Ice Coffee: the history of human activity in Antarctica

I haven't interviewed other Antarctic podcasters because that would make for dull content. "Do you press record? Wow! I do, too! Hey, how good is Audacity? Antarctica's cold, huh?" This episode I interview Samantha Hodder about her Antarctic podcast because the stories told in her series, "This Is Our Time," lie so far outside those recounted in my series that there's a lot to discuss beyond the bones of the medium.

Charcot leads his second Antarctic expedition aboard a new ship with a new engine. What could possibly go wrong? More groundings, more whimsy and more coastline explored. Well done those Frenchmen.

I'm sick of 2016. A friend just died for stupid reasons and my extended family and many friends are facing life in the USA under president Donald Trump and his cabinet of elite racists. I really have not been in the mood to read about noble suffering under the Victorian model of manliness and my notes about Scott's death on his return from the pole came to a grinding halt about two weeks ago. Here's a Frankenstein's episode stop gap comprising essays from the past about ice diving and contrasting Scott Base and McMurdo Station. I'll get back to the history in time for Christmas but in the mean time 2016 can fuck right off.

Boom! Two episodes in two days. Take that, incomprehensible download statistics. Let's see me make sense of you now. Byrd returns south to finish... something... something brave and stirring and laudably scientific and humanitarian, no doubt. Prolly work it out in payroll. Or in a post-hoc rationalisation that will remain in publication for half a century. More importantly, I get to share music I love with you. Egoism's song "What are we doing" rounds out this episode and I hope you're inspired to check out their offerings, available at https://egoismband.bandcamp.com/

More Norwegians head south seeking whales. A kerfuffle over who's on first marks the start of the Heroic Age. In 2005 I recorded an interview with Rob Robbins, head of the USAP diving programme. This was slated for a New Zealand radio programme that never came about, itself a rip off of RRR's "Radio Marinara" in Australia, and was captured using a badly battered Mini-Disc unit. It's not the best audio but I could have been using sticky tape and iron filings as a recording medium, for all I cared. Rob Robbins is legend among my circle and I was stoked to have his time and attention. With "Radio Tuna" failing to launch, this is the material's first outing.