Bang A Gong
Bang A Gong
Mike and Brad
Are you hurting for good books, music, movies, food? Is there a hole in your life you can fill with rented chickens(!) or Classical Latin invective? Or maybe you have a half-loaf of challah in your hand and a cast iron pan full of bacon grease on your stove, and you're wondering what to do next. Bang a Gong, your resource for New Things, has answers for you! Our pledge to you: we'll turn time on your hands into not nearly enough time at all.
E9 - I Want My MTV [Back]
Bang a Gong comes back rocking from hiatus to talk about MTV: that is, Music Television, as we remember it from its heyday in the 1980s.  Brad kicks it off by dishing on the hundreds of hours of vintage VHS recordings gifted to Gen Xers through the...
Sep 30, 2020
45 min
E8 - The Correct Method of Reckoning for Grasping the Meaning of Things and Knowing Everything — Obscurities and All Secrets
A feather helmet, a credit card, a hand axe, a painting on silk "admonishing" Empress Jia.  If that sounds like a scavenger hunt, it's because it is — and you can't beat the British Museum for scavenging.  Join us as Brad dishes on A History of the...
Aug 13, 2020
40 min
E7 - Upgraded Campfire Cooking
Classic campfire cooking works.  Hot dogs on sticks are tasty, easy, and the kids love 'em.  But a few very easy steps open up a whole world of savory ribs, mouth watering BBQ, campfire nachos supreme, Turkish coffee, perfect French toast . . . Have to...
Aug 7, 2020
33 min
E6 - TV is for Table Varnish and German and Italian TeleVision
The least handy guy I know refinishes a kitchen table that's suffered a decade and half of abuse from children.  After all that hard work, kick back, relax, and sample some TV that's so good it's worth the subtitles. The foreign language TV review...
Aug 2, 2020
54 min
E5 - Peel, Roast, and Brew
Explore the legendary radio sessions of John Peel.  While drinking coffee.  Coffee you roasted at home.  Because why would you pay $5 and drive to a god awful chain for bitter dreck when you can have fresh roasted better stuff right at home for a tiny...
Jul 13, 2020
47 min
E4 - Bacon Challah and Rented Chickens
In today's episode, Mike combines the best of Judaism and Christianity into pork belly-infused, toasted, braided, eggy bread and Brad goes suburban farmer on us and chases chickens around his backyard.
Jul 2, 2020
33 min
E3 - Systematic John LeCarré and ... Nuts?
Enough books, TV, and movies to entertain and enlighten for months, all from one spy author who's been at it for 60 years.  But where to start and where to go from there?  After that, a deeply profound discussion of the finest packaged nuts available...
Jun 19, 2020
43 min
E2 - Classical Invective and Runmapping
Explore the colorful insults of the greatest [non-American] orator of all time, Marcus Tullius Cicero.  Then explore every inch of your surrounding area on foot as fast as you can.  Cicero's Philippics and Runkeeper Mapping make this week different from...
Jun 11, 2020
30 min
E1 - Sinéad and Shalhoub
Dig back for some updates to your playlist and fall asleep without fail every night.  In the pilot episode of Bang a Gong, your hosts highlight Two Things that made this week different — and better — from the last.
Jun 4, 2020
37 min