Beantown Podcast - Zacchaeus at the Combine, Natasha Bedingfield Debate, and Where Did Mahershala Go (02272026 Beantown Podcast)

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

Quinn comes to you LIVE to discuss Gwen Stefani hits, Thin Mints, and Apple Pie Crumblers

Hey, what's going on? It's Quinn David Furness. Welcome to my show. Quinn David Furness presents the Beantown Podcast for Friday, February 27th, 2026, season 9 of our program. Quinn David Furness presents the Beantown Podcast. What's going on and what's happening? How are you? My name is Quinn and it's a pleasure to have you here. I am the creator, the host, and chief philanthropy officer advancement. They call it different things. right but that's how we should start this show before we forget anything else by thanking everyone who contributed to the pledge drive telethon fundraiser last Sunday just five days ago it was a lot of fun we had what five or six different people call in to play our trivia games i hope you enjoyed them i had a fun time making them and of course thanks for donating to charity if you did get that charity donation in and you sent me your screenshot of your receipt we will work on your donor prize for this year.

Topaz Elite Club, very exclusive. You gotta really believe in something. Believe in anything and throw them $20. That can be your annual giving. The season of Bean Town, just loop us in. No longer accepting donations, no more GoFundMe's, none of that stuff. So, yeah, that was the pledge drive. It was a lot of fun.

And thanks all for donating. So donor gifts, TBD, I'll be honest with you. I know we've kept it a surprise this year. You're probably thinking, oh, Quinn, he's probably had this in the works for weeks and weeks, you know, teasing it behind the scenes and what's it going to be? What type of prize is it going to be? And I'll tell you right now, I don't know, but I'm probably going to jump over to the Etsy shop in a couple days here. And I get a chance to breathe. Get my head above water.

Work has been nuts. It's been really tough. I won't say anything more than that. You don't come to the Beantown podcast to hear about work and slaving away and all that stuff. You come for an escape, like Gwen Stefani would say. Who was that? That seems great escape. Is that Gwen Stefani or is that?

No, that's Natasha Bettingfield, right? Who-hoo. If I could escape. And then a hand, han, nah, nah. Classic mid-2000s bop, right? What year do we think Swedish? escape is from. This is our first bonus trivia question of the show here. Well, I'm looking that up. I will let you know and all guests together. But listeners discretion advise when we're

listening to the program. Number one, we'll occasionally use some language. Number two, this podcast is objectively terrible. And of course, thank you to our friends in Pakistan. Thank you for making us the 112th ranked comedy podcast in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Didn't get any pledge drive donations from Pakistan so far as I can tell. based on IP addresses, internet protocol. But, you know, it's okay. I think it's probably a conversion rate problem, or maybe I need to download the Moneygram or WISE,

transfer wise, whatever it's called, remitly, I need to download that app, and that will probably boost our donations big, bigly in the future. I also want to mention I'm drinking the third of a four-pack that I've been nursing of West, not West, Midwest Coast, vaguely stylish. West Coast-style IPA. What's interesting about this, I said West at the start, I misspoke, but it was for good reason.

So I'm looking at the can here. It's a tall boy. And at the very top, there's kind of a label going around, just a small sliver at the top that says West Town. But the brewery is Midwest Coast, which is in the Westtown neighborhood of Chicago. But Midwest Coast is a brewery, and the name of the beer is vaguely stylish. And so my question is, what is this West Town referred to? Does Midwest Coast Brewing have some sort of a categorization system where Westtown is all IPAs and back of the yards is porters?

I guess if you really want to be a porter, you'd probably want to be down in the Pullman Historic District, right? Train porters, is that a thing? What do you do when you're a porter? You're someone who transports something from something else to, you know what I'm talking about? And then there's portage, right? P-O-R-T-G-A-G-E. Is that when you got to, like, carry your canoe between two sources of water? I think that's what portage is, or maybe it's something else.

I don't know. We're not going to spend a bunch of time looking stuff up today. He says, as he's about to Google Natasha Bettingfield's Sweet Escape, because we're keeping this short and simple. You know, we did, what, two and a half hours, two hours, something like that last Sunday. It was a lot of fun. but end of the week Friday 6 p.m. here with our research team Maple while moms at a bachelor party in Florida we're just keeping things cool, calm, collected, got a couple points I'm going to hit on and then

we're going to rap and get out of here. Not an actual rap, but we had a vision like two or three years ago for having a Bean Town's, Bean Town podcast closing credits rap song instead of Tishmango blues and it's going to be in the style of like a Will Smith rap from one of the his movies men in black men in black two back in black i think is what the subtitle or uh wild wild west there's a great youtube channel i don't remember the guy's name i don't think he's really active anymore but his big thing was doing the um he made a video every what is it september 21st is that the date from the song september by earth went fire do you remember the 21st night of September, I think is the 21st.

And for like five-ish years, maybe longer, he made like an elaborate video. It got more elaborate each year to him like lip-sinking to the song and doing all sorts of stuff and cool edits. His name's like Daegie something. But you could probably, if you YouTube Daegi, whatever, September, you'd probably find it. But one of the other thing, he hasn't done that. I think the project is finished. But he also did a couple of great Will Smith rap pair.

songs over the closing credits of popular movies. And this was back in like, what, like 2016, 2017. So the movies I remember is like Moonlight was one. I think that's probably the best one. And he does a good job of it. He's not just like sitting there watching the movie titles roll. And he's just like rapping. It's like he makes his own rap infuse with the theme,

the score of the movie, the film. So it's actually like legitimate. But Moonlight, I think, is the best one. I think he did Green Book, too. Not the sequel, but just Green Book. I don't think there's a sequel yet. But we'll see if Mahershala wants to sign on and go for a third Oscar. Isn't it crazy, Mahershachala Ali won, what, two Oscars?

For those two films, Moonlight and Green Book, what I just mentioned, in the span of, what, three years was it? Or was it back to back? I think it was, I think there was a year in between. And it's not that he's disappeared in the last six, seven years. although I couldn't really name him or Herschel Ali film lately. So maybe in a sense he's disappeared, but it's just like it's crazy when you go from like,

oh yeah, I won the award for like the best supporting actor twice in three years or whatever was. And now we don't really see much from him. I bet he does a lot of stage stuff. I could see that. But he's the type of actor where, you know, I didn't really know much about him before Moonlight, and I haven't really seen much of him since Green Book. I think he was in that Kong Skull Island movie.

with, I was going to say Jack Black, but that's the original King Kong. Not the original King Kong, but the 2004 Peter Jackson version. Who is it? Oh, it's John C. Riley is in Kong Skyl Island. I never saw it. I don't know. I think it was one of those movies where it's like, I kind of assumed it was really bad, and it's actually not that terrible, but it doesn't quite live up to Peter Jackson's King Kong. So it's just kind of fallen by the wayside. I don't know.

Okay, let's put a cap on this, and then I have some. something kind of sad we'll see emotional, I don't know, to get to. I was going to try to with one hand over here. Google search Natasha Benningfield Sweet Escape, and it seems like we could just search Sweet Escape. Oh, before I do that, let me guess the year. I always think this song's a little bit older than it is, if I recall correctly, because I feel like I remember, like,

grown up as a kid, going to the water park and hearing this, but I think I heard it like right as it came out. That's why they were playing it so much. So I'm going to guess Sweet Escape, Natasha Benningfield. I'm going to guess, 2007, Sweet Escape is my guest. Putting your guest to, why do I think that it's Natasha Bettingfield? You know what? If you're listening to the podcast and you know anything about music, so you know I've been messing this up this whole time,

and my original gut was right, it is Gwen Stefani. Natasha Bettingfield does that pocketful of sunshine song, right? Take me away. Does that song have sweet escape in it? A sweet escape. Now we got to get to the bottom of this, okay? You wonder how these Beantown podcast episodes inflate so much. Well, we need to understand.

So Sweet Escape 2006, I was off by a year. That is Gwen Stefani. And the course of that song is like, if I could escape, you know, I'd be a real bad girl. Bad girl didn't mean for you to get her. Okay, so let's get to the bottom of this. Natasha Beddingfield, a British singer, 44 years old. Okay, she did unwritten. Did she not even, why am I throwing Natasha Benifield into this mix at all? Does she even sing the song I'm thinking of? Who sings pocketful of sunshine? This has been a really painful 10-minute listen. Oh, it is Natasha Benningfield. This is the little. last thing we're going to say about Sweet Escape, Pocketful of Sunshine, Gwen Stefani, or Natasha Benningfield for at least the next 10 minutes so we can move on.

But what, how does the, you know what? I'm taking a, not a victory lap on this one, but I don't, I'm walking away from this conversation feeling less bad about myself because let's review the facts here. I originally said Sweet Escape was by Gwen Stefani, so originally I was right. I was only a year off on my guess, so I don't feel bad about that. And then in case you're out there saying, gosh, Quinn, dumbass, how could you confuse sweet escape with pocketful of sunshine? Well, allow me to read you the lyrics to the course of Natasha Bettingfield's pocketful of sunshine. And this might clarify things.

Take me away, a secret place, a sweet escape, take me away. So both songs mention sweet escape multiple times. In fact, Pocket Full of Sunshine might even mention it more. I don't know. Who's counting? So that's officially the end of that. We're doing a cut, a hard cut. We're moving on.

I'm going to try to do this, and I'll keep it brief, without getting too emotional because it's been a rough couple. of days for me emotionally plus work being crazy. But I'll say this for the next minute or two in all sincerity. We lost a friend on, I think it was Tuesday night, Wednesday morning. My pal, Steve, not my dad, but my friend, was in our family fantasy football, the Great White North, which you'll hear me talk about from time to time. Now, Steve is unique in that it's a family.

fantasy football league and he was not a member of the family. The way he got into this, he's a friend of my uncle who is a commissioner, the commissioner of our league. And so we had kind of a rotating door to some extent for the first five years of our league. It started with my, let's see, my first cousin once removed who is in the league, but his wife at the time had a team for about two or three years. and then they got divorced, and so my first cousin once removed,

my mom's cousin, my uncle's cousin, the commissioner, he's still in and has been for, this will be, what, our 21st season coming up here? He's still in it, but his ex-wife was only in it for like two or three years. Then my cousin took a team over for like two or three years. One of the stints was three, the other was two.

I don't remember which one was which. And it wasn't really his jam. I think he was in like, you know, well, this was what, like 2008 or something. So he was probably late high school at the time. So it wasn't really his jam. He gave it up. He stepped away and he, now he's back in the week.

He's been back for the last five plus years or so. So he's back in it. But it was going into season six. So this is like 2011-ish, 2012. And we were down a manager again. We're looking for a third manager for this franchise. And here comes my uncle, the commissioner, bringing in some guy named Steve Johnson,

who none of us have ever met, none of us know, except for the commissioner. And that's a tough spot to be in for Steve. You come into this family league, it's competitive, there's a lot of smack talk, and he did it with, I would say, grace. More than that, he came right back with a smack talk. He was a great kind of shit-talker.

We keep it relatively light in the Great White North, and it's mellowed out in the last decade or so compared to our first decade, I would say. But he, you know, he was right on top of it. He was sparring. He was jarring. That's right, jawing, J-A-W-I-N-G. He was in, we have two divisions in the Great Way North. We have Pope and Young, and then we have Boone and Crockett, which I belong to.

And Steve was in Boone and Crockett the entire time. So just kind of, I don't really know how this happened. And I think he and I just started budding heads in like a smack talk loving, playful way. I had never met the guy until my cousin's wedding, what, like three or four years ago. I was the first and only time I ever talked to Steve in person, invited him to my wedding, but he wasn't able to make it, unfortunately. And it's really a shame I'll never get to see him again or talk to him again, which is really not fun. But Steve and I kind of became instant rivals. I don't really know how or why it happened.

It just, it is what it is. And I got to tell you, every year, you play each other twice a year in division. And every year, those two games against Steve Johnson, he had the same name for all 15 or so seasons he played with us. He was the cheap shot artists, but just lovingly known as CSA. And new Steve, that was because my dad is Steve, so kind of have old Steve, original Steve, or just, good old fashioned Steve, Steve F, excuse me, who you know from Home Pride, Oregon.

Then you have never to be known by Steve J, for the most part, just knew Steve. That's how he was known across the league, but he embraced it. He took it on headfirst and recognized that while he was new and while he wasn't a member of the blood clan, he was an integral part of fantasy football, which I know if you're out there listening. and you're not really into sports or fantasy football. I get it. You're like, you know, it's nerdy, it's stupid. And that's okay to feel that way.

But at the very least, it's a community of people that all got together, all chatted weekly, you know, for four months out of the year, three, four months out of the year. And this is the first time in my life we've ever lost someone. I've been playing fantasy football for 20 years now. And it's the first time we've ever lost someone and, like, just was really unexpected. and didn't get the chance to say goodbye. So you know what? CSA, Steve Johnson, new Steve,

I don't know if they have podcasts up in heaven. I don't know if they have fantasy football in heaven. You're going to want to draft Samson. Look at the brute strength, the long hair, really quick off the line of scrimmage, or you can get, I don't know, who else in the Bible would be great at fantasy football? Jesus is kind of scrawny. Jude is as scary, he's sneaky.

He could be like a good slot-wide receiver because he'll find the holes in that defense and he'll expose you. I don't know, who else would be good. Zakias, great climbing ability. He would be a good point, you know, wide receiver, kind of, you know, those routes where you throw it up in the corner of the end zone

and you're at the one-yard line, Calvin Johnson style. Zakias, with his tree-climbing ability, I think he could really get up there and high point the ball. that's the football term. We'd say high point the ball. It could be a good, you know, deep safety or cornerback as well, tall and lanky, I would assume. I don't know.

If you got any other, and then we'll finish up this, what was supposed to be, serious tribute. But if you got any other Bible fantasy football recommendations, email us Beantown Podcasts at yahoo.com. And I think ultimately to wrap this up, that's the sort of just stupid kind of Bible-related, football-related humor that, Steve Johnson would have appreciated. Every year we would have a draft night call. I hesitate to call it a party because the Great White North has never drafted fully in person with any more than three or four people in one place, just because we've always been living in different states and for the last decade plus different time zones. But Steve would go over to my uncle's house, the commissioner, and they draft together.

And you'd occasionally hear Steve on Zoom, and you'd have no idea what he was saying. But the man was a diehard Packers fan. He never came off that. He was, from the outside looking in, from my perspective, not the best fantasy football player, but surprised me way more times and beat my ass. Good, way more times than I would like to admit.

Steve was never able to get all the way to the big dance or win the trophy, which is a bummer. because if I could trade any of my, knowing what I know now, if I could trade any of my titles, not that I've won a bunch, but for letting Steve have that once, I would do that in a heartbeat.

So that's what I got. There's nothing else that I can really say on the matter. The Great Way North is going to look different in its 21st season. compared to the previous 15, which I haven't fully processed yet, but that's what it is. So, Steve, if you get Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher or wherever up in the clouds, just send us an email. And maybe you just pretend you're a rock, Chris, or a Nigerian prince,

or someone who's trying to upsell me on podcast analytics and SEO search and stuff, and I'll just pretend or not pretend, I'll assume it's you. Just coming back to be a pain in the ass getting sent right to my spam folder. Just one more time. So we'll miss you, buddy. Let's see, let's do, we're not going to do full ad reads this week. I just got a couple more things I want to get to, starting with our animal of the week. Okay, so here's the way things went down.

After the Pledge of Tulletka fundraiser, I've been exhausted this week, been busy working. I haven't had a ton of free time. And so literally five minutes before showtime, I am gathering my stuff up and I'm looking at my notes that I jotted down on the way home on the train today. And I'm like, okay, so animal of the week, we got the very least we need this level of minimal preparation. We need an animal. So then I'm thinking about how sad I am. And I'll move you through this turbo mode. This just shows you my line of thinking.

In case you ever wanted to pull back the curtain and wonder, how does Quinn decide? or not how to see decide, but what's the train of thought like to get to something like an animal of the week? I'm at lunch today with my coworkers. My coworker has some children, has daughters who go to the same kind of Polish school as some of my wife's cousins do. And that got me thinking, okay, and she was telling me there's a big fish fry every Friday night in Lent, and now I'm feeling sad for myself because I'm home alone with that. the dog on dog duty i can't go down to the fish fry and but then i'm thinking okay you know poland what we know about it and then i'm thinking oh well it's been a long time since i listened to anything by

chopin and this tells you youtube is always listening i swear to god i don't know if this was because my phone was in my pocket at lunch and we were talking about polish fish fry or what but i get home this is how creepy this stuff is i get home i'm working i've got youtube in the background and just go to the home page and i get a recommendation for a Chopin Poinets, which I've listened to a million times, but honestly, I have not listened to it or clicked on it in my cognizant memory.

I don't think that's the right word, cognizant, but that's okay, in like six plus months. And YouTube occasionally brings stuff out, you know, from the grave, but usually it's just like the same ten old things you've been listening to over and over again. It pops it up as a recommendation is to just jump to on your homepage. All of a sudden,

Polynes pops up. So I turn it on and listen to it. It's great. It's Daniel, how do you, however you say, his name, Triflinov. Polynes and A-flat major, I think it is. It's a great one. That's how it ends. It's great. Very majestic. And then I'm thinking, you know what, this kind of reminds me of the Chopin Scarcy, specifically number four in E major. And my favorite recording is by Rafael Blaschaise, however he say his name, who rose to fame for winning the Chopin piano competition, which is like the big dog. And he was the first Polish, first poll to win it. This was in like 2006 or something since Christian Zimmerman, who's a legendary concert pianist. And it was like 40 years later. And if you're Polish and you win the Chopin competition,

that's kind of a big deal because Chopin, of course, was Polish. And then I'm thinking, Okay, well, I'm all in on the Poles and Polish and Poland this afternoon. How can we integrate this in? Now I'm thinking, well, what kind of animals do they have in Poland? What's the national mammal of Poland? That's what I Googled. And that gets us to our Animal of the Week. I probably could have kept, I could have saved three minutes and said some sort of fish like cod.

But that's not good enough for Animal of the Week. We got to drill deep into the research. And we get the National Mammal of Poland, which is the European bison, which I don't have a lot on, but it opens up the door to a classic catch-22 type conversation, bison versus buffalo, which I did get a little bit more into. I spent like two or three minutes Googling this. So to catch you up to speed on where things are, you probably heard some of this before, if not, buckle up. There's a European bison and there's the American bison, When you think of a buffalo wild wings, there's a buffalo in general.

Buffalo nickel. That's a bison. That's not a buffalo. It should be bison wild wings. But do you think Tyson, you know, the chicken company, you think they could do Tyson Bison Bites? My wife works in advertising. This could be a great pitch. Tyson Bison Bites.

It's fun to say, isn't it? Aye, aye, aye. It's not like I'm German or something. Nine. But back to the, so there is no, like, American buffalo. Anything you see in America or Europe, for that matter, that looks like, what you think of as a buffalo, that's a bison. And the official, what, the national mammal of the United States, the bison. National animals got to be the bald eagle, I suppose.

But mammal, bison. Excuse me. When we're talking buffaloes, we're thinking like water buffaloes, or imagine looking at like an ox or a yak-like figure. Now, yaks are a buffalo, but that's more what we're talking about with buffalo. The big thing, when you look at the American and European bison, which they look pretty similar, and I didn't even know they had bison in Poland, but you learn something new every day on the Beantown podcast. You look at it, they got kind of the hump. Like right behind their heads.

Not a full-on camel backtrian or, what are they? There's camels with one hump and two humps, right? There's no three-hump action going on. It's just one hump or two humps. My humps, my lady-lady humps. But the bison, you know it's a bison. Well, their face, they kind of got like a big beard, right? And they got the little hump.

Apparently the buffalo, there's no hump. They kind of look more like a cow, more like a flat back. And so when Europeans got to North America, they thought, oh, these bison kind of look like the buffalo we already saw in Africa or Asia, wherever. Apparently they'd been there before. I don't know. And so they named them buffalo. What doesn't add up is now you're telling me that there's been bison in Poland the whole time. So whoever it was Samuel Day Champlain or Ponce de Leon, they get to North America, they see these bison roaming around.

And they, what they didn't, they'd never been to Poland before. Someone play them a polonaise, please. And so now we're all mixed up. We've written patriotic songs about it. I guess I was going to start singing this. It's not really a patriotic song. It's more of like a homestead, westward expansion, westward hoe. I love ho as a, what's the part of speech, a interjection, probably what it is?

I don't know. H-O-exclamation point. Oh, give me a home with a buffalo roam. Home, home on the range. Which fits in well because we've really been getting into a little house in the prairie lately on the Roku streaming channel. I got to tell you, there's a great episode. last night where Charles Ingalls, he's like, he uncovered, not the, it's not the right word. What's the name?

He exposed a faith healer who was coming in and preaching in these big old tents, pretending to be, you know, pretending he could heal you. And apparently, Paw came in with a crutch and did some sort of, I don't know, magic mix up and exposed this faith the other. We came in at the tail end of it. And we just saw the aftermath, but things were getting hot and heavy. We're getting spicy. I got to tell you, there's a theme or a trend I've seen in these Little House and the Prairie episodes of, like, people getting exposed. There was this one the other night where this guy tried to steal some gold from these people's mattress,

and he thought he was going to get away with it, and the community rallied around him and held them up at gunpoint. So I don't really know what kind of lessons exactly we're getting from Little House on the Prairie, but I think at the very least we can say, like, community, don't go against the kids. community, which kind of sounds like communism. I don't know. But like what would, oh shoot, I had something. I lost my train of thought. That's a damn shame. Oh, the godfather, right? Never go against the family. Rest in peace to Bob Duval. Duval, right? Liam Cohen heads know that. So that's what I got on the whole bison, a European bison. That's our animal of the week. I don't know. The whole Buffalo Bison thing, it's kind of silly.

Buffalo Wildlings, their whole marketing scheme, their whole brand is founded in a lie. I had a bison burger once. I was at some sort of like county fair-esque type thing with my grandparents. I went to a handful of like events like that as a kid with my grandparents, And I don't really, you know, I don't have them all straight in terms of where they are, where they were. Like, is it like a Renaissance thing? Was it more of like going back to Little House in the Prairie?

More like a, like we had something in Rockford area, the Rockford area growing up called Settlers Days. Like settlers of Catan. Speaking of German. I can't keep track of all this stuff. There's also the great Macktown, right, in Rockton, Illinois, Macktown. It's like you go and. it's it's like a it was like an old trapping town in the 18th century or something like that and now it's like a historic preserved site that you know school children can go visit

let's read up a little bit about macktown macktown living history education Wikipedia here we go macktown historic district national historical historic district encompassing the remains of the Macktown settlement in Winnebago County, established in the late 1830s of the confluence of the pecatonica and rock rivers, which we've talked about. I think I had, it was like a year ago. This thought came into my head that I still remember when I was driving either to or from a church rehearsal when I used to work at a church in Rockton, and I crossed the river at just the perfect sunset timing, looking off to the west, and the way it was hitting the water, it was just, I'll never forget.

about it. Anyways, that's right where this is. Mack Town was one of the first settlements in Northern Illinois. The community was a major trading post along the Galena Chicago Trail, which if you're not from Illinois is just like from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, and was the site of the region's first bridge across the Rock

River. Stephen Mack is who it's named for. Two buildings remain standing from the original settlement at the Stephen Mack House, a Greek revival structure built in 1839. The Whitman Trading Post is a limestone building completed in 1846.

And that's essentially all there is to it on the Wikipedia page. The last thing I'll say, I just mentioned, I played, you know, I worked for a church. Kind of like a startup in a storefront kind of Lutheran church when I was in high school. But simultaneously from time to time, I would play substitute piano for the Unitarian Universalist Church. A Rock River. I think that's what it was. UU, CRV, something like that. And they, the reason I mentioned them is they existed, and I think they still do.

I have to go back and look, but they host their church services in the old Stephen Mack's school building, the tiny little one, like one or two building room school building. And that's essentially on the grounds, if you will, of Macktown, which we just talked about. This only happened one Sunday, but I kind of felt bad about it. I mean, I'm just out here hustling, making my money, serving the Lord. But I had one Sunday where I played my Lutheran service, 9 to 1030 or whatever, and then the Unitarian service starts at 11. And so after Lutheran's done, I pack up my stuff, skedaddle out of there. Now, this is quite literally across the bridge from each other.

It had to have been a three-minute drive at most. Out by where a good friend of the show Matt Feather is from. And I played both services on one day, you know, probably made my, I don't know, probably like 170 bucks for doing those two combined, which goes a long way when you're 17 years old. But then, of course, the last thing I'll say, we'll close this story and move on. We didn't, oh, I didn't develop a trivia question for it today. We're going to have to do that on the fly. That's okay. We'll figure it out.

Just don't let me close the show without it. That would be terrifying. We already did the whole Natasha Bettingfield saga. but what I was going to say is literally like the two years up until now I have a car now driving a decent amount ever since I bought the car two or three months ago but up until then the only time in my life when I like had a car slash was responsible for driving a lot other than you know work travel was when I was you know 16 through 18 which is with 2011 through 2013 which is right when gas prices were like as bad as they've been in my lifetime

We're talking like 4.30 a gallon, stuff like that. And those were like the window of time, maybe not exactly that period, but pretty close to the zenith of the prices where gas was so expensive. And so I'd drive all the way up to the north edge of Illinois, about a 40-minute drive from my childhood home, if you will, and then back on Sundays spending a third of what I made just in gas money alone, maybe a quarter. brutal, brutal stuff. Excuse me. There's one other thing, oh, we're going to get to our trivia question in a second as I think of it. But one other thing I wanted to mention just because it was in my notes, it says, Welcome to March.

I probably out there thinking this is going to be some sort of Louisiana-May Alcott type segment. No, this is just me trying to pump myself up. My mental health has been poor lately for a number of different reasons. some of which we've already talked about on the show today. But I'm trying my best to just like change my headspace, change my attitude on a lot of different things because it's just been very kind of like naturally negative, maybe not naturally,

but a lot of my response to things that's been happening in my life, work, whatever, it's just been like viewing it, coming at it from a very negative perspective. And I love March so much that I'm just trying to like, take every day more positively, which is tough, but you know, you have to do it. Like, no one's going to do it for me. I have to do it. But I'm just excited. I mean, February wasn't too bad either, just with stuff going on. He had, you know, the Olympics just wrapped up, which I really enjoyed.

Traders just ended. But there's just so many great, like, days slash moments in March. And just off the time I had, I'm not even a big birthday, personal birthday guy. but my birthday is the 16th. My father-in-law is the week before that. So that's always exciting. That's next weekend already, looking forward to that. And then we got, boom, the weekend after that is chock full. That's right, chock full.

Well, don't even forget pie day. I don't think you've ever had a slice of pie on pie day, but maybe I'll change it this year. We'll see if I can get a good discount. Sometimes the jewel pie as you go and it's like, oh, this thing's on sale from 16 down to 14. You're like, you think I'm paying 14 bucks for a jewel pie that's been sitting here for two days.

Jewel Pie is not a style of pie. It's just the name of the story that sells them. But then one time, this was two years ago already, I got like, they like made the pie, but they messed it up. And so it was like Apple Pie crumbles, which sounds like Trader Joe product or something. But it was, you know, on discount,

the whole pie for like four bucks or something. And I bought that. So it's like, once you start chewing on the pie, Like, I can't show up to Thanksgiving dinner with the apple pie crumbles from Jewel, but I can eat it myself and feel great about it and save 75% or whatever. That's what I need. I need someone in the bakery to really mess things up. So we'll probably call ahead and try to plot that out.

But you get, dude, in two weekends from now, big weekend. I'm not talking NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Watkins Glen. I think that's later in like June or something. Friday is what the 14th? Is that Pi Day this year? I think it is. Pi Day is that Friday. And I don't know why I targeted that Friday.

It's not. My birthdays, we're all over the place. This is usually a good signal for me to wrap up the show. My birthday is the 16th, which is a Monday, which means pie day is the Saturday, which is what I wanted to say originally. That's the St. Patrick's Day celebration in Chicago, which I'm too old to just like get shit-faced anymore because I will be wrecked for the next

two days and I do not want to be on day two of a hangover on my birthday even though I don't love my birthday it's just feels irresponsible to feel bad on your birthday right so we got to be wise with that but then the day after Sunday Oscars Sunday people the 15th and I think there was even something else going on that day too oh it's selection Sunday which I always love and a lot of this is college basketball too because now you get college tournaments leading up to selection Sunday and then March Madness starting the, what, Tuesday after then the playing games start. You get the brackets going or it's the Wednesday?

I think it's the Wednesday. No, it's the Tuesday and the Wednesday. And then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So you got to get your brackets going. I'm feeling good because I won two brackets last year and that probably never will happen again in my lifetime, but it was fun. Yeah, you get March Madness going. and you get longer days, daylight savings time, is next weekend, I think.

So now all of a sudden the sun's setting close to, like, 640, 645 p.m. in a week here, which is great. Warm or weather. You hear Natasha Bettingfield playing at the park. Kids are out there running around chasing balls. So for as many things going on for me in my own life that are. are not going the way I want them to, you got to look ahead to the positive things and try to frame your mindset around that as much as possible. I guess that's my parting message here.

As always, thank you to our sponsors, Home Pride, Oregon, Samson Q2U series, Cuts by Q and Beantown Sports Book. Okay, so we're going to, I don't, I should have tried to formulate something here, but my wife a couple days ago came home with some Girl Scout cookies. So what do we think is a Girl Scout's cookie related, Girl Scout's cookie related trivia question we could come up with? I'm looking at Thin Mints, which are my favorite and kind of classic, and I was going to say, oh, geez, but then I was like, not like, oh, gosh, I messed up like, oh, geez as an original.

Do we think thinnints are the original cookies? Has there always been a cookie sweet? Or do they start with one and then they expanded? What's the trivia question we can ask and play together here? You know what? We'll ask a year question and then we'll just see if anything else comes up interesting that we can learn about together and then we'll wrap the show. My question, not when the Girl Scouts were formed,

but first Girl Scout cookie, give the year. Like the year it was first, you know, the idea first popped up and the first sale. You know, however you want to phrase it or frame it is fine with me. First, that's what I'm going to Google, and I'll tell you what I come up with, but first Girl Scout cookie sale. I'll Google that and we go for the year. I don't have a great sense of Girl Scouts as an organization. It feels pretty new, doesn't it?

It's like not something you would have in like 1920, I don't think. I'm going to guess first Girl Scout cookie sale. I'll say 1962 first Girl Scout cookie sale. Even that feels like it might be early. So get your guesses in and we'll see if there's anything else interesting that we learn as we find this year. first Girl Scout cookie sale oh i was uh i was my my preconceived notions were wrong on this one according to the a i overview girl scouts started selling cookies in 1917 just five years after the organization was founded the very first cookies were homemade by the mistletoe troop in muskogee oklahoma

and sold in a local high school cafeteria as a service project excuse me i'm about to belch didn't quite take. So yeah, I was off. 1917. I really didn't know that Girl Scouts were that old. 1912. I didn't think we were that progressive teaching girls' entrepreneurial skills in 1917. I never would have guessed it.

Let's go to the Wikipedia article. Last thing on the show here today for Girl Scout cookies. Just seeing if there's anything else. The program's intended to both. Raise money and improve the financial literacy of girls. Yeah, isn't it something like the Girl Scouts take like 80% like to the top organization of your cookie sales and then the troop gets like the other 20 or something like that?

It's a brutal MLM system they got going there. Let's see. There it is. The first known sale in 1917. Okay, the bakery is paid 25% to 35% of the profits. 45 to 65% is used by the regional council to cover programming costs. Oh, here it is. And 10 to 20% is kept by the local troop.

So you're out there selling Girl Scout cookies, you know, whatever they are now, like eight bucks a pop and you're only taking a dollar back to your troop. That's brutal. That is tough, tough, tough, tough. History. Let's see. I just want to see, like, when do they decide, like, oh, this Girl Scout cookie is going to be like thin mint? that's kind of what I wanted to know because I'm sure when, you know,

Cheryl, whatever her name was, in Oklahoma, started baking them. I don't know if it was a chocolate chip or a macademia nut, but it probably wasn't thin mint, is my guess. Or, what is it, Tagalog? What's the name of that other one? I don't know.

Let's see. War efforts. In 1950s, three more cookie. Oh, that's more cookie recipes were added. Shortbreads, Scott T's, Savannah, Santa's today called peanut butter sandwich or doceidoes in the east of the U.S. and thin minced. So those were added in the 1950s, but it doesn't really say what the first one was. I don't know.

Berry biscuit. Oh, it's B-U-R-R-R-Y. Like it's someone's name. Okay. I just wanted to see like, oh, the first one was called chocolate. Or the first one was called for it. What if we just Google First Girl Scout cookie? A simple home-baked sugar cookie often described as shortbread in 1917.

And then I guess that's when they eventually added the others, the thin mints, etc. Oh, here this is from the official website. In 1951, well, this is later than we were talking about, but Girl Scout cookies came in three varieties, sandwich, shortbread, and chocolate mints, now known as thin mints. So let's just leave it there. Let's pretend we found a satisfying answer. And speaking of satisfying, the show is about to end. So thank you, everyone, for listening to my program.

Quindavere Frinus Presents the Bean Town podcast. Email us, more info on good biblical fantasy football, or it doesn't have to be fantasy, but just like football options, right? We talked about Zakias high-pointing the ball and Samson, with his brute strength. I guess he could be a good defensive end, I suppose, like a Miles Garrett type. let us know what else you think of. Get creative with it.

Goliath, I guess, that goes without saying he'd be a good defensive tackle. Who is David with his sling? Sling in stones? He'd be a quarterback, but I don't know. You really need arm strength to be good at the sling, or you just need accuracy? So now I'm thinking David is like a noodle-armed guy. Like current day Aaron Rogers, where he can't throw it more than like 20 yards downfield.

although I guess Aaron's still got a good Hail Mary, but he prefers to dink and dunk. Maybe David could throw that sling 300 yards or sling that stone 300 yards or whatever biblical unit of distance they use leagues, fathoms, who knows. And he just chose not to. Although I don't know how far away Goliath was. There's no way of knowing.

Guys, that's what I got for you today. Thanks for listening to my program. Quinn Davis Presents the Beantown podcast. We'll come for you. Come at you next week. Stay safe, stay sane. Bye-bye.