Podcasts and the rest of 2020

Podcasts 2020

Podcasts took on a new role in my life this year. More time in the kitchen and more time puzzling at home meant a more frequent need for audio entertainment. I started the year by finishing The West Wing Weekly podcast (and on clicking that link I see that they made a new episode to discuss the recent special to benefit When We All Vote, which I'm now excited to listen to). Between finishing that and discovering my new obsession, You're Wrong About, I dabbled in Ologies, This Podcast Will Kill You, After All: A Mary Tyler Moore Podcast, but none of them stuck.

A neighbor turned me on to You're Wrong About in May, and in under two months I'd devoured all the episodes that had yet come out. I now listen to it every Monday, except on the Mondays where they fail to publish one, which takes me about a week to get over.

Fortunately I have two other podcasts to fill my ears between episodes of You're Wrong About:

• The Greatest Generation which is about Star Trek, not your grandparents
• The Judge John Hodgman podcast

I was a listener of both of these podcasts 5ish years ago when I was working at Yeshiva University doing mindless work that left my ears available to receive podcasts. I fell out of the habit of listening to them when I became a copy-editor, and stopped being able to listen to podcasts during the workday. Fortunately they both thrived in my absence and were there waiting for me to pick back up.

When I first started listening to The Greatest Generation, it was a brand new podcast recapping and lambasting the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I listened to a few episodes, but did not watch the corresponding episodes of the TV series because the first season of TNG is terrible. They were also a little bit bro-ey, so it was easy to stop listening to it. I picked it back up at the beginning of season three, by which point both the podcast and the TV series had figured themselves out. The hosts were practiced in the art of podcasting and were more complex and interesting than the bros I remembered, and Beverley was back so all was well on the Starship Enterprise. 

I listened to each episode of The Greatest Generation in chronological order, sometimes watching the corresponding TV episode and sometimes not (if I remembered it well enough, or I remembered not liking it, although I did eventually go back and watch all of them). The hosts, Adam and Ben, discuss their lives in addition to Star Trek, and occasionally current events slip in. At the point where I picked it back up, Trump was just gaining steam in the 2016 election, and Trump is a hilarious figure so they'd do impressions of him a lot. After Trump won the election and he became something more to be reviled than laughed at, Adam and Ben stopped doing impressions of him. 

After they finished TNG, they continued with the next series in the canon, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Since I was slightly less familiar with DS9 (although not so unfamiliar as to not have already seen the whole thing, as early posts in this blog record), I have been in the habit watching episodes of the TV series along with the podcast, sometimes watching before listening and sometimes the other way around. The only TV episode I skipped was the series premiere, which I remember really hating. It was really interesting listening as they went through the beginning of the pandemic and reliving that through them (a process I went through in the opposite direction with Judge John Hodgman). By the end of 2020, I'd finished season 6. I am currently three months behind podcast (I'm about to listen to the episode they published on October 5, 2020), and expect to be caught up with them by the time they start Star Trek: Voyager (which they have promised to do, because this podcast is their lives now).

Since I had no idea where I left off with Judge John Hodgman, I decided to start from the most recent episode and work my way backwards, listening to new episodes as they popped up. I remembered listening to an episode of Judge John Hodgman years ago in which Hodgman (or maybe it was bailiff Jesse Thorn) announced that this was the preferred way to listen to a non-serial podcast, as that way you are in the know with the current goings-on of the podcast and the hosts, and can be subject to their pledge drives. At some point in a recent episode they revisited this and disavowed it, but it's too late now as I am stuck in this retrograde listening orbit. As I mentioned above, I got to listen as the pandemic and lockdown became less and less familiar to them until suddenly it was a brand new thing, and then the next episode, completely gone and life was normal again. I also got to hear Hodgman's urging that we get out the vote become less and less urgent and the election vanished completely.

Not podcasts 2020

In addition to the list at the bottom of this post, I also:

• spent outdoor holiday celebrations with my family at my sister's in Pelham (some birthdays, the High Holy Days, and Chanukah), my parents' in Commack (Thanksgiving), and Mohonk Mountain House (my parents' anniversary)
• got in some pool time and pre- and post-rehearsal social time at Lindsay & Leslie's in Rahway, NJ
• oh and by the way MARCHED IN THE MACY'S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE with The Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps, which involved weekly rehearsals on Saturday mornings in Harrison, NJ and a COVID test and tech rehearsal in Manhattan. Chalk that up to one of the coolest things I've ever done, and perhaps you saw me on TV?
• after a grueling two-week brand launch at work, which involved consecutive 12-hour days including weekends, was treated to a weekend in the country (how delightfully droll) at Cricket's parents' cabin in the Finger Lakes, which included much campfire cookery and a hike past a waterfall (because Ithaca)
• got to go to the beach (Robert Moses ::tui tui::) a few times with my parents
• celebrated 7 years of living in Brooklyn
• went on countless long walks and bike rides, the longest being a bike ride from Sunset Park to Astoria which involved three separate CitiBike rentals, and in general broadened my notion of what is an acceptable distance to walk and what is acceptable weather for walking
• attended copious Zoom and Google Meet calls, at which JackBox games was a frequent and welcome diversion
• did much outdoor drinking with neighbors in our backyard and at the sidewalk cafe that Judy's has become 
• voted
• got a flue shot
• got three COVID tests
• learned to play the ukulele with Holly (well, really watched Holly learn to play the ukulele and answered her questions about music notation and theory)