A Scoutmaster's Blog

Back in February I posted about some Scouting related blogs I have come across. Well, five months have past. I have found that a couple of have their names since then. I have also discovered a few more that I would like to share with you. Check them out and see what you think of them.

Akela’s Adventure (Cub Scouting Podcast): http://akelasadventure.com/
The Leader’s Campfire (Cub Scouting Podcast): http://www.leaderscampfire.com/
The Scouting Vine (Scouting News): http://goodturn.newsvine.com/
A Scout’s Campfire: http://www.scoutcampfire.com/
Troop 11, From The Committee Chair: http://troop11bsa.org/barnes_blog/
Rikki’s Scouting Resources (Scouting in Australia): http://rikkiresources.wordpress.com/
Scouts From The Big City: http://houstonscouts.blogspot.com/

The picture of the patch is from the USSSP website. It is an (unofficial) award that you may earn through the internet. Check it out.

If you know of any other good Scouting Blogs then drop me a line.

By now you know of Buttons, the radical Boy Scout. You have probably read the recent post about Eymard, the eighty year old assistant scoutmaster. What happens when they meet in the woodlands on a Troop 68 outing and conduct an interview? Well, it ain’t no Larry King style interview, that is for sure.

Eymard was a very good sport about the whole thing. He and Buttons exchanged some good natured teasing and had fun doing the interview. They discuss Eymard’s duties as an assistant scoutmaster, his age, cooking skills, knot tying, woolly worms, and other subjects.

Meanwhile, in the background, the Boy Scouts are preparing for the annual Camp Watchamagumee Egg Drop Competition. They are gathering natural materials to package an egg. During the competition the egg and package will be dropped, higher and higher, until only one egg survives.

It has been a couple months since we have made a video with Buttons. I hope you enjoy it. We had fun making it. And hopefully, within the couple of weeks, there will be another new video featuring that radical Boy Scout. If you have any ideas for a video featuring Buttons we want to hear about it. Drop us a note.

Download Podcast
Watch Video on the troop’s website.
Subscribe through iTunes.

If you are a reader of this blog, or a follower of the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast, then you know who Buttons, the radical Boy Scout, is. Buttons has starred in several videos that can be found online at Troop 68’s website and on Youtube. He seems to have gained a small following out in internet land.

Today, Buttons was a guest on a special edition of the Akela’s Adventure audio podcast. The hosts of the podcast, Mr. Bob and his son Ti, have been spending the week at Cub Scout Day Camp. They are posting a special podcast each day this week covering the different activities they participate in doing during the day. Buttons joined them on tonight’s episode and asked Ti, who happens to be a fan of Buttons, about his day at camp. They chatted about the different activities and the skits and songs performed during the day’s campfire program. It sounds like both Ti and Mr. Bob had a great time at camp.

Buttons would like to thank Mr. Bob for inviting him to be on the Akela’s Adventure podcast. The radical Boy Scout had a great time talking to Ti, and hopes they can do it again sometime.

Boy Scout Troop 68’s Laughs For Lunch Show has become a yearly tradition in Melrose. The Scouts, parents, and community have a great time during every performance. I have had every show video taped and played on our community access television station. Now, with current technology, I can post the best of the these shows on the internet for people outside of our community to watch and enjoy. The troop’s website and the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast (MSPP), in addition to YouTube, has been a great way to get these videos out to the public.

This week’s post to the MSPP is one of my favorite skits, Ice Fishing. When it is done well. And the guys did this skit well during the 2005 show. Nathan and Josh had a great time and made up the “Fisherman 2000” while on stage. They knew each other very well through their years of school and Scouting, and could play off each with ease. Jeff did a good job playing the young fisherman.

The skit features two older gentlemen who go ice fishing but do not have any luck catching the fish. A young boy arrives on the scene, starts fishing nearby, and begins catches a lot of fish. Of course, this drives the older guys crazy and they begin to hassle the young boy. Watch it, I am sure you will enjoy it.

Download Podcast
Watch Video on the troop’s website.
Subscribe through iTunes.

For eleven years the Boy Scouts of Troop 68 have done a community stage show they have named “Laughs For Lunch”. This nearly two hour campfire-style show features the Scouts performing skits and songs for the audience. The public is invited and asked to bring an item of food as their admission to the show. All the food donated goes to the local food shelf. We provide the laughs, the audience provides the food, thus the name of the show. Clever, huh?

Each year there are songs or skits that stand out as being audience favorites. During the 2006 show the troop performed the “Furniture Store” skit for the first time. Sergio and Josh, the Scouts chosen to perform the skit, only had time during the meetings to practice it twice. I was not very worried about how they would do though. Both of them had done several shows by this time and they were comfortable at improvising during skits. Little did I or the rest of the troop know how well they would do during the show.

The skit is about a person opening a new furniture store. He choses people from the audience to act as furniture. Each “piece of furniture” has its own characteristics. The person choosing as the “oak table” becomes the punch line of the skit. Before Sergio went out on stage to begin the skit I asked him to choose our district executive, who happened to be in the audience, to be the oak table.

You could not have asked for the skit to go any better then it did. Sergio seemed to choose all the right people to play the pieces of furniture, and the furniture volunteers did a great job living up to their roles. The audience really enjoyed themselves.

This is the first of several videos from the yearly Laughs For Lunch Shows that will be a part of the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast (MSPP). I hope you enjoy them as well as the audiences did when they watched the Scouts do them live.

Download Podcast
Watch Video on the troop’s website.
Subscribe through iTunes.

It is hard to believe but a small milestone has been reached. This entry to “A Scoutmaster’s Blog” is the 100th time I have sat down at the computer to post something for my thirteen loyal readers to read. (Actually, I do not have a good idea how many people read this, but I know it is not in the thousands.)

While I do not know how many people read these ramblings that I post online, I do know of a few statistics that I am willing to share with you. First, and I find this interesting, is that the blog now receives more hits per month than the home page of the troop’s website. For example, last month, May, the site’s home page received 1515 hits while the blog received 1999 hits. This month the blog is also ahead in the number of hits. Is this impressive? I have no idea. I do not know what other troop sites received in number of hits.

I understand that this site is very much a niche site. The only people who visit the site are probably involved in Scouting as an adult leader, or are a Scout them self. This site does not include controversial issues of the day so people are not brought to the site looking for those type of articles. But that is okay. This site is about Scouting, and more importantly, about my Scouting experiences.

During the last year and a half that I have been writing this blog there have been a few changes. The first is the layout of the page. I have experimented with a couple looks and finally deceided on this one. I think it is easy to read and easy on the eyes. I also started hosting this site within our troop’s site, instead of leaving it hosted by Blogger. I did this to keep people on the troop’s site as long as possible. I did have to give up some features that are found in a blog that Blogger hosts, but that is a price I was willing to pay.

One of the biggest “changes” to the blog was the inclusion of video podcasts. I have had several people write me about how they could get some of the videos I have posted on our troop’s site and YouTube. I thought a video podcast would be a great way to make these videos readily available. I have to thank Mr. Bob of Akela’s Adventure podcast for giving me a hand getting things up and running, and helping to get Melrose Scouting Productions listed on iTunes.

I have no immediate plans to change anything about the way I write this blog during the next hundred entries. I will continue to write about my Scouting experiences, add more podcasts as they become available, and let you know about interesting Scouting-related articles I find on the web. If you have a suggestion or two about subjects you would like to see covered here then leave a comment or drop me a email. It would be great to hear from you.

So you want to have a great campfire program, huh? Well, you have to have a great opening song, something to get the Boy Scouts fired up, something with a lot of energy. You need a song like the Many Point Scout Camp Rouser Song!

The MPSC Rouser Song is this week’s Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast (MSPP) video. The staff begins each week’s Sunday night opening campfire with this song which sets the tone for the rest of the evening. It is fast. It is loud. It is energetic. It is rowdy. It is everything a good opening campfire song should be.

This video was taped at MPSC in July of 2006. You can tell that the staff is hyper and ready to have some fun. In four weeks the Scouts from Troop 68 will be attending MPSC again. It will be time once again to join the camp staff in being as loud as we can possibly be!

Download Podcast
Watch Video on the troop’s website.
Subscribe through iTunes.

Buttons, the radical Boy Scout, loves to talk to Scouts about the Scout Oath and Law. In this video he talks about being physically strong, one of the Scout Oath’s duties to self. When he does some pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups he discovers it is not very easy to stay in shape.

This was the third time filming Buttons in his series of films. And in some ways it was one of the toughest. The pull-ups and push-ups were pretty easy to film, but the sit-ups presented a challage to film since nearly the whole body of Buttons was in view. I do not have the budget of the Muppets, or maybe I should say I do not have a budget at all, so I do not have access to all the special made sets available to those puppeteers. I have to discover the best way to film the puppet without being seen myself. I think things have been working out pretty well so far.

This video happens to be my favorite film of Buttons that has been done so far. I like the way he really seems to be alive and shows the “pain” of staying physically strong. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did making it.

Watch it on the troop’s website here, or download the podcast here.