Thanks for listening, y'all

we are exhausted, but it has been a blast. and please, drop us a line if you like the show or even if you are just confused by it. we love to hear from you. seriously.

special thanks

Thanks this week to Tim Miller


http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html

who was super helpful in shaping the episode.

Thanks Tim.

Episode 50

Has it really been 50?

No it has not.

Episode 50 is something a little different. I jsut got David's text tonight at 2:00 am. It's pretty amazing. But I do need to edit it. So give me some time. I'll get to it before Monday at Midnight.

I promise.

Thanks.

mk

Welcome... Idiotvoxers?

So Catalogue of Ships is #1 on a podcast rating site called Idiotvox which is great (though I still take issue with the fact that they call themselves a "democracy").

However, it's never translated into too many hits for us. Maybe 100 or so a month since we hit the #1 spot. Tonight we got over 400 hits from them.

So my question for anyone who found us through Idiotvox tonight... What's the deal? Did Idiotvox suddenly become really popular or something? Kudos to them, but that is kind of weird.

In other weirdness, there was a very nice interview with us in the Baltimore Sun (circulation approxmiately 300,000) which is also great. However, this interview only translated into three (3) pageviews from the Baltimore area.

So Idiotvox gets us 400 hits. BoingBoing gets us something like 8000 hits. Jay's Best of the Left Podcast gets a couple hundred. My question to you all: what does this say about the main stream media?

This was an article in a major publication with a local circulation on par with the Washington Post. The article had art associated with it (a screenshot of our homepage). And yet, these websites have that much more influence in their cultural recommendations.

Interesting.

Anyway, thanks Idiotvox. Please keep up the good work, but PLEASE stop calling yourselves a democracy. It's offensive.

k

Florida Recount Poker

In the episode DT did a pretty good job of describing the rules of "Florida Recount Poker," a game developed by David, our friend Josh, this guy, and myself in November of 2000. I thought I would explain them further and print them on the blog for anyone who wants to play:

The game plays like a normal 7-card stud game, for the most part. Each player is dealt two cards down and one card up. After a typical betting sequence, another round of cards is dealt face up, followed by another round of betting, and so on until seven cards are dealt.

The only difference is that certain cards trigger various alterations in the rules.

If a RED KING is dealt, the goal of the game completely changes. Now the win will go to the player who can make the LOWEST five card hand out of his or her (but almost always his, frankly) seven cards. The theory here being that a red king indicates that the republicans have won control of the White House, and the whole world has gone topsy turvey (it did).

If, however, a BLACK KING is dealt after the RED KING, the whole game goes back to normal.

If a BLACK JACK is dealt, the player who receives it is Ralph Nader, and he automatically receives "matching funds" from each of the other players in the amount of whatever the initial ante was.

Similarly, if a RED JACK is dealt, the player who receives it is Pat Buchanan, and he is forced to give all the other players payment in the amount of the initial ante for, as David put it, "being an asshole." I think our original reason for this was a bit more nuanced. The money was intended to be penance for unintentionally confusing voters in Florida with the butterfly ballot (if you will recall, many elderly Floridians were confused by the butterfly ballot, and claim they voted for Buchanan when they intended to vote for Gore).

I find our game somewhat prescient in that the Republican administration DID go on to quite frequently reward or promote its members after they failed in various ways (ie George Tenet).