Well, there it is, dear listeners, the A-Bomb City Podcast is no more!

The executive committee of the board of directors of the governors and trustees of the sponsors in tandem with the action group, helmsman, caterers, writers, technical staff and the cleaning lady have just adjourned an emergency sitting in Hiroshima's masonic lodge, and in a shaky voice an elderly gentleman in a pith helmet has stated:

"It is with the deepest regret that we announce the demise of the radiophonic extravaganza known as the A-Bomb City Pudcrust, but there you go, a year and fifty episodes is probably more than the world needs."

The reasons for our decision: of late it has become increasingly difficult to find time for recordings due to our very different schedules. Also, we have perhaps taken the concept about as far as it can go. Probably way too far.

In addition, despite a lot of hard work promoting it, we never saw an increase in our very small listenership. We got plugs on other major podcasts, got mentioned by a US radio station, faked our way (momentarily) into the Podcast Alley top 10 and whored ourselves all over MySpace and any forum that would have us, all to no avail. The number of show downloads always remained the same, about 3% of what Another Japan-Themed Show That Shall Remain Nameless gets. Boo-hoo! We felt we deserved better than that, given the effort we put in.

But we've had a lot of fun doing the shows, and it has been a great pleasure to interact with the kind folks who have taken the trouble to contact us. Your support has been much appreciated, and your kind comments have sustained us throughout the year of the show's life. We're very glad that people all over the world got pleasure from our humble little sonic endeavour. Thanks very much!

I'm going to leave the site up for a while so that those who want to can grab the 50 episodes before they vanish into the footnotes of podcasting history.

And.....to lighten the mood somewhat, I (Andy) will be launching a new podcast in the very near future. It won't be like A-Bomb City, but at the same time it may be oddly familiar in some respects.....   ;-)

Stay tuned...

Cheers,

Andy & Dave

Sorry about the lack of shows, but things are in a state of flux within the A-Bomb City camp....

More details to follow shortly...

The A-Bomb City Easter Extravaganza, featuring a squeaking Japanese Easter Bunny, reminiscences of childhood chocolate eggs, and...er...nothing else to do with Easter.

Dave reveals his new internet venture, a website featuring 100-word book reviews, and kicks it off with a summary of Eric Hoffer's little-known tome "The Ordeal of Change". Andy pretends to go and make a cup of tea.

Part 3 of Andy's 'Kyushu Diary' next, in which we discover the Chinese and European past of Nagasaki, and why the Lonely Planet guides are crap.

The musical interlude this week is an old Easter Islanders techno piece called 'Canova da Milano', based on sampled and reversed lute loops, which leads in to a discussion of said renaissance stringed instrument and its appearance in a certain Shakespearian epic.

'Difficult Word of the Week' features that esoteric biblical utterance 'shibboleth', which somehow leads into talk of immersive online world 'Second Life' - watch out for Alric Yoshikawa!

abombcity@gmail.com
www.abombcity.com
www.hirohurl.net
www.ardle.net
www.myspace.com/abombcity
100-word-book-reviews.blogspot.com

This week we kick off with that most important of questions - do the Japanese eat grasshoppers? From here we follow up with an amazing tale of how you can find honey armed with only a long piece of cotton, which somehow gets mixed up with David's fish-selling exploits of yore.

Next our hosts discuss some recent purchases - Andy has had a spring blow-out on musical gear while Dave has begun supporting the arts with his wallet.

In the second part of Andy's 'Kyushu Diary' we find out about how the residents of Nagasaki have come to love the bomb, after which STAVKA (www.ardle.net/stavkahome.htm) hit us with the experimental rock piece 'Modality in Extremes'.

Then it's time for the new 'Difficult Word of the Week' segment to rear its shiny head before Dave returns to feed us some more 'Real Japanese', this week concerning a subject dear to his heart: stinginess.

Don't forget to vote for us on www.podcastalley.com!

abombcity@gmail.com
www.abombcity.com
www.hirohurl.net
www.ardle.net
www.myspace.com/abombcity