There's an etiquette to all this, and if any mistakes were made in bringing this week's mini-episode of The Distraction to your podcast feed, those mistakes had to do with that etiquette. We knew that Drew would be at the beach this week, decompressing and wearing his rash guard so as not to get a sunburn, and the original plan was that the podcast would take a week off. But we didn't mention that at the end of last week's episode, and we never booked ourselves into a situation where I could host a semi-normal episode on my own, and we didn't want to leave the feed completely empty, and in lieu of continuing to make excuses I will merely end this sentence at this time and get to the mini-episode.
So what we have here instead of nothing, or a normal episode, is something silly and slight, shorter than the usual but in point of fact not especially short, in which our producer Eric Silver and I kibbitz a little bit about Defector's big week in New York City, do some meta-chat about podcasts and podcasting, and then recommend some other stuff you can listen to while our podcast takes this week to recharge the creative batteries. Eric recommends Dan McQuade's recent appearance on the video game podcast Insert Credit, and I advocated for uh the latest episode of It's Christmastown, a podcast where I talk about Hallmark movies. (I don't really listen to podcasts unless I am on them, or going to be on them, although I did put in a good word for some other pods and other guests.) Somehow, in an episode that was mostly designed to be an explanation of why there isn't a real episode in your feed, I managed to speak from the heart about Mr. Met's star power and talk in my awful Trump voice. The prospect of a long supercut of Drew's signature loud podcast noises being uploaded to YouTube and used as ASMR was mentioned, but hopefully not spoken into existence.
So it's not quite an episode. There was some vital sandwich-related follow-up, but The Funbag, wriggling and fragrant as ever, was unopened; I didn't Remember A Guy, although I'm happy to just mention Matt Stairs here to be polite; there was no moment in which I asked a well-credentialed guest a non-question that amounted to "Where do you get your ideas?" But it's not really not an episode, either. Next week, when we return at full strength with something more like a normal episode, you may miss this one's brevity, or its earnest appreciation of mascot gravitas. Probably just the brevity, if I'm being honest.
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