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Off Topic: Endings

One of my favorite things in the world is ending next week. The Best Show on WFMU is a three hour show on Tuesday nights (there's an episode tonight and then next week's finale), hosted by Tom Scharpling. It's a call in show with music, but it's so much more than that - there are also regular in-studio guests (last week was Patton Oswalt and Julie Klausner), who just hang out and talk about whatever with Tom. Last week's conversations included stories about Bruno Mars, about somebody pranking a pizzeria by ordering 178 pizzas for Bob Dylan's crew, and about the potential hilarity of Billy Joel's announcement that he's playing one show a month at Madison Square Garden "for the rest of his life". It's stream of consciousness, it's riffing off ideas, and if you love comedy, it's awesome.

Also, Scharpling, along with Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, has created a world centered around the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey, in which Wurster plays several characters, all related to or friends/coworkers of Scharpling's at the cardboard box factory in the town, which is the biggest employer. Wurster calls in with some benign comment or request, then things reliably get more absurd and surreal as the call goes on, and most calls usually end up with Wurster losing control and threatening Scharpling's life in very comical ways.

It's impossible to do justice to how amazing this show is with words (although Jake Fogelnest did a pretty good job in Spin a couple years ago), so here's the archive; dive in, listen to a couple episodes, and be sad it's going away. If you don't have 2.5 hours to spend listening to full shows, there's also Best Show Gems, an archive of Scharpling & Wurster bits which are exceedingly hilarious in their own right, and typically about 30-40 minutes at the most and well worth checking out.

Has anything that entertained you ended recently - book series, TV show, comedy thing, podcast, anything? Did you find something to replace it with, or did you just sort of accept the hole in your life and move on?

Anything else you want to talk about? Is the whole country frozen at this point?