Tonight, I ran out of space on the external hard drive that houses two important things: my iTunes library, and every episode of This American Life aired since they started podcasting. Truly, the latter is a vast storehouse of knowledge, wit, and storytelling matched only by the Library at Alexandria, lost to history.
I kept them because I like listening. Because I loved the fact that I had an iPod mini filled with nothing but TAL and audiobooks from David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell. (Serious bad day cure there, even if shuffle hands you one of the sure-to-make-you-cry episodes.)
Because I could throw them all into an audio player and go all day without putting any bandwidth strain on WBEZ’s servers past the initial download.
But I had to make room for music I had just purchased. Thanks, of course, to public radio.
The fact of the matter is, while its search could be greatly improved, TAL’s Web site makes it so much easier to find specific episodes than does having a ton of files lumped in a folder.
I threw it all away. About four gigabytes’ worth of stories around a particular theme. Gone.
The Matthew Crawford Trisler Museum of This American Life Antiquities has closed its doors, and I salute it with two songs I love because of the show:
“Yegelle Tezeta” – Mulatu Aztatke
“Scrapping and Yelling” – Mark Mothersbaugh
And a bonus, a song that, to my knowledge, has not been played on TAL, but which I wouldn’t know without the show – and suits the complete lack of perspective displayed by the whining with which I filled this post
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