The Omnibus Project: Background information when reading Planet Funny

The Omnibus Project

This article relates to Planet Funny

Readers who enjoy Jennings's dense, fact-laden prose in Planet Funny might like to check out his relatively new podcast, Omnibus! The podcast is cohosted by Jennings and John Roderick, front man for the indie rock band The Long Winters.

The premise of the twice-weekly podcast is that the two hosts — who both hail from Seattle — are producing a sort of audio time capsule, a primer to our society for historians in the long-distant post-apocalyptic future.

The show's topics are wildly eclectic, ranging from the cultural significance of the Rachel haircut to the Port Chicago disaster to the boysenberry or the pygmy hippo. A mere listing of the show's topics doesn't do it justice, however, since the two cohosts really just use the stated topic as a springboard for discussing a wide range of related (or thoroughly unrelated) issues and ideas, making the listener feel like they're just sitting at a bar or coffee shop enjoying the company of two of their smartest friends.

Newsweek has called the show "delightfully nerdy and full of esoterica," and it's true that listeners are likely to come away from the podcast with an expanded list of books to read, facts to research, or, at the very least, cocktail party trivia to deploy.

Jennifer Anniston modeling the Rachel haircut
Port Chicago Disaster
Boysenberries
Pygmy Hippo

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to Planet Funny. It first ran in the July 11, 2018 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.