We had a wonderful, marvelous edition of Tuesday Funk last night. There were five strong readers who engaged and captivated the audience with their words, and there was the regular Poem by Bill feature. I read "Four Road Trips" to kick off the second half of the show, and it went over well enough that I was really excited to put the video online. Unfortunately, Houston, we had a problem.

The way I record these shows is pretty basic, and usually works really well. I mount my iPhone on a little tripod, set the tripod on top of the amp, and point the lens at the microphone. I let the phone record straight through each half of the show, only touching it to adjust for the height of each new reader. Later that night or the next morning, I take the two long video files and chop them up into individual readings.

Well, last night when I downloaded the video files from my phone and opened them up for editing. The first file was fine, but the second...

The second file starts with me stepping to the microphone to introduce the second half of the show and read my poem, all while speaking in a woman's voice. Wait, a woman's voice? Yes, to be specific, in the voice of Lauryn Allison Lewis, the reader who followed me at the mike. Somehow the video file became corrupted and shifted the soundtrack forward by nine minutes and forty-four seconds. The audio of my reading was completely lost. The final 9:44 of the video, during Margie Skelly's reading, is silent.

I was able to fix the recording of those last two readers by extracting the audio from the file and reinserting it at the correct point (though trying to perform that task in Quicktime Pro was kind of like trying to tie a square knot in fishing line while wearing iron gauntlets). But that great reading of my poem is gone forever.

Trust me, though. It killed.

Which is exactly what I want to do to my stupid iPhone.