For some of last week and most of this one, the tubes between the ISP and my house were clogged with Youtube residue and stray glitches and bleeps from Bleep, so my Internet access has been spotty at best.

Stuck here in meatspace, with all its smelly human beings, terrestrial radio and primitive communication methods, I realized that while I can live without e-mail and news aggregators for a few days, I find it incredibly hard to go without Radio Nova, the best radio station in the world according to me.

Broadcasting terrestrially across the whole of France and virtually at novaplanet.com, Nova embodies the best kind of “freeform radio programming” — the kind that plays songs that I like, all the time.

Heavily skewed towards the soulful and eclectic, their idea of “heavy rotation” is to play the new Matt Herbert single sixteen times a night. Here’s their current playlist to give you an idea. Just now they played Carl Craig and Femi Kuti back to back.

And like our peaceful friends to the North, the French also have a quota system in place for local artists, so Nova is required by law to sort me out with the weirdest, best new French music, like General Elektriks and the excellent songwriter Julien Baer.

Oh, and their on-air talent is like WKRP on mescaline. I would love to hang out in that studio. I am convinced that one of their presenters is a drunken gnome.

The only local radio that comes close to Nova’s sensibility, musically speaking, is the Sun Tzu crew’s excellent City Soul weekly on KBCS. (They’d get a little closer if, like Nova, they would occasionally play songs like Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie” alongside the latest Jazzanova and Daz-i-Kue cuts. And ramble incoherently into the mic once in a while.)

Part of this station’s enduring appeal (to me) is in the time zone difference. My late night listening is helping Parisians get through their morning croissants. I wake up to their dinner music, and I work happily through the afternoon to the songs that stoned teenagers in Marseilles use to quiet the voices in their heads and get to sleep. This works for me.

So don’t hesistate. Get yourself into a new time zone.