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Portmanteaus, a combination of at least two words, are fun!  Here are some examples:
 

• Breakfast + Lunch = Brunch
• Smoke + Fog = Smog
• Short + Pants = Skort
• Pregnant + Angry = The dumbest word, it made me mad to read it
• Obnoxious + Replacement for a Sense of Humor = Snark
• Gamers + Comedians = The Gamedians Podcast

 I like that last one!  It's got a ring to it.  Let's look into these Gamedians, shall we?

Relevant Links:
Gamedians Main Site!
iTunes Download!
Libsyn Download Site (for Android and Non-iTunes users)!
Gamedians YouTube Channel!

The long and short of the Gamedians podcast is that you download it and subsequently listen to comedians talk about video games for a while.  Hosts Andrew Dewitt, Dan Bialek and Asterios Kokkinos are here to delight and entertain you with their crippling video game addiction that they've turned into fodder for a podcast.  You like the Xbox?  Some Skyrim?  Maybe you want to throwback to Grim Fandago?  These are your guys.

I remember the first time it hit home that the things I thought were awesome were actually the lamest, loser-y things.

Unsurprisingly, many of their attempts to talk about video games end up in wild tangents.  The conversations on the whole are hilarious and often include the hosts getting riled up about whatever topic they land on. 

Content Rating:  Tagged as Explicit.  There is swearing and content that is not work safe, so headphones on!  They aren't so much offensive as they are just vulgar, if that makes sense.  For example, they'll use swear words but there's no inherent vitriol towards whatever party their swearing about. 

Average Episode Length:  You'll get about an hour of fresh-squeezed entertainment per episode.  The shortest episode runs at 34 minutes, while the longest episode tops out at an hour and forty!

When I go to my Ewok market I look for free-range, no antibiotic Stormtroopers that have been treated humanely. 

Drinking Game:  I am going to point you good people over to the Drunken Moogle, where they offer only the finest game themed adult beverages and accessories. 

Release Schedule:  Oh!  We have a bi-weekly release on Gamedians!  Doesn't look like they hold to any specific days to release, so subscribe or check back often to see when a new episode drops. 

Music: Eight bit music!  It's adorable and makes me smile when I recognize the song being covered.

I have eaten mayonnaise because I didn't want to go get food.

Unintentionally Good Part:  These guys have nerd history and their reminiscing is really fun to listen to on the podcast.  There are a lot of sweet memories of their nerdy parents tucked into the episodes that I enjoyed.

Bonus Unintentionally Good Part:  Asterios Kokkinos' name.  It's just rad.

Unintentionally Bad Part:  Makes me want to spend money on video games, when I need to save it for important things. 

The human brain is a disgusting, glorious piece of machinery that mostly tells me to procure more Cheetos, Doritos, or other processed foods that end with the "ee-toes" sounds.  Once I have a few dozen bags (Funyuns are also allowed) stashed in the false bottom of my desk, my brain then tells me to write podcast reviews.

Brains are weird!  They wrinkle up when you learn a thing!  Your prefrontal cortex rewrites itself during puberty!  If something is wrong with your brain, like seizures, a doctor will crack your skull open and cleave your brain in twain to help you out!  AND WHAT I DESCRIBED IN THE LAST SENTENCE ACTUALLY WORKS.

Also, Phineas Gage. 

In summary:  brains are neat, brains are important to your day-to-day life, and we should strive to learn more about how they do the things they do.  With that in mind (pun!), we turn to the Enhanced Naked Neuroscience (ENN) podcast.

Relevant Links:
ENN RSS Feed!
Get it through Google!
Check out ALL of the Naked Scientist podcasts HERE.  There's so many and they're all FREE!
Naked Scientists Twitter!

Content Rating:  Clean.  Trigger-warning for zombies.

Average Episode Length:  A dubious average of the episodes I have downloaded in iTunes shows about 18 minutes on average.

Drinking Game:  Take a drink every time a specific part of the brain is named (dendrite, neural circuit, hypothalamus).  Alternate each drink with a glass of water because otherwise you will have an odd sense of guilt about what damage you're doing to the body part you're learning about.

Release Schedule:  Couldn't find any concrete release schedule, so let's go with "erratic".

Music:  A little intro, not bad, doesn't get it the way of anything. 

The ENN podcast is a series of interviews and articles relating to neuroscience.  Doctors and scientists in fields related to and surrounding neurology let you know about recent studies and what cool new things humans are discovering by prodding into lumps of grey matter.  If topics such as how scientists backwards-engineer neurons for testing, or studies on little amoebas and how they relate to human behavior, this podcast is your bag, baby.

Topics are discussed in such a way that they are accessible to the typical listener without being overly simplified.  This keeps the podcast interesting, and the topics themselves are flat out fascinating.  The interviews range greatly in topic, so if one interview doesn't interest you, another will be along shortly.

Unintentionally Good Part:  The delightful accents.

Unintentionally Bad Part:  When you start looking up neurological disorders on Wikipedia and the subsequent self-diagnosis that you have at least 3 of them. 

Unrelated rating:  Two out of eight mice that escaped along with the Rats of NIMH. 

This is Irregular.  Irregular is an irregularly produced podcast focusing on irregular conversations with irregular people.

I think we can all agree that mocking things is the best, right?  Nothing makes you feel better than cutting someone else down and the anonymity of the Internet makes is incredibly easy for people to post things that you can subsequently laugh at.  

Hm.  I probably should have watched more Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood when I was little.  Too late!

But what if, on the rare occasion that you have to catch your breath because you're laughing so hard at someone, you decided to let them have their say on the matter?  And what if you actually found them interesting and with their own, mostly valid opinion?  Then you'd have the Irregular Podcast.

Relevant Links:
The Irregular Podcast Website!
iTunes! Which only has the first episode available, so check out...
Download through Feedburner!  ..which also only has the first episode.

Just listen to it through the site, okay?

Content Rating:  Explicit.  SERIOUSLY.  The first episode is called "Kindleporn Authors" so you can take that a guidelines as to whether or not you'd be comfortable listening to this podcast.

"It's a Strategically Placed Hole."

Average Episode Length:  Arrrrrrround an hourrrrrrr long.

Drinking Game:  Go on to Amazon.com.  Buy one of the good books that I've listed for you on the side of this review, then go click around the Kindle selections.  First time you find a book title that makes you recoil from your computer monitor, go get a drink.

ALWAYS THE WEREWOLVES!

Release Schedule:  Please see the podcast title.

Music:  L'Aguardiente by Camper Van Beethoven.

The previously reviewed, and much-beloved-by-me podcast The F Plus has stepped out beyond their towering empire of delightfully bizarre and hilarious forums readings to hear what the people they've made fun of have to say.  Hosts Lemon and Boots Raingear step into new territory as they invite members of subcultures to step up to the mic and explain what they're all about.

[Spoiler:  the wackadoos in every subculture are in the extreme minority, which means that the large majority are just peeps that happen to like things like Underwater Boggle or Sheep Organization.]

The Irregular Podcast provides you with interviews from a handful of people that participate in weird things.  The tone of the interviews are... semi-earnest explorations of other people's interests.  The hosts are more than happy to joke around with their guests, and the guests are congenial and do their best to answer the questions put forth.  The dialogue is interesting and while you may not come out of each episode with a greater appreciation for your fellow man, you'll have gotten an episode's worth of entertainment.  

Unintentionally Good Part:  When the guests catch the hosts off guard.

Unintentionally Bad Part:  The little player that pops up from the site is frustrating to move back and forth along the timeline, which makes it hard to replay funny quotes for a podcast review.

Unrelated rating:  Four reposts out of five.

That's not a book cover, that's a t-shirt!

Simply put: cool physics and other sweet science.

Science!  Say it aloud, and with some gusto:  SCIENCE!  Science is real, and it's spectacular.  

It is also confusing when you try and learn about how scientific processes process.  Sure, I've made a Punnett square or two, put some Mentos in some Diet Coke to learn about nucleation, and when I'm bored I spend my time in Wikipedia looking up civilian radiation accidents because they're fascinating in a horrific way.  

So what do you do when you want to understand a scientific theory that is pretty deep?  The kind of thing that takes a Masters degree and a graphic calculator to get a grip on?  You could give up and go bake cookies, or you could watch the Minute Physics podcast.

Relevant Links:
iTunes download link!
Minute Physics YouTube Channel
Store!
Wikipedia Page
Twitter
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which sponsors Minute Physics

Full disclosure:  this is a video podcast!  Quelle suprise, I know!  In fact, this is the first video podcast that I've ever reviewed!  I really like audio podcasts for the sheer fact that they don't need to be watched to get the full content.  That being said, I really enjoy watching episodes of Minute Physics and wanted to share it with you.

So I am.

So there.  Geez, mom.  

"Host" Henry Reich has a lot of markers, an understanding of quantum physics, and a desire to share his knowledge with the world.


Content Rating:  Clean for everyone who exists in the third dimension (that's you).

Average Episode Length:  The show is called Minute Physics, isn't it?  One or two minutes tops for most episodes.

Drinking Game:  And excerpt from Supermasterpiece.com:

Quantum Physics Drinking Game

Whenever the mere fact that you are observing a phenomenon causes a series of potentialities to resolve into one actuality, chug a beer.

That'll work just fine.


Release Schedule:  Looks like there is a new episode each week, although no new episodes in the iTunes list since December of 2012. 

Music:  Not in particular.

Unintentionally Good Part:  The little cat that shows up in the illustrations.

Unintentionally Bad Part:  This podcast is just a port of the YouTube episodes, so there's no real advantage to subscribing to it via a podcast subscription over a YouTube subscription.

Oh, also I have to watch the episodes a lot of times because of my tiny brain. 

Unrelated rating:  Five Higgs bosons out of five.

Go forth, watch and listen!  Let me know what you think of it in the comments!

Space:  the final frontier.  Uh, something about the Enterprise... prime directive... that one episode with tribbles...

Huh, I thought I knew more of the Star Trek intro.  Oh well!  Can I repair my geek cred if I admit I still know the DuckTales theme (a-whoo-ooh)?

Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that the whole "boldly going where no man has gone before thing" is a fascinating aspect of science.  NASA is often at the fore of such exploratory projects, and over the years has, to put it mildly, done some rad stuff.

Send a satellite hurling through the void of space with a golden record affixed to it so that we might make contact with our future Alien Overlords?  DONE.

Strap humans on top of enormous fuel tanks with wings so that they might shake off the bonds of earth and go hop around on the moon?  DONE.

Pester Mars incessantly with rovers?  YOU BETCHA.

Turns out when they're not busy mocking gravity, NASA finds the time for podcasting.   They have several podcasts to offer, but I'll be focusing on the "omnibus" podcast, NASA - This Week @NASA.

Here's where I need that sound effect from old news reels that goes 'deet-deet-de-deet-de-dee-deet"

This week at NASA [swooshing space noise]...

Relevant Links:
Main podcast website
Download via iTunes
@NASA on Twitter
NASA facts!

Ooh, there's a podcast about the Hubble telescope?  Neat!

Content Rating:  So clean you could build scientific instruments in it.

Average Episode Length:  About nine and half minutes by the looks of the episodes I have downloaded.  It's like getting a postcard from spaaaaaaaace!

Drinking Game:  Get drunk quick version:  drink every time they mention something that is currently not on Earth.  For the slower version, only drink when said non-Earthbound object is controlled by a foreign country. 

Release Schedule:  Weekly, with a new episode every Friday.

You get to hear about what the Curiosity rover is up to, what's going on in NASA overall, what will be going on in NASA eventually, and you get to hear phrases like-

Using Dexter, a two armed Canadian robot on the station...

There's going to be a little nugget of information that you'll find interesting in every episode.

Music:  A little intro beep-boop, a little outro beep-boop music.  Not much to speak of here.

Unintentionally Good Part:  The short length is just right.  If a particular topic catches your interest, you can find another podcast that goes into more depth, but this overall summary of what's going on with NASA fits your ears just right.

Unintentionally Bad Part:  I am not an astronaut, and this saddens me.

Unrelated rating: Three Space Food Sticks out of three.

[HA!  Did you know that the crew of Gemini III snuck a corned beef sandwich on board?  They got reprimanded for it.]
 

Your Walt Disney World Information Station!

Let me make sure we get one thing straight from the start of this review, dear reader:  people lose their damn minds over anything Disney.  Now, I thoroughly celebrate the majority of the Disney catalog what with the movies (Sleeping Beauty is a favorite), the charming commercials, and that one run of shows on TGIF where everyone went to Walt Disney World and Uncle Joey got to be in the Indian Jones Experience and the guys from Family Matters blew all their money on some ladies. 

...I actually remember plot lines from TGIF?  Ugh.

ANYWAYS, I enjoy Disney and all of their delightful licensed products in my life.  When I was little I dressed up as Peter Pan for Halloween and had a great time when I went to Walt Disney World a few years ago.  As far as I knew you showed up at whatever theme park you wanted, bought some tickets, went on some rides, and went home.  That was the Disney experience, right?

Reader, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went.  Did you know Disney hosts marathons?  Food and Wine festivals?  Can you recall the etiquette for trading pins with cast members?  What do you know about the origins of The Carousel of Progress?  Did you ride the Fort Wilderness Railroad?

Apparently, the answer to all of that is yes!  Little did I know how many people held a deep knowledge of all this Disney close to their hearts!  What I always thought of as a distant temptation of my vacation time is a year-round passion for lots of people, and there is a huge information network to support all of the news that surrounds the theme parks.  One does not simply ride into Tomorrowland.

Which is why you need a guide, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if you already listen to WDW Radio Show.


Relevant Links:
WDW Radio Show main site
Lou's Twitter
Subscribe via iTunes
WDW Disney Radio Forums
WDW Shop, which features Disney walking tours of various areas in the parks.


Louis A. Mongello, or just call him Lou, has got Disney in his heart and he will share it with you for as long as you are willing to listen.  Behind the scene facts!  Trivia!  Fascinating details of the park!  He'll answer your questions and ask you why you aren't currently listening to WDW Radio from a Disney theme park this very minute!

WDW Radio covers pretty much any information you'd ever want about the Disney empire.  The most useful portion of it might be his vacation planning information on how to make the best of both time and money at the parks.  Considering the fact that this podcast is sponsored by TouringPlans.com it isn't too far of a stretch to say that this is a great tool if you're planning a trip.  Lou covers attractions for kids, families, honeymooners, couples, and the lone ranger of the Orlando frontier.  

Content Rating:  Clean, although I am kind of delighted by the idea of an explicit Disney-based podcast.  I got your Mickey Mouse right here, pal!

Average Episode Length:  These episode lengths are just all over the place!  Anywhere from over an hour to a touch over nine minutes is what I see at a glance. 

Drinking Game:  I found one for EPCOT and it has a scorecard and everything!


And since I just spent 15 minutes reading through it, enjoy Drinking Disney as well.  

Release Schedule:  Weekly. 

Music:  Clips and sounds from various Disney movies and attractions are used, and Lou invites listeners to guess their source.  There is also a nice little a capella intro, which I like. 

Unintentionally Good Part:  If you have fond Disney memories, this podcast is sure to stir them up. 

Unintentionally Bad Part:  I find it odd that Disney fanatics can both see the man behind the curtain, and still be awe of the great and powerful Wizard.  I guess it is a testament to the power of Disney magic that fans can both be aware of the gears and bolts that make up the machine, and still enjoy it for the sense of wonder and imagination it was intended to portray.   


Unrelated rating:  I would totally listen to this podcast while riding the PeopleMover ( or Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover if you so please) for at least 2 hours.  I love that ride.

As reader(s) of this review site know, I like to give goofy introductions to podcasts.  Well, consider this a break in the trend and observe this beautifully succinct description from Clarkesworld Podcast:

The Clarkesworld Podcast features all of our fiction in audio form. Each episode is hosted by Kate Baker and features an original story from our current issue. By visiting this page, you can sign up to have each episode sent to you via iTunes or email. Best of all, we offer this service completely free of charge.

Clarkesworld Magazine, purveyors of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories, has produced Clarkesworld Podcast which transposes those science fiction and fantasy stories into an audio format for your enjoyment.

Simple, elegant, and practically begging for you to give a little listen.  

Relevant Links:
Clarkesworld Magazine Main Site
Clarkesworld Podcast Main Site
Get a Clarkesworld Magazine Subscription in both digital and physical versions!
Donate or buy an Anthology!


Content Rating:  Caution suggested.  Writers are a wanton lot, and a prone to write about things that an earnest soul might not find suitable for their delicate senses.  Things like procreation.  Terrible, I know!

Average Episode Length:  An average taken from the last ten episodes shows a running time of approximately thirty minutes.  There are some episodes that last over an hour and some that run under twenty minutes.

Drinking Game:  Ooh, toughie.  Go figure, but there aren't a lot of book/short story related drinking games (other than my favorite, a novel little pastime called "drinking alone while reading").  However, the Internet has provided me with this delightful Dune-based drinking game.  If you're truly hardcore, you'll play through the full duration of the audiobook.

Release Schedule:  Per the Clarkesworld website, "A new episode is added to our site on the 1st, 14th and 21st of each month."

Unintentionally Good Part:  Sometimes when a line from a story is read aloud, and read aloud well, there is a spark in that and it can be a beautiful thing.  It will catch you off guard, as it has caught me. 

Unintentionally Bad Part:  This is a podcast that requires my full attention.  I cannot listen to it at work!  I could probably manage to fold socks as best, because I don't want to miss any details or dialogue. 

Unrelated rating:  Two of of three of the Laws of Robotics.

Please, allow Kate Baker the opportunity to read you a story.  Let her read you several stories.  There's not much more I can say beyond that to entice you.