Informações:
Sinopse
A discussion of virtually everything
Episódios
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Episode 138: Spontaneous Human Combustion
10/11/2013Every now and then, someone unexpectedly bursts into flames, and science has never been able to explain why. Except it totally has, and we’re going to explain it too. It’s a story that spans continents and centuries, involving the history of tobacco farming and candle-making, techniques for building houses from dung, and the sad fate […]
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Episode 137: Adaptations
03/11/2013This week, we’re looking at our favorite (and least favorite) film adaptations of books, and hopefully coming up with a formula for not screwing it up. And yes, that means some unfavorable comparisons between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but it also means Douglas Adams and Truman Capote and Harvey Pekar, and […]
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Episode 136: Valentine’s Day
27/10/2013This week, we’ve been asked to tell the world the true meaning of Valentine’s Day, and we sort of make an attempt at that. Sure, we get hung up on the horrors of ensemble romantic comedies for a while, and debate the qualifications for sainthood, and try to write a better Farmer’s Almanac, but it’s […]
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Episode 135: Cephalopods
20/10/2013We love a good old-fashioned topic about weird animals, and they don’t get much weirder than cephalopods. They change colors, they solve puzzles, they fight whales, and they’re basically the closest thing we have to intelligent aliens. So of course we love them! We also waste some time talking about Halloween music and picking fights […]
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Episode 134: Regina Spektor
13/10/2013How exactly does a musician capture one’s heart? Because that’s basically the question we’ve been asked, and we’re going to make some sort of effort to answer it. Does our listener love Regina Spektor’s talent? Her willingness to experiment? Her total lack of media coaching? Her cool friends? We’ve got ideas, and a whole lot […]
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Episode 133: The Running Man
06/10/2013Dystopian game shows are hot right now. Or at least we’re all predicting that they’ll be hot in the future. But the trend dates back at least to the 1980s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger fought for his life against a bunch of heavily armed gladiators on the abandoned streets of Los Angeles. It’s a tale of […]
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Episode 132: Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills
29/09/2013Strap in, because this one is going to get stupid. We’re traveling back to the futuristic year 1994, when the only thing standing between Earth and an invading alien army was a group of Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters. From Beverly Hills. Yes, somehow this was a real show, as well as the topic that finally […]
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Episode 131: Maker Faire
22/09/2013Once in a great while, we stumble into a situation too awesome to ignore. Topics? Bah! We just got back from watching a real-life carnival barker set off a human-sized game of Mousetrap. Obviously we’re talking about that. And robots, and go-karts, and artisan peanut butter, and guitars made of tennis racquets, and homemade jewelry, […]
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Episode 130: Memetic Theory
15/09/2013The word “meme” has been around since the 1970s, but it took another twenty years for everyone to decide they liked it. Since then, it’s been applied to basically everything, but is that really appropriate? We’re pretty sure we know. We’re also looking at the sordid fall of a memetics journal, the continued relevance of […]
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Episode 129: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
08/09/2013Russian literature isn’t exactly known for its optimism, but we may have wrung some joy out of a story that kills its main character on page one. Before there were inspiring stories of hope in the face of impending death, Tolstoy gave us a tale of social niceties, modest ambition, bureaucracy, and God, and he […]
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Episode 128: We Didn’t Start the Fire
01/09/2013It’s another musical episode, and this week we’re telling an entire generation to shut the hell up. We examine the horrible secrets of Billy Joel’s big list of stuff that happened, from the overly broad references to the slightly cheated rhyme scheme. Could this song be written today? Could it be written again next week? […]
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Episode 127: H.P. Lovecraft
25/08/2013Things are about to get non-Euclidean and kind of gross, because we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft and his possible connection to the wild world of obscene tentacle illustration. Was he a major influence on the form, or is it just Rule 34 working its dirty, dirty magic? Does anyone get laid in Lovecraft-land? Does it […]
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Episode 126: Character Crossovers
18/08/2013If you could take characters from one work and put them in another work, which ones would you choose? More importantly, how would you make it as funny and/or stupid as possible? We’re a lot more interested in the latter question, and we find a few decent answers to it. If you’re interested in festive […]
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Episode 125: The Great Cicada Invasion
11/08/2013We were promised a plague, but what we got was a few weeks of harmless bugs minding their business and occasionally chirping. Where were the decimated crops? The blotted-out skies? The children carried off by the swarm? Funny story: cicadas don’t do any of that. Luckily, they’re still big and gross, and we can probably […]
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Episode 124: Famous Last Words
04/08/2013We all have to die eventually, so why not go out with one last zinger? That’s basically the question we’re asking this week, even as we try to pretty it up by calling it educational. We’ve got Karl Marx’s last (short) rant, Voltaire’s deathbed burn, and Socrates’ least graceful dialogue, along with electric chair puns […]
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Episode 123: Hope vs. Despair
28/07/2013In a way, this is kind of the only topic. Like, anywhere, ever. Se we’re making a serious effort to add something new to the conversation. Inevitably, this leads us into an abyss of fast food mythology, terrible movies, Mormon kitsch, and desperately earnest mask-makers — you know, all the classics. Will this journey through […]
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Episode 122: Skyline
21/07/2013Someone asked us to talk about a forgettable and mostly-forgotten movie from 2010. So we did, and discovered a tale about a bunch of douchebags hiding in a condo, plus aliens or something. Is it absolute garbage, or is it one of those movies that gets everything just wrong enough to be irritating? Which of […]
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Episode 121: Possum Punchbowl Party Time Saturday
14/07/2013This week, the very foundations of the show crack and we spiral down into an abyss of terrible ideas. How terrible? How about marsupials teaching you history? Starchy omelets? Lots and lots of eye-gouging? And if that’s somehow not enough for you, we sing. Let that sink in. Subscribe via RSS Subscribe via iTunes Download […]
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Episode 120: Thomas Edison
07/07/2013Well this is awkward. It’s almost Tesla’s birthday, and who should show up on our topic list but his old arch-enemy? What should we say? Do we even understand the principles of electrical engineering? Is being a good manager the same thing as being a good inventor? Can we find something nice to say about […]
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Episode 119: Republican Hipsters
30/06/2013Wait, Republican hipsters? Is that even a real thing? Seriously, we spend most of this episode trying to figure it out. It’s a thrilling journey through a world of Biblical breath mints, ugly fonts, drunk Ron Paul fanboys, and Ed Hardy preachers, all set to soothing Brooklyn background noise. Because we may have left the […]