Tsing-Loh.... Sweet..Chariot?

"Her delivery style is generally ironic and spoken very quickly."

Oh, Kai.. Corey.. Terry.. Larry, dear Larry Mantle... Ira, Garrison, Steve! Some close friends and business associates might label me as unhealthily obsessed with the hosts and personalities of National Public Radio, 89.3 KPCC. It's true I listen to KPCC more often than not in my car- in the spirit-crushing traffic of Los Angeles, these programs (with the occasional voyage to 89.9's Morning Becomes Eclectic) keep me focused on the issues as they spin and collect in the radio waves around me.

But I don't just listen... I invest myself personally with the voices, creating faces and lives behind the names that bring me the news. Recently, when assuming the myspace identity of Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal, I did some basic research on his background. I immediately ceased and desisted this myspace joke, as I became slightly bummed at knowing anything remotely true about this person's life. It's far more fun to imagine!

All of my beloved NPR hosts, like so many puppets at my disposal. And the very bottom of that puppet pile is Tsing-Loh.

Sandra Tsing-Loh. You might not know her by name, but if you tune in casually to any NPR station, you may recognize her blip-reports like "The Loh Life" or "The Loh Down on Science". If you are a more dedicated listener, perhaps her inexplicable pronunciation and intonation haunt you long after the segment is completed. Sandra gives a snipet of something slightly more interesting than the Middle East or the stock market (sorry, Kai), but you realize when it's over you've haven't retained a notion of her speech, for the sake of her ABSOLUTELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE mode of speaking.

What does it take to get a radio journalist to that point, and still have a career? I have nightmares about seeing her speak in person, watching that mouth contort in ways I thought impossible to the human anatomy. I only wish my nightmares, and daymares, and trafficmares, stopped with her bizarre emphasis...

Tsing-Loh is a humorist, based in Los Angeles, who writes about her experiences living in the Valley. Her completely SoCal-centric novels handle her musings, her motherhood, and her middle-aged adventures in possibly the most boring neighborhoods of LA.

And yet, hearing her speak on a panel, I agreed with a lot of her ideas and politics, however pronounced. She's had an interesting career, and fashioned a market for herself...

I truly enjoy "musing" literature, like the work of Chuck Klosterman, and various other magazine journalist/novelists that seek merely to tell you what they think and make you chuckle....

I actually write a blog... uhm, this one... about my relatively young and somewhat unemployed perspective of living in Los Angeles... gulp.

Christ. What if I'm just one full-mouth gnashing mis-emphasized self-obsessed step away from Tsing-Loh?