Many are excerpts from presidential events; but others are more offbeat, like last week's clip titled "The Making of Presidential Football Helmet".
Whether you're thinking of a panel show about current affairs or something more offbeat, like audio food reviewing, this workshop will have you covered.
This is O.K. for something a bit offbeat, like the Piazza Armerina mosaics of Sicily, but it's a snooze if you're getting the same old sweep of the Sistine ceiling.
These one-of-a-kind degrees often appeal to students whose interests are a little more offbeat, like Feeney-Beaton, 57, who graduated in July after four years of part-time study.
For The Obscure Store and Reading Room (www.obscurestore.com), he scours for stories that are more offbeat, like a recent piece about a batboy attacking a baseball team's mascot and another about the struggles of a Pee-Wee Herman impersonator.
The choices that reflect its early taste for the offbeat — like an album from Lizz Wright, a torchy pop singer — are now squeezed in with offerings not unlike those at Wal-Mart, including the latest releases from Alicia Keys and James Blunt.
Other footnotes are offbeat, like Ellison's unhappy memory of having to rename his boat because journalists kept pointing out that the Shinto deity Izanami, spelled backward, is "I'm a Nazi".
Whether intended to celebrate a milestone birthday or just for fun, these "curated" trips can be offbeat, like seeing tree-climbing goats in Morocco; exclusive, like a tour of private tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings; or adventurous, like soaring over the African veld in a hot-air balloon.
In its heyday on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, it was a haunt for the louche and the lurid, and also for raconteurs of the offbeat like A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, Bob Dylan, Andy Kaufman and Lenny Bruce, who developed a routine about Albert Alberta, a half-man, half-woman act.
The material, he said, would range widely, from the upbeat and slightly offbeat (like "Pa' Oriente Compay," a polyrhythmic joropo by the reclusive Venezuelan Beto Balderrama) to the more laid-back (like "The Girl From Ipanema," the bossa nova by Antonio Carlos Jobim that became a hit in 1965 for Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz).
Many of the best images are offbeat, like the beguilingly awkward "Lake George and the Village of Caldwell" by Thomas Chambers, who is better known as a marine painter, or Thomas Charles Farrer's sweeping view of the countryside around Northampton, Mass., Smith College's home.
