Bent Corner

Fellow Hagerstown blogger Steve Shives of Steve Likes to Curse along with Ashley, his girlfriend have created a podcast.  It’s called The Snark-Gap Transmission and it’s very good.

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  I’m what you could call a podcast aficionado.  I was impressed with how good the very first episode was.  Not only was it funny and intelligent, it was really quite polished for being the very first show.  Steve and Ashley sounded as though they’ve been podcasting for a long time.

If you’ve read Steve Likes to Curse, you know what a talented writer he is.  He’s just as talented in front of the podcasting microphone.  I’m looking forward to next week’s episode.  After you listen to the first episode, you will too.

This week’s episode of everyone’s favorite science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod is the young adult story Alien Promises by Janni Lee Simner. It’s read by Anna Eley, wife of Escape Pod Editor-In-Chief Steve Eley.

Even though the story is labeled as a being for young adults and I am very much an old adult, I enjoyed the story immensely. It’s about a young girl who dreams that one day aliens will come and take her away. Not the kind of aliens who stand in front of Home Depot looking for work and who speak only Spanish, but the kind who travel in silver space ships and communicate through telepathy.

It was a good story.

Anna Eley does a fine job reading the story. Her voice has a quality to it that meshes nicely with the story’s main character and it brings life to the first-person narrative. My only criticism is that I think she pronounced reader as leader. It’s at about the 2:40 mark of the story. I listened to it a couple of times and it sounds like leader even though reader is the only word that makes sense.

It is stories like this that makes me appreciate the Escape Pod podcast for everything it brings.

There is a feud going on in the podcasting community between singer Brother Love, a superstar in the world of podsafe music and frequent guest of the Keith and The Girl podcast and author Tee Morris, a man who may be best known for writing Podcasting For Dummies. I honestly had never heard of the guy. I’m not a podcaster and I’m not a dummy. At least most of the time.

The two men got into this past summer at the New Media Expo in Ontario California. Being that it transpired at the New Media Expo, the whole exchange was captured on a digital recorder. Imagine that.

The argument stemmed from something that happened prior at this past Dragon*Con. Brother Love was to speak at one of the panels dealing with Creative Commons until he was scratched from the event at the last minute without any prior warning. He didn’t find out until he attempted to go on stage and take his seat. Understandably he was irritated over this. He had spend time promoting his appearance at Dragon*Con and this one panel had been the only panel he had planned on participating in. He voiced his displeasure to Derek and Swoopy, the event organizers and the team that produce the Skepticality Podcast.

How does this involve Tee Morris? Evidently, he is friends with Derek and Swoopy and he didn’t appreciate how Brother Love spoke to his friends.

Not only was the entire argument between Brother Love and Tee Morris recorded, it was played in it’s entirety on The Keith and The Girl podcast (episode 589: A Hero’s Return) the next time Brother Love was a guest. The segment begins at about the 18 minute mark.

Tee Morris might have been irritated with Brother Love over something that happened at Dragon*Con, it’s nothing compared to what he feels about Keith and The Girl playing the audio of the argument on their show. He’s also extremely angry with Brother Love, though I don’t really understand why. The audio wasn’t recorded by Brother Love. It was recorded unbeknown to him by someone who was there. Brother Love said he didn’t know a recorder was going during the argument. Keith and The Girl said they got the audio not from Brother Love, but by the person that recorded it.

Tee Morris is making the claim that recording the argument between Brother Love and his was a crime. He claims that you must have permission to record someone, even if it is in a public place in complete earshot of everyone there. Even if that public place is an event called the New Media Expo. Personally, I would assume everything said in public at the New Media Expo was on MP3 somewhere. I doubt I would be wrong.

If you want to hear exactly what Tee Morris thinks about all this, you can listen to Keith and The Girl, episode 641: Happy Jeremymas. They have the audio of a commentary made by Tee Morris concerning this whole thing. It’s the final seven minutes of the show.

It’s irritating to listen to. Tee Morris refers to Keith and The Girl as “Amateur Hour” and Brother Love as “Dink”. I’m not sure why he feels the need to give them codenames. It seems to me that if you are going to go to the trouble of trashing someone, you might as well make it clear just who you are trashing. There actually is a podcast called The Amateur Hour. Now it seems that Tee Morris has a problem with a podcast he has probably never heard of.

Why is Tee Morris so upset about the audio being made public? I can only imagine it’s because he comes off sounding like a complete douche. Not only when he is discussing his perceived problems with Brother Love/Dink, but what he says afterwards. When he learns that Brother Love is Jewish, he shares that his “first time” was with a “Jewish redhead” and that he has the scars to prove it. I’m not entirely sure I understand what he meant by that. I thought he was talking about the first time he had sex, but why would that leave scars?

I think that if it left scars, he was doing it wrong. I guess he should have read Having Sex With Jewish Redheads For Dummies.

I strolled over to Geek News Central the other day to see what Todd was railing against these days. Big surprise, he is upset about how the FCC will handle the auction for the 700 MHz frequency spectrum. That’s the area of the frequency spectrum currently used by old fashioned analog broadcast TV. Starting in 2009, TV stations wont be broadcasting analog signals on the 700 MHz spectrum and will instead be forced (kicking and screaming) to switch to broadcasting a digital signal on frequencies other then the 700 MHz range.

This leaves the 700 MHz spectrum open for other things such as cell phones or wireless Internet. Signals in the 700 MHz spectrum can travel up to four times farther then signals transmitted on the current wireless frequencies. They are also better at going through walls and they don’t kill bees like microwave cell phone frequencies do.

Some have been advocating that the entire spectrum should be completely open-access. The FCC announced that only a third of the 700 MHz spectrum will be open-access.

This is what Todd had to say:

I am severely pissed off. Sure, the rules state that the spectrum must have Open Devices and Open Applications but the FCC threw out the baby with the bath water when they reversed course on what could have been the most positive wireless spectrum development since the invention of the radio when they closed the door and are going to allow CLOSED SERVICES and CLOSED NETWORKS.

I am truly unhappy and I hope you are as well. I encourage you to pick up the phone and call anyone and everyone you know with influence and tell them how you really feel about this.

The problem is that the majority of Americans are quite content with these companies getting their way every time. It is beyond criminal to say the very least.

I don’t know who exactly Todd is accusing of criminal activity. Is it the FCC? Verizon? Sprint? Google? How about AOL? They don’t have a stake in this, but Todd often sets his sights on AOL, even going so far as to encouraging people to sell off all their shares in AOL. Never mind that AOL is part of Time-Warner and there is no such thing as AOL stock.

Who exactly then is the criminal here? I really don’t know. I left a comment on his blog yesterday asking just this very question, but it never appeared. Todd is one of those bloggers that runs a CLOSED SERVICE blog. He personally must approve each and every comment that appears. I can only assume that is why most of his blog posts have 0 comments. Maybe people are leaving comments, but their comments don’t pass muster.

I’ve never really understood why some bloggers feel the need to engage comment moderation on their blog. What are they afraid of? That someone will disagree with him?

The ironic thing about this is that he is all for openness when it comes to radio frequencies, but not when it comes to the comment section of his own blog. That’s kind of sad.

Does Todd know what throwing out the “baby with the bath water” means? I don’t see how the expression actually applies.