My Brother, My Brother And Me - MBMBaM 435: The Pasta Poem

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

Hey, y'all on the lookout for great, online deals from trusted sources? Here's a great deal for you: An almost hour-long audio file with a bunch of jokes on it! And how much will it cost you? Like forty dollars! Suggested talking points: Beezbos' Hunger, Secret Benefits, Dream Poetry, That's A Christmas To Me: Round One, The Basement Toilet, Dougway

The McElroy brothers are not experts, and their advice should never be followed. Travis insists he's a sexpert, but if there's a degree on his wall, I haven't seen it. Also, this show isn't for kids, which I mentioned only so the babies out there will know how cool they are for listening. What's up, you cool baby? Hello everybody, and welcome to my brother, my brother, and me, and if I show for the modern era, Cyber Monday is here, and I'm Justin Cyber McElroy, and I'm Travis Mr. Roboto McElroy. It's Griffin McElroy, your youngest baby brother. I put on my wizard hat and prepare my body for you. This is the value day, folks. If you head over to the number one shopping site in the world,

Bezosplace.com. If you go to Bezos Place, you can get a bunch of great deals on all the latest and greatest in tech toys. Gadget into Gizmos, plenty. Finally fucking put Toys R Us out of business this year, so we're all kind of on a high from that, and who will be next in 2019? Yeah, let's see who you want to see Bezos eat next. I'd say Brookstones had it fucking coming for a while, huh? You got your expensive like, you know, $240 Wi-Fi-enabled nutcracker. Bezos comes around. Now Brookstones in me. I am Brookstone. I don't know that Skywall still exists. I mean, Bezos might have already eaten that one. Did he? He got that one. He got that one already?

He travels a lot. He's on planes a lot. He sees it. He gets hungry. Bezos is going to eat the air mole. You know what I would like to see? I think that he has conquered it to the point where I think Bezos needs to walk away from Amazon, leave all his money behind, and start again, and see how long it takes him to catch back up to Amazon. Yeah, if you think you're such hot shit. Yeah. So what you did at once, anybody can make a multi-billion-dollar company once. Do it again. Yeah. If you're such hot shit. And you know what you're doing enough that I feel like you could catch back up in like five years.

Yeah. Why don't you just sort of send everyone, you know, $2.4 million, which as far as I know, you can do. And then let's see what else you innovate there. You lucky dipshit. Got him. Hey. I could do another one right. I could do one right now. That's equal to Amazon. Here's, do you want to hear it? Please. Yeah. This is the new one. This is the new one. Okay. Okay. You know how they have, if you get prime with them, you get two-day, free two-day shipping. I'm going to go for free one-day shipping. Okay. How about that? Like, how about that? Now, I'm bigger than Amazon.

It wasn't hard. Can I pitch one? Can I pitch one? Can I pitch one? Yeah. With every $30 purchase or more, one free back rub. From? Beesbows? No. Here's the thing. From whoever you want. Oh, wow. Yeah. And this is now a legal law of the land? Yeah.

Can I do this to, you know, Tony Romo? Can I just say Tony Romo? Yes. Come rub these shoulder. Okay. Now, you will have to schedule. I mean, like, if you're like Oscar Isaacs, like, I need that back rub. Like, you're going to have to schedule it. You know what I mean? Like, he's probably pre-booked up at this point. You know, this is a good thing that I don't run Amazon. This is why I can't be a big, rich hot shot like Jeff Beesbow.

This is why. Okay. It's because I would wait till Cyber Monday and then I would just put an animated video of myself and with Flash on the front page of the website and just say, it's all books again. Now it's just books again. Biter don't. I don't care. I'm incredibly wealthy, but this one is just books. I'm doing this for books. I should have never got away from books. It's all books again. I love petulant Cyber Beesbows saying, oh, we'll pay our workers a fair living wage in exchange.

It's all books again. Not going to get your Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals on those house slippers unless you're going to shove your paws into two big books. I hope you enjoy your dash button for kitty litter. Press it all fucking day. The only thing I'm going to bring you is a book about cat ownership. Maybe that's why it's time for Beesbow to walk away from it. Fill a sack with books and then walk across the country hand delivering books to people while he thinks about his next big deal, either that or maybe because at this point, let's be honest, Amazon, you've got to have like a whole giant warehouse

just full of the books you forgot that you were supposed to sell. Absolutely. Maybe start like hollowing those out and shipping people the things they ordered in books. Well, what do you think HQ two is going to be made out of, Trav? Made out of books? No, the bones of employees that Jeff just kind of uses as, you know, dude sucks. Hey, can I tell you guys something horrible though?

What's that? Did you see the Al Roker thing from Thanksgiving? Yeah, no. Yeah, I saw a headline and I skipped it. Oh, you should know you should have really patronized that click, bud, because this is a very, this is a good like meal time prep for me because Trav has posted our mom's old sweet potato casserole recipe that I had not seen in a while. It's like my favorite dish that she made for Thanksgiving.

I was so psyched. I made it. It was so ballin. And so I sympathize with Mr. Roker, who on the Today Show presented his mom's sweet potato base Thanksgiving food recipe is kind of a casserole, but with chunks of pineapple and like a heaping handful of baking soda in it, which I'm still trying to wrap my mind around almost as far and again, I do not. I'm not dunking on Mr. Roker or his mom or anything like that.

I would never do that. I respect the game. The recipe he did say on television a few times was sweet potato poon. And Al Roker said it with his mouth on the television and my ears and I'm assuming lots of other people's ears heard the waves that he created and then were sort of digitally synthesized, sent over the airwaves and then into sweet potato poon. And he really hit it poon and he hit it hard. Loud plosives, loud everything.

So that was the highlight of my year. That sounds very good. Where were you, Justin, when you saw it on a website? You didn't even hear the word, did you? No, I saw dad. Al Roker part of on TV and dad got really mad at him. Oh, yeah. Because he hates Al Roker now because he was mean to us that one time.

I don't know how I feel now. I was mad at him and then the poon thing happened and now I actually I think he gained a few points because how bold and brazen. Like I get that you're trying to share your mom's sweet potato casserole recipe. It's a beautiful instinct, right? But maybe have a talk with the producers, a frank talk with the producers. There was a fucking Chiron that said sweet potato poon. Somebody designed it.

Somebody sat down and said, you know what, I'm gonna put a lot of love into this sweet potato poon graphic and even the Today Show Twitter account tweeted the video with the caption, what do our guest judges think of Al Roker's sweet potato poon? They love it. Yeah, and I don't like it. We love Al Roker's poon. Yeah, I don't like it being possessive like that, huh? That's rough.

The guest judges love Roker's poon. And now here we are saying it and it's a word we would literally never say in any other context because it's arguably one of the worst ways to refer to genitalia. But I guess it's okay because it's actually referring to a marshmallow-y sweet potato treat. I don't know what's more offensive, the use of poon or the use of marshmallows on sweet potato. Yeah, we have feelings. That's, listen, we have some poonions.

It's no big deal. Did you say a poonions? We have some poonions. It's the worst. So this is an advice show, okay? And what we do basically on this one is we just give you advice. You send us your questions and we turn them out, come you like into wisdom. The Christmas creep, I don't even think I need to tell you all is officially on.

The candle nights, for many of you have begun. We've been hearing about it starting to come in across the wires. So thank you for those updates. Candle nights, because I feel like we haven't discussed it in a little bit, wholesale. Candle nights is a pan religious, pan sexual, personal pan holiday for everyone. So it is our holiday. It is a, oh, probably the most important thing in this special time of year to remember about candle nights is that it is a registered trademark of Big Jai Head LLC.

Correct. All rights reserved. So that is the most important thing about helping candle nights grow is that it is our trademark that only we can use. Let's get that first question going. I work over nights at a facility with a washer and a dryer. Ooh, no need to brag. On certain nights, we have less to wash than others.

Am I committing some sort of weird work crime if I were to throw my own laundry in on slow days? It'd save me money at the laundromat and I'd still use my own detergent. That's from worried washer in Washington. So holy crap, this is confusing. They work at a facility with a washer and dryer. Correct. On certain nights, we have less wash to do than others. Yes.

They work at a facility, like say like in a hotel where they're washing linens and sheets and stuff. Okay, okay, okay, okay. No, no, no. This is a Benny. This is a Benny of the job. It's embezzlement, Griffin. No, shush, shush.

You can't embezzle that, you know, tie. This is embezzling. Listen, not every job that you will ever have in your entire life is, there's so much coiness that goes into the hiring process. They're going to tell you, you know, salary. You can go back and forth blow by blow and try and raise that up. That's cool. They are going to tell you their expectations, give you an idea like the schedule is going

to be, what training is going to be like. And then they're going to tell you, you know, if it's at a retail place, to what kind of benefit you can get vis-a-vis a discount. But every job you'll ever have in your life is going to have these secret benefits that they cannot put down on paper. This place cannot write down. And also, you can do your laundry here for free. Hush, hush.

Don't tell nobody. Yeah, don't ruin it. Don't ruin it for everyone. Yeah. Like at the GameStop that I worked at, it was the secret benefit there was that Nintendo DS games were just fair to steal because it was 2000. You could just steal that, man. It was 2000 and it was like 2008, the DS had like started a decline.

You know, 3DS was just around the corner. And so I gave a knowing look to my manager. He looked back at me and nodded in a nod that said, you go ahead and grab, you know, Zelda Phantom Hourglass there, tuck it right into your shoe, like a little bag of cocaine, and go on out of here. It's a benefit. When I worked at Best Buy, the out of the secret benefit was like, you can just like play wee bowling for hours and say you're working and demonstrating the game for people.

A great benefit. Really, you're just really protect, like, I was really perfecting my form at Best Buy and that's why I'm a professional wee bowler now. Yeah. So thank you, Best Buy. At the blockbuster, Justin worked at it was you can steal one movie a month, just don't touch Fight Club. And then he did, he took a big bite of that forbidden apple.

He just couldn't resist. This is a binny. You're good. I'm not sure I agree with you guys. I hate to be the stickler, but I am not opposed. I don't think it's a problem to like use the washer and dryer stuff. What I do have a problem with is how do you maintain, like do the work of laundry? Laundry doesn't do itself.

Like once you've thrown those clothes in, maybe that's not a big deal, but you are going to need to fold those. If you throw them in your trunk unfolded, you're all you're going to end up with is a big pile of wrinkly clothes and nobody likes that. So are you going to take, is it not bad enough to take the boss man's detergent and water and now you're an electrician? They will use their own detergent, Justin. Okay, fine.

But now you're using his time. That's company time, Dilbert, to fold your laundry. You couldn't have picked another name. Couldn't have picked another name. There was none other ones there, right in there at that time. Yeah, I get what you're saying. How have we not, we have shaved so many of the edges off the laundry doing process, right? Like you go back and you look at the origins of laundry and you wash your clothes.

It's my favorite radio head album, by the way. Yeah, that's great. You wash your clothes in the river or you get the wash, the wash tub with a little thing that they play as a little cool instrument. Washboard. A washboard. And we got that fixed. We got now a machine that gets the clothes wet, tumbles them around,

gets some soapy and another one that dries out the work of the first machine. And it's like we got that far and we left the one big, very sharp, very deadly edge on it, which is now you have to do origami and sort and carry all of your heavy clothes. How have we not been able to like then they are injected into a small pellet that you can then just like pull out of your drawer. It'll be labeled Griffin's nice red shirt and then you just spit on it and the capsule disintegrates and there's your shirt ready to go. Soaked in spit.

No. Perfect. The capsule caught most of the spit. It will have some spit on it, but you didn't have to carry it like, you know, you just carry a box of pills. And then we'll need a fourth machine to ring out the spit. Listen, it's all I'm saying. Get my capsule machine going.

Do you guys want a yahoo? Yeah, I love that. Here's one sent in by Nick G. Thanks. It's a yahoo answers user Ashley who asks, Is it possible to create a poem in your dreams? About two months ago, I had a dream about a book of poetry. I opened it and read a poem and the theme was where the green sky meets the blue earth.

I only actually read, I only actually read the first stanza and the poem was amazing. I was so, I was so enveloped by the poem that I was actually sucked into the book and experienced the poem. Okay. I've searched and searched, but I can't find a poem about a green sky and blue earth. I really didn't think it was possible to create literature in a dream, but now I'm not so sure. I really want to find that poem.

Is it possible to write a poem in a dream? If anyone can help me or at least point me in the right direction, that would be great. I dreamt a poem. I did, it seemed a little long and a little tough and I had, you know, some nude parts of the dream I wanted to get to. So I did only read the first stanza, but it was amazing. I was so enveloped by the first stanza, which was all I allowed myself to read because of how boring it was.

I was sucked into the book and experienced this green sky and blue earth firsthand. Holy shit. Well, why is the sky green in this? It's a fucking dream poem. There are two answers to that Travis. One, it's a poem. Two, it's a dream. Yeah, but even in a poem, you're not like, look at that, I don't know, purple tree.

And it's like, oh, you're nailing it with this poem thing. You're like, you're like creating some very wild boundaries around what poems can have. Poems can do pretty much whatever, but if they get the color of the sky wrong, it's like next. Yeah. Next poem please. That's not about creating art and your beautiful, I don't know, rhymes or not rhymes. Come on, poems. Come on, not rhyming.

Anybody can not rhyme things. But then you're also like making the sky green? What are you talking? And earth is brown. That's entirely possible. You remember when Travis was a copy editor for EE Comics, how many of his works, he just sent back, no, no, no. Where's the punctuation?

Listen, I think your typewriter's got messed up keys in it or something because this is all fucked up. I just wrote back more commas. More commas, one line. This is a sentence, EE. You can do better than this. Gosh, I wish I knew other poets. I know.

Man, there's gotta be other ones, right? I've been wondering about this lately. I am married to a poet and you would think at some point I would have learned through osmosis or just from, you know, just kissing. I would have absorbed some sort of knowledge, but literally none. I feel like there's one named Yeats. There's one named Yeat, for sure. Okay, dream poem.

My favorite one is Lord Byron because where does he get off? Yeah, that's pretty good. So did you dream, can you dream? Did all of the George Lucas have a dream about Star Wars? Woke up, wrote it down. Not a poem. No, no, no, no, but Griffin, here's, I'm sorry, but what you are saying, yeah, of course, of course you can dream an idea.

Yeah, this is worse. What this person is saying is that they dreamed about a poem that does exist already, that they themselves have never read or seen, so they are trying to find the poem they dreamed about. Yeah, a very, very helpful user who like deserves a medal of honor for going above and beyond on Yahoo fucking Answers named Evelyn says, best answer, a rainbow by Donna Brock, curving up, then down, meeting blue sky and green earth. Evelyn, it's clearly the opposite, though, green sky, blue earth.

But Evelyn is correct. I appreciate your help, but you did come on. Come on. Evelyn gets an A for accuracy. So. And a P for poem. And an R for rainbow. And an L for letters.

There are many. She gets all of them. This would be. Is this a poem? Is this episode a poem? I mean, come on. What is in a poem? Fuck.

I mean, lots of, most stuff isn't. Most stuff ain't poems. Most stuff ain't poems. What do you know? Okay, point to something right now and conclusively prove to me that it's not a poem. I mean, I guess anything can be a poem. And if that's your philosophy, then 99 and then like a funny number of 0.999 after it, that guy would go on for a long time and you'd be like, wow, that sure is a very small number

of things are good poem. This episode, yeah, you could maybe write it down and then submit it to poetry class. You'll be expelled from the school for this. Or lauded as like the next poet laureate of the world. I do know this. I do know this. You have to be right. You have to be right in a poem to make a poem and it is hard to do it.

And I think saying out loud that anything's a poem. So fuck y'all is maybe a bad tact to take on, Travi. I mean, we're looking down on Wayne's basement, only that's not Wayne's basement. Isn't that weird? And then Wayne says, Garth, that was a haiku. So he was not intending to write a poem, but he did write a poem. But with his phraseology. Or just went like Drew Barrymore in The Antiquities is like Cellar Door.

And everyone's like, oh God, it's fucking beautiful. So both those things you just mentioned were professional actors reading off a script that somebody had written. Somebody did write that haiku intentionally, Justin. So I'm going to come at you. And for Travis's example, didn't do a poem. I'm pretty sure she read a poem written by a poet at some point. Both of you guys are just fucking tanked so bad there on both of the points you're trying to make.

Poems are hard. You've got to try to make them. I don't think that's a poem. You just made a poem. Poems are hard. You've got to try to make them. That could be a poem. Cut, print, wrap.

Grip, wrap. Now, was it a wrap? No. Our poems, raps. Some of them are. Yeah. I don't know why I'm having to explain this to the two. It doesn't seem like the taxonomy of these things is too difficult to understand.

Someone who is married to an appreciator of poetry, you, Griffin, are wanting to put a lot of bounds on what is and ain't poems. And I think what Travis and I are saying is very empowering. What we're sort of saying is, who knows? I think this is a scenario, Griffin, where when this episode goes up, poets will actually be coming at you for trying to limit their creativity, where I'm saying literally everything is a poem and anything could be a poem. And you're like, no, a poem's got to be like this.

And you're like old man poet who's trying to box them in, and I'm opening the door and setting them free. I feel like maybe I'm not putting boundaries on them, because a poem can take so many forms. But what you all are saying, you're coming up and over me and saying that like fettuccine alfredo, the dish of thick food, can be a poem. And I hate that. It spells stuff out with the noodles.

Yeah, sure. Or maybe you do it in such a way that somebody eats it, like you're a fucking noodle poet, Derek. Yeah, the cream spills on the Olive Garden table, and the sunlight shining through it makes a prism on the floor. And you point out that and say, look, everyone, a poem. Look before it goes away. Yes, it's a pasta poem.

All right, all right. I'm just saying that maybe, as always, I'm right and you're wrong. I'm just saying what Travis, I think what Travis and I are saying is maybe poems are a collection of letters and spaces and persuasion. Maybe they're a collection of gluten and dairy products. And peppercorns. You know what I mean? Like it could be whatever you need.

You're talking about discovered poems. I'm talking about undiscovered poems. Like I'm looking at the periodic table of poems, and you're looking at the first two lines, and I'm saying maybe there's even more squares and lines of poems that we haven't even discovered yet. Griffin is, okay, Griffin didn't know about undiscovered poems. Yes, I fell with a lot of poems.

Let me clear this up for Griffin, Travis, if I'm gonna be so bold. Please do, yeah, I'm obviously having some trouble here. Probably with a lot of poems is that people haven't realized that they're poems yet. Correct. So the hard work, a lot of people write poems and it's almost like wasteful because there's lots of poems out there already that we just haven't sort of unearthed yet. You know what I mean? Yes, that's true.

I guess it's not like anybody's ever kicked in the door to plowshares and said, hey, here's a French Alfredo, print this, you fucking cowards. So, yeah, that's fair. Now what a lot of people are wondering is what's plowshares. Yeah, it's a French. And you know what? I don't think that's as important as the fact that Pena Chini Alfredo can be a poem. You just say Pena Chini Alfredo.

Yeah, how would plowshares, a literary journal, how would they go about printing Feta Chini Alfredo? Playboy, you squeeze it between the pages of the book, Griffin. Each one, okay. Like pressing a flower. I thought maybe you upend it on the Xerox, whatever shape it takes is the poem. Oh, maybe that. Oh, I like that.

No, that sounds more like of a McSweeney's thing. Hey, Griffin, you're kind of getting the hang of it now. Yeah, I'm proud of you. You're a poet now, boy. When did you start plowshares? I didn't even know about it. Yeah, I was doing a weed in the 70s and eating the most delicious bowl of, not Feta Chini Alfredo, but in that family sort of a carbonara situation.

I let out a hearty burp. My friend Tim said, that's a poem. And so the rest is history, baby. Burp into this book. Quick. Yeah, I burped into the book. I burped all my secrets into it. Tim said, that's a poem.

Quick, slam the books. Slam the book shut before the burp poem gets away. And so that was how that worked. And there are people who are never going to listen to our show again because of this bit. Because they were, they're too afraid of how truthful it is. Like maybe this episode's a poem. I've been doing this for long enough now that I can sense these things. I feel like there are some people that have gone beyond mad and found emotions.

Beyond mad, which hopefully will be useful to them in their poetry. I've never thought of our podcast as us being the cinobytes from the Hellraiser movies, just like trying to make you experience new sort of by subjecting you to new sort of torturous body horrors by desecrating the things that you're passionate about. You can find new, you can transcend the base emotions into something more beautiful that you can then turn into poetry. Yes. Yes.

I'm only passionate about one thing. Do you all know what it is? Money. Money zone? Money. Yeah, it's money. It's money. It's the one thing is money.

This is the year that you could finally tackle your holiday shopping early. Guess what? You can just get everybody underpants and stuff. Okay. Yeah. Well, no, there's a reason because we're sponsored this week by Meondies. And Meondies uses the coveted micro modal fabric, which is three times softer than cotton. And let me tell y'all, if you like their underpants, you're going to love their lounge pants.

Yeah. I was wearing the lounge pants yesterday. My little baby boy grabbed like the cuff of the pant leg down at the bottom near my foot and just started playing with the micro modal fabric, just kind of stretching it and playing with it and having a great time, great for kids. Folks, let me tell you, these aren't pants to wear all the time. If you have things to do, don't put these pants on. Yes.

This is not working wear, folks. You're going to put these on and be like, I'm just going to stretch out here on the couch until Tuesday. What? I got fired from my job. You're so darn comfortable. And here's the thing. You can choose from four different cuts of underpants, all of which are available from

classic colors to adventurous prints. And the lounge pants, they come the ones I have are in this very fun black and red, like kind of very seasonal print that I really enjoy like a plaid. Mine are green and black. Oh, really? It's fun. Yeah, they're different. And speaking of prints, they'll be releasing a new print every Tuesday.

Speaking of prints, raspberry beret. Killer Shrek. So sick. And along with lounge pants, they got onesies. They got hoodies. They got t-shirts. I have a miandis t-shirt that is like one of my favorite because it feels like a hug. I've been wearing their hoodie since the weather changed here in Austin.

It's been nice, nice friend. They have a great offer for our listeners for any first time purchasers. When you purchase any miandis, you get 15% off and free shipping. It's a no-brainer. Get 15% off a pair of the most comfortable undies or whatever you will ever put on to get your 15% off your first pair, free shipping and 100% satisfaction guarantee. Go to miandis.com slash mybrother. That's miandis.com slash mybrother.

I want to tell you about Squarespace. If you've always wanted to make a website, but you thought it was for other people, point extras with tape on their glasses and pocket protectors or what have you, I have great news. Web design is for jocks now, thanks to Squarespace. Bringing the world of web design to the planet, lacrosse coaches and local tufts. You hear that Winklevoss twins? It's time for fucking revenge, dudes.

Yeah, dudes. Now even bros like yourself can make a website. If you're a bro- We've made the butt book. We are the Winklevoss twins. Didn't know how, but then Squarespace came up and high-fived us. Squarespace will let you turn your quality into a new website, blog or publish content, sell products and services of all kinds and so much more.

And they do it all with free and secure hosting, 24-7 award-winning customer support, analytics and built-in search engine optimization to help you grow in real time. And so much more. So please go to squarespace.com slash mybrother for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code MYBROTHER to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's my brother all on word. Hey, I got a Jumbo Trom here.

This one is for Zoe, Amy, Danny, Jude, Manny, Skye, Daniel, Noelle and Jess. And it's from Nico who says salutations. I'm sure you're wondering why I've gathered you all here today. It is important that I tell you that I am Nico and you are all my friends. The important ones clearly because you listened to this show. Zoe, one day I will get you to stop committing food crimes to the rest of you. It's 420 somewhere, so please 420 blaze it. For me, Jumbo Trom adjourned.

Love that. I love that. A lot of times we get letters and people say, I don't know when to stop listening to the Jumbo Trom. And this one had a little over and out on it. I think that Jumbo Trom was the poem. How about this next one then? Let's see about that.

Okay. I'll read it, I guess, because nobody else is doing it. This is for Perry. You intro'd it. It's for Perry Buto. Sorry if I fucked that up. It's from Mikayla Johnson Blanchard or Blanchard who says, Hey, specialty pizza.

I purchased this message to commemorate how far we've come since our days listening to Mbem-Bem and knitting on your bed. We don't like that show anymore, obviously. We've come way past it. It's really grown. We've grown and evolved and it's for we've put away our childish things. No, you're almost done with your masters and I'm finishing up my first quarter of grad school plus getting married.

I am thrilled that you continue to be an important person in my life and I hope hearing some love from these boys brightens your day. Looking forward to our next adventure. It's a sweet message. Sometimes we get stuff like this and I worry that we aren't rubbing enough love into it. We're just sort of reading. So like, I guess Perry, we love you? We love you.

Hi, I'm the JV Club podcast Janet Varney and I used to suffer from indecision. I couldn't choose between Star Wars and Star Trek, whether to call or text or the best way to cook my eggs. But now thanks to my weekly dose of We Got This on Maximum Fun, my decisions are made for me. Thanks, Mark and Hal. Warning, We Got This may cause shouting,

foam-throwing, the illusion that the hosts can hear you laughter on public transit and death. We got this with Mark and Hal. We know what's best. How about a next question? Before we do that, I have a special segment I'd like to introduce to you now. It's a new segment. It's a new festive segment.

A lot. There's a jingle I wrote for you. If I could just sing the jingle real quick. Okay, of course. Okay. Come and sit with me now in the candlelight. Yeah, this Christmas we're going to do right. Hang some lights on the tree.

Yeah, that's a Christmas to me. Put your arm around the fire. Yeah, I don't want any more knock. Yeah, you're calling me a liar. But I'm going to go out for a jog. That's a Christmas to me. You and me and her and a tree. Learning about birds and the bees.

That's a Christmas to me. So this is my new segment. That's a Christmas to me. And it's a segment where I'm going to read you three descriptions from Hallmark Christmas films. Two of them are going to be real films. And one of them is going to be a film that I have engineered. These are challenging questions that I don't want anybody to leap to snap decisions to.

I want you to really chew these over, okay? We have three films today. The first film is called Let It Snow. When Falcon Resorts acquires family owned Snow Valley Lodge from retiring owners Carla and Paul, driven executive Stephanie Beck must spend the week before Christmas in Maine, preparing a proposal on the property's renovations. Determined to impress Falcon's president, her detached father Ted, Stephanie reluctantly departs her warm Arizona home to immerse herself in the lodge's property

and decide how to change it to fit the hip young Falcon brand. While preparing to rebuild the Snow Valley Lodge from the ground up, Stephanie butts heads with her property guide Brady Lewis, Carla and Paul's son, who has decided to leave his family's business over creative differences with his dad. A self-defined Grinch, Stephanie begins her stay at Snow Valley Lodge immune to Christmas sentiment. But as the Lodge's festive traditions provide, the Christmas Stephanie never had growing up with her distant father. Stephanie finds herself enjoying every minute. It's a complicated professional's duties even further. The combative feeling she felt towards

Brady turned into a romantic one. The Stephanie's newfound Christmas spirit and unexpected holiday romance, she begins to question Falcon's overhaul. As her Christmas Eve deadline approaches, she's faced with the decision. She transformed the Lodge into a new winter hotspot or embraced tradition and let it snow. The latter one because it's the name of the movie. That's our first film. It's called Let It Snow. I want to get through our other two films. Their descriptions are slightly shorter, mercifully. These descriptions, by the way, are direct from the Hallmark Company's website. Yeah, but I didn't think you wrote these. Okay, thank you. This one's called Cast Away for Christmas.

When San Francisco... Well, they sit down to watch the Tom Hanks movie cast away. And you watch them watch the whole thing. It's awesome. Cast Away for Christmas. With San Francisco oil executive, Nick Sperling, comes to the remote Canadian hamlet of Cedarwood Island. He's only looking for one thing, the rumored oil deposit under Cedarwood's only tree farm slash bed and breakfast. In the hopes of endearing himself to its owner, single mob Lisa Craig, Nick pretends to be a bed and breakfast critic looking for Canada's most charming holiday escape.

When a snowstorm shuts down fairy service off the island, Nick finds himself stranded on what the natives jokingly call Christmas Island in honor of how the town goes all out for the holiday. Before long, Nick starts to doubt his plans to raise the farm in search of oil and starts to wonder if he could make a life with Lisa. But after she learns the truth, will she ever want to see him again? Is the truth that he's a ghost? No, the truth is that he's an oil executive, he pretended to be. Okay, last film. Christmas in Love. I can't believe one of these isn't real. I haven't even heard what this is.

Ellie Hartman is an aspiring crafter working in her small town's bakery, making famous Christmas cringles. When the new big city CEO Nick Carlingson visits the bakery, he arrives filled with modernization ideas destined to lay off many employees. During his visit, Ellie is to teach Nick how to make a cringle and determined to show him it's the people who make the business success, not machines. Nick meets more of the employees and townspeople, visits the food bank, and begins to see all the kindness that is shared, and he begins to soften. They're not convinced automation isn't better. Struggling with chasing her own entrepreneurial

dreams, Ellie begins to fall for Nick, but not before feeling betrayed when she inadvertently sees Nick's laptop filled with automation plans. When Nick finally tells the employees his future ideas for the company, Ellie must decide if she should trust him, but more importantly, whether to take a leap of faith in making her own dreams come true, and that's Christmas in Love. The three films again are Let It Snow, and that's about the woman who goes to the resort to find out how they do Christmas. Got to change it now. And knock it down. Castaway for Christmas is about an oil executive that goes to

Christmas Island to probably knock down the tree farm in order to build his oil thing, and Christmas in Love is about a guy who's going to go destroy the bakery to replace it with robots. That one has a Blade Runner vibe that I'm super into, by the way. Now, I do want to ask too, because I am not as familiar with the Hallmark Netflix original. Channel 312, Trav on Direct TV. Get there. Thank you. But did you specifically pick these three movies for the theme, or is it just a super common theme of like, person comes to town to destroy a small business? Oh no, Love Saved the Business.

This is Netflix's Christmas Inheritance too. It feels like some, what was the first, what was the ER movie for these that was just sort of then passed down through a game of Telephone and became all, and you know what? I'm talking about this, Justin, completely ignoring the fact that one of these is fake. One of these is you wrote. And I have to say Kudos. Kudos. Yes, it's a very realistic. I have to give half the credit to Sydney, who helped me, by the way, we cooked up our film in 10 minutes while she folded laundry and I kept the baby from killing herself. So it's like. Not the hardest. It's not the hardest.

Anything can be a urban person goes rural, romantic Christmas. Be careful. Learns that people are maybe worth those shits. Yeah. Yeah. There's, I think that that's definitely Travis Huston on one of the common themes in Hallmark Christmas movies. The three big ones, I would say, are big city person who fucking doesn't, has never heard of Christmas, never had it, somehow missed it. And then it goes to one small town where they're like, yeah, we got Christmas coming out of our ass here. Have a little bit extra Christmas. The second theme is white. The third theme is the like automation and preservation of business

in favor of like, like profits versus keeping jobs and, and, and. So literally saying like, this is more important than the money we would need to pay people who work here. Yeah. The people are what matters. I'm, I'm so worried about giving away anything. I know, I know, I know. I really hope Christmas and love is not the fake one because I feel like Jeff Beesboost could really. I have to say it's Christmas and love too. You do? Well, wait, no, no, I'm not saying that one's fake. No, I'm saying I don't want that to be fake. I think cast away for Christmas is for sure the fake one. I think it's Christmas and love. Justin. So what are our votes? Sorry, one more time.

I'm cast away for Christmas. Travis is Christmas and love. Christmas and love is the one with the cringles, right? Yeah. Okay. Then that's what I'm going with. As the fake one? Yes. All right. The winner of this round of, uh, uh, that's a Christmas to me is, uh, Griffin McElroy cast away for Christmas is a fake film that my wife and I came up with it to 45 today before we started recording. Holy shit. Thank you very much.

Yeah. That was good. I'm not saying it was fake because you gave yourself away. It just seemed like. I had to pick one. I had to pick one and it seemed like the oil was maybe. The one with cringles was real? Here's the wildest thing. If I may divert about Christmas and love real quick. So the CEO of the bakery company comes and he's the son of the current CEO and he's going to be the new CEO, right? He comes to the bakery company. This is where they bake all the things and he's from the home base in San Francisco. He is the son of the owner. Okay.

He shows up in this town of like where everybody loves Christmas and this woman bakes Christmas cringles, uh, shows up in the town and pretends he's not, but just pretends he's not that because in all of these films, the one thing that's very important is deceit. There's always deceit in these films is extremely important. This woman doesn't know what the son of the owner of her company looks like. She allows herself to be lied to for the entirety of the film about his identity. It is. It says absolute madness.

I am not as much of a business expert as I am a poetry expert. Is it common for a headquarters of what sounds to me like a single bakery? Yes. Yes. To be not in the same place as where the bakery is? I'm going to set up my office thousands of miles away from the only building that matters to my company. Yes.

Yes. Um, listen, we need to give thanks to Netflix for making bold films like a Christmas Prince that break the fucking mold. Like, uh, like fucking, uh, Christmas Chronicles, which is about a Santa who does fuck for sure. Exciting to watch that. I haven't watched Christmas Chronicles yet, but it is on my, uh, my 40 Christmas movie to do this. Yeah. Still looking for 10 more suggestions, by the way.

Can we do a Yahoo? Yeah, we've only answered one regular question this episode. Maybe we should do that first. You got it. I recently discovered that my landlord has a secret toilet hidden in my basement. I live in a house with an unfinished basement and there's a door down there that the landlord keeps locked and has told us this off limits. One day when I was in the basement, I noticed the door was unlocked.

So of course I took a peek inside was a toilet and a half used roll of toilet paper. I'm really not sure how to proceed from here. Call the cops. Call the, does he come to my house just to poop in my basement? Yes. What do I do? I'm not doing laundry. And suddenly I hear a flush and he comes out of this secret bathroom.

Should I be afraid? Should I tell him I've discovered his dirty little secret? Please help. That's from Bathroom Shy in Michigan. You can't tell him. He'll silence you. Yeah. Yeah.

If I had a toilet somewhere in the world that only I knew about, I would protect that with my life. Yeah. He will put you in the ground. No question. Holy shit. Have you guys ever thought about this? Just now.

The next I was reading it. No, listen. I put it in the question. Stop. Stop. Please stop and listen. Please stop and listen. There's not a toilet on the earth that only you have used.

There is not a toilet on the planet that exists that only knows your brand. Every toilet you have ever used, you may have been the first one to use it. And maybe in that moment you were the only, but that was not, it's not permanent. There's no, there are very few people aside from the mega rich, I assume, who just don't have their own toilet. And I think your landlord has that and knows that he is special because of it and has to keep it somewhere. Huh.

You got to call the police. They exist for this exact reason. 9-1-1, what's your emergency? Oh, listen, this is going to sound weird, but I found a toilet and we'll be right there. Every cop in the world is on the way. Listen, we're going to take good care of you. Don't panic, but get out of the house. Do you have a cupboard you can crawl into and get small?

Do you know, let me, let me get through this thought. Do you know how ragged your, your action has to be? That the first time that you move in with your new bride and you use the bathroom, she grabs you by the lapels as you come out and says, you look at me, Ralph Sperling, I'm not going to leave because I made a promise in front of the God and our failure. If you ever, ever do that in our home again, I, God, I need you to buy another house to put those in because they're not going to my house with my dad's ashes and all my different paintings

and my wedge wood and everything. You're not doing that in my home. We're going to have children here someday. You can't do that here. You're going to buy another house. This is an antique couch. Who's going to live there? I don't give a shit who lives there, Ralph.

Hopefully nobody for their sakes, but that is where you will put these crimes. You lock that shame in the basement. Can't even know you do it there. That's locked up. And then every year I could just come and brick over it, cast them on a lot of style. No big deal. That's completely fine. Once the toilet starts to melt from my leavings, I should just brick over the room.

But you know, that's probably what this is. It's just like, you know, there's, there is, for fact, bunkers. There was one planned or it was built in West Virginia, the Greenbrier for like, this is the case of nuclear attack. This is where we take people from the government. But once you know that location, like, well, we got to build another one. Like, I think that this is that. Like he has a secret turlet that if you let him know,

like your house is going to probably be gone tomorrow. Yeah. Or it dissolves from the stuff you do in it. And then you got to sell that house and buy a new house. Could we get an HGTV show out of this? And maybe you only get one episode a year. I'm thinking Flipper Plop. Okay.

Very good. I like that. I'm thinking Plopper, Plopperty Brother. What you should do is Flipper Plop Las Vegas to make people think that there's other ones that were very successful. So they should probably watch. Wow. This is a rough one.

I mean, just let your landlord have this. I mean, what my advice to you would be. If they'll cut you in on the action. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to let you have this secret. I don't know who you're keeping it from. I don't care.

I'm not paid to ask questions, but you are going to give me a key. It's going to be our little secret now. Yeah, that could work. I'm saying that there's another possibility here that we have looked at this as like a secret bathroom for your landlord. But what if when you tell your landlord like, what's the deal? He's like, you didn't use it. Did you, the last 10 people to use that toilet died in a horrific accident within 24 hours?

It's the ring. You got to get somebody else to sit on it. Can you leave a note in there that says I know? I mean, yeah. If you wanted to put everybody on blast, I think you could get, you'll need a 3D printer and a bunch of marbles, but you 3D print out something that looks like toilet paper and they reach over to get the scrape that they need and they realize it's not real. It's 3D printed and it looks really real.

And so they can't yell for help. And so they do that shameful walk that they do out into the basement. Well, what's that? The marbles are there and now you record and that's just for you. And then you never pay rent again. Never again. Do you pay rent? Jesus, that's right.

This is a good opportunity actually. You play this right. This is about as controlled as rent could get. You play this wrong and that's the ball game. Yeah, you'll be killed. Or they will. It's really important to play it right. There's a lot of ways that this could go bad.

Hey, I got a Yahoo here. I'd love to read. It's from Ava Willard. Sorry again, if I mispronounced that. It's from an anonymous Yahoo Answers user. I'm going to call Sperling who asks, is there a place where I can make my own sandwich? Not the house because if you say the house every year,

as funny as every Yahoo Answers user on this page. Travis, go ahead and say what you're going to say. No, go ahead and say what you're going to say. No, I was going to say I assume you mean like a restaurant. Yes, a restaurant where you can go and grab what you want. Nobody else has to touch it. I have eaten at Subway maybe twice since the day that I saw somebody cut their hand open while making me a sandwich.

I saw that and I said, I don't think I can come here as often as I do. This person wants a place where they want a place where they're in control. They want a Dugway for Dugs to get together and make their own damn sandwiches. Where they can be the sandwich artist. Exactly. Let me do the sandwiches like a paint by numbers place, like a wine and paint place. Just let me grab the meat with my own hand. My initial instinct to this was to say no, there are no restaurants

where you can make your own sandwich. And then it occurred to me, I've never asked. I think if I'm like, hey, just leave the pylons there on the bar and let me take a spin on this one. I'm something of a budding. I'm an outsider sandwich artist and I feel like I got a new style that could bring to it. I'm the e-comings of sandwich industry. When I was in high school, I was shown in a science class to film The Andromeda Strain,

the Michael Crichton adaptation, The Andromeda Strain. And there's a lot from that movie that's very like, it's a good flick. A lot of stuff that still stands out in my mind from that one time I watched it 13 years ago. And the thing that sticks out the most is when they're going into the compound, where they're going to study this virus that's ravaging the world, they have to pass through this chamber and they walk through this fluid that covers their legs and then there are these bright lights that flash up with this super bright, hot burst of heat that hits them very, very fast and hot.

And it burns off the top layer of their skin just instantly and painlessly so that they're fully, fully clean. And I'm going to need one of those in the entrance to every dugway if we're going to be handling big piles of lunch meats together. I'm going to need everybody to lose a layer and then go on. They'll have to be nude and they lose a layer of the skin and then you get your clothes back. And this is what the sandwich artists will be doing, is they'll be facilitating this process so we don't lose any jobs.

I like that part. As a concerned citizen, I love that we're not losing any American jobs. My favorite part is when we burn all the skin off so I don't have to touch anybody else's sin. I don't have to, somebody just came from their secret basement bathroom. I don't want to be the next one to make a roast beef. You know what I mean? Can we get a vending machine? Some sort of individually wrapped sort of slices.

Maybe there's other solutions other than burning all the skin. Here's the thing. I was going to give this a hard time of like, just make it at home. But I know, I realize, I know Griffin, I know. But then I also realized that there are restaurants that you go to where you buy an uncooked pizza to take it home and make it yourself. That's right, we discovered this terrifically. So this has to exist of like, here's the bread.

Here is, I don't know, different forms of greens. Here is some meat options and we'll look the other way. It's just the one you've made the most already of. Did that sentence get across the point I wanted? I'm not sure. A sandwich is, of all the things you've made for yourself already of. Sandwich is number one for sure. If I go to like a Korean barbecue place, it's exciting for me.

I'm preparing my own sort of meal experience. And it's exciting for me because I don't make Korean barbecue all the time. I'm still throwing down three, four sandwiches a week. And so I don't know that it's that it's exciting for me to do this. And maybe it's a bad idea. I know we don't usually put those up. Usually we're just putting up solid gold basketball shots, but this one seems like it may actually be quite bad.

I will say I'm afraid to dagger it at home. Oh God, that's what it is. But I could Dagwood somewhere where people might be like, I'm impressed, right? And like that, that's why I could see this being like, can you make a sandwich we've never seen before? Get your name on the wall, like with a photograph, that kind of thing I'd be down with.

That's, there's some dissonance there. If I see the Orange Cat Garfield or Travis's friend Dagwood make a tall sandwich and then eat it. Every time I see one of those on the printed page of my Sunday Funnies, I think, damn, that looks good. If I was confronted with a nine inch tall or bigger, a 14 inch tall ham sandwich that was just piles of meat, I would see that and say, that seems quite unappetizing.

That seems like a lot of ham to get through. The thing that's always bothered me about those cartoon strip sandwiches, by the way, there's always like a chicken leg or something on there. And there's a bone in there. There is a bone in that. I can't chomp through that. Maybe Garfield came in as a powerful jaw. What are you thinking?

And there's always like a toothpick with an olive on top. Yeah. You can't eat that toothpick. That's going to hurt your intestines. Not for cats. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Justin, Justin, you like sandwich? Yeah, I love a good sandwich.

I'm pretty much kind of just a meat and potatoes sort of guy. All right. Put meat and potatoes on your sandwich? I just kind of felt like you're letting me and Travis handle most of the legwork on this one. I didn't thought maybe you don't like a sandwich. I wrote like a third of the show earlier. So I was kind of toasting.

I heard that bit. I heard that bit. I was just toasting a little bit. Can maybe say like one, like contribute. Maybe like help, like build the bit like with one. I got a bit. So like if you weren't paying attention, I suggested like we burn everyone's skin off

who goes in. Travis was like, we can make tall sandwiches. So if you want to like get a handle on the ball, what would it say? Yeah, I got a bit that I've been working on. It's you know, I mean kind of lead up to it. Yeah, but just say, I'll be like, give me the rock. And Travis, you say like, here's the rock. Okay.

Give me the rock. Oh, here's the rock. Thanks for listening to our show this week. We hope you've enjoyed yourself. This is the end of the show that we've worked so hard on for you. There's a new episode of Till Death Do Us Blart, a podcast we create with Tim and Guy from The Worst Idea of All Time, which excitingly is heading into its fourth season.

You can hear all about that on this new episode of Till Death Do Us Blart. But if you've never listened, Blart's a death blart, as we've come to call it, is an annual review of Paul Blart, Mall Cop 2 hosted by us and Tim and Guy. And it is a show that will last forever because we have selected who will take our place if we are unable to fulfill our roles. And this is our fourth year watching it. And folks, it isn't getting better.

It is for me. The show's getting better. The movie's getting better for some of us. Our enjoyment of it is not. So find that wherever podcasts are right now. I will also say, well, you're going to be in Austin and Denver next week. So if you are going to be at those shows this week. This week, the current week you're hearing this.

If you're going to be at those shows, send your questions in ahead of time. But Austin or Denver, and just quick clarification, because I know we now do this in the audience portion. This is just for like that live first half where we read them, and you don't have to stand up and read it. Yes. So if you have one of those questions, email it to us with Austin or Denver in the subject line, depending on which show you're going to be at.

Yahoo's 2, please. So thanks to John Roderick and the Long Winters for the East 4 Theme Song. It's a departure off the album, putting the days to bed. It's a very, very good album and good dude. And also thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. You can go to maximumfun.org. Check out all the great shows there. Shows like Story Break and Switchblade Sisters and Jordan Jesse Go and so many more.

Maximum Fun.org. I want to do a quick plug. We just put up a bunch of new holiday merchandise in our store, mackleroymerch.com. We have ornaments for the Adventure Zone. My brother, my brother, me and Saul Bones. We have a What's Up You Cool Baby decal. Just went up. We have a new entry in our line of podcast merchandise.

It's a cross-stitch that says in this house we don't say happy holidays. We say podcasts. We have a joys candle nights pin. And of course all the normal great stuff that's in there. So please go to mackleroymerch.com and buy those things. That candle nights pin is only up for this month. So don't sleep. You only got a few more days.

Also just real quick. We've got a mailing list, a mailer that goes out. You can sign up for it at bit.ly slash mackleroymail. It is not a pyramid scheme. I think maybe that got printed in the times. I'm not sure where that's coming from, but that is incorrect. I got a yahoo here. This one was sent in by Sam left.

Thank you, Sam. It'll be our last yahoo of the show. So savor it. It's from yahoo answers user. My mouse cursor's gone. Where'd it go? Oh, it's hiding on the other monitor. You sneak thief.

It's there and something went wrong. I've not fuck it. They asked. Do ants pee in poo and how? My name is Justin Mackleroy. I'm Travis McGrath. I'm Griffin McGrath's where honey comes from. Even my brother, my brother and me kiss your dad.

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