What Jeff Listens To — This Week
What Jeff Listens To — This Week is an occassional feature on my site which highlights, well, what I have been listening to this week. Pretty self-explanatory. Some of these are programs that made me laugh. Some made me think. Some made me almost cry. Some just made for good background noise while I worked. Hope you enjoy.
[iTunes] - Free download available through 7-29-07
The Opening Lines of the radio program:
Host Ira Glass: Edward was just a little boy when he was switched from regular classes to special ed. It was kindergarten. And he viewed the move as a big step up.
Edward: I thought it was cool because when you think of the word special, meaning, like, special. You know, like good. A good thing. And like, with my name being Edward. I thought it was kind of built for me.
Ira Glass: Oh, like, Ed meant you.
Edward: Yeah.
I love Act One. It’s about the interviewers from a documentary called How’s Your News?. I want to watch that show now after listening to this segment. It sounds great! Act Two scares me, but makes me hopeful at the same time.
Good show this week. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald plays the game called, “We are so not going to ask you about Scooter Libby!” All questions not about Scooter Libby.
I first heard about the StoryCorps project some years ago. I’ve been fascinated with it ever since. I tried, unsuccessfully, to reserve a spot for my wife and I when the travelling booth came through Austin.
If you’ve never heard of StoryCorps, I’ll let them explain the project in their own words:
StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record one another’s stories in sound.
StoryCorps is modeled — in spirit and in scope — after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.
You can search the archives here or receive a daily podcast through iTunes.
A few of my recent favorites:
“Liddy did things on her own schedule” (Thom and Karen Horsey remember their daugher, Liddy, who had Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. Liddy died from an illness unrelated to CdLS.)
“My father was everything to me” (Dr. William Lynn Weaver to his daughter, Kimberly.)
“I had never been to the circus before” (Surviving the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944)
“A car drove up late evening” (Trudy Henry tells her daughter Jan Scoggins about some unexpected visitors.)
“Who is important in your life right now?” (LeKeisha Williams interviews her best friend, Tia Williams.)
[Audio (Explicit)] | [iTunes - Audio (Explicit)] | [iTunes - Video (Explicit)]
Sarcasm — gotta love it. I know that many of (OK… most of) the stories are not politically correct or even nice. But they are certainly funny and sarcastic.
The audio and video podcasts have different content.
Favorite line from video podcast of July 26, 2007: “Nobody’s going to trade oil for sticks.”
