A couple of weeks ago John Hodgman was in town, and as engi­neer for T. Hetzel’s Living Writers show, I got to meet the man and watch him through a glass par­ti­tion for an hour. JKH may only score as a minor celebrity on the ver­tigously log­a­rithmic US celebrit­o­meter scale, but he’s one of the few that I might actu­ally be giddy about meeting, and I was giddy.

The inter­view was great, and John is by any metric of sober non-giddiness a real plea­sure to interact with. He’s (sur­prise!) funny and inter­esting and affable. Which may actu­ally be sur­prising if you’ve read Kurt Vonnegut’s descrip­tion of the social lives of writers; roughly para­phrased: people expect writers to be artic­u­late and sparkling, since they may write artic­u­late and sparkling things. But the truth is they require two years locked in a room to get just a few basic thoughts out of them­selves, and when forced to relate to humans in real time (here I’m quoting) “drag them­selves through society like a gut-shot bear”.

Hodgman’s books are about being funny and inter­esting and affable, and yet that is what he is, so there you go.

The inter­view is great, T. did a lovely job as she usu­ally does and John needed little prod­ding. They do in fact engage in a thumb war at one point.

Which brings me to my involve­ment. Since I first lis­tened to this audio, I have been grad­u­ally for­giving myself, but it still pains me to say this: I screwed up the levels. John ini­tially asked for more volume in the head­phones, and I chose a very stupid way of bringing those levels up. Consequently there is clip­ping and dis­tor­tion, to a degree that sig­nif­i­cantly detract from the expe­ri­ence. No, I couldn’t hear it when it was hap­pening, but there were three dif­ferent meters that I failed to absorb visu­ally. Oh man, it still hurts. It does start get­ting better around minute 8, but it never gets good.

Anyhow, I’m putting the audio up because despite my inep­ti­tude, it’s still worth lis­tening to.