Judge John Hodgman - Opening the Members Only Mailbag

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

The holiday season has officially begun. Let's celebrate with some rollicking fun with the J Squad! That's right. We are opening the Members Only Mailbag and spreading some cheer. We talk about a romantasy series that has made one of our members "feral and unwell." Plus, eating salad greens by the handful, Jesse's clothing system, changing the toilet paper roll, and much more!If you want to hear more of the J Squad yapping, we have great news! We do this once a month and it's available for all MaxFun members. Missing out on the fun? We have an easy fix. Just join us at maximumfun.org/join for $5 a month, and you'll have tons of bonus content to catch up on.Looking for gift ideas? Get some JJHo merch at MaxFunStore.com! Or, a ticket to see us in January at SF Sketchfest makes a LOVELY gift! Sunday, January 18 at Marines’ Memorial Theatre, on sale now! Or, give the gift of MaxFun membership at maximumfun.org/join!Follow us on:YouTubeTikTokInstagramBlueSky Judge John Hodgman is member-supported! Join at $5 a month at maximumfun.org/join!

It's the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I am bailiff, Jesse Thorne. With me is Judge John Hodgman. Jesse, my friend, the holiday season is in full swing. I want to spread some holiday cheers. Should we open the members-only mailbag and share some of our most rollicking of letters? Indeed, we have some of our favorite letters from almost two years of the members-only mailbag. If you aren't a member, this is some of the stuff that you have been missing.

you can join us any time for $5 a month at maximum fund.org slash join. When you're a member, you will get access to our entire huge monumental library of bonus content. As well as our every month members-only mailbag, where we answer any question you might have or endure any complaint that you might wish to provide us. Up first, we'll be revisiting a dispute about a Romantasy series that a Max Fund member said made her feral. Spoiler alert, we have another letter about spoilers, this one from Amy, in Alexandria, Virginia, home of the Birchmere Music Hall. Please, quote, please allow me to spoil the ending of a fantasy novel.

I went feral reading the fourth wing books last December. My husband Reed agreed to listen to the audiobooks and catch up with me, but he ran out of steam in the middle of book two, Iron Flame. No spoilers, but the end of Iron Flame. is so juicy, I was unwell when I hit that last page, and I am dying to talk about it with Reed, but he won't listen for more than 15 minutes at a time. He says he enjoys it that way. Please order Reed to listen to the last five hours of Iron Flame within three days, or else I get to spoil the ending for him.

Okay. I now understand. I want to be clear. I now understand he won't listen to the audio book for more than 15 minutes. at a time. Not he won't listen to Amy for more than 15 minutes. I'm talking about the part of this book that he hasn't ran. Sorry, that was, yes. I now understand that. Yes, that was, that may have been more clear in the version of the letter before I edited it. But yes, for length, for length only. Yes, he won't listen to the audiobook for more than 15 minutes in time. He says he

enjoys it that way. I got to give Amy some credit for these adjectives. I've never heard. I'm never gone feral reading a book, but I get it. I understand. I went feral reading Middlemarch. And it's true. I was unwell when I hit the final sentence, which is one of the best sentences in English fiction as far as I'm concerned. I was unwell. And it was juicy. And I'd love to talk about it with you, but I don't want to spoil it. But can we compel read to read the rest of the book in five hours within three days so that they can talk about it? What do you say, foreign and company? I say read as me his obligation. He didn't say he was going to listen to it all within three days. He said he was going to listen to it all. He's doing it 15 minutes at a time. That's his way. Yeah.

That's how I listen to various Bill Bryson books on my audiobook app. Yeah, that's how you do your various triple Bs. Yeah. There is an inconsistency in this letter, though, because at first, Amy is saying he started listening to the audiobook of Iron Flame, but then lost steam during the middle. But that's contradictory to him continuing to listen for 15 minutes at a time. Like either he stopped reading or he's still reading just too slowly for his feral wife, who is clearly unwell. Do you know what fourth wing is all about you two?

No, I only made it through the third wing. Fourth Wing is the first book in what? What is currently a two book series, although I'm sure there will be more, because the two have done extremely well. And it is a fantasy book, a series written by Rebecca Yaros about people in fantasy world. A young woman is drafted to become a dragon rider and ride some dragons and gets into some scuffles and gets into a lot of. Apparently, a lot of, it's a lot of crushy romance, too. And that sounded very derogatory, but I don't mean it that way. I think, I think it gets, it gets sexy among the humans, not necessarily the dragons, but maybe the dragons do.

People are feral for this series of books. And they fall apparently into this genre that I've begun hearing about, which is called dark academia. You familiar with the dark academia aesthetic movement? No, I've never heard of it. Now that you say it, I can kind of like, I get it. I'm like, I didn't realize there was a name for that, but of course. Academia is my hero, and I've never heard of it as in the anime, My Hero Academia, about which I know nothing else besides its odd name. It's the, it's sort of the fetishization of, I'll have to swear to say it, but Yale shit.

Like Hogwartsy obsession with sort of like prep schooly, Ivy Leaguey, collegiate gossip. libraries and, you know, secret societies at Yale and all that stuff. It's a setting for a lot of stories now. And it sort of retroactively sort of absorbs older books like the picture of Dorian Gray and Morris by E.M. Forster and the secret history is a more contemporary book by Donna Tart. But then, you know, they're now like, have you heard of this book, The Ninth House by Leah Bardugo? Oh, no. Okay. So, I I was in Maine visiting some friends and their teenage daughter was reading this book. And my friend said about the books of daughters, and you'd like this.

This is a book. It's a fantasy book set at Yale in which all of the secret societies of Yale, they're actually full of wizards and witches. They all do magic. And like, skull and bones, which is a secret society at Yale, is really into predicting the future, particularly the future of the financial markets. This is not a spoiler. it's in the first chapter, which they do by reading the entrails of humans. And then other, like, I don't know what book and snake

is up to, but it's probably like they do a lot of magic regarding books and snakes and so forth. And Wolf said, which is a secret society at Yale is full of what you call werewolves, I think. And they're all in competition with each other. And it's all a secret that they're doing this. And then there's a fictional ninth secret society, a ninth house that the main character is in,

which is their job is to, basically be the police force for all the so the secret societies don't destroy the world and i was like huh and how do you think i felt about that you guys when i heard about this book i think you went feral i was so feral i was totally feral and unwell i was so angry that i i was so all i've been thinking about is fucking dark academia yale obsession since i'm 18 years old secret societies in particular I mean, you know, read the book. And I didn't think to write this. And it's a great idea that I didn't have.

And I'm not trying to take credit away from Lee Bardugo's really good writer. And I started to read it. I started to read it. And so it's the paragon of dark academia. You can hear me banging my desk right now, members only. But I couldn't read it because I was just too mad at myself for not being smart enough to have that idea. Well, anyway, tell me if you think this is too close to her idea. It's set at Yale.

but it's about a 50-year-old dad who just keeps coming back because he wants to be in college still. And there's magic, I guess. Where do the entrails come in? I don't know. I haven't figured that out, but it's like the hero,

it's not a plucky young heroin. It's a decrepit elderly weird dad who's just, who won't let go. I have a series of fantasy novels about predictions of the financial markets based on the entrails of the UC Santa Cruz men's Ultimate Club, UCSC Slug Ultimate, and also their lady and non-binary rivals, UCSC

Soul Ultimate. Why do you want to read their entrails? To find out what I should invest in. Oh, okay. I got you. Yeah. How else? How else are you going to find that out?

Anyway, I just realized now that the novel that I wrote, and this is a real typical weird dad blind spot, like, would people read a novel in which I, a weird dad, can't let go? of college and just goes and hangs around the library all the time and pretends to be there and I realize

I'm not the hero of that story I'm the villain I'm the one that the plucky protagonists have to chase out of there and say you don't belong here anymore I'm a vengeful ghost at my own college

now that I can acknowledge I'm the villain weird dads you got to remember you're not the hero anymore you're the villain of the story you're the backup character at best

Well, and that gets into like a different type of story, though, where you're an anti-hero. Yeah, but the plot, the plot isn't me sneaking into Yale. The plot is the people who are appropriately there at Yale and enjoying it have to exorcise me and get me out. Mm-hmm. It'll still be told from my point of view. Anyway, dark academia. Maybe I'll take a stab at it. I've not read Fourth Wing.

Lots and lots of people have. I did read a plot synopsis. For Iron Flame, and you can go on Wikipedia and read the plot synopsis, and I guarantee you that you will not be spoiled because it will be incomprehensible to you. Can I give a spoiler for a fourth wing that I got just by Googling fourth wing Reddit and only looking at the Google results, not actually clicking through to anything? Please. It's not an assassin school, but young adults murder each other in plain sight.

No one interferes as if it's business as usual. The fourth wing, fantasy romance, dragons, enemies to lovers. She fell first, but he fell harder. Is that the log line? No, that's a different first sentence of a Reddit post. I got to tell you, fourth wing seems to be very highly divisive on Reddit. In fact, the first result is my review of fourth wing and why I think it's so divisive. All right.

I just read the last sentence of the synopsis on Wikipedia of Iron Flame. And you know what? It's pretty juicy. I hated fourth wing, and I feel like I'm losing my mind. I'm going to be honest, like, I think the crux here is this, from my perspective as a husband. I'm the husband of a wife, you know what I mean? And a whole human being in your own right. My wife is not interested in fantasy romance novels.

I think she read, she tried to read that one that everybody liked that, that was that horny TV show on stars for a long time. Or maybe it was on one of the other. Outlander? Yeah, Outlander. She tried to read an outlander and she wasn't really into it. But because everybody that listened to her, her podcast, One Bad Mother, used to tell her to read Outlanders. She's not into that kind of thing, you know. Yeah.

But if she were and she told me to read it or listen to the audiobook, I would. You know why? Because I want to make out with my wife. I want to kiss with my wife. And if she tells me to read a horny book, I'm just going to be like, thank you, dear, and read it. Yeah. Being horny with one spouse is one of the best things of marriage. It is truly, it is truly the balm of marriage, hugging and kissing a person that you care about.

And you know what? She's kind enough to watch what makes me horny, which is old episodes of news radio. Every now and then I think about the fact that I had lunch with Dave Foley once and it just blows my mind. The greatest. I drove him around one time for San Francisco Sketchfest all morning to various morning radio shows. You know, got up at 5 o'clock in the morning, went and picked up Dave Foley, drove him around. talked about Patrick Warburton. Yeah.

What a lovely man. What a dream that was. Such a sweet dude. All right. Well, let's get back to Reed. Yeah. Read? You are ironically named, first of all, because you have a reading problem.

Well, no, I'm going to take that back. Reed does not have a reading problem. I believe Reed when Reed says that he likes the pace of 15 minutes of the book at a time. Now, he might like that pace because he truly enjoys taking in the story that way. he might like that pace because he really finds his book very boring and is having a hard time getting through it and is just doing this as a slog for his wife, but all he can manage to, all he can manage to, you know, choke down is 15 minutes of a day. Either way, you deserve to enjoy a book that you, the way you like to. But if you're not enjoying this book read, I order you to listen to

the rest of it in three days and just get it over with. I, if you're not enjoying it, I order you to be honest with Amy and just say this wasn't for me. But give her the closure that she needs to discuss the juicy ending. Because she's unwell. I mean, you want your wife, you want your spouse, you want your partner to be well, not unwell. And maybe you'll find the ending very juicy. I have to say, I read the first paragraph of the plot summary and I was simply confused. But when I read that last

sentence, I was like, okay, I can see how this is cool. Now I have something to look forward to. There's something out there for you there, read. You should finish this book up. Make your wife happy. And then if you don't like doing this with her, don't agree to read a book with her.

Same deal. Like, if you've agreed to read something or watch something together, you got to put in your time. You got to keep, you got to follow a scale. That's what I say. The bond includes feeling each other's feelings, hearing each other's thoughts, and learning to fly together via the use of a saddle, no less.

You're saying that they're not riding these dragons bear back? They actually have a saddle? Yeah. But... It's incredible. Reed and his wife are married so they can ride dragons however they'd like. That's true. That's right.

This has gotten to be a very horny episode. Yeah. Well, you know, we're doing what we can. Would you say dragons are horny or just... scaly. Some of them have horns. That's a great question, John. Look, our Max Fun podcast reading glasses did a show during the Max Fun Drive that I found

very educational. When I found out that the new, the hot new horniness is fairy men. Fairy men are what everyone is horny for. They've been waiting for their ultimate love, like the love to which they were faded for hundreds of years, because fairies live so long, and then they fall in love with a human woman. Hmm. And then they ride a saddle together.

And then do they apply early to Yale and get in? Yeah, exactly. Lee Bardugo owns Yale Dark Academia Fiction now, and she deserves to own it. Did I ever tell you about the time, I applied early to Yale? Did I ever tell you about the time the Yale alumnus came to visit me at my house? for an alumni interview and we walked to the St. Francis the St. Francis Soda Fountain

in San Francisco's Mission District, which is in a lower mission district. I've never seen a man so visibly uncomfortable walking down the public street. The whole time I'm like, I'm not going to get into this university. Oh, wow. Anyway, on that note,

I think they recently reopened the St. Francis Soda Fountain. They sort of fancied it up. Well, now you can get into Yale. But you'd be the ghost at that point. Yeah, that's true. You and I is ghosts in Yale? That would be fun. That would be a lot of fun.

That would be a funny, I don't know. Maybe I can, I'm looking for some new project. Maybe this is it. Yeah, Yale ghosts. Yale ghosts of, ghosts of Yale. Guess what? My ghost ghost are brown. Oh.

Mine goes to UC Berkeley because when my ghost was alive, they sent it, or they sent her two rejection letters instead of one. Oh, my ghost is still on the waiting list for UC Berkeley. I don't know well. Let's move on. Here's one from Aaron in Philadelphia. I just saw my husband. That's a Tom Waits song. Aaron in Philadelphia?

No, no, I was just singing a song. Sorry, go on. Do your thing. I just saw my husband open up a box of salad greens, grab a handful, and stuff them in his mouth. He doesn't like salads, so he believes this is the best way for him to reap the benefits of eating greens. Yeah.

I think this is slightly unhinged. Should he be allowed to continue to eat lettuce by the handful? What do you think, Jennifer Marmer, lettuce by the handful? Yeah, I have eaten lettuce by the handful before. Probably not the greens that Aaron's husband is thinking that he's going to reap benefits from. Like sometimes I just want something crunchy and cold. Yeah.

I'll just grab a handful of romaine and it really hits the spot. And are you pulling it out of a box? Out of a bag because I'm lazy. Yeah, out of a bag. No, I mean, you know, look. Jesse, what about you? Hand lettuce for you? I would never eat.

I presume when I'm hearing I'm open up a box of salad greens. I'm hearing that this is like a spring mix. Yeah. Spring mix is garbage. I'm putting myself on the record. It's spring mix sucks. You've got to go high or low. Spring mix is terrible.

It's in between. It's too floppy. It doesn't taste good. Right. Can't get it on your fork? Yeah. Either give me... Slides around.

Either give me like full-on iceberg lettuce. Or maybe a crunchy romaine. Or give me a specialized green, which I'm perfectly glad to eat. Specifically, I love arugula, and I've eaten it by the handful many times. Boom. Get that peppery handful. Just cook. I would even say baby kale if you really want to be, if you want a little vitamin boost,

yeah, grab some washed baby kale or better yet, wash your own lettuce. Yeah. Look, I enjoy a boxed lettuce from time to time. And here's the thing. What's the name of this person again? Aaron. Aaron and this is their husband who's got an issue with eating hand greens. Yeah.

All right. Look, if you're doing box greens and you want to eat by the hand, first of all, you need a hearty, a hearty green. particularly if you're doing it for nutritional purposes. So I would say a baby kale. I would say arugula is very good. I'd stay away from that spring mix. Romaine is a classic crunchy green. But you've got to have your own bag or box.

Like you can't be reaching into a shared bag or box. And it is absolutely fine, Aaron, if your spouse has their own private green stash in the fridge. And then I would also say that you. You can, I've been, I've been washing my greens lately. Let me tell you, you want to, you want to know, I learned this from our friends, Kenji, Lopez, Alton, Deb Perilman, the smitten kitchen on their, on their podcast, the recipe, which is no matter how fresh you think your boxed or non-boxed lettuce is, no matter how clean you think it is. Do soak it in cold water for 10 to 20 minutes before, even if it's clean, even if it's washed. The texture difference is dramatic. If you give that lettuce some time to soak it up, you get a bath.

It's crisper, it's fresher tasting. And then here's the other thing. This is a Julia Child trick that my wife has a whole even been doing an arm right passed on to me. We don't have a salad spinner because it takes up a lot of real estate in our New York apartment. And they don't really work really well. What works really well? Put your lettuces. You know this one, right, Jesse?

Are you talking about like David and Goliath lettuce situation? That's right. Well, go ahead and say it. You wrap it in a tea towel. Right. And then you swing it around your head and throw water on all the walls of your kitchen. Yeah, that's right. If you can step outside, here's what I do.

I go into the shower. Uh-huh. And I whip that thing around in the shower. And I'll often use a pillow case. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. You think that that's a great hack, but it's really hard to get the, like. Yeah.

You need like a toddler pillowcase. Well, it's also like once you have, so you put your wet lettuces into the pillowcase or wrap it up in a teatow, whip it around and you become the salad spinner. Yes. I think it gets a drier and fresher and it's good. But if you're doing it in a pillowcase, you're going to have little remnants of lettuce in the little corners of the pillowcase. It's called a midnight snack. I don't know. Yeah, right.

Reach in there while you, yeah, I don't know. You have to, I, I pull it inside out. That's a little bit of hassle. Tea towel is great. Also a flower sack, like a flower, you know, that flower, what's that? It's not a sack made of flour. Like a burlap? No, it's like that sackcloth material textile.

It's also like, they make tea towels out of it too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bought some blanks to embroidered and they're sitting unembroidered in my pantry. I've been doing a chopped up big, big chunks. of escarole and radicchio and arugula with a garlicky dressing. And it's lovely. It's been very, very good. And it holds up.

That's a salad that holds up. John, I had a vision of you in that one Pity Pablo video, just going, North Carolina, come on and raise up. Take your, what do you call it? Take your pillowcase. Spin it around your head. Spin it like a helicopter. That's us.

You know what I'm talking about, Daniel. I know that the listeners to. You know, that's about Pedy Pop. I have no idea. It's a North Carolina sportsy song, right? Yeah, I was just thinking of that John whips his greens back and forth. I did. Yeah.

And my garlic dressing brings all the boys to the yard, too. Wow, Jesse, after this salad greens episode came out, a TikTok trend started called Dinosaur Time. Have you heard of this? Yeah, this is like, this is the thing where people eat salad with their hands. like a dinosaur would if a dinosaur had hands in salad? I don't even know that a, well, a T-Rex would never eat a salad to begin with, but yes. And they also play the Jurassic Park theme song in the background, which is delightful. I think that probably the person who invented this was called S-A-H-M-H-M-H-M-E-M-Bing up on TikTok.

I think they're probably a Judge John Hodgman memo mailbag listener. Seems safe, right? We're influencers. That would mean we're influencers. Yeah, absolutely. Given that we're influencers, I'm going to head to. down to the mailroom in case we got any packages of anything from PR companies. Oh, yeah, good idea. We'll be back in just a second on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. It's the Judge John Hodgman

podcast. I'm Bill of Jesse Thorne. We've opened the members-only mailbag here on our program. Do we only hear disputes in the members-only mailbag, John? No, Jesse. I said it a little earlier, and I'm going to reiterate it now. The Judge John Hodgeman podcast is not about me giving advice. I dispense justice. But for the members-only mailbag, yeah, we'll offer advice. We'll answer nearly any kind of question. Now that we're influencers, obviously, if you want us to unbox some products,

I'll unbox some products as long as it's not like a cardboard box full of dead butterflies or something weird you want to send. You know what I mean? Like, be cool. At least put that in a nice, like a glass box or something. Yeah, exactly. But, no, we'll answer any kind of question, such as Kelsey's question about camp. Let's hear this one now.

Kelsey writes, I grew up in Girl Scouts, and I went to Girl Scout Camp, and I loved every minute of it. Were any of you in Boy or Girl Scouts, or did you go to camp? Let's answer the scouting question first. Jennifer, Jesse, any scouting in your past? Obviously a controversial organization. But certainly it was pretty common when we were growing up. My father was a very accomplished scout. Oh, okay.

He was something, some sort of Super Eagle Scout. He, in fact, had, my dad had almost no notable possessions in his life. other than maybe books but he did have his scout sash Oh wow Yeah from his adolescence And my dad had an absurd volume of badges on it Cool

But I never scouted I was brownie And then I did juniors But then I didn't stick with it So brownies are the Cub Scouts of Girl Scouts They're the little kid version There's daisies before brownies. So I was...

Hierarchies within hierarchies. Yeah. So I wasn't the lowest, like the youngest, youngest, but then the next one up. Oh. And so you would go, Daisy, Brownie, Jr., then girl. I guess so. I never found out. You never found out.

I wasn't into it. My mom said, are you, do you want to keep doing this? And I went, no. But I had fun in brownies. What did you get up? What did you get up to in the brownies? What were your, what were the activities? We sold cookies, of course.

Yeah. I remember knitting my troop leader's house. We learned to knit. That didn't stick with me, though. I re-learned as an adult. We did community service. We did like a toy drive for, you know, families in need during the holiday season. And I remember we went to somebody's house to like deliver presents and sing

Christmas songs to them. It would be very funny if you did a toy drive for affluent families in the summertime. Can you imagine? I messed around with the Cub Scouts for about five minutes, merely out of sick curiosity. I feel like everyone was doing it, so I gave it a little try. I don't remember what the badges were, but I got the lowest badge, and then I bailed out at that point. I think I went camping with my Cub Scout group one time. It was miserable enough that I knew I was never going to go again.

We all agree that scouting, at least on the boy's side, tends to be, I can't comment on the girl's side, but those of us who have bobcatted before, not a lot of fun. But camp can be a lot of fun. People love camp. Did any of you go to camp camp? Yes. All right, here we go, Jennifer Marmer. Jennifer's Jewish. Yeah, right, got you.

Yeah, I went to a Jewish summer camp in Southern California. Al-A-Neme, for those of you in the know, if you know, you know. And, yeah, I went starting when I was, I think, eight years old. And I went every summer through my going into my second year of college, I want to say. You know, I was camper and then counselor and trading and then counselor and then art room staff, took a break, did some other things. And then I came back as after I graduated college as like a division head and like head programmer basically. And I did that for like two years. And it was really fun.

I loved it. It was like a little taste of independence. And that really was interesting to me. And I had amazing friends and did, I mean, we went to a Jewish summer camp. So it was like lots of singing, lots of dancing, lots of dancing, lots of. I don't want to sing them. It's embarrassing. Too bad. I don't care what you want. No, I'm not doing it. Onward Christian soldier. Fair enough. Sure, sure, sure. Like, Let us proclaim the mystery of Jewish summer camp. Our mutual friend, Elliot Kaelin's wife, went to a camp called Camp Tuonga in Northern California, which I had a friend from high school who was so obsessed with Camp Tuwanga. He would constantly talk about it when we were in high school. And we'd be like, dude,

You're in high school now. Like, you're supposed to make out with girls at the high school. Right. But anyway. You made out at camp. Good dude, I know. Except for me. I didn't.

I was a late bloomer. But he also went to Camp Toonga. Everybody was always talking about Camp Toonga. And I found out that Danielle Kalin went to Camp Toonga. And I was like, oh, this guy knew Brady Gill went to Camp Toanga. He couldn't shut up about it. She's like, oh, yeah, I know that guy. And then now she packs up their children and sends them off to Camp Tuwaga,

even though it's in an entirely different region of the United States. The things I remember from camp, I went to Episcopalian camp. It was nice because at my church, they would tell my parents, like, Jesse should go to Episcopalian camp, and they would say, ha, ha, ha, not going to happen. And then they'd be like, well, because you're poor, we'll pay for it. And they were like, later, chump. They shipped you right off. Yeah, but it was very nice.

But the classic camp activities that I remember were canoes, which I did not want to get involved in. Archery, which everyone wanted to get involved in. So it was really hard to get a spot in archery class. And Sloppy Joes, which I still have a great fondness for. My camp memories, I went to two separate two-week sessions at Burgess. overnight camp, which is YMCA camp on Cape Cod. I did it two summers in a row. Why I went back, I will never know,

because my memories were primarily listening to kids cry themselves to sleep. Oh, no. And bug juice. Uh-huh. And ticks. My first introduction to ticks and probably my first introduction to Lyme disease. We had a big camp.

There was an infestation in New England at that time of a limonelma. Montre de Spar, which was, went by a different name, but now we call it the spongy moth, an invasive moth. And the caterpillars would do real damage to trees. So at the end, we had like sort of like Camp Olympics at the end where people would try to, you know, swim as many laps or collect as many leeches on their body from the lake. This is probably one of the reasons that I hate lakes from the start. Uh-huh. And I proposed that we put together a team to smash spongy moth caterpillars and collect a bounty for as many as we could kill.

And that was what camp was to me, just like running around in the muck in the woods, covering up your kids, the bottom soul of your kids with the guts of spongy moth caterpillars. It was so gross. I decided I didn't like camp because I actually love shower curtains and other forms of privacy. Oh, wow. There was definitely shower curtains in my camp. Yeah. Oh, no, we didn't have shower curtains. Oh, my.

And all of the counselors were these young people who just were playing mind games with us all the time. They would tell us that Hatchet Harry lived in the woods. And several of them claimed to have seen the Loch Ness monster because they were from Scotland. And we just believed it all. Yeah, we had camp legends like that. Like Alfonso was the ghost at our camp was a former kitchen. and staff employee or you know camp person who was mad the kids didn't like his ravioli no he was mad because somebody spilled hot soup on him and terrorized the kids because of that i can understand that

yeah someone if someone spilled hot soup on me you know what i'd do terrorized children yeah our daughter went to camp in maine and loved it so you know she she had a different she went to the same camp that ben stiller went to not at the same time. In fact, they told her that Ben Stiller was a ghost who still lived at the camp. Oh, my God. Well, someone had spilled soup on him. Well, yeah. That's right.

He was forever. Actually, I made a mistake. Ben Stiller was not the ghost. The terrifying ghost of Hidden Valley Camp was the ghost of Andy Dick. Aye. Oh, no. Yeah, scary. That is terrifying.

All right. Now let's go to a break. We'll be back in just a second on the Membo Mailbag. Say, here's a member of the J-Squad. Janine in Portland, Oregon. I'm glad to know. Janine has not died of dysentery. As a question, not for me, but for you, Jesse.

She says, I'm an ex-librarian who loves collection management and clothes. Jesse, as a menswear expert with a large wardrobe, do you have a method for managing your wardrobe? That's a good question. And I never thought to ask how many garments you would ballpark estimate you got. And where do you keep them all? So, like, there was no question that when we, in my old house, there was like a semi-finished basement type room, like a rec room kind of thing. Yeah. It was not the greatest of rooms.

Never is. but what we ended up doing was we just had some closet people build one of those particle board closets across one of the whole walls of the room made the room whatever three feet smaller, two and a half feet smaller

but we needed somewhere to put my clothes in our current home when we moved it was like there's no question that we have to move somewhere with some heavy closet space So in the bedroom that I share with my wife, in lieu of a reflecting pool, there's a walk-in closet that's as small as a walk-in closet could be, if that makes sense. Like, you can walk into it, but maybe there's two feet of depth of walking in. You're not going to be filming, get ready with me, TikToks in there.

No, not in the slightest. Not enough room. So I keep my clothes primarily in that space with a rack of, and when I moved in, it was pretty much empty, but Linda Holmes convinced me to go to the container store and have the container store install there. Well, my handyman installed it, but I bought it at the container store, a closet system. A system. You're a dad, you're a dad with a system. Yeah, Linda Holmes told me, just go get the system. It's too expensive, but it's better than trying to figure it out yourself and you can change it,

and they will always have it at the container store or in Sweden or whatever it is, wherever it is that they make it. So I bought the closet system, handyman installed it. So it's on the left-hand side as you enter, two rows of shirts, top and bottom. Top and right. Directly in front of you, slide out shoe racks. To the right, casual coats, sport coats, and a set of bins in which I keep sweaters and stuff. Then in my living, in my bedroom, bedroom is the room I'm looking to name. Right.

I have a chest of drawers. In my living, I mean my den. I mean my wreck. I mean my bedroom. In my chest of drawers, I keep t-shirts, socks and underwear, pants, blue jeans. I have those kind of like multi-tiered pant hangers in my closet for pants that keep a crease. Everything else is rolled. Things that don't keep a crease are rolled.

Right. And then underneath my bed, I've been with like a winter coat, but I don't wear that much. Yeah. But I love. And have been with like formal socks. I also have necktie racks in the closet. Right. Didn't mention that. And a thing of scarves, like an IKEA hanger that hangs from a coat rack, you know what I mean, with holes in it, slots in it for shoes, I think. But in this case, I keep scarves in it. Yeah. And then I also have seasonal clothes in the shed that I rotate in and out upon the changing of the season. So like four or five months a year in L.A., you can wear warm clothes somewhat. And then eight months. of the year, you kind of got to wear shorts or equivalent, you know.

You ought to charge admission to that walk-in closet, you know? I think a lot of people would like to walk into that closet. They're not a lot in there. That's Daddy's Special Place. That's Daddy's Special Place. Let me ask you this. Yeah. A bad thing happened, Jesse.

And that is my prized shaggy dog black sweater from Jay Press that I got for myself as a Christmas present several years ago from the J. President New Haven has a moth hole in it. And that's on me because I knew that if I put it up on that shelf, that's where the moths go. And we had some moth mitigation that it didn't work. I also knew not to hang it up on a hanger because that's bad for sweaters, right, Jesse? Yeah, very bad for sweaters. Now, my wife was a whole human being in our own right is also a very handy person with needles. And I'm talking about Knitcraft. I'm not talking about finding a vein for an IV for me. I hope that that has not happened yet in our marriage, and I hope it never will. But she's going to, she's going to affect

a repair. But my question to Jesse Thorne is, what are we going to do about the moths? How do I prevent this from happening in the future? Do you deal with moth mitigation, or is that not a Los Angeles thing? John, in a few days, I am going to be tenting my home because of moths. No, wow. You heard it your first, folks. I will also say that they did not tent my home for termites before I bought it a few years ago. And so we don't know when it was last tented for termites. So it probably would be a good idea for us to tent it for term.

You're supposed to do that every 10 or 15 years anyway. Whoa, for real? Yeah. But that said, I'm doing it for the moths. There's like a little bit of evidence of maybe some termites, but not enough for it to be like, oh, we got to get rid of the termites. Moth mitigation is really difficult. You can keep moths down.

You can keep them suppressed through other means. but actually getting rid of them is nearly impossible if they're endemic in your home. Are they moths like in your closet chomping in your clothes or is it like pantry moths? No, it's clothes moths. We did have some pantry moths when we first moved in, but we got rid of those are relatively easy to get rid of.

Look, the number one thing that I hate about clothes moths is that they eat your clothes. You know what the number two thing I hate about them is? What? Too hard to say that those. two words together. Clothes moths. So there are things that you can do.

So I actually got really intimately familiar with what you do with clothes moths because of this situation. So obviously you can have pest control people put a sort of like contact poison on your floor. This is safe for people and pets, but poisonous for bugs. They sort of spray that on surfaces. And that will kill the flappers. You're talking about the winged moths, the insects that we call moths, not the happy-go-lucky, transgressive young women of the 1920s who were cutting their hair off and wearing those slinky dresses and challenging, redefining femininity in the urban environment for the 20th century. Putting on rouge on their knees.

Mm-hmm. Mop-W-W-W-J on their knees. W-W-W-W-B-W-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B- That's a Moth's favorite song. The pest control will also have you, we'll also put that in the, like, corners of your home. Moths, like dark places where they're undisturbed. They like to eat dust and natural fibers, especially wool. Mm-hmm. And they're attracted to the oil on those fibers, you know,

wool has lanolin wool fat, but it also could have the oils from your body if it's clothing, right? Yeah, I make my own wolf fat. Yeah. And they like to hide in places where it's dark and where they won't be disturbed and where they can munch away. Now, when you talk about the munchers, I always understood that the munchers were the worms or the larger. So I said, that's why I'm so the flap. And the flappers are the flappers. but they're not the munchers, right?

Yeah, so there's male and female moths. It's the larvae that eat your clothes. There's male and female moths, and I think the males flap around and the females crawl around, mostly. They can fly, and both of them are bad at flying. Like clothing moths are very bad at flying. Cedar is not demonstrated to be effective.

That's a myth. I knew it. That's me snapping my fingers in discontent. Uh, the things that you can do to kill them are, um, you can essentially, uh, kill them with heat, same as you could with bed bugs. So if you put something in the dryer for more than about 20 minutes on more than medium, uh, that will kill it. But obviously you can't put it. If you have some moth eggs or some little teeny moth larvae that you don't know about. Yeah. Uh, washing and drying will kill them and, uh, dry cleaning will kill them. But,

ultimately, like, I just have a lot of wool rugs in my house. And even I got all my rugs cleaned and I took all my clothes to the dry cleaner, which was like a $1,000 project. Yeah. It was a very expensive project. And, you know, getting my rugs cleaned wasn't cheap either. And ultimately, while I did get clean rugs and clean clothes out of that process, it did not completely get rid of the moths. Moth balls also work, but they're super poisonous. I smell disgusting. Yeah, they smell disgusting. So it makes sense to store your clothes with mothballs, but it doesn't make sense to keep your clothes with moth balls in your home.

So when you say store your clothes with moth balls, like out of the winter season, take your wool fat, rich sweaters and other tempting treats for the munchers and the flappers and put them away somewhere with mothed. balls do you put them in like a you know like there are those people who put them in the like the plastic bags and they suck the air out of them they put them underneath their bed or whatever is that something that works or no yeah moth balls can damage those bags okay um so they say hard plastic is better than solder plastic but you know honestly i put them in those bags and i haven't had a problem you don't want i'm touching it directly but i haven't had a problem but uh but yeah it's like this big complicated thing there are also ways to detect and suppress them.

There are moth traps with pheromones that work very well, but they only attract the flappers. Right. And so ultimately, like serious pest control people say, like, that is a good way to monitor whether they are in your house. Right. But it is not a way to kill everything because it can't kill the larvae. Right.

If you're catching a lot of flappers with a pheromone trap, That's just an indication that you have a problem. A problem. Right. Yeah. And you also can use this kind of, this kind of wasp, microscopic wasp that's called a tritogramma, I think it's called, if I remember correctly. That's what they use to control these sorts of moths in like an agricultural situation outdoors. And you can, you can buy them live on the internet.

they are microscopic and don't do anything to people. You can't see them or anything. You can see where their eggs were in the little card that they give you. They give you like a little tiny card that has the eggs glued to it. And the eggs are like the size of a grain of sand, but you can't see those. But the actual insect that they release, you can't see. And those do eat the larva, but they have to get to them. And, you know, in a big old house, like,

mine and creaky old dusty wool rug house it just it it all these things that I did that weren't tending my house did suppress them like I haven't had to close ruined since I did all this stuff but they only suppressed them they didn't they haven't take care of the room they haven't taken care of them and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life um you know having to defend against them actively. And instead, I prefer to kill everything in my house. Yeah. And then just be more careful about what comes into my house and making sure that it gets

cleaned if it's secondhand before it comes in. Now, I presume that when you tent your house, you all are going to have to leave. And that means going through your walk-in closet to your own personal Narnia for for a little while before you can come back into the house, right? Is that what's happening? I'm going to drive to my cabin. The other really intense thing about this is, so we're recording this in the lead up to Thanksgiving.

We're going to do this over the Thanksgiving weekend. Right. And one of the things we have to do is remove all the food from my house. You can, for the fumigation, you know. Right. So we're just going to have to spend a day just dragging everything from our refrigerator, freezer, and closets into the shed where I sit right now, my office shed, including the freezer. We're going to carry the freezer over here. I think we'll just get rid of what's in the fridge, pretty much, but you're going to carry the whole, what do you have, a chest freezer?

It's been a long time. Yeah, I have a chest freezer. Yeah. I'm going to bring the whole freezer over. Yeah. So that the stuff will remain frozen, right? Yeah, exactly. So I don't just have to throw away everything that's in my freezer.

Right, okay, I got you. Right. I got food in there, you know. You got food in your freezer. I'll buy some meat at Costco sometimes. Yeah, boy. So, and then the other thing is you can't. Cover boy over here.

Costco connection cover boy. You have to leave your windows open or something while they do it. Yeah. And so you have to remove your valuables from your house while they do it because. You know, obviously, someone going into your house is risking their life because of the poisonous gas. Right, yeah. But you can't lock the doors. So all the jewelry has to come get put in our cars and go with us to our cabin over the weekend.

Wild Thanksgiving. I just picture your whole family sitting around in the cabin on Thanksgiving feasting on whatever, whatever food you have hauled up there and just draped in jewels all five of them. Just draped in jewelry. In my closet, I also have

I have like a you know what an engineer's tool chest looks like? Like it has a lid that comes out and then a front flap that goes out and then down underneath it. Like it flaps out and then under and then there's little drawers. Yeah. I have one of those

that has my jewelry in it as well. Okay. Well, you heard it here first, everybody. Jesse Thorne's Fiumgetting's house in a couple of days. That means the Jesse Thorne wardrobe closet will be closed. The museum of pocket squares will be closed for a period of time. Do not try to get in. Jesse, I have been secretly selling tickets to your closet while we've been talking.

I keep my pocket squares in clear plastic shoe bins. Good. That'll help people figure them out when they go into your house to steal them. Jesse, as of this recording now, it has been almost exactly a year since you tented your house for moths, how to go. Any of those little flappers make their way back into your clothes? I think I got rid of them. I'm like 95%.

I've seen a moth, but I think it was just a standard moth. Standard moths. The way you can tell is a standard moth wants to go towards the light bulb and a closed moths don't care about light bulbs. I did not know that. That's a great hack. We're influencers. Great hack.

Thank you. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, more letters from the members-only mailed. Wait a minute. The mailbag has motholes. Oh, no. Judge John Hodgman,

our shop is full of holiday gift ideas at maxfundstore.com. Have you heard about all this great holiday merchandise? First of all, we got our new caps. The right hat and the wrong hat. Exactly. Every episode on this program, we say, only one can decide. Who's right, who's wrong? Only I can decide.

But guess what? You could make my decision a lot easier if you put hats on your family's head that say right or wrong. We also have our brand new candle, which comes with a pure justice smell, and our comfy clothes for all you cozy goss out there, matching sweats and a cozy, hoodie, all at maxfundstore.com, along with our other great Judge John Hodgman merchandise and merchandise from other Max Fun shows. Maybe someone in your life doesn't want any more things. I understand it. Maybe they prefer experiences. Well, guess what?

We've got an experience. Why don't you get them tickets to our live show coming up in January at San Francisco Sketch Fest? It's always fun when we go back for San Francisco SketchFest. Indeed, That's one of my most treasured weekends of the year. No joke. Maximumfund.org slash events is where you can find the dates and get those tickets. That link will also be with the other links in this episode description. January 18th at Marines Memorial Theater. And if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we need your cases.

So go to maximum fund.org slash JJH. Make sure to tell us that you're in the Bay Area. We need cases to put on the stage at San Francisco. go sketch fast. And if you're looking for a digital gift for someone, you can gift a membership to maximum fun. That's the gift of the Membo mailbag, John. That's right. All you got to do is go to Maximumfund.org slash join. Five bucks a month will do it. Five dollars a month at maximum fund.org slash join. And you can be laughing along to the Membo mailbag or your special person can't be. It's like a whole separate monthly podcast that you get along with all of the other bonus content and indeed the pleasure and I hope honor of knowing that you are supporting, not just the Judge Sean Hodgman podcast, but the entire maximum fund network.

A listener supported network that is owned by its employees is a good thing. Jesse, you've got some stuff available in the Put This On Shop as well, right? Indeed. If you want to buy a one-of-a-kind special treasure, go to put this on shop.com. Use the code justice. We will give you 10% off all of the video. vintage and antique items in the Put This On Shop, plus everything else, like our baseball caps, which are handmade here in the United States, one at a time, our hand-printed posters for

the Bullseys 25th anniversary, our scarves and pocket squares, which are all handmade here in the United States, all kinds of stuff for men and women and everybody else at putthisonshop.com and you can use the code justice for 10% off everything. All those links are available in the show notes of the show page as well as on our YouTube page. Judge Sean Hodgman pod, you can get your holiday shopping done right now. But shall we get back to the mailbag? Indeed. It's the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

With me is Judge John Hodgman. Jesse, you know what I love about the members-only mailbag? Tell me. I have learned about so many niche subreddits. oh yeah somehow dogs on roofs maggot fishing

these are the subredits that have changed my life are slash key chains and somehow you manage to find a new subreddit related to our letters pretty much once an episode

we're about to share a letter about changing the toilet paper roll listener believe me when I say you will never guess the niche subreddit that Jesse presents us with at the end of this conversation I remember this

you're thinking of something and you're wrong you should listen to it let's go We got a letter here. This is a follow-up to our last month's Membo Mailbag. Those of you who didn't hear it, a person named David in Seattle wrote to complain that his wife doesn't replace the toilet paper on the roll when presumably she finishes using it or when it is done for whatever reason. Doesn't replace the toilet paper on the roll. Just leaves a bare cardboard tube rattling around on the roll.

there. And he didn't tell us her name, either to protect her identity for this crime, or maybe he forgot her name. I don't know. But we were curious as to why this person didn't replace a toilet paper and also what her name was. And guess what? We found out. Her name is Dora and boy, did Dora deliver. Dora wrote this letter. The reason I don't replace the toilet paper on the roll is simple. I hate it. I hate doing it, which is actually a pretty good reason. It's what I speculated was the reason it's annoying dora goes on to write the springy things suck and it always falls apart again we talked about this i find the sound that the springy we're talking about the the the spring loaded what would you call it an axle what's the

the thing yeah toilet i'm gonna go with axle i like axle yeah Maxill spin? Well, you think the toilet paper rule thingy doesn't? You're right. The spindle? I mean, the spindle, I think is probably, I think that's about right. If I, if I, toilet paper spindle, yeah, it's called a spindle. Boom.

It's called a spindle. And it's spring loaded inside so that you can angle it in between the two armatures that hold it. And it is very annoying to me. Dora, I agree with you. But I hadn't thought about the sound it makes when it hits the floor. But I should have, because it always hits the floor. It always falls out. And then you have to scuttle around like a bathroom crab trying to find it.

I think Jennifer Marmon is what I'm talking about. Bathroom crab is so funny. Yeah, you scuttle around like a bathroom trap trying to get it. And then you have to, and then you put the table. toilet paper on it and then it goes squeaky squeak as you put it in between the armatures and then you realize you put it on the wrong way because the toilet paper has to come over the top oh yeah right over the top no question jesse's being very silent i hope you agree with us on this one jesse i'm thinking about bathroom crab just made me think about bathroom monkey

you remember bathroom monkey no i don't it was a sat saturday night live sketch from from one of the years of Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s when things were a little up in the air and messy. A little dicey at 30 Rock then. But a truly special one. And I don't know if Jack Handy wrote it. It has a Jack Handy vibe. It was Janine Garofalo was the performer.

It was a television commercial parody. And for a monkey that cleans your bathroom. for up to eight whole months. And then she says, I don't know where monkeys come from. I don't know how they reproduce. I don't know how they eat. But I do know one thing. They were born to clean bathrooms.

And when its cleaning power is all used up, simply pick up another in any of three decorative colors. When it's cleaning power is all used up. Sometimes those Saturday Night Live bits, they just hit the right way. Yeah. They just hit right. You're talking about the topical parodies with politician impressions, right? That's always the best part of Saturday Night Live.

We all agree. That's always the best part of Saturday Night Live. They call me cold open boy because I love those cold opens. Yeah, they're never. Someone imitating a politician. Yeah, here's the thing that happens. happened this week, slightly differently. Oh, but those timeless weird ones are always fun to me.

The best. The best. A lot of geniuses working on that television show. We got, and by the way, one incredible genius who's writing for Saturday Night Live right now, Carl Tart. Carl Tart. If you folks don't know who Carl Tart is, go find out. That's all.

Go watch the video about it. Man, one time I complained on Jordan Jesse Go about how long it had been. been since anyone had called me young blood, which is basically like only when I was a young man, but also when I lived in a neighborhood where there were a lot of guys that were likely to call me young blood. Yeah. And somebody sent me a video that Carl Tart made that was like when you're on the basketball court and an old man is calling you young blood. And it was so funny. That's all. I'm just saying, Google Carl Tart, Youngblood, watch that on your Instagram Reels or whatever, because it is C-A-R-L, space, T-A-R-T. I was grateful you introduced me to Carl Tart just the other day.

I'd never met him before, and we ran into him in the airport in San Francisco. Yeah, that was really fun. I'm going to text him this afternoon. Anyway, if you ask me, this whole thing about the toilet paper roll is nuts. What do you mean? That's what they've decided. That's what they've decided. I don't think we should tell them to get to.

divorced. What, do you read it? I'm going to presume, yeah, I know. And I'm going to presume that David is sincere in answering this question and he's not just trying to preserve his marriage because it isn't worth getting into a fight with your spouse over, for sure. Sorry. I don't think that John finished reading the letter because there's some more information here

that I feel like our listeners need to know. Right. So let's get back into it. Sorry about that. So this is, to remind, this is a letter from Dora David's, wife, Dora does not replace the toilet paper on the roll after she or anyone finishes using it. And this annoys David. And the reason that Dora doesn't do it is because replacing it annoys her. But she counters, David doesn't even mind replacing the role. I know this because I asked

him, he likes doing it. He's the person for the job. And I am generally the tidier one in our relationship. Let me have this. Finally, while David does replace the role, he puts the empty tubes, the cardboard tubes on the shelf in the bathroom instead of throwing them out and they accumulate there till I carry them all down to recycling. At the end of the day, isn't this tomato tomato? Now, this is where I get into it. I don't think this is, is this tomato tomato? Tomato is a song about minor differences of pronunciation. It's the same thing just pronounced a little bit differently. But what Dora is saying here is that doesn't David's laziness by refusing to throw out the cardboard paper tubes even out my laziness? And I think that it's laziness ultimately

in not replacing the toilet paper roll. That's not tomato tomato to me. Sorry, Dora. So let's call the whole thing off from that regard. But Jennifer Marmer, you wanted me to read the rest of this letter. What do you think? Is this a big revelation to you? Well, I think the fact that she asked David and he says he doesn't mind doing it, you know, it's like he really just wanted to write in to call her out, put her on blast. If Dora is a reliable narrator. That's the thing here. Like, if he didn't mind doing it, why'd he write in? He told her he didn't mind doing it because what are you going to say? Yes, I mind that.

I would? Okay. He should if he does. Is that why Shane always calls me in tears? Oh, maybe. David, if you have said to Dora that you don't mind replacing the toilet paper roll and you meant it, then you shouldn't be writing us. If you said it to her and you don't mean it and you're writing us to get us to intervene,

well, I'm not going to intervene. You have to communicate more clearly. But Dora in the meeting. But by the way, David, you should. should be like it's not tomato tomato but it definitely takes two to tango and uh you should be thrown away the toilet paper or empty toilet paper rolls and dora i'm sorry to call you both lazy but i mean it's low scale laziness but it's like sometimes you got to do the stuff you don't feel like doing right and replacing that toilet paper roll is in is that's you got to do it you just

got to do it you got to be mindful of the work you leave behind Or they can just keep their system because it's like, for whatever reason, David hates taking the tubes down to the recycling or whatever it is. So it's like, all right, he'll replace the role and she'll pick up the other end of that task. There are tasks in my home that I hate to do. And Shane, my husband, for those who don't know I'm married to somebody named Shane, he'll do the things that I hate and there's things that he hates doing and I end up doing them. And there are times where I'm like, okay, I really can't. you know change the sheets today can you handle the kids room you know and he'll do it if i ask him to you know he'll he'll do it but like generally there are things that like we've taken on as like this is my domain this is your domain right but here's the thing if i'm with you jennifer in the sense that if if you guys want to work out a compromise david and dora of seattle and like well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna refill the toilet paper rule but i will bring the empty rolls down to the garbage or whatever because you don't feel like doing that.

Look, whatever it takes for you guys to stay married. I'm not read it. I want you to stay married. But honestly, you've got to replace the toilet paper roll. It's like cleaning the lint screen on the on the dryer. You know, now there's, I don't want to get into that whole fight again. I do think that it is ultimately the responsibility of the person using the dryer to double check and make sure the lint screen is clean. It is wise to clean it after. you use it, but you can't do it all the time. But if you don't have a clean lens screen, you're going to get a fire eventually. But with this, if you use the last bit of toilet paper and you don't replace the role because

you don't feel like it, I don't care if you've got an arrangement with David. You're setting David or anyone else next up in the bathroom up for a real crisis. That is no good. A real bathroom crab scuttle. Yeah, you don't, yeah, look, you want to be married to, you know, you're You know, you want to be a, you want to be a marriage of two wonderful whole human beings in their own right, not a couple of bathroom crabs. Hey, by the way, Dora sent in a photo of their cats. Millie, who is a black cat and Julius, of course, orange, orange Julius cat.

Perfect. Oh, love it. Doris says this photo I guess we'll share this photo somewhere, right? Yeah. The member's only page. The Bocco page. The Bocco page, you get to go see it over there.

We can share it on our regular page and taunt people. That's true. That's true. Let's share it. Let's share in taunt. Oh, yeah. There's a lovely photo. Actually, it's a very beautiful photo.

And you see Millie the Black Cat in Mint Descent from a pretty cool looking piece of orange furniture. and uh and and orange julius getting ready to uh pounce i guess on milly it's a real action shot i like it handsome cats dora says this photo accurately shows the state of affairs between julius and milly the angles are deceiving so let me clarify julius is normal size milly is a four pound tiny cat i guess because milly is closer i don't know how this is deceiving here's what i notice here this is a very tidy home Dora, you said you're tidier than David. So I'm giving you full credit.

You know, I have lived with two cats before. And as the host of Get Your Pets and occasional afternoon talk show, where I live stream with people's cats and dogs and other pets, I have seen into many homes that have had two to 24 cats in them. Even a one cat home like mine, the whole hall bathway is now given over to various pooping and peeing stations that my dumb, dumb, cat favors depending on what day of the week it is to see a to see a home with two beautiful cats in it that have not that has not been ruined by boxes you know like discarded

chewy shipping boxes or whatever and frankly that beautiful piece of orange furniture does not seem to have a scratch on it yeah good job good job i feel like i'm looking at a catalog can i just share something that i found on reddit yeah please do This is from the subreddit R-slash-terrain building. Here we go. This, by the way, a 178,000-member subreddit, R-slash-terrain building. The question is,

most unique thing you've made from paper towel or toilet paper rolls. Then the body is, using them as the main structure or whatever, what's the most interesting thing you've made? someone made a really handsome EWalk Village. That was really nice. That was the top one.

Wow. Yub, yub. Genuinely very impressive. But there were a few other answers that I really enjoyed. One just said, I build a triceratops for my kids. Someone explained very carefully how they made some stalagmites. They said, I use them as the base structure, then mixed white glue, water, and used toilet paper to shape the stalagmite around the roll. Someone replied to them, used toilet paper?

And then they said, yes. Fair. Someone said, with a couple ping pong balls, you can make a proper horizontal chemical tank, which suggests to me that there's people out there make an improper horizontal chemical tank. Don't even get me started. I don't know how you make a tank for anything out of cardboard. Yeah. Someone, well, if you're a terrain builder, you can. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. Lloyd Ryan 76 said, did a purple worm I'm quite proud of. Wait a minute. I love purple worms and I love all these people, Jesse. But how many of them are maximum fun members? I don't know, but I have one last one to read, John. All right. All out.

This is from Grand Mage Bob. Only for you, Grand Mage Bob. I save a ton of these roles to use for school and for the kids at my work. I'm a shirty person. What can I say? But to be onost, I've never made anything from them for myself, really. But I can do is, best I can do is I used a slice of a roll for a small part of a fantasy-themed marble maze.

Just one circular room. I should make an armor from them for the kids to wear. I'm speechless. Okay, Jennifer, Jesse, Joel, Suzzy, everybody who's listening. We have two different cases about how a family should pick movies or movie night. I got two different letters about this. Amber, in Bellevue, Washington. That's near Seattle.

We're doing a show there. says that their family's rule is that each member gets to pick their favorite movie when they're all sitting down to watch a movie. She says, we grown-ups like to inflict upon our children classic films from our own childhoods. The kids, who are eight and ten years old, always try to make us watch a movie that they've never seen before. The adults argue that a movie you've never seen before can't be one of your favorites.

The kids say they want to pick a movie without others being able to say no. All right. And before we get into the chat, Whitney writes with a similar thing, Whitney's writing from Santa Cruz. Jesse, ever hear of that town? Santa Cruz de California. Santa Cruz de California. My husband and I used to love introducing our 11-year-old son of movies we were raised with,

such as E.T. 9 to 5, Little Miss Sunshine and Clifford. Put a pin in that. Come back to that in a minute. But suddenly our son insists on watching movies we've already seen as a family. My husband and I don't want to re-watch movies. Please order our son to accept our choices. By the way, she's in Santa Cruz. Whitney wants you to know, Jesse, that she's the groundskeeper at Porter. Does that mean anything to you?

Yeah, I was a student at Porter College. What was your college, Jennifer? I was a student at Cowell, but I graduated with Porter because all my friends were Porter, and I wanted to have fun at graduation a little bit. Whitney graduated from Cowell in 2004. You left Whitney behind to join Porter. Well, I graduated in 06. Talk about before sunrise, before sunset.

Richard Lindelater should be making movies out of this generational intertwining. This is a novel in this thing. So wait a minute. So she went to college with both of you, it would seem like, at least some overlap, right? Yeah. I think that's true. She was at Whitney was at Cowell. And frankly, this is all more interesting than this question.

Whitney was at Cowell and then graduated instead of going into a career being a team for a Japanese ESL exam. Hey, you guys want to go to the library and check out some books? Yeah. Instead of doing that, she decided to go on a career path that would lead her back to Santa Cruz. Maybe she never left. She's a groundskeeper at Porter.

And meanwhile, her husband, Ian, is the maintenance guy at Kresge. Is that my saying that correctly? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is. What does it mean if you're the hippie college at Santa Cruz? I mean, it means the formula is powerful.

Yeah. Wow. Like, that's like double stuff Oreo of hippiness, isn't it? Pretty much. Is there a stuffy jock college at Santa Cruz? College eight. College eight is the jocks. Although they have a name now for it, but I would say college eight.

Yeah. Would they wear like blazers and turtlenecks and like walk around with pipes and look down at everybody? Like those snobs in the animal house? No, it's mostly rainbow sandals and board shorts. Those are the jocks? It's Santa Cruz. Got it. Okay, I understand now.

John, that's where the football team lived, John, at UC Santa Cruz. Here's my order to you, Whitney, first of all. I want you to collaborate with Ian Maintenance Guy. I hope that's his official job title at Kresge. I want you to collaborate on a romance novel about two people falling in love on the campus of Santa Cruz because I think that's going to be a hot story and you can then turn that into a film franchise in episode four a new romance Creskey meets Porter or whatever but meanwhile what are these families to do is family movie night meant to be for watching new movies or

rewatching old favorites Jesse you've got some children are there movies that they just want to watch over and over and over again I mean yeah In my daughter's case, she always wants to watch like a Shark Nato movie. There are a lot of Shark Nato's. Like, should I watch them from the beginning or should I watch like Shark Nato episode for A New Hope first? No, you shouldn't watch them. At all.

No, I have seen a Shark Nato, actually. I saw Shark Nato one. Sometimes somebody is in there and you're like, you know what? They bring a lot to the table in this terrible movie. And which one, which Shark Nato? was that. No, I'm not talking about one of the Shark Nato's. I'm talking about one of the people in the Shark Nato, because they got a thousand people in every Shark Nato, you know. Right, right, right. And then sometimes somebody, you're like, yeah, this person's great. They're doing a great job.

This movie sucks. Joel, you ever watch a Shark Neda? Never even heard of it. You watched that main, that main scary horror movie, a plague of Scallops? Yes, that's what I'm watching right now. Scallop Blizzard, I think it's called. When Sezzi was a little, We watched a lot of chick flicks. Chick flicks? Like what? Mean girls. Mean girls?

Yeah. Was that like something that was rewatched a lot? No. No? No. For our family, we all watched a lot of sound of music, a lot of Wizard of Oz. And in fact, our daughter, who is now a graduate of college and is home briefly before starting her independent life in an unnamed American city in three weeks. The other night I was falling asleep.

No, I was woken up at 2 a.m. By the sound of my favorite things. No, excuse me, how do you solve a problem like Maria? My daughter had been out at a bar with friends and came home. She's like, I just want to watch this movie again. Middle of the night. And all I wanted to do was get up and watch with her, but I had to exercise restraint because it's her life now.

That's her movie now. When my kids were very small, they loved the Toy Story movies so much That at one point, one of them somehow got set to Spanish and they would just watch it in Spanish. They didn't care. That's a plot point of Toy Story two or three. Yes, but no. But what I'm saying is the full film was in Spanish.

I don't remember if the part where Buzz Light Ear speaks in Spanish was transposed into English. Maybe Japanese. I was spent, I couldn't quite remember, but one of them would demand Floyd Story. Floyd Story, Floorie. What do you think, should when you're watching movies as a family, should you try to watch as many new movies as possible?

Forcing your taste on your child as Whitney and Ian are trying to do? Or do you accept that your children want to rewatch movies over and over and over again? I'm not opposed to my children rewatching movies, but I can't do it. You can't rewatch a movie? No, it takes a lot. for me to just watch like I'm cool with watching like a like a good kids movie like uh not like like Totoro or something like that that's like a legendary classic but like Mitchell's versus the machines was very good very good. Everyone says that I haven't seen that movie. Kids animated

film a lot of fun a lot of fun that movie but I watched it and I'm not going to watch it more times like it's for children like it's for families and it's full of stuff that I enjoyed right But, like, I don't even want to re-watch an adult movie that was made for me that I enjoyed. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's how I feel about it. I know what movie I want to see again. Hundreds of Beavers.

So that is going to be my next pick for Family Movie Night. I'm glad that came up. Oh, hundreds of beavers? Yeah. Joel, have you heard of this movie? Hundreds of Divers? No. I don't want to say anything more other than watch the trailer, and you'll understand.

Okay. It's about a guy, a guy in the wilderness of Wisconsin having problems with Beaver. with beavers, literal beavers. Right. Yeah. About 100, about 100 of them. Multiple hundreds. Sounds very enticing.

That's very good. I feel like kids get something deep out of rewatching movies that they connect with. And so I would say that even though it is often boring for adults to rewatch movies, particularly movies that are not that great, you know what I mean? But certain kids' movies, you don't want to watch them again. And kids want to watch them again and again and again and again. Like, I think adults just observe that as being annoying or immature, but I think something's happening. I think kids are really working through stuff and learning, getting a deep knowledge of characters that they clearly connect with when they do that.

So, and in particular, Whitney, if your 11-year-old son is saying, yeah, I'd like to watch ET again, because your taste is very good, ET, 9 to 5, Little Miss Sunshine, Clifford. Those are all good movies. I don't understand how you grew up with both E.T. and Little Miss Sunshine. Maybe you're a time traveler. But, you know, like, whatever, they're very different eras of film. But whatever your son is connecting to in those things where he wants to see them again, I don't think that you should try to prohibit him. Indeed, you know, maybe you should try to figure out what it is that he's really responding to.

That said, you know, and same deal, I should say, with Amber in Belmont. you where the situation is reversed, where the parents want to watch familiar classics and the kids want to watch new stuff, I guess, and this is the sad part because they don't want people to be able to say no to the movies that they pick. They're crying for help here, Amber, because they're feeling that they're, that they can't recommend a movie because every time they do, apparently you're saying, I've seen it already or I don't want to. So they have to, they're trying to come up with the new stuff so you don't have an excuse to say no to it. So essentially what you need to do as parents is say, yes, a little bit more.

Yes, a little bit more to your kids' choices, whether they want to watch something new and you get exposed to something new or whether they want to watch something old that you've seen before. Like, the point of exposing kids to culture, whatever it is, is to help them develop their taste and help them develop and explore what they respond to in storytelling. And you need to offer a little grace and not try to. to not try to be the video DJ all the time. There's give and take, but you know, you got to give a little grace to these kids. Yeah, I feel that. Yeah, I mean, Amber's whole thing is that the, their family has to pick a movie that's their favorite. But the thing that Amber is forgetting maybe is that she and her partner, you know, they have a whole lifetime.

I don't know how old they are, but I would guess 30s 40s, you know, they have all of these years of being able to define what their favorites are, their kids are eight and ten, they're still trying to figure out what their taste is. Yeah, exactly. They don't have as broad of a library in their mind to go back to. Yeah, that's right. They have an advantage. They've got years of favorites to draw upon.

The kids don't. Frankly, I wish that there was someone in my life who would just say, don't even think about it. Just turn on this movie. Because I am completely paralyzed by choice every time. And all I end up doing is just, you know, either letting our daughter march me through the death march of another five episodes of Love Island, UK, which, by the way, I love very much and enjoy quite a bit. Or I'm just watching Stathlet's Flats again or hundreds of beavers. Hundreds of Beavers is one of the first new movies I've seen in a long time, other than Furiosa, which, by the way, if you haven't seen Furiosa, what's wrong with you? Go and see it.

It's the best. Do you see Furiosa yet? Joel? No. Jesse? My family wouldn't go with me. Oh, no. Oh, no.

I would go to see Furiosa with you. Why can't you go by yourself? Too busy. My life doesn't accommodate it, yeah. I have to either have a child with me or I don't get to go. I have a child who's my oldest child is, you know, she's glad to watch sorority party massacre. Yeah.

So it's not a matter of inappropriateness. Right. It's a matter of it being too noisy. Sure. This one is quieter than Fury Road, but it's still pretty noisy. I would say that Fury Road is my favorite regular movie of the last decade. Yeah. And by the way, this is the thing that I didn't like when I learned it, but it's true.

That movie's nine years old. So get ready to, get ready to anoint a new movie of the decade because Fury Road is in the rearview mirror. You think they had rearview mirrors in those war cars? No. It's a good question. Too big. Ten and two. Ten and two war boys.

You think they had airbags? Yeah, probably so. Yeah. Safety first. I mean, I'll tell you this. They didn't have drum brakes. Antilock all the way. Yeah.

By the way, do you see Fury Road or Furiosa, Joel? No. No. I just stare at TikTok all day. Joel Suzzy? Fury Road, Furiosa. Guess what? You guys, you two are having a movie night while you're

here. Mean girls. No, Fury Road, then Furiosa. And then hundreds of beavers. Got it? Writing it down? Traybion. Let's move on.

I remember walking out of Fury Road. I went to see it with my wife in the movie theater. Going out after it was done, not in the middle. No, no. No, after it was done, walking out of the movie and standing there and turning to my wife and saying, was that the best movie I've ever seen? Pretty much. Yeah.

Pretty much. From the director of Babe Pig in the City. That's right. I mean, George Miller is incredible filmmaker. Shares a lot of DNA with Babe Pig in the City, I would say. If you watch Babe Pig in the City and then watch Mad Max, you'll notice. All right. There's a double feature for you, Joel and Sussie while you're here visiting.

Babe Pig in the City, double feature Fury Road. Mad Max Fury Road. Okay. Then Furiosa Mad Max Saga. That's it for another episode of Judge John Hodgman. And if you want to hear more from the members-only mailbag every single month, it's easy. You can become a member of Maximum Fund today at Maximumfund.org slash join. Five bucks a month does it.

You'll get access to the mailbag, plus a huge archive of members-only bonus content. You can also get your holiday shopping done now with gift memberships for the special people in your life. That's maximum fund.org slash join. Evidence and photos from the show are on our Instagram. that's Judge John Hodgman. We're also on TikTok and YouTube, Judge John Hodgman Pod, follow and subscribe to see our episodes

and our video content. We're having a lot of fun over there on the YouTube channel, Judge John Hodgman Pod. At the end of the episode, Shut Your Payhole, Jesse and I talked a bit about how much we love dish towels. We love dish towels, and we're not the only ones. Our commenter of the week,

Kelly Thorngate, says, I feel so seen. Kelly, we see you, and we are so glad you are seeing us too on YouTube. You're seeing us on YouTube right now. Get in those comments and tell us what movies your family is going to watch over the holiday weekend. I mean, it's a big weekend.

Are you going to watch a movie? Judge Hodgman, my daughter has announced that once Thanksgiving is complete, yeah. Home for the holidays, good Thanksgiving movie. In addition to planes, trains, and automobile is the one everybody always cites. Yeah, yeah. But once Thanksgiving's over, until Christmas, through Christmas Day, we will only be watching Christmas entertainment. Only Christmas entertainment. I basically am growing a little

tiny Alonso Jarrell day in my house. She refuses to watch anything. But so I'm just, if you got a, if you got a suggestion for a good Christmas episode of a television show out there, hit me up on social media or hit up Judge John Hodgman on social media because I will take all the suggestions I can get. I think there's only like one or two Christmas episodes of cheers. And then I'm flying blind. Maybe that obscure, you know, Star Wars holiday special or other obscure holiday special of a TV show is only available on YouTube. Make sure to share it with us. And while you're sharing things, why don't you share us on YouTube? Just press that little arrow button and you can share our YouTube episodes and shorts with whomever you like in your life. Make sure to click that like and

subscribe and everything else. It really does help people find the show. Judge John Hodgman was created by Jesse Thorne and John Hodgman. Another welcome to our new social media specialist, Megan Rosati. The podcast is edited by A.J. McKee, and our video editor is Daniel Spear. Our producer is Jennifer Marmer. Speaking of the holiday season, John, we need holiday recipes for our annual holiday party. If your family eats something weird or let's say all-American, hit us up at Hodgman at maximum fund.org or submit your disputes at maximum fund.org slash JJHO. Yeah, we've had tomato soup salad. We've obviously had eggnog and orange soda.

We've also had eggnog and Sprite. There was a year when we enjoyed some hot mold Dr. Pepper, I remember, Jesse, as well as all banners of unusual idiosyncratic, charming, and sometimes repulsive holiday appetizers and sides and main courses that have been a part of your family's tradition. go raid grandmas or granddad's or Aunt Judy's recipe cards this Thanksgiving and find some nice weird old stuff for us to make and eat on camera and microphone. Send it all over to maximum fun.org slash JJHO. And of course, we're eager to hear about all your disputes on any subject.

No cases too small. Submit those cases at maximum fun.org slash JJHO. We will talk to you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network Of artists-owned shows Supported directly by you