Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: “Widely Ranging Interests”

Posted by Maximum Fun on 8th February 2009


While one demands specialists in certain professions — hope springs eternal that one’s neurosurgeon, for example, is singlemindedly, obsessively, monastically devoted to neurosurgery — other positions are best suited to generalists. A broad breadth (and not simply a deep depth) of knowledge provides a distinct advantage to one’s writers, say, or one’s filmmakers, or even — why not? — one’s podcasters.

This is not the kind of argument possible to make rigorous in a few hundred words, so your Podthinker will instead marshal a confirming example. Make that two confirming examples: Mark Edward Hornish and Francis Gasparini of Widely Ranging Interests [iTunes link]. They do appear to possess what their title promises, though it would be a lie to claim that Gasparini and Hornish’s intellectual ken extends infinitely toward all horizons. In practice, the duo’s interests remain eclectic, though within the rough, misshapen bounds of the following regions of scholarship:

  1. Obscurities of history
  2. Obscurities of anthropology
  3. Obscurities of geography
  4. Making up bald-faced lies about oddities of history, anthropology and geography

Stylistically, their explorations of these areas — with special emphasis on area four — isn’t much different from the way the You Look Nice Today Guys do things: hold up a thin veneer of realism for a minute or two, then plunge, expressionlessly, into the bizarre, trying to not laugh and thus give the game away. Thing is, when Merlin, Scott and Sandwich blue-sky solutioneer about restaurants staffed by wise, dog-riding babies and ambiguously pregnant waitresses, they’re clearly talking nonsense. When Mark and Francis claim that the Micronesian island of Yap still maintains a functioning television studio [MP3] or that Jesus’ abandoned foreskin was, for a brief period, considered by Catholic doctrine to have become the rings of Saturn [MP3], who can confidently call bullshit?

Other topics touched (and grotesquely riffed) upon in the course of Widely Ranging Interests events include a television channel devoted entirely to processes (e.g., the process of lawnmowing), Gulag-wide beauty contests, the sinister effects of ergot poisoning and where to find 60-foot-tall spiders. As might already be clear at this point, the discourse meanders all over the place, sometimes chunkily, sometimes smoothly, sometimes stupidly, sometimes ingeniously. Whatever one can say of it, positive or negative, the nature of these guys’ conversations is one you’re unlikely to hear anywhere else in life, let alone in the podosphere.

This is both a plus and a minus. The very same discursiveness and fanciful elaboration that generate the bulk of the show’s entertainment value are products of a balance between fact and fiction best described as… uncomfortable. The listening experience is one of repeatedly being intellectually wrong-footed, of muttering to oneself that, hey, that’s a fascinating little fact about gigantic ancient stone money, then almost immediately realizing that it’s probably a fabrication. Unless it isn’t. But it must be. But it might not be.

Such talk can frustrate, sure, but here’s the important part: in none of these episodes is a single word spoken about The Dark Knight, nor about how rad The New Adventures of Beans Baxter was, nor about the eternal struggle between the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 that cannot be resolved. Any program that steers so artfully around the usual podcast dude subjects merits attention, especially when it has such an amusing fixation on the ownership of tiny, inconsequential, possibly nonexistent countries. (Although your Podthinker is 99 percent certain he’s read somewhere that Sealand is a real place. Maybe.)

Vital stats:
Format: erudite two-man You Look Nice Today
Running since: February 2007
Duration: 15m-30m
Frequency: twice or thrice a month
Archive available on iTunes: last eight only

[Podthinker Colin Marshall‘s once-wide range of interests has pretty much narrowed down to just podcasts at this point. E-mail him about podcasts and only podcasts at colinjmarshall at gmail. Discuss Podthoughts on the forum here or submit your own podcast for the next by-Max-Funsters column here.]