Blogging up for lost time

I've added a reminder to my Entourage calendar to remind me to blog on a regular basis. And, my editor made mention in her 6/25 issue of Note that Boise Weekly, like most other media outlets, does indeed have blogs and bloggers. What better inspiration to maintain a regular blog than to know that there's the potential for 35,000 people to click on the BW Blogs page and wonder why I haven't posted a new one in a month. Granted, I don't really expect 35,000 people to read my blog. But even if just three people click away from the site due to my lack of participation, it's incentive enough.

Quick update: Our 7/2 issue includes our Annual Coldest Beer feature. It's extra special this year because it's a big one at 70+ pages and it's bound like a magazine. We've got other great stories in the upcoming issue as well: we look at an artist who deals with his mental illness, in part, with his art; a handful of First Thursday wine events; Boise Community Radio; vocal coaches; a 2C restaurant review; and much more.
And any time you read a blog post, or a story online, please feel free to leave comments, good or bad.

Der went da judge

A couple of weekends ago, I held sway at two quite different events. I was one of three judges responsible for choosing the 2008 Queer Idol as part of the Pride events and I was one of three judges responsible for choosing which father played the part of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus well enough to win two tickets to see the teen diva in concert in Provo. The HM contest was put on by 103.3 KISS FM and emceed by my pal Hooker—with help from Chadillac and Lucky Tha DJ—the station's drive-time DJ. What was so fun for me is that Hooker played the Simon to my Paula for the Queer Idol judging as well. Along with Pride organizer Kris Jenkins playing Randy, we spent Thursday night at Hannah's for the preliminaries and Saturday evening for the finals, watching some of Boise's best belt their little hearts out and dashing their little dreams. Hooker's Simon was spot on, Kris' clearly channeled the big dawg producer and my Paula elicited a few "Is she really that drunk?" comments from the crowd. Congrats to Jared Michael for winning Queer Idol '08 and the father/daughter team pictured below for winning the HM/MC competition.

A New Era of BW

It's 9pm, and just a couple of hours ago, we sent the latest issue of Boise Weekly off to the press. This Monday and Tuesday were much like every other. They start early, end late and the long hours are filled with e-mail, phone calls, Google searches, thousands of words to write and thousands more to edit. But this issue was different. We have two new people in the office: Nathaniel Hoffman has taken on the role of news editor and Tara Morgan has joined the editorial team as staff writer. On Monday, Elaine, our Calendar Guru, returned from a 10-day Mexican honeymoon; Deanna took over as features editor and will now wrangle the rec section; I will continue on my merry way as A&E editor (minus rec, of course) and Rachael Daigle sat in the captain's seat as our new editor. As all of the personnel changes were taking place, so were changes in the overall attitude of what we hope to accomplish and how we hope to do it.

This week's issue is one I proudly hold up against any other alt-weekly without reservation. Our feature on Pride was well-planned and well-written and, throughout the issue, the contributions of some regular writers and those of some relatively new ones--namely a piece on couch-surfing by Johanna Kirk and a film review by Jeremiah Wierenga--were top-notch. I'm honored to be in the company of such fine writers as Nathaniel and Tara, and to continue to work alongside Deanna and Elaine to take the paper to a level that, under Rachael's direction, we can easily attain. Proofing the pages today, I was proud to see my name in the masthead.

Atkins out (and looking forward to the future)