Tenn Aloud

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William Tenn

William Tenn

It turns out there’s an easy way to hear my favorite William Tenn story actually by William Tenn — “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!” — read aloud by William Tenn.  

Mark Leeper noted in MT Void that Tenn’s reading of the story can be found in a 2002 episode of WNYC’s “Spinning on Air”, starting about 41 minutes into the recording.

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9 thoughts on “Tenn Aloud”

  1. Some “easy way to hear.” When I clicked on “Listen to the whole show” it downloaded a “.py” file that neither my computer nor anything else I could find could tell me what to do with or how to listen to it. Oy.

  2. It used RealPlayer to access the file when I checked it — so “easy to hear” probably is a gross exaggeration unless a person is willing to have that program installed on his/her computer.

  3. I thought most computers have RealPlayer installed. My wife’s shiny new laptop does and had no problem accessing this program.

  4. Having extracted the tentacles of Real Player from my computer with about the same level of difficulty required to eliminate “The Red Stuff” in John Wyndham’s short story, I am not letting it anywhere near any machine of mine again.

    But there wasn’t even anything saying this was a Real Player file, either on the web page it came from (as far as I could see) or in the file or anything I could find about it. Usually Real Player files will identify themselves in at least one of those ways.

  5. “But there wasn’t even anything saying this was a Real Player file, either on the web page it came from (as far as I could see) or in the file or anything I could find about it.”

    It’s a “ram.py” file: the “ram” part tells you it’s for Real Audio Player.

    Fwiw, when I click on it using Windows Vista, I, having the software set to query me as to which program I want to open what with, get a system query telling me “you have chosen to open ram.py which is a: RealPlayer Presentation,” and which goes on to ask me what I want to do about it.

    I haven’t seen the “py” before.

  6. That is, “ram” stands for “Real Audio Media.”

    http://filext.com/file-extension/RAM

    And here about .py: http://filext.com/file-extension/py

    In short, it’s Python, the programming language, which I’ve heard of, and couldn’t tell you more about, but surely a few million computer geek fans can.

    “The PY file type is primarily associated with ‘Python’ by Python Software Foundation. Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. .PY files can be executed with the Python interpreter and the .EXE container format itself can contain compiled Python source.”

  7. “It’s a “ram.py” file: the “ram” part tells you it’s for Real Audio Player.”

    In fact, it does not tell me anything of the sort, because my computer, like every other Windows system I have ever seen, looks at the part _after_ the dot to tell you what kind of file it is, and neither my XP operating system nor anything I could find on the web was of any help with “.py” in general or “ram.py” in particular. Nor does knowing that “py” is associated with something called Python help me in any way either.

    If I Google on “ram.py” I get, first, two other people asking what it could possibly mean and not getting answers, followed by a large number of hits for the word or name “Rampy” which does not help either.

    Nor have I come across anything like this on any previous occasion when I’ve been confronted with a Real Player file. The implication that the innocent end-user is supposed to know secret abbreviations which even the web cannot reveal is extremely irritating.

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