If you're interested in Bay Area local news, The Bay is a KQED podcast that does deeper exploration of local stories, and a young journalist of my acquaintance is about to be starting work on it as an assistant producer. But probably not what you're looking for.
The newest audio drama I'm listening to is a comedy, Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. Its major characters are Octavian, Antony, Octavia, and Cleopatra all getting into sticky situations as the Second Triumvirate bumbles around trying to govern Rome in its early days of total power / no money. I have no idea how they're going to handle the darker end of the story, especially what Octavian did to Octavia. And all the Romans have Northern English accents. From the makers of The Magnus Archives.
Well, the three Romans in the list above sound Northern. Lepidus sounds like a posh, extremely out-of-touch Southerner.
Empire by William Dalrymple (who's written some great books) and Anita Anand is excellent and very entertaining, they have such great chemistry I keep thinking they must be having an affair.
Empire is pretty good, yes, I'm listening to it too. But it comes out so frequently - an episode every few days! All that ad money for editing, I guess.
I think they have chemistry partly because Anand has the newsreader's ability to keep talking no matter what.
What nags me about Empire is it sort of flits around. It tells "the story of" such-and-such Empire in a way that sounds like it's meant to be comprehensive but is more like a bunch of little vignettes, and sometimes they seem more focused on the "Most people assume that X, but actually Y!" moment over getting real points and trends across. Part of this reaction of mine might be unfairly comparing them with the laboriously continuous storytelling styles of Mike Duncan and Everett Rummage (Napoleon).
It was apparently a one-off at six episodes, but Marvel's Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable Radio Show was fantastic (a direct translation of the Ryan North-penned comic book, which is unsurprising as he was one of the writers; the conceit is that Doreen is doing a college radio show now that she's been outed as a superhero).
Kelsey McKinney's Normal Gossip ("friends of a friend" write in with true gossip that they know about; Kelsey tells the story to her guest, usually a comedian, and they try to predict what will happen next/discuss bad choices being made) is reliably funny.
7: Oo, I didn't know that one, despite having purchased all the first several North series of USG.
What nags me about Empire is it sort of flits around. It tells "the story of" such-and-such Empire in a way that sounds like it's meant to be comprehensive but is more like a bunch of little vignettes, and sometimes they seem more focused on the "Most people assume that X, but actually Y!" moment over getting real points and trends across.
This would absolutely drive me nuts. Podcasts do this all the time, where they claim they're going to cover some topic, but they don't have any narrative arc and they just sort of jump around. It leaves me feeling like I don't know how much I don't know.
But it's very lively and entertaining, I like the Napoleon podcast but that is hardly very lively. If I want the lowdown I'll read a book.
Well, I do like lively and entertaining.
I'm going to create a podcast that is me reading plagiarized Paul Harvey scripts that have "And now you know the rest of the story" repaced with "At least that's what some asshole on Reddit says."
The funny-looking eyewear, if they even work, seem like they would only work for the kind of motion sickness that you get from staring at a phone screen while in a moving vehicle, but not for the kind of motion sickness that you get from being oscillated at 0.25 Hz.
Unless you're recommending something.
Would you like a Hertz doughnut?
I like the British History Podcast. It's at the right level for me coming in not knowing much, the host has a good voice a(nd a purely U.S. accent), and an idiosyncratic leftist perspective with some reliance on Marxist theory. Free and no commercials. $5/month you get bonus episodes featuring the main guy's wife, whose perspective is more sociological and feminist. Unlike some of the empire type podcasts, it dosn't limit itself to a few vignettes -- 435 free episodes so far, and another 130 bonus episodes, and we're still in the eleventh century!
Mind you, a fuck of a lot happened in the 11th century, in England, Scotland and Wales.
19: He makes me shake with anger. I cannot believe what a prick he is.
Paxton is more anti-abortion than the most tyrannical of medieval church or secular officials, no?
Probably. They didn't have the technology though.
I'm surprised I generally like podcasts as a concept because I dislike radio. But history podcasts generally trigger the same reaction in me as "I don't want to watch a video, let me read something" unless they're done in a more informal style like "you're wrong about," which isn't exactly a history podcast.
Fanatical opposition to abortion is actually a pretty recent thing even in Catholic circles, where it started in the eighteenth century as a result of a weird theological fixation on the status of the unbaptized dead. (The opening scene of Tristram Shandy is a lampoon of this from a Protestant perspective.) Medieval authorities certainly would have been opposed to it in theory but it wasn't high on their priority list.
Plus the whole quickening thing. And no testing to identify early stages (not sure if they were injecting urine into frogs yet).
Recreational frog injections were big, but the science came later.
"Highlander 2" didn't come out until the late 20th century.
18: I liked the BHP until I got at it with the host on Twitter about the existence of frequent extraterrestrial visits. IIRC he was sloppily and credulously promoting a very bad paper claiming to have seen alien craft zipping around above Ukraine at many thousands of miles per hour. (Why, yes, they were using a new technique, untested at that range, using underpowered equipment.) He got very snippy about it (I did, too, admittedly), and made weird claims like scientists being able to easily measure distance in all cases. Really disappointing: what I enjoyed about the BHP is that he reads the sources and tries to do so critically. If he's this sloppy and unduly self-confident with stuff I can look up, can I trust him with the historical sources I'm not familiar with? Just a huge disappointment for a show I enjoyed.
20: He's noted that the 11th century introduces the problem that so much happens and we have so many retained sources that he has to start making decisions about what to cover.
30.2: It seems like it may be a mistake to start with one of the few eras that (a) is of enough general interest for a podcast and (b) is so little documented that you can relate every historical source in a reasonable amount of time.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why Reddit is full of alien shit now. Maybe it always has been and I've just started getting them, but I assume it has something to do with the general wall of bullshit that is the Republican Party. Probably indirectly.
A major US gov UFO (though they use a different acronym now) was released afew months (?) ago. Maybe that.
I recommend Spy Family,* for funny feel-good silliness (with a surprisingly strong moral core). **
*Though I haven't started season 2 yet, don't know if the quality is maintained.
**I do not recommend watching while driving, motion-sick, or being oscillated.
I thought of that as more "effect" than "cause." But I could be wrong. I admit to not looking into it at all. I watched enough "In Search Of" as a kid to get that out of my system.
I get quite bad motion sickness, but I get sick even when I'm careful to keep my eyes closed, so I'm not sure those glasses will work for me.
I saw Godzilla Minus One, which I absolutely loved. I watched it in Tokyo at a Toho Cinemas theater, which added to the experience, but it was an objectively great film.
I've never been able to get into podcasts. It's hard to remember to listen to things that aren't music. Also, I listened to a lot of This American Life ten or fifteen years ago, and really overdosed on that deadpan Daria voice that everyone used back then. Do they still do that?
I just finished WaPo's podcast, The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop, which had a lot of depth on the execution of Maurice Bishop and subsequent US invasion of Grenada, in addition to the mystery "where is the body" aspect. The best part is the clip of Ronald Reagan mispronouncing "Saint Lucia."
Day after tomorrow is the feast of Santa Lucia.
38: I was never able to listen to This American Life. I have trouble articulating what I mean by radio vs podcasts, maybe just a sort of conversational style that's different than an interview/reporting style. But This American Life strikes me as radio, and when a podcast decides to replay a radio story as their episode it feels different than the usual episode.* Just to be inconsistent, some of my favorite podcasts are produced by radio outlets.
*Some selection bias here because if I thought the whole show sounded like radio I wouldn't listen.
Well, presumably if you were President of the United States talking about the local allies giving credibility to your invasion, you should have been briefed to pronounce it "Saint LOO-shə" but honestly I can believe there was not a single person in the Reagan White House who knew that. Nowadays we have DEI to prevent that kind of fuck-up.
Sent Lisi as the residents say. AIHMB, I had a case there long ago. Dinner with Sir John Compton was definitely a career highlight. Impressive fellow
dead loch - hilarious tv show, thoroughly recommend.
elisapie's recently released album inuktitut is fantastic.
For actual podcast recommendations:
I just started listening to The Big Dig, which seems like it will be good.
Maybe too stressful: On Our Watch.
Fun with failed companies: RIP Corp.
None of those podcasts have very many episodes, for better or worse.
The Golden Spruce is good, if a bit self-indulgent.
there's a podcast about the new berlin airport, didn't finish it not bc wasn't good but probably bc work travel sched lightened up thank god so was less focused on blocking out air travel for endless hours. but it was good!
i very much enjoyed she came to me (movie) but then i just enjoyed a documentary on the shitshow that was the intro of cane toads to queensland au & my better half rather promptly fell asleep i surmise bc he wants to preserve a good opinion of me, so.
also to 1 - congratulations!!!
I've been watching Vikings: Valhalla, speaking of 11th century England. Canute hasn't married Emma of Normandy yet, but knowing that's where it's going make the path worth it.
23: And Paxton is at least comparably corrupt. Anyone got some theses and want to use his forehead as a door?
"The Unconventional Soldier" has a strictly limited base of appeal but it's one that happens to include me, so I rather like it. Very much of the "pull up a sandbag" school of podcasting.
I tend to listen to radio programme archives rather than actual podcasts - In Our Time is available in podcast form, for example. If it's not on iPlayer, it's in archive.org.
"Thank you for downloading an American podcast. Frog in a well, making the amphibian phibian."
And a strictly limited base capable of parsing the accents.
26 (on the history of anti-abortion in Catholicism): thanks, I thought it was a bit earlier than that, but as you say it was low on the priority list. The Wikipedia page has some great lines:
"The US Conference of Catholic Bishops considers Augustine's reflections on abortion to be of little value in the present day because of the limitations of the science of embryology at that time."
"In the 13th century, physician and cleric Peter of Spain, who according to some sources became Pope John XXI in 1276...."
48: I enjoyed it, and recommended it to a Northumbrian going through their own despair over losing a beloved tree.
AIHMHBAWCTMAEO, Thursbitch is truly great. Totally other.
Dreaming of Sheep contains interesting stuff but is meh. I assume also it (and/or the White Navajo book) is part of the genesis of the latest Franzen novel, which sucks. Which I guess shouldn't be held against the sheep, but I'm not in the justice business.
What a time to be alive is my favorite podcast. Comedy podcast with the peg of talking about odd stories in the news, but they don't spend that much time actually talking about the stories.
https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/itvat-5e407/What-A-Time-To-Be-Alive-Podcast
Wikipedia has a list of people with long Covid. I check periodically to be sure I'm not on it. It's easier than going to get a covid test.
I do get motion sick very easily (no noise-cancelling headphones for me), but I'm pretty sure barfing would be more dignified than wearing those glasses.
Yeah. I've barfed before and you're right.
54: for a couple of decades my brother would tell workplace anecdotes at holiday tables that were utterly incomprehensible due to a combo of acronyms & bits he would leave out due to security clearance issues. you could follow the rhythm of an amusing workplace anecdote but he'd deliver the punchline & we'd all just look at him blankly. & then my mom & i went to his retirement where he got a medal & his co told the most alarming hair raising tale of the events leading to the (apparently big deal) medal & i could see bro getting increasingly tense bc mom & i (only civilians in attendance) weren't cleared to hear the unexpurgated tale but bro had to take it bc co was clearly relishing the telling. anyways he's much more chill these days, only secrets he holds are between him & var anadromous fish of no cal waterways.
55: I like the part where abortion was officially murder for three years in the sixteenth century.
Sort of like the DMCA exemption process.
OT: Apparently, I am now a Costco member. I'm going to get a hot dog.
55: The Wikipedia page cites, without quoting, Exodus 21:22-25 from the Greek Septuagint. Here's a similar bit from the modern Catholic version of the Bible:
22 "When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
There are other, more ambiguous translations, but it amuses me that the Catholic Bible (the New Revised Standard Version) makes a careful distinction between actual bodily harm and feticide, which is essentially treated as a property crime.
There are other, more ambiguous translations, but it amuses me that the Catholic Bible (the New Revised Standard Version) makes a careful distinction between actual bodily harm and feticide, which is essentially treated as a property crime.
Well, the distinction is in the original, and is the basis of the traditionally neutral-to-positive Jewish attitude toward abortion.
69: I think so. They may bake elsewhere and sell from the Costco.
Apparently, the Vaad says the Giant Eagle bakery is kosher, but doesn't mention the Costco. Maybe it's a lesser Kosher? I don't know.
Yes, it was only post-Roe evangelical translations that overwrote "have a miscarriage" with "give birth prematurely".
70: Right. And Wikipedia cites the Septuagint, which is translating directly from Hebrew and which in this regard is basically the same as the NRSV.
The anti-abortion versions of that verse in some modern Bibles basically say that the eye-for-an-eye thing applies to both fetus and woman. If you concede that translation, though, you've got a new problem. The anti-abortion reading is that the Bible is describing the penalty when men accidentally cause a premature birth with no complications or injury for anyone. Left unexplained is why that scenario should result in any penalty.
That sure seems like a weird scenario to contemplate -- though admittedly the Bible gets into some weird scenarios.
74: I've always suspected that, but haven't really been able to confirm it. Since unfogged is the font of all scholarship and wisdom, I will now consider my suspicion confirmed. But do you have a cite on that?
This website makes comparing various versions pretty easy. The New Catholic Bible has "so that she loses her child"; KJV has "so that her fruit depart from her". NIV--which I mistakenly thought was Catholic but I think I just mixed it up with the NCB as a child--has "gives birth prematurely" but "or 'she has a miscarriage'" as a footnote, which is a heck of a choice.
Not surprised that the Geagle bakery is kosher--that's the only supermarket I've ever seen with a mezuzah. Let's not forget the kosher Dunkin, the only one in hundreds of miles. (Thousands? Surely there's one in Boston somewhere?)
75.last: Here's a paper, if more about the source than the translations. The original text is somewhat obscure - an over-literal translation is apparently "the boys leave her" - but a reference to a miscarriage seems to have been the Jewish interpretation over the years. The Septaguint clarified by adding "µὴ ἐξεικονισµένος", the child "not fully formed".
I understand the NRSV is one regarded as more scrupulously accurate among the translations (from a mainline Protestant POV) and it also says miscarriage. KJV is poetic, "that her fruit depart from her".
The most egregious one I've found is the slightly pre-Roe (1965) evangelical Amplified Bible, whose selling point is that it has frequent parentheticals to better explain what's going in cases where they thought a faithful translation wouldn't get the point across (or something; philosophy of translation sure has changed since then). It has "so that she gives birth prematurely [and the baby lives]".
Translating ancient languages is genuinely hard, and this is a sticky question, even if miscarriage has the stronger argument.
I think people overplay their hand a bit on this topic, yes the centrality of anti-abortion opinions among Christians is a relatively new development, and no the Bible doesn't clearly oppose abortion, but anti-abortion views among Christians go back very far. It's clearly banned in Didache Chapter 2, and most scholars would put the "two ways" material in the Didache in the first century. So opposition to abortion is just about as old as Christianity, even if it's not universal or central.
That was me.
Like it's probably more luck than anything else that the author of Matthew (who overlaps in a lot of ways with the Didache) didn't put something about abortion when he composed the Sermon on the Mount.
I have no idea. I just learned that because I'm not the covered party, I can't go to Costco until I prove I'm in the same household.
Speaking of religion, I knew him when I was a kid. But not well.
He stole over $100,000 from a church and they just let him give it back and sent him to another church? Wow.
They didn't sent him back right away. And they didn't send him to a church that had any kind of money at all. Plus, they were probably relieved the crimes were only financial.
I wasn't even aware of Fort Calhoun. What kind of an asshole names a city after Calhoun in 1855? I mean, a racist asshole. But why there?
Apparently it was actually founded in 1820, when he was Secretary of War. But the Army called the actual fort Ft. Atkinson, after the commander there.
If I could remember my Wikipedia log in, I'd add a not-to-be-confused-with for Atkinson, Nebraska.
Which is famous because that's where I took the SAT.
||
"It penetrates, purifies, soothes and heals," claimed one enthusiast. "Try it on barking children."|>
That's something to sell in Atkinson.
85 sure, why not? It's not like he was molesting altar boys or something...oh wait
||
Monetary Fund report, Canadian taxpayers contributed more than $40 billion (U.S.) in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in 2015 alone (approximately $1,200 for every man, woman, and child).|>| In the same year, Americans contributed more than $2,000 per person, while China (a nation of 1.4 billion citizens) contributed the equivalent of $1,025 per person to support the fossil fuel industry.|>
Frieren is thus far very surprisingly good. (Anime not manga. Spy Family likewise.)
And the woke territorial legislature didn't even change it. Sad.
96: I barely watch anime and I'm getting some serious word-of-mouth on Frieren.
It looks like the original Ft. Calhoun was abandoned from 1827 to 1855, so someone has to bear the blame for not changing the name when it was re-founded.
The murderer was an Iowan. It's dangerous to live that close to the river.
95: In the most recent version of that data, the numbers are close, $1,000/capita in Canada and $2,243 in the US, $1,568 in China, but importantly, the vast majority of that is implicit subsidies (explicit are $47 and $9 of those per capita amounts respectively), and the rest is explicitly the social impact of carbon being underpriced. So in Canada, squinting at the visualizations, it's the collective harm caused by gas costing $1.25/liter instead of $1.50, and in the US, $1 instead of $1.75. (Also coal and natural gas.) We can get rid of the subsidy, but only by getting serious on the War on Cars and allowing it to get more expensive to drive, while spending like crazy on transit of course. I don't like how those snippets imply it's all going into the oil companies' pocket; we could nationalize them all tomorrow and that task would be about 0.5% easier.
Speaking of gasoline, in Iowa you can buy gasoline without ethanol. You can't in most other states. They don't even believe their own bullshit.
101 the lawnmower lobby must be appeased.
So we just watched "Leave The World Behind" and, well, "Netflix high budget crap" really is developing into a new genre, isn't it. Great actors, lots of money, and you end up with Glass Onion or Power of the Dog or Don't Look Up or whatever. Just slow, tedious, badly written, heavy handed rubbish. I'm actually starting to wonder if there's been some sort of seismic shift in the language of cinema in the last few years, something pandemic related that I have simply failed to catch on to.
77.1: I finally got around to the link, which was interesting but not on-point for what I was looking for. I want to know the political history of the anti-abortion version of that particular Bible verse. When did that translation originate and why? Was the anti-abortion version of that verse dreamed up because the implications of the original translation were inconvenient?
I am sympathetic to Upetgi's view in 79:
I think people overplay their hand a bit on this topic
And while I am genuinely curious about the factual basis behind the NRSV translation (a subject that link does speak to), my primary interest is in trolling anti-abortion people.
103: I don't think there's a change. What you're describing is basically Oscar bait. The streamers are just an extra 2-3 studios playing the same old game (Glass Onion frex was even given a limited theatrical release* to qualify for awards).
*Sadly limited, IMO, because I would happily pay admission just to see that photography on the big screen. Fucking gorgeous, though I agree the movie as a whole is meh.
I thought The Glass Onion was fine. I liked the big guy who I later learned was a professional wrestler.
Glass Onion seems exactly, consciously, and deliberately, in the style of the old 1970s Agatha Christie movies like Murder on the Orient Express that would have a load of fairly big name actors playing relatively small roles. I don't think it takes itself seriously, or is really meant to be Oscar bait. I didn't personally love it. I quite liked Daniel Craig's daft scenery chewing performance with the Foghorn Leghorn accent, but the film seemed quite shaky in terms of plot.
I preferred Knives Out as a movie.
Speaking of movies, why did she say "Normal is a setting on a dryer" instead of "Normal is a setting on a washer"? Lots of people don't have dryers, especially in Europe as I understand.
Yeah, prefer Knives Out to Glass Onion, one major reason is that I liked the way Knives Out dribbled out the truth in bits rather than one big reveal. But I thought they were both delightful, and Glass Onion is a good indication that they'll continue to be delightful as more come out.
Rian Johnson, his writing partner whose name I've forgotten, and Daniel Craig made *so much money* because it's a new IP and it got sold at the height of the streaming bubble. I'm very fond of Rian Johnson, because he's an exvangelical Mountain Goats fan, and because I like almost everything he makes. Poker Face was delightful, and it's just so rare to have someone nowadays willing to make a procedural. Everyone wants serial serial serial.
People like memorable new stories and characters! Sometimes. I'm sure plenty new IP sinks quickly; maybe still not enough studios will risk it much.
People should really just stop with the comic book movies. It's been done to death.
Like I think Daniel Craig has made more money off the Knives Out franchise than James Bond.
I don't think I've seen a James Bond movie since Pierce Brosnan. His Bond movies weren't very good, but I still think they shouldn't have fired him because I've always liked him.
Late to the original thing, but:
Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a podcast where she talks to accomplished older women and then her mom, Wiser than Me. Also Marc Maron's WTF sometimes has interesting guests. He's on average perceptive, but he talks a lot.
I thought James Bond just made a civil service salary.
116: Poorly sourced celebrity gossip sites, but I found that too. Apparently he only got a few million for his first few Bond movies, then low seven digits for the last few, ~$80m total. His Knives Out deal for movies 2 and 3 was over $100m. Netflix clout-throwing!
I am reading applications for a faculty position.
I am passionate uncountably working at a dynamic institution that has an affection to enhance not only students' professional and practical knowledge but also their critical and creative thinking skills through analog and modern pedagogical approaches to information of rhetorical, digital, and technical communication to encourage students to become confident and capable collaborators and leaders with their local and global communities, as [your institution] pursues.
Come again?
And it is not a frivolous spam application. This sentence aside, it's someone that I think we should discuss as a committee.
Should there be a comma between "passionate" and "uncountable"?
English not native, rest of the application is not a first draft? Confident and capable collaboration is good.
It sounds like corporate bullshit wording, not ESL.
Maybe some voice dictation that wasn't correctly copyedited? "I am passionate at the opportunity to be working...", things like that? If just that and "affection" have an alternate reading, the rest would be merely a bit over-jargony.