Podding Along

    It’s almost been a month since I last wrote and I suppose some explanation is in order. For the last few weeks I’ve been residing at the Wayne State Center for Addictive Behavior Studies, trying to rid myself of an addiction to Diet Pepsi Vanilla. This isn’t much of an excuse for not blogging though; the Center does have Internet access, and I had plenty of time in which to update my site — physical activity is frowned upon (it builds up thirst) so I mainly spent the days in the dorms anyway. What was and has been taking up most of time are podcasts.
    Like someone who quits smoking and starts gaining weight, I’m afraid I’ve replaced one addiction with another. I can’t stop listening to podcasts. I didn’t really start getting into them until iTunes 4.9 added podcatching capability (in May of last year), so I have a lot of catching up to do. It’s funny how many casts started up in March and April of last year, and are thus celebrating their first anniversaries now. Once I start listening to a podcast I feel compelled to subscribe to the whole feed and listen to all of it. One downside is this ends up with me perpetually living in the past, stuck in a loop of discussions of Pope John Paul II’s death, the Terri Schiavo court case, and the subway bombings in London. The biggest downside is that keeping up with these feeds is occupying a lot of my time. I can’t remember the last time I clicked the “Music” tab on my iPod and listened to some old favorite album or song. The only music I seem to listen to is whatever new band a podcaster chooses to present to me.
    I’m still plodding along though. I got caught up with all the Catholic Insider podcasts in about four months; with pigheaded determination I plowed through 235 episode of Keith and The Girl in exactly two months. And I’m doing this all over again, having just subscribed to 41 episodes of Dave’s Lounge yesterday.
    There have been a few casualties along the way too. I gave up on giving any more time to Dawn & Drew, Daily Source Code, The Word Nerds, Slate Magazine and Slate Explainer, Radio Go Daddy, WireImage, Open Source Sex, Drink ’Til We’re Funny!, The Animation Podcast (an interesting one, but sticking to it was too much like homework), Digital Life TV, Inside Mac Radio and Inside Mac TV, Amiee Mann’s podcast, Le Show, Morning Becomes Eclectic, Mugglecast, Olde English Sketch Comedy, Barack Obama’s podcast, and any and all Foxcasts, to name a few.
    To come publicly clean, in an air of full disclosure, here are the reasons why I’ve been so lax in adding new content here. I have not bothered to demarcate audio and video podcasts; and all links go to homepages rather than podcast feeds.
    …And that’s not even all of my 63 GBs of podcast hard drive space!