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Format: stories on everyday themes from ordinary people and the Canada-famous
Duration: ~75m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 51

Definitely, this show is not the opera. But the set of all things not the opera — even of just the things on the radio that aren’t the opera — is big indeed. Because it’s from the CBC and because it’s stitched together out of interviews with folk of both the ordinary and semi-famous varieties, I could probably just say “This Canadian Life” and be done with it. Yet Definitely Not the Opera [RSS] [iTunes] isn’t quite that. How it isn’t quite that is difficult to pin down, but then again, so’s the show itself.

My exhaustive research reveals that, during its 16 years of existence, Definitely Not the Opera has been ever a-changin’. Sometimes it’s focused on pop culture; sometimes it’s not. At certain points, its length stretched to a staggering four hours; now it hits more like 75 minutes. It was once hosted by Spark’s Nora Young; now it’s hosted by Sook-yin Lee, who non-Canadians might know from Shortbus, John Cameron “Hedwig” Mitchell’s crazy sex movie. On this program, which has never once strayed into the realm of crazy sex — at least while I’ve listened — she’s a more raggedy-sounding Ira Glass, pitching the concept of the day and proceeding to ask person after theme-relevant person about their experiences, feelings, and feelings about their experiences.

Broadly speaking, it is is indeed the This American Life model: “choose a theme,” “bring you three or four stories on that theme." Except that, with a slightly longer episode length and a slightly shorter segment length, DNTO might be said to back in more stories per. But they’re not “stories” in the TAL sense, exactly; they’re more conversational and less production-intensive. You hear the voices of Sook-yin and her fellow contributors more often than those of Ira and his. DNTO’s segments are less production-intensive, in that the words and the music and the whatever else aren’t as “woven” into a single fabric. Which show you’d prefer all depends on what sort of an experience you want to have. If you prefer your commentary on modern existence less crafted but perhaps more loose and spontaneous, this is the one you want.

The program’s bagginess extends to its choice of subjects and its willingness to grow grand questions or statements from the soil they provide. The question of whether this difference frees the Canadian show from the pretensions of its Stateside counterpart or whether it condemns it to fluffy irrelevance falls, again, to the individual listener. Sook-yin and company take on such pillars of the human condition as bathroom conduct [MP3], our ignorance of our neighbors [MP3], and what the deal is with tooth anxiety [MP3]. All fair game, certainly, and all immediately relatable — underestimate the importance of this at your peril — but they admittedly carry a faint whiff of the trivial. (Or is this really dependent on the subject matter at all? Do I only smell that on the occasions when the show itself treats them trivially?)

If Definitely Not the Opera, for all its richness of entertainment, has a problem, it’s a larger version of the one its title suffers. They grab your attention. They’re aggressively non-rarefied. They’re jokey. They’re unusual, but not all that unusual. But their mission and the information they convey remain muddled. What goes on in the show is often amusing and filled with humanity, but, as with anything you have to describe in terms of what it isn’t, it can be hard to tell if that’s what’s supposed to go on.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Format: sets and performances from Dublabbish sonic creators
Duration: ~3om
Frequency: erratic
Archive available on iTunes: most

Oh, how I enjoy this music, yet oh, how I find myself unable to describe it in any terms that make, y’know, sense. Dublab’s podcast [RSS] [iTunes] focuses pretty much solely on the music, provides thick sets of tracks with almost no speech whatsoever. But what kind of music is it? You can draw comparisons to CBC’s The Signal, but only in the sense that both shows play stuff that’s hard to pin down. It tends to have a beat, but you wouldn’t necessarily dance to it. It’s obviously produced with no small degree of technology, yet that’s often in the service of sounding handmade or “lo-fi.” It’s not experimental experimental — nobody would play it to a crowd of grad students in a repurposed lecture hall — but it’s not not experimental. It’s both slick and haphazard, algorithm-generated and handmade. It’s usually new, but it sometimes sounds old — or rather, sounds like it comes from no specific time period at all.

I came upon my show in my continuing quest to prepare myself for a semi-imminent move to Los Angeles. Some people might do this sort of research by reading books, talking to friends, watching Huell Howser, or memorizing Thomas Guides, but I’m a Podthinker through and through; I use podcasts. (And, let it be said, a pantload of Huell Howser.) One of the very reasons I want to move to L.A. is that it’s the kind of city that would produce an entity like Dublab, which is not just a producer of podcasts but, according to Wikipedia, is a “non-profit music public broadcasting internet radio station” that also does “art exhibition, film projects, event production, and record releases.” In other words, it sounds as if they’ve got a pretty solid foundation to become one of the most neato organizations ever.

That Wikipedia entry also contains a few clues as to the nature of the Dublab sound, which involves “mixing traditional music, such as folk, with electronic sounds” and “ the paradox that oftentimes music that is actually really old can sound very much like it was made in the present.” The identities of the artists and DJs Dublab presses into service might also provide helpful hints. Do the names Aska Matsumiya, Will Wiesenfeld a.k.a. Baths, SFV Acid, Chazwick Bundick a.k.a. Toro Y Moi, The Books, and 60 Watt Kid mean anything to you? If they do, you’d better start downloading this podcast toot sweet. (But then, you’ve probably already got it and have long since copied all the episodes to cassette.) If you’re like me and some of them kind of do, they probably all fascinate you enough to want to learn a lot more. Dublab’s podcast won’t really teach you anything about them, but it’ll give you a taste of their sonic style, which I suppose is the important thing anyway.

Given what I’ve found out about Dublab so far, they seem just utopian enough that they probably have some sort of residential geodesic dome. I enjoy their aesthetic so much that I’m starting to wonder if, instead of moving “to L.A.,” I should just move straight into that dome. But one question thrashes unresolved: as cool as I find this maddeningly difficult-to-describe music at the moment, might it just turn out to be an embarrassing late-2000s/early-2010s fad in twenty years? Like so many interesting things, there’s no easy way to determine if it’s absolutely permanent or the flashiest flash in the greasiest pan. I guess there’s an important lesson about the best music embedded in all this: you might just have to listen to the damned stuff.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Format: brief pieces on design and architectural phenomena
Duration: 4m30s
Frequency: weekly, or so it appears
Archive available on iTunes: all

As unsuitable as design and architecture would seem as podcast subjects, I can’t get enough shows about ‘em. Public radio super-producer Roman Mars, he of Snap Judgment and REMIX Radio, has a new one out called 99% Invisible [RSS] [iTunes]. It’s not bad! I wouldn’t normally cast the harsh stare of the Podthinking eye on month-old podcasts, but this one’s generated so much buzz that it practically commands attention. Either downloaders really like architecture and design or they really like Roman Mars — or both, in which case, lucky for him.

So far, Mars appears to work under a pretty wide mandate on the design-architecture axes. He’s done shows about toothbrushes, space travel, the TransAmerica building, and, my personal favorite, city flags. The show’s title, as I interpret it, refers to the staggeringly countless man-hours of design work underlying the built environment. This goes for everything from the cityscapes we pass through every day to the humble aforementioned toothbrushes, which we should really try to use every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at least. It’s the sort of stuff Donald Norman wrote about in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Overturn the log of life is worthwhile, fascinating work: do it and you get all kinds of colorful, squirmy knowledge bugs.

Give it some time, and the show could well become design/architecture’s Radio Lab. Mars uses a similarly intricate aesthetic, mixing thematically appropriate music with interpretive sound effects and cutting and pasting a whole bunch of speech on top of it. Though I can already admire the effort and craftsmanship behind this production sensibility, something about it seems not quite there. I’m somehow both pleased and irked by the busyness and repetitiveness that afflicts the program. That’s not to say that 99% Invisible makes any unusually bad choices in this regard; this bothersome fragmentation, alas, poisons a lot of what I hear on public radio these days.

What’s more of a problem is how each episode ends almost before it begins. Every time I listen to an episode, I start it up, and, four minutes and thirty seconds later, think, “What, are you kidding me?” The interestingness is certainly there — you could teach an entire graduate course on any one episode’s topic — but the depth isn’t. To Mars’ credit, he pushes what he has to the absolute limit, drilling as deep as one possibly can given less time than the average commercial break, but it’s a Sisyphean task. There’s something to be said for compression, for providing ultra-polished gems to be quickly consumed by a busy audience — but not that much. Just make it ten times as long, and we’ll be hearing the next great thing in public radio.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Format: social media marketing riffing and interviews
Duration: ~15m, though sometimes substantially longer
Frequency: more or less weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

So I hear this “social media” stuff is pretty big these days. Specifically, I hear it from The Hopkinson Report [RSS] [iTunes], a more or less weekly audio dispatch from Jim Hopkinson, Wired magazine’s “marketing guy.” Having recently picked up marketing and advertising as intellectual interests (read: I realized I couldn’t market or advertise myself to save my life), I soon got Hopkinson and his Report as a recommendation.

It’s a pretty damned lively show. Hopkinson speaks at a rapid clip, almost like a more self-aware but no less enthusiastic infomercial host. Given the time constraint on each episode, his speaking speed would seem to come by necessity. He’s not pressed into John Moschitta territory or anything, but most of his shows clock in around fifteen minutes on average. Most of the time, he just takes a marketing technology, trend, question, or case study and riffs on it. There are occasional welcome longer-form episodes — interviews with authors and other sorts of creators — but there are three things us kids value above all in our media: brevity, brevity, and more brevity.

Again, that’s just something I’ve inferred from listening to the program itself. I’m glad I approach Podthinkable podcasts by simply plunging in, because if I’d read the episode titles in advance, I would’ve developed serious, itchy reservations. “4 Important Video Trends Worth Watching”. “5 Reasons You Should be Using a Twitter Client”. “Four steps to riding a viral video wave — Recognize, Hypothesize, Capitalize, Monetize”. “Social Media is the New Rock and Roll”. I keep washing and washing, but the dirt won’t come off. The dirt won’t come off.

Let me emphasize that, despite what those titles might imply, this is not a loathsome show. It actually delivers useful payloads with surprising frequency; it’s just that they’re often encased in those hokey shells. Hopkinson has some solid advice about résumés, for instance [MP3], although I think he neglected to mention how rarely the really cool work out there to do doesn’t ask for résumés at all. And he’s been in the technology game long enough that he can bring an interestingly wide perspective to certain trends, comparing what’s going on now to what went on in the eighties and early nineties.

As marketing podcasts go, I doubt The Hopkinson Report will unseat, say, CBC’s The Age of Persuasion (which may or may not turn out to have a secret podcast feed if you Google around) in my favorites list any time soon. This might just be because I’ve never felt entirely comfortable in my own era and generation. Sure, I’m on Twitter, I grasp the usefulness of Twitter, and I know how big Twitter is, but I still feel more than a little weirded out when listening to anything about “how to write great tweets.” I’ll stick to my sweater vests, the CBC, and Jim Hopkinson’s conversations with interesting self-marketers and his observations about Japanese toilets. You kids run along and turn your videos viral.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: Philosophy 3, in fun chunks
Duration: ~5m-20m
Frequency: thrice a month, on average
Archive available on iTunes: all

In this show’s iTunes reviews, this cranky (in both senses of the word) one-star assessment appears:

Interesting that DeLaplante assumes a biological creature which has ‘evolved’ for the purpose of survival can know truth. Certainly our adapted faculties will help us to survive better than those of our predecessors, but is in no way our evolved brain a guarantor of known truth. In fact, since we are ‘evolved,’ we should not think that we actually can know anything.

Welcome to the world of internet rationality geekage. It’s got its own customs. One of its customs is to always try to appear more rational than the other fellow, even if the other fellow does a podcast about critical thinking. Even if you have to resort to scorched-earth type lines about how human brains can’t get truth.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Kevin DeLaplante sets The Critical Thinker [RSS] [iTunes] pretty far from all the more-rational-than-thou battles currently raging irrelevantly on. It’s essentially a philosophy course in critical thinking like you’d take in college — it was Philosophy 3 at my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara — but served up in very brief audio chunks.

This is a sensible way to do it, seeing as DeLaplante is a professor at Iowa State University. He’s also the proprietor of CriticalThinkingTutorials.com, which is a bit like all those those language-learning sites out there, except that it teaches you critical thinking. This podcast is a branch of that site’s curriculum, and it operates on a model that a savvier trend writer would call something like “Edu-2.0” but I call “adult ed freemium.” Like, say, Coffee Break Spanish, The Critical Thinker offers its “lectures” for free but charges for the other course materials, which aren’t absolutely necessary but presumably enrich the overall experience. (I’ll never know, because I spend my time that could be used earning disposable income writing podcast reviews.)

The need to know “critical thinking” may seem quite a bit less pressing than the need to speak Spanish, but I think it’s actually more so. (Slightly.) Given the directions academia has moved in the past twenty years, the very idea of critical thinking has been co-opted to “mean” various sort-of-defined things about the subaltern (dis)loc[a/u]ting their hegemony and whatnot — identity stuff — but it’s really about making and evaluating logical arguments. Or illogical arguments, as the case may be. The idea is that, without thinking critically you won’t know which are logical and which are illogical.

DeLaplante spends a few episodes giving his own reasons for pursuing critical thinking, including “self-defense” [MP3], “empowerment” [MP3], “civic duty” [MP3], and “wisdom” [MP3]. These are noble ends, certainly, and he maintains quite a dignified manner in pursuing them. He makes it clear indeed that he’s not running a show about how to shout people down, or even about what’s actually wrong and right; it’s all to do with the form of the argument. He emphasizes it with his choice of example arguments to take apart, managing in the first few episodes alone to cover creationism, abortion, and gay marriage while stripping them of all sensationalism. This is not the place for someone with a lot of fixed ideas about where arguments ought to arrive. And that’s a good thing. Now if you’ll excuse me, my brain insists I go forage for sweet, sweet berries and then reproduce.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: satirical news-reading, monologues, and sketches
Duration: ~1h
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: last ten

Years ago, I thought Harry Shearer was living the radio dream. Each and every weekend, he rolls into the studio — usually KCRW in Santa Monica, which he rightly calls “the home of the homeless” — and cranks out an hour of solo broadcasting, mixing news with commentary with comedy with music. His program, Le Show [RSS] [iTunes], is heard all over the world, and he’s been doing it since 1983. This once seemed like such a sweet deal, until it occurred to me that he probably doesn’t get paid. Luckily, he can bankroll all his radio efforts, no matter how pricey, with all the money he earns as the voice of Bart Simpson.

No, I kid; Bart’s voice actor is actually some lady Scientologist. But, having voiced half the remaining population of Springfield over the past 20 years, Shearer does indeed draw what must be a luxurious Simpsons paycheck. That means, not to put too fine a point on it, that his next meal ain’t comin’ from Le Show, which effectively makes it the highest-profile, highest-gloss one-man volunteer community radio public affairs shows ever. And when you’re talking about volunteer community radio public affairs shows, you’re talking about hobbyhorses.

Of all the Simpsons characters he’s done, Shearer’s “actual” voice sounds most like a very relaxed Principal Skinner, which, for me, remains a little surreal to hear saying things about Afghanistan and such. But for better worse, his has lodged itself in my mind as the voice of Sunday mornings. I find something very appealing, tonally, in hearing him calmly read the week’s selection of stories that appall and outrage him most. Though he pre-produces any number of sketches and surprisingly elaborate comedy songs about current events, he’s at his satirical best when simply peppering the news with off-the-cuff witticisms, jabs, even puns.

And yet, somewhere in the mid-2000s, I found I couldn’t bring myself listen to another second of his complaining about Dick Cheney. Shearer seemed to have developed an unhealthy fixation on the ex-Vice President to which he spared his audience no exposure. It was a bit like when Phil Hendrie decided to stop doing fake phone-ins and just talk about Iraq all the time. They’re men of two different ideological perspectives, sure, but an ideological perspective is an ideological perspective. If the Cheney thing hadn’t cut off my regular Le Show habit, I’m sure one of the other horses in Shearer’s table would’ve: high-definition television, maybe, or more recently, the Army Corps of Engineers.

But I kind of miss it when it’s not around. Returning to the program via its podcast in this post-Cheney era, I find that, though the positions of Shearer’s individual obsessions have reshuffled, the themes remain the same. He’s more or less entirely concerned with waste, incompetence, and general failure committed by corporate or governmental institutions, whether in distributing sodas, building nations, or all points between. There’s a place for this, of course, and Shearer’s take on it does seem to generate a certain amount of dark, Kafkan stupidity-of-systems laughter. Yet I find that most of the troubles he highlights, no matter how ridiculous, seem pretty much par for the course.

Maybe this is a generational thing, but I’ve always thought of sufficiently large companies or bureaucracies as the primary engines of epic failure. That’s what they’re for, right? So when Shearer goes on with very low-key indignation at the Army Corps of Engineers somehow flooding Denver or Pepsi accidentally giving Saudi Arabia the bomb or the U.S. military spending ten million dollars per year on a ragtime band or whatever, it can feel like he’s reading out of the phone book. “Joanne Smith, 847-2351. Joe Smith, 452-2822. John Smith, 358-2384. John Smith, 358-2384, ladies and gentlemen.” I have to wonder: what on Earth does he expect?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Format: Loveline clips and Loveline-related interviews
Duration: ~1h-5h
Frequency: surprising
Archive available on iTunes: all

Like most everyone radio-inclined in my generation — not that there are terribly many of us — I grew up on Loveline. For a few middle- and high-school years there, rarely did a Sunday-Thursday 10 p.m. hour come when I didn’t tune straight to Seattle’s 107.7 “The End” for what I craved. Late-night, informative, improvisational, hilarious: this, it seemed to me, was the best use of the medium of radio. I still think of the show’s 1995-2005 hosting team of Adam Carolla and “Dr. Drew” Pinsky as perhaps our time’s finest edu-comedic duo. Sure, Adam’s now got his own bigtime podcast and Drew remains on Loveline (alongside someone named “Psycho Mike”), but it ain’t quite the same.

As luck would have it, mini-legions of fans more obsessive than me were recording almost each and every show during its heyday. They’ve been making these recordings available on the internet for as long as large file transfers have been feasible, be it on your webs, your Napsters, your Bittorrents, your Morphei, etc. None has been quite so perfectionist about it as a guy named Giovanni, who in recent years has risen to the throne of Adam Carolla’s “Superfan”. Popular demand urged him to start his own podcast, where he’s the DJ and the greatest hits are old Loveline clips. Now he’s done it, with G.I.O.: Get it On.

Like most of us young listeners, Giovanni approached the show primarily as a laughter delivery system; given the surfeit of low-I.Q. callers Adam instinctively mined for comedy gold, it filled that function reliably. On-air, the hosts would often question whether or not the callers were learning from their advice — indeed, whether they were capable of learning from it — but we all know it was the listeners, not the callers, who were taking notes. Lord knows what trouble I would have gotten into if I hadn’t spent thousands of hours immersed in this rogue’s gallery of semi-sentient sex-and-drug dysfunction cases.

With what seems to have been a totally absent family and a peer group even dumber than Loveline’s caller pool, Giovanni admits to having needed all the radio help he could get. The show, he says, was the sole influence teaching him how to “live right.” Adam, Drew, and their engineers were the closest thing to family he had. These are two of the things he admits in an interview with longtime Loveline board operator Anderson Cowan [MP3]. Giovanni isn’t only the Raider of the Lost Tapes; he’s a relentless pursuer of conversations with people close to any Carolla-centric project.

There is no way to exaggerate Giovanni’s enthusiasm for Adam Carolla and Loveline. This comes through not just in the very fact that he puts together a podcast like this, but in the way he does it. It’s not as if he simply imports a favorite episodes into Garageband and records an intro saying, “Hey, here’s a good one.” He meticulously weaves what he considers to be the best moments of separate shows from different times linked by guest, by theme, or by something more abstract. He dedicates part of one episode, for example, to stringing together all the times Jeremy Piven ever discussed the production of Judgment Night, where Adam worked as a stand-in [MP3].

I really hope nobody brings an intellectual property axe down onto Giovanni’s project. If anything, I’m pretty sure whoever owns what he’s excerpting should immediately hire him. They’ll find a way to make money off what he does. Failing that. the vast Adam Carolla empire must have a use for him. And I know he’s Adam’s Superfan and all, but his archiving work reminds me of one thing above all: Dr. Drew was pretty damn funny too.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Format: Spanish class
Duration: 15m-20m
Frequency: every week or two
Archive available on iTunes: all

Both the weirdest and most obvious thing about this show is that its hosts are Scottish. This isn’t terribly strange in itself, though most podcast listeners seem to hail from North America, where voices with full-blown Scots accents remain rare. What’s mildly unnerving is having such a voice teach you Spanish. These particular Scots are good at what they do, no doubt about it, but if you’re a Yank like me, it’ll be all you can to do keep your “Ach!”s, haggis references, and Groundskeeper Willie quotations to a minimum.

But it would be unfair to focus on the exotic provenance of Coffee Break Spanish [RSS] [iTunes], especially since this kind of unexpected internationalism is one of those special delights podcasting has made possible. Stand back and ponder the fact that you can get a grasp on most any reasonably widely-used language — we remain in wait for most of the ones involving tongue clicks — quickly and for free, just by downloading and listening to a few audio files. I don’t know anybody who’s become fluent in a foreign language through podcasts and podcasts alone, but that’s not the point; the point is to get you going.

This is one of the most popular language podcasts around — hell, one of the most popular podcasts around. I chalk this up to two things. First and foremost, the Spanish language itself seems to be in healthy demand. Us North Americites, especially those of us in the southern border states, most likely want to be able to talk with our friends in Mexico. I myself have a jones to visit Mexico City, which seems just strange enough to be deeply fascinating. Failing that, we tend to try to “find ourselves” with extended backpacking journeys across Guatemala. Being from Scotland — er, Escocia — I would bet that the hosts, teacher Mark and student Kara, are more interested in Spain. Y’know, Barcelona. Madrid. García Lorca. Frank Gehry. All that.

This introduces another accentual quality that some might find off-putting: they usually use Spanish rather than the Latin American pronunciation. This strikes me as no big deal, since the latter sounds — from what I can tell — to be a lisp-intensive version of the former, but I sense that some listeners have written concerned e-mails to the producer. In the same way, you may or may not enjoy the goofy sense of humor that periodically surfaces, as when Mark expresses shock and dismay that Kara lacks a rock-solid grasp on the work of Billy Joel, but I can’t say as I mind it. I eventually did get a little irked by the cha-cha-cha flavor of the interstitial production, since it reminds me of everything I disliked about high school Spanish classes.

Yes, I took four years of this language back then, but the merciless sands of time have since reduced my Spanish to ruins. Given my aforementioned Mexico City jones, I figured I’d use Coffee Break Spanish as a first step toward rebuilding my skills. The show claims to be geared toward the absolute beginner, and, for the first few dozen episodes, boy is it: your holas, you buenos diases, etc. If you really are just starting down the Spanish road, it’s one of the easier, friendlier, more accessible ways to do it. There’s nothing especially innovative about the actual linguistic education it imparts — Mark introduces new material every time, Kara learns it, the listener’s given plenty of time to answer themselves, sometimes unusual things happen like cultural discussions or appearances by what sounds like a toddler — but nor is there anything to complain about.

This brings me to the second reason the podcast is so popular: consistency. Language shows tend to podfade rather quickly; they’re second only to maybe hey-my-buddies-are-kinda-funny comedy podcasts in that regard. But Coffee Break Spanish has endured with supreme clarity and regularity. For my own purposes, I wish they’d move a little faster, but hope has appeared on the horizon: about 50 episodes in, they get to the past tense, on which I could use some additional tutelage. The price is definitely right. (Unless you step up to this “freemium”-model show’s additional materials, in which case you’ll have to decide how right the price is yourself.)

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: questions and answers about what the story is with various things
Duration: ~5m
Frequency: on average, weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Back in high school, I thought the archives of The Straight Dope were just about the coolest internet thing ever. Stored therein were answers to burning questions I didn’t even how I had: “Was the legendary liqueur absinthe hallucinogenic?” “What's equus eroticus all about?” “What's Kwanzaa?” Truly — and I say this as someone who writes a lot on the web — some of the most interesting reading on the web. (I also drew no small amount of enjoyment out of the site’s message board, until it started charging. I’m web 1.0 enough not to pay for a message board on principle.)

The Straight Dope actually has a long, storied history, especially by the standards of enterprises you can call “internet things.” It’s a question-and-answer column that’s run in the Chicago Reader and elsewhere for nearly 40 years. The answers ostensibly come from Cecil Adams, “world’s smartest human” — a shadowy, wisecracking figure whose existence has always been debated — and the questions from Cecil’s public, which he refers to as the “teeming millions.” Most of the millions’ inquiries take the “What’s the story with... ?”/”What’s the deal with... ?”/What gives with... ?” form, demanding explanations of often mundane but sometimes exotic phenomena that public education inexplicably fails to address.

Two qualities make The Straight Dope so compelling: the curiosity-satisfying, hey-I-always-wondered-about-that nature of the topics, and the Cecil Adams writing style. Adams (or whatever hive mind of scholars labors under the Adams banner) combines clarity, intelligence, jauntiness, and mild-to-strong disdain for the questioner, somehow winningly. Some might call it “snarky,” but I find it higher-class than that; Adams makes sport of his readers, sure, but he also takes their concerns seriously. For instance, here he is beginning to respond to a writer-in who wants to know why Shakespeare is better than Tom Clancy:

Shakespeare versus Tom Clancy, eh? I admire you, Mark. You're a bozo, but you're a bozo with brass. What's more, you raise a question that deserves an answer. Fact is, neglecting the handful of fey creatures who claim they grokked Shakespeare upon first hearing "to be or not to be," few people get him right out of the box. The obstacle is his lofty language, much of which can only be grasped with footnotes, and sometimes not then.

Here’s his opener to a column addressing a question about what kind of fart it would take a 180-pound man to achieve liftoff:

You realize, K., that this question is idiotic. However, that's never stopped us before, and there's no doubt that from a scientific perspective the subject has its points of interest. So I assigned the job to my assistant Una, a professional engineer, who quickly obtained the relevant thrust equations from NASA and got to work computing the necessary forces. While Una and I found the results enlightening, for you — assuming you're the 180-pound man here — it wasn't such a good day.

It came as no surprise when I found out The Straight Dope, like many originally text-based internet things, now has a podcast [RSS] [iTunes]. On purely formal grounds, I can’t in good conscience recommend it: it’s just some guy — not, needless to say, the mysterious Adams — reading Adams’ words out loud. (Given infinity more resources, though, I imagine it could make a killer Radio Lab-type audio spectacle.) But if you’re not much for the written word, by all means, don’t hesitate consume a column this delightful ear-style. You even still get “Slug” Signorino’s accompanying goofy illustrations — which, say what you will, I actually find really funny — albeit squished to the dimensions of your mobile audio device’s screen.

You will, however, have to deal with beer ads every five minutes. I think the genius of Cecil Adamsian prose, which I’ve long worshipped as an exemplar of high weekly-column style and which maybe works even better spoken than written, is worth it. But I’m still trying to find a way to expunge from my mind slogans about how it takes characters to brew beer with character. Beer. With character. It takes characters. To brew it. To brew a beer. A beer with character. Which takes characters.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: L.A.-centric newsy culture segments
Duration: 20m-90m
Frequency: on average, weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

There’s a lot to say about how podcasting and public radio have interacted in Our Brave Age of New Media, but most of it would bore people. Public radio, alas, has had a much stronger effect on podcasting than podcasting has had on public radio, but the effects are interesting to think about nonetheless. At minimum, though, it’s pretty great that most public radio programs podcast. This enables you to, for instance, remotely scope out a city’s public radio situation before you move to that city. I’ll probably move to Los Angeles in the next year or two, so naturally, I’m submerging myself into all kinds of L.A.P.R. podcasts.

KPCC’s Off-Ramp [RSS] [iTunes] is one of the richest of these. I don’t quite know how to describe it except by the very, very dopey genre name “magazine show.” For those not into public radio, a magazine show assembles a bunch of loosely associated short pieces with lowish-medium to highish-medium newsiness value, unites them with a host’s voice, and calls it an hour. Off-Ramp’s concept is to keep more or less within the confines of Los Angeles, focusing on Los Angeles stuff: hidden wineries, anime conventions, Chicano rockers, “entertainment legends,” Phil Spector.

It actually seems to be a pretty amusing, informative, effective guide to Los Angeles culture, to the extent that there can be an “effective guide to Los Angeles culture.” I do not say this because I’m a displaced, embittered New Yorker who demands to know if you call this a bagel. I say this because L.A. contains so freakishly many types of culture that most attempts at making a Baedeker are doomed from their very conception. Fortunately, Off-Ramp doesn’t strain to be comprehensive, instead picking a series of cultural entities that might be interesting: a conversation with an obese nude model here, a search for L.A.’s most fêted hot dog jonts there. (There are even segments from The Dinner Party Download included, which remains, I’m saddened to inform you, just a bit too slick.)

While I can totally see how this radio kaleidoscope of neat L.A. stuff would be what you want to hear while driving around town, I can’t help but sometimes be irked by the short length of the individual segments. I’d normally have no choice but to rue whatever seems responsible at the time, but the Off-Ramp podcast feed provides longer versions of some of the show’s interviews and other reportage. The most fascinating stuff I’ve heard on the show comes in these “extras,” which includes an extended-mix around-the-picnic-table conversation with contributors to the L.A. literary journal Slake [MP3] or an uncut version of host John Rabe’s interview with the co-creator of Columbo [MP3], who’s evidently still writing new Columbo stories.

I am thus left in the awkward position of wishing that public radio would start to sound a little less like Off-Ramp and a little more like Off-Ramp’s podcast. Perhaps magazine shows could morph into, oh, novella shows, at least? While all the radio version’s quick hits about novelty food and entertainment-industry eccentrics reinforce my desire to move down there, but it’s the long-form stuff that really seals the deal.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]