One of the things I’ve discovered from my students is that the only sound a young person likes less than fingernails on a chalk board is Prairie Home Companion on the radio. For the older readers of this Weblog, therefore, a link to Garrison Keillor singing a reworked version of “Mama Tried” (follow the link and then click “listen”).
[Close readers/listeners of the lyrics will note the line “black T-shirts and jeans were all I wore” and compare to the image on my home page. Ever since I took up flying unairconditioned aircraft, I have switched to clothes with a higher albedo, e.g., grey T-shirts and zip-off pants.]
YES! I hear two seconds of Garrison Keillor’s voice and I want to stick a pencil in my ear. Whenever I listen long enough to hear one of his tweedy jokes, I hate him even more.
I’ve seen pretty much the opposite; I’ve always been a fan, as have many of my friends, and when I saw the film recently the mean age of the audience was somewhere in the mid- to late twenties.
When I was in college, I worked for Fedex as a courier. This was when I was about 19-23 years old. Every Saturday (6th day of the week is automatic overtime even if you’re only up to 25 hrs for the rest of the week) I would run my Saturday pickup route then head back to the warehouse, unload the other trucks, and load the aircraft containers full of freight. Listening to Prairie Home Companion while sorting and loading freight was the highlight of my day, although, honestly, it did drive any nearby coworkers crazy.
Zip-off pants, though. I don’t have any of those.
I don’t always seek out Prairie Home Companion, but whenever it is on I always listen at least for a while. As I have gotten older more of the stories take on more relevance in my life.
I have to admit that most of my co-workers don’t share my views either. But then again, most of what they watch is reality TV.
I’m a 27-year-old PHC fan, casually (along the lines of Marshall’s post, above). Used to listen to tapes of stories from Lake Wobegon when I was younger, they must have been a formative influence.
Philip, are you planning any update to your assessment of Israel now that the situation has changed significantly?
Jim: I’m not planning to update my Israel article. The Arabs declared war on the Jews in 1948 and the latest battle, however dramatically it might be spun by the TV networks and newspapers, isn’t news, which was one of my points in the article.
I’m skimming my article now, looking for signs of obsolescence. I found one sentence that I wrote back in early 2003… “if [the Israelis] signed a peace treaty with Yasser Arafat today and Hamas took over the Palestinian leadership tomorrow, the war would be back on”. Hey, that more or less happened! I must change my name to Nostradamus.