And now for the audio portion of the program...

My friend Matt has produced a podcast with his friend Lance for nearly a year now - I was even a guest on it once. Sadly, it's on hiatus right now as Matt is basically working the equivalent of two and a-half jobs, but I'm hoping that they pick up with podcasting again once his life settles down again. I fell off the listening bandwagon late last year, but I always enjoyed it - even when the topics were only of tangential interest to me. Knowing one of the podcasters personally certainly helped - you really can't say that about most podcasts.

I always told Matt that my friend Jeff would be a great guest on his podcast - and it's true. I knew that Jeff would be a natural, so for the Oscars this year, our friend (and his significant other) Caryle suggested that we record our own podcast, in which we detail our picks for the films that were "snubbed" by Oscar in years past. So that's just what we did. We sat around the MacBook and prattled on for 40 minutes. I finally sat down today to listen to it and I will never post it anywhere that can be found. It's not that I am embarrassed by its content - far from it - but we are clearly amateurs at this. But for a first try, it wasn't bad. It entertained me and I sent it to all the podcast participants (Heidi, Jeff, Caryle and Mary) but it's not really fit for other people's consumption. Most of the jokes are long standing in-jokes that would just make most people think we were on drugs while we recorded.

But that was enough to give Jeff the podcasting bug, and he e-mailed me this week to see if I would be interested in doing one with him. The only trouble is that he lives in Indianola, which is an hour or so's drive from here. The distance pretty much rules out getting together to do anything semi-regularly. Plus I didn't have any idea what we would talk about. And who in their right mind would listen?

Well, he convinced me and we're going to record something tomorrow when we rendezvous with Heidi's mom to collect Anna from a weekend at Camp Grandma. It's going to be Madonna related and the details have yet to be truly hashed out, but I can think of no more natural topic for us to discuss, as he has been my partner-in-crime for all things Madonna for 20+ years now.

This will definitely not be a regularly produced thing. My schedule (and Jeff's) simply doesn't allow it. If it happens even once a month, I'll consider that miraculous. I still don't think that I have the technical know-how that Matt has to do this with even a tenth of the quality he and Lance do. But it feels right and rather than call it a podcast, I'm viewing it more in terms of it being an "audio blog post." If I feel like it goes well, I'll be posting a link here. I may or may not pimp it on Facebook.

A significant portion of the credit goes to Matt who proved that this kind of thing can be done and done well. I know that something like this would never have even crossed my mind had it not been for his blazing of the trail.

So we'll see what happens. One thing is for certain - I shouldn't lack for things to say.