12 Months Before the ‘Cast, Part I

For three years, I drove to and from work either listening to The Kane Show (check that link and you’ll understand the quality of the programming) or music off of my iPod.  I wasted between an hour and an hour and a half every day this way– that’s 4-6% of my precious, precious time.  Last July, I decided to change that, and I started listening to podcasts in an effort to at least pretend to improve my mind.  A year later, I’ve been around the block enough to know what’s worthwhile in the podcast field.  Please enjoy this, Part I of The One and Only Official Review of Podcasts I’ve Listened To.

Stinkers

I frequently run out of the six or so podcasts that I still do listen to, so I can’t really afford to be that picky about what I subscribe to.  I am anyway.  I’ve completely given up on the following podcasts, in order of terribleness:

The Cracked Podcast

I apologize in advance for the length of this review; I just feel heartbreakingly betrayed by this one, because I read just way, way too much Cracked.  So much so that I frequently misrepresent stuff I read in its articles as fact.  It’s… it’s one of the worst things about me, really.  I spend most weekends delaying productivity by watching the stupid videos they make for hours.

So, when I first decided to subscribe to the Cracked podcast, I thought it would be either an awesome list of fun / hilarious stuff I didn’t know, like a radio version of my old favorite video series, or it’d be an awesome fun pop culture talking-about-session, like a radio version of my new favorite video series.  (I specifically link that one because there is, no joke, a Cracked podcast entitled “Actors Who Do Weirdly Specific Stuff in Every Movie.”  I haven’t listened to it, but it’s safe to say it’s boring and sucks.)

Let me give you an idea of what listening to the Cracked podcast the first time was like.  I listened to A Prairie Home Companion growing up, and I can remember picturing Garrison Keillor as a sort of handsome, older type — sort of an American Sean Connery.  And then I saw him, and it completely changed my view of the show — there was no way to unsee what I had seen.

 

Yeah… that’s a face for radio.

This is exactly how I felt when I listened to one of my (formerly) favorite Cracked authors, David Wong, on the podcast.  He wrote some silly “horror” novels (one or more of which was made into a movie starring Paul Giamatti) that were at least passably entertaining, and he generally made interesting articles and stuff.  But it turns out he’s like a dour, boring late-30-something boring guy who’s really boring and dour and… sad?  He’s really sad.

Another important factor is that Cracked works really well in written, hyperlinked format, so you can check out the studies and articles that are being used to justify their wild claims.  (Not that I ever do, but that one could).  Their videos work really well because they are well scripted.  Instead, the Cracked podcast takes your favorite people from the site and renders them boring and useless as they get into boring and useless conversations about stuff they half-remember from articles you’ve already read with head Cracked editor and most boring and useless person alive, Jack O’Brien.  Guys, what I’m getting at here is that the Cracked podcast is boring and useless.

I may look interesting, but guys trust me on this one: I’m boring and useless.

Representative Episode

Take this episode, with aforementioned David Wong and Jack O’Brien taking on “the true meaning of Christmas,” without any regard for what Christmas actually means historically.  Here’s a hint: it’s not “let’s get drunk and celebrate just to spite winter,” as they suggest, and instead has everything to do with role reversal, as they explicitly say it doesn’t.

This American Life

I’m going to catch flack for this one, but This American Life is boring, and Ira Glass is an annoying jackwad.  Honestly, my least favorite thing about TAL is Ira Glass; the stories go back and forth between mildly entertaining (think David Sedaris-level entertainment, where you say, “How thoroughly amusing!” and then move on with your life) and total snooze-fests, but Ira Glass just sounds like the kind of guy who grew up knowing that he was a dullard and decided to make up for it by getting like really in touch with his emotions, so that he could convey his true sense of wonder at everything from Michelangelo’s David to the masterpiece his barista just made whipping a fork through the milk in his cafe au lait.

Looks like it, too.

Otherwise, the show is probably fine.

Representative Episode

I was sort of poisoned against the show because the first one I listened to was their live show, and about half the show is Ira “My Voice is Stupid and So’s My Face” Glass just… describing things that were happening on the stage?  It actually made me physically uncomfortable how poignant he thought every single moment was.

Stuff You Should Know / Stuff You Missed in History Class

Hey team!  Do you want people to read off of wikipedia pages at you?  Great!  You can listen to the How Stuff Works podcasts!

This group really suffers from the same thing that the Cracked podcast suffers from, which is an inability to navigate to related information when you get bored.  Also that the people talking are boring and haven’t scripted anything out ; it’s literally just two people talking about what they found out about something.  They don’t even meet up after they do their research to talk about what they want to talk discuss or what was most interesting, they just put their initial discussion on the air and call it a podcast.  (They actually admitted this in an episode once, but I’m not going to go back and find it.)  The history one is usually a little bit better, but the delivery makes it sound like a middle school powerpoint presentation; they just sort of list facts and describe them as “really cool” instead of tying people and events into larger historical contexts.  Ultimately, it’s a waste of time.

Representative Episode

Some of the topics are actually really interesting, and despite the format, pretty infromative — I learned a good bit about crack, for instance, and about the Irish potato famine — but some are really boring or just poorly done.  Please enjoy my two least favorites.  Also, I couldn’t figure out how to embed their tracks in under 3 minutes, so they must be a pretty fly-by-night operation.

Stuff That’s Cool I Guess But Not For Me

Song Exploder

The idea for this one is actually totally rad.  Take a song and bring the musician on to talk about what went into creating it.  It’s a design podcast at heart, and I’m fascinated by design — the incredible amount of thought that goes into the seemingly simplest things has always fascinated me.  When I hear a song, I typically think about it as a guitar part, a bass part, a drum part, and vocals, and they all sort of work together and a song comes out, but it basically follows standard musical practice with fourths and fifths and whatever.  Maybe, if you’re going to do something crazy, you add in a keyboard.

It turns out that there’s about 30 other layers in the background, and all of them are tiny little design choices that completely change the song (“I used the theme that’s running through the bass line for the first two verses and put it up two octaves on a steel drum, but drop the resolution to the major chord so that it really gives you that sense of Caribbean heartbreak”).  Having the artist walk through these is fascinating; it’s basically VH1 Storytellers, but for the whole song instead of just the lead singer.

A media bias first brought to light through the ruthless journalistic pursuits of D12 in their seminal work “My Band.”

My principal concern with this show is that I’m not into enough hip, cool music to know anything about the songs they’re exploding.  Their episode list includes such bands as Poliça, Sea Wolf, and Nite Jewel, none of whom I’ve even heard of.  Even the bands I’ve heard of like Garbage have songs I’ve never heard of (in this case, something off a 2012 album — did you know Garbage was still making music?).  I subscribed for awhile in the hopes that something I’d ever heard of would come up, but it never did, and eventually I gave up.

Representative Episode

The first episode I heard was something I’d heard of, and it was totally rad.  Check out this explosion of the House of Cards main theme.

The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace is pretty much what This American Life wishes it could be.  It’s principally a story-telling podcast, and it presents well-told, slice-of-life stories that conjure images and emotions associated with a certain time and place.  It just happens to primarily focus on times that are not this time rather than attempting to document the present (and as a result one of the strongest emotions it conjures tends to be nostalgia).

My primary issue with this podcast is that it is very short (usually ~5 minutes) and it comes out rarely (~once per month, maybe?).  I basically got sick of seeing it not be updated on my list of podcasts and took it off.  Also, because I only listened to a few episodes, it’s somewhat difficult for me to be sure that I wouldn’t have eventually found it too sappy, boring, or, honestly, pretentious.  But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, because the episodes I listened to were pretty good, and I do love history.

Representative Episode

I can’t seem to find a good embed link for my favorite episode about the day that Niagara Falls stopped falling, but I can get a link from one of my other favorite podcasts, who occasionally use his stories in theirs:

---

So concludes Part I of The One and Only Official Review of Podcasts I’ve Listened To.  Come back next week for Part II: Podcasts I Actually Still Listen To!

Livin’ on a Prayer

It’s well known at this point that I have a bunch of New Year’s resolutions and that, when I run out of things to talk about otherwise, I go back to writing about them.  Well, since I have nothing else to write about, and since, to quote the “great” Jon F. Bongiovi, Jr., “we’re halfway there” with respect to 2014, I figured it was time for another update.

Weekly Resolutions

There are roughly 52 weeks / year, which means we should be about 26 weeks into the year up through July 1.  Here’s how I’ve done in weekly resolutions up to now.

• Work out 5 times / week:  24/26.  Technically this is A- to A range, but at least one of those weeks I worked out 6 times.  Moreover, I managed to work out 5 times a week on my 3 week vacation, and I’ve recently turned up the dial a bit (see BF%, below).  I give myself a solid A; short of an A+, but still pretty good.
• Sleep 56h / week: 2/26, F.  Maybe even F-.  I think I have to face the music on this one; it’s completely incompatible with the next resolution, since I have trouble falling asleep, and even on weekends when I don’t have to get out of bed it’s difficult for me to get 8 hours of sleep.  I’ll keep tracking it, but I doubt it’ll make the list for next year.
• Wake up earlier: 7/26 on getting into the office before 8:00 5 days a week.  This, quite frankly, is pitiful — I give myself an F.  I think if I relaxed the constraint to 8:15 or so, I’d probably be sitting at about 18 or 20 instead, and if I relaxed it to 4 days per week before 8:15 I’d be sitting at about 22.  Recent efforts have been unhinged by success in…
• 1 Date / week: 19, but if you just count overall dates I’m probably sitting somewhere in the 40s.  Admittedly, recent dating efforts have been concentrated on one person, but that was the entire point of the resolution anyway.  I give myself an A here.
• Contact 1 long-distance friend / day: 22/26, largely due to missing a single day here and there, and vacation, when it was exceedingly difficult to contact anyone.  I give myself an A here also, since I think I’ve only really missed two days.
• Write 1x / week: 25 / 26.  I managed to keep this up during my vacation, but I’ve fallen off a bit since.  Don’t worry, I actually have a ton of boring nonsense to write about — I’ve just had trouble making time to do so, since I’ve been traveling on weekends a lot recently.  I’m in town for a good stretch for the rest of the summer, so I shouldn’t have any trouble here.  I give myself a cautious A, with the caveat that what I’ve written recently is uninspired and vapid, and I really need to step up my game.
• Music 2 hours / week: 14 / 26.  I missed a few weeks due to vacation, and I missed a few weeks because I was like 20 minutes short.  That said, I’ve worked my way through almost the entirety of the Justin Guitar beginner’s course (which, if I haven’t shilled for it yet, I will now: it’s pretty fantastic.  He knows exactly what to practice and how to practice it, separating the skill areas and giving techniques with measurable results; he teaches chords first, then notes, so you can play songs from the beginning; he emphasizes ear training so you can pick up songs and think critically about your own playing), and at this point I can play a pretty wide variety of songs and styles and think of at least one way to play pretty much any chord, or something near enough that it sounds OK.  I’ve even more-or-less reached the point where I can see a new chord and sort of instinctively figure it out and switch to it, and I know just enough about music theory and finger shapes and the notes on the guitar to create any major / minor / V or VII chord I don’t know.  Despite batting just over .500 on this one, I give myself a B, tinging toward B+.  A by EOY if I can play through the beginner’s songbook and have mastered switching barre chords.

Yearly Resolutions

These are the resolutions I made for the entire year.  This category is pretty embarrassing, for exactly the reason I pointed out in my original post — if you have a full year to accomplish them, you’re going to put them off over and over and over until suddenly the year is over and you can’t do them anymore.

• Body fat percentage: This hasn’t gone down.  Like, at all.  When I gave up drinking for Lent, I expected it to go down, and it didn’t.  When I went on a cruise and ate 3 meals every day for dinner alone, I expected it to go up, and it didn’t.  At one point I started eating spinach salads every day for lunch, and I immediately lost about 10 lb and 2-3% body fat.  Then it came back.  It hasn’t gone away since.  I’m forced to believe that either my scale is broken (unlikely…) or I’m at what is really a healthy weight for me.  I’ve also re-emphasized cardio in my workouts, where if I have time once my workout is done I’ll try to get in some additional treadmill time (frequently sprint intervals), and I’ve at least started to look like I have lower body fat, although my scale doesn’t seem to believe that that’s the case.  Either way, I’m not going to get down to 10% this year, and probably ever again.  I give myself an F, but with the caveat that I’ll put that up to a passing grade if at the end of the year I at least almost look like I have a 6-pack.  Next year I will make this a more realistic goal.
• Olympic Triathlon: This one just isn’t happening.  I haven’t biked to work.  I think biking is scary and dangerous (although admittedly not so bad on bike trails as on roads).  F-.
• Dance lessons: Also has not happened; not on the cruise, not anywhere.  In fact, I went to a wedding recently, and my inability to dance was pretty embarrassing, frankly.  I should see if the girl mentioned in “1 Date / week” above is interested in taking lessons with me; my impression is she is similarly in possession of two left feet.  F.
• Join / form a band: F.  Just F.  I literally don’t think I know anyone anymore who plays anything.
• Coursera: I couldn’t finish a course I was taking earlier on Python because I “had to” go to Europe for three weeks, but it was a really easy course, and I will likely take it again if it comes back up.  Right now I’m taking a machine learning course that looks pretty promising; it was also apparently one of the first courses Coursera offered.  I give myself a C right now, with a real chance to rescue that to an A by EOY.
• Survive: Hangin’ on by a thread!  C at best.

Conclusion

Overall grade: C.  For the most part, I’ve gone a bit downhill since the last time I checked in, which is frustrating.  On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of progress in the things I really wanted to get done this year — I feel pretty good about my overall fitness level, I’ve been pretty successful dating, I’ve stayed in contact with a number of friends I haven’t seen in awhile (although I need to do better on that front, since it’s mostly the same group of 7-10 friends every week), I’ve gained some facility on the guitar.  The real thing I think I’ve done is identify certain things I just don’t care that much about (e.g., getting to work early) and certain things that are likely infeasible (56 hours of sleep, 10% body fat), and the key takeaway is that next year I’ll need to amend them in some fashion.  There’s still a lot of things I want to get out of this year that I haven’t done, and I’ll also need to start being proactive on that front, lest the year slip by and I haven’t managed to become even passable on a dance floor.  I’m sure I’ll check in with a final report card in six months, if not before.

#USMutantNinjaTurtles

“World Cup, blah blah, soccer — or should I say, “football!” — blah blah, American apathy, blah blah, we’re bad at this sport.”  That’s pretty much all I’ve heard on the radio and TV for the last three weeks.  This has ranged from the US Soccer Federation’s grand vision for soccer in America played out on the Freakonomics podcast to Ann Coulter’s recent absolutely hilarious anti-soccer rant, which shows she clearly has no clue what soccer is or what the rules are (I can’t resist picking it apart point-by-point, so here I go:

• Average NFL game: > 3 hours.  Average MLB Game: 2 hours, 58 minutes.  Average NBA game: 2 hours, 18 minutes.  Average World Cup Group Stage game?  Surprisingly hard to find, since the halves are 45 minutes and halftime can’t exceed 15 (compared to > 30 minutes for a Super Bowl halftime show), so let’s say 6 min stoppage time + 45 + 45 + 15 = 1 hour, 51 minutes.
• Ronaldo. Ronaldinho.  Beckham. Pele.  These are soccer legends.  They are national and international heroes on a scale that Peyton Manning and Tom Brady will never achieve.  Bradley, on the other hand, after coughing up a ball at mid-field with :30 to go against Portugal, is a national pariah.  Yes, it was his fault, let’s never forget that.
• Every other sport is co-ed at the kindergarten level; sex-specific traits (like increased muscle mass and height for boys and top-heaviness for girls) that account for co-ed sports becoming less competitive do not typically present themselves until puberty.  Anyone who’s played little league or watched The Little Giants can tell you this.
• It is obviously not a lot harder to score with a bunch of 300-pound idiots trying to hump you into submission, as judged by her previous statement.
• You are describing youth soccer at the Y.  Your statement about juice boxes and ribbons also applies to Little League and pee wee football.
• You’re not allowed to use a bat in football.  What actually separates man apart from lesser beasts is that we use tools.
• I have literally never seen an article indicating that women’s basketball even exists.  Your own article, in the meantime, does indicate that soccer is catching on.
• We use our local system of measurement, but for scientific calculations the metric system is easier to work with.  I visualize 147.2 centimeters as roughly a belt and a half.  How do you visualize 79.8 lb?
• “Record ratings for world cup” in the US would indicate that soccer is actually catching on. People watched the women’s game because it was the finals, and it was against arch-rival nation China.
• Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law probably didn’t affect a whole lot of people’s great-grandfathers.  However, I like soccer as much as the next guy, and it’s catching on with me.  Maybe that’s just the commy-Euro-legacy of my great-grandfather, who came to the US from Ireland.  You can trace the anti-American tendencies in my family through his son, who had the gall* to invade Normandy and Korea with that bastion of anti-Americanism, the United States Army.  Admittedly, after he won World War II, he did marry an English girl… who worked for NASA while they put a man on the freaking moon.

…aaaaand I’m spent

).

I don’t necessarily disagree with her stance that soccer isn’t catching on, or event that it shouldn’t catch on, but the argument she makes to get there is childish, bigoted, and ill-informed.  Like I said, I like soccer as much as the next guy — I watch it every four years and root for the Stars and Stripes (I’m wearing red, white, and blue gym clothes right now).  I bought a Jozy Altidore jersey.  I might even go to an MLS game after the cup.  I think soccer could catch on in the US, and I’d be happy if it did.  But there is something distinctly off-putting about soccer for the American audience…

Because soccer is the Vietnam War of sports.  In last Sunday’s game against Portugal, we played 94 and a half minutes of winning soccer, and we still couldn’t win the war.  This is a truly appealing aspect of soccer for many fans; the fact that at any minute, a small mistake could lead to a scoring opportunity (combined with generally low scoring in the game) means that neither team is rarely ever that far out of the game.  In sports like baseball and basketball, teams play each other repeatedly (especially in playoff situations), so small differences in talent eventually make themselves known and the objectively better team has a better chance of winning the series than of winning any one game.  In soccer, as in American football, the games are so grueling that series just aren’t possible, but unlike in AmFoot (as I will never call it again), in soccer the worse team can basically sit on its heels and play a sort of guerrilla defense to just prevent the better team from scoring (see USA-Germany).  This leads to closer games, which leads to more exciting games, but also higher chances that the worse team can come out of nowhere and tie (USA-Portugal) or win (USA-Ghana).

The beautiful Ho Chi Minh of Soccer

And don’t even get me started on ties.  As (apparently?) Navy coach Eddie Erdelatz said after tying Duke (GO DUKE), “Ties are like kissing your sister.”  Now think about the fact that the entire country was rooting for a tie against Germany, because a tie would guarantee that we advance to the knockout round.  If a tie is like kissing your sister, rooting for a tie is like, what, masturbating to her?  And we were also rooting for a tie between Portugal and Ghana (which would have also advanced us — see #6), and I think that’s like jerking it while watching the Lannister twins bone next to the corpse of their dead son (Spoiler alert!).  Americans are predisposed to hate ties, and soccer is, at its nature, a draw-producing sport. The NHL eliminated the tie from the game and introduce shootouts in order to boost viewership.  I don’t suspect soccer will follow suit.

SPOILER ALERT

That said, in honor of today’s game, here’s a reason why the U.S. should love soccer.  We love an underdog story, and the U.S. Men’s National Team are definitely underdogs.  When else in the last 100 years of American history has the US been an underdog?  Think about it — the third-most populous nation on Earth, more advanced than any other nation, with a military budget accounting for over a third of total worldwide military expenditures, a land that invented electricity, is facing a country barely 50 years old, with a population well under 10% the size of ours, who has to turn off its only major industrial center so that everyone can get power to watch the game against us, and that country is favored?  That doesn’t happen anywhere else.

But we made it out of the group stage!  And we almost beat those pesky Portuguese, including that beautiful Ronaldo.  Today, we face a tiny European country that’s best known for being sandwiched in between other European countries, and that country is heavily favored.  Even though we’re underdogs, I believe that we will win.

---

 

* Or should I say, “Gaul?”