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FROM All Things Considered September 5, 2006:

John Hodgman is a very funny man.

The writer and humorist is a sometime contributor to the public radio show This American Life and cable television’s The Daily Show.

Currently, he is getting even more TV exposure in an ad campaign for Apple computers, in which he plays a tweedy, lumpy and awkward PC opposite a relaxed, cool, slim young man, who is a Mac.

Hodgman is also author of The Areas of My Expertise — an almanac of random, fascinating and utterly unreliable information — which is coming out in paperback.

A Yale-educated, former literary agent, Hodgman has the gift of being outrageously but quietly convincing.

He begins at the absolute outer edge of credibility and, as if he is holding your hand, walks you over the edge into a very funny mix of reality and nonsense.

Take hobos, for instance — or as Hodgman refers to it, the “hobo movement in the United States.” He discusses at length hobo hieroglyphics, the only hobo Cabinet member in U.S. history and Walker Evans, who Hodgman describes as being a secret agent posing as a photographer in order to assassinate prominent hobo leaders.

TODAY ON RADIO TIMES WITH MARTY MOSS-COANE

THE THIS AMERICAN LIFE HOLIDAY SPEC-TACULAR: New holiday fables from David Sedaris, David Rakoff, Jonathan Goldstein, John Hodgman and Heather O’Neill. Plus a carol by Sarah Vowell & Marah.

[Photo Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org]
The City of Philadelphia’s photo archive contains over 2 million images that date back as far as the late 1800s, i.e. the last time a Republican won in this town. In all seriousness, this is an INCREDIBLE visual record of the city’s evolution and a relatively new web site, PhillyHistory.org, is making it available for online consumption and purchase. To date, some 18,000 images have been digitally scanned, at a rate of roughly 8,000 images a month. So, if you’ve been wondering why the line at Kinko’s is so godamnned SLOW, well, now you know. Phawker will be showcasing images from the PhillyHistory archive and their respective backstories on a regular basis. And to just to make local history fun, let’s have a WRITE YOUR OWN CAPTION contest right fuckin’ NOW! So lend us your wit, send in your idea of a makes-milk-shoot-out-yer-nose caption for the above image to Feed@phawker.com. First prize is a pair of tix to see the Psychedelic Furs at the Troc Dec 29th. This is your last chance, Mr. Devopants.

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ON FRESH AIR: Lead singer and songwriter, Ray Davies started The Kinks in 1964 with his brother, Dave. His latest album is the solo effort, Other People’s Lives. Said to be the pioneers of the rowdy garage band genre of rock music, The Kinks had many hits including “You Really Got Me,” “Lola,” “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting for You.” This interview originally aired on Apr. 3, 2006.

It’s been thirty years since the Heartbreakers debuted with their album Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Petty’s most recent album, and his first solo album in 12 years, is Highway Companion. It has been four years since he’s released an album with the Heartbreakers. This interview originally aired on Jul. 27, 2006.

HEAR NO EVIL: Brit Papa

For the last 20 25 years everything after Live At Leeds.

Reginald Branham became a computer whiz while at Overbrook High School in the 1980s, earning a four-year scholarship to Drexel University and becoming a computer executive.

In recent years, however, he had turned his attention to fixing up bars.

On Christmas night, Branham, 37, was shot dead at his latest bar, Cognac Corner in the 1400 block of South 21st Street in Point Breeze, making him the city’s 402d homicide victim of the year.

Police were not talking about a motive yesterday, but on the street outside the bar, those who said they knew Branham spoke of a possible hit and witness intimidation involving an earlier shooting.

They pointed to the boarded-up passenger window of his Mercedes SUV, which they said had been smashed in the last week, and neighbors mentioned that there had been repeated break-ins at Branham’s rowhouse on South 19th Street.

Police said officers responded to reports of gunfire about 10:15 p.m. Monday and found Branham shot multiple times in the bar.

INQUIRER: Two Plus Two Still Far Fucking Away From Adding Up To Four

DRESSED IN A black Dickies suit and black Timberlands, the chubby-faced 17-year-old crack dealer paced around the desolate lot working another graveyard shift.

In the darkness, a steady stream of addicts ambled toward him to make a buy. Then he saw a familiar face: his close friend’s mom. “I need a nick,” she mumbled to him. Without hesitation, he sold her a nickel bag - $5 worth of crack.

“I was surprised that she was a smoker,” Mikey recalled, months after that night. Today he calls it “the deal I will never forget.”

“I was thinking that a real friend wouldn’t sell to his mom,” said Mikey. “If he found out, how would he feel? But that is life. If she won’t get it from me, she will get it from somewhere else.”

DN: When You Ain’t Got Nothin’ You Got Nothin’ To Lose
[PHOTO By JESSICA GRIFFIN]

THE SHADES “Hello Mr. Johnson” (NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO)
Excerpted From THE BOB JR. Part Six BY DAVID SNYDER I’ve swore I’d get to this single before I put this miserable pamphlet in its grave. To set the context we’re going to revisit the bits and pieces of my life that on occasion have previously bubbled up here in the bastard offspring and, before that, in the old rag. I was born in Philly. But between fifth and sixth grade the family shipped out to New Jersey, some suburbs — from Northeast Philly, which was then a kind of a suburb itself, but I was too young to recognize that at the time. This happened to be a suburb of Trenton — Lawrence Township to be exact — even then the area was like a donut with this ring of suburbs surrounding a miserable hole. The only good things about living in New Jersey, even from this distance, was that you got both Philly and New York City TV and Radio signals (back in the days before cable penetration reached us), and the drinking age was 18.

As was common across the Mid-Atlantic area back then, I used to buy most of my records from Korvettes. Like your Best Buy, Circuit City & Target today, they always had a couple of new records heavily discounted each week — standard loss leader thing. In my Senior year of high school I found a tiny shop over in Ewing called Hole In The Wall, where I could pick up some of the stranger things I was hearing on WNEW-FM. I’m not even sure how I found out about this place, but I was now able to get the Bezerkley stuff I had been searching for. Somehow I got myself into a university, and ended up back in Philly. One weekend my first term when I was visiting home I stopped over at Rider College (that was about a mile over from our house, and back in high school it was easy to crash some of their parties and get all the beer you could drink for 50 cent or such) and found they were having a party in the student center. There was a band on one side of the room. They were dressed in white lab coats and played in front of a painted backdrop of a brick wall with graffiti on it and the name NOBODY SPECIAL in large letters. (more…)

AP: “He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared “our long national nightmare is over.” But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.

The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to “look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Ford also earned a place in the history books as the first unelected vice president, chosen by Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew who also was forced from office by scandal. He was in the White House only 895 days, but changed it more than it changed him. Even after two women tried separately to kill him, the presidency of Jerry Ford remained open and plain.”

WIKIPEDIA: The Warren Commission

“…what we are dealing with now is no longer hard ideology, but a matter of simple competence. What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who became the President of the United States with an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, and control over a budget beyond the wildest dreams of King Midas…and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war we could have
ended four years ago…”–Hunter S. Thompson
Rolling Stone #144, September 27, 1973

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