A hoped-for interview ahead with Gabra Zackman of audio narration fame is the news in today’s show on the channel. We also look back on the perils of narrating Sherlock Holmes while “falling out” with Covid, as well as the advances in the art of audio narration thanks to the progress of time. Something different: Sherlock Holmes, sick with Covid, this time on AudiblySpeaking!
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What a whimsical tale Dr. Watson has to tell of Jabez Wilson and “The Red-Headed League!” Between the laughter and the mirth that Holmes teases out of the tale, there emerges a dastardly crime so cunning that only Holmes himself could solve it. John Clay, the “fourth smartest man in London,” according to Holmes, and probably a man working for Moriarty, the second smartest man, is plotting to bankrupt a vital English bank. But the narrator should not reveal the plot. He simply takes the part of the players, in this narration by your audio interpreter of all things Holmesian, Rick Reiman. He hopes, and knows that, thanks to the brilliant writing of Arthur Conan Doyle, that you will enjoy it.
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This is your narrator for this series, Dr. Rick Reiman. Americans know too little about the Early American Republic, the Republic of President Thomas Jefferson, leading to the War of 1812 and its aftermath, the Era of Good Feelings. In this overview of Chapter 7 from The American Yawp, I summarize its major themes. This will benefit my students, who must complete a Major Project in which they identify the major fractures in American life and politics from the 1780s through this major period in American history.
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Hello, everybody! Rick Reiman here, audio narrator for Audibly Speaking. On rare occasions, I re-record a short story in the Sherlock Holmes series written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Not that I think I did a bad job in my reading the first time around. But I am quite certain that I am doing better in my reinterpretation of these stories as I go along, both sonically and artistically. Therefore, I look back on those Sherlock Holmes stories that I think are Doyle’s very best and try to do them (and my audience) greater justice than I did the first time around. I think that these stories, albeit on a digital platform, help us live out our digital lives more productively and in ways less likely to lead to digital addiction. They are my contribution to the digital minimalism movement, for more information about which I heartily recommend the YouTube channel of Laura Malvoyante. In what Holmes would call “my own small way,” this is a contribution of mine to that movement.
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The story of American history, the “American Yawp,” begins with this chapter, Indigenous America, spanning 10,000 years of history. There is nothing quite like it in history, as you will hear when you listen to it.
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What a pleasure it was for me to interview Laura Malvoyante about her insights into society’s growing need for digital minimalism in the face of the addictiveness of tech. Technology is a voracious feeder on the limited and priceless commodity of time in our lives. At the same time, sometimes the antidote to this invasion is technology itself, in the form of devices that can force upon ourselves, in their build capacity and form factors, a more limited and rational relationship to the digital plenitude. Laura’s matchless intelligence on this topic, and her own personal journey through digital addiction and the nexus between disability and device, make this one of the most important and timely episodes presented on Audibly Speaking.
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Move over Charles Dickens! Stand aside, Scrooge! For a nineteenth century English Christmas tale without parallel, you cannot do better than Sherlock Holmes’s conveying of the Christmas message in his discover and commutation of a felony, all to save a soul in the season of forgiveness of this time of year. My narration of this tale is my Christmas present to all of my listeners. And now, happy listening ion the frosty air of crackling fires, ice crystals, and Sherlock Holmes himself.
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This opinion piece on Medicare Advantage concerns the “hard-sell” that private insurance companies make this time of year on behalf of “Medicare Advantage,” the private insurance alternative to Original Medicare. I record this podcast episode to warn seniors to do their homework, and ask the question, why are insurance companies so anxious to sell their Medicare Advantage plans and not the Supplement plans that offer the insurance companies so little of a profit margin? Hmm…maybe the question answers itself. TV commercials give only one side of the story, the private insurance companies’ side. They don’t lie, but they leave out much that seniors need to know before making what could be a very bad choice.
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In our post-truth world, ignorance about Medicare has reached avalanche proportions. The greatest and most secure health care system in the world is now suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the form of babbling malcontents whose ignorance of Medicare is only matched by their outrage at it. Just go to Facebook or some other social media cesspool and you will see a lot of such heat, but precious little light. Medicare complainers, please heal yourselves and do a little, or preferably a lot, of research. Please!
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Today, Sunday, November 10, 2023, I reflect on the events of Veterans Day Weekend 1963, when JFK and Oswald lived out their last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, November 10-12, 1963. We review what we know of those fateful days. Next, I talk about the events of Wednesday, November 13 through Friday, November 22, 1963, to be published here on Audibly Speaking before Friday, November 22, 2024.
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In this final episode about my opinions and experience with learning Medicare for retirement, I spread the word that many people are talking about: Medicare Advantage plans and Part D Prescription Drug plans are undergoing big changes, premium hikes and in some cases disappearing acts during this Annual Election Period between October 15 and December 7. If you are on Medicare Advantage OR a Part D prescription drug plan (you can’t be on both) you need to research Medicare.gov to see if you have a plan that will continue to have the same benefits and premiums as in 2024. In most cases, benefits are going down, premiums are going up and some plans are actually shutting down. Watch the Youtube videos by Mathew Claassen on Medicare for expert and accurate advice to follow. This episode is only my opinion and personal experience. It may not be yours.
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In this third part of my series on what I have learned, or thought I have learned, about Medicare I talk about some myths I have discovered about Medicare Advantage and Part B. While Medicare Advantage may be the right choice for some people, I cringe when I watch the commercials during this Annual Election Period and see the slick pitch that insurance companies make to see the cash cow (for them) of MA. Here are the realities that I see from behind just some of the myths about both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part B.
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What in the world is Part D? My personal experience learning what I appreciated to find out about Medicare Part D coverage is the subject of this this brief podcast episode. Disclaimer: These are my opinions and what my impressions were. This is no substitute or necessarily as accurate as your doing your own research on Medicare. It is just an opinion piece on my reflections of my own experience.
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Medicare is confusing– what an understatement. Two years out from retirement I decided to try to understand it, suspecting that it might take me that long. I was not wrong! Now that I am retired and am now on Medicare, I tell this slightly autobiographical tale of what I think I have learned about Medicare in hope that it will either be interesting to or helpful for others, whichever the case may be.
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Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE. Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964.
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In many ways, I regard this as my best recording of a chapter from “The American Yawp” yet. I have deleted nothing from the text edited by its editors, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. I have added passages of my own where I think additions were needed to clarify what the original authors were trying to say.
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Late in his authorial career, in the 1920s to be precise, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was then deeply immersed in beliefs of mysticism and seances, had occasion to pair his rational detective, Sherlock Holmes, with a case about vampires. Did Doyle change the hyper-rational Holmes to suit the author’s new beliefs? Listen and find out!
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In the course that covers the first half of American History, the chapter on the Sectional Crisis of the Union, also sometimes called “The Impending Crisis,” leading to the American Civil War, is the penultimate such chapter. Next to the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the crisis written by the great historian David Potter, that one audio narrated by Eric Martin, this chapter from the Open Educational Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” narrated by me, Dr. Rick Reiman, surveys the crisis well in capturing succinctly its fateful highlights. Listen, learn and enjoy. An historian myself I have added a few sentences of my own to improve, I firmly believe, on the chapter’s effort to make the Sectional Crisis more understandable.
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No ordeal in American history changed America so much or so enduringly as the American Civil War. Listen as well as read of the odyssey and what it was all about, or just listen with this audio offering.
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Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a French immigrant to American wrote this classic essay, “What, Then, is this New Man, the American?” in 1782, as American Independence from Britain loomed. Was he correct in his descriptions of Americans then? Do his descriptions accurately describe Americans today? How was he wrong then, if he was, and how do his descriptions fail to characterize Americans today, if indeed they do?
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