Lying in bed this morning, Linda asked me what the latest podcast was about. “Nothing,” I answered, honestly. But anyway: Lies.com Podcast 11.

Seriously, there’s not much there. I’ve become my worst nightmare: Humming Dave-Winer-esque as I go through my pointless rambling, mocking my audience for their inability to bypass my breathtaking inanity.

Technically, I do talk about a few things:

• My commute, giving non-surfer surf reports on the break at Rincon, and being trapped in a never-ending car commercial.
• Bush and alternatives to Bush, the KCRW radio show “Left, Right, and Center,” and the difference between Hillary and Gore as candidates in 2008.
• James A. Baker (mistakenly misidentified by me in the podcast as the old Bush-family fixer James A. Baker, III, though this is actually a different guy, it turns out), who gave misleading testimony to Congress about proposed FISA changes in 2002.
• The Industry Outsider podcast (rss feed), and my pathetic audio crush on Lauren Morrill (or at least her voice).
• Donnie Darko
• Rumble Fish

Knock yourselves out.

More Bush-bashing (now with perspective!), some discussion of movies (including the Hollywood Saloon podcast, Man on Fire, and the Golden Globes), and extended rambling about The Grail Bird, Tim Gallagher’s book on the recent ivory-billed woodpecker rediscovery: Lies.com Podcast 10.

Here you go: Lies.com Podcast 9. Featuring:

• Bush’s illegal eavesdropping.
• Moments of clarity.
• High-end podcast special effects: An actual train. Heh.
• Movie reviews (Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, and a little Love, Actually).
• Almost (but not quite) watching my daughter die. (Update: Please understand that I’m talking about her hospitalization several years ago, not anything that happened recently. Apologies for freaking out my non-podcast-enabled sister M’Liz.)

I actually recorded it a week or so ago, but didn’t have time to delete the “uhms” and stuff until now.

Continued apologies for the light posting schedule. In the meantime, you can listen to Lies.com Podcast 8, including breathtaking inanity on:

• The masturbatory nature of weblogging and podcasting.
• The time I got bonked on the head as a teenager racing on my dad’s sailboat.
• My pleasure at reading Judge John Jones’ ruling in the Dover school board case.
• Similar pleasure at recent good news regarding the defeat of Bush initiatives in the Senate.
• A brief meteorological digression.
• A fantasy of mine involving Helen Thomas (now there’s some must-listen podcasting).
• A Malibu surf report.

My apologies for the dearth of posting lately. I’ve recently switched from consulting to an actual job (gasp!), and that, plus a lengthy daily commute, have been cutting into my available lies.com obsession time.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good, though; that lengthy commute means I have plenty of time for rambling, extemporaneous podcasts. Case in point: Lies.com podcast 7.

Featured ranting in this podcast includes:

• More about my new job, and the commute.
• Willliam’s eighth birthday, and the differences between him and Julia.
• The execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, and the death penalty, generally.
• State-sanctioned torture by the US as an indicator of George Bush’s stunted moral development.

Enjoy!

Just when you thought it was safe: Lies.com podcast 6.

I recorded this one in my car driving down for last Thursday’s Devo concert. No music or found audio; just me doing the stream-of-consciousness thing re:

• the use of “random” as a pejorative term
• the Bush administration’s visible elephant with the Plame outing
• a few anecdotes from my history as a geeky Devo fanboy
• skepticism and credulity re: bouncy balls and Art Lad
• working the graveyard shift
• offshore sailboat racing at odd hours

Enjoy!

Now available for your listening pleasure: Lies.com podcast 5 (30 MB mp3 file). Lots of fun audio clips re: Karl Rove and Valerie Plame, along with material about Iraq war fatalities, the space shuttle, my trip to a rose farm, and my special pillow. Special secrets available only to podcast listeners! Well, or boring, unscripted chatter about my personal life, depending on your point of view.

This one also features some music clips from my new favorite Magnatune artist, Williamson.

No script, music, or found audio this time; just random yacking in my best Dave Winer fashion: Lies.com Podcast 4 (13.9 MB mp3 file). I talk about my car accident, the lies.com manifesto, and (of course) I complain some about George Bush.

I’m curious what you all who actually listen to these (both of you!) think about the unscripted vs. the scripted approach. Thanks.

Here’s a “new” lies.com podcast: Lies.com podcast 3. The catch is, it’s actually the same podcast as Podcast 2, except I’ve “unencumbered” it by removing all the Magnatune music and the Dave Winer piece. That way, I think I’m safe distributing it in a commercial setting. I wanted to submit this to the people at KYOU Radio, but didn’t think I’d be able to (easily) get permission from Magnatune, so I just cut those parts out. (On the Dave Winer removal, I think I could make a case for “fair use” in including a short excerpt of his podcast for the purpose of criticism, but I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with him on it.)

Anyway, if you’ve heard the original version of this podcast, there’s even less reason than usual for you to listen to this one. Move along. Nothing to hear, here. And if you haven’t heard it, you probably should listen to that one, rather than this one, so you can bask in the healing light of my Winer-bashing, and my 733t musical mixing skillz.

My second podcast is done: Lies.com podcast 2 (21.6 MB mp3 file). I backed off some on the audio quality in the interest of making the file size smaller, but I ended up talking longer (about 45 minutes’ worth), which ate up some of the savings.

This podcast features the following:

• The secret Tony Blair memo on Iraq.
• The aftermath of the wayward Cessna over Washington, D.C.
• The question of whether Iraq has become a “failed state.”
• A musical look back at Bush’s Abu Ghraib speech impediment.
• The Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt, and Mark Twain’s story, “The War Prayer.”
• Chicago’s Virgin Mary water stain.
• Dave Winer’s mental health (or lack thereof).

Links and sources for the items mentioned in the podcast:

• Walter Pincus article on the Tony Blair memo from the Washington Post: British intelligence warned of Iraq war.
• Bush remarks on October 16, 2002: President signs Iraq war resolution.
• Juan Cole posting on Iraq as a failed state: 2-Day bombing total of 100 dead, hundreds wounded; Zarqawi threatens to hit American homeland.
• Press briefing by Scott McClellan for May 11, 2005.
• Press briefing by Scott McClelllan for May 12, 2005.
• Bush remarks on Iraq at the Army War College, May 24, 2004: President outlines steps to help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom.
• Bush remarks in the Oval Office on June 22, 2004: President Bush welcomes prime minister of Hungary.
• Wikipedia entry on The Spanish-American War.
• Tinfoil.com’s antique wax-cylinder recordings archive, including the one on The charge of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
• Mark Twain’s The War Prayer.
• Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench on The Virgin Mary of the Viaduct.
• The Political Teen’s video of Dave Winer’s BlogNashville session.
• Stan Brown’s post from Two Minute Offense on Dave Winer’s session at BlogNashville: On Disrespectful Disagreement.
• Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes podcasts.

Last but not least, the music included in this podcast:

• Bjorn Fogelberg, for the track ‘quite derivative’ from the ‘Karooshi Porn’ album.
• Aerobic Jonquil, for the tracks ‘Shinjuku Line’ from ‘Brain Stomach’.
• The track ‘Prison System’ was created by Michael Fisher, and is used
  with his permission. For more information about his music, see his web
  site at http://m-fisher.com.
• Kenji Williams, for the track ‘Soul Captain’ from ‘Faces of Epiphany’.
• Cargo Cult, for the track ‘Ambriel’ from ‘Alchemy’.

Everyone else is jumping off a cliff, so I figured I would too: Lies.com Podcast 1 (32 MB MP3 file). It’s basically 35 minutes of me talking about items that have appeared recently on the site, with some amateurish mixing in of music and whatnot.

The whole process was very much an experiment, and I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out. It reminds me a lot of what it was like being involved in the early days of desktop publishing, and then the early days of the Web: a bunch of excited amateurs wake up one day and realize that they have everything they need to do something that hitherto required a lot of expensive equipment and professional expertise. So they all start making mudpies, and the established experts can only look on in horror as the newbies recreate every mistake in the book.

So anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think. This first installment features lots of ragging on Bush (really? you think?), along with scattered other items, including a long rant about Troy and Josh and the downside to a fundamentalist Christian education. I mixed in some cool music, too, without ever (quite) violating anyone’s copyright (I think).

In the future (assuming I do more of these) I’ll probably back off on the fancypants mixing and music, and just yack, since that seems to be plenty challenging for my minimal audio engineering skillz. In that case I’ll probably also back off on the audio quality, which will make the resulting files smaller; this one is stereo, 128 bit depth, and 44.1 khz sampling rate, which is bigtime overkill for my not-made-for-radio voice, but I figured the music deserved it.

I still need to figure out how to do the RSS feed, so hypothetical future installments can be conveniently downloaded onto your intellectual-property-repurposing tool of choice. I’lll update this entry when that’s done.

Update: Hm. I think I’ve got the RSS 2.0 feed available. You should now be able to subscribe to lies.com content generally, or just subscribe to lies.com podcasts. Please let me know if you notice any problems. Thanks.

Later update: I credited the artists whose music I used at the end of the podcast itself, but meant to list them here, and forgot to do so. Thanks to all of the following:

• Bjorn Fogelberg, for the track ‘quite derivative’ from the ‘Karooshi Porn’ album.
• Aerobic Jonquil, for the tracks ‘Shinjuku Line’ and ‘Drop’ from ‘Brain Stomach’.
• rx of the party party, for ‘Imagine’.
• Belief Systems, for the track ‘Deep House’ from ‘Eponyms’.
• AntiGuru, for ‘Rectify’ from ‘Fall Submissions’.
• Artemis, for ‘Beautiful Life’ and ‘Fountain of Life’ from ‘Gravity’.

Lies.com podcasts are copyrighted by John Callender, and are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.