Oh, aren’t we lucky!? A double-bluffed, double-dipped, double-headed dose of Isaac Babel. When you’ve had a listen here and discover that you’re still running low on your recommended daily serving of Babel, you might head here to find a new recording of an old reading of another one.

HEY, Internet, I want to tell you all about Earideas.

Wow, that sounded a little snake-oily- let me try that again:

Plenty of you (because I’m supposing you’re all geniuses) are aware of the arguably unattributable (King Solomon? Buddha? Lincoln? Miette?) aphorism, idiom, and, notably, universally applicable phrase “This Too Shall Pass.

So, Ilf and Petrov met while working on a newspaper for railway workers, which is intriguing to me. For starters, where’s the podcastresses’ newspaper, and why have I not been invited to participate? My life’s literary collaborator could be waiting there, slinging the pen on the audio-coding equivalent to pieces on socialism and coal hauling,

For your bonus bedtime track this week, I’ve decided to double up on (I suppose?) relative abstrusity, author-wise. But this time, I’m in the fortunate position of already knowing and loving and potentially endlessly blathering about today’s subject, to prevent us all from hitting the high mile dudgeons ove

Ahh, so you’ve noticed that I still hadn’t read any Gogol, despite a-hundred-some readings including enough of a Russian contingency to keep a stronghold on the world weight-lifting championships for the next few centuries, and despite a story by an Italian all about Gogol, in its own peculiar way.

8 of Miette’s 2006 Predictions for the New Year:

– I will really really do all those things I meant to do in 2005, including those things in 2005 I was really really going to do after neglecting in 2004.
– Ditto 2003.
– When thinking of these podcasts, I’ll follow at least three of the Dalai Lama’s instructions, and be better off for it. (Though that one about silence; I’m doubting I can do much with that one.)

Welcome to this, the humble inaugural edition of Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast, which is really nothing more than my excuse to have a podcast.

You see, I’ll bet that other people don’t read to you enough. I know that people don’t read to me enough. So this way I can read to you, and then later listen to it myself, and take care of all our problems. Or at least take care of this one. For all of us.