Expert Testimony

June 19, 2015August 27, 2017

Episode 21: Pickup Basketball, Assigned Reading, Expert Testimony: Urban Planning, Unchained Melodies, and Those Winter Sundays

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Spencer. Together the trio discusses Steel and Spencer’s pickup basketball escapades, give reports on their recent reading (books by Thomas Pynchon, Dan Simmons, and Sabine Heinlein) and give each other new reading assignments (books by Frank Herbert, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ignazio Silone, Brandon Sanderson, Daniel Kahneman, and Alexander Dolgun), Dave & Steel ask Spencer all their burning questions about urban planning and transportation issues, share great music by Dawn Landes, Saintseneca, Christopher Paul Stelling, Strand of Oaks, Adult Mom, and Konono No. 1, and drop a beautiful poetic tribute to fathers from the twentieth-century American poet Robert Hayden.

Episode 19: Hug Daddy Game, Top 5 Norwegian Words, Small Talk, Expert Testimony: Ask the Marketer, Brother vs. Brother, Unchained Melodies, and East of Eden

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their old friend Alan. Dave introduces the two men to a game he plays with his daughters called the “Hug Daddy Game,” Alan shares his fave favorite Norwegian words, and they run through a segment of small talk, discussing the latest FIFA scandals, Alan’s love of a well-edited Hobbit remake, and Nate DiMeo’s fantastic podcast the Memory Palace. We then present a very special feature, “Ask The Marketer,” in which we present several difficult to market products to Alan, a professional marketer, and he explains how he’d market these increasingly repulsive brands/products, following which we share great music about fictional characters from The Flaming Lips, The Brunettes, Mumford and Sons, The Spin Doctors, Suicide, and Duck Tales, and Alan closes the episode with some book wisdom from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Episode 16: Disney World, Small Talk, Ask OTC, Expert Testimony: OTC Comics, Unchained Melodies, and The Phantom Tollbooth

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Oliver. Together they discuss Dave’s recent family vacation to Disney World (including a refreshing stop at Club Cool!), explore the benefits of Transcendental Meditation, learn more about the Rocky Mountain Land Library, speculate about the return of Full House (it’s going to be called Fuller House!), offer listeners moving advice and dance tips, discuss Dave and Oliver’s shared passion for cartooning and comic books, share their envy of the voices of Antony Heggarty, Prince Nelson, Van Morrison, Vic Chesnutt, Charlie Puth, and Bobby Hatfield & Bill Medley, and drop some wisdom from Norton Juster’s classic children’s adventure novel The Phantom Tollbooth.

Episode 14: Poetry, Expert Testimony, Small Talk, Ask OTC, Unchained Melodies, and Charles Reznikoff

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Katie (a female nurse!) to discuss a huge panoply of things, including Steel’s love for poetry, Katie’s college softball career, A League of Their Own, the return of the brontosaurus, Wonder Woman’s freaky creator William Moulton Marston, and the difference between anabolic and boring steroids. Katie also leads the guys through a set of rapid fire ‘lightning round’ questions, and they take listener questions about home buying, flu shots, and high school math classes, and then share some great music from Cayetana, Lucius, Blackstreet, Alice Boman, and Jason Isbell, and Steel shares two poems from the criminally underread Charles Reznikoff: “[During the Second World War …]” and “Te Deum”.

Links

Poetry

Three of the life-changing poets that Steel talked about:

And here’s a bunch of articles about Emily Dickinson’s “Master” letters:

From Nicholas Rombes at the Rumpus
An article on Dickinson’s love life from the Emily Dickinson Museum
A review of a recent (2012) book which makes a case for identifying who Dickinson was addressing as “Master” in these letters

Katie’s Indiana University softball athlete page

A League of Their Own

Small Talk

The Brontosaurus is back! (an article by Elif Batuman in The New Yorker)
William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, was a weird dude. Exhibits 1, 2, and 3.
More on the difference between boring steroids and anabolic steroids.

Unchained Melodies

Cayetana — Hot Dad Calendar

Lucius — Wildewoman

Blackstreet — No Diggity

Alice Boman — Lead Me

Jason Isbell — Cover Me Up

Book Wisdom

This week Steel read two poems by Charles Reznikoff: the first an untitled vignette, and the second a short poem called “Te Deum” (a Latin phrase literally translatable as ‘Thee, O God’).

Links

Assigned Reading