{"id":17912,"date":"2011-02-07T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T18:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17912"},"modified":"2011-02-07T13:24:55","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T19:24:55","slug":"17912","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17912","title":{"rendered":"A Semiotician, A Rabbi And An Astrophysicist Walk Into A Bar&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This American Life<\/em>, an NPR program, is a wildly mixed bag of a radio show; it&#8217;s frequently excellent, evocative, and sometimes leads you to some wondrous insights.\u00a0 For a show that is entirely by, for, and about upper-middle-class, college-educated, espresso-guzzling, Prius-driving white liberal hipsters, it&#8217;s very often worth the hour it takes to listen.<\/p>\n<p>Still, for those of you in my audience that produce <em>TAL<\/em>, I feel I need to clarify something.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Funny: <\/strong><em>The Onion<\/em>, America&#8217;s great parody newspaper.\u00a0 While it&#8217;s not quite as quirky and unpredictable as it was ten years ago (the move to New York from Madison didn&#8217;t make the paper any funnier), it&#8217;s still a weekly treat.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Not Funny<\/strong>: <a href=\"javascript:playMe('426&amp;podcast=1');\">Listening <\/a>to <em>The Onion&#8217;s <\/em>editorial panel not only making the sausage (which is mildly interesting)&#8230;:<\/p>\n<p><script src=\"http:\/\/audio.thisamericanlife.org\/widget\/widget.min.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;but analyzing the process to death, like they&#8217;re a group of philosophy professors debating the meaning of existence itself.\u00a0\u00a0 A bunch of journalism profs at a Columbia forum couldn&#8217;t possibly sound more pretentious and joyless.<\/p>\n<p>Note to <em>Onion <\/em>and <em>TAL <\/em>staff; you&#8217;re not curing cancer.\u00a0 Lighten up already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This American Life, an NPR program, is a wildly mixed bag of a radio show; it&#8217;s frequently excellent, evocative, and sometimes leads you to some wondrous insights.\u00a0 For a show that is entirely by, for, and about upper-middle-class, college-educated, espresso-guzzling, Prius-driving white liberal hipsters, it&#8217;s very often worth the hour it takes to listen. Still, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-universe-and-everything","category-lefty-alt-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17912"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17915,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17912\/revisions\/17915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}