- Some scheduled, fixed-topic podcasts start way slow, first mentioning every sponsor, talking about where the idea for the episode came from ("I was walking along Main Street when I saw a sign in the window of a shop . . ."), mentioning how cool the episode is going to be, how much respect we all must have for the person about to be interviewed, how we first became acquainted with their work, etc.#
- But Museum Archipelago takes another approach. Here's the opening script for a recent episode:#
- 0:00 "Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.#
- 0:06 "Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than fifteen minutes."#
- 0:13 "So let's get started."#
- (End of standard episode introduction. Episode's new content commences here.)#
- 0:15 "The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play . . . games. The central interpretive through line, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry, through fifty individual games, from Space War, developed in 1962 at MIT, to the latest console and PC games. But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with their original controllers. The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games the year of their release. Games like Asteroids and Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment. Early home computer games live inside your parents' home office, while the home console classics like Super Mario Brothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early-90s suburban home in the U.S. So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum . . . ."#
- Thirteen minutes remain in the (shorter than promised) 14 minute, 20 second episode.#
- PS. Check out the fifteen-page online gallery of old game machines owned by the museum, each machine shown in a photo with a healthy blurb about its significance. In German, but web browsers won't mind translating, if you like.#
- Flashback just now to Mohs surgery, where they remove a mole a bit at a time, scurry off to another room to see if they got all the skin cancer, then come back and dig deeper if they need to. Painless, it seemed at the time, except for the two hours on the table listening to the most insipid muzak. Maybe twice there was an interesting lyric or arrangement, but these were, I suppose, pop songs, so those moments were fleeting.#
- Oh, yeah, there was also a longish conversation about the real estate advice the surgeon had given the medical assistant and how that was working out, so I got to listen to that. Not much conversation with me, though. Surgeon was defensive and blamed others when I mentioned (politely, I thought) not having heard until that morning the reason why this procedure was the best choice for my situation.#
- I like inventing statistics. Here's one: the practice of medicine looks from a distance like a science but it is actually 47% communication and people skills.#
- And if I touch just the right spot near my ear, over the facial nerve, I can feel a tingle at the base of my nose where they did the digging. #
- You could write a small manual, A Taxonomy of Stock Comments, that described and categorized the instant responses so many people give on social media.#
- This taxonomy would classify the mental and emotional moves people make to avoid paying attention to what another person actually said--all the varieties of not listening.#
- And the manual would imply, by contrast, what it really means to take note of someone else's life by paying attention to the particular words the person has chosen to represent it and account for it.#
- Up the aisle of a Target store, a grade-school-age daughter harshly and loudly nagged at her mother. A bystander walked over and said, "You should be ashamed of yourself for speaking to your mother or anyone in that ugly way," to the astounded child.#
- Some scheduled, fixed-topic podcasts start way slow, first mentioning every sponsor, talking about where the idea for the episode came from ("I was walking along Main Street when I saw a sign in the window of a shop . . ."), mentioning how cool the episode is going to be, how much respect we all must have for the person about to be interviewed, how we first became acquainted with their work, etc.#
- But Museum Archipelago takes another approach. Here's the opening script for a recent episode:#
- 0:00 "Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.#
- 0:06 "Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than fifteen minutes."#
- 0:13 "So let's get started."#
- (End of standard episode introduction. Episode's new content commences here.)#
- 0:15 "The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play . . . games. The central interpretive through line, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry, through fifty individual games, from Space War, developed in 1962 at MIT, to the latest console and PC games. But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with their original controllers. The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games the year of their release. Games like Asteroids and Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment. Early home computer games live inside your parents' home office, while the home console classics like Super Mario Brothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early-90s suburban home in the U.S. So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum . . . ."#
- Thirteen minutes remain in the (shorter than promised) 14 minute, 20 second episode.#
- PS. Check out the fifteen-page online gallery of old game machines owned by the museum, each machine shown in a photo with a healthy blurb about its significance. In German, but web browsers won't mind translating, if you like.#
- Flashback just now to Mohs surgery, where they remove a mole a bit at a time, scurry off to another room to see if they got all the skin cancer, then come back and dig deeper if they need to. Painless, it seemed at the time, except for the two hours on the table listening to the most insipid muzak. Maybe twice there was an interesting lyric or arrangement, but these were, I suppose, pop songs, so those moments were fleeting.#
- Oh, yeah, there was also a longish conversation about the real estate advice the surgeon had given the medical assistant and how that was working out, so I got to listen to that. Not much conversation with me, though. Surgeon was defensive and blamed others when I mentioned (politely, I thought) not having heard until that morning the reason why this procedure was the best choice for my situation.#
- I like inventing statistics. Here's one: the practice of medicine looks from a distance like a science but it is actually 47% communication and people skills.#
- And if I touch just the right spot near my ear, over the facial nerve, I can feel a tingle at the base of my nose where they did the digging. #
- You could write a small manual, A Taxonomy of Stock Comments, that described and categorized the instant responses so many people give on social media.#
- This taxonomy would classify the mental and emotional moves people make to avoid paying attention to what another person actually said--all the varieties of not listening.#
- And the manual would imply, by contrast, what it really means to take note of someone else's life by paying attention to the particular words the person has chosen to represent it and account for it.#
- Up the aisle of a Target store, a grade-school-age daughter harshly and loudly nagged at her mother. A bystander walked over and said, "You should be ashamed of yourself for speaking to your mother or anyone in that ugly way," to the astounded child.#