take off, eh.

Even though life doesn’t exactly adhere to the calendar,  I can honestly say that 2008 did have a unique personality, different than any year I’ve experienced before. Here’s a look back at some of the new discoveries in my life that made a positive difference.

A. Podcasts

2008 was the year I really started subscribing and listening to podcasts. Podcasts are neat because they offer fresh content to your earbuds on a daily basis, at no cost to you! Plus, you have an archive of news or music that you consume as you please – not according to a broadcaster’s schedule.

During the peak of the campaign season, I found a handful of entertaining and informative political and news podcasts. Some of them are good enough that I still subscribe, including these:

• The Young Turks, hosted by Cenk Uygur, is a hilarious and smart show for the progressive audience. Cenk has a knack for highlighting the absurd and offensive antics of the right (or left, when appropriate) and presenting them in a  humorous way.
• Rachel Maddow is the single smartest pundit on TV. A brilliant addition to cable, but her podcast is a better way to consume the show.
• On The Media from WNYC – the smartest media  analysis show. Awesome segment this week covering Bush’s final press conference. Classic shit.
  

Beyond politics, I also found these podcasts to rule:

• Tiesto’s club life podcast offers up a fresh dose of trance each week. Tiesto is considered one of the top 3 trance DJs in the world, so you know that his music selection is strong. Only negative is sometimes he talks a bit too much. Perfect for the gym, or for the pre-party.
• More Apple nerdery than you can handle on The Talk Show with Gruber and Benjamin. Last new episode came out in October. But, it was great while it lasted.
• Real Late with Peter Roseberg comes from uber-station Hot 97 in NYC. Rosenberg is the quixotic DJ who finds – and plays – the real deal hip hop. Not the BS MTV/BET/KMEL stuff. And, he’s funny.
• Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin brings together the people from the sports world and politics. So, I guess it is kind of politics-y, but not really. Intellectual for the sports fan.

B. Other Stuff

I discovered some non-podcast things, too:

• Traveling lunges transformed my lower body workout routine from average to BLAU!
  
• Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz was easily the best book I read in ’08. A book unlike any other I’ve come across.
• Cambria. I had always imagined a town like this  – the quintessential central California beach town – exisred, but never knew that it actually did. In reality, far more magical than I could have hoped. A real treasure.
• The wonders of Yelp on the iPhone ensured I never got lost or ate at a third-rate, overpriced restaurant, no matter what city or neighborhood I was in.
• Keyshia Cole, Immortal Technique, Milosh, and Dining Rooms were the new artists I heard for the first time in 2008 that I played the most.
• Honey Crisp apples. Holy mackerel, where have these apples been all my life! They are sweet, they are crispy, they are perfect. Oh, and they’re organic at my local Whole Foods. Yum.

C. The Main Thing

The discovery of the greatest significance, though, was when I realized how much drinking was affecting my sleep. Since my college days, I had suffered from ‘transient insomnia’ and for many years just lived with it. Today, I have no such affliction. Why? Well, thanks to something I discovered during my first alcohol fast, last May: a crash course in the power of sugar. Prior to the fast, I was drinking easily two drinks a night before bed. Sometimes, more. And, almost without fail, after crashing, I’d wake in the middle of the night and then toss and turn, unable to return to deep sleep.

Once I began the fast, I regularly experienced nights of uninterupted sleep. It did not take long to figure out what was going on: the sugar content of the alcohol had been messing with sugar levels in my blood and, thus, my sleep. Wow. That revelation reinforced my motivation and efforts to cut way back on drinking.

The consequences of both of these changes (less alcohol, more sleep) are hard to overstate. I feel better, I look better, I spend less. And there is nothing that can replace, or make up for, a good night of sleep. Psychologically, emotionally, and physically, there is no subsitute for rest.

D. In Conclusion

There were other things, too. I finally listened to Getting Things Done, and instituted GTD principals at work and home. I paid off two huge loans, and discovered the joy of having money in my bank account. I didn’t discover, exactly, my drawing talent. But I did continue to develop it, and that has been a proud personal achievement, too.

All in all, not a static year. And that, above all, is what is important. Life, as they say, is a journey. I don’t want to be in the same place from year to year. To grow is to discover new things – some good, some bad – and evolve. And sometimes, a podcast is just the tool to do that.

Happy discoveries to you in 2009!

I am not an idle spectator of the boob tube. I am an active watcher – mostly thanks to the wonders of the DVR. Thus, rare is the day when I actually a) flip through the channels or b) watch commercials. How do I manage this? By recording teevee shows before I watch them. Then when I do watch, I get to skip the filler and consume the meat.

Consuming teevee this way has the side-effect of decreasing the variety of programs I watch, but ensuring deeper consumption of those programs I do.

Despite my technical mastery of the DVR and judicious consumption of programming, I still felt it undeniable that too much of my time was being spent in front of my dear flickering blue screen and Dolby-blessed speakers. So it was early this year that I pronounced my intention to disconnect from my satellite-fed dope, and kick the teevee habit. Nearly three months later, I have actually done the deed, and have begun my new, TeeVee-Free Lifestyle.

It is a big thing, going from ‘America’s Top 150′ channels to Rural Afghanistan Radio, or an approximation thereof. The point of my decision is to take back the time and energy I’d been devoting to following the characters on Fox, CBS, MTV & HBO, and give it instead to my life’s other pursuits: writing, designing, drawing, filming, running, walking, sleeping, reading and all the rest. It is, also, a gesture from which I draw motivation to expend energy on these other activities.

Lastly – but equally important – is my desire to disengage from the poisonous messages incessantly burnt into our consciousness when we consume teevee: the allures of fame, beauty, youth, perfect skin, perfect bodies, flawless sleep, rock-hard penises, giant breasts, plastic surgery, and perfect lawns; or the fear of fear: terrorists, murder, corruption, drug addicts, health risks, illness, the Pope, pundits, and going bald.

The ability of the teevee to propagate such mendacity seems infinite, and indeed strikes fear in this man’s heart. Why is it, I wonder, that we are so easily lured into a dark room, convinced we are living by watching others, as they live their lives, embark on adventures, engage in sexual relations, or chase their dreams. Meanwhile, we slump deeper into our own corners of the world, our bodies melting slowly into the furniture, our own dreams drifting further, deep into the recesses of our memories. Soon they will be forgotten or dead from atrophy, replaced by internalized evils of the teevee’s world, by the unreachable fantasy lives of Hefner and his three bimbos, Tony and his murdering gang, or Lauren’s famous and beautiful “friends”.

And so it ends, my teevee life. And back to my real life, I go.

Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert—first in rhetoric, later in fact—a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a worldwide war of epic scale.

The piece goes on to examine how that metamorphosis took place – based on a look at what was happening before 9/11.

Sadly, innovative and thoughtful perspectives such as this are completely absent from the mass media outlets, who seem so focused on recycling the same goddamned 12 pundits and 7 talking points that no real analysis is ever provided to the public. Instead weh have to search out ‘alternative’ press just to get something more than a bullet-point list of casualty statistics.

[It could be that making Skype calls free] has a lot more to do with avoiding wiretapping regulation. First off, by being free, the company can make a stronger argument that the rules shouldn’t apply. [... Secondly,] Skype might just threaten to turn off SkypeOut, rather than comply — and the larger the userbase at that point (free or not), the angrier those folks are likely to be, potentially creating a larger political problem for those supporting CALEA enforcement on Skype.

Not only have I escaped the hegemony of a global telephone monopoly, but by virtue of abandoning land-based phone service (at home only, of course), it seems I have managed to escape surveillance of my phone calls. It’s almost like not living in a police state.

On the one hand, their status as the nation’s de facto #2 paper (after the New York Times, of course) makes them both media aristocracy and big fat target. This means the Post, simply by covering a story, lends that story credence in the world of media. But in this new day of blogospherical impact, any part of a story that might betray bias or even lack of evenhandedness immediately becomes an epicenter of controversy. By allowing comments on all of their articles they have given the swarming hordes the flypaper they (we?) so desperately crave.

On the other hand, that very willingness to give voices to their readers is exactly the principal which makes new media so much more compelling that the one-way mass media broadcasting and publishing that defined media in the 20th century. Staking their place in the new media landscape marks them as courageous. It will, I am sure, drive more traffic to their website. This same phenomenon, by the way, is what is behind the rise of what Markos Moulitsas calls ‘people powered politics’, and is something that has the power to change our nation and world for the better.

So here we stand at the precipice of a sea change in media. A waterhsed moment, we witness a blue-blooded media outlet diving headfirst into the blue-collar sea of blog comments. Sounds like fun to me!