James Whittingham is a retired renaissance man and current stay-at-home dad.  Locals know me best for The James and Kevin Show (or Just for Laughs.) More recently, I'm mostly publicly known for my blogging. Above all, I am all things to all people, worthy of your respect and awe.

I was born in Fort Frances, Ontario and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan.  Both those places are in Canada, if you're a foreigner.  My education is in filmmaking and my background is in television.

Like many people, I come from a dysfunctional family. However, my family is much more crazy than yours. If you haven't already been convinced, you will be soon. (My autobiography is now being written.)

Poverty keeps me bogged down in a neighbourhood I don't particularly care for. Frankly, it's full of trailer trash. If our Canadian climate was warmer, they'd live in trailers and not dilapidated slum houses. Many of the people rent their homes.  Some houses are drug houses.  Some of the men beat their wives, children and pets, I suspect.

The people in my neighborhood seem to pride themselves in their ignorance, unfettered masculinity, and misogyny. Without exception, they all smoke.

 

Kevin Allardyce as Mr. Pencilhead(left) and me circa 1997

The love of my life: my son Aiden, born in September, 2003

About the New Site:

This is my first openly-public site.  Past blogs were intended to be private but they accidentally started gaining many thousands of hits per month exclusively through word of mouth.  My private blog caused trouble for my friends since so many people in high places seemed to be reading it.  My comedy partner and long time friend, Kevin Allardyce, was fired from his job as a ministerial assistant to the provincial finance minister in the Saskatchewan Government. Other friends have been reprimanded and have come close to being fired from important jobs just for their names appearing on my blog. I've decided to keep my personal blog private and restricted to a small handful of friends.  Please feel free to spread the word about this new, public, commercial blog.

• Podcast: Life is funny if you look hard enough, especially mine.  Leave a voice mail or write an email to be included in the show. See the podcast page for more information.

• VideoBlog: Slice of Life video clips to bring added breadth to my daily life. Some of my older video work is archived for new readers of the site.

• Consumer news: I do some consumer articles and rants occasionally.

• Daddy Diaries: my stay at home dad page. Pictures and stories about me and my son Aiden as you watch him grow up.

• Features/Biography: I will sometimes write stories about episodes in my life. Some of these have and will be archived for new readers.

• Store/Advertising: I try to generate some revenue through this web site to pay for it's expenses. More items will eventually be added to the store.  You can help by donating to this site with PayPal.

• People I know sometimes contribute to this site.  Their work can be found in the Your Articles section.  If you have a photo or information that would be of interest to my readers, please send them to me by email.

• Please note that this site is not always child or work safe.

James as Podcaster

Although I was educated as a filmmaker, I had a bit of comedy career with Kevin Allardyce in the Nineties. We started on community television and independent films shortly after university and ended on national broadcast television for a short time (all 10 episodes of Just for Laughs in 1997). In early 1997, I made a web site promoting our talents and created streaming videos of our television show [press reference here]. In 1999, with our career stalled, I started experimenting with a streaming internet radio show (RealAudio) and tried to figure out the technical ways I could include Kevin from his home. Streaming was expensive and not practical.  Later in the year our comedy career got reignited with the development and shooting of a pilot for CBC.  However, I saved the audio equipment from that time and am using it today.

In the spring of 2005 after nearly five years of blogging, plenty of controversy and great harm coming to people close to me because of it, I took my blog underground and shared it only with a handful of friends.  Early in the summer, Kevin told me about something called podcasting and found me a free piece of software called PodProducer. I dug the software so much it kept me interested in doing a podcast.

I made dozens of short little audio casts for my private blog, some from my deck on warm summer evenings when the ambience of the annual fair (only a block away) could be captured.

I didn't commit to bringing back my blog and burgeoning podcast to the public until February 14, 2005.  I initially numbered these shows at 101 but later decided to number my public shows from '1'.

Tech notes: I currently do the show live to disk three times a week.  It is recorded in the upstairs bedroom of my tiny wartime house with a cheap Radio Shack mic going into a basic mixer.  Shows elements are loaded into PodProducer and the show is recorded in Audacity where room noise is later removed and the show is encoded into MP3.  Doteasy.com is my free web host and Libsyn is my current podcast file host.

If you have any questions or comments, please email me at jamespod@jameswhittingham.com

James Whittingham (really old bio)