Now that I had my live music fix and my ears will be ringing for the next two weeks after the acoustic assault on my hair cells in my inner ear by Was (not Was) and an added bout of flu, it was time again to look for some good podcasts that keep my company in my sickbed. Already a happy listener of Steve Curwood’s ‘Living on Earth‘, I tried some of other shows that Public Radio International is serving over teh intarwebs. From what I understand (and please correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s complicated) PRI is a sort of of competitor to that other content provider for Americans with brains, NPR. I don’t particularly understand how they get their funding (my friend Panamaus one day tried to explain, but to no avail) but I think that while NPR gets some federal money, PRI mainly lives off grants and support from charitable organisations.

Anyway, I like ‘living on earth’, and so I tried out some of the other PRI stuff. Their Technology podcast, while more geared towards an younger geographically challenged American Audience, covers a good spectrum of issues and certainly is more informative than the BBC’s rather excruciating ‘Digital Planet’.

Even better is ‘the world‘, which manages to be a quirky, daily show with more unusual stories from around the world, a sort of ‘from our own correspondent’ with bells and whistles.

So, these two go onto the list. If I can believe ‘the West Wing’, democratic white house staffers are more into public radio than those dastardly republicans. So, let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Well done PRI.