The Awesome Foundation is a new philanthropic organization seeking to promote awesomeness.

They define awesomeness thusly:
"Awesomeness is more the product of a creator’s passion than the prospect of audience or profit. Awesome creations are novel and non-obvious, evoking surprise and delight. Invariably, something about them perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment, or method of creation. Awesomeness challenges and inspires."

And they're giving away a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached, MacArthur-grant-style, to support awesome projects. Your only responsibility, should you receive a grant, is to report back on what you did and how it went.

I know someone involved in the foundation, and can vouch for its actualness and legitimacy.

So start applying now!

Au Revoir Simone

Au Revoir Simone are an all-female, all-keyboard indie pop band from Brooklyn, New York. Their new CD is Still Night, Still Light.

In honor of New Bunny Day, here's a beautiful song about a bunny from class act and past TSOYA guest John Vanderslice.

Scotty Got an Office Job S02E10 from Scotty Iseri on Vimeo.

Listener Scott Iseri sent me a very nice email asking me to take a look at his web series, "Scotty Got An Office Job." He made up for the first video I saw, which featured ironic white guy rapping, with the second I saw, above, in which he answers viewer mail while at a staff meeting in his real job. Pretty funny. Also, he alluded to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure right up top, which is a key to getting on TSOYA (listen later this week for my interview with the band Au Revoir Simone).

Anyway, if you send me your web series, I gotta be honest, I probably won't watch it. But if you send it to press@maximumfun.org instead of my personal address... and you're nice about it... I might. And maybe it'll be good. Like this one.

As Laughing Squid notes, "Yes this is real, and no his co-workers are not in on it."

Welcome to season two of Coyle & Sharpe: The Imposters! In the early 1960s, James P. Coyle and Mal Sharpe roamed the streets of San Francisco, microphone in hand, roping strangers into bizarre schemes and surreal stunts. These original recordings are from the Sharpe family archive, which is tended by Mal's daughter, Jennifer Sharpe. You can learn more about Coyle & Sharpe on their website or on MySpace. Their recent box set is These 2 Men Are Imposters.

On this episode: Coyle and Sharpe chant while a man reads.

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photo by nuzz

I know a lot of folks in the MaxFun audience are podcasters, so we've put together a few promos that you can run in your podcasts to help introduce people to The Sound of Young America.

They are totally free to use (obviously), and you can just drop them in your commercial break, or at the end of your show, or even after a brief endorsement :).

When this post slips into the past, you can always find the promos by going to the Sound of Young America page and clicking "More About The Sound of Young America."

Sound of Young America Podcast Promos (MP3)

With John Mulaney

With the writers of Letterman

With Au Revoir Simone

Larry Smith is a writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Slate, Popular Science, and Men’s Health. More importantly he’s the founding editor of SMITHmagazine.net. A site entirely devoted to the art of storytelling and encourages you, the reader, to contribute. One of the many projects on the site is Six-Word Memoirs. It has been so successful that it has spawned a series of books. Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs is the first. There are more that 800 hundred contributions in one nice little package. Smith spoke to Chris Bowman about origins, community, and how a few words can lead to many.

Chris Bowman: First off the most obvious question, with Not Quite what I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs, what were you planning?

Larry Smith: Originally we started SMITH magazine as a participatory populist story telling community in January 2006. The idea was for a place where people who may consider themselves writers could write all personal stories. We always wanted to be a community where we had some professional editors involved and it was curated. I mean give them story projects. My Life So Far is a personal essay or part of your memoir in progress. Brushes With Fame you’d write about meeting celebrities. My Ex…that kind of stuff. We have other projects like non-fiction web comics and Memoirville, where we do interviews with up-and-coming or even famous memoirists. And all of that was going fine. We started with no money, a lot of volunteer labor and sweat. In November 2006 we decided to try this six-word memoir idea. The idea came from Hemingway, who was once challenged in a bar bet to write a six-word short story, For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn. The idea of six-words has shown up in different literary circles over time but no one had done a six-word memoir. It makes perfect sense for our readers because we are a community of storytellers.

CB: It has been said in a few places that text messaging is the death of the English language. And recently I read an article that cites Twitter as one of the reasons people are losing the appreciation for the rhythm of language. What’s your opinion when it comes to the state of our language?

Click on "Read More" for more from Larry Smith

Via Rob Corddry's twitter, the greatest film junket interview ever (with all apologies to Jordan). "I was sure a second Ashton was going to pop in and tell us we had been punked."

Jordan's always said that if he can't be in Cirque du Soleil, he'll beat them at their own game. here (warning: autoplays), he pitches Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips and Heather Graham on the idea.

Bill Withers from Jesse Thorn on Vimeo.

I was lucky enough to see the new documentary "Soul Power" a couple weeks ago. It was shot at Zaire '74, a festival of soul music from the African diaspora that accompanied the Foreman-Ali fight that was the centerpiece of the film When We Were Kings.

It features musical performances from, among others, Celia Cruz & the Fania All-Stars, The Spinners, Miriam Makeba, James Brown and the great Bill Withers.

I can count on one hand the number of musicians as important to me as Bill Withers, and it was an amazing honor to get to speak with him for The Sound of Young America. Bill has been mostly retired for more than twenty years, but he's very healthy and sharp as a tack at 70.

The interview will air next week. In the meantime, enjoy his performance from the film. And go see it when it opens near you in July -- it's AMAZING.