A podcast that I’ve recently started to enjoy is RadioLab from WNYC. I’ve been absorbing the back catalog when driving, cooking, or cleaning up after dinner. The audio is cut together in a frenetic, simultaneous, overlapping style that seems to compress the already chatty banter of the hosts. It quickens their pace to a neighborhood close to the disturbing cadence of the old FedEx ad’s John “Motormouth” Moschitta. Mixed with ethereal sound effects and music, the podcast is a production tour de force, bringing suspense and humanity to the nerdy topics they cover, like the super-collaborative mathematician Paul Erdős.

What spurred me to write was this podcast on an obscure academic book, In the Dust of This Planet. Its sudden appearance in pop culture and fashion puzzled the author. The book portrayed in the podcast is a study of Nilihism and Pessimism, as applied to horror in pop culture. The story made me think, hey that’d be a good name for a blog: Almost nil. Listening to the podcast on the morning drive left me with an emotional duality. It left me feeling black emptyiness, and awoke my always deferred desire to create. So rather than waste a day doing something fiscally productive, I spent a couple of hours sketching a drawing for my wife for Valentine’s Day. It was something I’d been planning on doing but never got around to it. I can’t say that it’s even mildly competent to stand as a work of art, but I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. I’ll have to report back later to see how my lovely wife (MLW) views it.

The creative impetus also got me to write in my blog today.

The new blog title has a geek double entendre in Lisp. The opposite of ‘t’ or truth in Lisp is ‘nil’.

I don’t know enough about Nilihism or Pessimism to gauge if they capture any profound truths. Radiolab’s vingette did remind me that we should strive make something out of the little wisp of life we have.

Speaking of our ephemeral wisp of time, I also, four weeks into the year, ordered a 2015 calendar. An improvement from 2014 by at least two months. Almost nil in the grand scheme of things though.

UPDATE: Grammar typos. Introduced Hungarumlaut (double acute accent) on “Erdős”.