Ep 120 - A Boy and His Dog, by Harlan Ellison

Overdue

Headgum

Craig Getting, Arts, Books, Podcasts, Literature, Comedy, Andrew Cunningham

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2015

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Harlan Ellison is a man whose reputation precedes him. His long and storied career as a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer is peppered with curmudgeonly diatribes and public incidents, many as interesting as the best of the thousand or so stories he churned out across books, television and film.

His classic story A Boy and His Dog takes quite a dim view of a post-WW3 apocalypse, so buckle up for another week spent discussing the depth's of humanity's depravity. In an attempt to lighten the mood, we also talk about dog literacy and allow Andrew's cat Newman to make a cameo.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well-told tale,
0:05.1	they will not shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.
0:10.4	Plus, these are books you should have read by now.
0:30.4	What can I overdo? What can I overdo? This is a podcast about the books you've been
0:39.5	meaning to read. My name is Andrew, that guy's Craig. We want to take a minute out of our busy
0:45.2	podcasting schedule to tell you about an issue that's very near and dear to our hearts.
0:52.0	And that issue is dog literacy. And I'm going to let Craig tell you all about it. Craig?
0:58.5	I didn't know we were doing the show yet. You're doing it. You just like packed me in the car and drove away.
1:08.0	What just happened? It is late. You want to get the episode out. I understand.
1:13.0	Dog literacy. Dog literacy. So I saw a program that the Evanston Public Library from Evanston,
1:19.6	Illinois tweeted out where they were teaching dogs to read sort of.
1:25.2	Okay. What method were they using? Because there are a lot of different ones. And scholars
1:31.1	can't agree on the one that is the most effective. Well, they're using some. Nobody's ever tried before.
1:35.8	Little kids. Okay. So the way to get your dog to read is to train your dog to become a therapy
1:43.4	dog. Okay. And then you bring it into a library and then a young reader practices reading
1:51.8	to the dog. And that's good because the kids read at the at like a reading level maybe just above
1:58.3	the dog. So they're not like challenging the dog too early.
2:04.4	Reading at a 27 dog years reading level. Yeah. And run spot run is offensive so they don't read
2:11.7	that one. Yeah. I mean, it's there's been some debate because you know, some people don't want
2:17.2	to censor it. They say, you know, it's a product of its time, whatever. And then some people
2:22.0	are really like they just think that the fact that they make spot run and everybody's looking at
2:27.8	them, they just they find that objectifying. And I mean, I can see their point. Yeah, I've read
	...

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