I had been holding out hope of doing a podcast this week, despite a horrendous schedule, but today was the final nail in the coffin. I am sick with something that my children brough home from school. My voice is horrible and my head is clogged. I will be back at the mic next Tuesday.
If you have linked to any of the posts on this blog, the url has just changed. I mapped a domain name (officehour.org) to this site, displacing the Typepad url. It has worked for the main page from the beginning, but it took some help from Typepad before I realized that I needed to activate the domain to get it to attach to the Permalinks. Anyway, that's done now and will work for all future links.
I am a bit slow on the uptake, but I wanted to thank Shane at Dane101.com for the nice review of this podcast. Also, ai mentioned Office Hour in this week's Blawg Review. I haven't been pushing the podcast too much because I want to feel more comfortable with it before it starts getting a lot of attention. Nevertheless, I appreicate the kind words.
36:50 Ten Songs From the ‘70s That I Still Like: #8 Al
Stewart, Year of the Cat
On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre Contemplating a crime She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running Like a watercolour in the rain Don't bother asking for explanations She'll just tell you that she came In the year of the cat.
She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arm in hers And you follow 'till your sense of which direction Completely disappears By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls There's a hidden door she leads you to These days, she says, I feel my life Just like a river running through The year of the cat
She looks at you so cooly And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea She comes in incense and patchouli So you take her, to find what's waiting inside The year of the cat.
Well morning comes and you're still with her And the bus and the tourists are gone And you've thrown away the choice and lost your ticket So you have to stay on But the drum-beat strains of the night remain In the rhythm of the new-born day You know sometime you're bound to leave her BUt for now you're going to stay In the year of the cat.
Every week, I make some progress with podcasting, and I think this is my best show yet. It's almost 53 minutes long and covers various topics, which you can see below in the program notes. I added some transitional music to the
program -- a brief electro-beat by Belief Systems called
“Electro-Jive” (from their album Eponyms). Do you like it?
(download)
(streaming)
Program Notes
0:24 Katrina: Christine’s
Post on Katrina. I talk about my Tulane law students in Contracts.
4:55 eBay to Acquire Skype: My short Office Hour post is here,
and my Conglomerate post is here. I
suggested that eBay was out of ideas (“the corporate equivalent of ‘jumping the
shark’”), but the company is striving to sell the deal as a natural extension
of the auction site (W$J):
EBay
contemplated building its own Internet-call service, "but we didn't feel
we would have a winning product," Ms. Whitman said in an interview.
"Skype is pretty far ahead in many dimensions." Skype boasts a
community of 1,000 developers who are building Skype-related applications.
33:57 Books: Lisa
Scottoline, Killer
Smile was “more history than mystery” according to one Amazon
reviewer. The story is based on a modern lawyer’s attempt to obtain
reparations for the family of an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who was interned in a camp in Idaho during World War II. This was my first Scottoline book, and probably not my
last, especially if Barbara
Rosenblat is narrating. I also discuss my current book, Jasper Fforde, Something
Rotten, which is narrated by Emily Gray, whose animated English accent
wows me. (Plus, I love the word, “foupons”!)
41:48 Cheese: The
first two posts in my Cheese Tasting Tour of Wisconsin at Conglomerate are here
(Brunkow Cheese) and here
(Gile Cheese).
46:12 Ten Songs From the ‘70s That I Still Like: This week’s
entry at #9 is Pink Floyd, Wish You Were
Here. Here are the lyrics:
So, so you think you
can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have you found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
When I was looking for a podcasting host, I considered using Ourmedia ("The global home for grassroots media"). For some reason, my early efforts there were frustrated by technical glitches, but I went back for another try today and successfully posted Podcast #1 and Podcast #2. From here on out, I will post copies of each podcast to Ourmedia, in addition to my regular host LibSyn. You can find links to both hosts for each podcast in the right sidebar.
This week's podcast is almost 45 minutes, a bit longer than last week's. Apparently, I am building up stamina as I work with this new medium. At some point, I intend to standardize the length of the show at one hour, but I need to become more proficient with the recording technology before that happens. Otherwise, sitting in front of the mic is becoming more comfortable for me, and I am learning lots of new things about music downloads!
(download)
Program Notes
0:20 New Theme
Music: “The Four Shoves” by Madison ensemble, West Wind. I discuss
the title of the song here.
21:32 The Right to Blog? Jeremy Blachman asserts,
“The law should protects us,” in his editorial
in the NYT. Ann Althouse’s take. Unfortunately,
the Gely-Bierman article is not available online.
33:13 Flags Over the
Capitol: Russ
Feingold’s website. If you are interested in David Baldacci, Saving Faith, try here.
36:00 First Day of Classes
at UW Law School:
Yikes!
38:10 Ten songs from
the ‘70s that I still like: This week, we begin the countdown with #10: Jackson Browne, Doctor, My Eyes. The “Top 10 Songs of the
70s” site. Not many agree with me about Jackson Browne. If you want to see the lyrics to Doctor, My Eyes, look below the fold ...
I haven't paid much attention to the download statistics for Office Hour because I didn't make a great effort to promote the first show. I am still getting accustomed to the medium, and these first few weeks will involve a fair amount of experimentation. Nevertheless, I was both pleased and surprised to see that 39 55 people have subscribed to the LibSyn feed, while another 28 34 have subscribed via Feedburner. Well, I appreciate the support and look forward to releasing Podcast #2 on Tuesday.
I just checked, and iTunes has added Office Hour to its directory of podcasts. Most of the directories my right sidebar also have added links to Office Hour, so that part of my setup is now almost complete.
So, does anyone out there know how to add an image to my iTunes listing? I thought I had included one in my original listing, but apparently not.
After one week, I have decided to change my theme music to something more traditional. In the sidebar, I have linked to an audio file from West Wind, a Madison-based quartet that specialized in traditional Irish music. The track contains three polkas, and the first two are called "The Four Shoves" which, according to group member Alan Ng, "refers to a figure in a traditional Irish set dance from county Kerry in which at one point
the men, behind their partners, use their hands to guide their
partner forward, in a shoving motion. You do this four times in this figure, each time advancing 90 degrees around the circle. Thus there are four 'shoves' that happen over the course of the whole figure." Alan also referred me to some sites on Irish set dancing, if you are interested: www.setdancingnews.net and see also www.celticmadison.org/dance/.
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