Podcast Sunday

Sunday afternoons are usually nice and calm for me. There's always some work around the house, usually some school work to prepare, but very little pressure. It's a great time to decompress. Putting the iPod on a playlist with 200 or so songs on it and hitting shuffle is a great way to create a soundtrack to the afternoon, but in the past few months I've discovered something else: Podcasts.

I know I'm late to this game compared to many people. I've known about podcasts before, but only recently have I gotten into exploring what's available and subscribing to different ones. During a road trip I took with some friends back in January, somebody wanted the radio turned to NPR to hear the show "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," which is an amusing current events program disguised as a quiz show, featuring jokes made by people who are funny, friendly, and smart -- three criteria that I'd argue no host on late-night television could claim altogether. And since I watch the news, I get to feel proud of how smart I am when I know the answers.

Not having a very high granola level in my bloodstream, I don't listen to a lot of NPR, but it was an interesting show. Interesting enough for me to schedule my weekend around listening to a radio show once a week on a Saturday? No, mostly because it isn't 1943, or whenever people listened to radio programs for entertainment. BUT. I took a shot and looked it up on my beloved iTunes, and there it was in podcast form. I subscribed and got into the habit of playing the weekly show a day later than the broadcast while I do lesson plans on Sunday afternoon. It wasn't long until I started browsing iTunes more deeply looking to see whatever podcasts were out there I might enjoy, and I found quite a few. Here are a few of the others I've discovered:

eTown
This one is great. eTown is a radio show that is almost a little too hippie of a show for me, but has great live music performances and interviews with some very respectable artists. I first heard this show played late Sunday night and then really early Sunday morning and then really late Saturday night (you get the picture of how it's shuffled around the schedule) on Cities 97 here in the Cities, so I was happy to find a podcast of it I could follow. It's also nice to be able to skip through the non-musical segments. I've discovered some great artists on this show over the years, and it's good to have it there waiting for me to hear it.

How To Do Everything
I found this one after it was plugged on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, since it's from the same production team. It's a short one, usually 15-20 minutes or so. The hosts conduct amusing interviews with reasonable experts who can provide insight into real and sometimes ridiculous topics like "How to stage a Navy SEAL raid," or "How to make Pandora Radio work for you," or "How to cure hiccups for real" (you really don't want to know) or "How to follow someone in a Taxi."

Live From Studio C
If you like the radio station Cities 97 but never get to hear their "Live from Studio C" radio spots because you have a job, well, here you go. The artists are interviewed here, even though the musical performances are largely excised -- I'd imagine there's some copyright thing at work there, or maybe they're just saving them for their samplers later in the year. Either way, I'm more interested in the interviews when I hear them. And if it's an artist I don't care about, then I'll probably just delete it.

Stuff You Should Know
I don't remember how I found this one, but it's a lot like How to Do Everything. A couple guys tell you all about interesting stuff you'd usually never stop to think about too much: how roller coasters, work, how to improve your memory, whether or not you'd remain conscious after being beheaded (apparently you would, for about 4-15 seconds), how to tell if someone is flirting with you, things like that. And regarding that last one? To that one woman I work with: Oh yes. Message received....

You can probably tell from this I'm starting to build up a nice little podcast library. And hey, if anyone out there has any favorites they'd like to suggest? I'm all ears.