To all of you couples now eligible for tax breaks and a bureaucratically-recognized thing for one another, I’m raising the drinks I’m double-fisting. A toast to you, from one of the most awesome – and non-hetero-normative bands ever – The Magnetic Fields.

Also raising the drinks is “This American Life.” On their newly redesigned website, you can find the episode, “81 Words,” a beautiful and fascinating story about how the American Psychological Association decided – because, apparently, a group of old white straight men can just decide this sort of thing – that homosexuality is not a disease.

Here’s a glass raised, from one white married straight man to everyone getting married, be you the same or otherwise. I wish you the absolute best in life.

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.

Sort of like how I just did, back there.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s up with Bob being away from his regular microphone – and I know that coupling a decent microphone with Skype can result in some pretty nice sound quality, but it sounds like Bob Skyped in over dial-up using his computer’s built-in microphone – after first recording his part of the show on an Edison cylinder.

(It wasn’t that bad. Over speakers in the kitchen, I didn’t notice the decrease in quality that Bob bemoans – and though I did notice when listening on headphones, I think it’s because I’ve begun listening for that kind of thing. (I’ve edited so much audio in the last few months, that I’ve begun to be able to read waveforms like you’re reading these words here.)

(Also, Bob, Brooke, Katya – you don’t know bad audio quality until you’ve had to edit something recorded via BlogTalk Radio.)

Bob felt that his audio quality was apparently bad enough that Bob needed Brooke to read the intro to his first story for him, as though she were reading him a bedtime story to help him sleep after a long playdate with a friend from preschool.

But what’s really bad is the blatant plagarism that “On the Media” unintentionally reveals at the end of the episode. There’s apparently a play about the closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in which – well, we’ll just let Brooke explain it:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: One of my favorite scenes is this reporter calling a politician and they are narrating their subtext.

[CLIP]:

ACTOR AS FEMALE REPORTER: Indirect question.

ACTOR AS COUNCILMAN: Insincere confusion about the point of the question.

ACTOR AS FEMALE REPORTER: Restatement of question.

ACTOR AS COUNCILMAN: Off-topic comment.

ACTOR AS FEMALE REPORTER: Same question.

ACTOR AS COUNCILMAN: Deep rumination and troubled contemplation.

ACTOR AS FEMALE REPORTER: Same question.

ACTOR COUNCILMAN: Mmm, complicated reasons why the question itself can’t be addressed as posed.

Now, this is no ‘indirect question’ I’m about to ask. It’s really closer to a direct accusation. In fact, it’s not a question at all. It’s a statement, because it’s a fact, and there’s nothing I can do to blunt that. I can only delay it, and I’ve done too much of that already.

This section of the play is lifted more or less directly from the 10th act of the “This American Life’s” episode, “20 Acts in 60 Minutes.” It’s about 25 minutes in, you can find the episode here. And try and tell me that it’s not dubious.

This week’s highlights reel was written by Matthew, much later than it should have been, and, if it had it been edited by Kerry, would have included the disclaimer that it’s probably no more plagarism than it would be if someone else started a public radio fanblog.

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

“It Could Be Worse”

I figured they decided to air it this week to lead up to the story about the economy, to show what happens when bad people decide to team up to screw over the world.

Apparently, Ira and company decided to air the episode because there’s a movie coming out about Mark Whitacre, the informant. The movie is called (obviously) “The Informant!“. That exclamation point is theirs, not mine.

It stars Matt Damon and is supposed to be pretty good. I’m going to try to make some time to see it this weekend, and if I do, I’ll report back. Have any of you already seen it?

Brooke,

I’m sorry about that gushy voicemail I sent. Sort of. The sentiment behind it was sincere, if strong enough to be a little embarassing.

Anyway, Kerry and I are both extremely grateful to you and everyone at WNYC for scoring us the tickets. We didn’t expect it at all.

I’d love to tell you all about the show, but it’s been posted already.

I’d love to show you pictures, but I didn’t want to be the guy taking pictures of the show instead of watching it. The only one I even tried was extremely blurry, and I didn’t want to try again.

Thankfully, This American Life posted some photos of their own.

Like this one, where, if you click through to Flickr and view it big, and then probably squint some, you can see us slightly to the left of the center of the 8th row back:

The whole thing was really great. Ira Glass was predictably charming. Mike Birbiglia was predictably hilarious. Dan Savage unexpectedly made us all cry. (Except for the part where I had a terrible coughing fit right when he got to the REALLY serious part.)

Starlee Kine was charming too. I was expecting that. I wasn’t expecting her to be actually kinda cute. I had kind of a big crush on her before, but her piece about family aggression therapy (it’s hard to figure out exactly how to explain) sealed it for me.

Between my thing for Starlee Kine and Kerry’s thing for Dan Pashman, I’m sure I speak for both of us when I say I’m a little relieved we decided to just exclude public radio personalities from our lists of free-pass-affair famous people.

But I digress.

It was completely unnecessary – but completely awesome – for you to go out of your way to find those tickets for us.

Our minds will never cease to be blown that you even know about us two kids fawning from Tennessee.

Thanks again. We’ll never be able to top that vacation. I just probably should have stuck with Kerry’s choice of words and said “I heart you” instead.

- matthew

I checked. I haven’t written about Mulatu Astatke before.

I find this completely shocking. For the last two or three years, after almost every episode of “This American Life,” I have had this song stuck in my head:

Yègellé Tezeta

And I couldn’t be happier with that state of affairs. There aren’t many songs that make me happier than “YeÌ€gellé Tezeta,” and there are precious few songs that better reflect the bizarre spirit of innocent, mischevious misadventure (tinged, for good measure, with sex and espianoge, just for the hell of it) that marks almost every TAL story that uses it.

Also, because Astatke is Ethiopian, it makes me think of Ethiopian food, which just makes me boundlessly happy to eat.

 img, by the way: “Ethiopiques” by FlickrDelusions.

“Air” Rollercoaster, originally uploaded by nic0.

I bought a new battery for my iBook last night. Which means that after months of eyeing a room’s outlets anytime I wanted to use my computer, I’m finally back to the land of laptop users enjoying the convenience they paid for.

But part of me wonders if my newfound good technology karma was subtracted from NPR’s today.

While I was at work earlier today, I hit a slow moment while waiting on a CD to burn. And so I hit Twitter, only to find the following tweet from Andy Carvin:

Roller coaster today on All Things Considered; the tape machine crashed so they can’t play recorded stories; live interviews only.

By “tape machine,” he of course means a giant computer, but that doesn’t make it any better. Without that prerecorded audio, the entire program is flying by the seat of its pants.

For what it’s worth, I barely noticed any difference. I think it speaks well for ATC – and the staff’s grace – that despite tech calamity, the only hiccup seems to be a bit of verbal hesitation when an interviewee is a little too eager to start talking before a question is actually asked.

Granted, it’s possible that it was fixed by the time I started listening (still going at 7:00 central, via KCRW), because I’m hearing a few stories I’m pretty sure were pre-recorded.

I really expected everyone to sound less articulate or more stuttery – I now realize why they have the jobs they have.

(Especially you, Laura Conaway – I’m really happy to hear you on ATC!)

As much as I like the work that happens when they work together, it throws me off when both programs make use of that work. Like the discussion of John Maynard Keynes. It appeared in both the January 30th “Planet Money” and the the January 30th “This American Life.”

I point this out not to criticize, but instead just to mention that I noticed it. In a very low-level way, when I was walking around on my lunch break today, listening to old podcasts.

I had almost gotten hit by a car, because I was paying too much attention to “This American Life,” but rather than turn it off, I just stopped paying attention. Survival instincts and learning instincts are not necessarily the same thing.

Then suddenly, it occurred to me that I had heard this conversation before. Which made me pay full attention again, until I remembered where I’d heard it.

It makes sense, really, that they would both use a segment produced together. Particularly when, as in this case, it’s a good segment. I like learning about the actual lives of the people who are in the news, particularly when someone, like Keynes, is no longer among the living.

NPR has collected all of their Inauguration ’09 coverage onto one helpful page. There are photos, stories, 105 year-olds, and all kinds of maps and interactive goodies.

“On the Media” was all over Twitter today, which was nice.  Also nice was their snark, which I normally only get once a week. The real question is this – was it Brooke or Bob who said the following:

(According to Matthew, OTM might want to check the cover of this week’s “New Yorker“.)

Andy Carvin also deserves a shout out for his Twitter awesomeness from  Washington.

This American Life posted their Inauguration show yesterday, and what I was able to listen to at work today was great.

On a sidenote, today was an intense and emotional day for loads of us. But I have to mention that the moment when I felt the most hope and joy over our new president was this morning, in my car, on the way to work, listening to Morning Edition. I teared up. I laughed. And I went in to work, excited about our collective future.