My iTunes playlist for this year, titled simply “2011,” represents my favorite songs of the year. And it’s exactly double the size of “2010″ and “2009.” That’s a function both of great music and great access to music. I was guided to these songs by many sources, and am forever grateful for the recommendations. It took more consternation than is socially acceptable, but here are my favorite 10 songs of the year.

“Just a Figment” by Morning Teleportation

After listening to this song, I went ahead and previewed Morning Teleportation’s entire album. And it was exhausting. Just about every track shifts directions multiple times before calling it a day. But on this track, puzzle pieces fly through the air, falling to the ground in a perfect fit. There’s so much here that you can love multiple parts of the song. Like, say, the Castlevania-esque synthesizer at the 3:40 mark. But be sure to notice when things get especially crazy at the end. Amid a whirlwind of guitars, the plaintive horn keeps playing, giving method to the madness.

“Under the Gun” by Apex Manor

No song better exemplified the difference between “cost” and “value” than this one in 2011. For most of the year, Amazon dangled this perfect slice of guitar pop for free, hoping to entice listeners into checking out The Year of Magical Drinking. That album features some similarly stellar songs, including the languid “Coming To.” But I kept coming back to this uptempo rocker with the simple, insistent beat. It’s the type of song that makes you say, “They used to play songs like this on the radio!” then proceed to slap yourself for ever sounding so old.

“Goshen” by Beirut

This song represents one of my favorite albums on the year, Beirut’s The Rip Tide, and it features all the trappings: simple piano playing, sad-sack lyrics and almost a martial beat near the end to give the song enough life to allow denial of any accusations of depression should a friend or family member bust in when this is playing. “East Harlem” is the most quintessential Beirut track on the album, but “Goshen” is the highlight for me. (Odd fact: according to Wikipedia, more than half the states in America feature a municipality named Goshen).

“That’s Where You’re Wrong” by Arctic Monkeys

After careful consideration, this song wins the title of “Best Song in 2011 That Features ‘Blunderbuss’ in the Lyrics.” (Better luck next year, LMFAO!) Alex Turner, through his myriad musical projects, consistently showcases a talent for lyrics. On this song, the bassline serves as the steadying base for a mix of echoing guitar and tight drumming. I almost wanted to put Turner’s solo version of  “Piledriver Waltz” off the Submarine soundtrack in this spot for making a singalong of such odd non sequiters, but this song is built to withstand time much better.

“Gratisfaction” by The Strokes

Ten years in, The Strokes made a divisive album. And while I haven’t had a chance to examine all the Angles, “Gratisfaction” can stand on its own as a pop gem. As the commenters on this YouTube clip highlight, the song sounds so reminiscent of some FM rock staple of the past. The initial stutter calls to mind the great vocal trick in “Give Me Just a Little More Time.” It’s The Strokes with at least one pass of the comb through the hair, and it cleans up quite well. Plus, this made Edgar Wright’s Top 30, a guy who makes great movies and dates Anna Kendrick. His word should almost be considered gospel at this point.

“Go to Hell” by Raphael Saadiq

This is the album I listened to the most in 2011, a great collection of songs that arrived just in time to blare out the car window this summer. “Heart Attack” immediately demands your attention, but I came to look forward to this song the most. It’s a throwback in the best sense, with Saadiq’s most plaintive vocals, a classic incorporation of strings and some great backing vocals.

“Lucky Now” by Ryan Adams

This is Ryan Adams’ singer/songwriter side distilled down to its essence. I wasn’t blown away on first listen by the rest of the album, but this song stands with his best work over the past decade-plus.

“You Been Lyin’” by Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears

You Been Lyin’ (Album Version)
My most quoted lyric from 2011? “They’re dropping bombs just to test the science!” The only thing more straight-ahead than the rock contained in this song is my line of sight when using the troughs at Wrigley Field.

“All Night, All Right” by Clive Tanaka y su orquesta

I’m not the biggest fan of processing vocals through electronic means, especially when it means just bumping up the tone-deaf to the level of barely competent. But I love how the vocals abandon any pretense of naturalism on this song, allowing it to become an electro-pop classic. The video in my head features a floor full of robots dancing their little batteries out at Studio 54.

“Codex” by Radiohead

Two of my favorite bands, Radiohead and Coldplay, both came out with albums in 2011. And while Coldplay disappointed in the way they decided to write big songs built for generic stadium venues, Radiohead’s King of Limbs disappointed in how the songs seem out of place when played almost anywhere. For want of a handhold, this album seems lost. Then “Codex” kicks in and tricks the mind into thinking that all that came before makes more sense. I choose to take the song out of its element and enjoy it on its own, and maybe the album will kick in for me sometime after 2011.

Other songs/groups receiving serious consideration: the return to form from The Dodo’s, the joyful ridiculousness of The Wombats, a damn fine debut by GIVERS, a heartfelt jam from The Rapture of all bands and two great songs from Noah and the Whale: Just Before We Met and L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. And … and … and …

They serve as workout partners, walk companions, backseat passengers and workplace buddies. Podcasts – as a medium – bring conversations to where we are, everywhere within ear(bud)shot. The best ones, the ones we manually check on iTunes subscriptions before a sync-and-go, create downloadable environments in which we feel like an important part of a conversation. Subscriptions come and go, but these podcasts proved to be my favorites in 2011.

The Basketball Jones – In both good times for the sport and bad, TBJ proved to be an indispensable part of being a fan of the NBA. The daily video show emanating from The Score’s Toronto studios spurred the excitement of an already stellar 2010 playoffs, breaking down each night’s action with passion and proper context. When the Dirkus Circus ended its run, though, labor issues clouded the future of the league and the podcast. The summer saw the full implementation of “The BLANK Jones,” bringing the goofiness at the periphery of the daily show to the forefront by talking in half-hour increments about everything from karaoke to the movie Real Steel. But the most impressive part of the podcast’s year began just as the league announced its first cancelled games. The show took its act on the road for the No Season Required tour, including a Chicago stop I was lucky enough to attend. And it helped lead to little videos like this, which provided proper distraction from the realization we wouldn’t get to see Derrick Rose glide to the hoop for a full 82 games in 2011-12:

Firewall & Iceberg – Overwhelmed by the steady stream of new shows debuting seemingly every week? TV critics Dan Fienberg and Alan Sepinwall provide a great navigational tool through these choices, and complement the show with in-depth discussions on the shows (Breaking Bad) that deserve them. The disagreements are slight, and most of the jokes are dampened by the destroyer of timing known as Skype. But when either host gets on a roll about a show he really likes or really H8s, it’s a must-listen.

The Flop House – I found myself in a quiet desk job this summer, alone with my thoughts and some JavaScript code for hours on end. A review in The A.V. Club’s Podmass feature pointed me to The Flop House, and it became my home away from home during those quiet work hours. The most recent episodes, focusing in principle on one recent bad movie release, hinted at a camaraderie and humor among Dan McCoy, Stuart Wellington and Elliott Kalan that developed over time. So I downloaded the entire 80-or-so episode back catalogue, because time plus curiosity always equals a test of bandwidth. And it proved to be a worthy waste of time, something that can’t always be said about the films they discuss.

Giant Bombcast – As a casual gamer who arrived at the newest generation of hardware a few years late, I caught up with Gamespot’s Hotspot podcast. But recent changes to that show (video, more compact, less nonsense) left me wanting more. The cup runneth over in the way Giant Bombcast filled that void. Whereas the Hotspot appeared to stumble in what it wanted to be, one episode of the Bombcast revealed Jack Palance levels of confidence. The hosts will dissect the new releases, but aren’t beholden to the format and will digress into recent releases, older games or off-topic conversations as need be. Most of my friends now pick up diapers much more often than a controller, but this podcast allows me listen in on what our conversations might have been like if social status hadn’t changed since the Goldeneye days.

Never Not Funny presents Rock Solid – This music podcast started somewhat conspicuously, with sound level issues marring the full impact of the debut episode featuring hosts Pat Francis and Gary Lucy. But the show quickly found its footing in its unabashed love of all kinds of music, organized conceptually each episode. Be it songs starting with a certain letter or favorite solo albums, the selections hit on rare gems that don’t always coincide with the accepted notions of what’s cool in music. And, yes, that means Journey. But both guys are quite funny in bantering about each selection, no surprise given their respective writing and performing careers. And five months into show, it has resisted any ruts, a testament to their broad taste in music and their favorite songs about broads.

NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour – This show, helmed by Linda Holmes, takes the concept of the podcast as a controlled conversation and inches the show closer to the ideal. The regular panelists, discussing a wide swath of popular culture, own such a unique chemistry that any time one of the crew is missing, it tips the scales in imperceptible ways and I almost refuse to listen. If you think NPR can’t be funny, Glen Weldon will prove you wrong. If you think an NPR host can’t love both a good stage production and a well-placed sexual innuendo, Trey Graham will prove you wrong. And Stephen Thompson proves that even a Green Bay Packers fan can move beyond understanding culture as something cheese-related. The weekly Friday release matches the mood of the show perfectly.

Reasonable Discussions – If anyone could channel resources into an informative, engaging pop culture podcast, you’d think it would be The AV Club. A strong stable of critics makes the site required reading, and the staff retooled its previous podcast into a more organized distillation of cultural criticism (and a few laughs, in case you were scared off by the daunting nature of that description). It would be easy to call it a nerdier, more specific version of the Pop Culture Happy Hour. But the show has its own unique attributes, including an implementation of those critics that focuses on their areas of expertise. I think in the new year this podcast will find more ways to exhibit the sense of fun that’s present in the writing. Right now, various “games” among the staff fill that role, which go on a little too long and showcase a level of knowledge that alienates even fellow pop culture obsessives.

Rockford Register Star podcasts – My friend Melissa Westphal contributes to this podcast, so I am horribly biased in this regard. But this shows the way that a regional paper can engage with the local audience in ways that don’t always have to be specifically local. Westphal, Chris Soprych and Will Pfeifer break down episodes of Breaking Bad and Community for those of us whose options for conversation at the water cooler might be lacking. But I really enjoy the Monday podcast called What We Watched with Soprych and Pfeifer. Each episode starts with the box office breakdown and DVD release schedule, then diverges into corners of the movie landscape both appreciable and odd. They wade through the pop culture mire, and while it isn’t always worth their effort, the conversation is always worth your time.

Joe Posnanski’s Poscast - 2011 was a tumultuous one for Posnanski, who took leave from his usual assortment of prolific blog posts and columns to focus on a Joe Paterno book, back when that idea seemed innocuous. It’s hard to say what the Jerry Sandusky case has done to his project, and Posnanski wisely stayed away from the public avenues of his Twitter feed and Sports Illustrated blog when initial steps into the spotlight showed that the post-revelation tide threatened to tear everyone involved asunder. Before going silent, though, he started an interview podcast. As previous examples can attest, I much prefer the “usual gang” setup over the varying nature inherent in interview podcasts. But I particularly enjoyed any time Posnanski talked with writer/producer Michael Schur. They geeked out over baseball story lines throughout the year, and capped each episode with a conceptual fantasy draft (“Five Athletes You’d Invite Over For Dinner”). Both Schur and Posnanski clearly enjoyed themselves, and – selfishly – I hope they come back soon.

Up and In: The Baseball Prospectus Podcast – I made a freakin’ Flash soundboard for this show. What else can I tell you?

After months of being scared to fully jump aboard the Cardinals bandwagon (“What’s that behind the corner there … Corey P-p-p-patterson?!?! Zoinks!”), I have given myself fully to the cause in ways that seem just as rational as relying on Jeff Suppan and Jeff Weaver to pitch your favorite team to a title.

To get in the mood for Game 162 tonight, I watched/listened to one the finest montages set to screen: Mark Safan’s “Win in the End” rallying the Beavers to a comeback in Teen Wolf. Squint your eyes, and the faces start to resemble the last few weeks for the Cardinals …

Remembrances of Sept. 11, 2001 inevitably will touch upon the world of pop culture and how that world changed, and music certainly played a part in finding ways to represent feelings that those of us outside the immediately affected struggled to express. Two songs immediately come to mind, and they show how our memories can compress and extend time to fit our needs. The first – Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – became associated with the tragedy for both being played and not being played. The song showed up on an advisory list created by Clear Channel as a song to avoid broadcasting on the radio. The decision made as much sense in the moment as it does now, especially when compared to some of the obvious plane crash and apocalyptic songs also on the list. This became abundantly clear on television Sept. 21, when a fundraising telethon called “America: A Tribute to Heroes” featured Paul Simon performing the 30-year-old song and giving it a new context.

The second song, “The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen, arrived more than nine months after the terrorist attack. The album deals with a host of themes brought on by the events of the past year, arriving seemingly at a perfect moment of reflection and expression (be it by design or the time-related necessities inherent in the creation of major label albums). As we travel further away from those dark days of 2001, the time between inspiration and production of “The Rising” grows shorter in our memories.

So much of the rest of pop culture from that era must deal with the inevitable comparisons to the new world it entered. Critics heaped meaning – both in representation and escapism –  on entertainment that just didn’t deserve the microscope. Anything that survived that vortex surely needed to stand on its own merits. Three albums scheduled for release during September 2001 did just that, and have come to be both of the time and timeless in their respective influence and appeal.

The Strokes – Is This It

Of the time: Perhaps nothing could be more telling about the music business in 2001 than to say I already had a burned copy of this album well before the September 2001 release date. Caught between the file sharing boom and the rise of music blogs, The Strokes built buzz with live shows that took them to where they made fans the fastest: the UK and Australia. In what will have to be considered a long line of music business missteps of the era, the various country-specific record labels released Is This It to coincide with live events throughout the summer. This turned out to be a great move for local fans … and anyone with file-sharing software on their hard drive. Audiogalaxy featured rips of the album by late July.

“Hard to Explain,” the first single on the album, almost seemed designed for the less-than-optimal mp3 bitrates. The production filtered the live drums to the point of sounding like a drum machine, and Julian Casablancas’ vocals welcomed any and all layers of mystery and distortion. It sounded fresher to the young ears of a music fan who didn’t grow up with the influences distilled by The Strokes than critics who could pick out the musical and affectation precedents. But compared to the competition, almost anything would do.

It’s easy to make jokes about the songs that end up topping the Billboard charts, but any mystery as to why The Strokes were seen as heralds of an alternative rock sound can be answered with this list: Lifehouse, Train, Crazy Town, matchbox twenty and Creed. All enjoyed sales success in 2001.

Sept. 11 altered this album in one significant way. The band decided to swap out the sneering “NYC Cops” (“…They ain’t too smaaaaaart”) with “When It Started” on the U.S. CD version of the album. Both sound like they belong on the album, and it would be easy to give the edge to “NYC Cops” just on its rebel merits alone. But it’s a great song, with a sinister guitar riff and bass line setting the mood from the outset. Ten years later, neither iTunes nor Amazon feature the studio version of the song for download.

Timeless: The band has struggled to live up to its debut album in the years since its release, but are still seen as the impetus for a genre alternately defined as “minimally produced,” “garage rock” and, most snidely, “‘The’ bands.” This managed to both highlight and marginalize bands over the next few years, with bands like The Vines taking The Strokes’ sneer to hilarious excess and The Hives highlighting the goofier and pop-ier aspects of the genre.

As the band struggles to meet its previous expectations, Is This It proves much easier to return to. It’s a jittery, energetic bolt of kinetic energy. One that bypasses tapping into the memories of listening to it for the first time and heads for a universal place found in both a 21 year old and a 31 year old. Avoid any theory that the music represents some kind of pre-9/11 mindset, because it reaches places that existed then and continue to exist now … even if the tracklist has changed slightly.

Beulah – The Coast is Never Clear

Of the time: My niece, to my everlasting joy, turned out to be an indie rock girl. Sure, she still owns all of the Twilight movies on DVD, but she also can write enthusiastic, poorly spelled Facebook posts about seeing Animal Collective live at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer. This has opened an opportunity for me to be the overbearing, music-pushing uncle. “Oh, you like Panda Bear? Well, you’ll LOVE this …” Thus far, I have restrained myself, and only burned this album for her listening pleasure.

Beulah comes out of the same scene that brought the sugary stylings of Apples in Stereo and the much-lauded In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel to the pasty white masses. Their second album, When Your Heartstrings Break, honed a talent for weaving dozens of instruments into songs that alternated between pop gems and longer passes through sweetly psychedelic locales. A game of musical chairs left the followup, The Coast is Never Clear, on a new label (Velocette) and in desperate enough position to send the album out for review everywhere, including a campus newsroom in northern Illinois.

Coast takes the gains made in Heartstrings and refines them even further. The music soars with summery surges and just a tiny bit of a punk growl to avoid early-onset audio diabetes. But the lyrics speak to a very specific mindset brought on by the end of summer. Just as some songs seem designed for release in the early summer months for optimum beach play, so too does this album for a more melancholy (and less lucrative, business-wise) time of year. “What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades” spells this out most clearly, shuffling to a Burt Bacharach-ian backing and allowing for direct interpretation or more symbolic aspects of what summer represents.

Timeless: I’d put this album up with Aeroplane as representative samples of this mini-ecosystem of music from the era, if only for one of the great lyrics ever written about the writing process: “I’ve been trying all the time to find a song that would make you mine/ But all I ever find, my love, are cliches that don’t rhyme.” That line, from the song “Popular Mechanics for Lovers,” surprisingly popped up on the soundtrack for the 2010 film “Youth in Revolt.”

The first hints of fall, be it a falling leaf or a falling nighttime temperature, bring out a longing for the season that never registered with me. Obviously, Big Pumpkin has sold the country on a bill of goods filled with apple cider and pullover sweatshirts that makes me shiver and sad. When these hints arrive, I put on this album and know at least a few guys understood the plight. Coast plants itself firmly in the weeks between the return to school and the start of fall. That its release date, Sept. 11, falls in this time period is a reminder of the time of year free from the clutches of history. It’s also my niece’s birthday, so I know that the day is capable of producing great things.

Ryan Adams – Gold

Of the time: So many signs on this album point to the specific time and place of New York City in September, 2001. Adams’ blend of singer-songwriter sentimentality and straight-ahead rock may not jibe with most preconceived notions of the American focal point, but his ambition certainly wouldn’t be out of place. He was both prolific and prideful in this time period, so certain of the classic within that even the album cover must be seen as an attempt at iconography. The first single and leadoff track, “New York, New York,” arrives so forcefully that you don’t really question why this guy from North Carolina thinks he can define this immense city.

The video starts with a haunting reminder of its place in time, just a few days before the Twin Towers fell. But the song, lacking even the slightest bit of ironic detachment in its affection, fit perfectly into the post-attack needs of new music listeners. The Entertainment Weekly review of the album pointed this out at the time, and in a way that still sticks with me to this day.

All the hallmarks of a creative burst of energy, bordering on excess, are readily apparent on Gold. Tempos and styles shift constantly, and simple country-tinged ballads like “When the Stars Go Blue” lead directly into a nearly 10-minute “Nobody Girl” jam that closes out the first half of the album’s 16 tracks. Later Adams albums would struggle with keeping the quality consistent throughout the album, but there are so many highlights on this hour-plus album that a full listen feels necessary. In researching the album, I didn’t even know about the addition that might test that notion, in the form of an extra five songs that would have necessitated a second disc.

Timeless: Adams might be more revered as a potential source for viable covers than as a performer in his own right. The area he frequently traverses, with his acoustic guitar and a prone heart, moves mountains of CDs when put through the filter of a young ingenue like Taylor Swift. But in the form of a shaggy-haired guy, it never connected in quite the same way. An interesting thought experiment could be conducted in much the way one theorizes about the inherent quality of a single-album version of The Beatles’ White album: what if Adams decreased his output in half and put the best half of his songs on those albums? Would we think of him differently?

In much the same way that there’s an imperceptible difference between the words ambitious (a positive character trait) and ambition (“Kicking, screaming, Gucci little piggies …”), so too is there a difference between Gold and Adams’ other work. The album came around at the exact time that it needed to come out, without the trappings of a sound that would relegate it to the particular vagaries of 2001. But the album has survived the subsequent years of growing cynicism intact, in a way that befits the album’s title and an author willing to call it so.

To paraphrase the Magnetic Fields, a podcast is like a violent crime: if you do it wrong you could do time, but if you do it right it is sublime. Poor audio quality or a bad phone/Internet connection can torpedo even the most illuminating conversations, turning a podcast into a herky-jerky affair with all the grace of a junior high dance.

Conversely, the art of audio production can create complete works from the relatively static content of a conversation. A lowering of technological limitations opened the yakking-for-public-consumption field to anyone with a voice and a prayer, and the most successful shows have learned some of the tricks used by radio to spruce up content. Oftentimes, podcasts make the stuff found on the airwaves seem like the nascent artform.

But picking the best podcast, or an ideal? It’s that type of foolish thinking that led Stephin Merritt to conclude, “A pretty girl is like … a pretty girllllll.” Personal standards will dictate what I call the pod-tonic ideal (see graphic above, and your infographic may vary). I define content as the combination of perspective and personality that makes me care about a conversation. This can vary quite a bit within a show, especially one that relies on long-form interviews. And production simply means the planning done before a show and/or the production work done after a show to make a podcast more than just a random conversation held within range of a recording device. Proper mics and audio levels set a strong baseline in this regard.

These aren’t all the shows I listen to, but their end results offer up enough examples to represent a nice cross-section of podcast approaches.

House of Punte: The KSK Podcast

I’ve written skeptical reviews after the premieres of The Colbert Report and How I Met Your Mother, so my initial thoughts can oftentimes seem premature in hindsight. But the same things I liked about the House of Punte remain true today. In a world full of fraudulent LOLs, the two shows I can’t afford to listen to in libraries are House of Punte and The Flophouse. This strength originates from the same source as the show’s biggest weakness: a group of people situated all over the country connecting through Internet means. The show has managed to stave off some of its conversational hiccups recently by connecting through Google+ and giving its hilarious participants some visual cues. But it’s still a crowded house, especially when guests wander in unaware. Regular features like the news and Phil Raintree’s Old Timey Newsreel provide anchors amid frequent diversions, and there’s a fun meta quality to a show that offers up the efforts of a smooth-running show but keeps in all the “backstage” talk that connects segments.

*Caveat: Host Josh Zerkle is the commissioner of an Ottoneu fantasy baseball league I participate in this season. His terrible fantasy team has not affected my opinion of his show in any way.

Fangraphs Audio

Comedy podcasts like Doug Loves Movies and Nerdist (among many, many others) ultimately found success because the talents of telling a joke or a funny story translate so easily to podcasts. But proximity for podcast guests counts almost as much as it does for horseshoes and hand grenades. Areas rich with talent and time can afford to tape a show in person, and it’s a luxury the Fangraphs team can’t afford. Host Carson Cistulli mixes one-on-one interviews with roundtable discussions, and the limitations of a group phone conversation dampen the type of personality that would liven up conversations involving wins above replacement and baseball organizational philosophy. Cistulli takes a little while to warm up to as a host, as he isn’t afraid to pause awkwardly if it means eventually getting to a clever turn of phrase. And if a guest tries to get on the same wavelength as the host, it can lead to some awkward grasps out into the ether. Still, the sporadic output of the show churns out some guests deep within the baseball culture that you probably won’t hear anywhere else.

Joe Posnanski’s Poscast and Jonah Keri Podcast

When it comes to biases, a bias against interview-centric podcasts certainly isn’t as frowned upon as those against lawyers or, say, the Irish. But it exists for me, partially because I spent many years interviewing people on a daily basis. I can’t see the conversation beyond the minutia of making a guest comfortable or phrasing a question the right way. But this is my particular hang-up, as the entire media landscape is based on attracting eyeballs, ears and all other pertinent organs through appealing interviews.

Both the Poscast and the Jonah Keri Podcast use the same concept: engaging writers as hosts talking to people they find interesting. Each struggled somewhat in the early going, with the Poscast figuring out the right mix of technology to avoid sounding like the bottom of a tin can, and Keri dialing back the casual energy that makes him the Practically Perfect Podcast Guest to allow his guests to shine. Still, both shows shine when conversing with familiar faces. Keri works best with Rob Neyer as guest, as both can jump from baseball to pop culture to culinary pursuits without missing a beat. And Posnanski takes full advantage of a friendship with Michael Schur, a television writer and statistically minded baseball fan that drops by monthly to talk sports and engage in ludicrous fantasy drafts.

Other installments of the podcast contain enough insight to rise above right-click/delete status, but seeing Neyer or Schur in the iTunes description propel those shows to the top of my must-listen list.

Rocco’s Life of Leisure

Consider the audio drop – maybe a few seconds of sound, compressed into a .wav format and available with the click of a button. It takes a momentary sound captured either in pop culture or the world at large and offers it a new context. And it allows an additional voice (producer/board op/etc.) in on the fun. Applied judiciously, the drop can serve as the inside joke among friends separated only by the airwaves. But when abused, you’re left with Crazy Ira and The Douche.

The drop seldom shows up in podcasts, in part because most setups would require that work to be done after recording. But Rocco DeMaro comes from the world of radio, and he uses that experience to craft a podcast where he anticipates the post-production before recording. With a spot for the drops already set, his podcasts feel more like a one-man show than your typical podcast presentation. And it’s a show that appeals directly to my demographic. The former host of the Pittsburgh Pirates radio postgame show touches on a variety of sports, statistical analysis and video games, all with a self-deprecating style and a willingness to go with a running gag. You’ll notice his professionalism in the way he continually re-racks the identifiers in an interview (“We’re here with …”), even if that interview starts off with asking the guest their opinions about athletic pants and swear words. His first “season” ended just before the MLB First-Year Player Draft in June, and here’s hoping that Rocco’s life involves a well-deserved paycheck and a forthcoming second season of the podcast.

Baseball Show with Rany and Joe

The age of the specialist means a podcast to scratch almost any itch, as well as the continued employment of lefty reliever Trevor Miller. A general interest podcast must be able to talk about the latter, as well as a hundred other intricacies while exuding an authority akin to the specialized competition. Years of writing about, caring about and talking about baseball have honed the abilities of co-hosts Rany Jazayerli and Joe Sheehan to accomplish this task. These two friends and former stalwarts of Baseball Prospectus usually take a simple topic, say the American League Central division race, and burrow down into each team’s strengths and weaknesses. Oftentimes, this can lead both to a macro view of the team-building process smashed together with a micro view of roster construction and managerial decision-making. Sheehan accomplishes that feat so many columnists strive for, in that you may seethe at one of his opinions but still care about what else he has to say. And Jazayerli can seem indefatigable (honed by a Kansas City Royals fandom, no doubt) in talking through the issues of the day, like a dentist who can’t help but converse even when his patient is struck silent with mouth agape. It makes for a quick, no-frills hour each week, and a great option for a baseball fan whose cares aren’t specialized solely on the local team’s fate.

The course served as a practical instruction to Adobe Illustrator, using projects to highlight different aspects of graphic design. My functional mind (with just a hint of flair or attempted artistry) feared assignments based on abstract concepts. But other than coming up with little graphics that represented concepts like “balance,” the class steered toward real-world applications.

For our final project, we were tasked with coming up with an 8-by-10-inch poster of our choosing. I considered multiple musical interests. (My homage to the “Judy in Disguise” album cover must wait for another day.) But then I considered what could generally be described as podcast album artwork. The real estate on an iPod touch screen begs for a visual accompaniment to all that audio, and I shudder to think how long I spent making sure my thousands of songs in iTunes carried the proper album artwork. The podcast can be considered in much the same way, and even the most basic of designs is preferrable to the emptiness of a screen adorned only by the generic, circular podcast symbol.

Podcasts provide plenty of fodder for potential designs, especially “kitchen sink” designs  that incorporate a bunch of different ideas within a general framework. I searched through my podcast subscriptions and settled on the Up and In podcast, a Baseball Prospectus enterprise that recently celebrated its first anniversary. The show revels in the types of tangents and callback references that make the show so easy to anticipate, even with its Cleopatra-esque lengths.

 I tried to create a design that worked as a simple baseball reference, while gearing it specifically toward the knowledge gained by listening to the podcast on a regular basis. That meant a slight punk aesthetic, given the musical “guests” featured during breaks in the content. I used a Blondie poster  as inspiration for the paper-tear title, and the bold color manifested itself into general shapes that helped make up the appearance of a baseball. This meant finding a bunch of images (specific beer bottles, a stopwatch, a hawk trap – don’t ask), as well as dealing with a familiar foe: the stitches on a baseball. They are quite difficult to deal with at my current Photoshop skill level, and always look goofy outside the confines of a baseball’s familiar white leather.

I softened the edges of each of these images to give them a softer look, then used a white color overlay with black shapes to add bold details. I started with black for the lettering on the title, but then switched to the red of the stitching to make it stand out even more. The paper tear was homemade (i.e. torn by hand and scanned), as nothing I found online looked quite right.

When I was done, I decided to send in the image as a show of appreciation to the show’s hosts, Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks. Kevin asked if he could get the image as a square eps file, and before I knew it he had used the image to identify the podcast on things like iTunes and the Facebook fan page.

As for my grade, the instructor took just enough points off to make me strive to do better. He thought that the image needed a few more rough edges to truly tap into the punk-by-way-of-Blondie style. So I blended the pure black background with a crumbled-up piece of paper. This necessitated a slight lightening of the background to show the detail, and cascaded into adjusting each of the images to represent this new baseline black. That left me with this:

The whole experience gave me a new appreciation for graphic design, and those creative souls who manage to take the canvass of an electronic screen and make it their own.

This bit of production work provides a nice middle ground between the excesses of morning zoo radio and the let-us-rec0rd-a-conversation aesthetics of other podcasts. It makes me seek out the band, the song, and if there’s anything else out there like this great song. And the reason it’s possible, as discussed by the show, is that one of the hosts is related to a member of the band.*

* A similar situation also applies to the always-enjoyable NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour, which welcomes listeners each week with a sugar-sweet instrumental from the podcast producer’s band.

Royalty fees and music rights have made any attempt at using recorded songs a fool’s errand. Many shows have worked around this limitation by soliciting original works, including the likes of The Jonah Keri Podcast and Doug Loves Movies. Others embrace the limitations of the form, using royalty-free music. The Basketball Jones weekly audio show took a potential negative and turned using “Steppin’ On The Beach” (aka “Dirty Talk” by James Wallace) into a weekly highlight. Still, while I understand the fear of allowing shows to distribute licensed music for free on one section of iTunes while the other section asks for $1.29 a song, podcasts have matured enough as an artform that record companies should realize the potential benefits of allowing popular shows with loyal fanbases to use their artists’ songs.

At least one record company took a step in that direction this past week, when Up and In: The Baseball Prospectus Podcast announced a deal with Bloodshot Records. The podcast – hosted by the excellent Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks – incorporates music as bumpers between segments of the show. In the past, the show has used music beyond the line of sight of litigous record companies, all the while exposing some relatively little-known bands to a whole new audience. Bloodshot has embraced new ways to reach listeners, including free samplers through Amazon’s MP3 store, and this agreement falls in line with those efforts.

Podcasts and revenue are still mutually exclusive, even for the most popular of shows. The costs of server space quickly turn popularity into a financial burden. But the audience – well, there’s gold in them hills. Advertisers s…l…o…w…l…y have warmed to the concept, as any listener of the Adam Carolla Podcast can attest. And by wont of RSS feeds and iTunes, the audience welcomes new content in a delivery system that direct mail marketers would envy. I’m not saying a band like Muse – with U.S. popularity propelled by the Twilight films – can be replicated through the smaller audiences of niche podcasts. But when you’re gambling on viral YouTube videos, early morning MTV airings and maybe a spot on the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to put some faith in an intriguing new bet.

In other podcast thoughts:

* Dan Levy at On the DL Podcast recently announced that his weekday show will end with show #555, giving fans about seven more episodes after today to settle in with a sports podcast staple. The show prided itself on long-form interviews with sports media personalities, but I always appreciated the days when media criticism and ruminations on the sports blog world dominated the conversation between Levy and his co-host, Nick Tarnowski. It became a staple of my early morning routine, with a hot shower and some interesting and/or provocative point jump-starting my brain. The show was thoughtful and entertaining, two attributes I wish sports talk radio could possess. And it will be missed.

* The AV Club has begun a regular feature called Podmass highlighting the best in a week’s worth of podcasts. Time commitments and the ocean of podcast content makes it difficult for most of popular culture to regularly focus on the medium. But the rise in quality, guest-laden comedy podcasts in the Los Angeles area makes for an easy hook, and this feature supplements a roundup of those podcasts with recaps of other shows you might have heard of. It’s a great resource, and it exemplifies some of the notable work done by the likes of Slate and NPR (with the aforementioned Pop Culture Happy Hour and Hang Up and Listen) in advancing the form and providing something eminently enjoyable week after week.

One benefit to not being an early adopter is that feeling of a whole library’s worth of content just waiting to be discovered. I bought a Playstation 3 and a Wii in 2009, and mixed up my playing of both new titles and well-reviewed old favorites. That continued in 2010, assisted both by the encouraging example of prices dropping for new versions of older games (the Bioshock effect) and my Blockbuster Online account adding older video games to the queue. I probably played fewer games in 2010, but those games received (and demanded) more attention. Here are my top 11 that were released this year:

1. Red Dead Redemption – I knew I was in deep when I spent an hour trying to make sure John Marston’s hand avoided an increasingly speedy knife on a warn-down table overlooking the mountains of Mexico. This gorgeous title threw so much into the gameplay, from horse wrangling to standard third-person shooting to trying to outsmart a rampaging bear. The turn-of-the-20th-century setting proved to be a great respite from the increasingly standard variations of war-torn battlefields, jungles and spacecraft walkways. And the story took some pretty amazing chances, in both structure and execution.

Inevitable comparisons to Rockstar’s main franchise, Grand Theft Auto, can’t be avoided. In GTA4, the ancillary missions and quests seemed like just percentage points toward a mythical 100 percent completion. But in RDR, these were interesting aspects to a larger, more cohesive framework. Also, and I say this as a person who mostly cowers in fear of most online multiplayer, the co-op missions online add tremendous value to a title that packs enough emotional wallop that it might take a while to play the single-player campaign again. I can’t wait to try out the new zombie-fied expansion.

2. Dead Rising 2 – The effusive praise for this game on the Gamespot Hotspot podcast convinced me to jump into this series having not seen the first (an XBox exclusive with a Wii-ified version later). And it was a game in such a classic sense of the word. The simple mechanics allowed for the game to be populated by a treasure trove of details, allowing for the creation of some of the best weapons you’ll ever find in a hack-and-slash game. But everyone knows that just wandering around a mall, even one run rampant by zombies, can be tiresome after a while. So the strict adherence to a running clock to complete both main and side missions makes for some amazingly intense gameplay and somehow accesses that deep memory of the music quickening in the first Super Mario Brothers game. As with No. 1 on the list, I also enjoyed the online component to this game, a four-player competitive version of the televised game show that starts the game (and can make life much easier in the single-player mode by transferring virtual cash to your account).

3. God of War 3 – Oh my god, they’re gorgeous graphics, the same solid game mechanics present in the first two games and some really entertaining boss fights. This series probably made revisiting the era of Greek/Roman mythology too daunting for any serious competitors.

4. Enslaved – This is on the top of my mind, as I just finished it. But where the game’s creators didn’t spend much time on the character names (even Beppo would be better than just naming the guy “Monkey”), it made up for it in taking a small-budget approach to the thrills offered by the more prestigious Uncharted series. It’s the Cobra of action games, certainly worth a rental or a budget buy and sometimes more fun than the AAA games we’re supposed to love more.

5. Angry Birds – It’s the game that made me believe you can play games on the iPod touch. I don’t know if games can get bigger/better/faster/more for the device, but this will suffice for some time to come. Also, as an unrepentant reader of walkthroughs and FAQs while playing games, I appreciated Roxio doing the work for us and uploading YouTube clips of completed levels.

6. Final Fantasy 13 - Man, a lot of people don’t like this game. So much so that I saw the game on sale for something like $20 during Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving. My copy of Final Fantasy 7 for the PS1 would go for more than that! Much of the criticism is valid, from annoying characters to a story that doesn’t open up until well into the game. But the combat system is a real treat, giving each fight the possibility of a pulse-pounding affair. The game would benefit from offering real decisions on party members and their specific strengths, rather than giving everyone similar abilities with slight variations. But it’s a testament to the series that it kept me trying to battle impossibly sized monsters just in the hopes they would drop materials for weapons/armor, even if those battles proved I really didn’t need it.

7. NBA Jam – Nostalgia can blindside you, or it can ease slowly into your mind. Having finally rented Punchout for Wii and felt how revisiting a classic can be especially painful on the Nunchuk-holding joints, I have gain an extra level of appreciation for how NBA Jam updated itself without changing the essence of its playability. As other sports titles battle year after year with a balance between simulation and pick-up-and-play (see No. 10), my best friend’s young son can play the game with his dad and enjoy it, while somehow gravitating toward the Rockets (Kevin Martin and Yao) as his go-to team. They’re no Shawn Kemp and Detlef Schrempf, but play on, playa.

8. Metroid: Other M – This game could join FF13 in the bathroom, shedding tears from all those hurtful things said during the lunch hour. Wipe your eyes, Samus! Sure, the story stinks and longtime fans bristled at any characterization that weakened her bad ass past. But it pushes the envelope for graphics on the Wii

9. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions – As one of the only fans of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, I’m evidently easy to please when it comes to comic book adaptations. This game mixes some classic interpretations of Spider-Man gameplay with Batman : Arkham Asylum-esque stealth levels, all while populating the game with all sorts of lore from the Spider-Man mythos. I finished the game but never quite felt comfortable with the web-slinging mechanics, but the combat was varied … especially in some pretty entertaining boss battles. A nice “buy low” candidate for bargain hunters in 2011.

10. Madden 2011 – For some reason (mostly work/school related), I haven’t had time to dive into the time-sucking wormholes more commonly referred to as the Madden franchise mode. I did try out the Madden Card version of a franchise, which is great for all of us who want to see quarterbacks Todd Collins versus Todd Bouman lead their respective teams in online competition. And people thought taking the Carolina Panthers as an existing franchise was daunting!

11. Bejeweled 3 - The best way to take a break from designing Web sites for breaks of five minutes that turn into 15. And modes out the mother-flippin’ wazoo, alternating between strategy and time-limit panic.

2010 titles I hope to get to (and/or finish) in the new year: Super Mario Galaxy 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Fallout: New Vegas, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Heavy Rain, Goldeneye, Vanquished and Call of Duty:Black Ops