#1506: Part 22, Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius

The Argonautica continues, as the Argonauts find themselves facing their greatest challenge yet — the bleak Libyan desert!

Part 22

33:47

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#1505: Ch. 14C, The Sacrifice of the Mass by M. Gavin, S.J.

The Sacrifice of the Mass continues, as we finish up the chapter on High Mass.

Chapter 14C

12:24.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

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When People Say “Cult Mindset”, This Is What They Mean

The poor suckers at Jonestown, who got convinced to do everything for Jim Jones including kill themselves, apparently left behind audio testimonies to what was going on in their minds, or at least what they thought they were supposed to say was going on in their minds.

NPR made a 90 minute audio documentary from this material and other stuff. You can listen to it at their webpage in its entirety, or you can listen to it in three chunks over here.

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Columbia Workshop

There are a lot of old radio dramas which have fallen into the public domain, and a good chunk of them are available on the Internet Archive. Here’s an arty one I haven’t listened to, but which seems to be chock full of goodness: Columbia Workshop.

It’s a mix of adaptations of classic plays and stories (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Hamlet) and contemporary ones by new writers. CBS (the Columbia Broadcasting System, remember?) wanted to show that they cared about educating the public and advancing excellence in radio. Composer Bernard Herrman and many notable directors and actors were involved in the series. You can learn all about it over on Wikipedia.

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Audiobooks on Zipidee

Apparently there’s some site called Zipidee which the Boing Boing people like. It has the virtue of simplicity. If you want to buy an audiobook or whatever, you just pays your money and downloads your files. No subscription needed.

I guess the big idea of the site is that you can “embed” the information in an item sales page on their site, into your site. Or something like that.

Bah. I hate getting sick. It is making me squirrelly to stay inside and rest. You can see how desperate I am, that I’m even posting this sort of boring thing.

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Some Audiobooks I Hadn’t Seen

Madeleine L’Engle herself, back when she was still alive and spry, reading The Wrinkle in Time and the other books in that series. In the sample, she has one of those interesting New York voices.

The Lincoln/Douglas Debates, read by David Strathairn as Lincoln and Richard Dreyfus as Stephen Douglas. This is a brilliant idea for an audiobook, and a must-listen if you have any interest in American history. Needless to say, it’s probably not the most comfy listen; it’s not fun to hear Douglas talking about slaves as if they weren’t people, and Lincoln saying only what he thought Illinois voters would be able to take. (IIRC, Illinois had no legal black residents at all, slave or free.)

Caedmon’s Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection. Well, I know I had you at “Caedmon” if you’re an old school audiobook listener. If not, you should learn that Caedmon did extremely high quality literary audio recordings, often of deservedly famous writers reading their own works. This collection gathers together various old recordings of Poe material done by Vincent Price (!) and Basil Rathbone (!!). So yeah, that definitely is a keeper.

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Audiobooks on EMusic

I’ve mentioned Audible before, and I guess iTunes has audiobooks on their store. (Not that I’ll ever be able to tell for myself, since they still make you download software just to see the selection.)  Anyway, I guess some of the other music stores also sell audiobooks, and some of them (unlike Audible) are in DRM-free formats.

EMusic has apparently been selling Random House and other audiobooks this way since 2007. If you sign up for their free trial subscription, you get 25 songs and one free audiobook as your sample. Since they’re all DRM-free mp3s, this is a good deal.  So if you really are jonesing for something and are too cheap to pay full price, this seems like a decent way to manage it.

However, eMusic is surprisingly coy about pricing. You can read the current prices of their music subscription plans in the FAQ, but if you want to find out what the audiobook subscriptions cost, you have to go to an “Upgrade” page which can only be reached by registered members. It seems to be similar to Audible’s book/credit pricing scheme.

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Still A Little Bit Hoarse

I’m almost well, but not quite. The problem is that my poor vocal cords are getting drippage enough from my head that they’re still a bit wobbly. We’ll see how they’re feeling later today.

In other news, the Authors’ Guild has suddenly discovered the existence of automated text-to-speech readers.

What, it took them until Kindle 2 came out? Now they worry about this, when it’s been a standard feature on almost every computer since the Nineties? Oh, yeah, what a grave threat to audiobook sales.

The Wall Street Journal goes on to point out that Amazon owns Audible, an online audiobook company. It bought Audible for 300 million dollars in 2008, when Kindle and Kindle 2 were already on the front burner. So obviously Amazon’s not too worried about audiobook sales going downhill. 🙂

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Instant iPod Audiobook — A Free Service from SFFAudio

If you’re an iTunes user, go on over to SFFAudio and check this audiobook iTunes-subscriptionizer out.

(Personally, I think y’all are weird for downloading a service/store you can’t access from the Web like a normal person without downloading weird software, can’t even preview a screenshot of beforehand, and which doesn’t even bother to have software that runs on my other computer; all of which were good and sufficient reason for me never to join the cult. But I know lots of you like this iTunes thing and have had trouble finding the relevant podcasts et al, so there you are.)

Oh, and Librivox continues its conquest of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books, which incidentally were some of the first books ever available on Gutenberg. I’ve never quite managed to get into them, but lots of folks love them. So now Librivox has a completed version of The Chessmen of Mars.

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Free Audiobooks for Black History from Librivox

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass. The thrilling story of one of America’s greatest and most influential orators, and how he escaped from slavery and made a life for himself as a free man.

African-American Collection. An anthology by various authors.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The influential novel that gave a human face to the victims of slavery.

Various poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. The saga of a biracial child abandoned by his father, who found more uses for peanuts than Carter had little liver pills, revolutionized agriculture, and founded a university. (In progress)

I’m sure there are many more applicable books, stories, poems, et al that didn’t leap to my eye, so be sure to browse their catalog.

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Sorry for the Silence

I’ve had a really bad sore throat ever since I woke up on St. Blaise’s Day. 🙂 I’m still not up for it tonight, but I did feel a lot better today and hope to podcast something tomorrow morning.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

UPDATE: In retrospect, it seems that it was a Very Bad Idea to go back to work on Friday. I was feeling a lot better and very full of energy when I got up that morning, and did get a lot done; but I felt a lot worse after work. It also seems that it was a Bad Idea to go ahead and cantor on Saturday evening for the vigil Mass, as scheduled. My voice lasted, all right, but again, it really tired me out. So this morning I don’t have any real sore throat left, but I’m slugging down guaifenesin like nobody’s business, trying to clear out the gunk. Sigh. So much for getting to see and hear the new Archbishop or go to a Confirmation barbecue…..

But the guaifenesin and rest does seem to be helping. I just can never lie down to sleep, ever again. 🙂

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Sinus Trouble

Sorry for the lack of new podcast material. I’ve been having tons of sinus pain the last few mornings and nights, and haven’t been in any fit state to record. (Although I have spent plenty of quality time under a blanket, trying to breathe in steam from boiling water in a bowl without actually burning myself.)

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