Endless Thread - Snacktime: In A Pickle

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

Snacktime returns with the story of a Redditor who got into quite the sticky situation. All he needed to get unstuck was a captive Reddit audience…and a jar of pickles.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. All right, so after a whole series on vaccinations and a pretty heartbreaking episode last week, I think we could all use a snack, right? All right, I'm ready. All right. I want you to savor all the flavors and the texture. All right. Okay.

Wait, you're not savoring enough. How slowly do you want me to chew this? You can like... It's very vinegary. It's vinegar and salt. What kind of vinegar? Balsamic? No, it's not sweet enough.

It's basically like a cheesy poof. Mm-hmm. But not cheesy. Not cheesy, but it has that kind of schmuts on the outside of it that a cheesy poof would have. Yes. Malt vinegar, maybe? It's apple cider vinegar.

It's an apple cider vinegar salt. I think it's like Himalayan salt technically. So Himalayan salt and Apple Cider Vinegar Poof. I won't say who makes them until they sponsor our show. Till then they're just anonymous apple cider vinegar poofs. All right, I'm going to eat my snack, which was given to me by Josh, because I didn't bring snacks because I did a bad job. It just looks like a carrot with some kind of pesto.

Yeah. It's a pesto. Oh, I have the lid here. Zug sauce. Z-H-O-U-G. How would you pronounce that? Z-H-O-U-G, yeah. Z-H-O-U-G-S-SOS. Ginger-y.

I'll have some in a little bit. I'm on the poof train right now. Weird. So we're eating snacks into the microphone because why not? Also, snack time is back, baby. The snack is back. Yep. This is where we tell snacks.

size stories from Reddit. So this is not your typical meal-sized episode, if you will. This is just a little something-something-something to hold you over until next week. Yeah, we are releasing full episodes every other week these days, but in between we will give you some bonus goodies like snack time. Mm-hmm. And this story came to us as a kind of unexpected snack time gift. The gift giver is a guy named James. I'm from Western Australia and on Reddit. My name is Agent 641. We found James in the comment thread of a post about a mysterious mountain of dishware in the middle of the woods, which is the story we are going to be dishing on for you next week.

No spoilers. Yes, yes. But the point is, on that post, James left a very brief but very helpful comment, which again, we are going to talk about later. I will leave it at that for now. And as you might know, when you leave a really great and, and subsequently very popular comment on Reddit, sometimes other Redditors start scrolling through your post history.

Sort of like, this person seems cool. What other cool posts and comments have they made? Yeah, like that thing people do with me all the time because I'm super cool. Oh, they don't. But this did totally happen to James. So we're talking to you about a specific story involving your discovery of a pile of plates in western Pennsylvania for which you have been

greatly celebrated on Reddit but you have also been celebrated on Reddit for another post that you made titled Who Do You Call When You're Stuck? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, sure. I had a feeling you might bring that up Like I was hoping you wouldn't look into it, like into my post history that much.

But geez, where do you want me to start with that? Well, in what way did you get stuck? Maybe let's start there. I had a countertop that I was trying to make. And I was using epoxy resin to coat it. And I let it set overnight in my living room. And when I came back to it, I thought it was dry. And so I was reading the instructions on the epoxy resin.

and to see if I needed to apply another code or do anything special. And I sort of sat down while I was reading, didn't really think about it. And I sat down on the actual countertop, which I had applied epoxy resin to, and got a little bit stuck. I didn't really notice at first, but when I tried to stand up, but I noticed, yeah. So literally speaking, you glued your ass to the countertop? Yeah, that's right. I wasn't quite sure, like, who do you call when it's not a life-threatening emergency,

but you're still going to need some help with something. So I thought I'd just ask Reddit because I had my phone with me. Your phone was within reach? Yeah, yeah, it was in my hand. So James is glued to his countertop. That's bad. But he has his phone. That's good.

And he uses that phone not to call for help, but to post on Reddit, which he probably chose to do. do in part because of what he was wearing at the time? I wasn't wearing anything, actually. I'd just gotten out of the shower, and I lived by myself, so I was just sort of wandering around the house naked. James, James, no judgment. No judgment.

If you got out of the shower, it's cool. Obviously, that's why I got stuck, because if I just got my pants stuck, then no big deal. You just take my pants off. Yeah. Yeah, but if you get your birthday pants stuck, that's a whole different scenario. yeah you can't take those off very easily can I just ask how did you finally get free I used a jar of pickles

this story gets better and better James I wasn't sure what to do I was trying to sort of like get free bit by bit and it wasn't working so I was on Reddit and someone mentioned that you know you can use a solvent or something to dissolve it. And I think, yeah, someone mentioned something like, gee, you're in a bit of a pickle. And it reminded me that, you know, pickles have vinegar as the liquid in them and that vinegar acts as a solvent. So I had a jar of pickles and used the juice to sort of free myself.

So you just took the countertop with you to the fridge to get the jar of pickles? Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, it was like too many. meters wide, so about six foot wide. And so I was able to get to the fridge from where I was. So I used the pickle juice. Did you eat a pickle during this process, any part of this process? Oh, yeah, yeah. I ate most of them.

Amazing. Okay, well, we really appreciate you telling us that story because it's a great story. Thank you. Thank you. We will move on now. But not just yet. You will have to wait until next week to find out how James

from Australia is an important character in our search for a mysterious mountain of plates in America. See you then. Bye. Bye. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry.

But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at Science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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