The First Ever Acephalous Podcast: The Eight Meme

What did you expect?   Perfection the first time around?

Comments

[Jamie]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Watch till the end folks. Head-on collision, indeed.

[Matt S.]

No contest, one of the funniest things you've ever posted. Damn, dude, calm it down!

[Stephen]

Can't breath can't breath can't breath can't breath! Bravo, headless sir, bravo!

[CR]

You can't know how glad I am to see that the more-diss time, less blog-time thing is working out for you. I'll bet your advisors will love this little number.

(That said, despite the fact that I am in the no-blog mode right now, the time saved by not blogging has mostly (98%) been redirected not into reading and writing but rather watching videos of people playing with their new iPhones and playing Bejeweled. I mean, I play Bejeweled. I don't, yet, watch videos of people playing it...)

[Sisyphus]

Best. Podcast. Ever!

Every time I thought the stories couldn't get any funnier, they got weirder. Do they crib Arrested Development scenes from your life, or are you in reality a laid-off A.D. writer working up side material?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Whenever you got to the most interesting parts of the stories, some kind of slur in the speech processing software would make the words undecipherable. Which I suppose lets the reader (well, hearer) make up their own endings.

Thus I now know that at 16, Scott broke up with his first serious girlfriend because of his intense attachment to Star Wars (as shown by his earlier conflict, in which the child of a Holocaust survivor informed him that the rebel Gunter Grass walker that he claimed that he had had actually served the Empire) had caused him to cut off his ear, Van Gogh style (it interfered with his Princess Leaia costume), and climb a tree to toss it at her window. She eventually rescued him from being stuck dizzily in the tree, but he and his future wife had their revenge later in philosophy class, where they altered their class notes so that the ex afterwards wrote that Deleuze had always gone by the name "Dizzy".

[Tim Lacy]

Very funny! Truly inspiring. . . . And just where did you find that masterpiece statue? - TL

[SEK]

Tim, the statue's the headless Lenin outside The Red Square in Las Vegas. I just clipped the background from a couple of different shots of it. (I should've normalized the light, so it came from a single source, but didn't feel like firing up the computer with Photoshop on it.)

Really, Rich? I tweaked it for effect in a few places, but I could understand most of it. (I'm not sure whether being deaf makes me more or less of an arbiter in this situation. Can I understand because I'm used to half-hearing things; or because I only half-hear things, anyone who isn't deaf should be able to understand it perfectly?)

Sisyphus, I don't think anyone cribs anything from my life (though it has been more adventuresome of late). Everyone has a hoard of such stories, they just don't spend time learning how to tell them. More than anything else, teaching literary journalism taught me the art of omission.

CR, I don't think they mind what I do with my Friday evening. (Actually, they probably do, but everyone's allowed a weekend every third Friday evening, right?) That said, I came up with this because I've been futzing around with text-to-speech players in order to be more productive. Slip an academic article into one, turn it into an .mp3, then the dishes can be done more productively. (And after years of listening to papers, I can actually catch more than I thought I'd be able to.)

And what's with the iPhone? Christ, people, it's a phone. (Or part phone, at least. I suppose I'd be more excited if I ever used my cell phone, but I don't even know where it is right now.)

[Miriam]

Well, at least you've started Against the Day. I'm sure there are brownie points for that.

I didn't really have a problem understanding the dialogue. But alas, there's probably no way to save those of us who use the less-common pronunciation of "Burstein" from the evil depradations of text-to-speech programs.

[Rich Puchalsky]

There were actually scattered words and phrases I couldn't get -- the name of the Death Star something toy -- the whole reason that you gave for breaking up with someone in the first breakup mentioned -- the name of the surgical procedure, and the book that you didn't finish (Against The Day, I see from the above).

I've never understood the point of podcasts, unless done as this one was for comic effect. Why would anyone want to listen to anything when they can read so much more quickly and easily?

[SEK]

Miriam, be thankful I goosed the thing a bit, otherwise you'd have been "Myron Beerstein."

Rich, I don't understand the appeal of podcasts either. The only ones I listen to are really just radio: This American Life and In Our Time. As someone who until recently had his own place and now writes for an uneven woody collective said in an email: "single-authored blog involves all kinds of cathexis I don't want or need -- from too-devoted fandom all the way to ... deeply fermented alphaliberalmania." I think part of the appeal of podcasts is the celebrity, the too-devoted fandom, the deep fermentation of your objector's objections, &c. It's tangible proof that you are the Blog God you fancy yourself to be.

Thank said, I had such a hoot making that one, I may do a couple more. Maybe a serious: Brief Interviews with the Famous Headless or somesuch. Depends on how much time I have (i.e. if I start sleeping more than four hours a night).

[Jonathan Dresner]

The text-to-speech definitely could be better. My wife uses text-to-speech readers all the time (book readers, screen readers) and I can't remember the last time I heard one that bad. The phrasing was OK (not great, but better than some of the older stuff I've heard), but the enunciation was awful, which is kind of the opposite of the stuff that she uses.

Cute, though.

[hermit greg]

Excellent! Great conclusion for the day. I now will vote.

[hermit greg]

Or, I would have voted, had the poll not been removed... today?

[SEK]

Bandwidth issue, apparently. I've had to move pictures to Flickr, cut down on how many images I display, &c. May have to pull down the sidebars too.

[hermit greg]

Ouch. You did get a lot of links today.

[Bucephalus]

Lame

[Cicero’s golden ass]

Wait I put the Backstreet Boy’s and Britney Spear’s debut album on pause to hear this?

=)

You're truly a classic fool! -_o