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.
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.
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.
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.
…And, may I reiterate, a voice for paper.
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.
[...] And, yes, I seem to have changed my mind. [...]