tl;dr – review of 8hrs of podcasts, interspersed with pics of Swans and so on. Continue at your own peril
Hmm. This took summat out of me. I may not be as young or as fit as I was. (1)
Left at 1120, returned 1640, basically non-stop yomping, with 11kgs of coins in the weighted jacket, two bricks in my backpack and 2 litres of water in the bird food bags. Listened to 8hrs-ish of podcasts at 1.5 speed (2).
No, nobody has ever told me I am quite odd. Why do you ask?
So, let’s get the swans and cygnets out of the way first. I filmed these a few minutes after turning back from bridge 79 (first time I’ve gone that far).
Bridge 79 looks like this.
The swan (daddy was further along) and her bairns look like this
Recently I asked a friend for podcast recommendations and he pointed me at Origin Stories, by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynsky. I will write more on this podcast in another post, but the short version is – yeah, good-ish stuff (ymmv). Here’s some snap judgements
| Oppenheimer: Fall out Good, without every REALLY getting into it. Defence (solid) of not-showing-Hiroshima-pictures. Could have done a little more on the connections with other Nolans, I guess. And on the way thinking about the Bomb has shifted? That said, you can ALWAYS find more to say about Big Subjects, and a podcast is 60 to 90 minutes, innit? |
| Elon Musk: The Man Who Fell to Earth Fun stuff – SpaceKaren has properly jumped the popularity shark with his handling of Twitter, and they show it. Good on his upbringing and love of specific sci-fi, on the weirdness of his family, and the epic “bullying” (i.e. physical assaults) he was on the receiving end of |
| Zionism Part 1 and Zionism Part 2 These were good, in that I learned plenty. I didn’t know about Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel The Old New Land in 1902, or about the 1987 play Perdition. |
| Climate Change Denial Part 1 Science Friction – yeah, okay. But relatively reliant on “Merchants of Doubt” and not great on the psychology |
| Climate Change Denial Part 2: Fuelling the Flames – yeah, okay. But there are so many other tactics (gish gallop, flooding the zone, predatory delay, botwars etc) that needed a mention. |
| Neoliberalism: Everything’s up for sale – yeah, okay. But not sure there was very much new in it. Could have gone more into instrumental rationality? Or Polanyi and the Great Transformation. Disciplinary neoliberalism gets not a mention |
Superheroes; truth, justice and the outsider way This was fun (perhaps in part because on a topic I am more profoundly ignorant of?) Good stuff on the class/religious aspect (i.e. lots of anti-Semitism etc). Two standouts – EC comics getting in trouble for, gasp, a black Astronaut – see the “Judgement Day” section of the wikipedia – and Lois Lane getting turned black for a 1970 Superman story. |
| Ayn Rand the Ego has Landed – yeah, good on her hypocrisy and general weirdness. Could have mentioned Two Girls Fat and Thin, and the great quote by John Rogers oddly doesn’t get a run – “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” To be fair, the quote from the New Yorker spoof about Ayn Rand reviewing kids’ movies was great.  |
| Cutlure War: Inside the Rage Machine – yeah, okay on this and “Kulturkampf”, but no exploration of Gramsci, Horkheimer/Adorno/Marcuse |
And finally, that promised body part. Anyone know a) if this was a goose and b) what might have happened? Died of natural causes and then scavenged seems most likely?
Footnote
(1) I can do something about the second, I guess
(2) This time had enough podcasts to listen to. But didn’t, as had promised myself, have ibuprofen ready to neck on my return.
marchudson.net 
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