wait wait… it doesn’t annoy me
For years I stood behind my view that NPR’s show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me was an exercise in self-important snobbery, rife with pretension and undue back-patting. But I’ve come around. Perhaps it is because I am a self important back-patter (true!). I started listening to it when I got a RadioShark and was looking for things to record. I scheduled it to record CarTalk (of course), Fresh Air (talk about snobbery), and I figured I needed something else to flesh out the schedule and fill up time on my commute, so I added Wait Wait.
Let me say this: This is still a show full of self-important snobbery, rife with pretension and undue back-patting. But I kinda like it. The deal was sealed when I discovered it is now distributed, almost ad-free via podcast (ps). No more skipping past station identification and fuzzy recordings.
I am sold.
Some day, perhaps I will even listen to This American Life. But dear God, the conceit of that show makes me want to throw heavy things at other things, and Ira Glass has a voice for print.
April 4th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
I can’t stand NPR.
There, I said it, and I’m glad I did. As a white, socially-concious, New England liberal democrat, this revelation is paramount to public proclamation that I don’t care for flannel, but that’s true as well. I’ve tried for years to deal with it, but the humorless and overtly self-congratulatory aspect of pretty much all the programming does me in every time.
Except for Car Talk. Those guys are clearly having fun with what they do.
April 4th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
I like NPR. I like the news particularly and Fresh Air is usually pretty fun.
Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and … uh… the other one really annoy me.
This American Life, really, I could take or leave. My sister, to this day, has a clause in her marriage contract, that she can also marry Ira Glass, but I only like it when it gets really funny. Sometimes it does, but I don’t really stick around for it. Ira Glass also wrote a comic a few years ago about how to get into radio. It was pretty punk rock.
April 4th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
The clause is really only that I can marry the endearing radio persona of Ira Glass, not the actual guy Ira Glass. Because have you ever seen that guy? Talk about a face for radio. Yeesh.
April 4th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
…And, may I reiterate, a voice for paper.
April 7th, 2006 at 12:58 am
It’s the heat. The sultry heat of a lemonade summer in Glassland makes a man cry. The haven of television rejects has become a radio of worlds; a destroyer of boils. I have an itch.
June 29th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
[...] And, yes, I seem to have changed my mind. [...]