Tag: Podcasting

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Episode 56: Reformatting

On this episode, we talk about reformatting this podcast or possibly starting a new one to supplement this show. Either way, the emphasis would be on the three things we talk most about in our day-to-day life: Music, food, and politics. And we plan to let the expletives fly.

Kidding aside, all three topics are connected in many ways and all three provide more than enough to fill a lifetime of shows.

And on that note, this episode also delves into the relationship between politics and music, including several interesting music documentaries that either have been released or will be coming soon. In keeping with our usual focus on LGBTQIA+ issues, we also talk about Will and Harper, the documentary about Will Farrell’s longtime friend Harper who came out as trans. We’ll have much more to say about that in coming episodes.

Finally, related to the topic of food and “wellness,” as they say in corporate-speak, we talk about the fairly successful healthy eating and exercise routine we adopted — and more importantly, stuck to — over the past year.

We hope you enjoy the show, and please feel free to follow us on Instagram (@jenn_and_dave). Until next time! 

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Episode 51: Time Warp

Hey, we’re back already! After a less-than-consistent podcasting schedule, we’re posting an episode for the second week in a row. Which is pretty remarkable, all things considered.

This week we talk about using people’s preferred names. That is, everybody’s preferred names. Not just trans and nonbinary people. It’s a sign of respect and you should get in the habit of doing it.

On a sort of related note, we talk about the term nibling, a gender-neutral collective term for nieces and nephews, which is particularly useful if you have nonbinary relatives with that relation to you. Again, it’s all about treating people with respect.

And because we’ve been inconsistent with posting lately, we talk about trying to record and post more often and suggest that you might be interested in some of our earlier episodes, including Episodes 49 and 50, in which we talk about our recent trip to Ireland to see Bruce Springsteen and a host of other things.

That leads us to revisit our recent impromptu/informal high school “reunion” and how we reconnected with old friends. We also spend some time talking about maintaining lifelong friendships and how valuable they can be for your mental health. And we talk about surprise parties, which are somehow related to this topic. You’ll just have to trust us.

From there, we recap our past couple of weeks, including walking in the Chicago Pride Parade with Lambda Legal, a fantastic organization that advocates (and litigates!) for LGBTQIA+ individuals and people living with HIV. We did an awful lot of walking that day — and struggled to find parking, as you do in Chicago — but it was a great time.

Finally, we talk about our youngest daughter’s college graduation party, living in a swamp, and the curious (and annoying!) morning time warp. Which is an appropriate way to wrap up this episode!

So, we hope you enjoy the show, and please feel free to follow us on Instagram (@jenn_and_dave). You can also follow us on the site formerly known as Twitter, where our joint account is @JennandDave1 and the podcast account is @itsotetPodcast. Until next time! 

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Episode 20: What Level of Dante’s Inferno Is This?

Well, we started out on a light note, talking about watching a certain game show only old people watch and setting up our cat “daycare” so we can work from home in relative peace …

And then we went on at some length about podcasting and making videos for our Instagram page and our YouTube channel, talking about the complexity of recording audio and video separately and trying to sync them up (which is why, ultimately, we settled on podcasting).

But then it got weird. We could not, of course, let the week pass without commenting on the principal at Tallahassee Classical School who got fired for showing students the statue of David, as the school had done every year in recent memory. The bright spot, of course, being that just about every news outlet that covered the story, including NPR in the story we link to here, had to show the … uh … Full Monty, so to speak. 

And there’s an even weirder angle to this story: According Peter Schorsch on Twitter, school board chairman Barney Bishop III, the guy who asked for the principal’s “resignation” over the statue of David, has some rather interesting, er, garden statues of his own.

Finally, we couldn’t avoid the other awful story of the week: another school shooting, this time in Nashville, where a semiautomatic-rifle-wielding maniac killed three young children and three school staffers at a private Christian school. We’ve talked about this before — because, of course, these incidents happen so frequently — but, as parents, we and our kids have lived with this insanity almost nonstop since Columbine in 1999. 

And as awful and inexcusable as this latest school massacre was, there is yet another awful twist. According to Nashville police, shooter might be transgender, though that’s not yet confirmed according to Reuters, so, naturally, the worst people in the world are blaming the trans community as a whole for the murders of these innocent kids. They claim that there’s some alarming uptick in trans or nonbinary people committing mass shootings, citing this incident, the December 2022 shooting in Colorado Springs where the murderer may or may not be nonbinary, and a couple of other incidents over the past few years. But here’s the thing: even if those incidents involve trans or nonbinary people, the number of trans and nonbinary people who commit crimes like this is infinitesimally small compared to the endless stream of mass shootings that happen in schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores … and nearly everywhere else in America.

So you have to ask yourselves: What level of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the kinds of monsters who use the killing of innocent children as an excuse to promote bigotry and hate against marginalized people? 

Anyway, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast. 

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