Bedroom Moments with Weekend Edition Saturday

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday has been just outstanding lately. Every story is interesting -- the darn show makes me stay in my bedroom so long, waiting to hear the next story, that it's not even breakfast time anymore when I get downstairs.

Today's highlights were:

• Symphonic Forensics: Alsop's 'CSI Beethoven', about a collaborative performance between Marin Alsop (and her Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) and a Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist. It included lots of details about what caused Beethoven's deafness, what he may have died from, and played recordings of how Beethoven's music would have sounded to him at different stages of his increasing loss of hearing.
  
• Capturing Cell Phone-Only Users in Political Polls -- The Pew Research Center finally answered my nagging question about whether the increasing incidence of younger people not having "land" phone lines will affect political polling results.
  
• BBC Comedy Hit Heads to U.S. -- I haven't heard of the show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, but found its creators very funny.
• 'Salesman' Willy Loman: A Towering Little Man -- Just a great story you wouldn't hear anywhere else, looking at an archetypal character of American theater.
  
• Costa Rica's Señor Scissorhands -- Reporter John Burnett's notebook piece about a topiary garden in Central America. Its creator spends all of his time working on the topiaries: "It's so much, it takes a month to trim them all," he says, "and when I'm finished, it's time to start over." Great pictures on the website, too.
  
• A Tragedy in Baghdad -- A moving essay by Scott Simon about yesterday's bombings in Baghdad's pet markets, in which two mentally disabled women were used as bombers.
• Plan Would Nationalize Schools to End Disparities -- I don't read The Atlantic, so this story was a heads-up on a story that proposes funding schools nationally and setting national standards that go beyond No Child Left Behind. The author made the case that local school boards are dysfunctional... and used the fact that the U.S. spends more on education than other industrialized countries (with less to show for it) to back up his claims.
  
• Facebook Backlash: Anti-Social Sites Flourish -- I missed half of this story (you have to shower sometime) but it sounded interesting, covering a new website called Enemybook.

Weekend Edition Saturday has a very high ratio of "driveway moments" -- but in this case, I guess I have to call them "bedroom moments." Teehee.