June’s 8

Listening – The Age Of Persuasion is a CBC radio show about advertising. It’s a 27 minute lecture on advertising history and theory delivered by Terry O’Reilly to your computer every week (if you search for the unofficial podcast).

Added Responsibility – I bought a Honda Fit. It’s my first car purchase and my first new car. I like it. It’s very efficient. It’s a manual transmission. I hope I’m driving it right.

Self Promotion – I’m editing WFPL’s news blog, The Edit. I have high hopes for it and I’d appreciate it if you subscribed to the feed. I’ve been poring over style guides to make sure I don’t upset meticulous readers with misplaced semicolons (I know, I know).

Add-on – I’ve been using TuneUp to fix the id3 tags on my music collection. It works well, and if you’re not in a hurry the free version will do just fine. I haven’t taken advantage of the extra information or concert finding functions, but they seem helpful. I was worried that using an add-on like TuneUp would bog down my system, but I haven’t noticed any dramatic changes in speed.

Uncool but cool anyway - Speaking of things in my music collection, I’ve been hooked on the early Randy Newman albums lately. His self-titled record, 12 Songs and Good Old Boys are funny, earnest and good. Is Newman the father of modern nerd-rock? Perhaps…

Even More Listening – I just found my copies of the Star Wars Radio Dramas. This was my first exposure to public radio. I think A New Hope is done better than the movie. It goes deeper into Luke’s personality and the acting is less stiff across the board. Except for Han, but it’s okay.

How long as this been here? – NewsRadio is on Hulu. Why are you here instead of there?

Paper magazine on the internet – I’ve been a Harper’s subscriber for a while, but I just recently used my subscription code to access online content. It’s wonderful. There’s a century’s worth of news and fiction to read and the old Mark Twain stories are worth more than the price of a subscription.