2X

No, that's not my pant size.

For a moment, I thought it a little too early in the development of the medium to call this the "Golden Age of Podcasting," but then I remembered the first Golden Age of Television came pretty early on in the development of that medium, too. When a thing is new, there are few to no rules to constrain its growth and direction, and though there are many, many regretful clunkers, there are also wonders too countless to number. Marty, anyone?

I think it was Christmas 2013 when I actually finished listening to all the podcasts in my queue, but then EconTalk did a joint episode with Research on Religion, and I never got caught up again. I try and try and try to resist the temptation to subscribe to another, but Imaginary Worlds was too tempting to pass up. In an ordinary week, I have roughly 30-45 minutes a day (between working out and doing the dishes) to listen to podcasts, with maybe 2-4 more hours during Saturday chores. When you're adding up 6-8 hours of new audio every week, you quickly get into a listening hole. I go through my podcasts in chronological order, so I was about six weeks and and 36 hours behind when I listened to the 500th episode of EconTalk.

Mike Munger mentioned that he listens to his podcasts on 1.5x speed. This had never before occurred to me. I was afraid everyone would sound like a chipmunk, but iTunes uses some sort of audio scrubbing software which doesn't alter the tone or timbre of anyone's voice; it just sounds like they're talking fast. I quickly adjusted to 1.5x, and then took the leap to 2x. As of today, my queue has gone down to only 27 hours, and I'm only 2 and a half weeks behind. At this pace, I am finally beginning to hope I can begin listening to podcasts the week they come out.

Sadly, my iPhone doesn't offer a 2.5x setting.

The Amazing Spider-Man

If you care a bit more than you should about these things, you've almost certainly seen the trailer for Captain America: Civil War in which Spider-Man shows up at the very end. (An aside: perhaps the actual movie will be about the Captain and his close personal allies, but the trailers make it look much more like the next Avengers installment. I go to a Captain America movie to see Captain America. And maybe the Falcon.) This has Thing 1 giddy with excitement, but me not so much.

Back when I was an avid comics reader, my favorite Spider-Man period was when Jim Owsley was editing those titles for Marvel during the 1980s. Thereafter, it seemed to me that Marvel was exploiting the character's popularity for cash value, putting him through countless wrenching changes and cross-overs for little reason other than boosting sales. That said, I thought the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies were fun, but by the third installment began suffering the same bloat which afflicted the first run of Batman movies after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton left the series. 

And then came The Amazing Spider-Man.

If you know any comic book history at all, you know the stories about how the Stan Lee-, Jack Kirby- and Steve Ditko-led Marvel Comics of the 1960s up-ended the industry. Spider-Man, we read, was revolutionary for having a secret identity which was not only as well-developed as his costumed role, but which was a nebbishy high-school student. We read about the excitement he generated among readers, offering a hero whom they could not only idolize, but to whom they could intimately relate (because you see, children, back in our day all comic book readers were irredeemable doofuses). I read about that Spider-Man, but I didn't experience him other than in the occasional anthology. The Spider-Man of my youth had aged, was in his late twenties, and even married Mary-Jane Watson. All of which was fine, but didn't exactly carry on the legendary magic of Stan Lee's 1960s Spider-Man.

I got that, finally, when Andrew Garfield took on the character in 2012. His portrayal, and the way the two films set his universe, finally landed me in the sheer joy of an adolescent climbing walls and the pathos of a teenager losing the man who had raised him while finding his first serious girlfriend. The Amazing Spider-Man movies gave me the opportunity to experience Stan Lee's original vision. Unlike any number of other recent superhero movies (looking at you, Man of Steel and the X-Men franchise), those films had an emotional heft which has stuck with me.

As much I've enjoyed the Marvel cinematic universe thus far, and the Avengers in particular, I'm not interested in seeing Spider-Man join it. To me, he's always been at his best when he is alone, struggling (and often failing) to figure out his place in the world . At the same time, I don't really object to him snatching away Captain America's shield, either. It's just too bad that moment had to come at the expense of ending Andrew Garfield's take on Spider-Man, the only one in which I've been interested for years.

The word of the day is "nicodemously"

I learned it this morning from Zimbabwean author Pettina Gappah when she was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition. She was explaining "Zimglish" (backup word of the day):

I'll give you one example: Because we love our Bible — we consider ourselves a very strong Christian country — so we have a lot of phrases that we take from the Bible that we think are English words. So for example Nicodemus, is a man, a Pharisee who went to Jesus at night and said, "How can a man be born again?" So to do something "nicodemously" is to do something secretly, under cover of the darkness. So you have politicians condemning the "Nicodemus machinations of the government" and you think ... What? It's my absolutely favorite Zimglish word of all time.