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SXSW and NPR and Me

Sunday, February 28, 2010

I’m heading to Austin in a few weeks to go to South By Southwest (interactive and music). It’s my first time ever, and I’m totally excited (even if I am staying a ridiculously long walk away from the festival).

That said, if any of you are going to be there for either portion, I’d love to actually meet you in person. I’ve heard that there’s going to be an All Songs Considered party, but I’m not sure where to RSVP for it.

If you, dear Radio Sweethearts reader, are going to be in Texas at the same time I am (March 13 – 20), please drop me a line if you’d like to meet up.

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Bees bring new meaning to “Workin’ on a sex farm”

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

My favorite NPR feature from this past Valentines Day was neither happy nor sad. It wasn’t even a contrarian approach to the so-called holiday.

You could, however, say it was about heartbreak and failed relationships. If you wanted to.

It’s this blog post from Robert “Emergency” Krulwich, wherein he explores the wonder of love between one bee, one flower, and the BBC Radiophonic workshop.

"Bee orchid" by Nigel Jones on Flickr

"Bee orchid" by Nigel Jones on Flickr

Okay, to be fair, the BBC radiophonic workshop only comes in because the video Krulwich included sounds like it was scored by said workshop.

Be prepared for thrills, chills, and exhiliration – this is “A ‘Will You Be My Valentine?’ From Hell.”

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New York Governor Paterson Makes Rumors Fun Again

Thursday, February 11, 2010

New York Governor David Paterson is dealing with rumors that he’s about to be accused of something bad – he’s already admitted ‘marital infidelity’ and cocaine use. The rumors are going crazy, and much like with Britney Spears, we think we know, but we don’t know.

It’s gotten to the point that the rumors themselves have become an more important news story than what they might be about or whether they’re true.

If the rumors are the news, how do you report them while making sure that Paterson’s “alleged misconduct” doesn’t get shortened to “misconduct?” Well, we just use the word “alleged.”

The difference between "alleged misconduct" and "misconduct" is that we KNOW Fleetwood Mac all slept with one another in a bed made of pure cocaine.

But this story is more complicated than that. Gov. Paterson hasn’t been accused of anything. His ‘alleged misconduct’ hasn’t been alleged yet – the rumors are merely that the New York Times is going to publish a story laying those rumors bare.

What that means is this: David Paterson, governor of the state of New York, is under fire for rumored alleged misconduct.

WTF, news media, WTF?

At least “All Things Considered” has the decency and wherewithal to report the story as it is and investigate how it got that way. It even includes this truly classic public radio line: “This truly is the scandal that dare not say its name — because nobody really knows what the heck it is.”

It’s a perfect walk on the balance beam between reporting rumors and sussing out why we love rumors.

The lesson I’ve learned from NPR’s story? More questions.

  • Can we please wait for something to become a story before making these premature ejaculations of reportage into a completely new story?
  • Or has the New York Times succumbed to the same pathetic tactic of terrible Hollywood blockbusters and cult TV shows?
  • Are they building undeserved hype in the name of selling papers?
  • Are they trying to sex up their political coverage?

I know times are rough for newspapers, but I’m not so sure that hiking up the Gray Lady’s skirt is the way to fix it.

Filed in Commentary, Journalistic Smackdowns, National Public Radio, Other Programs, Real News, The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

In Case You Missed It: Zombies = Good

Thursday, February 4, 2010

I love Andrei Codrescu’s NPR commentaries. He’s the off-kilter lovable curmudgeon uncle I always wished for but never had.

Add to that his crazy accent and crazy aptitude for the English language, and you’ve got a recipe for making me your biggest fan.

I took some notes after hearing his latest column, but I used the Dragon Dictation iPhone app. In a noisy car, that’s a recipe for some bizarre text. Allow me to share:

Under could just use call him on all things considered last night focus on zombies and vampires versus avatar or robot or computer-generated creatures at this wonderful dichotomy between things that are real nasty and some romantic getaway

What that translates to, roughly, is this:

Andrei Codrescu’s column, on last night’s “All Things Considered,” focused on zombies and vampires versus the Na’vi of “Avatar” (or robots or computer-generated creatures), and created this wonderful dichotomy between things that are rooted in humanity, with all the messiness, nastiness, and sexiness that that entails. It’s quite romantic, in its way.

I don’t question that impulsive reaction to the story, either. Codrescu even notes that “the zombie advantage is that they have human roots in the rising dead of all religions. If they succeed in crossbreeding with vampires, who also have undead human roots, they will be practically unbeatable.”

But really, I think the most telling moment from the transcription is this: “Avatars badger frogs, bearded cats and (unintelligible) are technically and generationally better motivated.”

I love Andrei Codrescu, but his accent is so thick as to be beligerently unintelligible. It can get frustrating. It’s so delightful, though, when you can make out the crazy things he says, and realize the ease with which he makes them seem rational.

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Nope. Definitely Not a Harpoon.

Monday, January 25, 2010

On our way back from visiting Matthew’s parents in Indiana yesterday, we got stuck in traffic. And by stuck in traffic, I mean that we went maybe three miles over the course of two hours. A little bit of research with our phones helped us find out that the wreck that was causing the backup had happened about 12 hours before we got stuck and involved three trucks – one carrying mail, one with a load of glass, and one full of milk. No wonder it took so long to clean up.

Anyway – while we were sitting in the car, Matthew getting cranky because he couldn’t read with all of the stop and go motion and me getting cranky because the only thing that sucks about driving a stick shift is stop and go traffic, we turned on the radio.

For all of us who thought that we were having a rough time, All Things Considered was playing a story about Phineas Gage. You may remember Mr. Gage from your college intro to psychology class. He was working on a railroad, trying to pack some explosives into the side of mountain with a metal rod. Unfortunately for him, the explosives were accidentally lit too quickly and the rod went flying through his head.

Ouch, right?
But Mr. Gage lived. Granted, he was a little messed up. Where pre-rod, he was once friendly and efficient, post-rod, he was crude, childlike and left with few career options beyond being a sideshow freak.

Anyway the point of the story is that a collector of daguerreotypes found a photo of a handsome guy with one eye closed holding what the collector thought was a harpoon. Ahoy, a whaler! The collector posted the photo to Flickr, where another Flickr user mentioned that it might be a photo of Mr. Gage.

So now, we know what he (and the rod that went through his skull) looks like. And you know, it’s pretty normal for a guy who had a traumatic brain injury.

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Breadwinner Blues

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

No woman I would ever be involved with goes to school for an MRS degree.

Convenient, then, that I ended up married to one of the more ambitious, self-motivated women, nay, people I’ve ever met. Kerry certainly gets more press than I do, that’s for sure, but she also makes quite a bit more money.

I Love Memphis - Most Influential Memphian

Kerry made the cover of the local alt-weekly this week!

I’m totally fine with that, but there is that masculine bit of pride that creeps up any time I come up a little short at the end of a pay period.

In short, I can corroborate the information presented in “Modern Marriages: The Rise Of The Sugar Mama,” a story from Tuesday’s “Morning Edition.”

Whereas if the finances were the other way ’round, Kerry would probably never hesitate to let me lend her a little, I simply can’t bring myself to ask. Kerry usually has to offer. She’s kind enough to insist – even though I insist on keeping a tab, which I pay back immediately on pay day.

Our marriage hasn’t been a way for either of us to get ahead. We went into this intending to ignore traditional gender roles, and function as equal partners. In most areas of our lives, we’re successful in this. We share chores (some days better than others), and split the bills, but we are anything but financial equals.

I know exactly what Derek Monnig means when, talking about how his wife makes almost twice what he makes, he says “Well, she gets called Sugar Mama quite often.”

I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud, but you get the idea.

I bring in what I can, Kerry brings in what she can, and that’s good enough for us. It’s just that Kerry brings more in. And again, there’s that masculine pride.

On top of that, my family never talked much about money when I was a kid, other than the occasional “be better about money than I am” talk from my dad, which never included information about in which manner he was bad about it, nor how to avoid it.

So I tend to avoid conversations about money.

That, along with the fact that I’d be worried that I wouldn’t be able to support us if I needed to, makes me feel guilty for making less. I know that’s silly.

I’m extremely proud to be associated with Kerry in any capacity, and I’m stoked that her boundless ambition – and drive to simply not suck – is being rewarded.

I’m just not sure how to handle my end of this new economic order.

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Welcome to the third year of Radio Sweethearts – We’re shaking it up.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

If you follow us at all, you’ve already noticed some changes happening around here with the posting schedule.

And, no doubt, someone has noticed that we haven’t written about this week’s all-Bob “On The Media.”

It’s been bothering us and puzzling us, and I think we’ve finally found the answer.

We’re a bit burnt out.

We both make out livings on the Internet – blogging, etc, for the monies. It doesn’t leave much room to do more for fun – let alone for free – when we get home.

We love public radio, but the pressure to make a new post nearly every day has turned listening into a bit of a chore.

Which – it should be noted – is no slight to the fine and lovely folks who make the medium of radio go.

But our bedraggled feeling has made it difficult to create consistently interesting, let alone compelling, content that we can proudly attach our names to.

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t breathe that sigh of relief just yet, Bob Garfield. We’re not going away.

As of today, the domain, radio-sweethearts.com has been registered to us for two full years. We’re going into our third year of posting almost every day, and honestly, we’re struggling to find new ways to say “we liked when you did this” and “we hated it when you did that.”

We’re moving to a weekly format, of longer, more in-depth posts about more general topics. We hope this will actually serve our audience better than the glut of half-hearted “neat story” posts we’ve been indulging in lately. Someone told us once that they liked how we actually hold people’s feet to the fire, and we want to get back to that.

So, as we enter that third year, we’re renewing our commitment to that idea in the best way we know how.

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Madeline Brand Interviews a Foreigner, is not Cold As Ice.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

A couple days ago, we were trying to remember the name of a British comedian. As is so often the case, Morning Edition answered our questions for us.

This guy:

John Oliver on TV

Is John Oliver. He’s the guy whose name we were looking for.

And he’s going to win the States back for Mother England. Which would be good for England, because, as Madeline Brand unwittingly implies, they probably don’t have TVs or anything over there.

From Memphis, Tenn., this is Senior Male Correspondent Matthew Crawford Trisler.

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The Center of Attention

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

A few years ago, I did a semester-long stint as a substitute teacher. I’d never had any kind of pedagogical training and had no clue what to do when a particularly loud-mouthed seventh-grader wouldn’t sit and keep his mouth shut during the “quiet homework time” that the teacher’s notes told me that the kids were good with.

After about 45 repetitive minutes of:

“Jeremy?”

“Yes, Mr. Trisler?”

“Sit. Down.”

Two ideas struck me:

  1. Never do this again.
  2. If the problem is that he won’t be quiet, use that to humiliate the kid.

The brilliant thing about that second idea is that it worked.

"Under Pressure" by goran konjevod on Flickr

I made Jeremy (or whatever his name was), go to the front of the class and give a speech about something he knew nothing about. I think I made his topic something like “The Distribution of Causational Philosophies Among the Space-Time Matrix, As Outlined in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

It didn’t actually humiliate him – which feels good to me in an ethical sense – but it gave him the attention he wanted, in a sanctioned – and therefore, much less disruptive – manner, and suddenly turned me into everybody’s favorite sub. Which wasn’t what I planned, but I’m not about to complain.

Every class I had for the rest of the day begged me to do the same for them. I highly recommend this technique to any teacher struggling to rein in an unruly loudmouth kid.

But, since no scientific theory is proven until the evidence is repeated, I present you with Act Two of this last week’s “This American Life,” called “Lewis Time,” in which student, loudmouth, and lovable scamp Lewis de la Cruz turns his school life around after his teachers implement something very similar to (and maybe actually funnier than) the impromptu speeches I made my students give.

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OTM Highlights 1/1: A New Year and some New Ideas

Monday, January 4, 2010

Hey, just because I refuse to make resolutions for myself doesn’t mean that I have to refuse to make them for others, too. Here are some things that Brooke and Bob should consider for the coming year.

1. Get Bob a better microphone. For the last few weeks, it’s sounded like Bob has been coming to us live, under water and in space.

2. Continue to call BS on the people who are supposed to be calling BS. I’m a big fan of this week’s story about the biggest media mistakes from 2009. You guys are making it clear that the watchmen need to do just a little bit better job policing themselves.

3. Hire the rogue. Seriously – If you’re going to continue to watch the watchmen, you guys should hire 19 year old guerilla fact checker Daniel Lipman.

4. Keep teaching us valuable life lessons (like how to ambush the unsuspecting). Make sure we know all of the little things we need to know before trying your life lessons – like tag teaming an ambush so that bathroom breaks are possible.

5. Let Brooke say “snuggie” more. It’s super cute when she says it. You can totally hear her grinning.

Happy New Year, everybody. May you get everything you ask for in 2010 (including that Washmatic you’ve always wanted).

This recap was written by Kerry and edited by Matthew, who tried to make a snuggie for our hyper, 75-pound dog last night. It was as hilarious as you’d think it would be.

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