e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID

It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…

Call For Comments: Why Do We Suddenly Love Musicals?

From Wayne: I used to think I didn’t like Musicals. There were a few, I guess. I saw Cabaret on TV when I was young (a heavily edited version of it, I’m sure), and had fond memories of some of the songs and imagery. There were others I saw in this context. I remember the…

Call for Comments: Cheesy Christmas Movies: Part II

From Hannah: Two years ago, I somehow convinced everyone to let me do a show on cheesy Christmas movies. And by wanting to talk about “cheesy” holiday films, what I really meant was “let’s talk about all these really ‘bad’ (but also sometimes kind of really fun and good in their own way) romantic comedies…

e137. Think Virtually, Live Locally! Our New Virtual Reality

Ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, people the world over have been forced to spend more time meeting and communicating virtually. As different communities have implemented differing levels of lockdowns, quarantine restrictions, and work from home protocols, and distance learning, life has increasingly taken place over Zoom. Socializing over FaceTime is the…

Call for Comments: Do we really like holidays anyway?

From Mav: As I finished teaching one of my Friday only classes, one of my students wished me a “Have a Happy Thanksgiving… or whatever” on his way out the door. It struck me that he was not just trying to be nice; as he was finishing the statement he realized the relative futility of…

Call For Comments: The Virtual Office (Only Avatars Please.)

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay From Katya: We’ve recently all been spending more time in virtual space — conference calls on Zoom, happy hours on Hangouts, and I guess somewhere, someone has been making a good old fashioned phone call. Probably. 2020 has made remote living more commonplace for many of us but remote…

e136. Describing 14 Films We Haven’t Seen

In a world where four podcasters are exhausted from the never ended horrific news cycle of politics, racial tensions, pestilence and death that has been the year 2020, these weary souls decide to take one week away from serious pseudo academic pop culture analysis with drinking and swearing and do… goofy pseudo academic pop culture…

e135. Election 2020: So Now What?

As most of our regular listeners are probably aware, the United States had a little election last week. Barely worth mentioning! And in that election Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump and Mike Pence for the presidency of the United States. And again, if you’ve listened to more than 10 seconds of our…

e134. Reality of Horrors!

On last week’s show, we investigated the comedic world of horror movies. This week, we wanted to go a different way… the reality of horror. Yes, of course there are horror movies that feature monsters and demons and other supernatural horrors. But what do we make of films like Deliverance, Jaws, Psycho and Cujo? What…