Sometimes, I find myself in a place or predicament, and I wonder what choices I have made in life that led up this point. It’s kind of a fun little game I play in my mind to keep me interested in life. Like the time I found myself walking out of a job I’d have for 7 years. Or the time I was sitting in my office tape recording a phone conversation. Or the time I was leading a state trooper on a high speed chase. Okay, so that last one hasn’t happened. Yet.
The most recent time I had such a thought, was last night. For the first time since the morning of December 17, 2006, I was wearing a necktie. I was sitting on a chair, in front of 3 cameras, interviewing a doctor of theology. How do I get into these sort of things? Beats me.
The show was “Atheist Talk”, and it airs once a month on various obscure cable channels. The podcast will be made available here: . We filmed two episodes, one in which I interviewed Dr. Steves as he discussed a “Thought Driven Life” and another as he addressed the topic of studying the bible as literature in the public school system. And where was the shows normal host? Well, that would be Dr. Steves, and since he couldn’t very well interview himself, I was recruited for the job. I think I came across very wooden, rigid and nonconversational – a lot like I am in real life. All in all, though, a pretty good time and a fun experience (even if I did have to don a phallic symbol around my neck).
Oh, here’s proof:
I’m the guy on the right, feigning interest.
The sweat on my brow is not, as you might assume, from the lights. No, it’s from the heat of hell’s flames, which reach pretty high on this set.
This is smarmyness.
Why hasn’t anyone told me what a bufoon I look like with my legs crossed like that?
So, how DID you find yourself in this predicament? Sounds like a pretty cool experience.
Oh, and for some reason your link isn’t showing up:
http://mnatheists.org/content/view/34/37/
Thanks for putting the link in there.
I’m not sure this is that interesting of a story, but here goes…
I was at a meeting of the MN Atheists, which I attended to volunteer as an editor of their newsletter. One of the board members, (Dr. Steves, who is also the host for Atheist Talk) was sitting right next to me. He asked for my email address. I handed him my business card & said: “Oh, and here’s my website”, which I wrote down on the card. The next day, he emailed me and said he was very impressed with watchtowerletters.com & that -oh the coincidence! – he also used to be a JW. We got to talking and, long story short, he asked if he could interview me in the June episode of Atheist Talk. But, guess what, due to certain technical difficulties, the June episode had to be postponed. Dr. Steves had to whip something up for the June episode in its place and, since he couldn’t find anyone to interview, he decided he would just discuss two recent books relating to the Bible. But, since he couldn’t interview himself and since he knew I had reserved that night anyway and since I was meeting with him regarding our postponed meeting…well, you can probably figure the rest out from there.
What were the technical difficulties? If you were both there at the time arranged why didn’t he just interview you?
Mom-
The ‘technical difficulties’ were that Grant wanted to interview me and two other guys. This meant there would have been 4 people on stage. Whatever the number of people on stage, it’s nice to have a camera on each one of them, but one of the cameras was broken. So, there weren’t enough cameras for Grant to interview a bunch of people, so he decided to do something simpler, in which we would only need two cameras.
Make sense?