stealing a page from dodrill's book.

so i'm w/ em in the lab, and as i'm useless here i'm going to keep blogging. and i'm going to do my first top ten list in no particular order, entitled:

top ten reasons to listen to NPR.

10. Morning Edition.

you have no idea how bearable this show makes my morning commute. re-read that sentence if you have to, i'm not changing it. anyways, this is the morning show that's always on while i'm driving to work. chicago traffic can be described best with a string of expletives, but this show helps me calm down in the midst of all that. they do news reports and interviews and book reviews and about everything else you could fit into a radio show. it's a nationally syndicated show, so you can find it on pretty much every public radio station.

9. All Things Considered.

this is the afternoon drive home version of Morning Edition pretty much. also nationally syndicated. it's fabulous, too, and makes that drive home a lot easier as well. All Things Considered also has a host that I think is the only person who will get their own number treatment here (though who knows, cuz i'm making this up as i go)....

8. Robert Siegel.

as i just said, he's one of the hosts of All Things Considered. i love his speaking voice. that and he's done some very interesting interviews lately, notably the ones with karl rove and tom waits.

7. Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

just a couple reasons why i like this show, which is a news quiz show with various celebrity participants each week that's on every saturday. first, it's based out of chicago. woot. second, the participants are hilarious. they have audience members play, callers call in and play, famous callers like Amy Sedaris and Tina Fey (from the last couple weeks) call in and play, and so on. they also have a panel of people who participate, like mo rocca and paula poundstone. if those names aren't familiar, mo rocca has the ambiguous title of "tv personality" who hailed originally (or at least most famously, i'm doing absolutely no research here) from the Daily Show. he's also been on those if love the "insert decade here" shows. maybe we should call him a comedic social commentator. paula poundstone is a comedian and the original voice of paula small on Home Movies, one of the best comedies of all time.
dodgen, that' s enough of a reason for you to listen to this show right there.

6. Car Talk

you wouldn't think that listening to two guys take calls on car problems would be the most entertaining thing to listen to on a saturday morning, but you're dead wrong. Click and Clack, the hosts, are brothers and they're hilarious, despite what Harry Shearer may have said on Wait Wait and elsewhere. i've also heard that they both went to MIT, so they're apparently brilliant as well. i can't really describe what they do here, you just have to listen to it.

5. Solid Reporting.

okay, this is a little more abstract, but i'm seat-of-pant-flying here. this is just a general quality that NPR has. it's exceedingly more fair in its reporting than other news sources. admittedly, i do think that NPR does have some left-leaning tendencies, but more than any other source they do try to report fairly on both sides of the aisle, politically speaking. usually, they have one piece focused on one side of the issue, and another devoted to the other viewpoint. in a way this is probably to reward listener loyalty as well.

4. An Exhaustive Internet Archive.

These folks put pretty much everything they do up on NPR.org; check it out.

3. Sound Opinions.

This is a talk show devoted entirely to music reviews and musician interviews. It's the music equivalent of Siskel & Ebert, as one of the hosts is a music critic from the Trib and the other from the Sun-Times. obviously it's also Chicago-based, which i like. i've only been able to catch the show a couple times, but i just learned you can listen to a podcast version of the show too, available of course in the itunes store.

2. WorldView

another Chi-town show (i think) that focuses on different crises in pretty much every area of the world outside of our borders. it broadens your perspective a little while you're eating fast food in your car on your lunch break--not that i've ever done that, of course.

1. Fresh Air.

not the synthetic music people. they don't get their own show. no, this is a philly-based show that usually has entertainers come on for half-hour to hour long interviews. terry gross is the regular host, and she does great interviews w/ interesting people. you can find them on the itunes store or on npr.org as streaming webcast archives. i enjoyed the ones w/ jon stewart and stephen colbert quite a bit. she also interviews authors and journalists, which is equally if not more intriguing. occasionally dave davies fills in for her, and he's also very good.


anyways, that's a taste of what you get when you listen to NPR. i don't know why i was compelled to do this. maybe it's cathartic, and now this kind of thing will fade into the background of life so i can focus on other things.

but really, you should listen to it. find your local station. it comes highly recommended from, uh, me.

the end.