So my super-cheap MP3 player went out of commission a while ago. Towards the end it was held together with a rubberband. Then, one day, mid-MP3, it just stopped working.
This may have been connected to the time I dropped it in the bucket of bleach water and then shook it out until it worked again. Or maybe ten months of constant use in a bakery was too much for it. Or maybe it was just cheaply made.
So I ordered another ebay super-cheap Chinese media player, one which had four-times the capacity for slightly less money (my co-worker Johnny Motard predicted that in another five years they’ll be a hundred times as powerful, hook up directly to your brain, and they’ll be mandatory).
But it didn’t work, so I had to send it back. So I’m without my podcasts at the moment. I went to Target to see if I could get a cheap interim player, but they were all about eight times less value than the cheap ebay alternative (presuming that the cheap ebay alternative ever actually works).
I had no idea how sucky my life was without podcasts. Over Thanksgiving here at the bakery I peeled and cored about two-hundred pounds of apples, all in excruciating non-entertainment. With the media player my mind was engaged, pink and vibrant. Without it, I was like one of those super-max prisoners who slowly eat their own hands.
Radio hasn’t been much use. Public radio in Austin is dominated by the super-sucky John Aeilli. Listening to his morning radio show is like listening to marshmallows on a chalkboard. He makes me want to eat his hands. But that wouldn’t shut up his inane pot-choked ramblings that he does between every single song, even though they’re probably two different versions of the same song.
God, John Aeilli sucks so bad.
But then a miracle happened. As I was swinging the dial between KUT and KMFA (the classical station), somewhere around 89.9 FM there popped up this micro station.
There were never any call letters, it just announced that it’s the Genesis Communications Network (GCN). Every show is a symphony of crazy. It’s the ideal programming lineup for every Ron Paul bumper-sticker loving, pot-smoking, chem-trail spotting, libertarian survivalist hippie with a gun.
This morning we listened to a show where a "doctor" warned everyone of the dangers of breathing gas. His website is GassingAmerica.com.
The shift before there was a show that sounded like the world’s longest crazy answering machine message. It sounded like he had simply called up a tape player somewhere and didn’t stop talking about the "Obama fascist corporate state" for an entire hour!
There was a guy from AnotherUntoldStory.com who did a five-minute monologue about how gun sales are up in America post Obama election because everyone knows that there’s a Muslim-communist-socialist-pogrom on the horizon.
But the best thing about this station is the commercials. They advertise gold of course. And then there’s also the Alex Jones site PrisonPlanet.com, and PepperSpray.com (apparently pepper spray is the perfect Christmas gift!), and a company that sells heirloom non-GMO seeds in five-year supply bundles so you can be self-sufficient after the complete collapse of civic infra-structure, and an ozone machine that cleans the impurities from everything you own, and survivalist gear suppliers who actually use the phrase "survivalist gear" in describing their product, and what has got to be the worst-designed website in history: "LearnTheSecretToYouth.com".
Yeah, it’s all sheer schizophrenia.
But it’s better than John Aeilli.
