Smodder's Day Put a Smile on My Face

Smodcast keeps me coming back. I like it, and I like Kevin Smith.

I'm not one of the frenzied followers that filled his message board with pleas to come back throughout the hiatus in the podcast release while he was filming Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but I check in every Monday or so and see if there's a new podcast to upload, because honestly, nothing goes better with morning workouts than listening to the world's premier couch potato talk about regular stuff with his best friends and family.

Since the hiatus, he quickly quashed any high expectations and fell into his old groove with his buddy Scot Mosier, and sorry Scot, still not sure which guy you are, but I like you as a voice and person. This is not a wait up until the minute you can upload it podcast, it's a nice way to spend half an hour or so when you can't do much else and beats tuning into MSNBC or something on the gym TV's.

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Smodcast - the waiting.....

Over at the View Askew board, thousands are anxiously, sometimes annoyingly, waiting for the new Smod.

Just exactly what does that mean, you ask? Well, the Smod is Smodcast, which I have written about before, a Podcast put out by Kevin Smith, director of several very good movies. As he puts it in the radio ad for 3 minute movies, "I've been known to direct some stuff.." paraphrased. He doesn't make a big production of it, but his podcast was my first, and still my favorite. The first one is always special, right?

The wait is for the last couple months while his usual weekly Smodcast went on hiatus while he was filming his latest flick, Zack and Mary Make a Porno. I mean, c'mon, he does Smodcast for free, what did we expect? From the incessant whining on his message boards, another of my first deep forays, you'd think he took a dump on every one of his fans by not getting somewhere and recording one of the precious Smodcasts.

I admit, I checked back to the download spot for Smodcast quite a bit these last few weeks, and occasionally looked on the message board to see if there was real news, but I was not part of the chorus of whines coming from his Smodcast thread. Oh sure, the occasional voice of reason, but most of the time, whining, on what is usually a very interesting thread.

And so this weekend, finally a new post on his blog, talking about the layoff, and the filming, and generally Kevin being the Kevin that makes his blog and Smodcast very interesting. The guy isn't Warhol, and thats good, he's just a decent guy, sharing what is a very cool life with everyone. I've never sensed posturing or backpatting, and it's almost always fun.

Also, he very often frequents his own message board, chiming in occasionally, but not getting into prolonged discussions. He even managed to reply to one of my first posts, after I had finally caved in and joined up. "Welcome aboard," I think it was, or something of the like. How cool is that?

It looks like the wait is almost over, Kev says, "..as soon as the recording equipment is back in L.A. ", and that works for me. I'll surely write some kind of review then, but for now I just wanted to talk about it, here. Not on the now slightly annoying thread. As I've mentioned, I pop up on the boards now once in a while, there are some good threads, about everything from the Writer's Strike to Reaper.

The header picture and smodcast links are pointing to where I am guessing the next podcast will be, so when they are not broken any more, the wait is over.

SMODCAST - Hanging out with Kevin Smith

SMODCAST

I've fallen behind the times, near critically. There has to be a juncture in which a person realizes that he or she is so detached from anything that is current that they give up and content themselves with the way of life they had grown comfortable with. You really don't have to change with the times if you don't want to, to put it in programming terms, going about your business is backward compatible. Sure you can pay your bills online and get just about everything else, but how many people still make sure they mail everything off?

My Dad, now gone, refused to use answering machines, or own a cell phone. How many people are there like that walking around that you don't even give a single thought to? Cell phones themselves are a cultural divide, now compounded with texting, camera phones, and MP3 players. At some point, everyone comes around a little, but it wasn't too long ago that the phone in my grandparents house was so important that we turned down the television and all sat in hushed silence as Grandpa answered.

All this just to say that I just recently discovered Podcasts. Yea yea yea, I know, but I have always and still do listen to a lot of talk radio, sports talk radio. I like music just fine, but after a while the songs start repeating, no matter what station you listen to, and none of them play the off the chart stuff I like. I started listening to Podcasts because I get tired of Sports talk radio too, or at least certain hosts that only grate on my nerves, adn sometimes you can't get good radio reception out here in the sticks.

The first Podcast I've found I can just sit back and listen to, often entertained and rarely annoyed, is Smodcast, with Kevin Smith and Scot Mosier. Everyone knows who Kevin Smith is, Scot Mosier is in his movies too, but I'm not sure who he is. I'm just not enough of a fan I guess, but listening to these two guys talk, I don't think it will bother either one of them for me to write that.

It's not a crazy zoo atmosphere, it's just the two of them talking, and they are funny a lot of the time. Just Kevin Smith's sheer openness helps things along, but he is a little too obsessed with homosexuality sometimes. Every Smodcast, at this point there are 9, at some point covers some homo-erotic episode or comparison, and though there's nothing wrong with that, it gets tedious.