It was a 24-hour roadside diner. They’re still out there. Some of them are chain restaurants, but that doesn’t diminish their 24-hour-dinerness. It may even enhance it, since you can walk into any one of them anywhere at any time and find yourself a member of the same motley crew. Scruffy but lovable Regulars. Truck drivers, of course. Cowboys. Assorted random travelers.

All of them hungry. Not always for food. But hungry just the same.

Late at night, the day after Christmas, we pulled off the highway and stopped at a diner with a sign in the window that said “OPEN NOW.” The sign seemed to imply that the place was brand-new, but it wasn’t. Or, if it was, it got rode hard and put up wet within a week of being built.

Inside the windows-all-around building, the dining area was a single narrow, L-shaped room. This made the designated “Smoking” and “Non-Smoking” sections one and the same. The yellow-gray air was uniform across the joint. But we followed protocol and sat in a booth in the “Non-Smoking” section, which was one booth away from the restrooms and right across the counter from the coffee station. The laminated menu promised protein, sugar, and grease in equal proportions. Just what we were in the mood for.
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Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat from South Dakota, is and was in the news as he recovers (hopefully) from surgery to correct a bleeding arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain. And I received a new iPod (to replace the one that just died) for Christmas.

Okay, you’re wondering where the hell I’m going with this.

One of the things I’ve discovered how to do (which I didn’t do with my old iPod) is subscribe to podcasts. Didn’t mean I didn’t listen to them on my iPod, it just meant I downloaded specific mp3s and added them to my itunes library manually. But this, it turns out, is a lot more work than required. If I subscribe to a podcast, it a)automatically downloads the mp3 when it becomes available, b)puts it on my iPod when I sync, and c)after I’ve listened to it, it removes it from my iPod after the next sync. This is pretty cool and I feel like a total idiot for not knowing this earlier.

So, I’m now subscribed to a bunch of podcasts. From NPR I listen to Story of the Day, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, Science Friday, and This American Life. I listen to BoingBoingBoing (the podcast from the editors of–well, guess), Lessons From a Geek Fu Master, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, Coffee Break Spanish, Moldawer in the Morning, National Geographic’s Atmosphere, Cory Doctorow’s Craphound, and then a bunch more science ‘casts: The Naked Scientists Naked Science Radio Show, Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, and a show from Australia Radio National called All in the Mind.

It’s this last thing that brings the two together.
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