3
November
2007

Episode 49 of Upon Further Review!

This week we talk babies, baseball players and brazen skeptics (well, actually humanists, but we wanted another “b”) in Episode 49 of Upon Further Review! In this episode we make a special announcement (you’ll just have to hear it for yourselves!) before moving on to the main portion of the show: first, we look at the power of infant registries with our take on Babies ‘R Us; second, we celebrate the power of America’s national pastime as we review the World Series; and finally, we examine the origins of the universe (sort of) with our review of the Humanist Network News Audio podcast. As always, we’re grateful for your ideas and suggestions–and as always, we ask that you please spread the word about the show! (As usual, podsafe intro music is provided by Sharif (“You’re My Girl”), outro by David Henderson (“We Gotta Go”).)

Reviewed in this show:

Babies ‘R Us

World Series

Humanist Network News Audio

10 Comments

  1. DrumIntellect:

    Thank you for the shout-out and for mentioning the show!

    I heard you discuss transcripts for podcasts (in relation to Humanist Network News Audio) and it sounded like you were in favor. But I think I remember you criticizing that in episode 9 (in relation to Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing). I’m not trying to pull a “gotcha”, but because in a previous lifetime I had a podcast which I transcribed each episode, but I decided not to go that route with the current podcast because of your insight. Do you support transcripts as helpful or do you dislike them as making the audio unnecessary?

    Anyway, I enjoyed the show!
    I never had a registry, but shooting behind the back and between the legs sounds like fun, so maybe I’ll have to start one:)

    As for the name of the Fall Classic, is there really any places worth speaking about outside the United States of America?:)

    Another thing to consider in regards to buying 120 articles of clothing, is kids grow. Fast. Buying too much of one size may lead to some clothing not being used much or at all.

  2. Wesley:

    Great show as always, guys.

    In regards to putting www on the beginning of a website url, for all practical purposes it usually doesn’t matter.

    You have your top level domains (.com, .edu, .org, .net, .uk, etc) and then you have your domains (volcanicast, furtherreview, google, co, go, etc) and then you have subdomains (www, ftp, bbc (that goes along with the domain co.uk), espn (to go along with go.com). You can actually have subdomains of subdomains (I always wanted to get dot.dot.dot.com because it just rolls off the tongue. But to own that I’d need to own (or get friendly with the owner of) dot.com).

    So, go.com owns the domain, and espn pays them for the use of espn.go.com. Some (very lucky) company owns co.uk, and everybody in Great Britain pays them for little pieces of that split into subdomains like bbc.co.uk and the like.

    http://www.whatever.com is EXACTLY the same thing, but in almost every web server setup in the world, the www subdomain just points right at the main domain.

    And that’s domains in a nutshell. If it wasn’t copyrighted, I’d insert the NBC “The more you know” image in here.

  3. Yael:

    I think you are totally off-base in the amount of baby clothing you think you need. (My son is 8 months old).

    I’ve found with my baby that we rarely went through more than 1 outfit a day(especially before he started eating solid food), and 1 pajama sleeper at night. The sleepers he usually wears two nights before I wash them. In the first couple of months, he mostly only wore sleepers all the time, I didn’t make a difference between day/night clothing.

    Only a couple times altogether did we have a leaky diaper that required changing his clothing (we use huggies most often, it makes a difference to use quality diapers). We always take along a change of clothing in the diaper bag for such an emergency. Only once did we need to use it.

    Also, if you are going to have so much clothing, watch the sizes. Don’t buy too much 0-3. They don’t stay in it that long.

  4. admin:

    DI: Good point about the transcript issue…there is a distinction, which we’ll talk about on our next show. And you’re right–the registry experience is fun, or at least it was with Greg. :) As for the extra clothes, well, considering we got a LOT of hand-me-downs, we imagine we can do the same for other friends of ours who follow in our footsteps a few months from now!

    Wesley: Thanks for the info, and that makes sense. It’s still not entirely clear to us why some people then might choose to list their address as www when you could always just put http and get to the same place, but at least we know about the whole subdomain thing now!

    Yael: Greg can’t even begin to tell you how much of a relief that is. It appears, then, that we may already have reached our goal for the clothing situation. As for the sizes, yeah…we know that the clothes won’t be helpful for that long, but for those three months it would be nice… :)

    Thanks to everyone for the feedback, and please keep it coming!

    T.R.

  5. Bernadette in Australia:

    Congratulations Greg and Clea, I wish you an easy birth of a happy and healthy young reviewer. She’ll be a pig (that’s Chinese zodiac not a comment about her cleanliness)which means you can look forward to her being honest, simple, gallant, sturdy, courageous, persevering, resolute,sociable, peace-loving, patient, loyal, hard-working, trusting, sincere, diligent, calm, understanding, thoughtful, scrupulous, passionate, intelligent. Sounds pretty good to me.

    Please watch your dissing of The Wiggles – aside from the fact that they’re one of our (Australia’s) biggest exports frankly I think you’ve less to complain about from us than we have from the Americans. Barney. I’ll say no more.

    I’m with Yael – you won’t need that high an OPD rating (Outfits Per Day). For the first week you might change her outfit each time it gets a little dribble on it. After that you’ll realise no one cares – least of all you (or junior reviewer).

  6. Tag:

    if we’re talking kid shows with disturbing or if not then at least slightly suspect national cultural identification factors, then..

    (run-on-sentence-*breath*-break -Ed)

    ..try growing up with “Mr. Dressup” as your role-model.

    The bloke had a “Tickle Trunk” for his various outfits and spent a lot of time with a young puppet lad that went by the name of Casey.

    ..who appears to have disappeared and been replaced by a young puppet lass.

    Mr. Dressup looks solid enough a citizen and has never been convicted of anything you understand, but sometimes he smells of burned rubber.

    Anyway, Hi from Canada!

    First time caller, um First time listener!

    Stumbled in here via a circuitous route that could never be properly explained without a tesseract and a large penguin but just wanted to say Hi, I’m enjoying your show!

    I’m also enjoying your photo, but that’s largely because Clea is beautiful. Not that Greg isn’t, you understand, I’m sure he is, but I’m willing to wager that Clea looks better in a dress.

    and Congratulations!!!

    (all around – to Clea for being so intelligent and beautiful and funny and for your upcoming bundle of progeny! and to Greg for scoring Clea who is so intelligent and beautiful and funny, and for your upcoming progeny, and also for your show!)

    Post Script: uh if you guys are taking suggs for upcoming episodes, if you could sneak a tape recorder into a class on _8 dimensional_ physics so’s I can visualize the E8 (in Garrett Lisi’s Exceptionally Simple TOE) more properly, that’d be really helpful.

    Failing that, how about the Clea worship episode?

    ok I’ll stop that now.

    *pause*

    But I do not promise not to start a Clea fan club up, in her honour.

    (and cue creepy stalker music, dun duun, duuuhhhhhn – Ed)

    Please stop helping me Ed.

    :)

    Tag
    Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Earth, Sometimes.

  7. admin:

    Hey Tag and, er, Ed–Clea is flattered, and Greg is, uh, vaguely troubled. :) Though he fully acknowledges that Clea looks much, much better than he does in a dress, and further that he was lucky in “scoring” her. Successfully pretending to be witty and clever certainly had a lot to do with it. As far as the suggestion is concerned, we’d be happy to take it on, if we, um, knew what exactly you were asking us to do. Greg is now even more troubled. :)

    Thanks for listening, and we hope you’ll stick around and continue to contribute!

    T.R.

  8. admin:

    Oh, and Mr. Dressup? Also troubling.

    ;)

    T.R.

  9. classic chris:

    Congratulations, Greg and Clea, on the new reviewer soon to be joining you!!! I’m sure that it’s so exciting, and I wish you all the best as you move to this next phase of family life!
    Good luck on making the magic 120 outfit number! Let us, your listeners, know if we can have a global baby outfit drive or something to get you through the gap…

    From my notes… about the length of the baseball season — it’s weird to me that it’s such a long season especially when you consider that there seem to be a lot of double-headers that should otherwise shorten it, and they do play for several days in a row… still seems long to me.

    Greg, gotta call you out on something – when you and Clea were talking about the World Series and renaming and Clea suggested something like the “American Series”, you made a joke like “yeah, babe. just what we want – to be more Americentric.” But isn’t it pretty Americentric to be considering the contest the U.S. dominates to be the “World” series, after all? Great discussion, though. Really enjoyable review!

    I was surprised at the high mark for the humanist podcast, but only because of the tone that the clip set and some of the other qualities you pointed out. Can not believe that anyone could produce a 5 1/2 min promo. It’s bad enough to me when someone wants a 5-6 minute video, and that has visuals as well as sound. listening to 5 1/2 minutes with no visuals? Better be pretty darn interesting. I also kind of don’t like that they ride on NPR’s tone. I think that NPR deserves that tone and cadence and does it really well, and is very experienced at it. At least from the clip you selected, it sounded more like someone trying to be like NPR than someone who happens to use an NPR tone. But that’s just my opinion from the review, and I know that I’d be much better served (and you’d prefer it) by taking the advice and listening to the podcast. So I’ll do that… thanks for expanding our minds, once again.

    Waiting in breathless anticipation for episode 50!!!!! See you there!!!!

    – chris

  10. admin:

    Thanks for the good wishes, Chris…we seem to be heading in the right direction as far as clothes are concerned, so hopefully such a drive will never be necessary from our loyal listeners. :) As for the World Series Ameri-centric thing, well, yes…Greg was concerned that in avoiding the appearance of Ameri-centrism (which is created by calling something a “World Series” when it isn’t) we not start by naming the baseball championship “American” anything. Wouldn’t really solve the problem. :) As far as the HNN thing is concerned, it does feel NPRish, which will turn some people off–but the material is so interesting, and the guests they get are so good (Rushdie is a pretty good start!), that we thought combined with the professional delivery of the show it was worth a high rating. We’d be interested to hear other people’s feedback on that, though…

    T.R.

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