Yum! For those of you who love fresh oysters on the half-shell as much as I do, this mouth-watering drop-in is irresistible. With his boat's engine humming and a guitar strumming in the background, an unidentified oysterman takes us on a workaday tour off the coast of Virginia to haul in a hatch-load of the scrumptious bivalve mollusks long prized among shellfish aficionados.

By now you've no doubt heard the bad news: over-fishing, offshore pollution, and various other inconvenient truths have resulted in dwindling seafood of all sorts. When producer Lawrence Lanahan asks his interviewee whether he thinks nobody will be eating fish in another 50 years, however, the old salt replies that this is a myth perpetrated by journalists eager to "use up paper." His forebears came to this country from Germany to dig ditches for Catholic priests, and he's not about to stop dredging the ocean's floor for oysters to return to a landlocked life of picks and shovels, no sirree.

Much of the charm of this piece derives from the interviewee's feisty optimism expressed in a Chesapeake dialect, which threatens at one point to lapse into unintelligibility. As a kind of Studs Terkel "Work" interview, Lanahan's audio portrait of the waterman becomes an homage to a way of life that may one day be gone with the waves.

You don't need to squeeze a lemon or add a dollop of cocktail sauce to savor the slurpy essence of this tasty testimonial.

Have you ever pinched yourself and wondered where you've been all your life?

Listening to "11 Central Ave" ("Ave" rhymes with "have," as in "They have game!") was a wake-up call for me. From "Mork and Mindy" to "Friends" (which was on one occasion idiotically compared to "11 Central Ave"), TV sitcoms have bored me woozy. Now here comes Susan Shepherd, the mover and shaker of "11 Central Ave," and I'm no longer a snooze-button-pusher. I'm up, up, and away like Superman for a four-minute hundred-mile's worth of hip comedy and hilarious high-end satire.

Although we never learn the surname of "11 Central Ave"'s family, they get together over breakfast as The Paradigmatic Post-Nuclear American Family of Our Decade. Forget antediluvian notions about "Life with Father"! Fifty-year-old Papa Nat is a de-fanged out-of-work ad exec turned house hubby. Wifey Christina is the feisty, reluctant breadwinner, straight out of an Ambien commercial; she's mama to 14-year-old Anneliese, and big sis to libertarian, Rick, who has a graduate degree in poli-sci but works at Kinko's. There are others who wander in and out of this with-it kitchen.

Episode 30 deals with Christina's phone conversations with a BlackBerry customer-service representative in India. Raga music enhances the piece, along with a smattering of Hindi and Urdu -- Christina is fed up with Nat's being "mono-cultural." She wants to broaden America's "lily-white horizons," to embrace the Hindustani sub-continent rising like a colossus.

Other recent episodes include a black rapper, Dante, who quotes "Romeo and Juliet" to Anneliese; Rick, who has donated his sperm (at "fifty bucks a pop"), but gets rejected from his upscale sperm bank for lack of takers; and Nat, who gives a standout reading of Wilfred Owens's great war poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est," for National Poetry Month.

"11 Central Ave" junkies applaud it for its seamless scripts, its terrific pacing and direction, with not-to-be-outdone actors. It advertises itself as "a radio comic strip." I prefer to think of it as the 800 lb. gorilla in the room -- which is fitting, considering that it comes from Chicago Public Radio and 800 lb. Productions!

Joel Brussell may possibly be the most outside-the-box comedian on public radio. His shorter pieces present portraits of quirky townies, poke fun at President Bush's fear of not being "fair to the troops," or pose metaphysical problems like the existence of God, but in totally off-the-wall ways. Some of these fractious drop-ins have tedious ostinato musical backgrounds, and all of them have Brussell's signature comic surreality, which I've likened to that of Hollywood's darkly humorous filmmakers, The Coen Brothers. So far he's one of the world's best kept secrets as a host for WRHC, 106.7 FM in Three Oaks, Michigan.

In "Show #32 of The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour," Brussell monologues sans background music -- except for two dubious, longish segments of uninterrupted songs. Of course, Brussell's contrariness comes so much into play here that "The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour" is a kind of "performance-anxiety" poem. It's an uber-zany, oy-vey version of something like Eliot's "The Waste Land," with its echoing chorus of voices, its collage or crazy quilt of dramaturgical sound bites -- and bear in mind that Eliot was a dramatist as well as a poet. Also bear in mind that the initial title for "The Waste Land" was "He Do the Police in Different Voices."

Brussell doesn't "do the police," but he does just about everything else. He's a wannabe mockingbird mimicking a parrot, a South Asian chiropractor, a philosopher stating, "What is most absurd turns out to be true. Whether that is true neither matters nor is absurd"! He quotes his pals' withering criticism of his comedy: "Joel, it doesn't make it down the birth canal"; "You're wasting your life." One of his down-home buddies is so disgusted with how unfunny Brussell is that he begs Brussell for "something entertaining, even square-dancing poodles" -- and, wouldn't you know it, this remark is funny.

I sure hope that NPR is creative enough to go full-tilt for Brussell's quixotic shenanigans. His wacky schtick is an acquired taste, like foie gras or Benton Harbor. Above all, there's method in his madness, and -- enough already! -- Great-Lakes container shiploads of angst-ridden, wizardly wisdom.

Anyone acquainted with the "three B's," -- Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms -- knows that the "three M's" include Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Mahler (let's ditch Mussorgsky and Massenet for now). Of these three magisterial M's, Gustav Mahler was the most strenuous in his transformation of middle European folk tunes, as well as klezmer and Jewish liturgical material, into orchestral and vocal music of supernal beauty. His nine completed symphonies are as out-and-out glorious as are the best works by the greatest late nineteenth century classical composers, including "The Two Richards," Wagner and Strauss. Quirky originals that they are, however, Mahler's compositions lapsed into obscurity after he died in 1911, only to be resurrected -- a perfect verb, considering his Second Symphony -- by Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s.

Uri Caine, a self-described jazz musician, has, for years, reveled in "raising cain(e)" with Mahler. I'm certainly no purist when it comes to fiddling around with "The Great Gus," as I privately refer to Mahler. I was riveted, near the outset of this piece, when Caine's jazz ensemble riffed on the famous folk tune in the first movement of Mahler's "Titan" Symphony. "Please, Uri," I whispered to myself, "give me more jazzified Mahler!"

Well, Uri didn't comply with my wish. Interviewed by David Swatling, he went on to discuss the history of "Das Lied von der Erde"; how it has been performed by Chinese musicians; how Mahler was so distressed by his adulterous wife, Alma, that he consulted Freud; how some of Mahler's vocal music has been set to verses by Uri's poet friend.

For all its inside info about the Maestro in Toblach, Amsterdam, and New York City; for all Uri's devotion to "The Great Gus," except for one other leap into syncopation and improv, Caine fell short of jazzing up a storm. Public radio listeners less hard-core about Mahler than I may find this piece edifying. I only wish it were more of a hotwired, blue-note musical experience, merging Mahler with Mingus and Monk.

Something about Joel Brussell's deadpan oral style reminds me of Garrison Keillor on a slow roll, edging his way through anecdotes toward punch lines less memorable for their belly laughs than for their subtle chuckles. When Brussell describes his friend the local grave digger Kirk Schrader's truck getting hit by an Amtrak train and Brussell wonders aloud what would have happened if Kirk had perished in the collision, I recalled, with a snicker, Hamlet's line, "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio."

Brussell's dark humor emanates from the icy winter landscape of Michigan, known for its frozen-solid grave sites. His portrait of Kirk abounds with Keilloresque Lutheran lugubriousness, plus the surreal gallows humor of those visionary filmmaking auteurs, the Coen Brothers -- I think of their nightmare Gothic chiller, "Fargo," rather than, say, the equally scary, wacky, but Los-Angeles-steamy "Barton Fink."

I don't know if there is a mass market for Brussell's edgy brand of niche humor, but public radio should have a place in its ecumenical heart for this upstart crow of an essayist. Brussell speaks from the depth of America's Flyover Land, with the shall-I-compare-thee-to-a-summer's-day poetry of Shakespeare and the that's-the-way-it-is prose of a freelance reporter hooked on coffee and Pop Tarts.

Maybe the electronic synthesizer's simple, repetitive chord changes, the piece's background ostinato ring tones, are a bit Muzaky and boring, too funereal for this quietly feisty production. But hey, give or take a few mud stains, I nominate Brussell's death-defying, dirt-under-the-fingernails piece for public radio's coveted I'd Rather Be Cremated Prize.

I've spent enough decades as a college prof to have been a millionaire had I personally garnered the royalties from the hundreds of textbooks I've assigned my students. And I'm just an English prof. Textbooks in my field average around twenty-five dollars. If I reaped royalties as a professor of chemistry, where textbooks often go for upwards of seventy-five dollars, there's a good chance I might be a worth a hundred million smackers by now.

Ricardo Ramirez's three-minute interstitial about the exorbitant cost of textbooks contains more than a threepenny's worth of true grit. (About two-thirds of the way through this piece, there are ten seconds of "dead air," which need to be edited.) With college tuition soaring faster than the cost of living, unless students are wealthy scions living on trust funds, they must buy textbooks and subsist on ramen noodles. Because profs are eager to keep up with the latest pedagogical materials, they require that their students purchase ever more expensive new editions. In one class this year, I'm not proud to admit that I chose the brand-new fifth edition of a poetry anthology, which cost my students twenty-five clams. Last year I used the fourth edition of the same text, which was five bucks cheaper.

Everyone on publishers' row knows that textbooks are bread and butter, while trade books are the icing on the cake. In rare cases, trade books like The Da Vinci Code or the Harry Potter series garner gazillions. But a respected commercial press like W.W. Norton and Company makes a fortune on its renowned literary textbook anthologies year after year.

The solution, as Ramirez states, may be e-books. Thanks to Google's attempt to digitize the Gutenberg galaxy, students in the future may be able to access umpteen pages on the Internet, thereby making textbooks obsolete. As a professor, I look forward to this. As an author, I worry about losing any meager royalties I may receive from, say, a book of poems.

Maybe I should write an encrypted undigitizable textbook titled "How to Be a Trillionaire"!

With Sunni insurgents battling Shiite militias in Iraq, you would think Islamic college students in America would be at war. Far from it, whether they are Sunni or Shiite, students in this country are as people-friendly as iMacs are with PCs. If minor rifts occur between Muslims, they are as likely to be resolved as they were during Saddam's regime, mainly without violence.

Nour Akkad's brief primer about Islam stresses that the initial split between the Sunni and Shiite branches of the faith was political, not religious. No matter whether you revered the prophet Muhammad or his brother-in-law and cousin Ali, you were a Muslim who believed in Allah and the Koran. Ever since the American occupation of Iraq, sectarian differences have grown into a religious schism, which has pitted Sunnis against Shiites in a civil war that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Christians and others.

In her conversations with four George Mason University Islamic students, Akkad finds an all-American stability and an era of good feelings absent in Baghdad today. Irrespective of whether they care about Sunni imams or Shiite ayatollahs, students work and play together in the DC area. They pray together at the campus's main meditation center -- interesting that it's called a "meditation center," rather than, say, a chapel or a mosque.

Neither Akkad nor any of her four respondents speaks English with the trace of a foreign accent. They sound as native-born as Dick Cheney. Yet one of Akkad's male interviewees, who seems as though he could hail from Hamtramck, refers to "Americans" wanting to know whether he's Sunni or Shiite. "I tell them," he says, "I'm either both or I'm just Muslim. There's no difference."

Is this young man an American? an Arab-American? an Islamic-American?

For that matter, is Dick Cheney a Christian-American? a British-American?

Amid the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air above Iraq, this uplifting Next Generation Radio drop-in brings up a disturbing question we need to ask from DC to Damascus and beyond: ultimately, who's who?

In the United States gender discrimination and child abuse are considered at least as despicable as bank robbery. People who arbitrarily promote John over Jane or subject kids to cruel and unusual punishment are likely to "tell it to the judge" in America.

The same has not been true south of our border, where machismo has long been part of Latino life. As a result, Juan calls the shots, while Juanita learns to "callarse la boca sin quejarse" (shut up without complaining). In major Hispanic metropolitan areas the situation differs, though not nearly so much as in gringo land. Small Latin American towns and villages adhere to age-old customs much as coffee and cotton continue as mainstays of Nicaragua's economy.

Against the backdrop of centuries going back to the Spanish conquistadors, Radio Cumiches reporters, sixteen-year old Jorge Luis Contreras and Edgar Castillo put together a savvy interview of a school principal in the cigar-producing northern Nicaraguan city of Esteli (population 200,000 or so). Migdalia Rauh deplores the separation of girls and boys, who, she believes, should work together and be treated as equals in her school's classes. As to violence at home, she urges dialogue between family members, plus education teaching parents to spare the rod.

Jorge Luis totes his mic to a couple of local schoolyards and asks the same grownup questions to eleven- and thirteen-year-old students. Surrounded by their noisy classmates, girls and boys alike profess an antipathy to gender discrimination and child abuse. The English translation is more than adequate, but the original Spanish -- this is a bilingual UNICEF Radio production -- carries with it certain clipped Caribbean cadences and Nicaraguan expressions, which I found wonderfully colorful.

A cynic might dispense with this piece as a cover-up. Machismo and the "woodshed theory" die hard in Third-World countries. I for one was glad to learn that First-World values appear to have arrived in Nicaragua, once known more for the clash of its Sandinistas and its right-wing contras than for its cultural sanity.

Paul McDonald's drop-in spiel about the poetry reading that Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure gave in San Francisco on October 17, 1955 is a must-hear for many public radio-philes who don't rank poems or National Poetry Month as top dog. McDonald's description of the wild, whirling events surrounding the emergence of Beat Poetry -- plus his summary about how the events on that famous October night developed from earlier sources and influenced the zeitgeist of the future -- is a gem of compression. Still, in 2007 I long for more. It's as if we linger in a time warp more than 50 years old, neglecting such brilliant current practitioners of experimental poetry as Michael Palmer, Paul Violi, and Erica Bernheim. It would be great to hear more about these and other edgy new poets on public radio.

Out of the ashes of genocide long-stemmed roses bloom. During the course of World Vision Report's update on central Africa ravaged by tribal war in 1994, we never learn whether Rwandan entrepreneur Beatrice Gakuba is Hutu or Tutsi. No mention of her tribal roots roils this success story about the daughter of a prominent expatriate Rwandan, who returned to her trashed homeland after her father's death. What matters is that Gakuba had the wherewithal and the genius to launch Rwanda Flora, a flower farm on the outskirts of Kigali that produces a million boxed roses per week. Because of 50-year-old Gakuba, glamorous in her designer suit, with diamond earrings, having been educated in Washington DC, 200 women have found employment in a six-acre rose garden the likes of which the White House has never seen.

Speaking of her workers, Gakuba is deadly earnest when she says, "They don't talk for the whole day. They have to focus." To supply the major flower auctions throughout Europe means competition with that botanical behemoth, the Netherlands. Which means a frantic work pace at Rwanda Flora. Yet Jacqueline, a 24-year-old worker, sounds A-OK when she speaks about her ability to pay for her younger siblings' schooling. During the years of genocide she'd lost track of her family and spent three years in a refugee camp. What irks her most now is her own lack of education. She's smart and eager enough to attend classes, but she needs to scratch out a living in the ten large white tents that serve as Rwanda Flora's greenhouses.

As a boss Gakuba is fiercely proud of her countrywomen, mainly genocide widows. On the other hand, she feels alienated from them, not having experienced their devastation. "I'm a psychologist," she says. "I'm a counselor. I'm a cautious keeper. . . . It's 200 lives in my hands."

A bouquet of yellow, orange and red roses goes to reporter Prue Clark for her exhilarating piece.

It is a little known April Fool's fact that veteran reporter Dick Meister is the leggiest public radio personality on the West Coast. From Seattle to San Diego, Meister has been showing off his "Arnold Schwarzenegger legs" in short pants since the Truman administration. With remarkable staying power, he has donned Bermudas and cutoffs, swim trunks and lederhosen -- with nary a varicose vein.

Even as a child sitting alongside his parents in church, Meister reveled in exposing his legs in heavy gray, scratchy tweed shorts. He continued his career as an exhibitionist when he was a Boy Scout with poison oak that covered his lower limbs, scratching like a male model itching to be discovered. As far back as 1951, when he was a semi-pro baseball player for the fabled Talmadge Sluggers, Meister "went Hollywood" and exchanged traditional knickers for the short flannel pants that let him compete with such heroes in the Leg League as Joe ("Leg of Lamb") DiMaggio and Mickey ("Pull My Leg") Mantle.

This lugubrious four-hour-and fifty-seven minute commentary on Meister's below-the-belt appendages is the most serious piece to grace the public air waves since Tom Thumb threw away his stilts and begged to be accepted for who he was on KQED. The only things I miss are impossible, given the limitations of radio: digital photos, as well as videos, of those luscious legs Meister is renowned for.

Some pieces are notable for their fancy footwork. This one's "got legs"!

Click & Clack and testosterone enthusiasts alike will warm to this lollapalooza about middle-aged Wickam Boyle eager to boost her sex appeal. If Australian males refer to women over 35 as "wrinklies," American writer Boyle, at 55, realizes she's over the hill. Like Nora Ephron, she feels bad about her neck, bad about the fact that men no longer ogle her, bad that she's no longer a bad girl, as one poet wrote, "wild to be wreckage forever."

Her solution is as simple as four wheels. Long a car-aholic, an accomplished designated driver for her three-sheets-to-the-wind dad, Boyle could be a female Mario Andretti. She could be a NASCAR idol for crying out loud! While on assignment at The Manhattan Classic Car Club, she gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to borrow a "mint-new 1964 silver Shelby Cobra," which, for uncool Toyota owners, is one heckuva spiffy spots car. She knows how to shift all eight gears like a pro as she plows through the Big Apple, top down in the convertible, to pick up her son Henry at school -- and pick up stares, "smiles, leers, hoots and hollers" from scads of admiring males. Then she burns rubber, heading for the West Side Highway and takes Henry on a joyride the likes of which he has never experienced with dear old Mom.

You will chortle over this mid-life mini-odyssey. Boyle may be the sexiest motorist to come along since Danica Patrick. The only traffic violation this NYPD sergeant noticed occurs when Boyle speeds north on the FDR -- the East Side's equivalent of the West Side Highway -- to 85 mph before entering what sounds like the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. To hit 85 on that two-mile-or-so stretch of traffic-laden, balky asphalt would as probable as a worm outracing Lance Armstrong.

But hyperbole starts with "h," which stands for humor. I humbly, honestly hope Boyle's hormonal hayride happens to be heard in a host of homes heartened by public radio.

On July 8, 2005, two days after New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to turn over names of her sources, San Francisco freelance journalist Josh Wolf was imprisoned for filming an anarchist protest and refusing to turn over his video materials to the FBI. Whereas Miller spent 85 days in jail, Wolf has been rotting in a Federal penitentiary in Dublin, California for going-on two years.

Obviously, the grand jury that convicted the 24-year-old Wolf was under pressure to crack down on anarchists. As Wolf states in this important jailhouse interview with Alex Stonehill, however, the anarchists in attendance that July day were not extreme hell raisers. Rather than torching the neighborhood as football fans are wont to do after, say, a Raiders game, the anarchists engaged in some vandalism and scuffled with cops. The FBI specifically charged that Wolf was instrumental in burning a police car, which sustained the horrendous damage of one broken taillight! Nonetheless, the feds considered these acts as terrorist felonies -- and punished Wolf for not handing over his video outtakes after posting them on his Web site and selling them to local TV news people, who aired them in the Bay Area.

In reopening the Wolf can of worms, this piece is extremely critical of the Bush administration's demonstrated record of abrogating press freedom. If Wolf had been a major network reporter covering his event, he would never have been allowed to languish behind bars all this time. Because he's an indie blogger, an activist lone wolf, he remains incarcerated until at least July 2007.

This timely segment asks us to think about whether we can still call America "the land of the free." Courageous as Wolf has been under fire, we can certainly call our country "the home of the brave."

Back in the 1950s and early 60s when Madalyn Murray O'Hair declared she was an atheist, most Americans were shocked and outraged. After all, right around that time during the Eisenhower administration, our pledge of allegiance had been amended to insert the words, "under God," in the phrase, "one nation. . .indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Not long ago, 18-term East-Bay-Area Democratic Congressman Pete Stark announced that he doesn't believe in God. Veteran freelance journalist Dick Meister, in a weekly public radio editorial, plays his progressive deck of cards to the hilt. He makes no bones about saying he thinks Stark is a no heathen but, rather, a hero bravely standing up for the First Amendment, i.e., the separation of church and state, opposing "God, Heaven and Hell, and the other religious myths," which comprise the "hobbling dogmas of religion."

Stark, as Chairman of the House's Health Subcommittee, part of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, is eager to work with the Secular Coalition of America in dealing with social problems like education and medical research in rational, not faith-based, ways. As a matter of fact, in 2007 Stark's atheism is no longer a hot-button issue; following the announcement that he was no pious knee bender, out of 500 letters he received from people worldwide, fewer than 100 opposed his being a non-believer, and of those 100 most were friendly letters. Still, with ever-sensitive antennae, Meister is well aware the American electorate will not vote for an atheist, preferring to sing "God Bless America" as a way of justifying devilishly diverse agendas.

Bushies and churchgoers, beware! Dick Meister speaks softly and carries more than a Bible!

Hannah Miller's coverage of Chicano music at the 2007 South by Southwest music festival is anything but one-sided. She interviews several Mexican-American band leaders, two of whose groups sound as different as mariachi music is from a kind of mellowed-out Latino Muzak. If funk, hip-hop, and salsa rhythms permeate the festival, Miller is more interested in discussing certain politically charged "messages" emerging from music than in the music itself.

Miller talks with Marco Werman, host of the BBC's program "The World," who attributes the recent resurgence of Chicano music to widespread discontent with racism, poverty, and the Iraq War. As much of a letdown as it is to hear Werman's voice fade too soon in a segue to another musical interlude, it's clear that Americans' current anti-Mexican bias in the Southwest is responsible for an outpouring of song. Rather than protest marches, music has taken the political center stage in the mid-2000s.

I've carped enough in PRX about gringo xenophobia. Suffice it to say that I agree with Miller's approach. My main reservations here have to do with her oral style, her speech mannerisms, which sound a bit too stiff, as if she's reading from a script -- which of course she is! I also have trouble with her pronunciation of the word "Iraq" as "Eye Rack"; this all-too-common mispronunciation sounds as tacky as if Iraqis were to pronounce the "United States" as the "Un-eye-ed Steets"!

One or two quibbles do not a fight club make! Hannah Miller's thoughtful drop-in counters certain disturbing stereotypes about Chicanos who continue to influence our Wonder Bread culture wondrously.