If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning, I'd hammer in the evening.. and still not get it right.

And prolly bust hammer a nail- my fingernail, that is.

But now I'm a little more confident. That's because I've just listened to How To Hammer A Nail Properly, the latest in the how to do stuff  Podcast series.

Hosted by Canadian technology journalist Tod Maffin, how to do stuff is a series of five-minute (give or take), light-hearted (as opposed to step-based linear) instructions on those life tasks that somehow don't get taught in school- or have books devoted to them.

Hit the nail straight on the head, and place your hand on the base of the hammer for maximum leverage. That's according to Vancouver Island carpenter Betty Barton, who Todd traveled to interview.

The show titles are self-explanatory: How To Chop Onions Without Crying; How To Drive (A) Cab, and How to Pour and Drink the Perfect Guinness. I've never done the first or the second, and as to the third, well, isn't every Guinness perfect?

My guess, though, is that you don't want to drink that "perfect Guinness" while hammering that nail. Now drinking that Guinness to get nailed, welllll....

Area 51 is an irreverent, silly, self-indulgent, 20-25 minutes worth of low-budget radio theater that's an absolute hoot.

The show resolves around short skits that live in the nefarious netherworld between Firesign Theater-like hip, ba-boom ba-bing and let's-see-how-many-people-we-can-piss-off, ideologically tinged performance art.

Make no mistake about it: politically the show is out of left field, but is more humorous than a lot of humor from that side of the aisle.

Take for example Show #20-Crossing the Lines. Here's what wound up in the crosshairs:

Ethnic stereotyping on television, such as the Native American medicine man who teaches hung-up suburbanites to Ghost Dance;

Will and Grace held up as an authentic example of gay life;

The "fact" that by the 22nd century, sexual intercourse will no longer be required for reproduction;

An all-too-true reference to the fact that Ghandi, Dr. King, Jesus Christ and former Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone all died beforeteir time -"but most despots die of old age";

What it feels like to be at a party and watch older person buying the beer with the assumption that he will come across as an authentically cool person - and wind up with a party babe;

Whoa, dewwdd. I can think of some parties where I've been that "old person."

Which shows that to love this Podcast, ya gotta be able to laugh at yourself.

As host of liberal talk network Air America's Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow uses heavy doses of irony and a bit of comedy on the day's news and absurdities.

In Maddow's world, most Republicans these days are power-mad, manipulative and not above hyperbole to distort the truth to ease the path for policies that wring more American blood out of Iraq and more bucks for their profit-obsessed, private sector lackeys.

As her frequent on-air call-to-listen goes, "every day we ... stick a sharp stick in the soft white underbelly of the right wing scheme machine." And to hear it these days, the "right-wing scheme machine" is going about discrediting all who attach any sigificance to a series of British memos that some say proves the current Bush administration used selective information to rig the course  for war well in advance of when it was launched.

Maddow's podcast features the meatiest segments from each of her morning broadcasts. If you think like she does, and want confirmation that you are not the only one, then Rachel Maddow's podcast is one to check out.

This more-or-less weekly, five-minute podcast about a key development in space exploration or space science has virtually nothing in common with such reverential productions as, say, the education-oriented, space-is-a-fascinating place daily radio series Earth & Sky.

Slacker Astronomy takes a topic, gives the basic facts, and then uses a bit of comedy radio theatre to explain it. For example, a recent podcast about the fact that the first two Voyager probes were about to exit the solar system began with a clip from the inane "oh-wow" moment in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" when Captain Kirk realized that the insignia VYGR in a stray satellite his crew encountered stood for... Voyager!

This was the perfect segue to the podcast's main theme - which described how Voyager 2 was actually launched before Voyager 1. "Astronomers always do weird things .. but since when do astronomers need a reason to be weird," co-host Pamela Gay says.

Still, Slacker Astronomy is mis-named. From the title, the production sounds like skateboarders reflecting on like what's up there, dewwd. No, not exactly, considering that Gay holds an Astronomy Ph.D. and works at Harvard Science Center. Her co-host Aaron Price has a master's in Astronomy. Neither are "slackers," but use that description to reinforce the notion that while Slacker Astronomy has a firm foundation in the facts, its theater-troupe flavor means it won't be full of either too much wonder or equation-ridden drone.