Thursday, August 30, 2007

Old Time Radio and audiobooks

I have had some time to spend in the car going to and from work. But it has been productive as I have listened to several CDs and other audio.

I started listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Then I interrupted it, for now, with the unabridged audio book for Eragon by Paolini. Good work, so far. Eragon is immensely rich with description and vocabulary. Amazing as it was done by a fifteen-year-old. I also bought a reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, the whole thing, so I am looking forward to that one.

This gives me something meaningful and at least educational on the ride to work. The time doesn't feel wasted. Plus I intersperse here and there with Jack Benny. I would probably never listen to them at home otherwise, and I love Old Time Radio.

I first discovered OTR on the Chicago airwaves when I was in high school. WMAQ (I think), or at least one of the news stations, had an hour long broadcast most evenings. I was hooked. I think I tuned in by accident. I used to tape them off the radio with the cheapo cassette tapes. I had a shoebox full of them. Now my collection has been updated to digital with the OTR communities on the web, like The Cobalt Club. I have whole series now on mp3. It's a pretty good collection. I am happiest for what's thought of as a pretty complete set of the old Superman radio show. I say almost complete because there are many episodes lost to time, and I have most of the episodes thought to exist.





Old Time Radio and audio books listened to the past two weeks so far:

Jack Benny 12-27-42 and two of the three with Orson Welles from 1943

X-Minus-1 "Mars is Heaven" by Ray Bradbury

"Who's on First?" routine by Abbot and Costello

Amos and Andy 5-21-29 and 5-23-29

Lord of the Rings part 4

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My god, how old are you?

Matt Butcher said...

Not THAT old--they were re-running the OTR--maybe I didn't make that as clear as I should have!