Beantown Podcast - Sagas, Scions, & Dexters (04192026 Beantown Podcast)
Episode Date: April 19, 2026Quinn comes to you LIVE to discuss IMEI numbers, earthworms, & names you wouldn't name your kid...
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Hey, what's going on? It's Quinn David Furness. Welcome to my show. Quinn David Furness presents the Beantown podcast for Sunday, April 19th, 2026. What's going on? What's happening? How are you? One day until 420, blaze it. Still never smoked weed in my life or a cigarette, but I did, did have a cigar last weekend in Kentucky. I think it was like my third cigar of all time.
Just the whole, like, smoking anything.
There's nothing.
Smoking, vaping, none of that.
It just never caught on for me.
I just didn't want to do it in college.
Had no interest.
Didn't want to pay for it.
You know, you get to, like, the house parties.
And I, you know, had no experience with it.
So I don't know, you know, what the technique is.
I don't know what the effect is going to be like.
So you're at a house party when you're, like, 18,
and people are passing the joint around.
It's like the circle of trust in that 70s show.
But as someone with a lot of anxiety and worry about peer pressure,
not as much anymore, but certainly 12, 13 years ago in college,
you know, you just, I can't be like, oh, so how exactly do I navigate this thing?
Right? I'm not going to ask that in the middle of a party whenever it's having a great time.
out myself as a homeschool loser.
And so it was always like, you know what, let me just go pound this bottle of Svedka.
And I know how to do that.
Not that I came into college with more experience pounding vodka, but it's an easier, I would say, barrier to entry, a lower barrier to entry to learn how to drink something that tastes like hand sanitizer than worry about like,
inhaling some smoke and making sure you hold it for the right amount of time and then exhaling.
That's the only reason why I'm willing to do is cigars because all you got to do is kind of, you know,
breathe in, breathe out for a couple seconds.
And it's not even about like inhaling anything really for me at least.
It's just about like looking cool.
I feel like an old, you know, 1920s gangster or something like that.
call me Quinn Capone because I'm cool and I'm smoking cigars.
Anyways, I am the creator.
I am the host and I don't know, the Surgeon General, right?
The Surgeon General is the one that's got to put the warning on the nicotine pouches saying
if your baby smokes tobacco, they're going to be weird.
So that's what I do for the show.
I tell you what, the Surgeon General Warning of the Bean Town Podcasts.
if you listen to this show, you're going to be,
you're going to come out a lot dumber than when you came in.
You might learn something interesting.
Maybe, maybe not.
I guess I'll share with you.
I learned this.
I was reading, I'm reading a James Baldwin biography
and utilized the term cyan, S-C-I-O-N.
And I realized, I was able to figure out what it was from context.
I had to look it up after to confirm.
But I realized outside of the Toyota Sion,
I love when car brands do that.
They have their whole little like off shoot.
And it's somewhere in between like an entire brand of car and an actual just model of car.
They call them divisions.
So you have cyan, which is like no longer around gone extinct.
But for 15 years, you know, from like 2002 to 2016 or whatever, it's like, oh yeah, I'm buying a cyan X3 or something.
something. It's like, well, this is really just a Toyota, right? It's really a Toyota
Sion X-3, but no, we're going to make it its own thing. We're not Toyota, we're
cyan, but we are owned by Toyota. I don't know. That stuff always feels like we're trying
to be too cool about it. Anyways, the Sion is when you are like an heir or, yeah, I guess an
air is a good way to just put it. There's another word, or a descendant, air, H-E-I-R, by the way,
of a wealthy family or a wealthy fortune.
So I am the sion of the furnace family fortune, the lumber money and the farming money in
southeastern Minnesota.
Holy moly.
Money, money, money.
It's really too bad that Great Grandpa Harold or something didn't strike oil down there
in Albert Lee or Emmons, Iowa, wherever, Emmons, Minnesota, I think, wherever he spent
his time working, plowing.
I like how a word like plow.
It's like nowadays we just spell it PL-O-W,
but you go back 100 years and we're using more of the PL-O-U-G-H type of thing.
Now it just looks like pluff, PLU-G-H.
But yeah, there's your word of the Beantown podcast, Word of the Week,
S-C-I-O-N.
And if anyone out there ever drove a sign or still drives a sign,
not completely out of the realm to say, you know, they're not on the road anymore. I think when I
read it this morning, they disbanded, they stopped making them and absorbed them back into Toyota
like 2016 or 17, I think. So it's very possible that there are still Sion owners out there.
Email us, Beantown Podcast at Yahoo.com. Again, it's Beentown Podcast at Yahoo.com. If you have any good
science stories.
Sion's story would be a good horse name, which is a good reminder.
We are two weeks away, guys.
I know we've been, I feel like we've been talking up this year's horse name special
more than almost any other year in the past.
But the Beantown podcast, ninth annual horse names special, top ten horse names special
will be in two weeks.
Prior to Derby Day, the Kentucky Derby is, what, 13 days away here.
We have a wedding day of.
Literally, like, the ceremony is going to be happening.
Cocktail hour is going to be happening.
As a derby is ongoing, and it's only two minutes long.
So they call it the fastest two minutes in sports.
And so maybe you'll get a stream going on my new phone,
which is not a new phone, but it's new to me,
which we'll get to in a second here.
Wow.
What a saga.
You thought, you know, Star Wars prequels were a saga.
I got a saga for you.
a cyan saga you know what it's a it's a homemade homegrown horse name and we're going to add it to the list
sion saga is a great horse name so let's add it but this is your reminder as i'm doing that that uh your last
chance we will be recording the show i don't know probably like the thursday of that week um
so like 10 days away 11 days away something like that so give you
your horse names in.
You can email us.
You can text us, whatever you prefer.
Looking forward to that.
A couple other notes here.
Listen discretion advice when we're listening to the show.
Number one,
we'll occasionally use some language.
Number two,
this podcast is objectively terrible.
Also, shout out to our good friends in Pakistan,
Lahore, Karachi, Burma,
wherever you are listening from.
Thank you for making us the 112th ranked comedy podcast
in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
We are drinking a new Belgium, what is it called,
Juice Force Ranger or something like that.
It's a dangerous beer.
Let's put it that way.
It's like 9.5%.
It's absurdly high.
But it's one of those juicy IPAs, so it's pretty sweet.
And you can, it's not a beer where you drink it,
and you're like, holy moly, that's going to put me over the edge.
It's extremely sippable, which is, it definitely has its pros and cons.
It makes it really easy to go through it quickly, which is dangerous.
But sometimes you get those strong beers.
You know, I'm thinking like a 90-minute IPA or something from dogfish head.
God forbid the 120 minute.
And you take a sip and you're just like, ooh, this is, it's like drinking a block of cheese or something.
Not in the taste, but just it's thick.
It's going to take me some time to get through this.
Not so much the new Belgium Juice Force Ranger.
You probably know they're Voodoo Ranger.
I feel like that's their most popular beer.
But these were a holdover from Bachelor festivities in Kentucky.
And yeah, if you're curious, like, were we more taking it easy with kind of the light beers and, you know, the approachable stuff?
Or were we really going for it with straight bourbon poles and nine and a half percent beers?
Well, I brought home a nine and a half percent beer.
So that kind of tells you how the week.
end went no church bells on the show today there are you know it's it's funny i spend my whole life
sitting on the couch and i can look out the window over yonder a block and a half away is
saint uh what is it saint ben's but it's not benjamin there's another saint saint benedict
that's what it is i was going to say it's it's some cool catholic name pope-ish like benedict not
Benjamin. Yeah, St. Benedict's a huge Catholic church here in Chicago, and they ring their bells
at the top of every hour, four or five minutes late. The clock is just barely slow. So I get those bells
24 times a day, but they don't quite carry. When the windows are open, I can get them, but you still
wouldn't pick them up on the podcast. It's nothing like that. Lutheran Church, I think it was,
that we were next to last week in Louisville. That was nuts. Those bells really had some weight.
The last housekeeping thing I wanted to mention before we jump into some of our other items here is apologies because this past week was tax week.
You're probably thinking, man, once a year we get the sweet, sweet pipes of tax specialist tax expert Matthew Fiedler.
And I got to tell you, I dropped the ball on this one completely forgot it was even tax season because I only got 2,000 turbotax ads this last week.
And usually I need 2001 to feel really prepared.
And so I dropped the ball on asking Matt until way too late.
And so we're going to try to connect soon at a date TBD to figure out when exactly we can talk taxes.
But I'm thinking a good idea for this year would be thematically what happens if you're late on your taxes.
What are the considerations, filing extensions?
There's a whole world of lateness.
as far as taxes go that we've never explored in nine seasons of the Beantown podcast
despite having a tax special every single year.
So that's on the docket.
We'll see you'll know about it when the episode comes out,
hopefully in the near future.
But my taxes were, I was going to say my taxes were uneventful this year.
Uneventful in doing them, not so much in the penalty.
Well, it wasn't a penalty.
The penalty wasn't bad actually at all.
I did my taxes in like February and usually my taxes in the grand scheme of things are not overly complicated
but for just like a single I was going to say single I'm not single for just like an average Joe
you know it's it's a step up from just the oh yeah I worked at one company this year I got a
W-2, I entered that in myself and clicked some boxes, took the standard deduction, yada, yada, yada, that's it.
I still take the standard deduction, but my, for the last six cycles or so here, my tax have been a little bit more complicated with some consulting work, other gigs, excuse me,
and it's always a little bit of a toss-up trying to figure out how much extra tax to withhold every year or every paycheck
from my W4 because my income is not super, it's not consistent month to month.
And even year to year, some years I do better, some years I do worse.
Suffice to say 2025 I did better than I thought I was going to do.
So good problem to have, right?
Well, not if you didn't pay enough attention to your withholding and adjust accordingly,
apparently.
I didn't think, and I, you know, sometimes it's like,
You get to the end of the year and you owe this much or you get this much back and you're like,
all right, that makes sense.
Like, yeah, this was kind of a down year or this was an up year.
It didn't feel, maybe I was just high on my own supply.
It didn't really feel in the moment 2025 like I was just killing it with all the side gigs and side hustles and stuff.
In fact, I literally got laid off from my main side hustle in August of last year.
and so it really didn't feel like, man, it was just just, just, just, just, just killing it for lack of a better word.
But yada, yada, yada, ended up owing five grand to the federal government.
And I was worried, you know, because you can see as you're doing your taxes, I do it free tax USA,
you can like see the number changing and like how much you're going to owe as you're going through it.
And I was worried that the penalties were going to be a trade.
for under withholding.
And the penalties actually weren't that bad,
which is why I'm confused about the whole thing.
It's like, why did I owe $5,000,
but it was only like $100 in penalties or something?
Because from all the formulas I've seen for like how the penalty is determined,
it feels like it should be a lot more than what I paid compared to how much I owed.
So, yeah, it was a brutal year for that.
No one's going to listen to this and say,
Oh, you owed $5,000, you must be really hurting financially.
So I'm not looking for pity.
I'm just saying in the moment in February when I actually filed, it was unexpected.
You know, when you got your site set on various things like having a kid buying a house,
doing like the end of the Shawshank Redemption when you go live on a beach cabana in western Mexico,
like Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, get away from the grind.
You know, that's my vision, that's my goal.
Well, when you got to just shell out an extra five grand that you weren't anticipating having to shell out, it sets you back a little bit.
Okay, let's just put it that way.
Life is expensive.
That was my taxes, but yeah, we apologies to the loyal listeners who certainly appreciate hearing Matt's voice more than they appreciate hearing mine.
It is my mission to get him on the show before too long here to talk.
Late taxes, back taxes, front taxes, whatever else he wants to cover.
I mentioned, oh, one other thing, I've got to give a shout out to my brother who passed this along to me,
and I think his wife, my sister-in-law, passed along to him, and she had a friend who passed this along to her.
But since we mentioned horses, I will mention this quickly.
and then we'll say thank you to our sponsors and do our phone saga,
not a Sion saga, this was an iPhone saga.
But my brother, this is a great, a quick read on Wikipedia,
passed me along the name of a horse, Potatoes.
But the best part was the spelling is P-O-T-A-T-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O.
Sounds like I'm singing a backstreet boy.
song or something but spelled potate po like potato but instead of one o at the end it's eight oh so that when
you sounded out as pot pote eight o's it's just brilliant it really opened up a whole new world of
creativity and here's the best thing you think oh this is you know some some prankster in the 21st century
down in lexington kentucky getting real crafty with his names no this was
18th century United Kingdom or Great Britain or whatever.
Someone was naming their horse in this cheeky fashion.
This is really the only way you could say it cheeky.
So yeah, if you think horse names are a new phenomenon,
I got an update for you, buddy boy.
These wild naming conventions, just ultimate creative outlet.
I know we talk about horse names all the time,
but it's just it's an opportunity to if you were ever like a bad speller or never really got a handle on grammar or syntax in grade school becoming a professional horse namer is really your calling in life because no one can tell you nope you spell that wrong potatoes doesn't have eightos nope it does because i just called this horse potatoes or mind that bird like what does that mean
or irregardless isn't really a word.
I think about this all the time.
One of the podcasters I listen to,
he doesn't use the word regardless,
but loves the word irregardless.
Well, if you go to the Miriam Webster dictionary,
they'll tell you,
and this is a common misconception.
There actually is no word irregardless.
For further reading, check out the R section regardless.
Well, you can be a horse and just call yourself irregardless,
and no one can say, oh, you can't be.
named that. So ultimate creative outlet, horse names, big shout out. Another shout out to our good
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I also want to give a shout out to the Samson Q2U series.
If you were picking up on some crisp, clear audio at the start of the show with our intro music,
well, it might be because we got a new phone in the mix, a new used phone,
but also it doesn't matter how good the quality is coming out of the speaker.
It needs a good receiver, and that's what you get with the Samson Q2U series.
Biblical quality, gigahertz of biblical proportions.
I don't think gigahertz really has anything to do with microphones,
but it sounds cool, doesn't it?
Oms, ampiers, all the SI units, sports illustrated units.
When God speaks, he uses a Samson.
I was trying to find a way to tie in, like, Kate Upton's large breasts to SI units,
but unit is really more of like a male genitalia thing, isn't it?
And it's like you don't see Channing Tatum or,
Taylor Lawner on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
So couldn't quite make the connection.
You wouldn't really refer to a woman's breasts as her units.
So it didn't make sense.
Okay, let's move past it.
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I kind of said jive with a little bit of an R in there.
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Our Animal of the Week, I got an NFL thing and then we'll do our, well, we'll do Animal
of the Week, then NFL and then Phone saga, Science Saga.
We did the science saga.
We'll do the phone saga and then we'll finish with our trivia question.
which is good for the sports heads and for the film buffs,
combining two of our greatest passions here at the Beantown podcast.
Our animal luke, the earthworm.
That's right.
It implies that there are worms from other planets like arachis, sandworms.
No, the earthworm, I was out traveling for work all day, Wednesday,
and had a little bit of downtime middle of the day,
and it was kind of a rainy, foggy day.
and so I got the chance to go to a nice little forest preserve.
Forest preserves of Lake County and just did a little like mile loop walk.
Just an opportunity to get out and stretch a little bit.
See, you know, walk around a lake.
And because it had just recently rained, there were earthworms all over the paths.
And it's just kind of a sad thing, right?
It's like the rain falling, the earthworms, they're beckoned to the surface, I suppose,
but I think they're really in it for the moisture,
but I like to think the following, you know,
the taps of the rain on the ground,
the drum beats,
it's like the sirens of ancient yore.
Your or lore, it could be either.
Ancient lore, ancient yore.
And they're called to the surface
where they then kind of wriggle around.
And I don't know,
do all the earthworms who like come up to the top soil
when it rains looking for moisture,
do they die because like the birds get them or they get stepped on or do some like make their way back
underground and can earthworms like burrow and make their own holes to go if you give me like a
like a nice grassy lawn a knoll if you will k-n-o-l-l and earthworm comes up because it's wet are they like
they're strong enough to just say okay i'm good up here i'm going to go back underground
Watch Dune Part 3 with Timothy Shalame.
Or do they have to find a pre-made hole or a burrow of some sort?
I feel like if it's soggy enough, they could probably get down on their own.
But it's got to be tough with no arms or legs.
That's the earthworm.
There's a lot of different types of worms.
I feel like I mostly know earthworms and night crawlers.
It reminds me of the ACDC song, Night Prawler.
Great Bon Scott vocal work might be his best, like, of all time before he died.
I mean, he was only in what?
Like, he was like late 30s when he died, something like that.
So it's not huge discography, Rip Bon Scott.
You also don't see a lot of guys named Bonn.
Let's pull out Google.
We don't, I don't want to, like, read a biography of Bonn Scott per se.
He choked on his own vomit.
But Bonn is a first name.
I just, Ronald, well, it's not his first name, that helps.
Ronald Belford Bon Scott.
And how old was he when he died?
33.
Yeah, geez.
Tough man.
But yeah, night, it's not night crawler.
That's the name of the worm, but night prowler.
It's a great spooky Halloween type of song.
But it just kind of checks off all the great ACDC,
early ACDC boxes, bluesy, good guitar work from Angus Young, great rhythm from Malcolm Rip,
and excellent vocal range from Ronald Belford Bond Scott.
The opening line is something like somewhere, a clock strikes midnight.
It's a full moon overhead.
You hear a dog bark in the alley, someone's baby cry.
A rat runs down the alley and a chile.
Shill runs down your spine.
Something like that.
It's a great song.
Go listen to it.
It's our Beantown podcast, single of the week, Night Prawler by ACDC.
It's got to be like 1976, I think.
Dirty Deeds done dirt cheap, I believe.
I say that five times fast.
That's our Animal of the Week, the Earthworm.
The NFL Draft is this Thursday.
I've been toying with the idea of doing a specific show.
which I don't know, maybe, how about I got to work all day, Thursday?
Maybe we could fit in in Friday somehow.
We got weddings the next two weekends.
So traditional recording time is limited.
We could probably fit it in next Friday afternoon going into night two of the draft.
So maybe we'll plan on that.
We might be able to do a taxes NFL draft special two for one.
So let's save like the fun names for next week.
let's plan on NFL draft, like best names in the draft this year.
Let's try to do that on Friday, five days from now.
That's the plan.
Hold me to it.
But I did want to mention, let's make a note for next week.
There was a big trade in the NFL last night, or was it this morning?
I can't remember.
But the Giants defensive tackle, Dexter Lawrence, traded to the Cincinnati
Bengals straight up for the 9th.
number 10 overall pick in this year's draft, which is just kind of like low-key, a good trade for both
teams, and you're not here for football takes, so I don't need to like dive into all of it.
But the reason I mentioned it is the first name of this guy, Dexter.
Like it's not an uncommon name.
Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter the TV show with Michael Anthony Hall.
Or is that Michael Anthony Hall was in the brat pack, and this guy's Michael
C Hall. I can't remember. Too many Michael Halls out there. And my cousin was once married to a guy
not named Mike Hall, but Mike Hall, H-U-L-L. So just a vowel difference. If you say it fast,
no one knows if you're saying Mike Hall or Mike Hall, right? See what they did there?
The best part of all that is Mike in it of itself is a shortening of Mike Hall. So we've really
spun an intricate web here, haven't we? Michael Hall, Michael Hall, Michael Hall. Michael Hall.
that's tough.
That's tougher to say
and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
But the reason I mentioned Dexter,
it's just one of those names
that I can't,
and this is no offense,
I'm not like hating on the name.
If you're out there,
you're named Dexter, Dex, whatever,
it's fine, like, I'm sure you're cool.
The reason that my point I'm trying to make is
it's one of those names I can't imagine
having a baby.
and doctor says, all right, what do we put on the birth certificate?
And you and your wife or your husband or whomever say, you know what,
we're going to call this baby Dexter.
I can't imagine looking at a baby.
It's not even like an old-fashioned name, I feel like.
I can't imagine looking at a baby and saying, you know what, this looks like a great Dexter.
In my day, what I, our Beantown call of the week has sirens roar past.
Email us Beantown Podcast at Yahoo.com.
I'm sure everyone has some of these.
and again it sometimes it's personal sometimes it's not sometimes it's just a name is a name like marlo
stanfield marlowe too i wouldn't mean my kid marl um email us beantown podcast at yahoo.com
it's a wire reference jame hector uh what are names it's just for one reason or another
you would never say oh yeah this like dexter that's it for me um or that that's that's the one i'm
thinking of today. Others that come to mind just off the top of my head, not pre-planned, Chad.
I can't imagine a baby popping out and be like, oh, this looks like a beautiful Chad. Kevin,
I know Kevin's a relatively popular name, but I just can't imagine looking at my kid and saying,
oh, beautiful baby Kevin. And I've known many Kevin's over the course of my life. It's just not,
it's not for me, okay? I'm trying to think if there's any other ones. I can't do Hannah anymore.
That one's personal. Too many exes named Hannah too much.
Anyways, I'm sure I could go on and on.
It's a feminine on and on and on.
Add chapel to the list.
Not naming my baby chapel.
Sabrina, not even, you know, Sabrina Carpenter nowadays,
but when I was a kid, Sabrina the teenage witch and Sabrina the psychic Pokemon gym leader,
not happening.
Agatha?
I know Agatha is like a super old-time female name, like a blanche or something like that.
But how can a baby pop out and say, oh, this is beautiful Agatha?
I don't want to clown on any individuals.
Don't take this personally.
But there are certain names that I think are just like not particularly pretty.
And maybe that's how you feel about Quinn and that's fine.
But Agatha, for real?
Who are we kidding?
Who are we kidding here?
Can't do Agatha.
No, heck no.
Not happening.
Email us or text us other names.
What's that name for you?
Everyone's got a different opinion.
And if you say Quinn, I won't be offended because this is, you know, there's no wrong
answers.
It's just your experience.
All right.
Last thing here.
Before our trivia question, the phone saga.
So, I'm going to try to tow the line here.
between giving you detail because it is a saga and also not just boring you to tears.
Basically, I always buy my phones refurbished, typically from back market.
And up until, you know, two days ago, I had been on my third iPhone, which is an iPhone
X, iPhone 10, but it's an X.
Yeah, my third ever iPhone I'd ever had.
and I switched over to it in like 2021, I think.
So I'd been on it for like five years.
It had been a very reliable phone, you know, very few issues,
was still pretty quick, battery life,
not amazing anymore, but far from terrible.
I've had phones that I really just run into the ground
and the battery life just gets completely out of hand.
And this was not the case with this guy.
The little other thing I'll note is
my wife had lost her phone
well temporarily lost
and then it got run over by a car
and so had to get a new one like two years ago
and when that event happened
excuse me I was like already
I wasn't like ready to switch phones
but I was like you know what at some point
before too long
I'm going to be switching phone so I might as well buy it now
right so that when time comes
I just do it and it's not going to be like
I've never personally been in a situation
in my life where I like lost a phone or my phone broke and so I wasn't able to use it but
I don't want to ever be in that situation if I can you know do anything to avoid it so I went
to backcountry not backcountry backmarket.com this was back literally like September
October 24 we're talking a full year and a half ago and ordered a new phone it was like
200 or not a new but I've refurbished iPhone 12 uh
which I think at the time back in 2024, we were on like iPhone 15 or something.
So it was like, you know, still behind the times, but not too bad.
Anyways, buy it.
I've been sitting in my sock drawer for literally a year and a half untouched, still in the packaging.
Never thought about it.
See it every time I get socks.
Well, so I did think about it.
But otherwise, never really touched it.
So phone on Friday, my iPhone 10, my ever steady, reliable iPhone 10, just starts acting really weird.
First issue was like my side gig, my software app, software testing app that I use was just like only loading 20% of the time.
It's this weird thing where you like click on it.
It gives you like the animation of the app opening.
And then it's just like a black screen for about five to ten seconds.
And then it just cuts away and takes you back to the home screen and the app is still open.
But you can't like utilize it at all.
which is a problem because that's a money-making avenue for me.
So the second I start losing out on profits,
that's when I start making a change.
And then I was also trying to listen to a podcast
when I was walking the dog on Friday
and there weren't new podcasts like populating on my feed.
And then I come back and a bunch of apps need updating.
So I'm like, okay, let's do this.
You just click the update all button.
And they just were all doing the spinning circle,
nothing happening.
And so I do all the classic, I reset network settings, do a, you know, turn it on, turn it off,
try a bunch of different things.
And the phone is still just being weird.
It's really hot.
And I can still like, you know, do other basic functions, like use apps that aren't
trying to update.
I can text people, whatever.
So it's, it wasn't like an emergency 911 situation.
It was just like, you know what?
I was kind of waiting for a sign like my phone actually physically like broke or lost or
the battery life just became untenable.
but you know what i've had this backup phone ready for a year and a half i spent the 250
all the way back then it's like let's just have nice things and upgrade it so i go get the phone
first thing is it's you know it's completely dead and so you got to not only plug it in you can't
use it right away it's got to be plugged in for like an hour before it even lets you use it so i fired up
i was reading about a situation online this didn't come to fruition for me but there are people who
get stuck in that zone of like your phone's not charging and it's completely dead even though
it recognized the charger apparently there's a thing you can do and I thought I was maybe going to have
to try this but it didn't happen thankfully where you take a hair dryer to the back of your phone
to heat up the battery for like two minutes and that can get it going which is crazy to me but didn't
have to do it so no hair dryers were involved in this saga but it was something I can
So finally the phone gets enough charge. I'm like, all right, here we go. I've transferred. Every time I've
gotten a new iPhone, you just transfer it. Back in the old days, you'd have to do like the iTunes backup.
Now you can just do it on the cloud. So, or you don't even really need that. You just like hold the phones next to
each other. So I get the the transfer process going and get the new phone booted up. It's got like this
cool, didn't even look for a rival looking like cloud circle thing that you scan with the old phone
and it kind of connects them. So I'm like, oh, this is going great. This is easy. No problem.
get the transfer going you know it gives you the the welcome screen it's like oh la hello beyond
veneu coniciwa other hellos and like all right here we go it's going to be super easy
let me get the sim card going so i take the old sim card out and throw it into the new one
I've had the same SIM card my entire phone career.
I think it, like the original like side flip phones,
not slide flip,
but you know they like slide out with the keyboard.
The Nokia or the LG Cosmos 2,
that was the phone I had in college until I got a smartphone.
I don't think those had,
um,
what are these SIM cards the way that,
that smartphones do these days?
But anyways, yada, yada, yad.
I have,
SIM card since I was 20 years old, 10 years still going strong.
Shout out to that little chip.
He's been through a lot.
And slide it into the new phone and all of a sudden I get a message saying,
and it's this really long text and very small font on the screen and it's like,
this carrier network has, the carrier network, I don't remember exactly what it says,
but it's like, it's locked your phone.
This is not an iPhone hardware issue.
Contact your carrier for more details.
and I'm like, oh shit.
I'm like that kid in the drug commercial with the EpiPen
where he eats the peanut butter at lunch and he's like,
oh, shoot.
And he's about to die and they got to prophylactic him, whatever.
It's a happy end.
He's fine because he's taking the $1,000 drug.
So I start doing some Google searching.
I'm like, what the heck?
And at that point, I'm realizing I might be extremely boned.
because everything I'm reading is like, oh yeah, if you see this message, you got scammed big time.
You bought a locked phone, even if it said, you know, unlocked.
And I go back and look at the listing from like two years ago from when I bought it and said unlocked.
I'm like, okay, shit, I got scammed.
Big time.
And I've never had to deal with this before.
It's a new problem.
So I'm going through.
And the interesting thing with the phone is when it gives you this message, you can't even like do anything.
you can like you can't go to like the home screen and keep using it it's just like not going to let you use this iPhone at all which is i didn't know that was a thing
the only thing you can really do is do an emergency call you dial this number it's like star star zero six star pound or something
and it show when you do that it like shows you on the screen your phones like hardware details serial numbers and the i m e i
numbers. I don't know what it stands for, but I. M.E.I. So I get that. And so I go find this
YouTube video. I don't remember exactly what it's called, but I got to give a big shout out.
This guy completely saved the day. And it was something like how to unlock any smartphone,
something like that. So to give you quick context, basically,
smartphone or wireless companies, your AT&Ts, your singular wirelesses, your US cellulars,
etc. at Verizon. I don't really understand how that.
this works but they like lock an iPhone so that you can only use your iPhone if you're a customer of
that particular cellular company and so I'm able to watch a video to figure out how to get this
data the IEMI numbers and the serial numbers whatever and then there's a link to a website where
you can like punch in that data to figure out what cellular company your phone is registered to
And so I do that and I see some weird, it was like C sweet wireless or something, some weird, non-American thing that I've never seen or heard of before.
And at that point, I'm in my lowest of lowest.
I'm like, I am really boned here.
Because it's supposed to be like you have to, the wireless company won't unlock your phone unless it's like fully paid off basically as a thing.
but I'm like this is some random ass cell phone company or wireless company that the previous owner of this phone had attached to it.
I don't know if the phone is paid off.
Like maybe it was sold without being paid off.
Like I am up crap crick without a paddle big time here.
But I got extremely lucky.
I'll tell you what, because I keep watching this video from this YouTube guy.
So now I know the name of this wireless company.
And so the next step this video takes you to is like every wireless company has a way to contact them essentially to say, you know, explain your situation.
And it's totally out of your hands like if they'll actually unlock the phone or not.
And so I'm assuming at this point it's going to be like I'm going to have to find some weird ass like customer service line and try to explain my situation.
And maybe the phone's eligible to be unlocked.
Maybe it isn't.
Who knows?
I actually, total shot in the dark,
I just Googled the name of this company.
I don't remember what it was,
but I Googled like C-suite wireless unlock.
And the first hit, it feels way too good to be true.
The first hit is this scammy-ass-looking website
where you click it, you go in, you enter the IEMI numbers,
the serial number.
And I assume it's going to be like one of those things
with like a look-up someone's,
phone where it's like you can enter it and that shows you the details but it's all asteris and it's like
you know pay $10 to unlock this and at that point I was going to have to decide like do I want to
give out my credit card number is this just going to be a waste of $10 but no it was totally free there's like
an unlock button and I'm just like sure what the hell click unlock and you get a spinning circle for like
five seconds and it's just like congrats your phone is now unlocked and at the moment I'm thinking like
Well, I mean, that's better than nothing, but there's no way that actually did anything, right?
Restart my phone.
This baby is unlocked.
Holy moly.
How, like, you got to be angel from heaven.
Touched me.
He touched me.
There's a great Gator vocal band song.
He touched me.
Oh, he touched me.
It would be a good companion piece to Knight Prowler.
You got a guy prowling in the night.
Next thing, you know, he touches you.
who protect girdle your loins let's put it that way but the saga is not over it's like at the end
of attack of the clones when anakin and pad may get married the saga is not over let me tell you
what guys so the phone's unlocked i'm able to navigate it just like normal there's actually a
section if you go to your iPhone you click general about you can scroll down and it'll say
carrier restrictions and if your phone is like not paid off
or still locked by AT&T or C-suite wireless or whatever,
it will say like locked to this carrier.
What you want to see, and you can go check this for yourself on your own phone,
it should say no SIM restrictions.
So I go there, I check it.
It's all good to go.
I'm like, okay, cool, we are cooking with gas now
because the phone has transferred.
It looks just like my old phone.
You know, I got all the apps, all that stuff.
But I realize a tiny little nagging message in the upper right-hand corner
where it should say LTE or 5G or whatever, it says SOS.
When you need me call me, made me turn to SOS.
When you're gone, how can I even try to move on?
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dun.
I love that song, Abba.
And so now I'm back.
I wouldn't say at square one,
but I'm at like square two because I can now use this phone as like an iPod touch but
ideally when I'm not on why because that's the thing it's like if you're on Wi-Fi you can use
it for everything you can even do like iMessage and Wi-Fi calling but if you are not on Wi-Fi
you can't use it for anything internet connected nor can you call anyone or you know in in
in nor in any situation could you like text someone who's in
Android or something. So like we got to get this figured out. Otherwise we got to go back to the old
phone and buy another do I roll the dice to buy another used phone and maybe it'll be locked,
maybe not, or do we just pony up? And I was looking at the new phones that Apple sells. And it was
like five, six hundred bucks for the 16. So I'm like, you know what? If I can spend $5,000 to pay
taxes, I can spend $500 on a phone. I'm rich over here. I'm like Scrooge,
McDuck, despite all the money I've lost on the Beantown podcast over nine years.
So I watch a YouTube video.
It's like 10 minutes long.
It's like, here's the 15 things to try when your phone doesn't recognize your SIM.
Because that's the thing.
At this point, I'm like, obviously something happened for the better because my iPhone
went from like you can't use it at all to you can use it, but it's just like not recognizing
your SIM.
And I'm like, so I go through all.
all these different things reset network settings you know a million different things and i know that
it's not like a hardware issue because when i pop out the sim you know if you've ever done that you get
like the little paper clip you stick it into the hole on the right side of your phone it like
the cartridge pops out that's where your sim card goes when i do that and remove it the iPhone
gives me message it says no sim detected but when i pop it in the message goes away i'm like it
obviously detects it just doesn't want anything to do it just doesn't want anything to do it
do with it. And so the last thing on this YouTube video, the second YouTube video, these guys,
it's like what to do when your iPhone doesn't detect your SIM. The final option before you're
totally boned is a factory reset on your phone, which is always a little scary because it's like
even if you do the backup, you can never, I personally never feel 100% confident that you're
going to get everything back. But I'm like, you know what, Project Hail Mary. At this point, we got
other options. So I do a full iCloud backup. It takes like half an hour. And I go for the factory reset,
you know, two seconds left on the clock, throwing it deep down the field to, you know,
Golden Tate against the Packers, Monday night football replacement refs, chuck it up, see what
happens. It works. Holy moly, we do the factory reset, reboot the phone. You know, it's like you're
just setting it up brand new you restore from the i cloud backup and that sOS changes to a beautiful
5g call my wife it's like uh comel harris calling joe bide and we did it joe except we were sitting
right next to each other and i don't think we even really talked on the phone because we were next to
each other on the couch and uh the only uh it worked we're good to go the only like footnote epilogue
I have is I was we were lying in bed yesterday watching oh that new uh shits creek guy
Dan levy show and the sOS came back and at that point I was like oh shit and this has all been
in the last 48 hours so I wouldn't I'm not going to come out here and say oh yeah we did it Joe
we're out of the woods like I don't know it still could go haywire but I got the sOS message again
yesterday and thankfully it was just like I had to go back into my iPhone settings and it gave
me an option to update carrier settings, which I saw as like a common, you know, sometimes you just
need to update carrier settings. And so, I don't know, I am still a little skeptical, a little nervous
that, you know, because the last, the iPhone 10, we got five solid years out of it. And it's still,
it's still, it's not like it just was completely dead, end of the line, dump it. I just put it back
in my sock drawer, so it's an emergency backup in case.
something, God forbid, something happens, knock on wood.
But I don't know.
I'm skeptical with the whole SOS thing and the saga that we're going to get a solid five years out of this one.
But I've got to tell you, I felt very proud of myself and exhausting all possible options that I could think of, that I could find in my research.
I don't know the first thing about this stuff.
So thank you to the YouTubers, beautiful thing about the Internet.
the whole time I'm just thinking about like trying to do this 20 years ago
or like my grandmother had to try to figure this out.
It's just holy moly.
So shout out to the people on the internet for their knowledge sharing.
And shout out to me for being persistent
because for every one or two YouTube videos or Reddit thread
that had a helpful suggestion, there were like 20 others that I waded through.
wait in the water that had nothing to do with what I was dealing with.
So that's, excuse me, my phone saga.
If you called me Friday afternoon, you couldn't get through, try again.
Phone lines are now open.
And I'm feeling pretty proud of myself.
With that, I think it's about time we go to the dog park.
What do you think, Maple?
She's over here snoozing.
We do have a trivia question.
So we watched Project Hail Mary last night,
and there's a character in the film named Rocky,
because he resembles a rock.
And that got me thinking about the movie Rocky,
which I probably shouldn't have given this preamble
because it gives away one of my three answers.
The movie is Rocky from 1976.
So here's the trivia question.
We'll just do the other two because there's three answers.
Very simple.
Name the three sports.
themed movies that have won the Oscar for Best Picture.
And yes, sports themed is at my discretion.
I don't think there's anything that is particularly close.
You can't say that Green Book is a racquetball movie.
There's no racquetball in Green Book.
You can't say Moonlight is a swimming movie just because Mahershal Ali and the little kid
go into the ocean at Miami Beach for like two minutes at the end of the first act.
That's not a swimming movie, okay?
sports-themed movies that won best picture.
So yes, Rocky was an unexpected giveaway there.
I apologize.
That's from 1976.
That's the oldest one.
I will give you the years on the other two.
You can take a minute to ponder.
The years of the other two best picture winners,
this was the year of the movie, I believe,
not the year of the Oscar, which would be the year after.
1981 and 2004 so these are i was going to call them newer movies if something is 45 years old i don't
think we can necessarily call that newer anymore but uh we're all getting a little bit gray around
the edges aren't we so rocky 1976 two others sports themed movies that have won best picture
see if you can name them if you want more time go ahead and pause because we're going to we're
going to review the answers. I've never seen either of these movies, which is, or, well, I've seen
Rocky, but these other two I have not seen, which put it on my list, I guess. But there's a lot of
movies I haven't seen that I should see. I will say this first one, 1981, chariots of fire,
obviously we know the music.
Bum, bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, bum, bum, bum, best score at the Oscars.
vangalus, how do you say his name?
I don't know, he's like Irish or something.
I read a little like animated children.
I don't know if he was animated,
but like a children's biblical,
children's classics kind of book growing up
about the Chariots of Fire guy,
Eric Liddell, the Scottish guy.
And then I read like his full life story on Wikipedia,
not the whitewashed Bible version.
Not that there's anything bad to say about Eric Lidel,
but he died in a Chinese prison camp in 1943, I think.
Tough.
Or maybe it was 45.
He died when he was 43.
I can't remember.
Brutal.
Rip.
Seemed like a very genuine good guy, though.
So Cherries of Fire, 1981, and then 2004, another one I've never seen.
Hillary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby.
The only thing I know about Million Dollar Baby is,
He takes her off life support at the end.
Does she get into that predicament because of a boxing thing or be like a car crash?
I don't know.
Million dollar baby 2004.
Cherries of Fire, 1981, Rocky, 1976.
We're going to keep this under, it's going to be high and tight.
The saga ends.
We're going to keep this under an hour.
We got NFL draft names for you next week.
Horse name special in two weeks.
It is a lot of fun.
here spring at bean town season nine you're not going to want to miss any of it for all of us here
at the bean town podcast my name is queen david furnace i hope you're staying safe stay insane i'll check in
on you next week bye bye
