A Thousand Times No

 

 Skullcrusher Pirate Hotdish [48:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The holiday season continues apace. To mark Boxing Day, the onset of Kwanzaa, the first day of Xmas gift returns, a belated Festivus, your 40th birthday, or anything else notable about today, here’s a special year-end bonus: a medley of live performance highlights from the December 16, 2006 “Jonathan Coulton meets Paul and Storm” show at Milkboy Coffeehouse in Ardmore, PA.

(Check out the impish tour poster from Visual Thing a Week inkmeister Len Peralta of Jawbone Radio.)

“Skullcrusher Pirate Hotdish” is named in honor of some of the themes appearing in the songs — and to mark the fact that I’m visiting in Minnesota (which is disturbingly devoid of snow at the moment). I’ve freely reordered songs from the show’s two sets to give you a sampling of all the performers, separately and in combination. If you’re new to either of the featured acts, you’re in for a treat.

The set list for this virtual concert:

Opening Band (P&S)
Skullcrusher Mountain (JoCo)
Nugget Man — Robert C. Baker (P&S w/JoCo)
Code Monkey (JoCo w/P&S)
Your Love Is (P&S)
Over There (JoCo w/P&S)
A Better Version of You (P&S)
Creepy Doll (JoCo)
The Captain’s Wife’s Lament (P&S)
Re: Your Brains (JoCo)
~~ All brief “commercials” courtesy Paul and Storm. ~~

Please note: All songs appear with permission from the artists, and no robots, pirates, zombies, cuddly creatures, or giant squid were harmed during the making of this mix. Nothin’ furry in the slurry.

Get ready for the new year — resolve to catch Paul and Storm with Jonathan Coulton LIVE in 2007. [“Release the doves!”]

P.S. There’s also an interview with Jonathan Coulton right next door on our website. Go, monkeys, go!

 

 InTheNo 3: Musician Jonathan Coulton [57:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Just how far do you have to go when you quit your day job and pursue a record contract? If you’re singer, songwriter, and troubadour extraordinaire Jonathan Coulton, a little interplanetary travel is all in a day’s work.

We talk about a myriad of topics, including:

• The Pluto formerly known as planet, and the “Planet People” who determined its fate
• The PopSci Podcast
• A Mystery Holiday Musical Clip
  [spoilers: secret performers, song information]
• Actor Brian Dennehy
• Theremins and Clara Rockmore
• Coulton’s interview on National Public Radio
• Ikea and a certain bathroom lamp
• The Yale Whiffenpoofs
• When You Go remix (MP3 download)
• Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig
• The Code Monkey Remix Contest winners

The music playlist for this episode:

• I’m Your Moon
• Chiron Beta Prime
• My Monkey
• The Future Soon
• First of May
• Ikea
• When You Go
• Code Monkey

We’ve departed from our standard weekend release schedule to bring you this Solstice special. Hope Yule Enjoy.

Like what you hear? We invite you to sample other archived episodes. You can also receive future episodes on a regular basis by subscribing with just one click at iTunes, Podcast Alley, or Odeo, or by dropping our RSS feed into your podcatcher:

http://podcast.1000timesno.net/rss

I don’t mean to go on like a broken record (especially since most of you born after the Carter administration have never owned a turntable), but the sad state of podcast directories has me needled. iTunes burped, Odeo pooted, and now Yahoo! Podcasts has deposited a gleaming pile of not-Shinola at my feet.

It took me five successive days of podcast feed submissions to get beyond Yahoo’s mistaken system-error message. When I finally managed to break through last week, I received the following confirmation onscreen:

You\’ve successfully added this Series to Yahoo! Podcasts. If you don’t see it immediately, check back in a day or two. Thanks!

Did you catch that hiccup in the very first word? Botched escape characters should have been a clue that my poor podcast feed would be shut away by those Yahooligans like a prisoner of ASCII-ban. Somebody please send me an owl if it emerges. Ever.

(Note to Yahoo!: “Beta” is not Greek for “craptastic”. If you devoted just a fraction of the coding muscle you throw behind some of your other betas to podcasting, I’d be singing your praises — not these Mo’ Beta Blues.)

Alas, Odeo, where to begin? This is not a rhetorical question: the Odeo website has some of the worst, most labyrinthine navigation I’ve ever encountered on a website.

The problems don’t stop there. Getting my podcast channel set up on Odeo has been a downright odious experience. My claim ticket repeatedly went unrecognized and required administrative intervention; Odeo is so behind on updating feeds that the latest episode of InTheNo still hasn’t appeared (four days after it was released).

Odeons, I’m out here rooting for you. Please get it together.

(Memo to Evan Williams: Usability matters, and goes well beyond having attractive graphics. Don’t give me “Looks pretty, works shitty” when I know you’re capable of so much more.)

At one point last weekend, I needed to run a quick errand a couple of miles from home, so I made a last-minute reservation with PhillyCarShare to use a Prius for 15-30 minutes. When I arrived at the neighborhood Prius stable, all four of the liftbacks had bolted, including the one that was being charged to my account that very minute. Yes, somebody else was out there pimping my ride.

A few minutes and one phone call later, the fleet dispatchers shifted my reservation to a Honda Element that was parked a half-block away. Since the Element basically looks like a Lego decked out in rubber fetish gear, I had always assumed it would drive like a toy. I was wrong.

Under the hood, the Element is still a Honda, and it’s got the well-balanced handling to prove it. Meanwhile, the Prius has extremely soft steering, tetchy Toyota brakes, a permanently obstructed rear view, and an unnerving propensity to side-shimmy down the freeway on blustery days. Okay, environmentally friendly cars can’t all be Tesla Roadsters, but do they really need to roll down the road like a helping of underdone brussel sprouts? Let’s hope not.

As for the Element, I’ve gotta hand it to Honda — it was good fun to be reminded that I always did love Legos.

 

 InTheNo 2: Psychologist Barry Schwartz [56:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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What if nobody ever turned you down, leaving every possible option available to you? Psychology professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, explains how being asked to choose from an overabundance of options can actually lead to feelings of dissatisfaction and helplessness, rather than greater contentment. We talk about everything from jeans to jam, gourmet appliances to dog food, job hunting to retirement planning.

We also touch on the work of several notable scholars, including:

• Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore College,
  The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004)
• Sheena Iyengar, Columbia University
• Hazel Rose Markus, Stanford University
• Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, and the late Amos Tversky, Stanford University
• Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, University of Chicago,
  “Libertarian Paternalism is not an Oxymoron” (HTML) (PDF)

The choice is simple: Listen in!

Like what you hear? We invite you to sample other archived episodes. You can also receive future episodes on a regular basis by subscribing with just one click at iTunes, Podcast Alley, or Odeo, or by dropping our RSS feed into your podcatcher:

http://podcast.1000timesno.net/rss

I went to an “Evening Dress is requested” event last night. Getting home after a late night at work, I spooled through the “I don’t have anything to wear” routine for a while, then finally managed to leave the house in a non-naked state. This entailed donning several items I don’t regularly wear, including:

• Black Italian pumps
• A floor-length skirt
• A top with 20 hook-and-eye fixtures in the front
• Lipstick
• Contact lenses
• Vintage screwback rhinestone earrings

At some point late in the evening, I realized that my right earring had fallen off. I unscrewed the matching earring from my left ear and showed it to my host, asking him to inquire about its lost mate the next time he returned to the private club where we were gathered.

“Why don’t we take a quick look around right now?” his wife suggested. “The crowd is thinning, and we might be able to spot it.”

We retraced my steps and peered around for a bit, but nothing turned up. My host mentioned the lost earring to some of the staff, who also took to looking as they hustled from floor to floor. After a bit more searching, I decided to put the remaining earring into my purse for safekeeping. I popped open the clasp to my itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny evening bag and dropped the left earring inside.

That’s when I caught sight of the rogue earring. It was right in front of me, winking — booby-trapped between my decolletage and my personal asset portfolio. [Cue circus music.] Mission accomplished, garnering a hearty round of guffaws.

“Well, it’s a good thing you spotted it,” my bemused host noted dryly, “because that’s not exactly one of the places I would have thought to search.”

As ever, what’s lost is found, in the very last place you look.

I had the chance to finally meet face-to-face with Joey Campagna, the host of the Acappella U podcast, when he came down to Philly this weekend from Rochester, NY. Joey and his assistant, Ryan (better known to listeners as “Rymachine”) were in town for a concert by Off The Beat, Penn’s award-winning a cappella vocal band. Joey and Ryan hit a few wrinkles along the way, including wretched Northeast Corridor traffic and a small problem that required the services of AAA and a local locksmith. But they got what they came for: great audio and video footage of a smokin’ hot live performance. You can always put your money on OTB to deliver when they hit the stage.

The thing I missed was a chance to get an interview with Joey. With his very tight schedule, he had to turn down my request to record for my own show. One of these days we’ll have a reprise. In the meantime, check out his podcast, and marvel at the dazzling possibilities of the human voice.

I’m very fond of the microphone I purchased to record podcasts, a Snowball from the well-rounded folks at Blue. As the name would suggest, it’s big, round, and white. Unfortunately, it’s also been quite a handful lately, interjecting the recordings with a high-pitched squealing noise that no amount of post-production massaging can remove.

“Call them and ask them to fix it,” said one of my friends with extensive recording experience. “You’re dealing with people who make serious microphones. They’ll take of it.”

Fortunately for me, he was right. Blue Microphones immediately shipped out a replacement Snowball via FedEx Ground. I observed online as the package made its way from California into Pennsylvania, and then into a truck in Philadelphia. Everything was running smoothly, until I received a “Delivery Exception” email from FedEx early Friday afternoon.

“FedEx attempted, but was unable to complete delivery of the following shipment…”

Puzzled by how they could have failed to deliver to a continuously manned reception desk, I called FedEx to learn more about what happened to the package. “Our records indicate that the package was loaded on the wrong truck and sent to a completely different part of the city,” a customer service agent told me. She took my phone number and said she would call when she learned more about the status of the package.

Of course, I received no call. Eager to bring the microphone home before the weekend, I rang up FedEx again. This time, another agent told me it was impossible to reroute any misdirected package within the same day. When I asked if I could pick up the package at a central FedEx facility in the city, he told me that was impossible, too. In order to keep down the cost of their ground shipping, he explained, FedEx has trimmed away options like customer pickup that create too much cost overhead.

It took three-and-a-half days for the package to travel over 2,800 miles from Ventura, California to Philadelphia. Now it’s taking another three-and-a-half days for the package to get across the city. What’s wrong with this picture?

When I posted the first episode of InTheNo: The 1000 Times No Podcast, I signed up to be listed on iTunes. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. It’s been nearly a week, and the podcast still hasn’t been picked up.

Last night I resubmitted the InTheNo podcast feed for an iTunes listing. This morning I resubmitted yet again. Interestingly, I only received a confirmation email from iTunes with this third and most recent submission. The previous two attempts must have vanished into thin air. (Perhaps they didn’t get the memo that the Internet is not a truck, and they disappeared while hitchhiking on the information superhighway.)

So if you have found this site via iTunes, welcome — we’ve been waiting for you. We’ve got plenty of Peanut Chews and Cupertino Kool-Aid. Pull up a chair and say “Hello.”