JolieSimons.com

Does the podcasting world yet have a superstar?

Podcasting as a medium is pretty small-time, but podcasting is growing as media moves online. Today, we can consume whatever media we want, whenever we want it. Terrestrial radio is being hit just like every other form of media as evidenced by the recent format switch of KLSX, the station that used to have Adam Carolla’s morning talk show. KLSX decided that they want to spin cheap records rather than pay for expensive personalities and, in that ugly shuffle, Adam Carolla was unceremoniously axed. 

Fans cried. Many a fan called on the last two day of The Adam Carolla Show to weep as Adam comforted each and every one of them, reminding them that change is almost always good. As a shot in the arm to those suffering, Aceman—he calls himself “Ace”—assured each of his listeners that he wasn’t going anywhere. Huge numbers of fans across the world were downloading his daily KLSX-sponsored podcast and streaming KLSX live. Adam knew then his potential: if terrestrial radio won’t have me, I’ll still have fans out there.

Carolla took a giant leap into the podcast-only world. Sure, other big personalities put out podcasts. These podcasts are almost always marketing for another vehicle—like a TV show or a radio how—or an in-the-basement kind of affair. The This American Life podcast, for example, wouldn’t exist without the NPR show already broadcasting nationwide on NPR affiliate stations. No giant star has tried to monetize or capitalize on the podcast-only medium. That is, until now.

The Adam Carolla Show ended on a Friday. That following Monday, fans all over the world took to their computers and found a podcast just for them. Carolla was using his own money. He had no sponsorships, no advertising. He was using his own equipment, his own domain name, his own electricity to record about 45 minutes of Adam being typical Adam, uncut as the marketers say. Often times, he says, he is in a bath robe. Sure, it was no four hour radio time slot and didn’t benefit from a studio full of equipment with people to run it. But the feeling was very raw and organic. The show was, indeed, that methadone to keep Adam fans satiated. 

Since then, Adam has pulled out all the stops to get guests, the usual suspects of Adam’s circle: Dr. Drew, his former co hosts Theresa and Bryan, Larry Miller, Bill Simmons, and David Allen Grier, all popular guests on the morning show. But from the moment The Adam Carolla Podcast went online, it was pretty obvious that Carolla has stumbled on something great. His first show, a sort of airing-out of laundry, certainly an uncharacteristically melancholy Adam, was downloaded over a quarter of a million times. Granted, the show wasn’t even on iTunes for easy download yet. 

Since then, ratings have been high for the show. It is ranked number 1 on the iTunes “Top Podcasts” list. In a little over a week of podcasts, the show has been downloaded over a 1.6 million times. This begs the question: have we found Podcasting’s first superstar? When Carolla was on a podcasted corporate radio show, he enjoyed the backing of a company to do the work for him. Today, he’s paying his own way just to connect with fans (and maybe get some bread down the road). It’s genius marketing and self-promotion. Most of all, it’s great talk radio, the kind of radio we’d actually like to hear over the airwaves.

The recent mainstream acceptance of the sport of mixed martial arts, known as MMA, recently had a big breakthrough. On Saturday, the first primetime MMA event aired on CBS. Elite XC Saturday Night Fights introduced the primetime broadcast television world to the controversial sport.

Parade magazine said the game should be banned. The world of “legitimate” sports has long criticized the sport for not actually being a sport and more controlled brutality. Fans, however, mostly young men, flock to MMA which makes a sport out of kicking, punching, and grappling with others. Yes, people bleed. Yes, there are lots of really painful-looking things going on. Yes, it’s violent. But let me try to explain to women why this sport should matter and why you should not freak out so much about the popularity of this “fighting sport.”

One of the bones of contention for the CBS event was the women’s fight between Gina Carano and Kaitlin Young. You may know Carano as Crush, the “hot” gladiator on NBC’s series American Gladiators. Carano has been called the face of women’s mixed martial arts since women haven’t really been major players in MMA until Carano showed up. So far, she’s undefeated and trains with some very elite names in the MMA community. She’s being trained by Extreme Coture, the fighting school established by MMA hall of famer Randy Coture. Then again, maybe she’ll do American Gladiators full time and will quit the daily grind of fight training.

Thing is, fighting looks pretty violent. In the early days of UFC, one of the sport’s major fight organizers, fights were brutal and the stuff of paid subscription television. There were no rules, so any man could fight any other man, so they did. Men’s teeth were kicked out. Hair was pulled. Groins were kicked. Blood was spilled, sometimes in copious amounts. This wasn’t a sport but televised brutality. While the “train wreck” appeal was undeniable, it quickly became apparent to everyone that the sport had to change in order to gain respect.

So the sport pulled together and created some unified rules. In UFC events and Elite XC events, there is no eye gouging, groin kicking, or elbows to the head while fighters are on the ground. There’s no breaking of fingers. Ringside doctors have the power to stop any fight at any time. Referees are required to stop fights they feel might become dangerous.

MMA may look brutal. It is fighting, after all, but the danger is overemphasized by critics. MMA doesn’t kill. Dale Earnhardt fans know all too well the pain of sports death, and the danger of sports like NASCAR, the NFL, or even horse racing are understated in the media while the dangers of MMA are overstated. MMA requires that fights be stopped before anyone actually gets hurt.

The idea is that fighters get to the point when they could potentially hurt each other seriously, like locking someone’s arm or chocking someone while on the ground. When this happens, the fight ends before harm is actually done. Nobody’s breaking their arms because the fighter wins when he proves that they could but before he actually does. Boxing emphasizes standing up, even though tremendous damage is being done to the brain, and Muhammad Ali is reminder of the damage that can be done by boxing. MMA, however, is a sport where the fight is stopped before the damage is done. If you’re not fighting back, you lose. No exceptions.

Then, there’s the question of taste. How tasteful can it be to have muscle-bound men, with the occasional woman, punch, kick, and wrestle each other in the name of sport? How can a sport be tasteful if so many of its athletes bleed during competition? Therein lies the most legitimate criticism of MMA.

When I was a young girl, I used to watch my grandfather while he watched boxing on TV. Grandpa was quite possibly the world’s most mild-mannered man. He had a heavy accent and a dark, brooding look about him, softened over the years by gray hair and the rounding of old age. He also loved to watch boxing, a surprising sport for a man like him to enjoy.

As boxing events wore on throughout the afternoon, he would sit in the living room, watching as men would pound each other about the head and body. He’d ball up his fists and hold them under his neck, occasionally throwing light punches in the air and shouting in the language I didn’t know. Eventually the frustration would overwhelm him and he’d storm out of the room to go work in the garden. A few minutes later, though, he’d always return to find out what happened.

I feel like our tastes don’t always have to define us. Yes, most MMA fans are young men, the kind of men who buy energy drinks and malt liquor, perennial corporate sponsors of MMA events. I, however, am a fan. I don’t know why I’m a fan, but MMA seems like a harmless indulgence. If sweaty men want to punch and kick each other for money and they want me to watch, I’ll watch.

So there you have it, MMA in a nutshell. Ladies, feel free to hate MMA if you want. I, on the other hand, will be enjoying last week’s big UFC pay-per-view event, hoping for some nice armbar or rear naked choke action.

I love my Wii. My husband and I managed to stand out in the cold, freezing ourselves to the bone for nine hours outside of a Wal-Mart in order to get one, but the wait was totally worth it. The night we got it, we stayed up until very early in the morning playing Wii Sports, the game that comes packaged with the Wii system in this country.

The thing about Wii Sports is that it gives you the opportunity to actually get off the couch in order to play games. There are real motions involved. To play baseball, swing the Wiimote like a bat. To play golf, swing the Wiimote like a golf club, and so on.

When the concept of the new game Wii Fit was introduced at the famed E3 convention and advertising videos were placed online, the inevitable backlash began. This video on YouTube lampooned the strange motions that accompany a Wii Fit gaming session:

After all, who would want to play this game? When playing the game, you look very silly.

Wii Fit is the next evolution in Nintendo’s bid for an “active gaming” market. The game comes packaged with a balance board, a white board on which you stand in order to do most of the minigames involved in Wii Fit. You can also check your weight and track your progress over time. There are aerobics, strength training, yoga, and balance games you can play, all using the ingenious balance board to measure weight fluctuation and center of gravity.

After seeing and reading about recent demonstrations, including a somewhat-puzzling demonstration on NPR’s Morning Edition, I’ve decided that the Wii Fit is the next frontier in active gaming and I’m all for it. Perhaps kids all across the country will play fun balance games while at the same time dropping some pounds. Perhaps it will bring families closer together with games everyone can play. Or perhaps it will surprise everyone and become a flop.

Whatever it is, I want one. If my family is reading, you can buy me one for my birthday which I know is in the fall, but I take advanced presents.

Wii Fit is now available at stores for about $90.

So the folks at Paramount decided they were going to try out a little game. They already knew that Iron Man, the new film starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwenyth Paltrow would be a smokin’ hot summer release. People have been talking about this movie–at least the nerds I associate with–for months if not years. So, much like other highly-anticipated big blockbuster summer action movies, they decided to host midnight airings for the nerdy boys with disposable income. And, just to spice things up a bit and get this party started off right, they decided to allow theaters to let patrons see the movie before midnight, as early as 8 PM.

Some of us nerds have jobs in the morning, you know.

The word didn’t get out as quickly as many had hoped, but the turnout was still very good for the last minute change in start time at the theater I attended. Total sausage fest. Lots of denim and chuckling at subtle comic book jokes. But here’s the real shocker: this movie was awesome! Totally unexpected.

Iron Man tells the tale of the beginning of superhero Iron Man. Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) plays the billionaire playboy role without a lot of brooding, almost like the antithesis of Christian Bale’s dark and conflicted Bruce Wayne in the contemporary Batman series. The difference is that Stark loves to talk. He’s not so much a transparent character, but he does lay everything out on the line.

The audience instantly connects with Stark’s plight. After a weapons demonstration in Afghanistan goes south, he ends up the prisoner of a terrorist sect which orders him, at gunpoint, to build a special missile using parts from the other missiles laying around, ironically purchased from his own weapons manufacturing company. Stark decides to defy orders and spends his time building a special suit instead to not only fix his ailing heart but also make him bulletproof.

John Jon Favreau does a bangup job as director. It’s almost like he decided that Iron Man was going to be the anti-superhero movie. Cheesy one-liners are almost entirely eliminated and replaced with dialogue that’s, well, actually funny. Actors are given plenty of room to breathe and the stilted dialogue of other big action flicks–like the woman constantly screaming in fear or the constant shouting of “We’re running out of time!”–is nonexistent. In some places, Favreau gives a little homage to the late Robert Altman by even letting characters talk over each other, much like we do in real life.

Iron Man succeeds where other movies have failed. Iron Man is good to the comic book nerds who want to see some authenticity to the Tony Stark/Iron Man character. Movie goers want to see a movie that’s original and not the hackneyed affair we’re used to (ahem Spiderman 3). The laughs are steady and often. Even the emotional moments are bittersweet and surprising in a flick with this much CG.

If you see only one movie this summer… oh, wait, isn’t that the quote they always put on movie posters? How about… Go see Iron Man. It’s the big summer blockbuster that WON’T kidnap or kill you.

Grade: A -

So you have no idea what an lolcat is? Well, fortunately for all of us, there’s a Wikipedia article about it. Also, Time magazine did a short write-up of the lolcat movement.

So what’s up with lolcats? Why should anyone care about them? Lolcats (also seen as lol cats) is a term used to describe pictures of cats with funny and grammatically-poor captions written across the picture. The lolcats movement has spawned loldogs, and lolrus (for some reason, walrus pictures) as well as any other animal or cute photo you can think of that would be improved by silly captions. Here’s an example, a reference to the famous monologue by Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood:

So why should anyone care? I thought the same thing until I began looking into the movement. Lolcats and lolspeak is truly a user-generated language created by people who, to the best of my knowledge, have never met each other. Currently my love of strange social movements and language has created a great interest in lolcats.

I’m currently compiling research on lolcats for a potential article or book. If you have any personal connection to lolspeak or lolcats and want to share your experiences, I’d appreciate your input. Please feel free to email me here.