Omahype: The Omaha Events Calendar

In this increasingly digital age, I love that radio still exists. For now anyway.  Whether you listen live over the radio waves or download your favorite weekly podcasts to one of your many personal electronic devices, here’s to the remaining romance of some of the best radio shows: This American Life, Radiolab, Little Steven’s Underground Garage, Studio 360 (Kurt Andersen will be interviewing Steven Soderbergh right here in Omaha at Film Streams’ Feature event on February 20th), All Songs Considered… Speaking of ASC, I just loved that Mind-Fi Fail skit in the first episode of Portlandia where Fred Armisen has a meltdown over his PDAs (and other online addictions) and Carrie Brownstein tries to save him. Hilarious! And speaking of PDAs, how funny is it that Personal Digital Assistants and Public Displays of Affection have the same abbreviations? Coincidence? I think not! Now there’s a hilarious skit in the making. I can see it now:

A customer enters a coffee shop and orders a latte. The barista stops mid-milk frothing to answer his ringing cell phone. But instead of saying “hello”, he puts his mouth over the mouthpiece and starts making out with it. But just for a little bit. He quickly returns to making the latte and we see the customer’s confusion — maybe he just imagined the whole thing? When the customer turns around to grab a table, the shot widens to reveal a scene where everyone’s straight up making out with their phones. There’s even one dude humping his laptop in the corner. When the customer runs out of shop in terror, he sees people walking down the street holding hands with life-sized replicas of PDAs. They’re on every corner — arms around each other on park benches, kissing under street lamps. One girl offers flowers to her PDA love and blushes, and another guy actually gets down on one knee in front of his PDA girlfriend with a diamond ring. When she says “yes” to his proposal, the surrounding crowd erupt in applause. At this point, our main character is completely panicked, dripping with sweat from the horror of it all…until we see a pretty single PDA round the corner and catch his eye. Enter slowmo, bashful eyelash flutters, windblown hair, glints of sun off of every reflective surface, and some serious 80′s synth music as they run (still in exaggerated slowmo) towards each other. And SCENE. It ends before the make-out pay-out. But we get the idea.

What do you think!? I got totally side-tracked there, but I kind of love that. Who wants to make the first-ever Omahype short?? Maybe someone already made this. Seems too obvious to not exist somewhere. If there’s already a YouTube or Vimeo, please do us all a favor and post it in the comments.

Okay now, back to radio…

So there are two great local radio shows I wanted to tell you about.

First up: The Weekly Grind. Co-hosted by author and Omahype contributor Wendy Townley, this hour-long show aimed at fresh-minded entrepreneurs airs live at 10 am every Saturday morning on KOIL (1180 AM). A few weeks ago, they interviewed Jason Kulbel from Saddle Creek about the development in North Downtown. You can listen to the whole episode here.

Second up: New Day Rising. This locally produced indie radio show has been on The River (89.7 FM) for the past six years. They’ve recently changed their time slot to 2:30-5 pm on Sundays so they follow NPR’s All Songs Considered. They try to incorporate local indie music into their playlist. Last Sunday they featured a big block of Interpol to prep for next week’s show at Slowdown as well as a cut off of Bright’s Eyes’ new record. You can check out their recent playlists on their site.

Alright now, I’ve given you some homework. Film a comedy short, then listen to some local radio!

- Laura