{"id":384,"date":"2012-02-19T23:21:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T07:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=384"},"modified":"2012-02-19T23:21:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-20T07:21:17","slug":"podthoughts-the-vinyl-countdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=384","title":{"rendered":"Podthoughts: The Vinyl Countdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/center>
\nVital stats:<\/strong>
\nFormat: Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public
\nEpisode duration: 30m-1h30m
\nFrequency: 3-9 per month<\/p>\n

\u201cA bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it.\u201d The prospect does not immediately appeal. Several of you may find the deal sweetened if I reveal the identity of that dickhead as Keith McNally, the podcast auteur behind XO<\/em><\/a>, one of the shows I\u2019ve respected the very most in all my years Podthinking. XO<\/em> repays your listening time with both its high-caliber production \u2014 some of the most intricate craft I\u2019ve heard in a podcast that doesn\u2019t also air on the radio \u2014 and its seemingly untrammeled access to the psyche of one not-particularly-inhibited young man with a lot on his mind, a high-intensity way of saying it, and the inexplicable ability to combine those qualities without descending into obnoxiousness. A real marriage of the raw and the refined, you might say, which most conceptually strong podcasts officiate in one way or another.<\/p>\n

The Vinyl Countdown<\/em><\/a> [RSS<\/a>] [iTunes<\/a>], now. This show sits on the opposite end of the production spectrum from McNally\u2019s other brainchild: a bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it. For half an hour, an hour, two hours, two and a half hours<\/em>, you can hear McNally and a handful of dude- or lady-friends gross each other out; reminisce about antics past; swirl the ice in their glasses; and speculate about what, in a series of made-up realities, each with their own rigid rules, does or does not count as gay. His friends have names like \u201cRobocop Craig\u201d and \u201cMustard Mike.\u201d When something or someone comes up a lot in these conversations, McNally will occasionally splice together an episode illustrating it, as when he made one out of Louis C.K.\u2019s visits to Opie and Anthony<\/em> [MP3<\/a>] (hosts whose manner, worn to a featureless dun by years upon years of morning-zooishness, makes you especially grateful for a challengingly personal program like this one).<\/p>\n

To think this began as a video game show. I hadn\u2019t actually started listening back when \u2014 if \u2014 McNally and his coterie stuck to that agenda; when I first tuned in, things had clearly long fallen into the kind of free-for-all that, listened to from certain angles, almost sounds like chaste formalism. But catch me on a good day, and I just feel delighted at the very fact that, at the touch of a button, I can listen in on a couple hundred hours of some Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public. I tend to think that certain types of podcasts have grown popular because they give us a line to the sort of conversations that have fallen out of our lives; it certainly hasn\u2019t fallen out of these guys\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vital stats: Format: Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public Episode duration: 30m-1h30m Frequency: 3-9 per month \u201cA bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it.\u201d The prospect does not immediately appeal. Several of you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-podthoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}