The Strong Words saga begins, as so many sagas do, with Bruce Willis. Or, perhaps more accurately, with a promise pertaining to Bruce Willis and the relative likelihood of him winning an Academy Award for acting: Adam Angiulo vows in a high school library that he will eat VHS copies of every Bruce Willis movie should the aforementioned prospect become actual, terrifying fact. He has been egged on relentlessly by Josh Radde and Tim Toomey, pushed to their brink by their insistent assertions that the aforementioned New Jersey lunkhead is a serious actor.
Well, it's the better part of a decade later. Bruce Willis still isn't a serious actor and tracking down VHS copies of even a quarter of his films would take some serious time on eBay. But Josh, Tim, and Adam are still going at it, simultaneously embracing American pop culture and poking holes in its cheap, synthetic fabric. Josh has the inside scoop, Tim has the film-school hardened cynicism, and Adam has - well, it's not clear exactly what the dude has. But it's a special thing, emitting strange and wonderful smells.
Josh Radde is the moderator of the program, always thinking quickly and usually mis-speaking, but sometimes steering the program forward towards transcendence. He graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in Communications, taking lots of useless classes while working in various capacities at the WZND radio station - this combination of academic study and hands-on know-how uniquely qualifying him to have his voice recorded and played back on the internet. Josh was once a prominent stage actor but now surfs boob-jiggle YouTube videos while collecting fat corporate paychecks.
Tim Toomey studied film at SCAD but designs websites now for a firm in Chicago. He maintains a consistently impressive Netflix queue and shows remarkable endurance in the face of Sylvester Stallone movies from the 1980's (unless the movie in question is "Over The Top," in which case he falls asleep before the final Las Vegas arm-wrestling showdown). Tim is a straight talking outsider with inside knowledge, similar to George W. Bush. Toomey has the distinction, however, of never being directly responsible for the death of 3,000+ U.S. soldiers.
Adam Angiulo studied for six years at Elgin Community College before receiving his Associate's Degree. He now works at a gas station because a) he can listen to his iPod while performing menial tasks and b) it pays better than his previous job at the hot dog stand. Adam is the show's resident music expert, although he contributes very little in the original content department, declines to talk about music on the show, and spends most of his time trying to think of new ways to insult Tim's red hair and latent homosexuality. He can, however, reproduce any Motley Crue song with mouth noises, and this is mostly how he got the "music expert" position. It's pretty impressive.
Each of these men is impressive in his or her own right, but together they form a monolithic and well-hung beast of pure entertainment. The Strong Words program, started as a lark and funded by Tim's credit card, has now snowballed into an internet sensation - the podcast for people who don't usually listen to podcasts, internet radio for people who claim not to know what the internet is, sweet e-talk that simply sounds better on vinyl. Strong Words is frequently off-topic, usually vulgar, and always hysterically funny - if you ever hid old copies of Entertainment Weekly under your bed, go ahead and rip the latest SW episode on to your iPod. You can tell people you're listening to Sufjan Stevens.
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