13 posts tagged “diversions”
Podcast Episode 56
Response to question 1:
"You won't be the first person who has left home with nothing and struck out to a new city to make a new life without a safety net. get on a bus, drive away, go to a new city, find somebody you can be the roommate of, get a job pouring coffee somewhere at a coffee shop and exhale. Stop fucking around. You don't want to waste your whole fucking life living a lie. Often times when you feel trapped in a closet, you want to make your situation feel somehow noble, and your suffering you want to magnify to basically excuse yourself from taking any action... A lot of people have suffered like you've suffered. And there's a way out if you have the courage to take it. If you have the internet, and you have a gay friend, and you're not tied up in your mum's basement, you can be free! Are their hearts going to break? Good. They should. Because reality needs to bring your family into conflict with the fantasy that is their faith."
Response to question 3:
"What I know about sex with dolphins is probably exactly what you know about sex with dolphins, because if you google "sex with dolphins", and it sounds like you have googled "sex with dolphins", you come to a page that is titled "Sex with Dolphins: How To and A Personal Viewpoint". This person who claims to have had sex with dolphins has more information about sex with dolphins than I do, because I've never had sex with dolphins, or met anyone who's had sex with dolphins and I'm not particularly interested in meeting anyone who has ever had sex with a dolphin."
Question 6. The caller is a woman:
"Hi Dan, I've been with my girlfriend for about 9 months now and I recently discovered that she likes dirty talk. She had a previous sex partner who used to call her names and insult her with really nasty stuff like, umm, "You're a cunt-hungry cum dumpster". And I'm a little disturbed by this metaphor but I'm happy to try doing this with her but the problem is I have really no imagination for this kind of thing. I mean, I tried it and the best thing I could come up with was like, "Oooh... You naughty tart." Which is lame, right? Totally lame. And kind of disturbingly Victorian. So I was wondering if you could advise me on where I could get some inspiration for talking dirty. And inasmuch as I'm a dyke, if you could recommend a book, that would be perfect. Thanks."
Download the Savage Love podcast. You can find it at the iTunes store or thestranger.com. You'll never know how much you have in common with a gay Mormon boy in Utah until you do.
Geek love:
During the Q&A after Village People Radio Show, director Amir Muhammad said that the Malaysian government had banned his film, giving him seven reasons why. He said he responded with 14 rebuttals. He didn't win, but just read reason number five. Or rather, butir nombor lima:
5. Filem ini boleh sahaja dimulakan oleh perkataan yang tertera di skrin, contohnya “Amaran Oleh Kerajaan Malaysia: Fahaman Komunisme Dilarang Dan Anda Ditegah Daripada Meniru Ideologi Merbahaya Ini!’ Ayat ini boleh terbit dalam saiz font yang amat besar. Ayat ini juga boleh berkelip-kelip seperti lampu neon supaya lebih jelas. Kalau tak cukup satu tanda seru boleh guna lima atau sepuluh.
Fuck lah this is hilarious but I can't even begin to capture the humour in English, because -- need I say it again -- things just sound very funny in Malay. (Especially things to do with technology and modernity, because these words just don't exist in Malay and so we have to adopt the English words and pronounce them in Malay, which sounds terribly weird but also painfully funny when given the right context.) But let me try anyway:
5. This film could just be prefaced with some words emblazoned across the screen, for example "Warning from the Government of Malaysia: The Communist Ideology Is Against The Law And You Are Forbidden To Adopt This Dangerous Ideology!" This sentence could be shown in a very large font size. This sentence could also flash like a neon light so that it will be clearer. If one exclamation mark is not enough, you can use 5 or 10.
Quote found on the wonderful Internet:
I found out about bands before they were cool before finding out about bands before they were cool was cool.
Well I didn't get the $50 book voucher from the very short story contest, but I did make it to the "best of" shortlist!
Second try, voucher. Then: world domination.
For people who like to read and have too many books on their shelves:
Sign up on BookMooch. You can list all the books you don't want anymore and the books you'd like to have. Then you can add me as a friend so we can trade. (Look for cisoux from SG.)
So far I've sent out one book, Arundhati Roy's The Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire, to a guy in Philadelphia. And I'm waiting for a girl in Guam to send me her copy of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. It's like turning the world into a huge free bookshop!
I'm late into the game, yes I know, but I'm all for podcasts now.
I hardly ever click on the iTunes store because we can't buy anything anyway. Whatever information the store can provide me, I can find on Google.
But today I went into the store just to get a quick look at Sufjan Stevens' albums, and on the front page I saw a podcast for This American Life, and it was free!
I was still a bit skeptical, because when I first got my Mac I couldn't even download the six free songs that they promised because they demanded that I give them the details to an American bank account before I downloaded the songs. But as it turns out, podcasts are available for all! You can live anywhere in the world and get iTunes' free podcasts! And they have lots of free podcasts!!
I'm still surfing through what they have but for now I'm subscribing to an audio podcast called 60-second Science, the Ricky Gervais Show, the National Geographic video podcast and of course This American Life. Having a podcast for TAL is just so much more convenient than streaming it off the website because with a podcast, I can pause it whenever I want and resume listening where I last stopped. Extremely important given that their shows are an hour long.
I just listened to an episode. It was about recordings that people make for other people, like mix tapes, phone messages, etc. The first story (there are usually a few stories, or "acts", in a show) made me laugh out loud at several points. And the last one was pretty heart-wrenching: you just listen to some tapes that this guy made a few years ago for his long-distance girlfriend, audio letters. It's kind of crazy that he's letting the whole world listen to how vulnerable and puppy-like he was. But it taught me: all guys sound the same when they're in love.
Anyway it's terribly sweet. Makes you think about the first few months when you've just fallen in love.
Go download iTunes now and get the podcast.
Hmm I wonder if there's a David Attenborough podcast.
Who would have guessed that everything could end so suddenly on a pretty Tuesday morning? In the space of two hours, we left behind a happy era of Game Boy economics and trophy houses and entered a world of fear and vengeance. Even if you'd been waiting for the nineties-ending crash throughout the nineties, even if you'd believed all along that further terrorism in New York was only a matter of when and not of whether, what you felt on Tuesday morning wasn't intellectual satisfaction, or simply empathetic horror, but deep grief for the loss of daily life in prosperous, forgetful times: the traffic jammed by delivery trucks and unavailable cabs, "Apocalypse Now Redux" in local theatres, your date for drinks downtown on Wednesday, the sixty-three homers of Barry Bonds, the hourly AOL updates on J. Lo's doings.
-- Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker
From the September 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a collection of reactions from writers including John Updike, Jonathan Franzen and Susan Sontag just after the attacks.
Listen to one of the stories from This American Life while you drift off to sleep, and you'll go to sleep happy.
The best way to start is to click on the staff's favourites.
So far I've listened to Babysitting and Somewhere in the Arabian Sea and I'm hooked. The programmes are filled with wonderful stories from average, everyday people.
I got to exploring the site thanks to the David Sedaris clip I wrote about earlier, and even if you don't know or care who David Sedaris is, you should go to the site anyway and listen to any of the other stories. It's like reading without having to, you know, read. Really interesting stories. I can't emphasise this enough.
Well I say, if you can play along with Ricky Gervais' crazy questions and make me laugh out loud, you're pretty funny.
The bit with Chris Martin is in the second half, but the first half is funny too:
The Ricky Gervais Show podcast
Yes, I've been at my computer all day doing nothing productive. What can I say, I love the Internet.
