Over the past few months I have been working through the North American Congress on Latin America’s (NACLA) rather large collection of microfilm on the Nicaraguan Revolution. The collection is held on twenty rolls of microfilm with at least 1,000 pages on each roll, which translates to roughly 20,000 individual pages of documents. Luckily my department has a digital microfilm machine, as opposed to the difficult analog models, but going through such a large microfilm collection can be a very tedious task. Too keep me from losing my mind during this process I have been listening to a number of podcasts.
The first, and in my humble opinion foremost, of these is Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Bang! Bang!, which is a weekly podcast featuring such popular comedians as Paul F. Tompkins, Nick Kroll, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. The show is beyond absurd as each weeks guests create bizarre characters and improvise hilarious encounters. Below is this weeks episode, which had me laughing out loud in the library yesterday. If you like strange Irish women and robotic dogs I would recommend taking a listen.
When I have run out of episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang! I often turn to How Did This Get Made?, a podcast in which comedians Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas (also a regular on Comedy Bang! Bang!) rib one terrible movies they have watched. If you liked MST3K but thought that it could use more profanity this is the show for you.
These two shows are my staples, with a little music mixed in. They have helped me get through hundreds of pages of documents with my mind intact, and hopefully they will get me through hundreds more.
Andrew W. Wilson 