In love

I have to admit that Miguel has to share my heart with NPR. We have talked about writing a love letter to Scott Simon. I do not know a better voice than his to wake up to on Saturday mornings. I must admit that I haven't always like NPR. My dad drove me to school for a few years in high school since I had an "early bird" class, and we always listened to Morning Edition. I guess I wasn't cultered enough at that time in order to appreciate it. In my senior year of college, the Bellingham signal was poor at the Pink House and I didn't want to listen to the jazz on KPLU. (I guess I'm still not cultured enough to appreciate jazz.) KWMU in St Louis was the first station of which I became a member. I listened to NPR all of the time when I wasn't studying medicine - while cooking, eating, playing with the cat, etc. To partially make up for not having Thistle and Shamrock in St Louis, this station introduced me to the program To The Best of Our Knowledge which is this wonderful show dedicated to theme per hour. Here is the description from the website.

"TTBOOK began as an audio magazine of ideas - two hours of smart, entertaining radio for people with curious minds. It's sort of journalistic (because some of us are, or used to be, journalists), but it's never about the President's speech to the U.N., weapons inspections in Iraq, or yesterday's stock market disaster. It's the kind of show that would spend an hour on the future of capitalism, or on the roots of Islamic fundamentalism. It might also spend an hour on hair. Or salt. Or pirates, road trips, psychic phenomena, house cleaning, animal intelligence, high energy physics, or how to say you're sorry. (You'll find all those shows in our archives.) It's the kind of show where someone might mention Charlotte Bronte or Anthony Trollope in one segment, U2 or They Might Be Giants in another."

My favorite NPR station has to be KOPB in Portland. If I though I listened to radio a lot in St Louis, I listened even more in Portland. I got to listen to Thistle and Shamrock again, but alas, no TTBOOK.

Now that I'm in Port Angeles, I restrospecively appreciate KOPB even more. We have access to the "classical music" station affiliated with WSU and while it has some of the good care NPR stations, we have to resort to listening to our favorite programs online.

I can't imagine not having NPR around and getting news solely from the local newspaper. My dad finds it somewhat appalling that the radio is my only source of news. He thinks it is biased as a result. Sure, NPR is a little liberal leaning but my biased view is that it is fairly unbiased.