Format War Veteran

by | Dec 3, 2018 | Episodes

There are many important decisions that shape our lives and by which we judge other people.  Coke or Pepsi? Rolling Stones or Beatles? New York or LA? Cats or dogs? iPod or Zune? That last one was pretty easy for the vast majority of people.  The competition between two titans of the technology industry to be the music player in your back pocket should have been a heated battle that raged for years. Instead, Microsoft’s Zune never achieved more than 10% of the market, taking two years to sell as many units as Apple sold in a month.  A few short years later, the Zune was quietly shuffled off to the format war graveyard. 

As long as we have had media on which to record our art, there have been competing formats.  While more modern examples like Betamax vs VHS or Blu-ray vs HD DVD may leap to mind, format wars go back as far as the days of Thomas Edison and the first audio media, wax cylinders.  The first format war was between Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner, both of whom invented competing types of media for the phonograph. Edison first pioneered the wax cylinder in the 1880s. He originally intended it as a means of recording telephone conversations, but the cylinders soon became a popular format for musical recordings.  In the following decade, Berliner released the disk record, the shape we’re familiar with today. Disks had originally been used solely in children’s toys, and in the beginning their sound quality was poor. Frighteningly, terrifyingly poor. Look on YouTube for the first talking dolls. Chucky had nothing on these girls.
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Baptism by…

by | Nov 27, 2018 | Episodes

Baptism announcements in church newsletters are not usually cause for much excitement outside of the initiate’s family, certainly not a matter for the state supreme court.  Unless you’re a particular Syrian-born man who claimed that the church in Tulsa, OK where he converted to Christianity agreed to keep his name private. They posted it on the church’s website, as they do with all baptisms, making it the first google result for the man’s name.  Which is why, when he returned to Syria, he was kidnapped and tortured, and why he later took the church to court. 

It took the man, only called John Doe in court documents, three days to escape his captors, several months for he and his wife to return to the United States, and multiple surgeries to repair the injuries he’d received.   He cannot return to Syria, leaving behind a son, a house, and two cars, and received frequent death threats. Doe sued First Presbyterian for $75,000, accusing it of breach of contract, negligence, and outrage. (more…)

Surprise Polyglot

by | Nov 21, 2018 | Episodes

Like all things, English has changed and developed over time. Though it began as a German language, many words are taken from Latin and French. The grammar is also from other Germanic languages, but neither is it much like that of Romance languages. Romance languages, like French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian, come from the far western reaches of the Roman empire, where people spoke common, or vulgar Latin.

As its name suggests, the English language began in England. Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, from whom we get the word English, and Jutes) came to Britain from around 449 AD, pushing out the Celtic Britons or making them speak English instead of the old Celtic languages. Some of the Celtic languages, like Welsh, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gallic, are still clinging on today. The Germanic dialects of these different tribes became what is now called Old English. Old English did not sound or look much like the English spoken today. If a time machine dropped out off back then, and you didn’t immediately kill them with disease, you’d be unlikely to understand more than a few words. (more…)

Read A Rainbow

by | Nov 13, 2018 | Episodes

What do the missing words in the following book titles all have in common?: The ___ Mile, Where the ___ Fern Grows, The ___ Letter.  Need a clue? Here’s an easy one: Fifty Shades of ___. That’s right, all of these books these have colors in their titles, like a butterfly in the sky. Let’s take a look at these books and read a rainbow.

Let’s kick off the show with the most widely-circulated colorful book – the yellow pages.  You don’t ever hear, “I’m in the book” anymore and our fingers don’t “do the walking” as much as they do the swiping these days.  Considering that there have probably been more phone books in print than any other publication in the history of the world, this represents a large cultural shift in a relatively short amount of time.  The first phone directory was created in 1878 on a single piece of cardboard, with fifty listings, and it didn’t have any numbers. It only listed the names of the businesses that had a telephone, since human operators connected all calls and the average person needed to be taught to use their newfangled telephone.    (more…)

Cannibal! The Podcast, with Nature Vs Narcissism and Sketch Nerds

by | Oct 30, 2018 | Episodes

There are many reasons why an individual or group of people would eat other people, such as religious rites, shows of superiority, and signs of respect, but also out of necessity. Few people think of the Donner party’s ill-fated trek through the Sierra Nevadas or the rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 without thinking of people driven to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to stave off death. So we can split cannibalism into four often overlapping categories: by choice, by necessity, endo-cannibalism (eating people within your group), and exo-cannibalism (eating people outside your group).

It would probably be more accurate to refer to today’s topic as anthropophagy, meaning the eating of man, rather than cannibalism.  The word cannibal comes from a group of people who may not have eaten human flesh at all. “Cannibal” comes from Canibales, the name that the Spanish gave to the Caribs, the natives of the Caribbean islands.  The Spanish accused the tribe of ritualistically eating their enemies, but most of the initial reports came from Christopher Columbus, who had both personal and political reasons to make them seem as savage as possible. (more…)

Words You Can’t Say On TV Or Radio, with JoChristie

by | Oct 23, 2018 | Episodes

Hollywood in the 1920s was haunted by a number of scandals, like the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and alleged fatal sexual assault by movie star “Fatty” Arbuckle, which brought widespread condemnation from religious, civic, and political organizations.  Political pressure was increasing, with legislators in 37 states introducing almost one hundred movie censorship bills in 1921. Faced with the prospect of having to comply with hundreds of local decency laws in order to show their movies, the studios chose self-regulation by way of a single church official.  

The movie studios enlisted Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood’s image.  Hays, Postmaster General under Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee, was paid a lavish sum equivalent to $1.4 million in today’s money inflation.  He served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), where he “defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrums, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities.”  The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Landis as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in the wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal.  That was the one you might have seen dramatized in the 1988 movie Eight Men Out.

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