...and a time to cast away

I think my long term relationship with National Public Radio is coasting to an end. It’s time. I think we hit a new low this morning when “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” used the Black Eyed Peas as a musical interlude, and the damned thing got stuck in my head. For obvious reasons, it’s ill-advised for a 140 kilo bald guy in his early forties to be strolling down the halls of an all-girls high school obliviously crooning, “My hump, my hump, my hump, ha! My lovely lady lumps. Check it out!” in a breathy falsetto, even if no one understands what he’s saying.

Unfortunately, that’s all I really took away from NPR this morning. That and the weather forecast for Minneapolis, nearly 9,000 kilometers away. I no longer care who gets Carl Kasell’s voice on his home answering machine. The Car Talk guys sound increasingly bizarre, though I freely concede that’s entirely my problem. The Driveway Moments are blending into one prolonged howl of bathos, and the promise of never hearing David Sedaris talk about his mother again fills me with a sense of hushed and happy exultation.

Why NPR, anyway? It’s just a sort of sonic security blanket. Listening over the internet, I could be listening to any English programming in the world. The BBC, or Australian Broadcasting, both of which are great by the way. Or why not go farther afield? Surely there’s something interesting coming out of South Africa, or New Zealand, or even Belize or Guyana. I always tell my students English is the key to a thousand doors, for which I suffer a great deal of eye-rolling, and here I am suckling at the teat of Liberal America. Well, no more! Goodbye, Peter, Karl and company. So long, Terry. Tom and Ray, old friends, I bid you adieu. And Sylvia Poggioli, you sorceress, how you inflame and unhinge me! But we can’t continue like this. We just can’t.