Ear Candy

Maybe you're driving to your golf match. Maybe you're taking a walk in the afternoon. Maybe you're working out on the elliptical at the gym. Each is a solitary pursuit that makes using your hands for reading or typing problematic, and so leaves your ears ripe for the picking. Once upon a time you might have turned to a radio to listen to tunes or the news. Travel down the timeline, and that transistor got swapped for an MP3 player of some flavor, enabling you to listen and relisten to your favorite artists. But increasingly those alone-times are the perfect opportunities for you to add your name to the 584 million others who stuff their ears with a podcast.

Just forty years old, the podcast started as an "audiolbog" back in the 1980's. It took 20 years and the internet to take it from a curiosity to a thing, one that today counts 55% of the population as listeners. And we/they have plenty of options: as of March 2025, Spotify had more than 6.5 million podcast titles on its platform.

A big reason for that is that the barrier for entry is almost nonexistent. For sure, there are highly produced productions like "Radiolab," "This American Life" and "Serial," each of which integrates voices, natural sounds, music and effects into a seamless sonic tapestry. That requires a raft of producers, researchers, writers and editors, all of which cost bucks. But the vast majority of podcasts are much simpler affairs costing far less: a mic and a person spouting opinions, occasionally joined by a guest to play off of or tangle with. Slap a musical riff on the front and back, and you have the Joe Rogan Experience, currently reaching 14.5 million listeners

It's an oddly retro approach to this most contemporary of media channels. No computer-generated imagery, no swirling electronic scores, no fully rendered imaginary ecospheres. Rather, it's just Billy in his bedroom with a $99 Blue Yeti USB Microphone, ranting about illegal immigrants/ Elon Musk/ water pressure/ fluoride/ Real Housewives/ Tom Cruise/ eggs/ WNBA/ electric cars/ etc., and sometimes all in the same show. It's not a lot different from being seated next to Uncle Ernie at Thanksgiving.

Likewise the commercials that pay the bills. These are integrated into the streams, and have a kinship with the very first radio ad from 1922. That 15-minute promo on New York City's WEAF for the Queensboro Corporation promoted apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens, and was just, well talk. And so it is for most podcast commercials. Called "Live Read" even if it's prerecorded, the format eschews any fancy production values in favor of a simple recitation. Usually it's just the host or a regular guest reading a script that is supposed to feel like you and they are having a chat: "Friends, before we move on, I want to talk to you about Johnson's Miracle Elixir. Ever feel drab and blue? Well, Johnson's Miracle Elixir is the perfect cure. And if you order now, you'll also get a trial portion of Johnson's Miracle Tonic for free!" The copy could be lifted from a Stephen Sondheim musical, albeit with a URL at the end.

More and more audio podcasts are even adding a video component, driven by the simple fact that they also cost nearly nothing. It was shock-jock host Don Imus who added a camera to his radio studio back in 1996, and broadcast live on newly formed MSNBC. For some reason an audience got hooked on not just listening to people talk for hours on end, but watching it. Fast forward to today, and the biggest growth channel for podcasts isn't Spotify or Apple Music, but YouTube: the platform now has 1 billion active podcast consumers every month.

What's there to listen to or watch? For sure there are the 800 pound gorillas like the aforementioned "Joe Rogan Experience," Alex Cooper's "Call Her Daddy" and Shannon Sharpe's "Club Shay Shay," but much, much... much... smaller game as well. "2 Fast 2 Forever" rewatches the entire "Fast and Furious" franchise over and over and dissects it endlessly (they're on episode #403). "The Episodic Table of Elements" is exactly what it sounds like: a discussion of the periodic table (they're currently on #94, plutonium). Or "The Empty Bowl," described as "a meditative podcast about cereal." Check out episode #114 which seeks to settle the important question of Boo Berry vs. Count Chocula.

In the 1989 classic film "Field of Dreams" Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a disembodied voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come." Kevin Costner does exactly that, and the ghosts of baseball past do indeed materialize. With podcasts it seems it's not that much different, just with an audio slant: if you record it, at least someone, somewhere, will listen.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford listens to podcasts when he walks. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Taking the Temperature

Your morning routine may vary from mine, but it likely contains many of the same elements. You get up, put on a robe and some slippers, use the bathroom, and eventually head down to the kitchen. There you either start a pot of coffee or grab a cup, then get something from the fridge or cupboard for breakfast. You likely glance at your phone to see if there were any urgent emails or texts that popped up after you went to bed, and/or what major catastrophe is challenging the world. And then you look for the one empirical piece of information that you need to really start your day: the temperature outside your window.

For sure you want to know the chance of rain, how hard the winds will be blowing, if it will continue to be sunny or cloudy... the full weather picture. But a glance at the outside world will give you the general vibe, and the only really quantifiably metric you need to know is how hot or cold it is. That determines the socks you pick out, the pants that make sense and the type of shirt to pull from your closet. Wool or cotton, short or long, heavy or light: all of those options can be sorted quickly based on that one number.

In order to answer that critical question, for approximately forever, we have had an indoor/outdoor thermometer sitting on our kitchen windowsill. Long before there were more connected devices, this little readout has let us know what the outside world is up to. As technology goes it wasn't much: a little display, a long wire that stuck out under the screen, powered by a battery that lasted seemingly for years. Yes, we have smart speakers with digital assistants, cell phones that offer the complete NOAA forecast, and now even connected thermostats that change their readouts to show the outside as I walk by. And still both my wife and I glommed onto that tiny LED the first second we came into the kitchen.

That is until the outside temperature read "HH.H" I fiddled with it a bit, and integers popped back up. But as I settled it back into place the alphabet returned. Moe fiddling, more numbers. More settling, more alphabet. I picked it up and found two tiny screws on the back. Always up for challenge, I took it down to my workbench and opened it up. Sure enough, you could see the lead from the probe had snapped off the little circuit board. I stripped the wire back to some copper, fired up the trusty soldering iron I had gotten when I was 13, and reattached it. That done, I snapped it back together, and reinserted the battery. The display flickered to life.. but in Celsius. Seems that when I pried it apart I inadvertently switched the units. I flipped the selector switch back and forth to no avail: it wouldn't go back to Fahrenheit. And so until we as a country convert to the metric system (a process that has been rumored to be happening for at least as long as I've been alive), the device was only good if I lived in France. 

Oh well. The circuit board was dated 1995, so it had a pretty good run. But then came the usual question: what to replace it with? Punch "indoor/outdoor thermometer" into Amazon, and the first handful that come up are all wireless units. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense: no need to route a wire through a closed window, the ability to put the readout anywhere. But as always, the devil was in the details. The thermometer itself: "-40F to 140F." More than adequate. Wireless range: "100 feet." Way more than we would need. But the batteries?  "Battery life in sensor decreases substantially below 30 degrees." Huh? We live in colder climes, and I don't want to change them every week in the winter. So I guess back to what we had.

I searched for a wired unit and picked one out. But then I spotted a note on the new unit: "To change the °F/°C units, take out the batteries first before switching the C/F button." Could that be the case with the one we had? I ran downstairs and plucked it from the top of the trash heap in the workshop. I popped the battery out, slid the switch to "F", put the battery back in and... voila! Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit came to life! (Well, not really: he died in 1736, but his units woke up). I raced upstairs and reinstalled our friend back to its rightful spot. And the singular piece of data that starts my day was once again available. 

What's the lesson? Don't give up? Do things in the right order? Confirm you have the right choices in place before you give something power?  We're talking thermometers here, but feel free to extrapolate that last one. 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford always has cold feet, at least in terms of temperature. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Cinematic Life Lessons

Doesn't matter if it's a movie or a TV show or book, there come's a time when you say "Wait a minute... that can't be." It's that point where, regardless of the world you have taken at face value, something in it strikes you as implausible. To be fair, the whole thing might be implausible to begin with: dragons zipping around, cars that don't need to stop for gas, hundreds of bullet flying while the hero emerges unscathed. But if you try and put too fine a point on it the entire thing falls apart and there's no point in watching or reading. Look at it this way: to be disturbed by the fact that the gun gets through the metal detector while you accept that the guy in the cape can fly seems to be a quibble at best.

It's a concept articulated by English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 in his autobiography "Biographia Literaria." He and colleague William Wordsworth talked about how you had to have "poetic faith" wherein realistic persons and characters had to be imbued with a semblance of truth sufficient for the reader to go along for the ride. Beyond that, however, you can push the envelope a bit. While the technique had been practiced by writers dating back to the ancient Greeks, Coleridge gave this approach a name: "suspension of disbelief."

This basically means that whatever fictional world is created, it is incumbent upon the reader or viewer not to get too hung up on the details. As long as there is an internal logic to the scene, for the sake of the story, we don't look too hard at any discrepancies. Still, if you watch enough films or programs it is hard not to come away with some life lessons that, while in our own experience may seen ludicrous, seem to be cinematic reality. I recently came across a list of these truisms: see which ones square with your own experiences.

Once applied, lipstick will never rub off, even if scuba diving.

If staying in a strange house, women always investigate any unusual sounds wearing their most revealing underwear.

If you are being chased though town, you can take cover in a passing parade, which will be happening on any day of the year.

It's easy to land a plane as long as there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.

If you need to hide in a building, the ventilation system is the perfect place. No one will ever look in there and you can travel anywhere with no one finding you.

If you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, no need to speak the language, a German accent will do just fine.

A man will show no pain when getting taking a ferocious beating, but will wince when a women tries to clean his wounds.

When paying for a taxi, no need to actually look in your wallet. Whatever bill you pull out with be the right fare including tip.

During any police investigation it is mandatory to visit a strip club at least once.

Any car crash results in the entire car bursting into flames,

A lighter or single match will light up an entire dark room.

When you turn out the lights in a bedroom, everything will glow blue and be visible.

All single women have a cat.

One man shooting at 20 attackers has a better chance of success than the 20 men shooting at him.

Dogs always know which is the bad guy and will bark only at him.

A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from the force.

If you start dancing in the streets everyone you meet will know the steps.

You see this stuff constantly, a little slip in the conceit you are asked to swallow. Most recently we were watching an episode of the series "Reacher" about an itinerant ex-Army cop who floats around dealing with trouble. At one point he has infiltrated a mega-estate run by a wealthy crook with an arsenal and a private security force. The place has walls and fences and camera systems galore. Yet when Reacher arranges for a power failure as a distraction, all the gates swing open and there is no emergency backup generator... the guards all curse the dark and walk around with flashlights and lanterns. C'mon.. even we have a backup generator, and my criminal enterprise is but a fraction of this guy's.

For sure you can lament the ridiculousness of it all. But how much fun would that be? Or as by someone posted online, "At a certain point, it's a deal with the audience where the director basically pauses the movie and says, ‘Look, if you want to see some more cool action scenes, just initial here that it's OK that the alien computers run on MacOS. And then we can go back to blowing things up for you.'" 

Where do I sign?

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Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to live in the world that is on the screen. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Big Life

Everybody has challenges growing up. It might be family issues, it might be health problems, it might be social conflicts. For most they are a bump in the road, for some they are more consequential. But in most cases the general trajectory stays the same save for course corrections as needed.  For Annie Pingry, however, those bumps in the road turned out to be mountains to climb.

For sure there were some of the not-unusual growing up challenges: her parents separated, she moved from urban Charlotte NC to rural Waynesboro VA. But then came third grade and her first seizure. A diagnosis of epilepsy followed, treated with increasingly larger doses of medication. Things took a turn for the worse about the sixth grade as the seizures got worse and more frequent. It turned out that her growing brain started bumping against a benign tumor in her skull. That caused two grand mal seizures, the kind that causes loss of consciousness and body-wide convulsions. More often she had less severe attacks on a weekly basis: "My whole body and my head would shake. Then I would forget the entire day, whatever I learned in school. And so it was a constant state of catching up."

By the eighth grade she was on "a crazy amount of medication. Some of them weren't even epileptic medications, and it would just basically zone me out." Her doctor came to her family with a proposal. He had discovered an experimental surgery that four other people had had with good results. No promises, but it had the potential of easing her seizures. Her folks gave her a choice, and without hesitation she said yes: "I was like, I wanna be able to drive a car."

She was admitted to Virginia Commonwealth University's VCU Medical, and hooked up to an EEG for a week as they waited for a seizure to happen so they could pinpoint the location in her brain. After the surgery she spent two weeks in the hospital and the rest of the summer in bed recovering. "You can only recover from brain trauma when you're asleep. That's why people with brain trauma are always tired a lot and they're just like, ‘I need to sleep.'" 

Come fall she was physically well enough for school even if she was academically behind. This was the time of "No Child Left Behind," and she was pushed to ninth grade, ready or not. She was constantly trying to catch up, but just kept getting shuffled along. She graduated on time with her class, but with a GPA of just 1.5. That, plus the reactions of people around her, caused her to doubt what she could do: "I always really wanted to be a student, but I was told I wasn't very smart because of my epilepsy for so long that I really was discouraged. People in my life were just, it's okay. You can't do school because you're not smart. You don't understand things. You're not gonna get it. And I really wanted to go to college because I wanted to be a part of something normal. But it was just impossible."

If she couldn't handle college, Annie decided that being normal at least meant being independent. She moved to Richmond, and went to work: a nanny, a dishwasher, an ice cream scooper. Seeking a change, she packed her car and did a cross-country road trip to Seattle, where she had some family. She lived there for four years doing more of the same, then crossed the country once more and came to New York City. She kept up the odd jobs, even trying to learn floral design. Eventually one server job paid off in an unexpected way, as she met fellow worker Ben and fell in love.

In the middle of the pandemic they moved to Philadelphia for Ben to pursue a graduate degree in music. Once he graduated they figured they needed to get on firmer financial ground, and moved home with family to save and figure out their next move. Ben eventually landed a job here in Westchester, and they moved to a sunlit apartment in Hastings-On-Hudson and got married.

But while Annie's personal life was working out, she still wasn't settled. "I was really tired of being on my feet. I know that I'm smart. I know that I can do something, I have the patience and the ability." She figured out a plan: community college, then a full degree, followed by graduate training in social work to help kids who were like her. She and Ben talked it over and punched in the numbers: "My husband's really math oriented, and he was like, ‘Okay. If we don't eat out for four years we can do it.'" And do it she did: this spring she graduates from Westchester Community College, already has one acceptance, and is waiting to sort through all her choices.

Annie doesn't think her story is inspirational, she was just a person coping with what life throws your way. "It's never too late, and there's so many people that wanna see you succeed. You have to just keep looking for it. People want people to better their lives. I've lived a really big life, and I wouldn't have been able to be where I am right now had I not given myself that time to live that big life."

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Marc Wollin of Bedford thinks everybody has a story. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.