award tour

I just wanted to make a quick comment about CBC Radio. The comment is that it is awesome. I drove from Toronto to Ottawa today and decided to see what makes the Sunday morning program. First up was Sunday Edition which had this amazing piece about Canada’s new “Guest Worker” visa program which basically brings people into Canada to do unskilled labour that no one in Canada will do (like work at Wendy’s or work on farms). Next up was The Late Show which profiled a late author named Martha Blum who resided in Saskatoon and was a Holocaust survivor. The piece on her was phenomenal. Next, Vinyl Cafe did a show about covers which included crazy stuff like William Shatner’s Mister Tambourine Man, some standards like Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, but the one that really surprised me was a cover of the BeeGee’s Islands in the Stream by The Constantines & Feist. The Debaters was pretty good and then Wiretap was fantastic (I especially loved the bit about Josh trying to “rid himself of his material possessions and hit the road, wandering-hobo style”).

I really wanted to point this out because radio in Toronto is genuinely atrocious and it’s so nice to see that the CBC has such diverse, entertaining, and quality programming.

I was just listening to some old As It Happens podcasts from December. One of the podcasts contains an interview with Evil Knievel about his recent lawsuit filed against Kanye West for using Evil’s likeness in the music video for Touch The Sky. Now, as you can imagine, this all seems pretty ridiculous. Since parody is free speech this is clearly the workings of one crazy old sumbitch.

The interview is pretty funny since Barbara Budd is pretty laid back and is just calmly asking why he’s suing him. Evil goes into this long schpeel about how he worked his whole life telling kids to do the right thing, believe in God, yada yada yada, and that Kanye is ruining that. But she asks again, about what in particular he didn’t like about the video. Here is his response…

“I just thought it was off color, that’s all. I didn’t like the point he was trying to make [pause] about interracial sexual things. I thought that was a bad choice. I thought that it would work bad with children using me as an example. [His tone of voice becomes much more angry at this point] I’m entitled to my own opinion. What is it that you’re trying to get me to say?”

You read that right, “interracial sexual things”. Not that I expected much more from an 80 year old man from Montana.

A little while back I pointed out that CBC Radio now has a weekly podcast featuring the best of As It Happens. I only first heard of the show last year when my friend Juan was actually on the program after sending an email pleading with them to let him on. I’ve been listening to the show for just over a month and have been really impressed.

For example, back in October there was an interview with Pakistani President Musharraf which became quite confrontational but was still incredibly substantive. The interviewer wasn’t playing your standard journalistic “gotcha” game. She was just asking tough questions. It’s so amazing to see or read content that has a fresh take on current events. Mainstream news has just become so homogenous. Another example was from this week’s show which featured an interview with an American who has been living in Kandahar for the last 5 years running a non-profit business. Her observations about how things operate day-to-day in Afghanistan were really thought provoking. She also had some pretty harsh words in response to comments recently made by Canadian Commanders in the region.

The show also features more upbeat stories which are usually really quirky and offbeat. Some of them can be boring but others are quite interesting. I find what makes those interviews even more entertaining is the fact that most of the interviewees seem so excited to tell their story and are always so thankful that anyone is interested in them at all.

Anyways, if you have an ipod or just want some occasional talk radio content, check out the podcast.