VPRO's Marathon Interview

Het is een produktie die past bij de zomer. In podcast brengt de VPRO de oude marathon interviews uit. Dat gebeurt al tijden overigens, maar de levering geschiedt onregelmatig en vandaar deze post. In de afgelopen maand is er een grote lading interviews geherpubliceerd, waarvan ik menigeen al van een recensie heb voorzien. (feed)

Dit zijn ze:
Rijk de Gooijer
Jan Leijten
Louis Th. Lehmann
Abram de Swaan
Jan Blokker
Remco Campert
Martin Simek

Meer Het Marathon Interview:
Hans Galjaard,
Bert ter Schegget,
Lea Dasberg,
Rudi Kross,
Ina Muller van Ast,
Jan Wolkers.

Watch a World Cup stream with foreign IP

Besides being busy with a lot of serious stuff, I am also kept away from podcasts because of the World Cup. This is even a bit of a quest, as I love to watch football with Dutch commentary and I am stuck with Israeli TV. The Dutch national broadcaster offers live streams, but they are open to Dutch IP's only. So, I am shut out with my foreign IP. But there is a solution.

I found out that at Eurovision Sports, one can see the national broadcasts of the World Cup from some 36 European television stations - among them the Dutch. If you go to the Eurovisionsports site, you will get the game without commentary - which is also not bad, especially if internet traffic is heavy, as this stream is the most robust. In the sidebar you can click channels (1-12, 13-14 and 25-36) and choose your preferred broadcaster. Once you do, you get to enjoy the entire football broadcast from that station just as you would with a national IP on their own site.

Apart from the Dutch channels (Netherlands, Belgium), there are channels in French, German, English and many other languages.

Irish History Podcast

Here is a new podcast that is off to a promising start. The Irish History Podcast started a couple of months ago and has produced two fascinating episodes so far (feed). It has paid some attention to the earliest known inhabitants of Ireland - those barbarians the Greeks and Romans referred to. And it has begun a series about the Vikings.

When I was listening to this podcast I was reminded of the beginning of the Celtic Myth Podshow. This series kicked off two years earlier. It vividly retells Celtic myths and at the time started with the Irish myths. These Irish tales contained a lot of coming into existence and historized narrative. At the time I would have loved the CMP to compare the myths to history. And in exactly the same way, I was hoping, and am still hoping, the Irish History Podcast will take on Irish tales and address them as some kind of source for the earliest history of Ireland, or at least as a viable source to compare with what regular history makes of Irish history.

Maybe this is to come when the podcast reaches the middle ages, when most of those old tales were written down or to the later ages when Celtic culture was rediscovered as the roots of many from the British Isles. In any case, no history can go without historiography and the construction of histories, the imagined history if not as the actual history than as the cultural history. Yet, even without that, the Irish History podcast is a welcome addition to the world of history podcasts especially since it addresses a realm that nobody else pays that kind of attention to.

Reith Lectures 2010 (2)

Here is a quick heads up. The second lecture in the Reith Lecture series came out. Download it before the BBC takes it off line.

Martin Rees speaks of the challenges to science in the modern era. This lecture is aptly titled: Surviving the century.

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees explores the challenges facing science in the 21st century. Can we survive this century or will we destroy ourselves through bio-error or bio-terror? Professor Rees looks at the problems and explores some of the solutions science can provide.

Previously about the Reith Lectures 2010:
Reith Lectures 2010.

About the Reith Lectures in 2009:
A new politics of the common good,
The bioethics concern,
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market.

The usual suspects

Another weekend has passed. I am too busy to write extensive reviews, but here is a list of podcast whose newest episodes I listened to:

History 1c (UCLA)
New Books In History
Veertien Achttien
Volkis Stimme
Norman Centuries
In Our Time (BBC)
A History Of the World in a 100 objects (BBC)
Russian Rulers Podcast
Binge Thinking History

History of Jerusalem - UCLA

UCLA offers a course Jerusalem: The Holy City: A History of Jerusalem from Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel which initially had an audio feed, but that was discarded which left us with just the video feed.

There is a lot wrong with this way the course is offered. The sound of the video is poor, the camera is static so there is not much of a gain in seeing the lecturer (Professor Robert Cargill) and also the view on the screen with his slides is rather poor. What one might gain in seeing a bit of the slides is traded for the general drawbacks of vodcast: the files are big, the download takes a lot of time (and often fails), the material takes a lot of space and many players do not support the format.

Still, all you needed to know about the Middle-East in a 3000 year span nut shell is offered in this course. It shows how Jerusalem takes on huge meaning for everyone involved in spite of its poor military and economic weight. More than anything this course shows how politics and the course of history can be dominated by our constructions of holiness alone.