This past Spring, The Big Something recorded personal essays by a group of students many of whom, though not all, are immigrants learning English as a second language. Others are adults studying for their GED while working full-time jobs.

Their teacher, Sue, writes:

Teaching adults is beyond rewarding; I feel as if I am teaching two generations at once, because I know that whatever they learn, they will then be able to pass on to their children. My students inspire me every day with their persistence, determination, and often humor in the midst of it all. I repeatedly profess to them that EVERYONE has a story to tell, and that theirs are just as important as anybody elses.

Although they may be reading at the middle school level, many of my students are second language learners whose speaking and writing skills are still developing. So I have them talk and write about their lives. Thanks to KRCC, they now have a chance to tell them. I am so proud of their courage.

In this first installment of this series of stories, which we’ll run on Wednesdays over the next five weeks, we’ll hear Julia’s story of crossing the US/Mexico border.

Click on the player below to stream it or you can download it by right clicking on THIS LINK.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If you’d like to learn more about the students in Sue Spengler’s class, you can read their blogs at unity-2008.blogspot.com, and at writersofthefuture.blogspot.com.

(If you love The Big Something, right now would be a great time to renew, join for the first time or give a little something extra to KRCC online. Please include a note that you like The Big Something. Thanks! thebigsomething@krcc.org)

The fall membership drive is almost upon us and the semi-annual KRCC Early-Bird Open House is this weekend at our headquarters at 912 N. Weber. All of this means, of course, it’s time to add another coveted KRCC t-shirt to your growing collection. Please enjoy this mini-retrospective of T-shirts past from General Manager Delaney Utterback’s lovely (though, sadly, incomplete) collection.

As it were, if you are in possession of any of the T-shirts NOT shown in this slideshow, we’d be grateful if you’d bring them down to the station this weekend so we can either photograph them or accept them (if you’d be so generous to donate them) into our permanent collection.

Thanks!

Noel & Delaney, thebigsomething@krcc.org

… all covered with Yoga!

That’s right folks, as you may or may not have heard, Yogini and artist Kat Tudor will be leading the willing to the top of Pikes Peak to create “the world’s HIGHEST yogic spiral” next Wednesday. (More details HERE if you’re interested in joining.)

While we’re uncertain whether the yoga spiral will go down in the Guinness Book of World Records, the event will join a growing list of illustrious Rocky Mountain highests, the most recent of which was Kevin Bacon and his brother performing atop her purple mountain’s majesty and joining in what was allegedly“the world’s highest drum circle” this past June.

Since it can’t hurt to be aware of your historical antecedents, we turn once again to the Pikes Peak Library District’s wonderful YouTube collection of historical films from the Alexander Film Company for this: A 14,110-foot hoedown/square dance from 1963 (the video also includes construction footage from the erection of the spectacularly ugly visitor center, if you’re interested).

(We loooooooove your feedback. Keep it coming in the comments or send us an email: thebigsomething@krcc.org. Thanks!)

We hope you’ve already heard about the award-winning oral history project Story Corps and the fact that you can sign up to record your story in the MobileBooth at the Penrose Public Library in downtown Colorado Springs between September 24 and October 17.

Whether or not you’re familiar with Story Corps, we hope you’ll learn something more about it with this slideshow tour of the Airstream MobileBooth with Manager Whitney Henry-Lester.

GIANT DISCLAIMER: DON’T WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW OR READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T LIKE WATCHING REALLY HARROWING LIFE OR DEATH NATURE VIDEOS, DEER GETTING KILLED BY COUGARS, OR CUSSING, OR THINKING ABOUT HARROWING LIFE OR DEATH SCENARIOS, THE POSSIBILITY OF GETTING KILLED BY A COUGAR, OR CUSSING. THANK YOU! THE BIG SOMETHING

Anyone who lives in the Pikes Peak region and spends any time hiking, biking or running in the backcountry has certainly thought about the very, VERY remote possibility of being attacked by a mountain lion/cougar/puma. Please keep in mind that, as this website points out:

* In California, from 1986 through 1998, exactly two people died from mountain lion attacks, whereas in one year alone, over 4,000 people died in traffic accidents, including 800 pedestrians. This means that your car or someone else’s car is 2,000 times more likely to kill you than is a mountain lion. (A Detailed Calculation gives the ratio as between 1,150 and 4,300.)

* Over 300 people have been killed by domestic dogs in the U.S. between 1979 and the late 1990s. This means that your family dog or your neighbor’s dog is ten times more likely to kill you than is a mountain lion and hundreds of time more likely than is a coyote.

That said, dying in the jaws of a mountain lion does hold a slightly more terrifying grip on the imagination (and neck) than the jaws of life or the jaws of Snoopy, which is to say fear is often more powerful than facts! (BTW, if you want to indulge your horror fantasies, here’s a page that lists cougar deaths in Colorado through 2001 and here’s a description of a more recent attack in Boulder).

And sometimes there are very good reasons to be afraid, such as this moment in August 2008 captured on video by local hiker Jen Kulier, who wrote to us to describe how she and her friends captured this video in the Crags on the backside of Pikes Peak:

Some friends (Mark Lee, Keith Emmons, Jackson Solway) and I were getting an early start to summit Pikes Peak from the Crags last August. We were driving up the road to the trailhead at about 6 am. I was riding shotgun and holding a video camera, because we planned to film some of our hike. Just before we got to the Mennonite Camp, a deer walked into the road and stopped, so I started filming the deer. At the same time the camera started filming, the mountain lion jumped out from the trees on the side of the road and attacked the deer.

See for yourself (“YouTube here we come!” Indeed!):

(Thanks to Joey Ernst for the tip and to you, as always, for your great comments and feedback! thebigsomething@krcc.org)

When my wife, Marina Eckler, and I were living in New York earlier this year, both of our computers were stolen from our apartment. The only irreplaceable items, sadly, were the thousands of digital photographs. The only backups we had were the few photos she had posted to her blog. The other night, while we were going through the images, I began to notice an odd portrait of our area that emerged from her lens. A native of Los Angeles who spent her 20s in San Francisco, Marina was never entirely convinced that the Colorado landscape was, in fact, the Colorado landscape. She was, however, fascinated with the bizarre conflict between the suburban/urban 50s-80s cityscape and the natural landscape and the West’s own ideas of itself, which heightened her sense of geographical alienation. I asked her if I could download these photos and put them together into a slideshow. After I did, she suggested Ennio Moriccone’s “Duck You Sucker,” part of the soundtrack from the film of the same title (aka Fistful of Dynamite), one of Sergio Leone’s great Spaghetti Westerns, to flesh out the dislocation between the ideas of place and actual place that the images reflected for her.

(We always enjoy your comments and feedback! Thanks, thebigsomething@krcc.org)

Congratulations are in order for the Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival. This weekend’s festival marks their 10th, yes TENTH! year here in Colorado Springs and they’ve brought us so many great gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender films over the years, including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Aimee and Jaguar, Trembling Before G-d, But I’m a Cheerleader and dozens more features, shorts and documentaries, many of which have crossed over into the mainstream.

One of the most daunting parts of the festival is choosing between the many great films when you can’t see them all. To help you out with the process, we’ve dug up trailers for all the feature films at this year’s festival and have embedded them in the order they will be screened, beginning with tonight’s opening at the Fine Arts Center. For more information, including tickets, you can go to www.pplff.org.

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