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The Craziest Show Ideas I Could Think Of 
Lisa Williams, lisa AT cadence90 dot com
Random Shows
| | Real Life, Modern Day High Seas Piracy |
| | A commercial cargo ship is attacked by ACTUAL PIRATES nearly every day of the year. |
| | Attacks are getting more frequent and more deadly -- the crew of the Brooklyn III were never found again. |
| | Pirates are starting to steal whole ships -- repainting the name and sailing them to ports where they have paid off port officials. |
| | Pirates paint ships to look like those of customs officials, stopping a cargo ship while many pirates in small fast boats board from the rear using grappling hooks. |
| | Potential Guests: Michael S. McDaniel, lawyer and expert in international shipping law who's become an expert on modern day piracy; Captain Cynthia Smith, whose ship was attacked by pirates; someone from the ICC Commercial Crime Services, who runs the official piracy reporting center |
| | Because Getting Old is the Last Taboo |
| | Ronni Bennett's blog, Time Goes By, writes about aging because nobody else is even trying to get to the heart of the matter: "I find aging to be fascinating and even mysterious. I’ve never been this old before and I want to know a lot more about it. Since no one else is writing in any genuine, real-world way about the later years of life, I have taken on the challenge." |
| | An entry from last week: "In January 1992, Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer. Her doctor explained her options with great care and kindness, but the bottom line was that she had maybe three or four months to live. Mom sat in silence for a long time when Dr. Hunt finished speaking, then she looked him in the eye: "Are you telling me, she said, that I shouldn’t buy any green bananas?" |
| | On Beyond Maxwell House: George Howell and Coffee in America |
| | When I was ten my Uncle Tim took us to a strange place in Boston, a little store with bin after bin lining the walls. This was the original Coffee Connection. I had never seen a coffee bean before. I had never seen a coffee grinder, and didn't know anybody who had a home grinder. My mother said, "Uncle Tim and his fancy stuff," and people's feelings about coffee that doesn't come from a can tells us nearly everything we need to know about class prejudice in America. |
| | George Howell was one of the first people to bring coffee in the bean to Americans, to introduce us to the tastes and smells of coffee from different places on the earth. He flipped his groundbreaking business, Coffee Connection, to Starbucks as that chain went national. But he's at it again, in Acton, roasting tiny batches of coffee. See Terroir. |
| | Going It Alone: Chris Nolan and Stand-Alone Journalism |
| | "It was labeled fluff. Well, Quattrone's under indictment because of my work -- I don't think he thinks it's fluff." -- Chris Nolan, of Politics from Left To Right |
| | "The newsroom has left the building," Nolan says, and she's put her money where her mouth is, going it alone with her site Politics from Left to Right, which started out as a Bay Area news and politics blog but got launched into the national arena when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom started signing marriage licenses for same sex couples. |
| | I listened to Nolan speak at BlogHer and she's great -- wry, smart, great comic timing. |
| | The Day The Desk Calendar Died: David Allen and Organization for the Plugged-In Life |
| | David Allen's book Getting Things Done has become a cult document among bloggers, coders, and other folk whose plugged in lifestyle has made trying to get organized with a Day Runner like trying to patch up a bullet hole with a Band-Aid. |
| | His books have gathered an online community at 43folders.com. People in the community say that "nerds are like canaries in the coal mine" for what they call "life-hacks" -- new strategies that help them cope with new workplace and life realities that hit them before the general populace. |
| | Allen and his adherents come to surprising, counterintuitive conclusions about modern life, specifically, modern work life. |
| | Guests: David Allen, Merlin Mann of 43folders, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.com |
| | Question: What was your worst moment? When everything had fallen apart and was a mess? |
| | In the Sixties we had a sleek, plastic future with flying cars that spoke to an American, and increasingly a global, hopefulness about the future. What's the state of the future today? |
| | Guests: Wit, blogger, SF author Teresa Nielsen Hayden; blogger, SF author, and computer science professor Rudy Rucker; young Hugo Winner and blogger Charlie Stross, cyberpunk legend turned "design for the future" professor Bruce Sterling |
| | Sterling is "The Mayor of SXSW," the big annual tech/music/film festival in Austin. Listen to this talk he gave to get a sense of him, he's great aloud, relaxed, funny: Sterling at SXSW |
Practices that are Daily and Lifelong
| | Why? Like the knitting show, these are practices that have a large number of people who are passionately devoted to them, sometimes for decades. People find surprising meaning and insight that influences their lives in these practices. It's the little things. |
| | See Mark Romano's Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession, released June of this year. |
Explorers and Going to Extremes
| | This is the polar opposite of the "Daily Practices" camp, but everybody has a fascination with people who push the limits of what a human being can do. |
| | The Top of The World: Everest |
| | Potential Guest: Don Shirley The tragedy of Dave Shaw's dive to rescue a trapped diver's body in Bushman's Cave off the coast of Australia; Dave's support crew, including legend Don Shirley, have written and given interviews about the event |
| | Astronauts. Who doesn't love astronauts? Did I mention astronauts? No? |
| | I'd love to hear from some of the former MIR cosmonauts. The MIR was like a trailer park in space -- things were always breaking, catching on fire, and cosmonauts were allowed to drink vodka onboard. |
| | Potential Guest: Burt Rutan, maverick pilot and spacecraft designer, on the quest to get private craft into space; recent X Prize test vehicles made it out of the atmosphere. |
| | Race Across America (RAAM) teams race across the continent on bikes, taking turns and going 24 hours a day. One team was so extreme that they had IV taps planted in their forearms -- when they came off their bike shift, they'd lie down in the trailer and be hooked up to a saline drip to rehydrate -- only to get back on the bike an hour or two later. Winning teams cross the country in only five days! |
| | New Year's Day Show: The L Street Brownies |
| | A great New Year's show. What was the first time jumping in the icy water on New Year's Day like? Who's a first-timer this year? Funny stories about members who have departed to the Great Tavern in the Sky. |
Topics Worth Returning To Again and Again
| | Mental health and mental illness -- nearly every listener will have a family member who has had a mental illness; many of them have had these diagnoses themselves. |
| | Martin Seligman, Aaron Beck, and David Burns, all researchers into the psychological basis of optimism and resiliency. Most research into mental illness focuses on what's wrong; Seligman, et.al. look at how things go right -- why are some people resilient? how does optimism work? |
| | Iraq -- I loved y'all's (yes, English needs a third person plural) coverage of the wars resulting from the breakup of Yugoslavia. I had no idea until I talked to other people that virtually no one else was covering it and that listeners to the Connection were more well informed about that war than anybody. Iraq doesn't suffer from a lack of coverage but it certainly suffers from a lack of understanding. I try, but I'm still not sure I really understand or know what's going on over there. |
Quick Hits
| | Harry Frankfurt and On Bullshit "“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” writes Frankfurt. “Producing bullshit requires no such conviction...Not by accident do we refer to someone with a peculiar gift for this as a “bullshit artist,” for “the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play... bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.” No other single book helped me understand more about life and politics today. Why didn't truth work anymore? Why had people become unembarrassed, even unruffled, when presented with truth? |
| | Koan Bremner is a podcaster whose show, Crossover, is about her life as a transgendered person with her family, workplace, and friends. I saw her speak at BlogHer and immediately wanted to import her from the UK to live in the other half of the two family I own. Generous, brave, smart, and very funny. |
| | Halley Suitt: What can you say? She's been called the Ellen DeGeneres of blogging for her open, sunny, unafraid approach to life. She'd be great on almost anything. |
| | Eulogies and Obituaries, peoples' experience of writing or giving them; funny ones, sad ones, good and bad funeral experiences. |
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Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
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