Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

The list of podcast episodes as yet not listened to has swollen to 70 thanks in due to spending most of last week in Windows as well as having lost my iPod earphones on the plane. (WestJet didn't have them in the lost & found, which surprised me a little, their having raised my hopes by being otherwise generally awesome.) Not to mention I didn't write an update last month. No earphones meant no listening to podcasts while in transit, which is no excuse, since I still have ironing and bill-paying.

I added no podcasts since last time, and even unsubscribed from one, ChinesePod. It was time to admit that despite intentions to do so, I was never going to get around to listening to them. Too much going on in my life to pretend to even have the time to continue learning Mandarin.

It pains me to say this, not having anywhere else to listen to great Canadian music, and knowing people who work in production for the show, but it must be said: I skip the talking bits of the still excellent CBC Radio 3. At least they put those in chapters within podcasts to make it possible: KEXP, can you please do the same? The latter has no talking for their awesome song-of-the-day podcast, so I've moved a few to my regular iTunes Library. "Convert Selection to MP3", despite the podcast already being in MP3 format, is your friend.

More than a day's worth of CITR's The Jazz Show, an afternoon's worth of KEXP's Sonarchy Radio, 6 hours (!) of The Crazy Canucks and a half hour of Planetizen Podcast wait for me to work through. But to Dave, who knows my usual response to his notification of a new podcast is to tell him how behind on podcasts, as with everything, I am completely up-to-date on The Canucks Outsider.

Not much change from the list of podcasts I listen to from last month, but I did add two more since:

• Book's Music, from John Book, who plays a very wide variety of music on podcast episodes that are exactly an hour long each. I've known about John Book for several years, likely since 1997, when I first subscribed to the Influx mailing list about DJ Shadow.
• The Talk Show, an awfully-named podcast with an awful website with no show notes or links, and slowly improving production values. Dan Benjamin and John Gruber talk about Apple, Inc., and mostly about the iPhone lately. They've had an interview or two, and after 5 episodes, no women or non-white people have been guests. All that must make people wonder why I even bother subscribing, but I have to admit I think about the stuff they talk about (Macs, digital photography, the iPhone), so therefore I listen.

Also I'm listening to podcasts much more now that I leave my computer at work on weeknights. That was a decision I should have made several months ago.