Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts

Meg asks:

Is there some sort of memo that goes around telling everyone else who the cool indie/alt/edgy bands are? Why am I not on the mailing list?

Since I can’t seem to post a comment on her Weblog at the moment, I thought I’d answer her question here. I don’t know about a memo, but there are a couple of podcasts that do just that, and you can subscribe to them in iTunes or any of a number of other podcasting clients. There’s the CBC Radio 3 podcast, based on which I’ve puchased at least a half dozen albums in the last couple of months, and, of course, there’s the Radio Clash podcast.

And speaking of podcasts, I was listening to the latest episode of the BBC World Service Documentary Archive podcast, a return to Sarajevo ten years after the siege of the city, on the subway on the way to work this morning, and it was all I could do not to cry. On a couple of occasions, I’ve stood on the subway laughing at something that only I can hear on my iPod, and that probably looks strange enough, but crying at something that only I can hear might be a little too strange. Or maybe no one would notice.

Four earlier episodes of that same podcast, “The Soul Within Islam,” chronicled a British Muslim’s travels around the fringes of the Muslim world (to Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey, and so on) in search of clues to the future of Islam. It’s a fascinating piece of reporting, but I find it very amusing that in his travels in search of the soul of Islam, he manages to find and interview not one but two Islamic supermodels in two different countries who’ve since given up modelling and now wear the veil. After speaking to the first one in Malaysia, did he really need to speak to the other in Turkey to flesh out the supermodel perspective on the future of Islam?