Everyone was out of town this weekend which allowed me to play the opening riff of Blackbird over and over for 20 minutes, but it also gave me a chance to gorge on podcasts. I listened to them while I organized the garage, cleaned long neglected parts of the house, worked out and drove to and from my interactions with the outside world.

In addition to my regulars here are three new favorites:

Berkeley's History 5, the history of Europe from Renaissance to the present. The course is taught by Carla Hesse who is direct, charming and alive. I even liked listening to her housekeeping section at the start of her first lecture because in it she outlined how to learn. "Don't be frustrated by weirdness," she said." Weirdness is the moment when you learn something." Carla Hesse

KCRW's To the Point on the Bush tax cuts, the deficit and the election. I like Warren Olney. I've been on his show. That's not why I'm recommending this. He had good guests and touched on all the important political and economic issues. The section on electric cars was a bonus.

David Hacket Fischer talks about George Washington's crossing of the Delaware as a part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History podcast series. Perhaps I liked this because I know so little about this period.

I downloaded all of these through iTunesU but you can also get them from their various web sites.

My wife sent me a text the other night "not sure if I can get a can." She meant cab (though to be sure, can is in short supply in this economy). It was the latest in a series of auto-correct mild amusements. When I try to respond "yay" to an email or text message, my Blackberry steps in and sends "gay" which makes me seem very 1940s.

Ages ago,  I asked people working the Twitter to offer some of their auto-correct nightmares. Here are some of the responses:

@kscincotta: @jdickerson - My phone keeps trying to change "Yankees" into "wankers". #correxmenot

@nancyscola: iPhone changes my mom's nickname, Joojee, to "Hooker"

@thenote: Kagan is Jahangir on my Droid

@ sacca My iPhone corrected "AT&T" to "Ayatollah".

@ zachroth92 'yeah' being changed to 'yeshiva'!  

@JonHenke I once had this happen "you should turn that room into a murderer". Or a nursery. Your pick.

@JonHenke: My Droid used to change "fyi" to "dying"

@Sutebia   I live you. 

 Tmerrifi congatulating a Duke grad on their win I wrote "Dulles!

derektixx once typed "in a loud bar need me?" ...to "in a loud bar need men".

@andylevy iPhone changes OMG to IMF.

@FeistyShelia  iPhone also corrects to "ducking" "Cynthia" which adds to my grouchy.

My colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote a piece about how the cell phone's autocorrect software works and why it's getting better.

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I believe in Germany they call this art. By the way, what would the german term for this be? Hellspuppydozerslingzer?

Beyond the obvious risks of filming dangerous stunts, some doctors are intrigued by how the Internet may be influencing normal adolescent development. Dr. Moreno notes that one of the distinguishing characteristics of early adolescence is the "imaginary audience" -- the self-conscious feeling that everybody is watching you.

"For kids in middle school, a really normal part of that is the perception that you're on stage, and that everybody is looking at you," says Dr. Moreno. "But for kids today it's a different world they're growing up in. It's a world where there really is that audience."