...recomending "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me"

One thing I have become addicted to is podcasts. As much as I love listening to music on my iPod and iPhone, there are times I like to listen to actual human voices, especially on the way into and back from work. Sure I could just take off my headphones and listen to the cacophony of human interaction around me, but I don't really like real people.

Every now and then I'm going to toss a podcast up here that I like, and if you want to download it, fine, and if not that's cool also.

The first one I'm going to recommend is the podcast of the NPR news quiz Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. News quizzes/panel shows are really more of a British thing (more on that in a week or so), but the format is normally always the same: a couple of teams of journalists and entertainers are asked questions about the week's news and then go into little comedic riffs on them as they explain what happened. Think of it like a tag team late night monologue. Wait Wait Don't Tell Me also adds a listener participation element, where people win a prize (Carl Kassel's voice on their home answering machine).

The centrepiece is "Not My Job" where celebrities (writers, entertainers, other journalists) do a small interview and then are asked three questions about something that is normally in the opposite realm from what they would know. For example Bruce Campbell (of Evil Dead fame) was asked three questions about the history of Barbie; Kim Cattrall was asked about the history of prohibition, Michael Moore was asked about etiquette from an early Miss Manners book.

I found out about Wait Wait... from, of all people, my mom! She listened to it on NPR in Florida, and once I found out about the podcast I decided to start listening to it just to understand what she was talking about. This is also one of the two (TWO?!) computer things my mother has ever told me about...more on that in a coming couple of weeks.

Wait Wait... is fun, always informative, and provides a good few chuckles even if you don't follow the new closely. It comes out Saturday night/Sunday morning and so is there for me on my Monday commute into work. This really helps get the week off to a good start.

You can download Wait Wait... here [link opens iTunes]

(And remember, you don't need an iPod, iPhone, or any MP3 player to enjoy podcasts. You can just download iTunes for free and listen to it there).