Hours of Entertainment for the Whole Family

And now, for something slightly different…

From time to time, I’ve posted MP3 files of interesting programs from BBC radio; the response to these programs - including one about British hacker Gary McKinnon - has been fairly impressive. Never one to change a winning formula (memories of New Coke having forever scarred my psyche, and taste buds), I’ve got a little more stuff for your listening pleasure today.

First off, it’s the height of election season here in the States, so what better time to analyze the political and sociological impact of… a cartoon? Yep, a number of brainiacs look at the politics of Bart, Homer, and the rest of The Simpsons in Whose Side is Bart Simpson On? (27min, ~13MB)

Next, in recognition of the brutal, cutthroat nature of politics, you can listen to The Strange Case of Oliver Cromwell’s Head (28min, ~13MB), which attempts to answer one of history’s more interestingly gruesome mysteries.

If cartoons and decapitated politicians aren’t your thing, perhaps heavy metal is more up your alley? Coinciding nicely with the return of heavy metal to Iraq, you can listen to a BBC program about the first Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda, in Baghdad Headbangers (27min, 25MB). Rawk on, and all that.

Thanks to some server-software updates, all of these files should be streamable directly through Winamp or similar programs. That’s right, you no longer need to download these things to your hard drive before listening to ‘em: instant listening gratification can now be yours.

In a similar vein, I’m also pleased to announce - thanks to the assistance of my webhost - the launch of an internet streaming-audio “station”, dubbed - with no little irony intended - “Entropic Streams”. It’s an eclectic mix of audio programming, principally from the BBC archives. Right now, there’s just over sixteen hours of material, but I hope to more than double that, as well as periodically rotate stuff in and out. It’s, content-wise, stuff that I find interesting, and think people who read this site will, too: a lot of oddball history programs, political/military/current affairs stuff, and the odd (sometimes, very odd) comedy program, short story, or whatever else thrown in to lighten things a little. Some of it is material I’ve posted to this site in the past, but most of it is new, and (I think) interesting.

It is - of course - completely free, and you can listen in a number of ways: by going to this page, and clicking on this link, or by downloading the “playlist” for your chosen media player:

For Winamp;
For Windows Media Player;
For RealPlayer;
For Quicktime.

There are no ads - there aren’t any “station IDs”; just uninterrupted, random programming. If you’ve got any comments on this experimental service, I’d love to hear ‘em. In the meantime, enjoy the downloads, in all their streaming goodness, and/or enjoy the “station”…

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