video

Twenty-three days and counting down until the Ramble Music & Arts Fest, and one of the festival's organizers was kind enough to get us a whole host of video clip highlights from last year's run. (If you're feeling ambitious and you've got some free time on your hands, you can find all of them on YouTube.)

We'll try and get another video up every couple days right up to July 5, when The Batavian will be on the scene in Jackson Square to shoot some footage of this year's event. Be sure to look out for that.

In the meantime, here is Sierra's "Until We Meet Again."

In Episode Two of our living history series at the Holland Land Office Museum, Pat Weissend tells us about a pair of Civil War medals on exhibit. Check it out:

We'll be back at the museum before long, so be sure to watch for the next episode!

Have you ever seen those cardboard stands full of CDs made by Putumayo World Music at the coffee shop or the bookstore or the grocery store? As it turns out, those CDs — millions of them — are distributed here in Batavia, out of a huge warehouse space on the second and third floors at the Harvester Center, the old Batavia business incubator.

We got an inside pass today to check them out. Here's what we found:

The Batavian has polished up its YouTube channel a bit. You can check it out anytime to see all of our videos, past and present, leave comments, become a fan or recommend your own ideas for what we should get out and point our camera at. Once we have a few more videos in our vault, look for us to do a 'Best Of' video recap with some of our favorite moments from what we have done so far.

Long gone are my own days behind the microphone in a broadcast booth at a college radio station — I jocked for a couple years at RIT's underground rock station — but today I got to relive the delirium as I joined deejay Robyn at Genesee Community College. Robyn spins rock of all stripes (though mostly classic, she says) for WGCC 90.7 FM, where she doubles as the station's public relations director.

Her personality is perfect for radio: cheeky, garrulous and none too shy of the microphone's allure. It was no surprise, then, that she was also a perfect video tour guide to take us behind the scenes at the station and tell us a bit about herself, the music and what it takes to run a radio show.

Thank you to everyone at WGCC for letting me and my camera in your sacred space, no questions asked. Look forward to working with you all again.

Here's an interesting video that appeared on YouTube overnight -- of a train pulling out of a roundhouse in Batavia.

The description of the video reads:

S6 1044 emerges from the DLWR Enginehouse in Batavia. The five-stall roundhouse was closed up at or around 1956, when the New York Central moved their mainline south of the city; track was relaid into the building during the past winter (2007) by the hard-working GVT track department. So like the title says, it's no fire, it's just an ALCO.

A local church has also uploaded a "pastor appreciation" video.

This morning, Pat Weissend was kind enough to show me some of what they've got over at the Holland Land Office Museum, where he serves as the director. I took a video camera and we stepped out onto the cold stone floor of the wood-walled museum addition that houses the 14-foot gibbet — a variation on the gallows. He tells me that the hangman's noose is the most popular artifact at the museum — no surprise, I guess, when you consider the morbid curiosity of children big and small.

This video will be the first in a (hopefully) long series of discovery-style episodes over at the museum, where they have thousands of other artifacts to scope and get the story on. So be sure to tune in regularly and keep an eye out for those. We'll try and get a new one up every couple weeks or so. In the meantime, and without further ado, The Batavian presents: The Hangman's Noose.

Visit the museum's Web site for more information, and to access links to Pat's podcasts on history. Or just head over to 131 W. Main St. and check out the collection.

Full of coffee and unshaven, I took off to Adam Miller's Toy and Bicycles this morning to poke around — and I took a video camera with me. They've got everything. Magic tricks. Games. Bicycles. Model cars, planes, boats. Wind-up anything. Vintage everything. Plush whatever. Check it out.

Not much Batavia news out on the Internet this morning. Not in Rochester sources, not in Buffalo sources, not on WBTA Batavia radio — which has a brief about the library budget (we posted results last night), plus a few out-of-area briefs and the vows of a Congressional candidate not to be greedy. So yeah, not much.

That means it's a great opportunity for you to make the news. I will not be hanging at Main Street Coffee until later today, in the afternoon. But that doesn't mean you can't just write a blog post about what's going on in your life, neighborhood, city, home, school... Or give me a call (585) 802-3032, and tell me the story and I'll do all the grunt work for you.

That's about it for now. Look for some video later tonight and hopefully some more in the morning. In the meantime, hone your own journalistic skills and file a report. If it's news to you, it's likely news to the rest of us, too.

Twenty-year-old Moriah Schoen just launched a Web site for his video production business, Schoen Productions. Don't let his age fool you, he's already got five years experience. Samples of his work — weddings and mock music videos, for example — are available on the site.

Moriah got his start, he tells us, when he was 15 years old and shot a video for a Batavia Youth Football Game, "and I fell in love with video editing." From there, he became the cameraman for his church, New Hope Ministries on Bank Street, and just kept on making videos, until he decided he was where he wanted to be, and it was time to start a business.

I guess you're never too young to be an entrepreneur. Best of luck, Moriah.

The title of the video says it's from 2007, but it was uploaded just yesterday. It looks like it's coverage of a training exercise.