Last weekend I drove to Chautauqua to meet with a freelance client about our next project, and while it wasn't a long drive, I was unsure of the ability of Sirius XM to satisfy my aural urges. It seems like lately I just flip through all 30 of my preset stations without finding anything I can tolerate for more than a song or two, and that gets old quickly.
Rummaging through the bin of physical CDs that I kept after the Great Purge of 2013 (Drink!) and/or firing up my big laptop with the iTunes library and curating the perfect playlists seemed like too much work, so: Podcasts to the rescue!
The problem there is that I only listen to three podcasts on a regular basis (Car Talk, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The Big Podcast with Shaq) and I was already pretty much caught up with all of them before I finished backing out of the driveway. I had to cast my nets upon the pop-culture waters and see whether anything I could snare would hold my interest while navigating around the parade of orange barrels on I-90.
Luckily, while working through my backlog of Entertainment Weekly magazines over at my parents' place a few days before my trip, I came across a reference to The Shipping Room Podcast.
It seemed to hit a few of my personal sweet spots -- which include but are not limited to watching a lot of television shows, having definite feelings about what does or doesn't happen on said shows, and talking about fictional characters at length and in great detail. (Once a co-worker interrupted a discussion I was having with another co-worker to ask if what we were talking about had happened in real life or on TV. I think that was the line, anyway -- it's been a while. You know how a piece of something that happens now reminds you of a tiny snippet of something you remember from almost twenty years ago and you laugh or otherwise react but if you have to explain to a third party why/how you made the connection and had that reaction it all falls apart because you can't quite supply enough of the context to make the remembered incident relevant/meaningful? Yeah, it's like that.)
I'm only maybe ten or twelve episodes in to the podcast archives -- for whatever reason, I keep picturing them as the Delicious Dish duo on Saturday Night Live -- and I've got about 40 episodes to go until I'm caught up. So, even though I'm listening to them at double-speed, I should have more than enough material to get me through any jaunts around town/impromptu road trips in the foreseeable future.
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