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Notes from Brendan Greeley

This piece was an accident. I was in Germany for a wedding last May and scheduled a day to spend with friends in Hamburg who, upon my arrival, put me in the car and drove me to the World Championships of Lawnmower Racing. (I have to capitalize it because a small town owns the copyright. This is in the piece.) I arrived with a vague plan to drink beer and nap in the grass and left with a way to explain the messy, intimate relationship I maintain with my German friends and their country. This is how I told this story, as an anecdote, and it’s why, I guess, Jay Allison at Transom told me to leave myself in the piece when he produced it for radio.

I’m glad I got this on record last fall; I have since moved to Hamburg and spend a lot of my time debunking conspiracy theories about U.S. foreign policy, so this would probably sound angrier or more defensive if I had written in the last month. The point in the piece about the obsessive German need to have an opinion has been confirmed for me, but it’s also still true that Germans actually do know how to be funny.

Tech Info

I recorded all of the interviews on an Olympus DM-1 digital voice recorder, without an external microphone. I use it for print work, but the sound quality is evidently not good enough for radio. This is a shame, because it fits in your shirt pocket, comes with software to upload digital sound to a computer as a wav file, and with a 128MB SmartMedia card holds 22 hours of sound. Missing from this piece are the sound clips where I drop the Olympus into the mud and then drop a mustard-covered sausage on top of it, so it travels pretty well, too. The phone interviews were recorded using a $5 Radio Shack microphone that attaches with a suction cup to the back of the receiver.

I have never recorded a radio piece before – this started as a PowerPoint presentation for one of John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book lectures. Ted Lebouthillier at Big Dog and Hat turned the PowerPoint slides into a Flash presentation, and Jay Allison at Transom produced the piece and recorded my voice at his studio. Jay dealt with poor sound quality of the clips by making the dictaphone itself an integral part of the text of the piece; he couldn’t hide the Olympus, so he flaunted it. Ah, my little Olympus.

About Brendan Greeley

I work as a freelance print journalist and now, God willing, as a freelance radio journalist. I’ve published features and opinion pieces in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Europe, and I have produced miles of text about the reinsurance industry.

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