M. Thomas Inge Transcript (2)

December 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is the eighth anniversary of Charles Schultz’s official retirement from creating the “Peanuts” comics strip. The strip that ended the 49-year-old run of our favorite comic, here in America, had a farewell letter from Charles Schultz attached with Snoopy at the typewriter. The end of this letter read: “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, how can I ever forget them?” Indeed, none of us will ever forget them, and we still read them every week in classic “Peanuts”.On the show today are two authors and legendary pianist, George Winston. My first guest is the author of “Charles M. Schultz: Conversations”, as well as many other publications. Welcome to the show.

M. Thomas Inge: A pleasure to be here.

Kent Gustavson: It’s M. Thomas. How do you pronounce your last name?

M. Thomas Inge: Unless somebody tells you, it’s hard to know. It’s Inge. It rhymes with words like ‘fringe’ or ‘hinge’. There’s no nice word it rhymes with, but nevertheless, it’s Inge.

Kent Gustavson: There’s no nice word that rhymes with ‘Inge’?

M. Thomas Inge: I can’t think of a positive word that rhymes with ‘Inge’, but nevertheless, that’s OK. I’ll make it a positive.

Kent Gustavson: Well, welcome to the show. Now, it was a few years ago you wrote this collection of interviews with Charles Schultz. He was a personal friend of yours?

M. Thomas Inge: Yeah, he and I came to know each other over the years because I was writing about comic strips, and he, of course, had “Peanuts”. “Peanuts” is the best comic strip of the 20th century, so naturally, I would write about that. And, he saw an essay I had written, and so, we began to communicate, and I would go out and visit from time to time. But, the problem we had was that he wanted to talk about literature and I wanted to talk about comic books and comic strips, so we sort of talked at cross-purposes.But, he was a fine human being, and he cared very much that people, like myself, found his strip of interest. He was a little puzzled when we told him that we thought it was an intellectual strip, and that existentialism was at the base, and he said, well I don’t know what that is.But, whether he knew it or not, intellectually, we certainly felt it. And, that strip sort of touched the souls of all of us in the 20th century because he knew how to put his finger on that basic human situation - that we’re all alone in the world, we’re all insecure, we need a little help. And, more often than not, we’re disappointed, like Charlie Brown, every time Lucy pulled that football away, but we still have the hope, as he did, to try to kick it, nevertheless.

Kent Gustavson: And, he never did kick it over all those years.

M. Thomas Inge: No, and he thought about it at the end, before he retired the strip. He said it’s sad that Charlie Brown’s never going to get a chance to kick that football. And of course, he couldn’t let him do it because it was that kind of frustration, which was at the root of the humor of the strip.

Kent Gustavson: So, maybe that’s what kept Charlie Brown going was that he could never kick that football.

M. Thomas Inge: Exactly. Isn’t that what gets us out of bed every morning? We think maybe today we’re going to kick that darn thing, and we have to try. We know we’re going to fail, but nevertheless, if you don’t have that hope in the possibility, it makes for a pretty dreary day.

Kent Gustavson: When did you start to be interested in comic books and comics?

M. Thomas Inge: As a child, I grew up with them; they came along at the same time I did. And, I read them, loved them, could draw, and therefore, wanted to be a cartoonist, naturally, the way many kids did my age. I drew cartoons through high school and through college, but I began to realize that I was never going to be a great cartoonist. I was never going to be a Walt Kelly, an Al Capp, a Milton Caniff or Charles Schultz. And, I thought well if I’m not going to do that, maybe I should try something I’d be better at. So, I became a professor of English instead because I love literature too.

Kent Gustavson: And, what do your colleagues think about the comics? Have you had some struggles over the years?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, being in English departments, which are fairly traditional - where Shakespeare is the high-water mark, and nothing else seems to matter - they think what I do is rather odd and peculiar, so they look askance at it. But, the way they put it when they speak to me about it, they say, well it’s nice to have a hobby, Tom. And, they don’t realize, I suppose, it’s serious, maybe more serious than my work on William Faulkner and traditional literary subjects, which I do love as well, incidentally.I like the ‘high brow’ literature, the ‘low brow’ literature, the comics and everything in between. So, they don’t quite understand, but I think with time and the publication of more studies, the attention of the academy, the attention of museums to comics, the point will be made that these are extremely important cultural artifacts. They’re not ephemeral, but very central to our cultural experience.

Kent Gustavson: Well, I think culture is turning around a little bit right now with a lot of these graphic novels coming out, and a lot of these movies that are coming out. They look like living comics. What do you think about all of that?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, the comics and movies have been related all along. Some of the very first live action films were based on some of the popular comic strips, so they had a parallel development. And, they both use words and pictures in order to convey the story or the information, therefore, they’ve always been allied. And, the fact that the movies are so popular simply shows that we want more of those characters than we get out of the comic books, per say. We want to see them in real life. We want to see them three-dimensional.And, we also enjoy the same fictional context in which there are the good guys fighting against the bad guys, and you can tell which is which, which is not always true of much of our culture today. We can’t tell who the good guys are, or the bad guys are. And, that whole business of a superhero sort of standing in and trying to bring about a sense of justice, we know it’s not going to happen too often in the real world, but we like to see it happen in the fictional world, at least. And so, there’s a strong narrative appeal there that the films answer to.But, the graphic novels now, while they are outgrowths of the comic book, this is really a very interesting new phenomena, in a sense, is the fact we’re calling them graphic novels is not just an effort to make them sound ‘high brow’. It’s an effort to try to identify that it’s something quite different. And this notion of telling stories, lengthy narratives about complex issues and problems through words and pictures has been a part of our cultural impulse all along.But it’s reaching fruition in a very different kind of genre, and there will be a whole new set of ground rules there. What amazes me is that there are so many young artists and writers who are stepping forward and want to participate in this creation. And were I a younger man, that’s what I’d try to be too. But as it is, I’m going to have to settle for teaching literature and teaching comics, at least in the context of American humor.

Kent Gustavson: How would you compare, I know you’re an expert on Faulkner, how would you compare Faulkner and Schulz? Do they live in the same world?

M. Thomas Inge: Probably not.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: In a certain sense, because the kind of worls where Schulz lived was kind of rare world which he built around himself, where as Faulkner immersed himself deeply in that whole southern experience down there in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner was trying to deal with the dilemma of mankind, let’s say, in the larger universe. Schulz didn’t quite shoot for that high an aim. But what they both did in a sense, there are a few similarities.What Faulkner did was to renew the whole genre of the novel for another hundred years. He showed you could do things with fiction that nobody thought was possible. So he experimented and opened up the novel so a lot of other writers could step in and build on what he started. Schulz has come along and taken the common strip and done something very unique and special with it. After he started doing Peanuts, we began to notice a kind of direction humor took in the other comic strips.Look at the comic strip today, and they are all more or less directed toward satire and humor. There are hardly any adventure strips, any serious strips. Those strips disappeared. And what Schulz demonstrated was you could treat complex issues in that very brief form with a minimalist kind of art. And that you could do it in that space, appeal to readers, and communicate and provide good for the world.And so in that both renewed the art form, you see, made it novel for the present. In that sense they’re similar.

Kent Gustavson: So when you had conversations with Schulz, as in your book Charles M. Schulz Conversations, did you talk as friends? Was it a little more formal? What did it feel like?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, he was the kind of person who made you informal when you were around him. What I would call Mr. Schulz, I still do, in fact, but he said “No, you have to call me Sparky.”. I still have a little bit of trouble with doing that because I revere the man so much. Somehow just calling him Sparky felt like putting him on an equal plain, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there.But he made everybody around him relax, and he was so unassuming, so humble about what he did. Some arguments we would have would be about the comic strip as an art form. He felt that no it’s not art, and I would say well if anything in the world is art, what you’re doing is because for me what art is, is something speaks to succeeding generations. People come at it later on.You go look at the Mona Lisa generation after generation and people find interesting things in it. Are you going to be able to do that with the strip too? So, our discussions might more often than not be sort of arguments about that sort of thing. And then he would want to know why I like Faulkner and why I read Faulkner. One interesting writer we did have in common was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a great admirer of The Great Gatsby.And there are countless Peanuts panels in which you’ll find Snoopy pretending he’s the great Gatsby at one of his parties. Or Charlie Brown approaching the little red-haired girl in a way Daisy Buchanan was approached by Gatsby. I forgot his name there for a moment. In The Great Gatsby, there was something about the poetry and power of that particular novel. And they both came from Saint Paul, Minnesota, too, so they have a similar background.But that particular novel attracted his fancy, and his copy is marked up and you’d find quotations appearing there. So, that was one writer that he particularly enjoyed and one we shared.

Kent Gustavson: What is the importance, you know, for Schulz, what was the importance of having that classical connection? Having the literature in his work.

M. Thomas Inge: I don’t know that it was necessarily important to him. Only in the sense that great books are important to all of us. But he admired the kind of effect that Fitzgerald could achieve in a few words. He aimed to achieve that same kind of effect in a few pictures as well as in a few words. So, in other words, it sort of tutored him. I mean, one thing about Fitzgerald is that his books were brief; he was to the point. He was concise.And that’s what you have to do in a comic strip. That’s why Faulkner would not be a good influence, because Faulkner was all over the place. Fitzgerald gets right to the point, as Hemingway did. And so for him I think he learned how to write and how to draw, but at the same time he was the self educated person. He did make it through high school, did not attend college. And I believe he, as often the case who don’t go to college, they somehow feel like they missed something and they regret not having had that opportunity.I think his reading is deep reading, and he read lots. He read Dostoevsky, he read all the great books. It was never his part to get the education he missed. Which is a way you can do it. I often tell my students that I’m a guidepost, and I’ll point you to the library and point to the books to read, but you have to go there and read it for yourself. That’s where education takes place, where the learner takes initiative to learn, and he was a learner all of his life.And to me, it was interesting that he wanted to know about great music, about great books, and you know, he couldn’t even read music but you remember how many times he brought music into that comic strip.

Kent Gustavson: Oh yeah.

M. Thomas Inge: When Schroeder’s playing piano, what he’d do is get a piece of sheet music that he wanted and just copied it into the comic strip.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: He was so pleased when someone wrote a symphony based on the character’s that played it kind of all those years ago. Because he loved music but he didn’t really know a lot about it. And he loved literature, even if he didn’t know a lot about it in the practical critical sense.

Kent Gustavson: I’m excited to talk much more about Charles Schulz in a minute, here we got to stop for a dish identification. I’ll be back in a second.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, History, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, Entertainment, PODCAST

Dave Praeger Transcript

December 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest is an intriguing one. Dave Praeger is the founder, editor and webmaster of poopreport.com and author of “Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product”.On the day commemorating Peanuts and Charles Schulz we think about comedy and this is comedy in its purest form. Welcome to the show.

Dave Praeger: Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks a lot.

Kent: And you are chatting with us from India.

Dave: Yeah, that’s right. I am in India on a quest to find this guru who is in the Himalayas who has learned the secret of cleaning using only one square of toilet paper.

Kent: [laughs]

Dave: I will not rest until I find him.

Kent: What time is it down there?

Dave: Actually, it is midnight here. It is really cold in New Delhi. Who knew that New Delhi gets cold in the winter, but that is the thing. I am looking forward to getting into my bed and warming up.

Kent: Very good. So tell me a little bit about the “Poop Report”, poopreport.com. What is the interest in excrement?

Dave: Well, poopreport.com started back in 1999 when I was working at what is now a very failed dotcom and because it was in the process of failing I had very little to do. One day my friend had a very funny story that involved something that had to do with the bathroom, and I thought, “This needs to be shared with the world”. I searched and searched and searched, and I couldn’t find any appropriate place to submit his story. I thought, well, I spent four years in college. This must be what I can do with my education.So I started this site, which is essentially a place for users to submit stories of things that happen in the bathroom, funny stories, and people will comment on them. And a whole community has developed around it.It is fun, but we try to push it as much as we can towards what we call the intellectual appreciation of poop humor. We are not just going to tell funny stories. We are kind of going to analyze the circumstances, the sociological issues that make it funny.Why should this one thing that we all do be so fraught with emotional baggage? Why are there so much shame and so much negativity associated with the one thing we all have in common? And so, when we are not laughing at the stories we are trying to figure out what is this thing.

Kent: Your quest is peace by poop.

Dave: Exactly. That is exactly right. We see it as the great unifier because black or white, man or woman, Muslim, Christian or Jew, this is one experience we can all relate to. It transcends languages and politics. When you think about it like this, I know it is funny to think about, but in a sense it is also very true that this is the common dateline across humanity. And, therefore, I believe it is worthy of attention.

Kent: Now, honestly, we all have some great stories. I can tell you one quickly. I spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East, and I have a good friend who was living in Gaza. He grew up there; it was before all of this trouble happened a few years ago. I went down there, and his family rolled out the red carpet. We took a walk and looked around the town. It was very interesting.And then I found I needed to go to the bathroom. I said, “Can I use your toilet?” And he pulled me aside and he said, “Kent, I have to explain something to you.” And I said, “Well, I know how to do this. This is going to be OK.” And he said, “Well, here we don’t put the toilet paper in the toilet. We put it in the trash can.” And I thought, oh my goodness but you know it is so culturally different between us. We share the same events but in so many different ways.

Dave: Yeah. When I came to New Delhi I came here right at the end of October, and one of the things I did was speak at the World Toilet Summit, which is a really interesting gathering. It was very much focused on issues of sanitation developing in the developed world. There is a huge portion of the world that just doesn’t have access to basic sanitation.One of the things that I mentioned is exactly what you said and it is that to understand, it is not just a matter of giving people an infrastructure, there are different cultural attitudes towards it. They have to understand in order to bring people up to a certain level. It is not just a matter of constructing a village toilet.We know, given what we know about science and hygiene and everything else and I saw it on the train here in India, the people who walk out in the morning and go to the train tracks and relieve themselves. We understand why it is unsanitary, but they look and they say, “You want me to go into this cement room, this brick room. It is hot. There is no air and do it in there when I can do it in the field like God intended.” The cultural grounding of this is so fundamental. They are trying to get people to change or break different techniques. It is really, really hard.

Kent: Right.

Dave: That is one of the things that I talk about in the book.

Kent: Humor really helps to explain a lot of things, then.

Dave: Yeah. The humor is absolutely critical. When you are talking about a taboo subject you need to put the taboo on the table and break the tension that it is creating. And the easiest way to do this is humor.The book starts out with some, I don’t want to say graphic imagery, but it starts out with very , let’s call it, a little bit sensational descriptions of some things that happened, and I did that on purpose. Right away, the taboo is dissipated. You are laughing. You are enjoying it. You see that I am coming from the same place as an author, that I am not some weird guy with a weird fetish. I am just some guy who has thought that, yes it is funny but it is also worthy of intellectualization. So, we’ll laugh at it, but when we’re done laughing, let’s talk about it seriously. And so, it’s a lot smoother to go into things like Freud and ideology, sociology, and psychology once the taboo has been broken. If I just started by telling the origin of the toilet in the struggle, your eyes would glaze over and you’d want to go to sleep.

Kent: You talk about poop in the Bible and that also got my attention. Can you tell me about that?

Dave: Well, you would think that given the overall over-arching shame that surrounds poop that it must be in the Bible somewhere that “thou shalt hide your poop from everyone,” and no one shall ever know what you do when the bathroom door is closed, but it’s not quite the case. Poop only appears in the Bible a couple of times. The most detailed biblical reference is in Deuteronomy 23:12 where God is detailing rules for armies on the march. And, basically he says that if you’re going to go to the bathroom, you should do it outside your camp because, to paraphrase God, that’s pretty gross if you do it in your camp.And so, a lot people have understood that to mean that you should not go to the bathroom in a place where you live. And, there were actually some rabbis in ancient Jerusalem who took this really seriously because Jerusalem was called the “Camp of the Lord,” or something to that effect. So everyday, they would walk outside the town to use the bathroom, but on the Sabbath that was too far of a walk, it was considered work. So, on the Sabbath they just had to hold it in because they weren’t allowed to go at all.

Kent: They had to hold it on the Sabbath, my goodness. And, why was the toilet invented in the first place? It seems like it’s a fairly useful device.

Dave: Yeah, it is. And, it has saved more lives than perhaps any other human invention, but it wasn’t invented for sanitary purposes. And, the most important message of my book, I think, is to understand the history of the toilet as a tool of ideology. Because it was actually invented by the rich Victorians in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to distance themselves from the rest of their society. They were rich and elite, but with the Industrial Revolution, so were a lot of other people were earning lots of money.So, in order to differentiate themselves, they began to pretend that their bodies were different. And so, they would powder their faces, they would wear perfumes, wear the finest clothes, and eat only the finest food. They developed this sense of morality that showing strong sexual desire was taboo, and bodily functions became taboo. But, the problem with bodily functions is you can hide it, but they’re still going to happen to you.And so, in the old infrastructure, before toilets, you would do your business in a pan and there it was. When you stood up, it was there and it was laughing at you, and telling you that you’re no different from the peasants who are living in the slums. So, the demand existed for a device that would make your waste completely disappear, so that no one could see it, and you denied that it happened. And, you could pretend that you’re a completely different kind of species from the rest of society.And, that’s where the toilet came from; it was originally a tool for the rich. It wasn’t until the 1860s or so, when science finally found the link between cholera and fecal contamination of water, that they realized how important it is to keep our waste out of our water supply, and that toilets were a very good tool to do this.

Kent: Tell me a little bit about the serious side to this, the environmental impacts and what’s still going on in the world. I know there are a lot of issues in many places about this.

Dave: Our sewers and our sewage treatment plants do a very good job of reclaiming water, taking the water we flush and putting it back into the water system. And, if the only other part of the function was human waste, then there would be no problem because we could compost that and put it back as fertilizer, and we complete the circle because as the top of the food chain, we’re also supposed to be at the bottom.But, the problem is with municipal sewers and this is across the board in any city. It’s not just human waste that goes into the sewers. It’s the household waste. It’s the paint you pour down the sink, or the drain cleaner you pour down the sink. It’s industrial contaminants, municipal contaminants, and the pollution that runs off into the storm sewers, if it’s got that kind of system. All these things are coming into the sewage treatment plant, and when the water is taking out, these things are being concentrated in the waste.So now, we have an organic resource that we want to use as fertilizer, but it’s got all these other contaminants, heavy metals, and God knows what else along inside of them. So, you’re faced with a choice. Do you dump it at sea? Do you put it in a landfill? Or, do you compost it and use it as fertilizer anyway? And right now, I think about half of the waste in the U.S. is used as fertilizer.And again, if this were only organic matter that would be a wonderful thing. But, because there are all these contaminants, they have to use certain techniques in the farmland to insure the contaminants don’t rise into the food chain or go down into the water table. But, these are farmers doing it, and farmers, by definition are going to die someday. And, the land is going to go away someday, and these contaminants are eventually going to move and come back to haunt us. And so this is the long-term environmental impact it’s what’s going to happen to these contaminants.

Kent: Wow. What got you interested in this? In college, did you study biology?

Dave: No. As I told you, I started this website just for the fun of it. And, over a couple of years, after we posted more and more stories, I started noticing patterns. I started noticing that this isn’t just all for laughs; this is a very strong, social influence. So, I started thinking what is shaping it? How does this shape us? And, how are we shaped by our attitudes towards it? And, the book really came from there, and all of the research stuff came out of there. Why is it funny, but why is it so fraught with negativity?

Kent: I’ve been speaking with Dave Praeger, author of “Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by the Grossest National Product.” I’m going to come back with you in about two minutes here, and we’ll chat a little bit more.

Dave: Great.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Science, Health, History, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Politics, PODCAST

M. Thomas Inge | Peanuts & Faulkner

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Interview with M. Thomas Inge: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The first author guest featured this week is M. THOMAS INGE, an authority on popular culture and the history of the comic arts. He is the author or editor of over 50 books. His three-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture was cited by the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work in 1979 and was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1989.From Booklist, the review of his book “Charles Schulz: Conversations”:

The media tributes that followed cartoonist Schulz’s death in February gave fans a glimpse at the quiet, unassuming creator of the beloved comic strip “Peanuts.” Those seeking additional insight into Schulz and his work can turn to the 16 interviews collected in this volume, which range from a 1957 Saturday Evening Post feature portraying Schulz as an unsophisticated, Middle-American everyman to the collection’s highpoint, a lengthy late-career dialogue with the Comics Journal, a publication known for applying critical rigor to the lowly comics medium. Christian Herald and Psychology Today interviews focus on aspects of Schulz’s work that were of particular interest to their readers, and a Los Angeles Times sports pages piece examines Charlie Brown’s losing record on the ball field. Schulz’s comments touch upon everything from his drawing technique and work habits to theological ruminations. In all the interviews, his basic decency and commitment shine through, and the modest Schulz refuses to admit that his work could be considered art. The thoughtfulness and creativity he demonstrates in these pages belie his demurrals. Gordon Flagg

Posted by admin | Filed Under Comics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

M. Thomas Inge | Comics & Literature

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Interview with M. Thomas Inge (2nd Segment): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

M. Thomas Inge, Ph.D. is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of English and the Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. A native of Newport News, Virginia, he received his B.A. degree in English and Spanish from Randolph-Macon College in 1959 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American literature from Vanderbilt University in 1960 and 1964 respectively. After teaching at Vanderbilt University, he became a member of the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University from 1964 to1969, when he joined the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He served as Chair of the department from 1974 to 1980 and then was Head of the Department of English at Clemson University in South Carolina. From 1982 to1984 he was appointed Resident Scholar in American Studies by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington.As a senior Fulbright Lecturer, Inge has taught at the University of Salamanca in Spain (1967-68) and at three institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1971). On a third Fulbright appointment in 1979, he offered courses on American humor and literary regionalism at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union. As resident Scholar with USIA, he consulted and lectured abroad in eighteen countries, including France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the People’s Republic of China. More recently he has lectured in Poland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Denmark, England, Germany, and the Czech Republic. At the invitation of the Gorky Institute, he returned to the Soviet Union to participate in conferences on Sholokhov and Faulkner and the works of Eudora Welty. He has led travel-study courses to the Soviet Union in 1988 and China in 1989, and in 1994 he taught at Charles University in Prague on a fourth Fulbright lectureship.Among others, Inge teaches courses in American humor and satire and is the author or editor of over fifty books. His three-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture was cited by the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work in 1979 and was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1989. In addition to his continuing interests in literature, Inge is also engaged in research on the history and development of American comic art, which resulted in his book “Comics as Culture.”More recent publications include “Anything Can Happen in a Comic Strip,” a study of self-referentiality in the comics, and “Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, a collection of interviews with the creator of Peanuts,” the first in a series of such collections for which Inge is serving as the general editor for the University Press of Mississippi. Works in progress include books on the relations between American literature and the comics and the adaptation process in the films of Walt Disney. From http://www.wittyworld.com/bios/bioinge.html

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Dave Praeger | Poop Report

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Dave Praeger: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The second guest is DAVE PRAEGER, the editor of PoopReport.com, a site dedicated to “the intellectual appreciation of poop humor.” He’s been seen on National Geographic TV and the BBC, interviewed by Esquire and the New York Press, and heard on everything from Sirius Satellite Radio to NPR. Find out more at www.poopreport.com The latest news from Dave Praeger and his book “Poop Culture” is below (from www.poopthebook.com)

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