of rolling their eyes and slunk off accordingly, warning all along the way that the wordiest of camera nerds was on a real bender. By Hump-day's dusk, I'd fallen silent, suffering a kind of dashboard despondency as I steered my mobile newsroom straight into the malaise. When it came time to pound my frustrations into a post, I found I couldn't do it, so I stewed in my juices until I was about ready to boil. And when I did, I was more than happy to get it all over ya...

Then, I went for a walk; several of them actually, in the company of my kids and canine. It was there - in my suddenly sun-baked neighborhood - that I realized I'd been whining on the inside. As frightfully insipid as some shifts feel, what I do for a living still beats a grown-up job. I still love it in theory but sometimes the real-world execution feels like an unfinished sentence in which I go from a news-man possessed to a half-dead zombie... At 23 I was conning my way into cop-shops, trading gossip and station paperweights for a shotgun seat on the very next ride-along. At 43, I sink in my seat at the first sound of scanner crackle. How I came to be that way is a story I'm still working on, but I'm not too far gone to admit that all the histrionics I can muster are nothing more than the blather of a badly aging hunter-gatherer. I'm not the first photog to curse the universe over dung-heaps in the distance, nor am I the last. But I join you tonight confident in the knowledge that the journey is still very much worth it - as long as you're careful where you step.

The dog taught me that.

I'm having that dream again...

...you know, the one where I'm covering the press conference and the room goes weird? Normally, I wake up as soon as the speaker's eyeballs start sliding down his face, but the other night the vision persisted...

There I am, happily half-conscious when the dolt at the podium starts speaking in gibberish. At first I'm confused, but then simply riveted as the monotone wonk sorta morphs into the lead Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well, hey, I've seen that flick enough to know what's comin', so I block the shot of the nearest photog and scream, "Don't look, Marion! Shield your eyes!" Well, THAT doesn't even fly in dreamland so the photog - a guy I've chatted up at a half dozen structure fires but still can't name - throws an elbow of his own and before you know it we're grappling on the floor like a two A/V geeks fighting over whose turn it is to thread the filmstrip. About that time Himler's chin begins to drip, which is when I usually snap awake with the cat in my face, but this time I shake off my attacker, grab my camera and rise to my knees, lens cocked, loaded and ready to roll. There time stands still as I fight to catch my breath, knowing only that if God's about to strike down the Third Reich - or even that guy who was going over the city's new recycling plan - I'm damn sure gonna get the shot...

But what does it all MEAN? Am I projecting my inner sense of cinema on the most mundane facet of my day? Am I secretly wishing that something - anything - spectacular happen at these notoriously time-wasting events? Or could it be The Big Guy is finally about to smite yours truly for attending more pressers than church services? Naaaaah, it's probably just something I ate...

NAB '10: Check Your Head

Reticent as I am to mention it before booking passage, it's looking pretty official: Team Slinger WILL be attending NAB. That's the National Association of Broadcasters, a shadowy cabal that does little more than stage the world's largest Electronic Media Show every year in that glittering scab in the desert known as Las Vegas. Twice now Weaver and I have traveled there to take in the toys, shoot a few goofy videos and suck up as much free booze as strangers will foist upon us (that's me in the middle there, trying to shake off a hangover in the making long enough to finish taping). But we don't span the continent just to get hammered. There's work to do! What with fending off vendors, gathering enough schwag to choke a sales team and rendezvousing with certain readers, there's barely enough time for a contemplative stroll at the end of the day - let alone trying to rid Vegas of every drop of Maker's Mark.

But it's not the gadgets and ass-hats that bring us back every couple of years. It's the B-Roll Bash. A sausage party if there ever was one, this yearly summit attracts TV news photogs from across the country - all hoping to get a glimpse of the always tall Kevin Johnson, founder of b-roll.net - the highly influential message board that served as the Viewfinder BLUES proving ground. Long before I ever began to blog, I was honing my prose over at Kev's treasured website. For that I'm eternally grateful and if crashing his party every couple of years is the least I can do, well who better than a news photog to do the least that he can do? Don't answer that; just know that in a little more than a month from now I'll be breaking out my finest cabanawear for a surgical strike on Sin City. If that's the kind of thing that deploys your tripod, join us!

Already Rick 'the artist formerly known as Turdpolisher' Portier has pledged his attendance, Amanda Emily is setting aside her archives long enough to visit and we're still hoping that Tiger Woods will wing in one evening for a game of Pin the Blame on the Bimbo. Okay, so that guy's something of a tool - but with the year he's had I don't expect he'll be too eager to hang out with a bunch of sleazy media types, anyway. YOU, however, would be Perfect! Drop me a line if you're in the area come April 12th. I'll be sure to clear my calendar long enough to accept any chips, tips or gratuities. Just be careful, 'cause as we all know... What happens in Vegas will be heavily blogged about. See ya there!