TODAY+

Community radio - last chance to listen.

November 15 was the 50th anniversary of campus-based community radio CKCU 93.1 FM. I got inspired to start putting a series together, celebrating community radio that I’ve been involved with, starting with CKCU. It’s still in progress; I hope to be sending something published out soon.

But little did I know that one month later, December 15, would be the last live broadcast of ‘sister station’ CHUO 89.1 FM (which will be the second station in my series).

At the end of November, CHUO’s Board of Directors said they needed to raise $150K over the next two weeks. Then this week, they announced it wasn’t happening and the station would be shutting down - though they’ll keep playing repeats of recorded content after Monday for a few months to fulfill their radio licence.

But the next three days are the last chance to listen live, to hear the last broadcasts and the hosts sign off.

Saturdays on CHUO has been something of a ‘signature lineup’, especially with Black On Black 11am-noon, Rockers noon-2pm, and Caribbean Flavour 2-4pm - all broadcasting continuously for well over two decades. A couple links:

• A profile of Papa Richie, host of Rockers, who’s been there since 1984 (!!) which was before they even got their FM licence to be heard over the airwaves off of campus. At times he’s also hosted other shows, sometimes with alter-egos (i.e under the name Daddy Rich) - I remember listening to his 2-step/UK Garage/house music show the night Perdita Felicien won the Olympic 100m hurdles.

• A profile of Adrienne Codett, one of the team of five hosts of Black On Black. She’s done a lot of really good community and education work you can read about, and - again with the track and field- she was one of the older athletes to look up to at the Ottawa Lions while I was training there as part of the high school sprints/hurdles group in the mid-1990s.

• A 10-minute interview from CBC radio this week with Sarah Onyango, another of the Black On Black hosts, and Michael Assivero (aka Mikey Wizdom), host of Caribbean Flavour. Each of them have been volunteering at CHUO for over 20, almost 30 years, and in the interview they talk about the closure of the station.

So tune in! On the airwaves locally 89.1 FM; on the internet via chuo.fm 

And like I mentioned, I plan to have something published soon about CHUO, about CKCU, and more…

New zine!

Healthy eating / nutrition.

One of the really good things I wrote way back when was a set of articles on nutrition: the first was a summary of a workshop on healthy eating, then also there was a two-part writeup of an interview I did with nutritionist (Registered Dietician) Linda Barton.

This was while I was at the U. Waterloo student newspaper.

Barton was the school’s nutritionist, and the workshop was run by school nurses who worked with Barton, so it is all focused on the same approach to eating.

It’s very good approach, I think - I had got very interested in nutrition while doing track, and this approach makes more sense than almost everything else I’d found… and almost everything I’ve found since then, too.

And now, I’ve finally got it packaged into a printable zine format:
you can download, read, print it at this link!

*To read a print-format zine PDF on your computer: Start on the right hand side of the first page (the cover), then scroll down one page and read the left hand side, then scroll down another page and read the right hand side, and keep going until you get to the bottom page where you read it in full left to right, then make your way scrolling back up the pages, reading the sides you didn’t already read on the way down.

The impetus to make it into a zine, was because I was tabling at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair in late November - and because I’ve always thought it would be good to be able to have in hand and give to people.

But I’ve been doing some distro since the book fair too, and the thing with this is, it really can speak to where someone is at, they really appreciate it.

Of course other people aren’t too worried concerned about their nutrition habits, so it’s nor really for them, only some people. But it’s a different type of thing than most of my (activism / social change oriented) stuff.

Feel free to print it out and give it as an X-Mas gift…
that’s something I am planning to do :)

That’s it for this edition.

Got thoughts? Send me a note!

I hope it’s being a good season for you, and it’s not all just cold.

There’s maybe one more newsletter coming before the holidays…