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.

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.

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.

In fact, if you go to williamwolfe.net, you’ll find yourself directed to matthewtrisler.com. I haven’t abandoned my bachelor name totally – I still use it for creative pursuits.

It’s useful for Matthew Trisler to hang around for SEO, I guess, but what becomes of ol’ William Wolfe? Well, there’s that one page in the McSweeney’s book of lists, and I think the songs on my MySpace page are still tagged as William Wolfe, but he’s dead.

Enter Nazanin Rafsanjani’s contribution to this week’s “On the Media.” A journalist from the Harvard newspaper wrote a story a few years back about anonymous sex via Craigslist. He doesn’t want that following him into his new career as an elementary school teacher. So he changed his name and had a funeral for it.

"Halloween Mask, 2005" by huberton on Flickr

Which is a little bit better than poor William Wolfe’s fate, set adrift in a vast sea of Google results.

There’s also an interesting story about creative nonfiction/memoir/personal essay, wherein Brooke interviews Ben Yagoda. He doesn’t seem taken with the genre, despite having written a history about it.

It doesn’t help that memoir’s reputation as a genre has been sullied by self-indulgent writers who bend facts to get at truth – which needs to be done on occasion in creative works, though never in journalism, which deals in facts, anyway, and not greater Truths.

The problem I see with that situation is not that facts aren’t valued, but that the writers are frequently disingenuous about where they bend the facts.

Here’s the real kicker though.

In the signoff, Bob claims his name, too is Brooke Gladstone! Whoa!

They’re spoonfeeding us. It’s more fun to have to work to spot The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

With that, though, Radio Sweethearts is produced by Matthew and Kerry Crawford Trisler in Memphis, Tenn., with the full knowledge – and less consent than amused tolerance – of Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield.

We won’t be covering the next two weeks of On The Media, because they’ll likely be repeats anyway, and we’re not holding our breath over here for any mention whatsoever of the end of “Editor and Publisher.”

Who will watch the Watchmen, Brooke? We wanted you to pick up the ball so we can change our tagline to “Watching those who watch the watchmen.” Also, “watch” is a weird looking word.

The Crawford Trisler household wishes everyone who’s stuck with us this far a Merry Christmas, and we’ll see you – briefly – next week.

It’s cold. There was even a snowball fight in Times Square the other night.

We haven’t had any snow yet, but the fact that all of our windows are single-pane makes me terribly grateful for that.

All of this is to say that we don’t get a whole lot of time off of our day jobs, so we’re not really taking this time off from R/S. Not fully. We’ll be a bit sparse and sporadic until the first week of January.

"My Nephew & Creepy Santas" by Radio Rover on Flickr

I’ll be posting my “On the Media” commentary tomorrow, and we’ll call it a week. Next week will have attention paid, as well, but I can’t predict that.

You all hang tight. Or rather, go, scatter, be with your loved ones. It’s Christmas. They’re more important.

Hi, how are you?

You don’t know me, but my name is Kerry Crawford Trisler, and I’m the (snarkier) half of the blog radio-sweethearts.com. It’s one of very few public radio fan / critical blogs. We don’t work for NPR or PRI or anything – we sort of see ourselves as the ones watching the ones watching the watchmen.

But I’m not here to tell you about my blog, Jesse. I’m here to talk to you about our relationship.

I know you run a very successful and fun radio show called Sound of Young America, one that I should listen to and enjoy. I’ve been told by many people (both in public radio and civilians) that you’re a lovely and talented person. But, I just can’t get into it. There’s something about it that just grates on me.

I just can’t buy into your show or your whole “America’s Radio Sweetheart” thing. And (this is unfortunate), when I can’t decide how to feel about something, I immediately hate it. I’m a woman of action, you see.

A large part of my discontent may come from your bio on the WNYC Web site. I hope you didn’t write it, as I don’t agree with people who brag about how fascinating and funny they are. I have an ex-boyfriend like that, and I don’t like being reminded of him when I listen to the radio.

So, Jesse, I need your help. I need you to help me make a decision about you and your show. I need you to help me choose once and for all if I love it or hate it.  If everyone that I trust with regards to radio likes you, I should, too, right?

I’d like to talk to you sometime and get all of this worked out. Email me, please.

Thanks!
Kerry

Anyway, there are more immediate concerns, like jailed journalists, how some countries try to suppress you even when you don’t live there, and how Indian movies depict Indians who’ve left.

Okay, so that last one doesn’t fit. But the story called “Indians Abroad” is fun, even with the part about the “last scene from the movie Pirava, in which a blind mother weeps after her son has been killed by the police and her husband has had a mental breakdown.” I’ve had a long day.

This in-house interview about the history of the depictions of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) in Indian cinema with WNYC reporter Arun Venugopal doesn’t sound like much fun, until you hear Brooke go all mealy-mouthed over the pronunciation of the movies’ names, the giggling about the song “Dum Maro Dum,” and Brooke’s last question, “Last question: Kumar, good for the NRI, bad for the NRI?”

The answer: Great.

And then the interview closes with a clip of Kumar presenting the smokeless bong.

Dum Maro Dum, Brooke. Dum Maro Dum.

[As Venugopal points out, the song title "Dum Maro Dum" translates as "here, have another puff" - though really I prefer the Kronos Quartet's translation: "Take Another Toke."]

This recap was written by Matthew and ‘edited’ in a loosely defined fashion by Kerry.

I even dug up a “This American Life” episode that served as a great example of the similarities between Howard and my friend.

But I was wrong.

The episode I wanted, it’s not here, it must be in La Jolla. Reader Jack Busch – who is something of a kindred spirit of ours, with his Wiretap fan blog – dropped a comment on that earlier post to remind me about the TAL episode “Recordings for Someone.”

It’s Josh Karpati who reminds me of my friend, with his insistence that every new idea is “pure gold.” And with his habit of leveling insults at Goldstein that may be more appropriately leveled at himself.

I’m not going to say much about the episode – if you’re a TAL fan, you’ve already listened to it more than once. And if you haven’t heard it, I diggy-don’t want to spoil the beauty of Jonathan Goldstein’s stentorian tones about a particular inadvertent piece of comedy.

"Weeki Wachee Mermaids" by Rusty Boxcars on Flickr

- The president makes speeches and hardly anyone listens, save for the media, proving that whole Fireside Chat thing wrong. According to the awesomely named political scientist George Edwards III, these speeches rarely result in any action by the American people. That begs the question, are Americans lazy, or are the speeches just that uninspired?

- Bob interviews Slate’s war reporter, Fred Kaplan, who also happens to be married to Brooke. Needless to say, both Bob and Kaplan sound less than thrilled with the interview. Where’s Brooke in all of this? Maintaining her journalistic integrity, for sure.

- Incidentally, the song played immediately after the Kaplan interview is Dan Auerbach’s “Heartbroken, In Disrepair”. I think they’re trying to tell us something.

- L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner died this past week of an apparent suicide. He came out as transgendered a few years ago and wrote for a while as Christine Daniels. Eventually, he returned to writing under his male name. Listen to the story for the recordings of Christine reading her column about trasnforming. It’s a total heartbreaker.

- Finally, this week sees an OTM journalist sneak into one of Japan’s elite Kisha Clubs. And no, before you get all excited like I did, a Kisha club is a corrupt little press club, not a gathering of girls named Keisha. The story sounds like it belongs on “This American Life” – I wish OTM would use this kind of storytelling more often.

This recap was written by Kerry, who was all alone, much like Bob in this episode. Only, I didn’t have to interview the spouse of my secret beloved or anything uncomfortable like that.

Carl Kassel by Melody Kramer

Like many Americans, I wake up with Carl Kassel every morning. Which sounds dirty.

He’s always on my radio, the first coherent voice of the day, reminding me that it’s now 8 a.m. and I need to speed up the getting ready for work process.

Alas,  Carl, my elderly voice of reason, is finally calling it quits with the morning newscast. He’ll still be a regular on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, but now he won’t have to get up at 1:05 every morning.

Which makes me wonder – what time does Carl Kassel go to bed in order to get up at 1:05 a.m? Doesn’t that put a damper on his social life? I mean, I know he’s 75 years old and all, but I’d think he’d maybe like to have dinner after 10 a.m.

Congratulations on your semi-retirement, Carl. May your jersey hang proudly in the NPR lobby.