I'm so glad you made this thread, Scotty. I was about to come in here raving about Welcome to Night Vale. (I first mentioned this podcast in my Random Things post.)

I'm not very far in, but I've begun to notice the metaphors they use and the underlying themes - both political and person - in the narrations. The narrator speaks of the sheriff's Secret Police pulling over a five-headed dragon from another world and how it could potentially be dangerous, so they search his car. Civil rights organizations protested that officers had no legal grounds to search the vehicle, but they ceded the point when reminded by Secret Police officials that the backwards court system "will uphold any old authoritarian rule made up on the fly by unsupervised gun-carrying thugs of a shadow government." This seemed to me to be an obvious reference to immigration - illegal or otherwise - and, of course, our failed justice system. (As this scene played, I found myself thinking of Sherrif Joe Arpaio's methods in Phoenix.)

Later, he speaks of a bake sale hosted by the Night Vale PTA that will go toward funding a space vs. earth war, which is probably a reference to those who supported the war on Iraq and Afghanistan (or, arguably, any war at all). This episode in particular references a strange glowing cloud of which mentions are made throughout the narration, and at the very end of the episode, the speaker seems to be referencing it to depression, death, or any other crippling life event one might experience. The manner in which he does it is astonishingly positive, and as a listener, I came away with a sortof uplifting and inspired feeling.

This show is my new favorite thing. I love how they take simple real-life circumstances and blow them up to these extragavent, extradordinaty outrageous situations that seem to only have the slightest relation to things that actually happen in the real world, yet at the same time, the metaphors seem to be there. Someone with an incredible imagination came up with this, and I am legitimately envious of a mind like that.

Other than that, I really only listen to my general Utah podcasts. Radio From Hell, Geek Show Podcast and The Let's Go Eat Show.