Podcast Pickiness

I have a strange relationship with music. One day, we're BFF. Singing, dancing... it's a great bond. Other days - most days - I can't listen to any song for more than ten seconds. Seems kind of silly for a girl like me to have an iPod, you might say. Shut up, I'll do what I want, I say in an immature reply. Enter podcasts. Talking on just about every topic under the sun, free for the downloading. I have a roster that keeps me sane on the public transportation here and I'm always trying to add new podcast friends to my playlists. To encourage me to keep posting here, I've decided to write about a podcast a week. I'll start with the ones I know I like and then perhaps venture out into new and different podcasts. Suggestions are welcome, so fellow podcast junkies, feel free to let me know who's chatting it up on your mp3 player of choice. Here we go!

Slate Explainer Podcast

In theory, this podcast is a fantastic idea; in practice, it's been a bumpy road. This podcast is a great exmaple of the importance of the narrator. I love this column on the Slate website, so when I found there was a podcast I literally squee'd with joy. (Squee: verb. To squeal girlishly, usually in conjunction with a positive emotion.) When I started listening, June Thomas was the speaker. She was all right aside from her bizarre accent. It sounded like a typical Scottish accent with the occasional word that would come flying out of her mouth and bitchslap me with the absolute ridiculousness of her pronunciation. Soon, I stopped enjoying the podcast. I began listening on edge, waiting for the next retarded word to arrive. Before long she was replaced, and her replacement made me long for the days of stupid pronunciations.

Michelle Tsai is the bane of my iPod's existence. Supposedly she's a writer for Slate, and she should stick to a medium that doesn't require me or anyone else with any hearing ability to listen to her voice. She speaks with the affected sing-song voice of a braindead Valley girl who would be booted from The Hills for being too ditzy and annoying. In Tsai-talk, every statement is a question, and every question is coquettishly overacted. I picture her flouncing into the studio to record each week and it infuriates me. Occaasionally some other guy reads the Explainer. Yeah, those are the good weeks. I was forced to give up listening to this podcast because I was going to have to feed my iPod into a wood chipper if if I heard that she was "Michelle Tsai and this is the Explainer podcast for Thursday, March thirtinkth" one more time. Thirtinkth is not a typo, it's an attempt to capture the spine-crinkling annoyingness of her voice. Thirtinkth. That's actually how she says it. Grr. Hang on, I've got to go punch something.

A few months ago, I would have only recommended this podcast to you if you had either a huge tolerance for Valley girl or a deafening love of trivia. Even then I would have pointed you to the web column instead. However, there has recently been a long-awaited changing of the guard. Other listeners must have felt the same way because Tsai has gone the way of the dodo. There's a new female narrator, which means that my boycott of the Explainer podcast is over! New girl has a minor problem with over-enunciation here and there, but for now I'm chalking that up to excitement about her new job. Time will tell, but I don't think she'll take the Tsai-path to eardrum distruction. She had better not, anyway. We saw what happened to Tsai. Well, technically I guess we didn't. But I have my theories...