Slashdot Mirror
NPR's "Car Talk" Glides To a Halt
stevegee58 writes "After 25 years on the air, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers) are calling it quits in September. With their nerdy humor, explosive laughter and geek cred (both MIT alums) Tom and Ray will be sorely missed by the average NPR-listening Slashdotter." How many garages have names as cool as "Hacker's Haven"? I've long thought that someone should assemble a compilation featuring nothing but hours of their laughter. (Which will be available for sampling, since they will continue to play archived material for a long time yet.)
Nooooooo! These guys were brilliant!
Sad day indeed.
This makes me feel sad. They were a great part of Saturday mornings. I know they are up at retirement age, but I hope they find some other projects that help them share their wit and wisdom. Click and Clack Rock.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
I first listened to them on WBUR, before they were picked up by NPR. "Cartalk Plaza" was located on Commonwealth Avenue, not in "Hahvuhd Squayah", and "our fair city" was Boston, not Cambridge. Been a long time since I wandered those haunts. Click and Clack weren't going to last forever, guess it's that time to move on.
I think that when they saw the Dodge Dart was coming back on to the market, they decided to get out of the business.
Sorry, nothing too insightful to say other than how sad I am! Can we do a /. funeral? We could hire the Donwanna Behere funeral home.....Yea, lame I know - -
see? we need them!!
will work for dragon quest localization
The mouth-breathers see "NPR" and have flooded every forum on the internet with their ass-hate "libtard yuck-yuck" comments. It's a great show, more for entertainment value than anything. Oh yeah, and NPR listeners are bar none the most well-informed news consumers in this country.
My local station plays the show at 7 or 8 Wednesday nights which is when I usually catch it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
After recommending muriatic acid to remove concrete overspray from a cars paint they added the advice to "test it out on a neighbors car first". I will really miss these guys.
I guess you can tag the parent Flamebait, but I think it serves a valid purpose. Not everyone loves the show. Some people are sickened by the thousands of hours of perfectly good broadcast time that are wasted on the hyenas in question each week.
To quote Harry Shearer, whose Le Show followed Car Talk at the time, "Memo to the Car Talk guys: Stop Laughing."
"A matter of internal security, the age old cry of the oppressor" - Jean Luc Picard
Haywood Jabuzoff
I guess you can tag the parent Flamebait, but I think it serves a valid purpose. Not everyone loves the show. Some people are sickened by the thousands of hours of perfectly good broadcast time that are wasted on the hyenas in question each week.
To quote Harry Shearer, whose Le Show followed Car Talk at the time, "Memo to the Car Talk guys: Stop Laughing."
Preach it brother!
I get that it's a popular show, and I actually liked it the first time I heard it. But once I noticed the incessant hyena laughing it just got old very quickly. It's like a loudly ticking clock. You might not notice it, but once you do it can be as irritating as all hell.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Back in the 70s when they had said garage, a "hack" was someone who was unskilled or at least an amateur at whatever it was they were trying to accomplish. Hackers were just dedicated hobbyists. Their Hacker's Haven was a shop for DIY shade-tree mechanics to rent space at to work on their project cars. It wasn't until sometime into the 80s that "hacker" started taking on a different meaning.
In any case, TSA and DHS didn't exist yet, they weren't yet on the air so the FCC wouldn't give two shakes. The most they might have to worry about is ending up in a Bufile at the FBI, which seems unlikely.
Program Intellivision!
It's a show about a couple of guys having a good time while talking about cars.
It hits the nail on the head. I'm sorry people laughing cut's you so sharply. really, you should see some one.
HAHahhahahahahahaha hahaha
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He's just bitter because he has forgotten how to make people laugh.
Shearer hasn't been really funny for a long time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why stop now...? Were they unready to embrace Electric Vehicles? "Too" ready...?
Technologies change... perhaps a new generation must take over the helm, when they do...
There's definitely something to that. The show was really great back when people had bizarre problems with something like a 1982 Suburu, and it turned out to be a vacuum hose leak. Now it's all "should I buy this used car?" and "take it to a dealership and have them read the codes".
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I saw, or rather heard, two very knowledgeable guys helping people and having a good time doing it. Car Talk is/was a gem and will be sorely missed by the thousands of people that they have helped and millions of people that they have entertained over the last 25 years.
It is too bad that the parent poster didn't call them to learn how to change the channel on that radio thing in the dashboard of their car.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Hmm... "Magliozzi", is that a Sephardic name or an Ashkenazi one?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Oh, come on. Why can't an expert be someone who knows where to look and produces helpful information?
I grew up with Car Talk and it never occurred to me to question the reality of the show, so when I found out how it's produced (not a secret: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Talk), it felt like learning the hard truth about Santa Claus all over again. Hurts, right?
Suspension of disbelief is your friend, and it's still a great show. My weekends will miss them.
You sir have no idea how tv or radio production works. Sorry to ruin your world.
A real diagnosis would be everybit as horrible as helping a relative on the phone with a computer problem-- most the call is trying to communicate and often does not properly describe what is going on then you look like some git when it doesn't work and it was actually THEIR fault. If they really did know their stuff it would be a typical production to have them do the work upfront and NOT on the air where it could easily take most of the show to properly handle problem besides being BORING to listeners/viewers. It is not a "speak with a sex therapist" show where the topic is the only thing holding it together.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Gasp! Next you're going to tell me that the Stig actually knows more than two facts about ducks!
Keep reading: "...or at least an amateur." You're right, though, I chose my words poorly. There were (and are) some very skilled, talented hackers at MIT. (Look no further than HAKMEM!) Hacks are still hacks, though, clever as they may be. The TMRC hackers (perhaps the largest MIT hacker contingent I'm aware of outside the famed MIT AI lab) describe themselves thusly:
Program Intellivision!
I am sure this is done like every other show. People are screened, a number of recordings are made, and the best are broadcast. The show is edited to fit the hour timeline, and of course the calls that don't work are not broadcast. They probably use old calls as fillers. Those who listen to the show also know they have had callers call back to see if the diagnosis is correct, and at this time they include situations where diagnosis was wrong.
This is pretty typical. I watched a taping of Wait Wait, and it is also heavily edited. Not all the answers are given at the time of the question, and it is edited for time. There seems to a general attempt to show that NPR and PRI are not fact based using minor incidents of non disclosure. For instance, there is a great brouhaha over the work of humorist David Sedaris. Now, I understand that are some sad people who believe that every word in the biography of Ronald Reagan is true, but reasonable people among us know that any story, not matter how based on fact, is to some degree apocryphal. Recollections are based on reconstructing memory, which is highly unreliable. We get a realistic point of view by listening the recollection of many people.
What we have here is the proposition that a live unedited show based on personal opinion is more valid that a semi-scripted researched show based on fact.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd disagree about Le Show, but that's beside the point.
I understand that people like CT, but my local NPR (opb.org) pays to play them twice a weekend. I know from listening to other NPR affiliates across the country over the 'net that there are some seriously good programs available for broadcast - programs that I suspect would even cost *less*.
My NPR affiliates love to brag on the diversity and alternative voices that they provide to the community, but on weekends they spam me with nothing but Wait Wait, Praire HC, Car Talk and Michael Whoever's show. Few of those are terrible on their own merits, but the opportunity cost is disgraceful.
Things have gotten marginally better over the years, but the weekend is a wasteland of chuckleheads. Every time the local NPR station brags on diversity I roll my eyes and think that I've always been able to listen to re-runs of CT twice a weekend but they've never broadcast a single episode of Tavis Smiley.
I get their point - they're more serious than the fart-sound morning shows and more diverse than the honkey-trash christian country on other stations, but that should by no means be the hurdle by which they judge themselves.
I'd seriously like to see a report on what is being paid for programming and what programming was turned down when the pledge drive comes around. I've always suspected that two lesser-known informative shows are passed by in order to chum the weekends with hyena talk.
"A matter of internal security, the age old cry of the oppressor" - Jean Luc Picard
Here's how it worked:
- You call the 800 number, describe your problem, if it sounds interesting the producer (Doug Berman) called you back and scheduled you for the show. So the problem is already known.
- About Thursday afternoon before the weekend broadcast you called in to essentially a conference call a few minutes before your slot and got to hear the end of the previous caller. I suppose this is to get you in the mood, all it did is make me come down with a bad case of flop sweat.
- You're on, you talk to the guys for five or ten minutes. They (correctly) guessed the solution to my problem pretty fast, primarily I think because they saw it before in their garage. My time was edited down a bit, but it was mostly verbatim.
- They do not send you a copy of the broadcast, the only way I have one is because I recorded it off my local NPR station when it hit the air.
That's the scoop. This is Tom from Michigan with a mysterious oil leak in his Z28 Camaro signing off.
From wikipedia, but I remember when this happened:
"In addition to at least one on-orbit call, the Brothers once received a call asking advice on winterizing a couple of "kit cars." After much beating around the bush and increasing evasiveness by the caller, they asked him just how much these kit cars were worth. The answer: about $800 million. It was a joke call from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory concerning the preparation of the Mars Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) for the oncoming Martian winter."
I just don't get this decision at all. Can someone please explain it using a software engineering analogy?
Someone else can provide the specific details, but on a show in the past few years, there was a caller who I seem to remember had a delivery truck but somehow often ended up where there were lots of sheep or goats.. and the said animals would always freak out when he was playing Car Talk and the guys laughed.
NPR-listening republican checking in.
What were you saying?
I called in once to see about getting a diagnosis on a car issue. They took the info, and said they would get back if they found it interesting, but if they did, then the whole phone call would be essentially scripted. They would do (or have done) a diagnosis off air, then pretend to figure it out all in the span of a few hyena-larious moments on air.
Experts my ass.
Sorry, that's a lie. I was the assistant chief engineer for WBUR for 8 years, and I sat in on the recordings of many of their shows. I've also consulted for Car Talk, fixing their network and computers, and have stayed at one producer's house in New Hampshire.
The producers screen the calls (they get hundreds each week), but Tom and Ray know nothing about each call. They're presented with the person's name, city, and car type, and that's it.
Mind you, the recording of the show is over 2 hours, and then gets edited down, but no - the calls are not scripted, they haven't pre-diagnosed the problem, and yes, they figure it all out during the phone call. That call may be edited from 20 minutes down to 5, but it's still their first (and only) crack at the problem.
I'm not sure why you'd lie about something like this, but it's probably some sort of mean joke like your sig, because of your own personal insecurity and desire for attention. Just as I hope others don't believe this, I hope your wife sees your posts.
Laughing like a hyena at everything that comes out of your brother's mouth is not "humour". It's annoying idiocy.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Click and clack have done 25 years of persuading Americans that the American suburban culture built around the gasoline burning passenger car is OK. ...
That is the nature of mass media. Car Talk has been facilitating the acceptance of American automobile based culture for 25 years.
Look, America has an automobile-based culture. Click and Clack aren't going to change that on their own. "The Hey People, You Shouldn't Be Driving a Car Show" wouldn't have lasted two weeks on the radio. On the other hand, a lot of people drive cars, their cars break down in various ways, and they can use advice on how to fix them. Click and Clack provided that advice in an entertaining way that helped to relieve what can otherwise be a very stressful situation for people who rely on their cars.
But to claim that they're stumping for the car lobby is just you getting up on your soapbox. They regularly advocated energy efficient cars, hybrids, and so forth, and their driving recommendations had more to do with safe driving and fuel efficiency than the middle-aged fantasies of sports car owners. And despite all that "don't drive like my brother" fun and games, they never made any secret of the fact that Tom Magliozzi doesn't own a car and doesn't drive.
Breakfast served all day!
Huh, there seems to be very little truth in your statement. I have a friend who was on their show about three years ago. She left just a little bit of info in a voicemail when she called (name, phone number, car type, and a very short 20 or 30 second statement of the problem) - which I guess is how their screening process works. They called her back in a day or so (along with a number of other people) when they were taping the show, and she got to talk with Tom and Ray almost immediately. Nothing was scripted. The actual segment they recorded with her didn't make it on the air for months though...
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black