Action! Adventure! Drama! Fresh Fruit!

I’ve been listening to some podcasts lately. For instance, there’s the fantastic Clayborne drama which is getting interesting. Frank and Thompson went to the station to find out what happened to it but Frank found that his passcode no longer works on the door. Who changed the code? A womyn that Thompson thought had worked at the station dies but he finds out that she, in fact, did not work there. Why was she there? What will happen to Karen now that her estranged husband has found out where she is? Run – don’t walk! – to clayborne.blogspot.com and find out!

I also subscribed to Chris Pirillo’s podcast. Chris, as you computer types out there probably know, is computer geek. He used to be on TechTV helping people out with their PC problems but left for reasons I cannot recall. I guess it’s not a big deal as TechTV is now G4 and seems to avoid any mention of computers that is not related to video gaming. Although I should, I haven’t watched any of this G4 hoo-ha as 2 minutes of television about gaming is more than enough for this non-video gamer. From the web page, it looks like they still have hot young things gracing the screen, though. Personally, I liked Leo LaPorte and the other guy who wore a Utilikilt. Hey, I fix computers for a living – they’re my kinda people. And I liked Martin what’s-his-name. Not his late night show but when he was on The Screensavers. With a degree in English or literature or English literature, he made good, geeky Dennis Milleresque puns. I dig that stuff.

If I may go off on a digression, has anyone seen his MSNBC show or whatever cable news station he’s on? I saw most of one of them a week or so ago and, boy, how far the mighty have fallen. Our political differences aside, he’s just not very funny anymore. He’s been castrated – there’s no ooomph to his schtick. His demeanor is just way too mild-mannered and he seems about as comfortable as Mother Theresa at a Chippendales show. Anyway, back to podcasting.

So I get like a million podcasts from Chris Pirillo’s feed a day. And they’ve all been interviews with folks attending SES which is this convention for techno-marketers or something like that. I am so fucking tired of hearing about how blogs are going to be the primary means for people to get their fill of news in the not-so-distant future. What a fucking nightmare that’s gonna be! Right now, I’d hazard a guess that perhaps 0.00001% of all the blogs out there are worth a shit (and I count my blog in the other 99.99999%). Of them, a lot are just news aggregators, that is, they just have brief commentary on a story and lots of links to sites that employ real human beings to go out and research the story. (And even that’s becoming rarer nowadays.) Pretty soon we’ll require blog aggregators to filter through all the blogs that winnow through the news. Who the fuck wants to tack those seas? Just find good news sources and go to their page directly or get their RSS feeds. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything particularly revolutionary about any dipshit being able to post a link to an AP story and say how wonderful or how awful the story is. Fuck, pretty soon there won’t be any investigative journalists left. News outlets will just offer press releases and talking point memos because it’s cheaper that way. Save yourself the hassle of navigating all those blogs and just go to the taproot of lies: whitehouse.gov.

The BBC podcast I’ve been listening to is pretty cool. Some guys hosts a show about an obscure topic and brings some university professors on to discuss it. So far, I’ve listened to their thoughts on alchemy and the modern conception of utopias. The Sex Geeks feed has been hit or miss. The show on Inside Deep Throat bored the shit out of me but the latest one was alright. They just bantered on about various things sexual. At one point, silicone was mentioned and the female host asks where it comes from. The guy replies, “From silicon.”
Her: “Where does silicon come from?”
Him: “It’s one of the elements like oxygen.”
Me: “It comes from sand you moron!”

The Dulcinea directed me to a podcast on shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage, called Rope Weekly hosted by a guy calling himself Graydancer. He’s a dork in the grand tradition and, although I’m a dork too, it makes for bad listening. Oddly enough, he lives here in Madison.

So, as with blogging, the lesson about podcasting is that, just because anyone can do it, doesn’t make it interesting or worthwhile.

I had my second tutoring session with Alex on Wednesday. He’s got the alphabet about 85% down. Well, more like 45% if you don’t count the fact that he doesn’t recognize lower case letters. So I’m having him write out the letters over and over in upper case until he’s got them down cold. Then I’ll move on to lower case. From there we’ll go into the sounds of the letters. Yeah, it’s a long row to hoe but it’ll be worth it. I realized at our first meeting that he wasn’t good with the letter V. He’d draw the left-hand line vertically instead of at an angle. However, by the end of our session on Wednesday, he was writing it correctly and even doing so without lifting the pencil off the paper. Personally, I felt this was an accomplishment and got all giddy inside when I saw him do it.

As I wrote previously, Alex is from Gambia and his native tongue is Mandinka. As we were going over the alphabet, he told me that “today” in Mandinka is pronounced “bee”. So I learned something myself. Next I wanna get him to give me some Gambian recipes. It’s pretty weird to think about how he gets through life right now not being able to read. That’s gotta be a real bitch. At least he can speak English. I’m fairly certain that he wants to get a GED at some point but I’m thinking he’ll be fucking thrilled as pie when he can read the newspaper. I asked him why he came here and he told me that he watched TV, such as CNN, and one day he pointed to the TV and told his mother, “I have to go there”. And he came here. He loves America and he thanked me over and over when I left his apartment. Not many Americans give up their lives here and move thousands of miles away across The Pond in search of a better life. We’ve got it pretty good here so let’s not fuck it up.

I got my tickets for the Wisconsin Film Fest yesterday. There were 2 or 3 films that were sold out but I got a good smattering:

Wheel of Time - Werner Herzog – ‘nuff said.
Kabala
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction - Sam Fuller and Lee Marvin.
Moolaadé
Nomi Song
A League of Ordinary Gentlemen - it’s about bowling!
Vodka Lemon
What’s Wrong With Frank Chin?
Consuming Spirits
Old Boy
The Kino Film Revolution
Wisconsin’s Own Narrative Shorts – Program 1

I wasn’t able to get tickets for Shake Hands With the Devil or Henry Aaron’s Summer Up North. Still, plenty of cinema to keep me busy.

I’ve gotta remember to get a ticket for Steve Earle so I can get drunk and yell for “Condi, Condi”. I may go meet up with a bunch of pagans tonight. It would be in public so I don’t think anyone would be skyclad but you never know with these people. Perhaps Gem can give me the info I seek…