Tuesday, July 03, 2007

My 15 minutes (or 30 seconds) of fame

I've worked with people like Carl Woese and Jonathan Eisen who routinely get interviewed by the media, but this is the first time that I've been in the spotlight. In May, Chris Condayan interviewed me along with several other bloggers attending the ASM 2007 meeting in Toronto, and he's edited them into an edition of his MicrobeWorld series dealing with microbiologists who blog.

Besides me, the featured bloggers are John Logsdon, "Yersinia", Tara Smith, Elio Schaechter, and Larry Moran.

Tara seems to think that she is too "animated", but I think she is undervaluing the value of animation. After all, this week, the animated Ratatouille beat out the latest "Die Hard" movie....

I could complain about my segment too, but it's probably pretty representative of me (not that I tend to talk into phones without calling someone first...)

9 comments:

Tara C. Smith said...

Not a complaint; more of a warning, I guess. :) I thought yours turned out really well!

Pedro Beltrao said...

The little music jingle in the start/end of the video is a bit off. Not funny and not serious just weird (to me) :). The rest was very nice to watch.

Jonathan Badger said...

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the music; it seems to promote the bacteria-phobia so present in our culture (no pun intended). Bacteria aren't all enemies of mankind!

John Logsdon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John Logsdon said...

We didn't look as silly as I had feared..
Oh yeah, "tag"
go here.

csuspect said...

About the music.... I just thought you would be interested to know that the song "Bacteria" is by Jonathan Coulton who also hosts the PopSci podcast. The lyrics actually come from an employee manual issued at a Perdue chicken processing plant. Coulton is getting to be quite popular and he provides his music to podcasters royalty-free. For some reason it just seemed fitting to me, but without knowing all that background I can see how it would appear to promote "Bacteria-phobia." Maybe I was just too close to it. - Chris

Jonathan Badger said...

Well, the song is by a fellow member of the Jonathan-mafia that secretly controls the world, well that puts a different light on it, Chris :-).

But, seriously, I while think it is really great that Jonathan Coulton is offering the use of his music royalty-free, and setting some unusual text to music is kind of a cool thing to do, I think it was just the message of the text itself and not the music that Pedro and I were reacting to. Maybe overreacting, I don't know.

soccer mom said...

ha, maybe this coulton guy can afford to claim no royalties because CLOROX secretly pays him... :)

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