I like this energetic audio-diary format, somewhat of a Mockumentary. I’ve done previous versions for Mother’s Day and the 4th of July, and a non-holiday version for a doctor’s appointment (way back in 2002), called Stress Test. Inspired by Bill Simmon’s old ESPN diaries.
This is the second of two “Hacked Feed” podcasts. I did interviews with hackers who attended the Dallas Hackers Association monthly meetup. In this recording, I asked, “have you ever been robbed?” and asked them to compare being robbed in real life to being hacked. What was different? What felt the same?
This is the first of two (so far) “Hacked Feed” recordings. I asked hackers who visited the Dallas Hacker’s Association meetup if they had ever been hacked, and how it felt if they had. I love hackers. The curiosity and persistence it takes to be a hacker somehow colors people outside the lines in so many other areas that you truly get a wide range of characters.
In 2007, Transom put out a call for Shortlists for a new NPR show called Weekend America (which has since been discontinued). This was the first one played, which I thought was pretty cool.
I wrote “Andy & Dirk” for a Third Coast Festival contest years ago, but it had to be under three minutes long so I never submitted it. It had to start with “To begin with, they never got along” or something like that.
By the time I came up with 4th of July Fireworks, I had done a couple of audio diaries and thought I’d give this a shot. It was really fun, because a) It’s the 4th of July and b) it involved Fireworks. Growing up, there were so many mishaps. In high school, on Halloween people […]
When Mother’s Day rolled around in 2004, I thought ‘hey, I should write one of those diaries for it.’ This is the result. It’s not a reflection of my relationship with my then-wife, but I often would read news stories about how guys shop last-minute and how they forget birthday’s, anniversaries, and such and took […]
Here’s my creepiest story. This is sometimes played by random public radio stations around Halloween. Years ago, it was featured on Love & Radio as well.
I got this idea from a similar story in Reader’s Digest. I loved reading all the anecdotes and jokes and the little filler items they had at the end of a story that ran a bit short. One of the anecdotes was from a woman who said something like this happened to her father. I […]
This story idea came to me a long time before I did it. I was downtown walking around and almost stepped in front of a bus. It was pretty near miss, probably one of my top ten “near death” experiences. I thought, “Why doesn’t God just talk to us, and say, ‘hey, doofus, watch where […]
I was several miles off-shore, windsurfing, when I broke down, and was attacked by a shark.
This is one of the pieces where I feel like I really found my sound. I had made a few pieces in the regular way, telling a story, adding a little music. In this one, I had this really weird experience going to the doctor. This piece is basically true, with some embellishments for humor’s […]
I went out to eat with some friends and there was a lot of overt racism. I thought about it for a couple of weeks because I was really frustrated by the assholes in that restaurant (a well-known American seafood chain). I guess I had feelings of vengeance to work through.
Going through other people’s trash. This is one of my Mom’s favorite pieces that I’ve done. It was originally part of a Mockumentary CD I put out in the early part of the millennium.
I was looking for one of the scariest/stressful things I could think of for a young man, and being naked and 3-5 minutes from my clothes would have done it for me. Several people have mentioned the tangents in this one, where I go off and talk about something seemingly unrelated at just a tense […]
This is one of the first stories I produced. I basically just did some weird abstract stuff. The reference to Pat Buchanan is a reference to the 2000 Presidential Primaries, so this was probably around early 2000, though it could have been sooner.
This is one of the first irreverent stories I created. From 1995 to 2005 I had a web site called goofiness.com (I sold it in 2005) where I did all kinds of stupid stuff.