The coolest writer you don't know talks about the intimacy of audio, being a 21st-century tramp, finding meaning in work and family, van life before #vanlife, and how we all need to be needed.
Absolutely fantastic choice of outro yet again, Apparitions by Matthew Good Band, but f**k me, that was loud! As it should be though, but I don’t think my neighbors were happy!
We had serious sound editing issues this episode, for which I apologize. My Audition program had a meltdown and I had to jerry-rig. I’ve fixed it now! - NR. PS: Fab song
Before my usual novel (which I appreciate you all let me get away with, Startrek discussions not withstanding) I would just like to say the absence of “This American Life” and “Prairie Home Companion” has been the most profound loss to me in regards to NPR. Those two shows gave me a slice of appreciation for the world like no other did. Once those became some form of zombie brand, NPR lost all its value to me.
As far as folks opting for a path other than college I think generally it's a good thing. We aren’t at the moment lacking academics, artists, entertainers and commentators. The result of decades of always telling kids “college is a must” has led to the institutions becoming bloated, marketing driven cattle chutes for diplomas. We are missing an entire population of people with practical life skills, an appreciation for trades, and an interest in “being of service” to the world as an ethos.
We generally don’t notice the shortfall in these skills and trades because of the immigrants amongst us. The debt we as Americans owe to Mexican immigrants alone is almost incalculable at this point IMO. They have been helping us stay afloat for the past two decades in the service industry and trades. They are almost the sole reason I never regretted moving on from the trades as a younger man, because at minimum I knew SOMEONE was going to be carrying the torch.
As always I am speaking from the perspective of a guy who has a messy background, but as far as I can tell schools of all levels are increasingly hostile to guys writ large. Factor in the boot on the neck that is college debt, and it only makes sense to look at alternatives. I guess I am more team Mike Rowe in my guts, with an appreciation for the insights Ken is passing on here.
I am not saying Ken is barking up the wrong tree btw, but given what his bio is, and the lifestyle he has chosen I don’t get the impression he would have had difficulty finding a path to a fulfilling life with or without college.
Sure college may have given him the ability and interest to clearly articulate his life to the world, and perhaps examples from his “liberal arts” education inspired and illustrated what living a “full life” looks like. But, the mindset and fortitude to actually live that life is something that comes from elsewhere IMO. I get a strong feeling that if you were to ask what was the biggest factor leading to the desirable life he now has, he is going to caveat “college” with “Well obviously my parents”. Good or bad, parents are the reference we all use to choose a cardinal direction in life.
I too have lived the “vanlife” but not by choice. Being without the comforts of a brick and mortar home, mailing address, or furniture has it’s benefits. I very much appreciated his “wet towel” caveat in there, and the bit that implied that sometimes hardship is the GOAL, not the problem.
Coming up on my 48th birthday I have those weird lenses on that make you want to go back to the “hardships” you got through in your younger days (with the requisite “old man yells at cloud” vibes). To have those awful surprises that throw a monkey wrench in all your shit and make you scramble. But also, I am basking in the warm glow of the monitor that facilitates this gravy train I am now riding. I know I am preaching from a pulpit built by luck and circumstance with dashes of the grace of others I often take for granted.
I won’t sit here wishing misery on kids trying to make it in the world. If I had kids, would I want them to be on a roof at 13? Would I deprive them of birthday parties, and new school clothes just because it will make them appreciate good times more? Seems unlikely. There are parts of my body that are pretty wrecked from roughly the first decade of my life being an “adult”, and god knows what kind of mental deficiencies would be uncovered were someone to look from missing out on those hallmarks of childhood. However, I feel like promoting higher education and avoiding hardships is almost the same mistake flipped on its head.
All that being said, I only write this particular novel because I feel like if I were to take Ken’s preferences, interests and insights and lay them over mine they would very likely be damn near identical. At the end of the day us guys are fairly predictable in that way. We might have a similar operating system, it's just running on different machines. I assume we would argue over who has to be the Mac and who is the PC, but even that feels more supporting of my assumption to me.
Anywho, stellar pod. You guys are really hitting stride at consistently turning out good shit, so this bit at the end is sort of becoming redundant. It may look like you are treading water to you sometimes, but as a ferocious consumer of podcasts I can assure you the shape of what you are doing is becoming clearer everyday, and that is perhaps THE deciding factor of success in this arena from what I can tell.
I'm glad you mentioned PHC - I was also a regular listener for years and also got to see a live show in Seattle way back in 1985. Having listened to so many episodes, I had a picture of it in my mind, but seeing it live was a different kind of treat. And I don't remember exactly when I drifted away from it. I was a regular listener to NPR from the early 70s until sometime in the lste 90s, when I again drifted away.
I agree with you on the trend for folks opting for other than college. You referenced Mike Rowe: his "The Way I Heard It" podcast is good for a dose of that.
Well first of all thank you, when I write these screeds it is often more compulsion than craft, but it feels good knowing someone reads the whole thing. :D
I might be hallucinating here but I think the last time I was listening to PHC there was something about Lindsay Lohan? Was there a movie or something? Hard to imagine her at Lake Woebegone. I feel like a broken record but that guy to me is the biggest casualty of the excesses of #metoo, aside from like "due process" or whatever the libertarians are on about :D. Mike has a youtube channel now if you ever wanna see that slightly weathered Troy McClure face again, it is criminally unsubscribed IMO but pretty much always a good chuckle. https://www.youtube.com/@therealmikerowe he has his mom on now and again which has some of the same warmth one used to get from PHC for what it is worth.
Good episode! I love when you come up with people I've never heard of who are obviously worth a listen. I want to listen again, which I'll do tomorrow.
Podcasts are the new version of radio for me, so I do think they will be around a long time. It's much like radio, except now you get to choose when to listen and who to listen to (and certainly not as many ads).
I did a lot of cross country driving, by which I mean across the continent, in the 2000s and 2010s, and for much of it, there was only talk radio, and audiobooks on iPods and similar devices. Talk radio was hit-or-miss, especially when driving 400+ miles in a day in the Midwest or the mountains. Nancy mentioned Dr. Laura - I do remember listening to her quite a bit, and it was as entertaining as she mentioned. Rush Limbaugh as well, and do I need to say that listening does not imply agreement/endorsement.
I started listening to audiobooks back in 1997, about when Audible.com started, but back then the devices would only hold a few hours of a book, so you would have to reload every evening at the hotel's Wifi. Capacity changed quickly, so eventually holding an entire audiobook (or even two or three!) became simple.
Podcasts for me seem to start with Russ Roberts and Econtalk, in about 2007 or so. And I remember loving Radiolab as well; don't remember why I drifted away from it at some point. And Serial in 2014 indeed seemed to be a huge tipping point. Very well done, set a standard that's been copied (and abused) since.
And now it feels like podcasts have been around "forever"; it's hard to remember the times before.
On a recent 4 week trip, when I traveled with friends and had little time alone, my podcast queue piled up to 40+. No worries, that just left plenty of time to listen when I finally headed for home on my own.
I would welcome Ken's curated list of podcasts, but perhaps even more, specific episodes of them. Based on a recommendation, I will often dip into a new podcast, but can often find that I really only want that particular episode, not enough to subscribe to the entire series.
I know there are podcasts I would enjoy that I don't even know about. A commenter here (don't remember who) mentioned "Booknotes+", which I'd not heard of, and I now listen to about 1/2 of them. I'll mention "Twenty Thousand Hertz", which someone I follow on Twitter mentioned more than a year ago, and I listen to nearly all of these. <https://www.20k.org/>
What a marvelous world we live in, where people create this wonderful content. Thank you.
Agreed on the playlist from Ken, but in the mean time here is a doc where I have been dumping youtube channels I really enjoy. Given your references and the like (I still have my quarter pounder iPod some where around here :) I wager there will be a few in there that will tickle your fancy.
My uncle was a trucker and he is basically the only way I knew about radio shows like Rush, Dr. Laura, or Art Bell. He would come back from a long trip and have a rambling mind dump of all the stuff he heard on these shows and I was always sort of transfixed. It's what I remember most about him, that and the Pall Malls, over-sugared over-creamed coffee, and having a can of Stroh's seemingly surgically attached to his hand. :D
I have always been interested in history, so my first podcast was Mike Duncan's History of Rome followed shortly thereafter by David Crowther's History of England. Because of Nancy I discovered Jack Henneman's History of the Americans. All three are excellent as is The Rest of History (even though on of the hosts is a plagiarizer, there was an article about him years ago by MM).
Of course I always listen to this one immediately along with TFC (and The Re-Education whenever it returns).
Ladies, every episode is great. Thank you. You contribute greatly to the pleasure of my morning walks.
[1:09:35] Initially enthused enough to buy her book I must admit that I got to the stage where I'd heard Louise Perry say the same bloody things again and again on all my favorite pods, I learned just to press skip when I saw that she was the guest yet again. Don't get me wrong, she's great, but my god you can have too much of a good thing sometimes!
People do have different interviewing skills, though. I've listened to the recent interviews of Glenn Loury by both Meghan Daum and Russ Roberts; different enough that I would not want to have missed them.
[14:20] I remember when I first moved to the US and found out that Americans call Rapeseed Oil Canola Oil, I thought that us Brits needed to change the name too, but 20 years on, no dice! Those bright yellow fields are stunning though, I agree!
I've never watched Clarkson's Farm, I need to give it a shot. I don't particularly like Jeremy Clarkson as a person, his politics, his attitude, but he really has a gift, to have an audience in the palm of his hand, he's a superb host of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' and he transformed a dreary motoring magazine show that had been running since the seventies into a total ratings juggernaut.
I wouldn't marry him for sure but I love his way of filming a project. I think you might enjoy! There's lots of animals, it reminds me a little of the old All Creatures.
Had to turn it off a couple times, which I think is a first for me (did finally finish it, though).
The idea that before Jordan Peterson, etc. there were no "heterodox" voices is a pretty outrageous argument ... as opposed to recognizing that for whatever reason you were either allergic to those voices or simply in a bubble where those voices weren't allowed.
There have been mainstream voices making mainstream conservative / libertarian arguments for a long time ... Reagan, George Will, WFB, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, Thomas Sowell, The Weekly Standard, Reason, Heritage Foundation, Cato, etc. These were not crazy right wing fringe neo-Nazis ... they were arguing many of the points which today seem, I don't know, heterodox? Not recognizing this, so late in the game, is either willful disregard or stubborn cognitive dissonance.
It's as if there's only one good point of view ... which is lefty progressive liberal or whatever ... and that the only reasonable counter to the worst of those arguments is better lefty progressive liberal arguments. As opposed to mainstream conservative arguments, which have always been there. Seeing former progressives almost but not quite see the light is encouraging but also frustrating. Come on ... you can do it ... it's not so scary.
I am completely with Sarah on wanting there to be a little less overlap in Podcasts, especially when it comes to interviews before the release of someone’s new book. I was so fucking sick of hearing about Rob Henderson after a few weeks that I don’t think I’ll even read his book because I heard him talk about it on five different podcasts.
Correction, Sarah, the Alcan Highway ends in Delta Junction! There’s a visitor triangle dedicated to it where the tourbuses stop so that people can take pictures and buy trinkets like a fox fur bikini and cute little “worms” made of fur that wriggle when you pet them.
Delta Junction is my hometown! Don’t take away our claim to fame ;)
Sure is! Not a single stoplight in town. My childhood was idyllic growing up on a 40-acre Homestead, but by the time I was a teenager all I wanted was to leave that small (minded) town.
Boy, what a lifetime of experience has taught me. I would love to live in Alaska again and I wish I had appreciated it when I was there.
Funny thing about the IDW being conservatives for liberals - I always thought of them as being liberals for conservatives!
My first podcast was the Dennis Miller Radio show, probably around 2008. I had an mp3 player that I had to load daily as it could only hold something like two hours 😂. From there I "met" Rob Long, a frequent guest, and then Ricochet. If you don't know Rob, check him out, he's hilarious. He does the Martini Shot podcast and GLOP (Goldberg, Long, Podhoretz) on Ricochet. Fast forward to 2024 and now I have such an enormous podcast feed that there's no way I can keep up with it!
Absolutely fantastic choice of outro yet again, Apparitions by Matthew Good Band, but f**k me, that was loud! As it should be though, but I don’t think my neighbors were happy!
We had serious sound editing issues this episode, for which I apologize. My Audition program had a meltdown and I had to jerry-rig. I’ve fixed it now! - NR. PS: Fab song
OMG that's funny - I fall asleep listening and yup! That woke me up! I don't think I even realized it was actually loud, not just my imagination :-)
Before my usual novel (which I appreciate you all let me get away with, Startrek discussions not withstanding) I would just like to say the absence of “This American Life” and “Prairie Home Companion” has been the most profound loss to me in regards to NPR. Those two shows gave me a slice of appreciation for the world like no other did. Once those became some form of zombie brand, NPR lost all its value to me.
As far as folks opting for a path other than college I think generally it's a good thing. We aren’t at the moment lacking academics, artists, entertainers and commentators. The result of decades of always telling kids “college is a must” has led to the institutions becoming bloated, marketing driven cattle chutes for diplomas. We are missing an entire population of people with practical life skills, an appreciation for trades, and an interest in “being of service” to the world as an ethos.
We generally don’t notice the shortfall in these skills and trades because of the immigrants amongst us. The debt we as Americans owe to Mexican immigrants alone is almost incalculable at this point IMO. They have been helping us stay afloat for the past two decades in the service industry and trades. They are almost the sole reason I never regretted moving on from the trades as a younger man, because at minimum I knew SOMEONE was going to be carrying the torch.
As always I am speaking from the perspective of a guy who has a messy background, but as far as I can tell schools of all levels are increasingly hostile to guys writ large. Factor in the boot on the neck that is college debt, and it only makes sense to look at alternatives. I guess I am more team Mike Rowe in my guts, with an appreciation for the insights Ken is passing on here.
I am not saying Ken is barking up the wrong tree btw, but given what his bio is, and the lifestyle he has chosen I don’t get the impression he would have had difficulty finding a path to a fulfilling life with or without college.
Sure college may have given him the ability and interest to clearly articulate his life to the world, and perhaps examples from his “liberal arts” education inspired and illustrated what living a “full life” looks like. But, the mindset and fortitude to actually live that life is something that comes from elsewhere IMO. I get a strong feeling that if you were to ask what was the biggest factor leading to the desirable life he now has, he is going to caveat “college” with “Well obviously my parents”. Good or bad, parents are the reference we all use to choose a cardinal direction in life.
I too have lived the “vanlife” but not by choice. Being without the comforts of a brick and mortar home, mailing address, or furniture has it’s benefits. I very much appreciated his “wet towel” caveat in there, and the bit that implied that sometimes hardship is the GOAL, not the problem.
Coming up on my 48th birthday I have those weird lenses on that make you want to go back to the “hardships” you got through in your younger days (with the requisite “old man yells at cloud” vibes). To have those awful surprises that throw a monkey wrench in all your shit and make you scramble. But also, I am basking in the warm glow of the monitor that facilitates this gravy train I am now riding. I know I am preaching from a pulpit built by luck and circumstance with dashes of the grace of others I often take for granted.
I won’t sit here wishing misery on kids trying to make it in the world. If I had kids, would I want them to be on a roof at 13? Would I deprive them of birthday parties, and new school clothes just because it will make them appreciate good times more? Seems unlikely. There are parts of my body that are pretty wrecked from roughly the first decade of my life being an “adult”, and god knows what kind of mental deficiencies would be uncovered were someone to look from missing out on those hallmarks of childhood. However, I feel like promoting higher education and avoiding hardships is almost the same mistake flipped on its head.
All that being said, I only write this particular novel because I feel like if I were to take Ken’s preferences, interests and insights and lay them over mine they would very likely be damn near identical. At the end of the day us guys are fairly predictable in that way. We might have a similar operating system, it's just running on different machines. I assume we would argue over who has to be the Mac and who is the PC, but even that feels more supporting of my assumption to me.
Anywho, stellar pod. You guys are really hitting stride at consistently turning out good shit, so this bit at the end is sort of becoming redundant. It may look like you are treading water to you sometimes, but as a ferocious consumer of podcasts I can assure you the shape of what you are doing is becoming clearer everyday, and that is perhaps THE deciding factor of success in this arena from what I can tell.
Well said, especially your final paragraph.
I'm glad you mentioned PHC - I was also a regular listener for years and also got to see a live show in Seattle way back in 1985. Having listened to so many episodes, I had a picture of it in my mind, but seeing it live was a different kind of treat. And I don't remember exactly when I drifted away from it. I was a regular listener to NPR from the early 70s until sometime in the lste 90s, when I again drifted away.
I agree with you on the trend for folks opting for other than college. You referenced Mike Rowe: his "The Way I Heard It" podcast is good for a dose of that.
Well first of all thank you, when I write these screeds it is often more compulsion than craft, but it feels good knowing someone reads the whole thing. :D
I might be hallucinating here but I think the last time I was listening to PHC there was something about Lindsay Lohan? Was there a movie or something? Hard to imagine her at Lake Woebegone. I feel like a broken record but that guy to me is the biggest casualty of the excesses of #metoo, aside from like "due process" or whatever the libertarians are on about :D. Mike has a youtube channel now if you ever wanna see that slightly weathered Troy McClure face again, it is criminally unsubscribed IMO but pretty much always a good chuckle. https://www.youtube.com/@therealmikerowe he has his mom on now and again which has some of the same warmth one used to get from PHC for what it is worth.
Good episode! I love when you come up with people I've never heard of who are obviously worth a listen. I want to listen again, which I'll do tomorrow.
Podcasts are the new version of radio for me, so I do think they will be around a long time. It's much like radio, except now you get to choose when to listen and who to listen to (and certainly not as many ads).
I did a lot of cross country driving, by which I mean across the continent, in the 2000s and 2010s, and for much of it, there was only talk radio, and audiobooks on iPods and similar devices. Talk radio was hit-or-miss, especially when driving 400+ miles in a day in the Midwest or the mountains. Nancy mentioned Dr. Laura - I do remember listening to her quite a bit, and it was as entertaining as she mentioned. Rush Limbaugh as well, and do I need to say that listening does not imply agreement/endorsement.
I started listening to audiobooks back in 1997, about when Audible.com started, but back then the devices would only hold a few hours of a book, so you would have to reload every evening at the hotel's Wifi. Capacity changed quickly, so eventually holding an entire audiobook (or even two or three!) became simple.
Podcasts for me seem to start with Russ Roberts and Econtalk, in about 2007 or so. And I remember loving Radiolab as well; don't remember why I drifted away from it at some point. And Serial in 2014 indeed seemed to be a huge tipping point. Very well done, set a standard that's been copied (and abused) since.
And now it feels like podcasts have been around "forever"; it's hard to remember the times before.
On a recent 4 week trip, when I traveled with friends and had little time alone, my podcast queue piled up to 40+. No worries, that just left plenty of time to listen when I finally headed for home on my own.
I would welcome Ken's curated list of podcasts, but perhaps even more, specific episodes of them. Based on a recommendation, I will often dip into a new podcast, but can often find that I really only want that particular episode, not enough to subscribe to the entire series.
I know there are podcasts I would enjoy that I don't even know about. A commenter here (don't remember who) mentioned "Booknotes+", which I'd not heard of, and I now listen to about 1/2 of them. I'll mention "Twenty Thousand Hertz", which someone I follow on Twitter mentioned more than a year ago, and I listen to nearly all of these. <https://www.20k.org/>
What a marvelous world we live in, where people create this wonderful content. Thank you.
Agreed on the playlist from Ken, but in the mean time here is a doc where I have been dumping youtube channels I really enjoy. Given your references and the like (I still have my quarter pounder iPod some where around here :) I wager there will be a few in there that will tickle your fancy.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16cKfH_NEQhNrtTa5yjLfnbtq0l7KMSMsSyBt9jHyYUs/edit?usp=sharing
My uncle was a trucker and he is basically the only way I knew about radio shows like Rush, Dr. Laura, or Art Bell. He would come back from a long trip and have a rambling mind dump of all the stuff he heard on these shows and I was always sort of transfixed. It's what I remember most about him, that and the Pall Malls, over-sugared over-creamed coffee, and having a can of Stroh's seemingly surgically attached to his hand. :D
I have always been interested in history, so my first podcast was Mike Duncan's History of Rome followed shortly thereafter by David Crowther's History of England. Because of Nancy I discovered Jack Henneman's History of the Americans. All three are excellent as is The Rest of History (even though on of the hosts is a plagiarizer, there was an article about him years ago by MM).
Of course I always listen to this one immediately along with TFC (and The Re-Education whenever it returns).
Ladies, every episode is great. Thank you. You contribute greatly to the pleasure of my morning walks.
Literally cheered when Sarah said she wasn’t done with her intro. Great guest!
I read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down way back when I first moved to Portland (thanks Powells!). I still think about it regularly.
Ken will be a wonderful therapist. I’m so glad he chose that path. I’m looking forward to updates down the road.
[1:09:35] Initially enthused enough to buy her book I must admit that I got to the stage where I'd heard Louise Perry say the same bloody things again and again on all my favorite pods, I learned just to press skip when I saw that she was the guest yet again. Don't get me wrong, she's great, but my god you can have too much of a good thing sometimes!
People do have different interviewing skills, though. I've listened to the recent interviews of Glenn Loury by both Meghan Daum and Russ Roberts; different enough that I would not want to have missed them.
Her own podcast is really good though - always an interesting guest!
[14:20] I remember when I first moved to the US and found out that Americans call Rapeseed Oil Canola Oil, I thought that us Brits needed to change the name too, but 20 years on, no dice! Those bright yellow fields are stunning though, I agree!
I kept thinking that while watching Clarkson's Farm!!! ( Thanks Grace for the recommendation)
I've never watched Clarkson's Farm, I need to give it a shot. I don't particularly like Jeremy Clarkson as a person, his politics, his attitude, but he really has a gift, to have an audience in the palm of his hand, he's a superb host of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' and he transformed a dreary motoring magazine show that had been running since the seventies into a total ratings juggernaut.
I wouldn't marry him for sure but I love his way of filming a project. I think you might enjoy! There's lots of animals, it reminds me a little of the old All Creatures.
To answer... Yes, Ken is cute.
Had to turn it off a couple times, which I think is a first for me (did finally finish it, though).
The idea that before Jordan Peterson, etc. there were no "heterodox" voices is a pretty outrageous argument ... as opposed to recognizing that for whatever reason you were either allergic to those voices or simply in a bubble where those voices weren't allowed.
There have been mainstream voices making mainstream conservative / libertarian arguments for a long time ... Reagan, George Will, WFB, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, Thomas Sowell, The Weekly Standard, Reason, Heritage Foundation, Cato, etc. These were not crazy right wing fringe neo-Nazis ... they were arguing many of the points which today seem, I don't know, heterodox? Not recognizing this, so late in the game, is either willful disregard or stubborn cognitive dissonance.
It's as if there's only one good point of view ... which is lefty progressive liberal or whatever ... and that the only reasonable counter to the worst of those arguments is better lefty progressive liberal arguments. As opposed to mainstream conservative arguments, which have always been there. Seeing former progressives almost but not quite see the light is encouraging but also frustrating. Come on ... you can do it ... it's not so scary.
I feel like my chosen podcast to be a guest on would be On Being! I just love Krista as an interviewer.
I am completely with Sarah on wanting there to be a little less overlap in Podcasts, especially when it comes to interviews before the release of someone’s new book. I was so fucking sick of hearing about Rob Henderson after a few weeks that I don’t think I’ll even read his book because I heard him talk about it on five different podcasts.
Correction, Sarah, the Alcan Highway ends in Delta Junction! There’s a visitor triangle dedicated to it where the tourbuses stop so that people can take pictures and buy trinkets like a fox fur bikini and cute little “worms” made of fur that wriggle when you pet them.
Delta Junction is my hometown! Don’t take away our claim to fame ;)
Had to look on the map to see where Delta Junction is. That is remote. Google Street View gives just a hint.
Sure is! Not a single stoplight in town. My childhood was idyllic growing up on a 40-acre Homestead, but by the time I was a teenager all I wanted was to leave that small (minded) town.
Boy, what a lifetime of experience has taught me. I would love to live in Alaska again and I wish I had appreciated it when I was there.
Funny thing about the IDW being conservatives for liberals - I always thought of them as being liberals for conservatives!
My first podcast was the Dennis Miller Radio show, probably around 2008. I had an mp3 player that I had to load daily as it could only hold something like two hours 😂. From there I "met" Rob Long, a frequent guest, and then Ricochet. If you don't know Rob, check him out, he's hilarious. He does the Martini Shot podcast and GLOP (Goldberg, Long, Podhoretz) on Ricochet. Fast forward to 2024 and now I have such an enormous podcast feed that there's no way I can keep up with it!
Rob is a friend! - NR
And thanks for recommendations!!! Couples therapy is such a brilliant show, and I'm watching The Taste of Things tonight!