Radio waves

I missed out on Free Comic Book Day yesterday. My partner bought this big piece of folk art off of EBay, and we had to drive to Delaware to pick it up. So it was a long day in his car exploring the mysteries of XM Radio.

Dear On Broadway: I beg you to spend more time and effort on your programming. Half of the time your selections sound like a coded mix tape I would have assembled in college (while drunk) for a boy I liked. But even I wouldn’t have added those dumb songs that were obviously shoved into a show to cover the scene changes.

For the second year in a row, an innocent animal has been desperately injured in the running of the Kentucky Derby. This one was euthanized on the track. The glamour! The tradition!

When I want to stay awake through the rolling hills of western Maryland, there’s nothing like ignorant callers on talk radio to keep me alert. One person actually suggested that the crisis of rising food prices might actually put a dent in our nation’s obesity problem, which struck me as a kind of draconian optimism. That said, I couldn’t help but notice that the price of the dog food we buy went up about 30% since the last time I bought a bag.

Public Radio International giveth; Public Radio International taketh away. On one hand, I caught an episode of This American Life that included pieces from Sarah Vowell and Dan Savage. (And there’s a new book by Vowell on the way, so SQUEE!) On the other hand, Studio 360 is kind of painful. I’m the first to agree that Ira Glass is ripe for spoofing, but imitating isn’t spoofing.

This is how my self-esteem operates: The other day, I got an e-mail from an editor at Print letting me know that the magazine had won for General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards, and that one of the issues in their submission was the one that included the article I wrote my manhwa. My immediate thought: “Yay, my article wasn’t enough to lower the standard of the magazine into runner-up status!” Of course, now I’m all, “Suck it, Aperture!”