Damn!

Yo, what up. I'm on a once-per-month blogging schedule now, apparently. Big thanks go out to "todos los fieles" who stop by once in a while to see if I'm still kicking.

Recently I started looking in earnest for good podcasts to listen to while I'm commuting, cleaning, cooking, sitting in seat 24C, etc. The only podcasts I had ever downloaded before were Tim Gunn's hilarious behind-the-scenes throwdowns from Project Runway. Mystifyingly, these aren't all available on the PR website; you have to get several of them from Yahoo, and even there the files are semi-hidden. That's too bad because these are easily some of the most entertaining shows you can find, podcast or otherwise.

Apart from Tim's genius tell-alls, though, I wasn't finding anything remotely worth the time and electricity required for the download. Most of the shows I saw listed on "best podcast" websites sounded like the shit you used to hear coming out of CB radios. I'm talking serious "breaker breaker"-level inanity here.

Then I stumbled, by accident, on the podcasts at NPR, and lordy do they have a lot there worth listening to. Damn! I had always wanted to listen to This American Life, since everyone raves about it, and since Sarah Vowell is always gut-wrenchingly funny on Letterman . . . but who has the time to get near a radio whenever some show comes on? Well, fret no more, my friend; you can just download that podcast. They'll let you have this week's episode free, and they say that you can pay for previous episodes at Audible, but . . . hallelujah . . . the "streaming" techonology they use for their previous broadcasts is just Flash mp3, so if you browse with Opera, it's easy as pie to keep the downloaded file as long as you want. Just be sure to move it out of your cache once the download is finished, and keep your cache capacity nice and high, like 200 megs. Thank God for Opera! It's the hoarder's best friend. Another example: Wanna hang on to that Flash movie from YouTube? Just watch it in Opera, move (or copy) the file out of your cache and rename it from .tmp to .flv, then open it in VLC.

Also check out American RadioWorks for some good hour-long documentaries on interesting topics. You can find the whole podcast directory for NPR here.

One thing you start noticing when you listen to these NPR podcasts, though, is how many hosts on these shows are tedious to listen to as time goes on, just because of the way they speak. If only they would talk like normal human beings--like the ones they're interviewing and talking about, say--the whole experience would be so much better. You can really tell it was their writing skills that got them the job, not the sonorous timbre of their voice. Apparently there is no audition (literally) for these people.

The main weirdness to me about podcasting is this business about "subscribing" to a particular podcast. I guess that's a great option if you're always using iTunes with an iPod, but since I'm waaaay too poor for an iPod, and waaaay too debauched to pay for music online, this is not a good option for me. Who needs a middleman? Shouldn't every podcasting site also just make the mp3s available as direct downloads so I won't have to hack the xml?

This has been your Podcast Minute with Lef. See you.