O'Dark 30

Tuesday Podcast 5/14/13

It's podcast time, folks! We've got a handful of audio treats for you today. A literal handful -- if you were to somehow put today's audio in your hand, it would exactly fill it. Try it and see! But enough science talk. Let's get down to it. We're going to start things off with a new installment of The SoCal Byte from producer Nathan Callahan. It's the "My Chilean Pen Pal" episode, and it'll hopefully fulfill your Southern California-based radio needs this morning. And who doesn't love The...

Tuesday Podcast 5/7/13

Hey everybody! We've got a nice long podcast for you today; at a little over 90 minutes, this thing is like half a complete O'Dark broadcast. And you can put it right on your portable listening device, because of technology! We'll bring you the "Benny Goodman and The Art of Intersection" episode of Views and Brews Remix. I don't know if you guys know much about Benny Goodman, but let me tell you this: that dude could intersect like a sun of a gun. What else? Well, that Views and Brews is...

Tuesday Podcast 4/30/13

I've just been listening back to the "Speed of Light for Pyramids" episode of 99% Invisible, and boy is that some fascinating stuff in there. 99% Invisible is usually pretty interesting, but this episode, about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, is really catching my ear. Hopefully it'll catch yours, too. Then we'll bring you another installment of Jake Warga's series The Things They Carry. If you've been listening to the show and/or the podcasts lately, you've probably heard an...

Tuesday Podcast 4/23/13

Hey, everybody. We hope you had a wonderful Earth Day yesterday, and that it was just as earthy as you'd hoped. Today it's Podcast Day, a holiday that comes twice a week 'round these parts. Today's 'cast has a couple of nice little pieces for you and/or your ears. We'll start off with a new installment of Jake Warga's great series The Things They Carry. In this series, Jake talks with U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan about what they carry with them every day, and in this episode, we'll...

Tuesday Podcast 4/16/13

I'm gonna be honest with you folks -- we're all still a little giddy around here after yesterday's performance by Patty Griffin and special guest Robert Plant. Not a bad way to spend a Monday at work if you ask me. And if you thought that was great, you're really going to be disappointed by this podcast! It doesn't have Patty Griffin or Robert Plant in it. Sorry. But seriously, though, it is a pretty cool podcast even without those guys. We've got return appearances by two of our favorite...

Tuesday Podcast 4/9/13

If I know the O'Dark audience, and I think I do, you're all staring at the computer screen and wondering if anyone on the O'Dark team has a sister with a birthday today. Yes, as a matter of fact! Thanks for asking. And happy birthday, Melinda! We've got a nice little 'cast for you today, full of homegrown talent. We'll kick it off with installment numero dos of Delta State, the new Spike Gillespie commentary series. What's Spike commenting upon today? Tune in and find out! Then it's the...

Things are hopping around the KUT/KUTX studios today, folks. We just kicked off our spring 2013 membership drive this morning, which happens to be our first-ever two-station drive. It's kind of exciting, while also being kind of horrifying. Just like O'Dark 30 (segue!). But despite the hectic atmosphere around these here parts, we've still carved out a little time to bring you a fresh and tasty podcast. And this one's a dandy, featuring the world podcast premiere of the new show Delta...

Tuesday Podcast 3/26/13

O’Dark 30Tuesday Podcast 3/26/13 Greetings on this blustery spring day, good people. Also, what the heck, weather? You’re confusing and weird. What’s on th…

Tuesday Podcast 3/19/13

Hey, it's the last day of winter! Which means it's going to be in the 80s today and then slightly colder tomorrow, when it becomes spring. I don't understand that at all, but then I'm not a meteorologist, I'm just a radio producer. And here's what I've produced for today: The cast will start off with The Harmonica, a nice little something something from the fine folks at Stories from Deep in the Heart, a project of Austin's own Texas Folklife. Then we'll move right along to a new installment...

Tuesday Podcast 3/12/13

We love to see your bright shining faces fill with wonder as you unwrap your podcast on Tuesday morning. What treasures await you within? Tear open that virtual wrapping paper and find out, friends! Okay, we'll just tell you, since virtual wrapping paper isn't really a thing and we're getting tired of this metaphor anyway. You're gonna hear The Devil You Know, which you might be surprised to discover is not a documentary about O'Dark host Hawk Mendenhall. Crazy, right? It's actually a "movie...

Tuesday Podcast 3/5/13

Thanks for stopping by to pick up today's podcast. We hope you find it fresh and tasty and cooked to your liking. What's on the menu today, you ask? First off, it's a show that's new to us (and therefore, we assume, new to you). It's a cool little thing called The SoCal Byte, which Hawk was excited to find since he's from Southern California himself. This episode is called "A Duck's Worth of Existential Dread," and it's pretty fun. Then we'll check in with our buddy Rob Rosenthal and his...

Tuesday Podcast 2/26/13

Boy, oh boy, how about that wind yesterday, huh? We all hope that you and yours didn't lose power or get blown around too much. Also, we're really rethinking our decision to put the O'Dark offices in a treehouse. Things are a mess around here, man. But we're going to soldier on and bring you a spanking new podcast anyway, 'cause that's how we do things around these parts. We've got three cool bits of radio for your ears today, starting off with Mississippi Porches, a great little...

Tuesday Podcast 2/19/13

What's on the podcast today? You might as well ask what's not on the podcast! No, wait, that's not right at all. Telling you what's not on it would take forever and give you little usable information. It'd be a total waste of your time and mine. There are literally millions of things that aren't on today's podcast. But, more importantly, there are a handful of things that are on today's podcast, and they're pretty cool. The lesson here? Be happy with what you have. We'll start off with A Toy...

Tuesday Podcast 2/12/13

Wow, we just realized that today is Mardi Gras! That makes a lot of the stuff we've seen around the office today make slightly more sense, even if some of it is still pretty unsettling (I'm not giving any details, Hawk Mendenhall, but you know what you did). Today's podcast doesn't have anything to do with that, of course, but we did actually thrown in a little Valentine's thing to try and make it a bit timely. So that's something, right? We've got two items that might be of interest to you....

Tuesday Podcast 2/5/13

Greetings from O'Dark 30. You might know us as the three-hour show that didn't lose power halfway through this past Sunday night. Za-zing! Super Bowl burn! And here we are again, bringing you more audio treats to stick in your ears. What's on tap today? A few things, actually, beginning with a little something from Austin-based producer Lindsay Patterson. This intriguing and informative piece on microbial video games originally aired on Studio 360, and now it's here on this podcast. Then...

Tuesday Podcast 1/29/13

Today's podcast is really going to run the audio gamut in a quick twenty minutes or so. In under half an hour, we'll bring you a new look at classic cartoons, an exploration of romantic music, and a meditation on the ephemeral nature of sound. "Heard, Once" will kick off the show today, and it's a great episode of the reliably awesome Memory Palace podcast produced by Nate DiMeo. This piece doesn't just chronicle an overlooked chapter of history; it also explores the nature of sound and its...

Tuesday Podcast 1/22/13

If you listen to the big big show on a regular regular basis, you're pretty familiar with our buddy Jake Warga by now. This guy produces great radio, and we air his stuff enough that he's become an O'Dark Hall-of-Famer. So it breaks our little hearts to think of bad things happening to the guy, whether it's not having enough milk for his cereal or getting violently mugged. We're not sure how his cereal-to-milk ratio is this day, but we do know that he got mugged a while back, and was hurt...

Tuesday Podcast 1/15/13

I've just been informed that corduroy is the "cloth of kings," which is great news because I'm wearing a corduroy sport coat right now and now I feel all fancy. Plus it's a chilly day, so it's great corduroy weather. What I'm saying, basically, is that if you're not wearing corduroy right now you're living your life wrong and you really should do something about that. So, what's on the big 'cast today? We've got great pieces about two important Americans. First off, it's a piece from The...

Tuesday Podcast 1/8/13

We've been informed by Wikipedia that today marks the 22nd anniversary of a UFO sighting in Trans-en-Provence, France. A witness to the event said "The device had the shape of two saucers, one inverted on top of the other. It must have measured about 1.5 meters in height," except he probably said that in French, which must have made it sound much more romantic. What are doing to commemorate this historical moment? Nothing, really, except sitting in our cubicle and imagining the hilarious...

Wednesday Podcast 1/2/13

Hello and welcome back, loyal interwebbers! Thanks for bearing with us while we took the holidays off, and for checking back in to grab this rare Wednesday podcast. We trust the holiday break was good for you and yours. We're very excited around here because just before Christmas the Austin Film Critics Association voted us the Best Film of the year! It came as quite a surprise to us all, since we're technically not a movie at all, but a radio show. This has got to be an unprecedented honor,...

Friday Podcast 12/14/12

A week ago, we brought you a new episode of John Pierson's Master Class and took that as an opportunity to mock O'Dark alum Rebecca McInroy; we mentioned that, unlike our buddy John, Rebecca's the kind of boring nobody who's never even met Robert Redford, much less feuded with him. Well, it turns out that Rebecca actually has met Robert Redford, when she shook his hand at some film festival or something. So consider this a rare correction to the O'Dark podcast page: we were technically...

Friday Podcast 12/7/12

It's a homegrown episode of the big 'cast today, featuring a couple of pieces produced by folks we actually know personally. First up, it's the premier episode of the 2012 season of John Pierson's Master Class. John's always producing movies or writing books or flying off to Fiji or catching piranhas or feuding with Robert Redford, so he qualifies as one of the more interesting folks we know. In between all that adventuring, he also finds time to sit down several times a year with...

Friday Podcast 11/30/12

Well, here we are at the tail end of November, Interweb friends. We trust you're having a joyous and festive holiday season. And if you're not, we're going to turn that holiday frown upside down for you with this fantastic little podcast. And we do mean little. This one is a bite-size version of the 'cast, clocking in at just a bit under seventeen minutes. If that seems too short for you, feel welcome to listen to it twice. It's short but sweet, featuring two pieces of audio goodness for...

Friday Podcast 11/23/12

Like most of you, the O'Dark staff is off work today, scattered around the nation in various states of food-induced stupor. Knowing that none of us would be in any shape to actually work on the day after Thanksgiving, we've pre-produced this podcast write up and scheduled it to go live on the interwebs this morning. Technology! Hopefully, nothing earth-shattering has happened since this was written, so we won't sound like dummies for not mentioning it here. But if something big has...

Friday Podcast 11/16/12

Happy Friday, O'Darkers! It seems like we've been hearing an awful lot about this F1 thing lately, and it must be some kind of big deal because they've shut down half of downtown to make way for it. But we here at O'Dark Central are savvy shoppers, and we've learned never to jump at the first version of these newfangled doodads; we're going to do the smart thing and wait until they get all the bugs worked out for the F2, which will probably be out in like six months anyway. And what else...

Friday Podcast 11/9/12

Listen, folks. We know it's been a week and a half since Halloween, and we know that in the past month or so we've dedicated about 37 podcasts to Halloween and/or spooky content. But here's the deal: our esteemed host, Hawk Mendenhall, has got a monkey on his back, and that monkey is named Halloween Radio Pieces. He loves ghost stories and haunted houses and stuff more than any grown man should, and he puts pretty much every scary thing he can find on the big show. So we've got what is (I...

Friday Podcast 11/2/12

On Tuesday, we brought you a big, whopping, nearly-three-hour 'cast that kept to a theme (Halloween, our host's favoriteist of favorite themes). Having a through line that was not only consistent but timely felt weird to us, so we're going the other way today, with three pieces that have nothing in common whatsoever. First off, it's a new show called Fresh Talk. Or at least we think it's new. This is its first time on O'Dark, so it's new to us (and you), and that's all that really matters....

Friday Podcast 10/26/12

Happy Friday, good people of the interwebs! We're enjoying the crisp fall winter around here, and we hope you are too. Today's podcast has nothing to do with the fall, and it's surprisingly ghost-free for a late October O'Dark event. So it's not spooky and ghoulish, but it is a darn fine podcast if we do say so ourselves. We're starting things off with a little something from O'Dark hall-of-famer Jake Warga, Namibia Road Trip. This little piece of audio goodness is about exactly what the...

Friday Podcast 10/19/12

With only twelve days to go before Halloween, O'Dark host Hawk Mendenhall is in full holiday mode. He's spending his days eating candy and trying on costumes in his office (his Spock outfit was pretty good except for the ears, but we didn't buy him as Wolverine at all). But despite that busy schedule, he's still found a few minutes here and there to work on the big big show, even if he does insist on filling it with Halloween content. That's why we're leading off the big 'cast with the...

Tuesday Podcast 10/9/12

All right folks, you know and I know that Halloween is over three weeks away and that there's no real reason why we should be bringing you Halloween content on this podcast. But have you ever tried to explain to Hawk Mendenhall that there's an appropriate time for spooky stuff and that that appropriate time is not "every week of the year?" I have, and it did not go well. So it's Halloween time on the podcast! Put on your costume, grab a sack of fun size candy bars, and settle in for the...

Tuesday Podcast 10/2/12

Wow, is it October already? Seems like just a few days ago it was all warm and sunny and now here it is almost Columbus Day. The time, she does fly. And how better to celebrate the changing of the months than with a fancy new podcast? We'll start things off today with a fresh installment of one of our favorite new shows, Sounds Familiar. Each time out, producer Blake Cooper tackles a different aspect of pop culture, taking a look at a theme or trend that others might overlook. This time,...

Tuesday Podcast 9/25/12

We've got a really great podcast cooking up for you guys today. To start things off, we've got a new episode of The Plan from the Hearing Voices folks. This one's all about Elvis (Presley, not Costello), and it's a cool and interesting take on the King of Rock. It's a hunk o' hunk o' burning public radio. And then it's the new edition of How Sound, the show that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the radio production world. This show is always interesting, but today's episode is a...

Tuesday Podcast 9/18/12

Hello, our interweb friends. We've gathered you all here to today for one very important reason: to bring you a new podcast. Of course, that happens every Tuesday and Friday except when we forget, so that's not really surprising or earth-shattering news. Still, it's free audio for your ears, so that's pretty cool, right? Right. We're gonna start things off with a really nice but kind of heartbreaking piece from producer Jane O'Connor. Get your hankies ready for Groundhog and Mirror. Then...

Tuesday Podcast 9/11/12

We're starting off today's podcast with Visiting Ground Zero, 2001 from producer Jake Warga. Jake's an old friend of the show, and he's produced lots of great stuff over the years. We brought you this moving piece about a year ago on the big show, and it seems appropriate to bring it back again for today's podcast. Then we'll move on to a couple of more recent pieces. Up second on today's show is Couscous and Cultural Diplomacy from producer Andrea Wenzel, a great bit of audio from WAMU...