Running on a treadmill is not the most engaging of occupations, so both Mer and I try to multi-task while we exercise. Meredith is going back through all 84 lectures on American literature from the Teaching Company, and she is well over half-way done (she gets in one lecture per day that she exercises).

I just spent the last three or four weeks in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I have had this book recommended to me several times, so I went to the library and got it on CD, and listened to about 30 minutes at a time when I ran. The reader was excellent, changing her voice for each character. This is important, because to my surprise, Middlemarch was about the town of Middlemarch, and had at least ten important characters and several minor characters as well. I’m not too bright when it comes to names, so it was helpful to have the different voices to get the characters straight. The book is very well written, and the plot lines are interesting, especially in the last half of the book (once the plot lines are fully developed for all the primary characters). I’m glad to have “read” the book, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a highly regarded book.

Having finished up Middlemarch yesterday (on Thanksgiving), I needed something new to listen to. I did download the entire radio program The Shadow from archive.org, but I decided to see if anything else caught my fancy there. So, I went back to archive.org, and I was delighted. They have lots of free (legal) music – concerts recordered by fans and posted online with the bands’ blessing. I made an entire (free!) CD of Eddie From Ohio songs that are not on any of their other recordings (songs they only did in concert).

I also discovered that archive.org has many public domain books online that have been read by volunteers. I commend the program, but the readings are good amateur recordings, which are a little hard to take after the professional recordings of Middlemarch, Animal Farm, and Jane Eyre that I have heard in the last year. I kept looking.

What I found that made me quite happy was archive.org’s listing of the Burns and Allen radio show from the 40s. I had always heard that George Burns and Gracie Allen were extremely funny, but my exposure to their comedy had been limited to just a few clips here and there. Archive.org had (for free!) several years’ worth of the show online. I downloaded three years’ worth of programs and converted them to iTunes (they come as mp3s). I got my first listen this morning.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Gracie is a master of one-liners, and they are delivered flawlessly. I was laughing out loud on the treadmill, even after running for over 20 minutes. The humor was all clean, and the things that Gracie said were always funny, even when I knew what was coming (which was not often). George plays the stright man perfectly, never laughing or seeing anything unusual in what Gracie says. Beautiful.

My only complaint from the program that I heard was that the ads were placed in the show, as part of the show. There is no way to do subtle product placement on radio. Having someone come in and randomly start extolling the virtues of “Swan Soap, the soap doctors recommend for babies” in the middle of the scene was awkward and irritating. My best guess as to why they chose to advertise that way was to make sure listeners heard the commercial – you could not get up for a drink during the ad because it was part of the show.

Still, even with the odd ads in the show, the Burns and Allen show is worth downloading from the link above. It is good, clean fun, and it sure helps move 25 minutes of running right along.

Oh – for history buffs out there, it was interesting to hear Gracie encouraging Americans to save all the paper they could for the war effort.

Exercise – funny stuff!