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The Blue Jackets Roundtable Podcast – Episode XIV – CANNONFEST

This podcast is a bit different. It’s something I really wanted to do from the announcement of this year’s CannonFest, and I am glad it worked–for the most part–as I intended. I decided to take my phone and my handheld recorder, and circulate around/through CannonFest to talk to various folks about the experience and about the team.

And, though there are some caveats (below), I think it couldn’t have gone much better based on what I’d hoped and intended. To that end, my thanks to everyone that made CannonFest possible, and that was willing to share their time and their experiences on the podcast. It’s a long one, for sure, but hopefully it’s worth it to stick it out through the entire thing.

Overall, I did want to offer some notes and apologia:

  • First and foremost, my apologies for the audio quality. But, in a way, I don’t apologize. The place was LOUD. I was using two separate devices (my voice on my phone, and my guests on my handheld). I purposefully over-modulated my voice to make sure you could hear it over the background noise, and I wanted to make sure that the chats were just that: conversations. So, I recorded two separate audio streams, and spliced/overlaid them together after the fact. Please appreciate that I put between four and five hours of work into harvesting the audio files and putting them together. It doesn’t sound as good as our other podcasts, but hopefully you get a feel for the environment at the same time.
  • As you listen and get further and further in, you may find yourself saying, “Sheesh, he’s basically just talking to his friends at this point.” And, my response to that would be: Umm, yep. To me, that’s kind of the point of CannonFest. I went to my first Fest in 2011, and admittedly was fairly fresh on the scene of the overall Jackets Blogosphere, having just joined the Cannon in April of that year. I didn’t know many of the folks personally. Well, fast forward two years, and I hope it’s evident that many of these people are, in fact, my friends. And, that’s awesome. It speaks to the closeness of this community, to the fact that we’re a friendly, welcoming group of people, and that CannonFest really, truly is a gathering of friends first, fans second. So, I don’t apologize for the tone of the latter half of the podcast. It came out exactly the way I wanted it to.
  • When I chatted with Dave Cottone, who is a very good friend of mine both in terms of Jackets fan-dom as well as other arenas, I neglected to ask him about the Sedona Grace Foundation which he started and runs with his lovely wife Jill. I’ve known Dave for awhile, so his work there is something I’ve just taken for granted, if you will. I wish in hindsight that I’d asked him to talk a little bit about it. Go to their website and check it out. They do great, great things.
  • My personal, and heart-felt thanks to Jarmo Kekalainen for being so willing to chat with me for almost three minutes despite the desire of so many people to talk and get photos with him (I tried to wait until the first wave of folks in line had died down). Along those lines, my apologies to anyone who had to wait in line while I talked with him. I tried my best not to gum up the works too much.
  • While chatting with my friend Tyler, I used a word to describe the Sedins that I really wish I hadn’t (and, to his credit, from which Tyler wisely backpedaled). I bleeped it out of the podcast, though I can’t erase the fact that I actually said it. You can probably figure out, in context, what word it is. Let me say as a mea culpa that, I play hockey with several women on my rec league team (and many more women play in our league, for that matter). To a person, they are all as tough as–if not tougher than–anyone else in the league. I can’t apologize enough.
  • There’s a strange blip in the middle of my conversation with Tom Larrow (@Skraut), which out of respect for him I edited. It was clear that the response to his videos was very powerful for him, and I wanted to respect his response and keep it private for him./

But, again, overall, it was a great experience for me, and hopefully for all of you. Enjoy!

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