Word of Mouth has more ideas than it knows what to do with, so let us know what you'd like to hear next week.

Here's a list of things we're considering. Add a comment with the idea(s) you think should win this grueling match. Let the best ideas win.

• Female mobsters
• Health care in China
• Online-only churches
• The subprime student loan crisis
• Why boldness is bad for science
• Paul Bunyan chic
• Census conspiracy theorists
• Early steps toward a real mind reading device
• Brown bears disappearing from Japan
• Dreamy folk from Shelly Short
• Hospice in prison
• The neuroscience of navigation
• Mixtapes from ex's
• Obsolete objects and rituals
• Senior citizens who greet troops as they return from Iraq
• British playwright Tim Crouch
• The truth about sloths
• Sesame Street 40th Anniversary!
• Tech Crafting

Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

• Art as a reflection of a changing Berlin
• East German/West German couples reunited

Dang that's a lot. Let us know which ones you like best and we'll do our best to get 'em on the air.

(Photo by JTony via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Pity the poor maligned typewriter. It was once the axis of a writer’s life. Hemingway packed up his portable Royal in its well-worn leather case and dragged it to Cuba because he couldn’t live without it. In the 1960s, school children practiced speed typing on sturdy Underwoods and adults pushed down shiny black keys every time they paid a bill or wrote a letter.

Today typewriters collect dust on thrift shop shelves alongside rotary phones, cassette tapes and Rolodexes. These once ubiquitous objects join the ranks of dozens of outdated items and rituals, from the boom box to airport goodbyes, that journalist and social commentator Anna Jane Grossman has amassed.

Grossman’s new book is Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By. She’ll be joining us on Monday’s Word of Mouth to talk about her compendium of once essential, now archaic staples of American life.

We want to know what objects and traditions you see vanishing before your very eyes. We’ve already gotten some great responses from listeners like Grace who wrote in to tell us about her home’s lack of landline, ironing board, and catalogues.

So what things are disappearing from your life? Share a comment below or leave a message at 603-223-2448.

(Photo by Ricardo Mendonça Ferreira via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The Berlin Wall is making its Los Angeles debut this month. The Wende Museum installed several segments of the original Berlin Wall on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. They asked artists to paint over a few of the panels with American icons who helped tear down the wall that divided Germany. Artist Kent Twitchell planned to paint two portraits, one of JFK and the other of Ronald Reagan.

In the end, there was only room for Kennedy, causing a deep division in the L.A. artist community. Unlike the Cold War, the rift will be short-lived. Organizers are symbolically tearing down the wall on Sunday night.

On Monday’s episode of Word of Mouth, our German correspondent from the Bloomberg News arts desk will guide us through changes in German life and culture since the fall of the wall, through the prism of its art.

We’ll have room for your memories of a divided Europe, so add them here or leave a message at 603-223-2424.

The Associated Press: Berlin Wall drives wedge through LA art community

(Photo by Albert Domasin via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Karda Estra is the recording persona of English composer Richard Wileman. Wileman started out as a rocker but veered into composing classical works for chamber ensembles and electric guitar. His imagery tends toward the gothic and his music to the dramatic.

John Diliberto talked to him about his sound as part of the "Echolocation" series.

You can listen to this piece at The Public Radio Exchange.

If you’ve ever driven down a narrow rural road marred by pot holes, or walked through a crowded street begging for a larger sidewalk, you might have wondered where all that economic stimulus money is going. Now there’s an app for that.

Just hold up your smart phone to the project in question and find out how much of the $787 billion dollars are being used to fix that road or build that bridge. It’s one of a slew of new augmented reality apps that overlay data from websites like recovery.gov on to real-time maps.

You can hold up your phone to a monument to learn about its history, or use facial-recognition technology to read a friend’s online profile and double check any social faux pas before you start a conversation. Next thing you know, they’ll release a smart phone that transforms into a hoverboard.

The Huffington Post: Layar App Maps Stimulus Money Onto The World Around You

A folk-punk musician is trying out the ultimate in green concert touring: embarking on a two-month long bicycle tour down the east coast. Aaron Scott of the band Attica! Attica! currently lives in Portland, Oregon, but he recently came eastward to begin what he calls the Ditch The Van Tour.

A few days before taking to the road via bicycle, Scott played a show at his old stomping grounds in Ithaca, New York. WRVO's Jasmyn Belcher met up with him and produced this audio postcard.

You can listen to this piece at The Public Radio Exchange.

(Photo by Nate Morris)