NPR
I sure do love my Playstation 2, but I wouldn't say I'm a gaming fanatic. I go through bouts of playing it daily and then not playing for months. The fact that I'm pretty much a solitary gamer has a lot to do with this...it's just not as much fun to play a game like Tekken against the computer rather than a real-life opponent. I tend to go for RPG or horror games. Usually, I get a few games for Christmas and my birthday and I'm good for a year or so, with maybe a purchase here and there over the course of the year. I'll say it again-I'm not a hardcore gamer.
So you can imagine my annoyance when my PS2 shit the bed around Christmas time last year. Shortly after Christmas, to be exact....like December 28th or so, which didn't leave me much in the way of time to enjoy my holiday game loot. Adding insult to injury: on Dec. 1st (as some of you may recall) a tree fell on my car, effectively destroying it, so I was in pretty piss-poor financial shape to replace a game console that I regularly used, but certainly not enough to cause a meltdown.
I had a bunch of sealed games Santa brought me and no way to play, so about a week later I broke down and decided to buy a new PS2. Why? Because it's still the best game console out there (don't whine to me about the XBox having better graphics-it may be true, but until the Xbox can match a system that can play all my PSone games as well as my PS2 games, it's a lesser value in my book). Plus, fixing the problem, which turned out to be a "bad motor", would have cost me almost as much as a new PS2 and would have robbed me of mine for up to 6 weeks. Of course, finding a PS2 right after Christmas was nigh impossible, but I managed to get one eventually and so far, it works fine. All of which brings me to my point...
I've recently discovered National Public Radio. Of course, I always knew it was there, but it's only within the past year or so that I've been listening regularly. I have a job that requires me to be on the road a great deal, and I loathe 99% of what passes for music nowadays. And although I love my cds, they get repetitive after a while. I stumbled onto WBUR, Boston's NPR station, by accident, and it's pretty much exclusively what I listen to now.
NPR has some great programming, and it always surprises me by holding my interest with things I never thought I'd be interested in-kinda like that time I watched that show on Alaskan King Crab Fishing on the Discovery channel. Case in point: today I listened to a show all about Make magazine, a new magazine dealing with ways to do-it-yourself. Most of the stuff the magazine covers is about electronics and mechanics, and it's a lot of step-by-step stuff, like how to fix a phone or how to MacGuyver things that supposedly don't work anymore so that they do. Those who know me probably realize I'm the most mechanically ignorant person on the planet-I can change a tire, but I don't change my oil- I have someone else do it. If you want someone who can launch a satellite with a toaster and some bike parts, talk to my brother, because he's the one with all the know-how. (Maintaining a set of bagpipes is its own challenge altogether, as evidenced by the fact that mine don't currently work all that well. That's why I'm an angry piper, goddammit.) The fact is I never cared. My interests lie entirely in other areas.
But boy do I wish I could have fixed that "bad motor" rather than shell out another $150.00 for a PS2.
My point is that I was surprised I was as interested as I was. It's not the first time this has happened while listening to NPR, several weeks back I caught The Connection, and one of the guests was a guy who collects, of all things, dictionaries. I thought: "this guy must be a blast, a real social tyrannosaurus." Turns out it was one of the most interesting shows I've heard once I found out why he collects them: he studies what words mean in different languages. For example, the German definition of love is far different from the definition that appears in French dictionaries. There is no distinction between "upset" and "angry" in Spanish. It was a show that looked at the origins of words, how they change meaning, and how they mean different things across cultures and languages. All this from a guy who collects dictionaries.
I'm aware that all this stuff probably sounds boring, I know if I was reading it without having listened to it beforehand, I wouldn't be much impressed. But keep in mind NPR is home to shows like Fresh Air and The Connection (two of my favorites), shows that showcase authors (like Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow-may he R.I.P. and some I've never heard of but are eager to read now), poets, scientists, politicians, musicians, and guys who collect dictionaries, to name a few. I've learned more about the war in Iraq from NPR than any other news source, both through NPR's coverage and through the BBC which reports things from a perspective that's not our own.(Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious it sounds to say I get my news from the BBC-but I guess if I thought things weren't being censored to death around here I'd feel differently.) In other words, we get to see what the rest of the world thinks about us (and let me tell ya, that there Guantanamo Bay is quite the sticky wicket.)
NPR in the Boston area is broadcast on WBUR 90.9 FM. You can listen to it on the web anytime too, at http://www.WBUR.org , if you're out of the area or if you live in, say, Texas for example. Plus, the site has a keen search engine so you can look up past shows...my favorite thing to do while I'm doing other stuff is to listen to an old show I may have missed. I punched in Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, and got a great Vonnegut interview from 1999 or so on Morning Edition; I listened to it while I organized my computer room. Ditto for Neil Gaiman, PJ Harvey, Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore, Paddy Keenan, and R.Crumb. Give it a shot with someone or something you'd like to know more about-chances are it's been on National Public Radio at one time or another.
Hey-don't look at me like that. The title of the post says NPR. Sorry if you thought it was gonna be about the PS2.
So you can imagine my annoyance when my PS2 shit the bed around Christmas time last year. Shortly after Christmas, to be exact....like December 28th or so, which didn't leave me much in the way of time to enjoy my holiday game loot. Adding insult to injury: on Dec. 1st (as some of you may recall) a tree fell on my car, effectively destroying it, so I was in pretty piss-poor financial shape to replace a game console that I regularly used, but certainly not enough to cause a meltdown.
I had a bunch of sealed games Santa brought me and no way to play, so about a week later I broke down and decided to buy a new PS2. Why? Because it's still the best game console out there (don't whine to me about the XBox having better graphics-it may be true, but until the Xbox can match a system that can play all my PSone games as well as my PS2 games, it's a lesser value in my book). Plus, fixing the problem, which turned out to be a "bad motor", would have cost me almost as much as a new PS2 and would have robbed me of mine for up to 6 weeks. Of course, finding a PS2 right after Christmas was nigh impossible, but I managed to get one eventually and so far, it works fine. All of which brings me to my point...
I've recently discovered National Public Radio. Of course, I always knew it was there, but it's only within the past year or so that I've been listening regularly. I have a job that requires me to be on the road a great deal, and I loathe 99% of what passes for music nowadays. And although I love my cds, they get repetitive after a while. I stumbled onto WBUR, Boston's NPR station, by accident, and it's pretty much exclusively what I listen to now.
NPR has some great programming, and it always surprises me by holding my interest with things I never thought I'd be interested in-kinda like that time I watched that show on Alaskan King Crab Fishing on the Discovery channel. Case in point: today I listened to a show all about Make magazine, a new magazine dealing with ways to do-it-yourself. Most of the stuff the magazine covers is about electronics and mechanics, and it's a lot of step-by-step stuff, like how to fix a phone or how to MacGuyver things that supposedly don't work anymore so that they do. Those who know me probably realize I'm the most mechanically ignorant person on the planet-I can change a tire, but I don't change my oil- I have someone else do it. If you want someone who can launch a satellite with a toaster and some bike parts, talk to my brother, because he's the one with all the know-how. (Maintaining a set of bagpipes is its own challenge altogether, as evidenced by the fact that mine don't currently work all that well. That's why I'm an angry piper, goddammit.) The fact is I never cared. My interests lie entirely in other areas.
But boy do I wish I could have fixed that "bad motor" rather than shell out another $150.00 for a PS2.
My point is that I was surprised I was as interested as I was. It's not the first time this has happened while listening to NPR, several weeks back I caught The Connection, and one of the guests was a guy who collects, of all things, dictionaries. I thought: "this guy must be a blast, a real social tyrannosaurus." Turns out it was one of the most interesting shows I've heard once I found out why he collects them: he studies what words mean in different languages. For example, the German definition of love is far different from the definition that appears in French dictionaries. There is no distinction between "upset" and "angry" in Spanish. It was a show that looked at the origins of words, how they change meaning, and how they mean different things across cultures and languages. All this from a guy who collects dictionaries.
I'm aware that all this stuff probably sounds boring, I know if I was reading it without having listened to it beforehand, I wouldn't be much impressed. But keep in mind NPR is home to shows like Fresh Air and The Connection (two of my favorites), shows that showcase authors (like Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow-may he R.I.P. and some I've never heard of but are eager to read now), poets, scientists, politicians, musicians, and guys who collect dictionaries, to name a few. I've learned more about the war in Iraq from NPR than any other news source, both through NPR's coverage and through the BBC which reports things from a perspective that's not our own.(Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious it sounds to say I get my news from the BBC-but I guess if I thought things weren't being censored to death around here I'd feel differently.) In other words, we get to see what the rest of the world thinks about us (and let me tell ya, that there Guantanamo Bay is quite the sticky wicket.)
NPR in the Boston area is broadcast on WBUR 90.9 FM. You can listen to it on the web anytime too, at http://www.WBUR.org , if you're out of the area or if you live in, say, Texas for example. Plus, the site has a keen search engine so you can look up past shows...my favorite thing to do while I'm doing other stuff is to listen to an old show I may have missed. I punched in Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, and got a great Vonnegut interview from 1999 or so on Morning Edition; I listened to it while I organized my computer room. Ditto for Neil Gaiman, PJ Harvey, Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore, Paddy Keenan, and R.Crumb. Give it a shot with someone or something you'd like to know more about-chances are it's been on National Public Radio at one time or another.
Hey-don't look at me like that. The title of the post says NPR. Sorry if you thought it was gonna be about the PS2.
posted by The Angry Piper at 4:07 PM
5 Comments:
Soon they will interview Malach, you just wait.
Sadly, now NPR funding is under attack. Republicans spend billions killing innocent Iraqis but hem and haw about spending millions for educating our own citizens. Clearly, an educated citizenry is not in their best interest.
Sounds like China
NPR's funding is under attack, but it always is. The majority of their funding comes from private citizens, which is a good thing, I suppose. Keeps most of the spin away when you don't have a commercial checkbook behind your programming.
10 days and counting, i need the ruminations of the piper, you bastard.
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