12,000 Songs, Trivia, Star Trek III and stop selling us pizza!
What I'm Listening To - WILT Wednesday podcast recommendations.
Behold, the greatest invention ever made.
The Sports Walkman.
I used to go through four “walkmans” a year. It was usually the headphone jack that went out. You’d lose one ear, but if you kinda held the headphone jack with your thumb it would play in both ears, for a while, and eventually that wouldn’t work.
The other thing that would happen is the walkmen would fall/dro/get jostled on The 7 Train as I commuted. I smashed many.
The Sports Walkman was very durable. You could drop it and it kept working.
I was listening to an episode of The Watch a few weeks back. I was planning on recommending it to you anyway for their fantastic discussion of pub burgers, and then for their nerdy discussion of X-Men movies.
Then they discussed the Apple Top 100 Albums list, a silly list as all lists are so I won’t get wigged about it - but they did discuss how music consumption has changed.
Kids, back in the day my Sports Walkman and I had MAYBE three hours of music with us. If the batteries lasted. A typical day might be Synchronicity and “June 1987 Mix.”
People used to listen to albums. You started by listening to the songs you actually liked, and then over time you began to love the other ones. For example, the Joshua Tree starts with three killer tracks that were radio hits. On a crowded 7 Train it’s far too hard to fish into your coat to find the walkman to do anything, lest hunt for the nest song - there’s no skip, you’re just fast forwarding and guessing - so you let the cassette keep playing, and over time you LOVE Bullet The Blue Sky. And so on and so on.
In 2007 the iPod changed things, and pretty quickly I could carry around 12,000 songs and I could make a 90 minute mix tape/playlist in three minutes instead of it taking me two hours of real time listening, including finding a short song to use up the space at the end of side 1 of my cassette.
These days we are all walking around with all the music ever recorded (except Andy Summers’ XYZ, not available digitally but I have a CD upstairs, if only I had a CD player. Do you still have a CD player? Even my CAR doesn’t have a CD player, Times change)
Anyway, The Watch guys got into all that….
The Trek Files is fun for deep dives on Real Star Trek (pre-2009). I particularly enjoyed the one about Gene Roddenberry’s notes for Star Trek III.
I stumbled across this pod The Big Story, which I will call “The Daily but Canadian.” I find they have very interesting topics, and their hosts….don’t speak….in….The Daily…dialect…where you have to…… pause unnaturally…..in a way that…..makes Christopher Walken wonder. (Why do ALL the The Daily hosts do that?)
Anyway the TLDR (TLDL?) on this one is: We just want coffee and donuts, why are you trying to sell us pizza?
Some good Inside Baseball here - what is Spotify up to NOW with podcasts?
I want to point you to last Saturday’s Daily Comedy News where I spoke with Mark Malkoff about Late Night TV for an hour. This Saturday I have an equally fun conversation with the New York Times’ Critic-At-Large Jason Zinoman, who writes fantastic pieces about comedy.
5 Daily Trivia Questions is seeing a nice lift in the numbers this week!
Let me know what you’re listening to! Restack this post on Substack and add you own suggestions!