Sunday, November 23, 2008

Definitely Not the Opera's Podcast.

My piece* made the best of podcast. Check it, (and the best of DNTO Podcast) out!

Right here!

*It's about 20 minutes in.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Kristen on Definitely Not the Opera!

This Saturday you can catch me on Definitely Not the Opera as I recount a ridiculous story of airport travel when I was six years old.

It'll be on most everywhere on CBC Radio 1 at 1pm (1:30 in Newfoundland)

Speaking of airports...

This is the look me and my pal Katie had on our faces at an airport in Milan.



We learned the Italian word for "late" pretty quick.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Creativity and Play!



Fun lecture!

My two top points to take away:
-Kids are more engaged with open possibilities
-Our desire to be original is a form of editing, and not very playful.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Make a TV antenna out of a can?!?

Amazing. This will be my next project.

In the meantime, I find myself sick. We auditioned 150 kids at work the other day and I took it as a time to watch them interact with my iPhone while in the waiting room. I have a sneaking suspicion it was kid germs that got me sick!

Can-tenna!!!

More posts when I'm better. Sigh!

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

America, you did good.


Yes, We Can.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Une Partie!!

At my high school you could either graduate and go to university by taking math, or by taking French.

I was horrible at math but really wanted to leave my town and go to University so that decided it. I was taking French.

The French teacher though, it was very odd, because you knew that when you were in French you were probably going to go to University, but Mr. Goudereau, our teacher who sat in front of the class was a constant reminder of what would happen if you never left our small town.

Mr. Goudreau had been born in the town- so goes the rumors, had never left, and his whole family lived there and now he was teaching "Mauvais Etudiantes" as he called us at the school.

He looked like Mr. Spaceley from the Jetsons and we would always try to get him to say "Jetson!!" and it would be really funny because it would be a reluctant French accented "Jetson" and that would make us laugh the most.

He was maybe not the calmest teacher, and we would do things like throw "dictionaires" across the classroom, and he would yell at us to stop, and we would do it more because we got an immense amount of pleasure out of seeing him upset.

Perhaps this wasn't the best working relationship when I review it.


Mr. Goudreau and our class needed to get on the same page, and when you're a teenager there's pretty much only one way to get on the same page with somebody.

We decided that we needed to have a party. In class.

We started circulating a note, which made him angry that we were passing notes, but on this note was important! It was the sign up for what we were going to bring and the time we were going to have the party at.

The next day at our decided time we pulled out all of our food at once. I pulled out a bag of chips, the girl behind me, Jennifer pulled out a cake, and Meggan was pulling out bread and dip- and over on the other side more "Mauvais Etudiantes" were pulling out cups and napkins. It was great. We had a full service party going on.

Mr. Goudreau saw what we were doing and stopped teaching his lesson.

He looked at us having a party and realized there was probably nothing he could do about it. What was he going to do? Call the principal on all of us? Call all of our parents?

He looked at us. We looked at him.

He was in shock. He didn't know what to do. His "Mauvais Etudiants" were all being bad together.

He looked at us, and gave us his barter…

"Only if we can listen to Roch Voisine".

We looked at each other.

What? Nobody in the class liked Roch Voisine. Roch Voisine was the horrible soundtrack to this French class, the stuff we were forced to listen to after our french conversations about our "musique favourite." But together we decided that day, on our French class party day, that we would give it to him.

He turned on the Roch Voisine and joined us in our fun, and the rest of the year in fact was a little bit calmer which proves a teenagers theory of parties solving everything is maybe a little bit true.

And besides, we would have never gotten away with doing that in math class.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Need Inspiration?

I learned about Paul Wellstone when I had somehow weaseled myself into a Politics and the Media class at the University of Alberta class. We were taught by a lovely man who was rumored to be a draft dodger. He was from Chicago and we watched a lot of American political campaign videos by default.

In amongst the great videos, "Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy for me!" we saw a video for a great man, a Senator named Paul Wellstone- whose campaign commercials had an appeal it seemed, to everybody! Check this out:



Anyhow, he seemed great. He was one of the good ones, who just was in politics for the right reasons and actually fought for the people. In coming into this US Election my thoughts have been with the people of the United States who are hoping for a change and it made me remember Paul Wellstone from my class. Then I saw this inspiring tribute video.

He died in a plane crash, and I wonder what he would be doing now had he not have.



Aw man.