KXLL Tune In

Big thanks to everyone who donated to KXLL during the 2013 Spring Pledge Drive. We raised $9,500 with money still rolling in. That total included 100 individual donors and almost 50 sustaining members! We couldn’t do it without you, Juneau.

Pint glasses and coffee are in, so stop by the station to pick them up. If you got a t-shirt or sweatshirt they’re still being custom made at Aurora Projekt, so stay tuned. Hats are also on the way.

If you missed out on the action, there’s still time to donate here and claim some of our cool prizes.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Almost a year ago, Lia Heifetz and eleven others left their home of Juneau  to experience how the Pacific Ocean impacts the planet for “A Trip South.” From Douglas Island the team kayaked down the Inside Passage, camping on rocky beaches and working with the elements to safely paddle the series of straits and channels that connect southeast Alaska to western British Columbia and Puget Sound. Ninety-three-days later, the group arrived in Lady Smith Harbor on Vancouver Island where they transitioned to biking down the pacific coast towards Central and South America.

This Thursday, Lia and Lucy will be on KXLL to talk about the experience and their upcoming slide show event this First Friday at 7 p.m. at the Silverbow. Tune into “Annie on the Spot” at 4:00 to hear Lia discuss the upcoming event and find out where the “A Trip South” team is now.

Students from Discovery Preschool visited KTOO today to get a tour of the radio and tv facilities. During their tour they stopped by the Excellent Radio studio to sing songs and record a station ID.

Check out some clips of Juneau’s Mark Rainery – friend of KXLL – completely ripping Montana to shreds. Vote for this video and get Mark up to Tailgate Alaska!

Mark Rainery shreds Montana

Here’s a little clip of Juneau born and bred Astronomar opening up for diplo at the XS club in The Wynn casino in Las Vegas. It was amazing to see and this club is off the proverbial hizzay.

It’s called the Harlem Shake. The University of Georgia men’s swim and dive team did it underwater in Speedos. The Norwegian army did it in the snow. The latest viral dance video craze starts with one dancer — jamming out on his own — surrounded by what appear to be oblivious bystanders. But then, all of a sudden, everybody’s dancing.

The meme started when YouTube comedian Filthy Frank took “Harlem Shake” by Brooklyn-based Latino producer Baauer and played off the wild dubstep drop 15 seconds into the song. That’s when everything gets wild.

But this Harlem Shake is not quite like the original. Filmmaker Chris McGuire even went out on the streets of Harlem to get reactions to the videos. To quote one resident, “That’s not the Harlem Shake at all. That’s humpin’, and that’s not the Harlem Shake.”

So where did the original dance actually come from?

“It’s been around for decades. Most people trace it back to a street dancer named Al B, who used to entertain the crowd at the Rucker tournament, which is a legendary basketball league in Harlem,” says Jay Smooth, Harlemite and host of the hip-hop video blog Ill Doctrine. “It was brought into the mainstream by one of my Harlem neighbors, Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, who brought the dance into a couple videos he made with one of his artists, G Dep.”

As dance styles do, the trend faded as it stayed true in Harlem. But when the meme appeared on YouTube, it wasn’t anything like what Al B did.

“You’d shimmy really quickly and swing your arms back and forth, then freeze and start up again,” Smooth tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “[Al B] had a really elaborate story as far as what he saw as the origin of the dance, tracing it back to mummies in Africa, I believe, who couldn’t fully use their bodies because they were wrapped up in the mummy robes.”