Dubber Takes the Subway, Spoons Makes the Archive

(As usual, the part of this post you'll actually find really useful is near the end.)

Anyone who's in the Canadian podcast fishbowl or has listened to Description 18 might know my big tipping point in becoming a podcaster was listening to and guesting on a podcast called Dubber and Spoons Take the Bus, in which two media profs in Birmingham England would have an often-funny conversation on their bus ride home from work. On vacation in 2005, I rode on the bus with them for an episode on Canada Day, we hung out afterward with their respective wives and Dubber's son and all were lovely to me; then when I got home, I sent them an audio message saying how lovely they'd been and other general things, inspiring Dubber to say I should do a podcast, which eventually resulted in me doing this one.

In the years since, they podfaded - Spoons (James) moved to Australia with his wife to another prof-type job and furthered his career as an excellent photographer, and Dubber (Andrew, and originally from New Zealand) became one of the preeminent authorities on using various tools on the internet to create, promote, share and make money from music.

Dubber's expertise on that and radio brought him here to Toronto to speak at a big academic conference about radio at, of all places, my alma mater of York University. A couple nights ago, he came downtown and I was happy to reunite with him in actual physical space, having drinks with some great guys who had been to the latest edition of DemoCamp nearby that night. When things broke up, Dubber had the idea he was going to drop the equivalent of a week's rent to take a cab all the way back up to York, but I told him that was insane when he could get more than halfway there on our own public transit (actually, he could get the whole way up, but those buses to York from Downsview Station have always been kind of a drag). So I gave him a token (which he found really small and really odd) and introduced him to the wonders of the TTC. He survived to present the next morning, and will now go on to share his wisdom in consultancies with bands in Hamilton and Montreal. For more on his multitude of works which you'll find useful (most of them, anyways...), take a look through the links at andrewdubber.com.

But say you're a podcast listener who's noticed that many of your favourite podcasts have been less frequent in the summer as folks step back or recharge or do whatever it is they do. Looking for something to listen to in their place for a while? Consider the fact, then, that James has gathered most of all the old episodes of Dubber and Spoons Take the Bus (there were just under 50, and Dubber didn't really keep anything), and has put them on a new blog, thebuscast.com. Get a taste of it with these promos I helped them do back then, and decide for yourself if they'd be good summer replacement material.