Mistakes Were Made

I recently decided to to purchase http://www.carscafmoo.com (do *not* go there — it is extremely not ready yet).  I was going to register the domain through WordPress for the low, low price of $18 annually, which would have allowed me to port this blog over seamlessly (like — really seamlessly… like going to ccm.wordpress.com would just redirect you to ccm.com).  But what I really wanted was a chance to develop my own website back-end — twiddle around with PHP scripts, build out customized themes with my own CSS, explore Python; you know, fiddle with how real websites get developed in the real world.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t let you do that.  If you register with WordPress (and perhaps pay for some additional adds-on), you can build a pretty bitchin’, full-featured website without writing basically any code.  A WordPress site also takes care of a lot of the administrative work that’s nice to have, but not strictly necessary — basic stuff like following and comments (both of which are pretty customizable), but also things like alerting you when someone has commented on or followed your blog, or even linked to it, and page view counts and the like.  And that’s, like, totally rad — except if you actually want to write code, they direct you to this page, which lists hosting options.  External hosting gets you none of those sweet WordPressy things, although you can then download WordPress and have all of its features available for your website or whatever, which is actually pretty cool, and perhaps something I will, nay must, explore, especially when I eventually port this sucker over to there. 

Anyway, assuming I want to develop my website from the ground up, he’s what I should have done.  I should have built out the basics of my website locally, probably designated a folder on my local machine as the web root, figured out a way to serve that out through apache (preferably limiting the IP addresses served to local host so I’m not serving it out for the world to see), spent a month or two building up the PHP, JS, & CSS libraries required to make my site run smoothly, back-populated the existing post history into the new format or whatever, crossed my t’s and dotted my … lowercase j’s … , and then, once everything was all neatly tested out and packaged up — WHAMMO, roll-out!  Huge success!  Standing ovation! High fives for everyone involved!

Pictured: both the standing ovation and “everyone involved.”

But what I did was, instead of doing any of that, I just blew a cool $100 registering with BlueHost for a year (it was the cheapest single-year plan).  I then proceeded to spend the next 3 hours twiddling around with Twitter Bootstrap and the header image I have on this blog in order to get the very, very simple header currently up at http://www.carscafmoo.com (go ahead, click the link at your risk…).

Or don’t bother. Here it is.

The impressive thing is that I actually have some experience with web design from work (and admittedly I frequently forget how the web HTML / CSS / JS part is the stuff that takes me the longest, not the actual operational code work), but what struck me was how surprisingly difficult it was for me to get off the ground here — not really in terms of the hosting setup being confusing or hard to deal with; the registration went really smoothly and pretty much immediately after clicking the confirmation button, I went to the website and it totally existed and everything.  What’s incredible is the insane amount of overhead that I just completely take for granted at work — and all that despite not having to set up the server and run apache (which, actually, I’d like to figure out how to do sometime).  Things like versioning systems and test spaces are just completely missing for me, and I have to build them out from scratch, which will be hard since I don’t yet have SSH access, and when I do get it I probably won’t have root access (or maybe I will???).  Speaking of SSH access, I don’t think I have any way of copying files as I write them locally up to the server other than through their web-based SFTP client (at least not yet), which is a huge pain in the butt for debugging.  I probably spent all of 30 seconds setting that up at work, and I literally don’t even know where to start with this site.  Needless to say, there is a ton of stupid nonsense I’ll have to figure out between now and actually launching the website.

So where does that leave me? Right now, I have a website that totally exists and people can go to it DEAR GOD that has exactly zero features and will take me, I dunno, at least a month and a half working in my spare time to get anything going on, and I’m paying almost $10 a month for it.  And the first step in that many-day journey is to figure out the very basics — stuff like 

• Access
  • SSH and exploration of the server (I don’t even know what OS it’s running?); root access?
  • MySQL — what version are we running?  Do I have admin privs? 
• How to quickly upload files (SFTP access + SublimeText SFTP plugin?)
• Secret test space
  •  Folder structure: Maybe ccm.com/SECRETTESTING/ holds a version of the website and ccm.com/ just points to ccm.com/live or something?  Maybe I figure everything out locally and serve apache out to localhost and then test out locally?
  • Includes paths: How do I reference inclusions? (Probably relative to the file in question?  Maybe a centralized includes function?)
  • Access: Is there any way I can shut the test space off from non-authorized visitors?

Once that’s done (hopefully this weekend…?) I can start to get some content.  I at least have a pretty basic idea for that — I’d like to have a blog (which also means I’ll have to copy all of these posts over there…), but I’d also like to have other contributors (so if you have something to say and don’t really want anyone to read it, start writing it down!), so I’ll need a Contributors page with brief bios of people who have contributed and links to their most recent stuff.  I’ll want an About page that’s even remotely meaningful, and for now, that’s probably about it (although that’s a lot of work in getting folder structures and back-ends — think searching — set up).  Only then will I really be ready to launch.  I’m hoping I can be there by mid-October for obvious reasons (… it’ll almost be Halloween…?)

Once the basics are up, I’ll be able to start looking into things like tracking page views, following and commenting (assuming I can’t just plug right into that through WordPress; maybe I can, or maybe I’d rather build my own for sport); converting to Python, and adding all sorts of fun features (logins for contributors!?).  Of course, I can literally do all of these things on my current (free) blog through WordPress, but that’s beside the point — and the topic of an upcoming post, so I’ll leave that for then.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ll try to keep posting here weekly, and I’ll double-try to have my posts there make their way back here.  And if you’re reading this, remember — I’m looking for contributors!  Let me know if you want in.

T-U-R-T-L-E Power

The absolute greatest popular art is that that captures the spirit of childhood – movies like Up and Toy Story 3 literally bring tears to my eyes, and, for someone as cynical and pessimistic as I am, it’s amazing how any Muppets encounter manages to fill me with joy for days. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise is exactly in that vein – there’s nothing more childish than a bunch of, well, teenage mutant ninja turtles – so it was a no-brainer for me to fly up to Madison, WI this weekend (apologies for the late post…) to watch it with a friend of mine who feels the same way.

From a Ninja Turtles perspective, the movie was actually pretty OK. The Turtles had noses for some reason, and were a little too modern, perhaps – over six feet tall and crazy jacked, and they said “brah” instead of “dude” and sported long, torn masks and holsters for their weapons – but all-in-all it reminded me that I love the Ninja Turtles, and for every scene in which I wondered why Donatello’s voice was so high or Raphael was sporting a do-rag, there was a scene that made me happy because of how childishly stupid it was (I’m looking at you, DJ Mikey).

Which group would you rather share pizza with?

But purely from a good film perspective, the 2014 TMNT movie was, well, relatively atrocious. I’m not suggesting that the TMNT movie – or any TMNT movie for that matter; some of my favorite TMNT movies growing up were poorly made – should be made particularly well. (Seriously, the scene where Vanilla Ice just breaks into “Turtle Rap” while the fearsome foursome busts the foot clan inside an early ‘90s NYC club is among the greatest scenes ever filmed, in this blogger’s humble opinion.) And I’m not talking about the bigger, badder version of Turtles we got in this movie – sure, give Shredder a blade-gun with infinite ammo and make the Foot Clan a paramilitary terrorist organization for some reason. I’m talking in terms of just, like, the very basics of storytelling, the Heroes on the Half Shell deserve more than what they got in this case.

It starts at the very beginning – a shaky cam following reporter April O’Neil as she tries to get information through a tough, no-nonsense interview with the victim of a Foot Clan attack! Man, we must be watching the news as her cameraman hurries to follow her as she runs after her quarry, hot on the trail of an elusive gang of bandits! Wrong. Pan to her cameraman, leaning against the news van, camera clearly packed way. No more shaky cam for the rest of the film, no further mention of it. The only possible explanation is they cut the scene where he has the camera out, and they just never edited out or re-shot the shaky cam bit. That’s shoddy filmmaking.

Then you have the blatant storytelling flaws that I like to think even a child could pick up on – a mention of “first day of spring in NYC!” leading to a cringe-worthy “…looks like April came early this year” line, inexplicably delivered on a mountain inexplicably covered in a thick winter’s snow further-inexplicably connected by inexplicable sewer with NYC.

Inexplicable!

This is a basic storytelling problem – if you are married to the idea of the snowy mountain so you can have a crazy snowy-mountain-sledding fight scene, set the movie in the winter. If you’re (for some ridiculous reason) married to the “April came early this year” pun, set it in January or February instead of December. But don’t point out how warm it is and how everyone is wearing tee shirts, then move ten miles and have a blizzard avalanche scene. It’s not hard, guys.

It doesn’t get any better – the Turtles (except Raph) get locked up in cells (inexplicably they are kept awake for this) and their blood drained in order to extract precious mutagen (formerly ooze – come on guys, let’s stick to canon here), and three Turtles have three tubes coming out of them leading to a blood… tank… thing… with four tubes of blood running in. Again, not hard to catch this error; you can even fix it in post (as I’m led to believe all film-makers are running around saying all of the time).

And this is not to mention the rest of the hilarious mutagen problems – they need anyone who has the mutagen flowing through their veins, so they capture mutagen-enhanced rat Master Splinter… then punch / stab him really hard in the gut and take the turtles instead, leaving Splinter to die. The Turtles decide they need to get the mutagen so they can give it to Splinter to save him, despite the fact that it is obviously already in his body coursing through his veins also. The bad guys also have spent 15 years trying to recreate the mutagen to no avail without knowing the Turtles are out there, but they just happen to have this contraption set up and ready to go that can separate regular blood from mutagen, and they have the pathogen that the mutagen can cure just loaded up and ready for dispersal at a moment’s notice from the top of a NYC skyscraper.

Then there’s the hilarious scene where they get their blood drained (besides the “fix it in post” problem) – which involves a blood-deficient and clearly weakened Donatello telling a panicking April that the only thing that can give them the energy to break out of their confinement is adrenaline – good thing there’s an enormous adrenaline button that takes up a quarter of conveniently-placed computer console monitoring their life signs! Of course, their first priority is to save Raphael, who’s busy getting his face ground into the dirt by Shredder, who is “gonna kill him!” But as soon as they break out of their blood-draining prisons, Shredder’s gone to catch up to the evil mastermind behind the whole plan, who’s on his helicopter on the way into New York to disperse aforementioned inexplicably-ready-to-go poison. I won’t even mention that, upon coming down from their adrenaline high, the Turtles have no further blood-loss related problems, except oh wait, I just did.

Then there’s the final battle, which occurs almost immediately after this – we see the helicopter of the Big Bad approaching the dispersal tower in NYC, and Shredder at the top of the tower… except wait, didn’t Shredder leave after him – how did he get there first? The Turtles battle it out on top of the tower, including a touching moment in which they have to hold up the entire spire so that the poison doesn’t fall off and disperse itself, killing “everyone in a 10-block radius.” Not seconds later, the spire falls off the tower, no problem, because some other problem came up, so that one’s no longer important and can be ignored.

The sad thing about this is that most of this would have been fixed with like an hour more of script writing and ten more minutes of film – you can even keep the snowy mountain in springtime. The big bad gets the blood, but he needs time to separate out the mutagen and prepare his diabolical plan. The Turtles escape and travel the long distance back to NYC to lick their wounds, develop their characters, and nurse an ailing Splinter who clearly isn’t going to make it – insert mystical reason he needs the mutagen here. Then, after a day, a week, a month, a season, April gets wind that something is going on at Big Bad’s tower that night – there’s a gala perhaps, whatever — and she’s suspicious of his motives, so she checks it out. She alerts the Turtles, they recognize the immediacy of the situation and the opportunity to get the mutagen to save Splinter (¡¿and maybe they have to rescue damsel in distress April O’Neil?!) and the final fight scene happens exactly as it did in the movie.

I’m not asking for a masterpiece here – all I’m asking is that the Turtles be given a standard, boilerplate movie plot that’s executed well. It’s not the movie treatment they need; it’s the movie treatment they deserve.

The World of Tomorrow, Today

This day began as all days began, before dawn, with the sound of music.  It came of its own volition — it was not provided by a roommate or a relative with a phonograph to simulate the rooster’s crow; its source instead was a small box on the nightstand made of metals and organic compounds, which, by means of electricity alone, could keep track of the time of day and even the day of the week and would play music at an appointed hour in order that our protagonist might rouse himself in suitable time to meet his employment obligations.  Furthermore, within the box — not substantially larger than a pocket watch — resided thousands of songs (recorded not by cornet and trombone and tuba, but by strange, electrically-amplified imitations of guitars and pianos, providing complex syncopated rhythms and layers of distortion or clarity unachievable with conventional instruments), and yet only a select few, perhaps 500 or so, would be allowed to play for this important morning task.

Having so been roused, our protagonist lay for a moment in his bed; though mid-summer, the air in his housing unit was kept cold for him through a central Temperature Status Unit and would not be allowed to warm until after he had left for work, and his bed was warm and comfortable.  Suitably steeled against the prospect of the cold, he set to the daily routine of washing himself, so that he might be presentable to his employers and fellow employees.  Said routine included washing not only his face and hands, but his entire body, by means of a spray bath, with water running over the body and disappearing into a drain.  This means of self-cleaning might be employed not once, but two or three times during a day, and could be effected entirely within the confines of a person’s residence; indeed, despite living on the fourth floor (of a 10-story building!), our protagonist was able to summon water of a desired temperature simply by maneuvering a valve, whether in the bath or in either of the sinks in his housing unit.  If asked, perhaps he could have indicated whence the water came (“the river,” or “the rain,” perhaps), but he was never asked and in truth thought little of how it arrived or, after cleansing his body, where the drain sent it.

After drying himself and applying a deodorizing paste to his body, our protagonist set to dressing himself.  He selected from his closet a pair of pleated slacks and a button-up shirt.  His clothing was of sufficient quality that it would last through years of wearing and could be easily cleaned with modern processes, but he was not of sufficient means to have employed a tailor, which was seen as rather luxurious.  Instead, he had ordered these clothes through electrogram, having selected from a catalog of available fabric patterns (summoned and displayed in less than a second on his Personal Information Interface) and provided his personal measurements.  Clothing of a suitable size had then arrived 3 days later, though he had remarked about the seemingly interminable wait at the time — other electrogram services were offering same-day deliveries.

Once dressed, he grabbed a plastomer mug and, reaching into his electronic icebox (which operated similarly to his Temperature Status Unit, removing warm air from the interior and pumping it to the outside world), he opened a canister of milk, purchased some 10 days prior at a comestibles emporium and still fresh.  He poured some of the milk from the plastomer canister into the plastomer mug before adding his coffee, which had automatically brewed that morning, having been electronically scheduled to do so the night before, before returning the milk to the electronic icebox such that it might stay fresh for another 10 days.  Armed with his morning coffee, he grabbed his Personal Information Interface for work and set out the door and down the hallway of his housing complex to take the elevator to the subterranean autostables.

The autostables were constructed as successive floors up to 30 feet below the building, and his automatic carriage was stabled at the bottom, since he typically got home later than most of the other people in his housing complex.  His automatic carriage was similar to the others in the stable (of similar proportion, carrying up to 5 people with room for luggage in the back; propelled in a similar manner; of a similar height; with specific holders for his coffee mug), yet different (dark grey where others were black or white, or red, yellow or green; 4 doors where others had 2; smooth where others were angular), though they all subscribed to various standards of efficiency, safety, and proportion so that they might all use the same infrastructure.  Every morning, he drove his automatic carriage — powered by means of the combustion of carbon-based fuels (pulled out of the very Earth itself in astounding quantities) inside an engine contained entirely within the carriage itself — up the three floors, instructing the carriage directionally through a miniaturized version of a ship’s wheel and accelerating and decelerating the carriage with pedals located on the floor.

Exiting the autostables, he conducted his carriage to the autohighway (part of the largest public works project in the history of the world, a web of roads linking towns and cities across the entire continent, designed specifically to ensure connectivity across the country by means of autocarriage, which by its inception 60 years prior had become ubiquitous), which he would drive on for ten miles before leaving it to reach his office.  The autohighway was congested with other people’s autocarriages, as it typically was at this time, so the 10-mile ride took half an hour instead of the 8 or 10 minutes it would have taken with no such congestion.  During this time, he listened to publicly available educational messages, produced throughout the country and conveyed to him upon request through a network of electronic linkages known as the World Wide Electrical Information Network, ultimately leading to a series of hundred-foot-tall towers dotting the landscape, which wirelessly broadcast information through the air that could be picked up by his pocketphone.  This day, he listened to a message produced across the continent in San Francisco about the intricacies of designing buildings (frequently tens of stories tall) such that they were exited easily in the case of fire or other such catastrophe.

His office stood halfway between the city to the east and one of the aeroports that served its 6 million inhabitants to the west.  As he conducted his autocarriage, two-hundred-foot-long aeroships made of aluminum, departing from the port and carrying hundreds of people to destinations around the globe, thundered thousands of feet overhead, kept aloft not by flapping wings as a bird, but by the air flowing over fixed metal wings at the sheer speed at which they traveled — typically hundreds of miles in an hour — and powered to that speed through means of combustion of those same Earth-drawn compounds used to power the autocarriage, run through complex turbine systems, deriving the power of an entire steam locomotive.

Arriving at the turn to his office’s autostable, he turned on his turn indicator, which flashed a light on the outside of his autocarriage that other conductors would interpret as his desire to make a left turn at the next intersection of roads.  Sitting at the intersection (an automated system, optimized around efficiently and safely conducting autocarriages through the grid of roads whose standards were subscribed to by all conductors of autocarriages, indicated that he would have to wait by means of illuminating a red-tinted light), he thought about the day ahead of him — he was employed chiefly to find specific pieces of information on the World Wide Electrical Information Network by remotely accessing Information Interface Nodes and to instruct his company’s own such IINs to automatically access and store that information themselves — he dreaded the prospect of another boring day in the same boring world.

Intro to Metallurgy

I’ve already talked a little bit about addiction (I won’t link back to it, b/c nobody wants to read that trash), but I feel the need to bring it up again in light of new evidence of its overwhelming power.  I’m not talking about the dream I had last night, in which I had so much to drink that I couldn’t fall asleep in a timely fashion (???) and had to take a Xanax (???) to fall asleep (true story, not making it up, etc.).  No, I am of course talking about the modern marvel known as electronic cigarettes.

Let’s back up here a little bit.  I am not condoning smoking; I don’t need to remind you that “tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the United States.”  I have smoked 2 cigars in my life, and I found them moderately enjoyable at best.  So concludes the history of my smoking.  I don’t intend to start smoking, I don’t see its appeal, and I almost certainly never will.    DON’T SMOKE, KIDS.

Not even once.

When I’m walking around and I see people smoking cigarettes, I always turn to whoever I’m with and say (just loudly enough for the smokers to hear), “Oh my God. They look so cool.”  The joke comes from the world’s worst drug prevention strategy, of having teachers tell kids that “other kids will tell you it looks cool, but it doesn’t.”  Literally the best possible way to make a kid think something is cool is by telling him that the cool kids think it is and The Man doesn’t.  Anyway, the point is that in the 21st Century, it really doesn’t look that cool — people under about 35 grew up in a world where smoking killed at least one person they knew and loved, and they knew that it was smoking that did it.  (Admittedly, my grandfather died before I was born, so that might not actually be true for me.)  Smoking is — largely — seen as a disgusting habit that causes bad breath, yellow skin, rotten teeth, and kills people.

But then again…

On the other hand, there is something that is just wildly, incalculably metal about lighting something on fire, sticking it in your face, and then — with a huge middle finger to your own mortality — taking the toxic outpourings of that fire into your very body and proclaiming you do it because you enjoy it.

You know what’s undeniably not metal?  Loading a new Pina Colada flavor E-Liquid into what a repurposed vibrator, wrapping your hand around it like you’re giving it a handy, and then sticking it in your mouth and sucking in some sweet, sweet vapor.  Notwithstanding one of my favorite headlines of all time (“E-Cigarettes Contain Powerful, Deadly Neurotoxin” on Fox News — the powerful neurotoxin was nicotine, by the way), there is almost nothing I can think of that is less cool than vaping.  That’s right, you “vape” e-cigarettes, since they produce vapor instead of smoke.

Not pictured: Metal

And yet, at day clubs in Vegas, at night clubs … also in Vegas, and out on the streets in DC and Arlington, I see 20-something douchebags breaking out their e-cigs and sucking away at them like 4-year olds with lollipops.  I have my share of crippling insecurities, but nothing made me feel better about myself in comparison to other people than seeing a bunch grown-ass men who were bigger than me, cooler than me, and get laid more than me belittle themselves by sucking on a plastic vapor handle.

Electronic cigarettes are so incredibly far from cool that I can only see one possible explanation for their existence: nicotine addiction is the most powerful force on Earth, and if putting the nicotine in a glorified tampon applicator can’t stop it, nothing can.

12 Months Before the ‘Cast, Part II

This week, I’m picking up where we left off in Part 1 of my podcast review (perhaps more appropriately titled “Stuff I Don’t Listen To and Why I Don’t Listen To It”, or “I Get Angry At People For No Reason”).  This week, I’ll be talking about the tiny, tiny subset of podcasts that I think are even remotely worth my time to listen to, in ascending order of worthiness.

Barely Worthy

Of the six podcasts I still listen to, three of them are moderately interesting at best, and hugely infuriating at their worst.

Planet Money

I started listening to PM because I thought they would tell me about the basics of being an adult — saving, investing, planning for the future.  It turns out they’re actually a poorly-named economic-themed anecdote-based podcast.  They have some interesting tidbits, like the one about the conference that set the dollar up as the primary international currency, but an equal number that are basically pure conjecture about a dumb talking point, like the one about milk being in the back of the store.  They also have some interesting policy tidbits.  After I found out that they provide no useful information, I kept listening to them primarily because… they’re short?  They come out pretty often, which means if one episode is really boring, it’s over quickly, and maybe the next one will be moderately interesting.

One of my chief gripes with them is that they claim to be an economics podcast, but not a single one of them appears to have any economic training — they’re just reporters.  And while I understand that it’s their job to go out and find actual economists and get them to opine / spew data at people, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the reporters to have an idea of what the economists are talking about.  This comes up again in the Freakonomics podcast, but nothing infuriates me more than people saying things like “It may not make sense, but to an economist…” because it implies that economists have this magical power to see the truth through the BS.  Economics is basically just the study of the allocation of scarce resources, and applied broadly enough, that’s basically what everybody does every day — allocate scarce resources, like their time and money.  They treat economists like some sort of mythical creature with God-like money knowledge, but basically anything being explained by an economist should be understandable by anyone who has ever made a decision.

The other thing that brings this podcast down is the voices of the reporters.  Zoe Chace has the single most annoying speech pattern (even worse than “vocal fry“) — seriously, it sounds like she’s viciously attacking the words as she speaks them.  And then one of the reporters has like… maybe a lisp?  There’s definitely something lispy going on, and I end up focusing way more on how he’s saying things than what he’s actually saying.  I know this is a cheap shot, but it’s actually an important part of the presentation.  Their job as radio hosts is to present things with their voices; you’d think they’d brush up on their non-regional diction and present a palatable medium to convey information.

Would you listen to this?

 

Representative Episode

This might be my least favorite episode — it’s not really fair, since this is basically what I do for a living, but it just drives me through the roof how they are so incredibly befuddled by the end of Trading Places, especially given that their explanation of commodities trading literally comes from the movie itself.  “I watched this whole movie and I had no idea what was going on, can you explain it?”  “Yeah, watch the movie, it explains everything.”

99% Invisible

99% Invisible is ostensibly an architecture podcast, but it turns out architecture is pretty boring and esoteric, so they broadened their focus to general design.  I actually really like this for the most part; there have been some really interesting stories (like this one about the Citigroup Center building in NYC secretly being structurally unstable and needing secret nighttime retrofits) and a lot of really cool stuff about how things got the way they are (like this one about barcodes).  The reporting is usually solid, and unlike PM, the 99PI folks actually understand what they’re talking about and add to the story.  It’s also not an actual radio show, just a podcast, which means the format is a little bit more flexible.

On the other hand, the host Roman Mars is a special kind of unbearable, self-import hipster.  He’s exactly the kind of person you would expect to tell you repeatedly he’s from San Francisco or to name his kid Mazlo — or for that matter to spell it “Mazlo” instead of “Maslow,” like a less-un-normal person would do.  It could be much worse — his soft-spoken self-importance is almost always positive, singing the high praises of the tiniest details of the most boring and mundane garbage.  Still, it’s a huge drawback to the show, especially when he’s talking about, for instance, the designs that went into creating a community for hypochondriacs who think that they are allergic to plastic and electricity being near them.

Representative Episode

My favorite episode so far has to be the one about futuristic-looking interfaces in sci-fi movies; in particular, I think the “design apology” concept adds a cool dimension to a lot of these movies.

Seriously, it completely changed my view of this scene.

Freakonomics Radio

The Freakonomics podcast is well-produced and entertaining in much the same way that the books are, and while Dubner suffers from the same “… but to an economist!” problem as Planet Money, he at least understands that it’s not so much about being an economist as it is about thinking in a certain way and evaluating decision spaces, and he’s a surprisingly good interviewer.  The podcast also explores a larger economic space than PM, embracing behavioral economics and focusing less on the monetary aspects of economics.  The show also features a rich set of experts on various economic subjects, and excels whenever Levitt stops by, primarily because he sounds like such a goofball.

The reason this doesn’t make the “best of the best” cut for me is that I think most episodes lack a meaningful conclusion.  This could be viewed as a plus, since the best conclusions are almost always going to be “it depends,” but the subjects usually aren’t interesting enough as talking points to make it really engaging.  Also, I spend a fair amount of time yelling at the radio when they start discussing problems I think have obvious or incorrect solutions, and now that the Silver Line is open it’s much less acceptable for me to yell than it was when I commuted in my car.

I swear I’m yelling at my phone, not at you.

Representative Episode

The episode about quitting is probably the most representative episode — basically, taking a common maxim and examining whether or not it’s true from an economic perspective (in this case, examining the return on allocation of scarce time).

I also really liked his interview with Takeru Kobayashi.  Who knew the hotdog champ had studied economics?

Good Stuff

Honestly, these two and the winner below are all up there on my list of favorites.  But I’m ranking things, so they have to appear in some order.

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!

WWDTM is my go-to Friday podcast, since it puts me in a good mood for the weekend.  It’s also the most likely to be interesting for long journeys and the least likely for me to zone out on.  It’s a usually informative and frequently hilarious news quiz show, hosted by Peter Sagal with Bill Kurtis as a scorekeeper for three panelists, typically drawn from a pool of B-level comedians (basically the ones most likely to be on NPR…).  They also feature listener call-in games, which range from impossibly easy (the limerick game, wherein Bill Kurtis reads a limerick with the last word or phrase missing, and the user just has to figure out what rhymes, and people will routinely be like “Hmmm… you said ‘turple…’ then ‘urple…’ and it’s a color… so … orange?”  It’s incredible when someone doesn’t get it.) to impossibly hard (the fake news game where each contestant reads a ridiculous news story and the user has to guess which one is real).  I can’t imagine what it’d be like to call into that show and be told that you’re going to be on the fake news story.  I think I would cry.

There’s two things wrong with the podcast — the first is clip shows, which they do about every other month, when they’re on vacation, and the second is some of the panelists.  A lot of the panelists are great — Roy Blount, Jr. and Tom “We’ll leave the light on for you” Bodett are my favorites — but some of them are cringe-inducing, in particular this one guy, I can never remember who, whose laugh is … whatever the opposite of infectious is?  It’s like a vaccine — a weakened form of laughter that stops you from ever contracting the condition once you’ve experienced it.  But I’m sure he’s a great guy or whatever.  Hilariously, they also have Bobcat Goldthwait as a panelist.

Yeah… that guy.

Represenatative Episode

The episodes are all pretty similar, so I just tried to find one with both Tom Bodett and Roy Blount, Jr.  This one features Itzhak Perlman!

Backstory

Backstory takes a theme and explores its past in America.  The hosts are three American history professors from around Virginia, each with a specialty in the 18th, 19th, or 20th Century.  They do several 5-10 minute pieces on various aspects of the issue, typically consisting of interviews with experts or a story from one of their producers. The themes range from hot-topic issues (the “I Have a Dream” speech on its 50th anniversary) to somewhat more mundane fare (fashion in America), but the pieces are consistently enlightening and usually help to contextualize the theme and how it fits into other themes throughout history.  (In the aforementioned fashion example, for instance, they explore the contradiction of the white settlers “civilizing” mission with the Enlightenment’s fondness for and closeness to nature, and how this plays out politically with Benjamin Franklin’s coon-skin hat in France during the American Revolution.)

A look later appropriated and expanded on by one Rep. D. Crockett, (NR-TN)

Occasionally, the podcasts can be a little dry, and I have a tendency to zone out.  Also, frequently the call-ins are either yawn-inducing or cringe-worthy.  But all-in-all, as a history buff, I think this is one of the better history podcasts available — certainly the best one I’ve found so far.

Representative Episode

It’s hard to come up with a really good representative episode, because they’re all of pretty similar quality.  I chose this one because it’s topical now.

The Big Winner: Radiolab

I get the most excited when I see that I have a new Radiolab to listen to.  It’s the best-produced (some might say over-produced?) of the podcasts I listen to, and it consistently provides interesting stories that are at least mostly science-based.  It’s hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, and although Krulwich frequently plays the straight man, debating theories they’re presenting with such clever arguments as “I just feel like that can’t be true,” he’s usually saved by Abumrad, who convinces the listener of the plausibility of whatever’s being presented.  Also, they were just on Colbert.

Occasionally, they do a music episode, and I usually hate those.  But otherwise, the show is top-notch in entertainment and information, and I just wish it came out more often.

 Representative Episode

This one is actually totally not representative, since it’s their live show, but it is my favorite, because dinosaurs.  Just stop listening after the dinosaur part, though, because the rest was kinda boring and trippy, if I remember correctly.

This one was really good and is probably much more of a representative episode.

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That does it for The Only Podcast Review You’ll Ever Need.  If you know of any more I should listen to, throw them my way!