A dero by Jermaine RogersToday, I was in and out, mostly in, at the NHPRC Electronic Records Fellowships Symposium. Max and TJ did a great job taping all the talks and we’ll have them online in due time.
We also had a delightful Journalism and Mass Communications School meeting in which all searches were approved with little discussion. We are hiring excellent folks!
Then at lunch, I heard a brain-straining mind-openning talk by Lennart Bjorneborn of Denmark on his webometrics work and on Small World Phenomenae and distributed knowledge organization and self-organizing structures on the Web.
[more on this and on the Symposium later]
During breaks, I saw a gorilla, a giant rabbit, an armadilla also giant, and a large mouse running around on the quad between the Wilson Library where the Symposium was held and Manning Hall where I live and Lennart’s talk was given. They invited me over, but then had a disagreement with the armadillo. And we went our separate ways. They were not far from the place where I ran into the energy witching group a few weeks back.
Odd occurances continued. As I went to my car to go home, I found that a car the exact same make, model, year and color of my car had parked beside me. The only difference was that the other car had a parking ticket on it and mine didn’t.
Later Tucker and I went to Weaver Street Market where we ran into 103.5 WCOM’s Jacques Menache (he’s also the ArtCenter founder and an old friend) who took us on a tour of Carrboro’s new low power community FM station. The building is an old branch bank and Jacques has ingeniusly moved the drive-in window to the studio so that the on-air DJ has a great view of the street. The station’s antenna which has about a 10 mile range is up the road above our house. It’s on the high point of Southern Village in the soccer field behind Mary Scroggs Elementary where Tucker went to grades 1 – 3. If you are a music or radio person in this area, drop by and lend WCOM a hand.
Our evening ended with a trip to our favorite toy store Wootini [sorry their site isn’t up quite yet] [but they did great a good write up in the News and Observer] where a big party and art show were underway. The occassion was the release of a new comic-based toy designed by Jermaine Rogers. Jermaine was there signing posters and making odd faces — he is famous for his rock posters which include an ongoing story with some mysterious characters in them. A race of underworld bears called Dero are the subject of the toy. DJ Uzi was spinning and playing music too. The whole place was full of folks who could understand what was up with custom evil bear toys. Jermaine was kind enough to sign some posters for us despite Tucker’s antics. On the way out, Tucker found a freehand drawn sign directing folks to the show which had blown off into the corner of the building and brought it home (since it wouldn’t stick up any more). Our Dero likes to stand on it.