Episode 63: Podcast creator Jason Becker will change your mind about umpires
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Let’s meet the baseball nut who sticks up for the guys behind the plate that every baseball fan loves to hate. Yes, we’re talking about umpires. In this episode of the Check It Out! podcast, host Ken Harvey talks to his friend Jason Becker, creator of the . “In my book, he’s a genius, and he’s producing a fascinating podcast for the officials behind America’s favorite round-ball sport. That’s baseball, and those are umpires,” Harvey said in introducing Becker. “Fans and players often...
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Episode 62: Professor's academic research on racial strife leads to his first novel
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In Episode 62 of Sno-Isle Libraries Check It Out podcast, co-hosts Ken Harvey and Tricia Lee talk to local author Stewart Tolnay and learn how he has used his study of American racial history to create interesting fiction and nonfiction. Tolnay is a Ph.D. professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington. His first fiction novel, “,” features a Black Vietnam War veteran, his white girlfriend and the struggles they face as an interracial couple in Everett in 1969. Tolnay is also the author or co-author of...
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Episode 61: Peek inside the childlike mind of Chris Ballew and meet Caspar Babypants
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Part 1: You Don’t Wanna Be a Rock-and-Roll Star Chris Ballew lived the rock-and-roll life. As frontman for the late, great Presidents of the United States of America, he wrote infectious, goofy, catchy hits about “Peaches” and a “Dune Buggy” when heavy grunge dominated Seattle’s FM radio waves. He toured all over the world. He played to packed arenas and stadiums. He even won a Grammy award. But that’s the old Chris Ballew. Today,...
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Episode 60: Thanks to the internet and copious amounts of data, the future is now
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Rodney Clark helps deliver the future. As the vice president of the Worldwide Internet of Things and Mixed Reality Team, Clark and his crew work with more than 8,000 partners and clients to connect billions of everyday devices to the cloud. Sensors on stop lights, cash registers, automobiles, home appliances, exercise monitors, video doorbells. They all generate information and data that allows organizations to take action on that data and insights. “It’s a wave, it’s a reality,” Clark said. It’s no longer “the future.” “The job that I have and...
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Episode 59: If coronavirus has you worried, this good doctor reminds you you're not alone
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If you’re anxious about the global coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19, you’re not alone. In this episode of Sno-Isle Libraries , you’ll hear how a globe-trotting disaster-relief doctor loses sleep about the deadly virus that has upended our sense of “normal.” is a clinical assistant professor at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine after spending 33 years at the University of Washington School of Medicine in a similar role. In 1994, he and his wife, Debbie, founded CMRT, the nation’s first state-affiliated medical disaster response...
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Episode 58: Claudia Samano-Losada loves libraries as much as she loves her communities
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Claudia Samano Losado has many talents. Early-childhood educator. World traveler. Life coach. Recreation-center owner. Dance-movement instructor. But maybe most importantly, Losado is a fervent Oak Harbor Library supporter. “I think I’m very passionate about a lot of things, and one of my passions is to share with others and to take and give in the same way,” said Losado, a member of the library’s board. “Since I have had so much from the library I’ve wanted to give back to, and this is a very good way to give back, but not just that, to know more about the...
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Episode 57: For food critic Nancy Leson, deadlines got in the way of a good time
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Chapter 1: Meet the writer who’s not fond of writing Nancy Leson loves books, she loves libraries, she loves to talk and she loves food. That makes the Edmonds resident an ideal guest for Sno-Isle Libraries . Libraries figured large in Leson’s childhood in Philadelphia. Her family had little disposable income, so off to the library they went to borrow books and glean information from encyclopedias. These days, Leson says, the Friends of the Edmonds Library book sale is her favorite book event every year. Books and learning followed Leson into adulthood. ...
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Episode 56: A Rich Frishman picture isn't just a thousand words. It's a story unto itself.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, some of photographs could be novels. Frishman was a news photographer for The Daily Herald in Everett and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before he left to pursue freelance work. He knows how to tell a story with a photograph, and he still sees and tells the stories of America through his camera lens. Frishman has criss-crossed the country to chronicle its beauty and everyday life in his collections, and , and the guarded secrets in The difference between Frishman and the rest of us who think we take good pictures is how...
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Episode 55: Sometimes, a guest's gift can be hard for hosts to swallow
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admits he was a bookworm as a child. Is that why the prolific author loves insects, and loves to eat them? Sno-Isle Libraries hosts Ken Harvey, Jim Hills and Jessica Russell sat down with Gordon and chewed the fat about his reputation as “the bug chef.” And they graciously accepted the guest’s gifts, as polite hosts do. Yes. Harvey, Hills and Russell ate bugs. The Seattle-based author of “” and 19 other titles covering , and has appeared on many TV shows and headlined national festivals. When Gordon visited Sno-Isle Libraries and laid out plates of edible bugs, the hosts were...
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Episode 54: From "J.P. Patches" to elusive gorillas, this Edmonds pair has seen plenty
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If you’re old enough to remember when Seattle television was limited to a handful of broadcast channels and you remember J.P. Patches, you’ve seen the work of Sharon Howard and Mike Rosen. Howard got her start in broadcast TV in 1977 with KIRO-TV as a floor director for newscasts and “.” It was performed and broadcast live, six mornings a week. Without any rehearsal to speak of. “Well, everybody thinks that we had a script and it was planned, but our plans were to meet in the cafeteria 15 minutes before the show,” Howard said. “And we just played it by ear. Somebody would say,...
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In this final episode of the second season of Check It Out!, hosts Ken Harvey, Jessica Russell, Paul Pitkin and Jim Hills relate their personal holiday dreams and nightmares and dive into library resources that may just help set a tasty dinner table.
Hills, not beset by the piled-plate, food-touching phobia, shares that a holiday meal is best perceived as a single entity, the sum of its parts as measured both horizontally and vertically. The description, however, takes Russell back to a time in her life when space between menu items was required and the queasy realization that she may not have moved as far past those days as thought.
Russell describes her southern roots by painting the mental picture of deep frying turkey in a Louisiana front yard. “Deep-fried turkey is the best,” Russell proclaims with no dissenters. The pot, she goes on to say, is the same one used for the crawfish boil.
“In Mississippi, that (pot) is called a washtub,” Harvey says.
Pitkin allows that as a child his family finally rebelled at his mother’s cooking to the point that they chose to have the holiday dinner delivered. From Nordstrom.
The Sno-Isle Libraries collection, Russell points out, has thousands of cookbooks and other resources available to help make any holiday celebration memorable.
Pitkin, executive director for the Sno-Isle Libraries Foundation, points out that there is more to the holiday season than eating.
“I encourage everyone to make a year-end donation to the foundation,” Pitkin says, adding that foundation donations support a variety of programs at the Sno-Isle Libraries.
“The third-grade reading challenge is coming up,” Pitkin says of the program that includes thousands of students across Snohomish and Island counties. “The reading challenge helps third-graders improve literacy at a time that very important to their development level.”
The foundation is also the primary sponsor of TEDxSnoIsleLibraries, which is returning after a hiatus on May 9, 2020 at Edmonds Center for the Arts, Pitkin says.
Speaker videos from the 2015, 2016 and 2017 events have been viewed more than 3.5 million times, Harvey says.
“The foundation has always been the main sponsor and we could not be more excited that it’s coming back,” Pitkin says.
Finally, Harvey offers a peek at what’s coming in Season 3 for the podcast.
“We working on getting Everett Community College President Daria J. Willis,” Harvey says. “And, the head of IBM’s Watson project is going to talk to us about artificial intelligence and quantum computing.”
And books? What about books?
“We are working on a slew of authors, some nationally acclaimed, some just getting started,” Harvey says.
Episode length 37:26
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