A Pair of Pleasant Podcasts

So lately I've been frustrated by the seemingly endless barrage of NPR pledge drives. I'm starting to feel much as Homer did in the great episode that found him so annoyed by Betty White that he falsely pledges to public television, leading to a chase scene involving a set of deadly Teletubbies and a wild, monstrously vulturian Big Bird, and sanctuary with Reverend Lovejoy (one of my favorite third-tier Simpsons characters, I think; see also "Mister Sparkle".)

Thus, my commute to and from work has been filled largely by podcasts, of which I've become immensely fond. There are several to which I've been subscribing and listening for quite some time - This American Life, the AV Club's Hatecast, They Might Be Giants, Bob Boillen's incredible concert series (which has provided me with complete concerts by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Sonic Youth, Neko Case, and a whole host of others), Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and the terrific sci-fi anthology Escape Pod and its fantasy sister series Podcastle. But recently I've found two new series that have brought me tremendous amounts of joy.

The first is a pure piece of nostalgia, recommended to me, in fact, by blast-from-the-past best friend of days gone by, Daniel Newman. It's Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Futurecast featuring selections from his new book - wait for it - Memories of the Future. The show (and book) are based on Wheaton's revisiting of Star Trek: The Next Generation on which he played child prodigy Wesley Crusher, a character both revered and, perhaps more often, reviled by a generation of nerds (in which I vigorously include myself.) So far, he's proven himself to be an insightful commentator with a vibrant sense of humor. Side note: I dealt blackjack to Mr Wheaton about five years ago in Lake Tahoe; after I particularly good hand he quipped "You're awesome Sean - when we go on the class trip, you're not taking the bus. You can ride in my mom's car."

The second aural pleasure has fewer personal memories tied up in it but is on the whole more engaging. It's the personal blogcast of actor/author Stephen Fry, best known I think as Jeeves of the PBS Wodehouse series with Hugh Laurie and the most prominent British actor not to have appeared in a Harry Potter film (he'd've been my first choice for Horace Slughorn, but I can't ever fault anyone for casting Jim Broadbent. Also, I just noticed that Fry narrated the British versions of the Potter audio books. In America we get Jim Dale.) I've read a number of Fry's books, including The Liar, Making History, and, what was in retrospect rather inexplicably my favorite book in high school, The Hippopotamus. Fry has a fascination with language (not to mention a florid gift for delivery) which he examines at length in one of the recent episodes of his 'Podgrams'. As I started listening to this episode, I began thinking of an old sketch of his (which he quickly referenced) from A Bit of Fry & Laurie.



What is played for laughs in the sketch, Fry examines with sincerity in the podcast, and while that may sound pretentious (and insufferably dull), the result is in fact pure joy.

So, anyway, that's what I've been listening to.