You gotta listen: Pseudopod

To pay for my graduate education, I run an archaeology lab.  Well, that's actually unfair.  What I really do is manage chaos.  I work 20 hours a week, making sure that artifacts, paperwork, maps, photos...whatever material from 600+ archaeological projects, undertaken over the last 20 years, manages to stay in some kind of order, and that the new stuff that keeps coming in gets properly curated and cataloged.  To paraphrase Jon Stewart:  "this is 60-70 percent less exciting than it sounds".  Most of my week is spent entering coded data into a computer, with a slight plurality of the remaining time spent labeling photographs and washing artifacts. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do, and sometimes it is just downright cool to be handling objects that were made hundreds or thousands of years ago.  But... well, lets just say that most of the time, I'm basically a cubical monkey, if the cubical was splitting at the seams with pottery and stone tools.

As such, I have recently started accumulating podcasts, in order to fool my brain into thinking that I'm not doing mindless tasks, and I wanted to pass one on down the pike. Pseudopod bills itself as "a weekly horror podcast".  Every week, they put out a show consisting of one narrated horror story, usually between 20-30 minutes long.  Just enough for a taste, and not enough for indigestion.  They're usually by published authors, although I think they accept user submissions, but the quality is consistent either way.  The stories range from funny to grotesque to skin-crawlingly unnerving, and they're all narrated extremely well...even the occasional bad dialogue, so endemic in horror literature, is given more tastefulness than it probably deserves:  witness "The Land of Reeds" which, among other things, is a revenge story set in Ptolemaic Egypt, and contains more than its share of ghostly dialogue, but manages to keep the tone serious.

The most recent story, as of this post, is a perfect example of why I eagerly await Pseudopod on my RSS.  It's called  "Jihad over Innsmouth", borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft's famous tale of degeneration and monstrosity in crumbling coastal New England.  (Lovecraft is clearly a favorite inspiration at Pseudopod, so much so that for their 100th episode, they read his startling and evocative story "The Music of Erich Zann").  "Jihad..." is a kind of alternative history of Islamic terrorism, with the main character as a Sufi, and the terrorists as...well, I won't give it away, but if you know Lovecraft, you'll love this story.  Even if you don't, I think you'll find it a fun, creepy adventure.

Pseudopod has a sister podcast called "Escapepod", which I haven't checked out yet, but if it's up to the same high standards as Pseudopod, I'm sure I (and you) won't be disappointed.

Toss it in your feed and give a whirl.