It’s not my anniversary, per se, but I’ll tell you a little secret. I’ve got Todd breathing down my neck for a show blog and I figure since it’s late I’ll butter him up a bit. What follows is not nostalgia, because times clearly were shitter then.
“There is no reason every newspaper doesn’t have a podcast. It’s really almost embarrassing.” I said this to my then-boss and editor of the Bayside Gazette Tom Melville in the Spring of 2007. As part of my pitch to get the paper to sponsor a podcast, which I knew at the time to be the real future of news. Reporters talking about the news is the most real coverage you’re ever going to get, especially if cursing is allowed.
We produced the Tom and Tony show on and off for three years, right up until the six months before the paper got sold and things got ugly for all concerned. Not long before, Tom suggested we have on this skater dude who did something with music, maybe, or skating or photography or something. He had a functional website (which remains a rarity on the Eastern Shore up until today) promoting Ocean City. GoodCleanFunLife.com was odd for us because it seemed to suggest wholesomeness. The photos they were posting clearly were not wholesome, so we took them to be, what was called back in the 1980s “straight edge.”
Straight edge people were religious (or at least alcohol and drug free which in it’s monomaniacal bent is all the same to me) and celebrated the fact that they could party without any chemical reinforcement. I didn’t doubt it, per se, but never got the point. It’s stupid enough to have too much to drink and go around yelling, “I’m so fuckin’ drunk!” in people’s faces. To behave the same way except to yell, “I’m so effin’ sober!” (straight edgers also don’t curse) was just embarrassing for all involved.
So when Todd came on the show to promote his website to the three people on the Eastern Shore who understood that there was such a thing as a podcast, I was ill-prepared to interview him. What we had discovered about having guests on the podcast was that they were really bad interviews. They stuttered, they left a lot of dead air and they were confused that we were asking them questions that required elaboration. In fact, we tried buying them beers just so they would have enough liquid courage to string together a couple of sentences.
That wasn’t Todd. He was clear and engaging and receptive to bad jokes. When Tom bailed it took me all of three seconds to propose doing a show together. The show eventually became the Todcast and, although it’s changed a bunch in the last three years, Todd shows up every week.
GCFL celebrates its 5th Anniversary this week, appropriately by starting something new. The first event they covered was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Ocean City. This year, although they’ll provide some coverage, they have other things to do. This is, in some ways, an inaugural year for them. They’re going full-time running Todd’s media empire so they are more in demand than they were in 2009, when they were just the only ones covering the parade for free.
In this weeks Todcast we hit, in no particular order the
The HMRA Orange Crush the clock silliness (I have a passive-agressive relationship with the Orange Crush), Sysco’s support for the buy local economy, the Netflix network and the future of video entertainment, Burley Oak Pickles, the Eastern Shore Brewery, and tales of stolen ceramic cows.
Best quote of the show:
“If you don’t alarm your cow, you’re certainly going to find it stolen.”
You can follow Todd and Tony individually on Twitter, or collectively by subscribing to the Todcast on iTunes. If you can’t stand only getting 30 minutes of Tony’s dulcet tones, or you’re interested in home brewing, check out the Beer with Strangers podcast. If it’s his writing you can’t stand to be without, the No Relation blog is open 24/7.