If I hear one more person during this fund drive declare in their pledge message that their pledge is “for Obama,” I am going to put my radio through the wall.*

* – Which is hard, seeing how my only functioning radio is part of my car stereo.  But I’ll find a way.

On The Media: “Uncorrectable” (September 19, 2008).

The transcript isn’t up yet as I write this, but I’m just listening to Friday’s On The Media now.  This is a fascinating and ultimately depressing piece about politics, biases, and how correcting misinformation doesn’t necessarily correct misconceptions.

NPR finally cracked my last.fm top 50 artists.  It’s #45 this week.  I do a lot of half-listening to “Fresh Air” podcasts while I’m doing other things, and I guess that adds up.

I was listening to NPR a while ago and happened to catch interviews with some members of the MIT team taking part in the BP Solar Decathlon. It piqued my interest in the project and made me start thinking about solar energy, conservation, and self-sufficient homes in general. Preparing for another winter with poor insulation, natural gas heat, and typical upstate NY winter weather has made me a lot more excited about the idea than usual. I’m not just environmentally conscious, I’m cheap, too!

From my point of view, the most intriguing application of this technology is for off-grid housing. Around the time I was born, my father and uncles bought property in Northern NY and built camps there. They were primarily for hunting, but I’ve never hunted and I enjoyed spending time there. The main problem is that the camps don’t have electricity; they do have woodstoves and we could have lights and TV if we ran a gasoline generator. I always imagined turning one of the smaller camps into a little solar-powered summer home and writing retreat….solar panels and northern NY winters don’t really mix.

So, hats off to the Solar Decathalon participants. I hope that this event helps to make the technology more available to us civilians, and help affect real change in how we live!

Right now I’m listening to the Fresh Air podcast.  I’m listening to an episode from a few weeks ago, an interview with Robert Reich on an issue dear to my heart, the problems with super-capitalism (big box stores, large companies, and the rest of the current state of things) and the problems and choices caused by it.  Listen to the interview if this sort of thing interests you.

I’m listening to On the Media from a few weeks ago, and the topic at hand is Mitt Romney’s being a serious Mormon presidential candidate. Brooke Gladstone is interviewing a Mormon author, and she just cannot get the sneer out of her voice when asking religion-related questions.

I really hate NPR sometimes.

“This American Life” is doing two live shows within easy reach for me at the beginning of March, in Boston and in New York. With the usual suspects–the TAL staff, Sarah Vowell, Dan Savage, and I think Chris Wilcha is appearing in New York. He’s working on the TV series, which cuts my media-appearance degrees of separation from my favorite radio show. Wilcha did the very short-lived PBS series “Secondhand Stories” with John Freyer, in whose book I appeared. You can do the “search inside the book” thing for page 166, or maybe this link will work. [ETA: Turns out that Freyer turned some of the AMLFS material into a "This American Life" story, cutting my degrees down to one! Yay!]

One of the more surreal moments of college for me was fiddling with one of the video editing stations in the Mac lab while I was working until 2 a.m., tuning in the episode of Conan where Freyer was a guest to promote the book I was in and importing it into iMovie.

Anyway, my original point is that they’re doing these live shows, presumably to promote the TV show and charge $40-$60 for people to watch a radio show. I’m really torn. Class doesn’t get in the way of any of these, and I could rearrange work if I really wanted to. But I’m not really inclined to go alone, or spend the money, or do the requisite traveling. I find the sheer amount that they’re traveling odd, too. It’s clear that they’re either assembling more than one episodes, or multiple versions of the same piece. Hodgman and Rakoff are, sadly, performing at the shows outside of easy travel distance for me.

The Car Talk guys drive my car! Well, not my personal car, but the same model.

Vroom!