4 thoughts on Episode #070 – White Noise For An Infant Nap

  1. I was also in band in school (and still), in spite of not being very good. I’ve been playing saxophone all that time, mostly because my mom played sax in high school, so I was playing her saxophone. Somehow, I never ran into the “we have too many saxophones” complaint, but I do know various people who were told that they needed to play clarinet for a year before they could play saxophone.

    I was in marching band in college, and we used a style which I think is similar to Carrie’s, where your upper leg is supposed to be parallel to the ground, which doesn’t work so well when you’re 5’2″ and play tenor sax. It’s hard to have your arm and your leg in the same place at the same time…

  2. Wow, two stories I submitted for News of the Stupid made it in a row. Happens too many more times I may start to get an inflated ego. 😉

  3. Great episode. I started doing trumpet in elementary school. Sad to say I was only mediocre at it, but I stayed in the band. In high school, I was switched to baritone horn which has the same fingerings as the trumpet but uses a larger mouthpiece. That I was good at, and it lead me to joining the high school jazz band (which was invite-only so you had to be good to be in it). I was also in high school marching band, and stayed in it through my first year in college (when I had to give it up due to lack of time). I still have my trumpet and baritone horn in my garage and plan to some day relearn to play them (mostly relearn how to read music and get my lip back in shape).

  4. I played tuba (the distinctly non-wooden variety) from 6th grade through college. My first band director was actually pretty psyched to find someone who didn’t have to be cajoled into playing it. Another big advantage of playing tuba is that no one expected you to have to buy one, so the school always provided one for you, and you just bought the mouthpiece. The downside of marching with a sousaphone (which is the marching equivalent of the tuba for those who don’t know), is that it can easily weigh up to 75 pounds for the fancy ones made of silver, which sits on a single spot on your shoulder only a square inch in size. All kinds of back and exhaustion problems can ensue.

    In response to complaints that people don’t like the podcasts where you’re walking around and getting out of breath, I say that instead of bowing to the naysayers, you should go even further down that rabbit hole and try to do a section of your podcast while running on treadmills, or performing WiiFit routines, or something similar.

    Instead of finding a particular person to sort through all 70 podcasts, have you considered a crowd-source model where people can sign up on a list to do one or more episodes. Then, people could contribute an amount of time proportionate to their free time, and the whole project would be done more quickly since it could be completed in parallel rather than serial. If you wanted a second opinion to make sure nothing got missed, you could even accept two volunteers per episode to make sure their song lists matched. You don’t even need complicated code to keep track of it, just a simple list where folks can call dibs on as many episodes as they feel that can handle.

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