Podcast: The Ride - L.A. County Fair with Eva Anderson and Amy Nicholson

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Strange foods packed with salt and sugar. Brain sloshing spin rides. And a cartoon animal mascot??? Have Eva and Amy brought the ultimate PTR episode topic? Bass Pro Shops is up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide  FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever. Dog. Warning, the following podcast may contain vanilla ice singing, dismissive brownie remarks, nameless and faceless judges, and famous pig name theft. All that plus Eva Anderson and Amy Nicholson return to talk about the L.A. County Fair on today's podcast, The Ride. Welcome to Podcast The Ride, the theme park podcast that always gets the blue ribbon for ignoring theme parks to talk about long dead character actors. I'm Scott Gardner. Jason Chardon, you laughed loudest, so I go to you first. I did laugh loudest. Hey, once again, rest in peace, Dabney Coleman. you know, we gotta give it up. If you don't, yeah, if you missed it, that was a second gate thing. If you missed the live

reaction to the death of Dabney Coleman, which occurred only many hours earlier, and directly in the middle of a sentence I was saying from Jason. About your loving family? Jason's like, whoa, whoa, we have to address something right now. Hang on, hang on. Dabney Coleman has died.

No, the castle's not on fire, don't worry about it. There's Mike Coleman. I mean, Mike Carzal, look what you got me doing now. I'm here, and I respectfully, I wait. If Larry Storch dies, I wait till a sentence is complete before I announce it. That's what I bring to the show. I'm like this rude man sitting next to me here, Jason.

People had to know many days from when it happened when we found out about right no same day i had just three minutes before gotten an la times alert and mike's like that happened 12 hours ago and i was like i can't control came out many days later you were breaking the news to no one unless unless there were people who missed the entire thing. I assume all of our listeners have Dabney Coleman death alerts ready to go. They want to know. Well, if they listen to this show, they also are interested in the alive status of over 90-year-old actors. So they should have an alert.

Yeah, and we do have a lot of those in play. What's that podcast you listen to? It's about theme parks and actors over the age of nine. Cutting off a young audience. That's a pass. Hey, today we are talking about the LA County Fair. This is exciting. This is fun.

And I was thinking how the fair is all about, you know, like the crazy indulgent foods and like here's the combo of burger with Krispy Kreme donuts. And that's in a way what we've got going on guest wise today is, you know, like the burger with Krispy Kreme donuts. Both elements great on their own. Perfect guests on their own together. Oh, my God. What a treat. Right. All right. Perfect. Perfect perfect everyone loved it great great what i'm saying is we got two great guests great separately on the show best pals together and i'm so so glad you guys came here together uh to talk

about this and your history with this uh one renowned film critic and the host of unspooled the other you know from all the best episodes of this show. It's Amy Nicholson and Eva Anderson. Hey! We're here! Yay! We're best friends! You know what this makes? I'm a donut and you're a Krispy Kreme donut and these guys are the three burger patties in between us.

Because it's triple! You're right! It's triple! Wow! Oh, what an honor. Jason's the middle patty. Okay! No further questions uh um so excited about this and to talk about both of your your rich history uh with this event and i don't look i don't want to tangent for too long i want to get to the fair but eva this is your beat and i feel like it needs to be discussed i'm starting to think copperfield's never gonna get to make the moon disappear oh you know i heard he was still so somebody wrote on your subreddit that he is still

advertising the moon disappearing from his show at the mgm yes while it's while it's going let's be clear we were all know, if you haven't heard, some things have been going on with him. Some terrible things have been going on. Some very atrocious things. Double digit allegations. You might say his good name is disappearing. I might say.

But he, the question is like, A, when will that show stop? because we've been discussing on a text thread how he's gonna they like he will be dragged out kicking and screaming so the technique and we're like all right what's the distance from the stage to the door and while the while the police are dragging me can i get out all the rest of my lines rapid fire so that technically counts as one performance and that still goes in the record book what happens to blue if he doesn't have a show to do what happens to musha k what happens to the monkeys that that paint your face what happens to the puppets and the ventriloquist dummies the rooms and rooms of puppets and we just realized while we were discussing this

mike that madam is in the museum dav David Copperfield owns a Madam puppet. Maybe the Madam? We're not sure. He also owns a lot of lamb chops. You said he had gotten a pile of lamb chops. You sent a video and then you said he has more lamb chops than this. Yes.

He has a room that's mostly lamb chops, including some giant lamb chops that were in uh that i think we're in macy's day parade whoa no part of me wants to see a big lamb chop a human a life-size lamb chop so yeah i don't think i i still believe he will make the moon disappear but now every day it feels like more of a threat oh Oh, yes. We talked about that. That he will like, all right, we're going to go through with these allegations. We're going to go through with whatever legal process. All right, fine.

Do you want the moon back or not? Yeah. I hope you liked your tides. And then he starts like, and then I'll make Idaho go too. Idaho will disappear as well. Do you want to keep asking questions about what I can make disappear? Right. If I can make the moon and you've seen over many keep asking questions about what I can make disappear? If I can make the moon, and you've seen over many specials what else I can make disappear, where does it stop?

What about you? Can I make you disappear? Yeah, this is making me very scared about the health and safety of the women who are testifying against him. That they'll all make it to court without disappearing. It's possible. We don't know supernaturally what he can do. Can he make the entire courtroom disappear? Can he make the city that the court is in disappear uh your honor the witness has been sawed in half but also this is just in the background so you know if he say does leave mgm that leaves ch Chris Angel as the reigning cool guy magician.

He wins. In Vegas, he does win. Copperfield's nightmare. And yet, a hero, a new, what do they say? A new hope? A new fighter has entered the arena. Because David Blaine is now doing shows periodically in Vegas. Yes.

What can you tell us about this? So this is a new, he's doing it, and there's, what is the deal with the residency? There's like three shows. He had three shows last month. He's doing three shows at the end of August, the best time to be in Vegas. And then he's doing three shows in December around New Year's. Okay. So it's very limited.

Yes. Exclusive. Exclusive. Very highly exclusive. It's the win. But I do have a friend that went and texted me immediately that I need to get there. I need to go. Oh boy.

So he said that David Blaine's disaffected, emotionless performance makes it incredible. Wow. Oh. So we have a new really listless magician named David in Vegas. Wow. Void filled immediately. Who wants to be cool?

Who's in the pussy posse? The hero has risen. Exactly. When we needed him the most. I'm not missing Copperfield at all now that I hear that. Yeah, I know. That's fine. He just needs blue. Well, he should just buy blue.

Or use magic to make blue where he is. Just point in the general direction of what part of town you think blue is in. Blue should just retire to the island. Blue. Is this okay? Yes. He's earned it.

Blue is in charge of the monkeys. This is yours now. Fetch me root beer. Underwater statue's mine. He inherits everything, I bet. David left everything to blue. The only one who showed me true love. None of my wives, none of my parents.

I found a quote from an interview. There's this dirty puppet ventriloquist, Otto and George, which is where the Madam Puppet video is from. But did you see the, it's an interview where Copperfield's like, you know who taught me about Aldo and George? Kevin Spacey.

And it was like, oh man, this is like 2009. It's all tying together. Like, were you guys on a plane when you had that conversation? Us and Diddy, you know. The boys. Wow. Oh my God.

So someone needs to save that madam puppet also. But I don't know. I'm not going to be the one to do it. And seven or eight lamb chops. And a bunch of very big lamb chops. Scoop up all the lamb chops you can find. Which might only be half of them. But just if you can get in there, grab as many lamb chops as you can and get out.

All right. Well, I just wanted to make sure we discussed where things were at. Because we were wondering if by the next time you were with us, if it would have happened. Yeah, since October, we've been having this conversation. And I think we'll check in every time, I think, no matter how worse and worse it gets. But to a more pleasant topic, let's talk about the fair. And I'm so glad you both brought this to us, I feel like we've talked about the fair and you participating in the fair and in the contest for a long time.

But what is the whole history here? Who does it start with, and how do you guys end up doing it together? This definitely started with Eva. Yeah. It was, like, 2007. I was dating a guy. We went to the fair together. And it was a very fun day.

My first time there. But I witnessed... We went to the Beer and Wine Pavilion. And tasted some beer. Ended up in a conversation with this old married couple from the Inland Empire. Whose names were Ronon and nancy who were competitive mead makers and they got into like the drama of the mead tournaments and i was like that's interesting and then i went to see the baked goods i overheard someone being

snarky about some of the cakes in there like saying something mean an old person saying something mean about something. And I was like, this is incredible. So the next year I entered, I made chocolate cookies with, I'd broken up with that boyfriend, but I was like, I am all in on the fair. I'm taking the fair. Wow. So I made these cookies with candied bacon on them and I needed a date to the fair. And I was just starting to hang out with you, Amy.

So it was one of our first like, I feel like solo hangs was that we went and ran around the fair together and I totally lost I entered the cookies and I did not make it in the cabinet I like belly flop spectacularly and that radicalized me to be honest because I thought chocolate with candied bacon was a cut above I thought chocolate with candied bacon was a cut above. I thought chocolate with candied bacon was really like pushing the limits of what baking could do. I was really proud of you. Oh, thank you. And so in your failure, I then became hooked, addicted, angry,

emotionally caught up in the drama of the baking cabinet. And I have been really, I've spent many years by your side rooting for you. The year that you added a lot of pretzels to your cookies and they got upset about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, i feel like we go a lot together as a team and have like for the last decade basically on and off geez this is beautiful i'm like true and like like rooting for each other supporting each other uh uh and getting like more and more fond of this place and like the the the odds and ends and like stray corners of it because i i would imagine because this is like a you know there's

2 000 things to do at this particular fair and like entire swaths of it you could miss very easily i'm sure oh yeah no and then on and off we've gone on off for the last 10 years i entered stuff sometimes Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you make it in the cabinet. Some days you get a blue ribbon. You know, every year it's a different story. It's you making your own L.A. County Fair story.

Wow. Wow. And I have liked going, you know, when I do go without you, like I will visit the pastry cabinet on years where you have done well or not. And I will send you pictures of me flipping off the winners if it has not been your year yes you always do that yeah it makes me so happy because i love being passionately angry about something like this i always wanted i was like the best way to experience this seems to be to have an emotional stake you should find what that stake is and then it becomes this whole giant 2000 thing becomes about you, about me. And it's my special thing.

And this is the dream is to get in the cabinet. I don't think I knew the cabinet aspect of it. Yeah. But I went to the fair yesterday as encouraged by you guys. And I took my son and I had a great time. And I'll factor into the discussion. But I don't think I knew that that the uh there's the initial competition but then you get to stay your your cookies cakes whatever it is stay in that cabinet for the run of the fair for more than a month wow

wow just rotting oh yeah there's some really moldy disgusting stuff in the cabinet like buttercream and fruit they're just not holding up. Yeah. Yeah. It's hot at the fair then it's a particularly like the way it's trapped in that like under the grand stands area and then a case within that. That's three levels of heat. Three levels and

they have a whole category called sugar art where people are making delicate filigreed sugar that just does not last ever. Like it immediately dissolves into a pile of food yeah there was i cannot figure out what was going on but there was one slice of cake that was so mangled this time around that i think a rat got into the cat that was the only way i could explain what had happened to it because it was like only like parts that were just missing oh you gotta see the rats you gotta see the fair you gotta get deep fried who are you you gotta meet the fair rats i mean eva

was actually really trying to get people involved in this rat conspiracy because we were standing next to an older couple and you you were telling them that you believed there was a rat in the cabinet and you were being really insistent about it i, the best thing to do in the culinary baking area is to engage with whoever is standing nearby. So sometimes you're like, hey, I won a prize. And an old lady gives you a mean girl look to her husband like a bitch

from seventh grade. Or sometimes they drag you over and they're like, look at these disgusting caramels. And you don't know this person and you don't care but they're just like, you're not supposed to wrap them. He always wraps his caramels. It's like just weird stuff always happening in that. But you have to talk to strangers to engage with it.

We also love the Culinary Arts Pavilion because it has the greatest competition of the fair, tablescaping. I don't know if you admire tablescaping. I found tablescaping. As soon as i saw this area i was like have we talked about this before and and i'm also taking in like this has to be any of the thing i and the tablescaping and and doors semi-related with doors yeah doors i was yes competitive in that case competitive decoration of doors and i was really blown back by the phrase with a top a qr code vote for your favorite door it's not a phrase i expected to see that day also the fact

that all these these door scaping and table scaping the judges you can read the judges comments and they can be very very nasty but my favorite was on one of the doors this time someone had stretched fabric to cover the entire door and one of the comments was like the door is no longer functioning as a door they got points offered making it no longer a door i'm finding door scaping like fascinating because it's new right this is only the second year that they've had doorscaping. Oh, really? Yeah, doorscaping is brand new.

And when you think about it, I grew up in the Texas suburbs. There were definitely women who got into wreaths, Easter-y door frames. But now, when you watch an art develop, which is what we're doing with doorscaping, brand new, second year, you're watching people push the frontier of what a door is. Because I feel like last year, it was a lot of holiday doors,'re kind of basic like oh it's christmas oh hi oh it's memorial day okay this year somebody had an indoor door where it was like a door representing being inside a teenage girl's bedroom oh right yes i saw that flip where you're like oh this is a world opening up like it's literally a door into a new area of competition you can imagine

any door now in year two they flipped the entire thing the entire system of doors on its head and honestly a really spectacular twilight zone door oh where they made it into the door from the opening to the twilight zone with all the stuff around a big stand-up broad serling and everything on it is black and white, including the big eyeball. Yeah. But is that maybe like IP? Is that frowned upon? Or could you make a Marvel Comics door?

Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. They're fine with that. There's Harry Potter tables every year. Okay. Yeah. And we're very into competition. And we have, I would say, lamented how IP has invaded the competition space.

Poododle grooming competitions another thing really into they're not at the fair that maybe someday yeah but we would be so good to do creative dog styling at the fair but we've watched like ip enter the poodle grooming space which has been kind of a bummer it used to just be like i'm a dog that looks like a carousel horse and now it's like i am all the characters in moana and it's tacky here. Oh yeah, sure. I went, I went one year for that. And yeah, the, and that one,

the winner was like, it's Spider-Man and who's Venom. Yes. Yeah. But then the, how it was like the, the mouth of Venom wasn't the mouth of the day. It was like a dog.

It was like the teeth were on. Was it the symbiote coming off of Spider-Man, the alien entity, Jason, you know what I'm talking about? It was a little more traditional. The Venom symbiote tries to off of Spider-Man, the alien entity, Jason? You know what I'm talking about. I think it was a little more traditional. Because sometimes when the Venom symbiote tries to get off Spider-Man, he has his own mouth sort of jutting off of a head. So perhaps that's what it was.

It was his neck was his mouth, his wide mouth, his teeth. But we will get in fights with judges. Oh, yeah. We really hate the judges at the Poodle Grim. Yeah, we'll scream at them and then we'll get mad about the wrong table winning. Because there's a lot of, you know, sucking up to your audience that I think happens in these kind of competitions. Yeah, condescension. Yeah, a lot of like, salute the troops tablescaping.

That happened this year. Both, yes, door and tablescaping. I noticed that. And there was one, and forgive me, I don't want to be stealing valor, but I think the one that I was, I swear when I was looking at the photo later, I saw like a little swirl on the forehead of the soldier. Picture it, it was like a little, I mean, tablescape,

there might be a bigger explanation required, but it's like, all right, you set a table for some kind of theme, and the competition is not, it's like all right you set a table for some kind of theme and the competition is not it's it's the plates that you choose and the forks and knives that you choose but then also like the menu of what's being served and the backdrop and then other decorations so in this case it's like welcome home we are proud of you over red white and blue and then photos of the returning soldier hugging his children but i swear i saw a little swirly on his forehead that indicates the watermark of a stock photo website

where it was not. I really think so. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I know what I saw in the photo. I think I'm looking at like a, it's a cloud something or other. I've seen this swirl before. And if that's the case,

then I don't know if it won or anything, but like I'd rather go give it to the fun Halloween door than be guilted into it by a troop who is not the- Properly licensed. Yes, yeah, yeah, yes. A troop whose image was not paid for to be part of this competition.

Don't you sit with your son though and look at uh when you eat dinner you look at framed photos of you and your son yeah always yes of course that are on the table where you're eating he's in it fine but mainly me looking sharp handsome doing my duty uh you know it's a bonus if he's in it but yeah me is the main thing and it's on the table yeah yeah yes while we eat. Yeah, yeah. I know you need to look at your food

to make sure that you're properly getting your food. But when you're not reaching for your peas, eyes on me. Jason has dinner with that photo of him in a sailor suit on the kitchen table. I tell him that he is, and then we can start on the appetizers. The other aspect of that door also,

and this, you know, I'm not, I don't really come from a military tradition. I'm not in a military family. Maybe this is how it is. I'm left to assume that if you're a soldier, then you want to eat dinner next to a framed photo of a bald eagle really close up, staring right down the barrel of the lens,

angrily, A mad bald eagle. A terrifyingly powerful bird. I believe the table that won this year is like a really spectacular, nice midsummer table. Didn't it win? I had some objections with the nice midsummer table, where the whole center of the table was just a huge floral display. You know, kind of like you just took a wedge out of Florence Pugh's costume and put it there to me I felt like there wasn't any room to eat yeah you know I was like expecting them to take some points off but they did put ribbons around the table legs which I thought was beautiful and I like the Edward Gorey table which was the like masterpiece

mystery table okay that had all the characters from the opening of mystery i had to i had to really like divide luckily my son was eating churros during all this but i'm like as soon as these churros are up he's not gonna have the patience for the table scaping contest so i was taking in what i could but i knew i had a ticking clock which was uh you know cinnamon and powdered sugar giant I did really enjoy getting to see this I feel like you know I mean we're looking at like theming and it's if this show is about theming you know this is just some good just like winnowed down theming let's take a table and uh just with a table how can we transport you into another world and my favorite thing was that this table competition invented the idea of summerween a summer halloween what i mean maybe that exists outside of this but

i've never heard of summerween before and i now want to host my own summerween party because it was like i mean the detail i love the most was like here's the grill with cobwebs all over it and then there's burger patties and then melted cheese on top but they made jack-o-lantern they made a jack-o-lantern smile in the cheese oh okay that's great I want to make

haunted hamburgers at my summer ween party I thought that one was wonderful and it didn't score very well and I was really upset about it I thought it was because it had a very sticking up for kind of sexy looking Frankenstein head taking up a lot of the table. It did, and he was really sexy. He seemed weirdly aroused. Wait, the head seemed aroused?

Yeah, he was a papier-mâché head that just had the wrong expression for a Frankenstein. He was like, ooh, is that one? He was like, hey, ladies. Okay, it was more like... He was like Austin Butler Frankenstein. He did was it like, he was like, ooh, like, is that one? He's like, hey, ladies. Okay, it was more like. He was like Austin Butler Frankenstein. Oh. He did look like Austin Butler. Yeah, he looked too much like Austin Butler. Austin Butler does seem like he's always aroused.

Yeah, he does. Yeah, no, I'm not joking. The Jacob O'Lourde Frankenstein. Yeah. Like, somebody who just got too much testosterone. Right, right, right. And his long and stretch. The subtext of these actors.

They just, they're, every second they're on frame, they're rock hard. Yeah. That's how they get the performance. They just, every second they're on frame, they're rock hard. Yeah. That's how they get the performance. They just have to shoot around. Who else is going to play Elvis? But then there was a table that tried to add like a specific erotic element. Like it added storytelling. For me, I think the first time I'd seen storytelling at a tablescaping competition.

The text chain? The text chain. There was one, it was like a couple who were sitting down at an Italian restaurant. That was the idea you were getting. And the front of the tablescaping was like a couple who were sitting down at an Italian restaurant. That was the idea you were getting. And the front of the table escaping had like a brick wall. And on the brick wall, you could see the text of the couple like arranging the meetup. You know, like, oh, we're going to go. We're going to get some spaghetti.

Oh, it's going to be great. But when you walked behind the table, which is a space that I don't think they've ever used. I've never seen theming behind the table before. When you walk behind the table on the backside of the brick wall, the guy was cheating on his girlfriend by texting somebody else and saying he can't wait to meet up with her after dinner. Whoa. Did you just have a sense there was more story back there

or did anything point the way to it? How'd you know? I just I'm a curious person. I'm gonna look at every angle of the table. Wow. That's so great. Wow. All of these, geez, these art forms that presumably our listeners have just heard about for the first time tablescaping and doorscaping boundaries are being pushed

instantly in this fledgling new art i i learned about tablescaping i think a few years ago from eva's posts like from instagram stories and i kind of was able to suss out what it was and i'm like there has got to be a whole subculture and competitiveness oh yeah and like a whole world of this and and doorscaping decorating doors does make me think of besides like christmas and halloween i do think of people who are really excited and doing a big like Disney family vacation if you stay at the Disney hotels you will often see a decorated door

same on cruise ships people like go all out decorate their own hotel door oh yes it's like dorm rooms right like when I was in the college dorm room they let us paint them and i painted giant carrots all over mine for some reason oh you're so random it's like the simpsons curtains that's what it seems like oh yeah don't they have

don't they have carrots on their curtains i think that's right yeah when you're like when you're talking about um any of these contests how in the shit are you as far as knowing who the judges are? Not at all. Not at all, yeah. Very surface level. We have no idea who they are. And I don't recognize names year to year from people that enter. We should.

It'd be good to really get specific about our competition. Yeah, because we know the dog groomers. We have favorites and most hated dog groomers. Yeah, we love Angela Kumpke. She's the best. Yeah. We love Angela. We're in Angela's stance.

So you're in the shit when it comes to dog contest. Yeah. Okay. Cause there've been times when I'll like talk to you about something and you'd be like, I can't like you do. You have like a limit usually for like, I already have like five things I'm in the shit on and I have to cut it off. Is this about wrestling?

Well, wrestling happened but it also happened when we were at Breakfast Club or something. I think of a similar thing where I asked if you were going to get involved

and you're like, I can't. I can't go deeper. Yeah, exactly. You would put the wall up there. Yeah. Getting more into Breakfast Club. Right.

Which is a whole thing. Which is a Los Angeles club. Did you go to in Burbank that Bob Gurr is there? Yeah, Los Feliz. Los Feliz, yeah. Okay. We became members last year. They make you put your hand in a fried egg. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los Angeles Club. The Los an elk's lodge kind of thing that anyone can go to. Yes.

And we want Jason to be involved. We want you to just be in it already. You should be the president. We should usually be the president. Oh, okay. You don't want to watch

the steps of him engaging with it. You just want it to have happened. I want to be the president tomorrow. It's turning 100 next year, so I feel like it's a good time to get in. Oh, okay.

Yeah. And look, you have to get up pretty early, but it's breakfast. You get sausage, you get bacon. You get some sort of croissant bread pudding usually. Well, now you're sticking my leg. I love variations

of bread pudding. You could probably work something out where you put a cot in the building and just sleep there the night before. Is there any way to... It happens every week, is that correct? It's every Wednesday. Every Wednesday. At seven in the morning.

Between seven and nine. Yeah, but is there like a 10 o'clock Wednesdays, third Wednesday of the month? No. This is one of the things that you'll try to institute. Are we not all tired of these early hours? Everyone says, no, we're old. We love it.

We love it. This is perfect. Oh, man. Everyone except even amy are old with actually with that and the fair do you feel like you are like some of the only people taking the torch generationally on some of these areas um not so much with the fair but i'm always surprised that we never run into anybody we know there. Because it's really close and it's so fun. And I have never, ever run into any acquaintance there, ever. And I find that just bizarre. I love my friends, but it makes me a little mad at them.

Like, what are you doing with your life that's better than this? Yeah. I saw pictures over the weekend. Some people I went to college with were there. Oh, really? I think one of them got a ribbon in cross-stitching. What? I gotta look it up.

Do you have another friend that's entering? And then last year, the other thing we're not even talking about is the entertainment possibilities. Last year, Amy and I went, and we saw Vanilla Ice at the fair. On top of everything else. Oh, this was where Vanilla Ice happened.

Right. I remember you talking about Vanilla Ice. Doesn't he, he like stands on a box. That's the one thing in my head about it. He sings No Woman, No Cry. But he also wrapped himself in the American flag because I think he knew his audience. He also was just joined on stage with like everybody on the planet. He had all Ninja Turtles come out.

They came out really dramatically to do the Ninja Rap with him. He just like brings good Ninja Turtle suits with him. Yeah, they came out like one at a time and got behind mics to dance. But there was also a giant polar bear and a clown. A guy in a reflective silver suit. Yeah, like a disco ball guy. Yeah, he also, eight months later, was performing at Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago.

On New Year's Eve. Hopefully doing the exact same set. Yeah, I was wondering, did the turtle costumes make it to the Mar-a-Lago show? I don't know. I would love to be able to talk to somebody that was there, but they probably... And doesn't he do unpleasant versions of all of his songs, too? Like, their worst versions? Oh, yeah.

He does a Rob Van Winkle, like, heavy metal version of some of them. Oh, he does the Hard to Swallow era? He does a Hard to Swallow set? Well, he thinks that was, like, when he does the hard to swallow era he does a hard to swallow set well he he thinks that's was like when he was the most sexy and cool so he definitely dresses like hard to swallow oh yeah come on the most when he was the most sexy and cool is when he had white guy dreads obviously when he had like a chronic era way after all that that music was popular. Did he arouse a Frankenstein of white guy dreads? He should have. Oh, okay.

But you can see all sorts of tribute bands. You can see Vanilla Ice. When we saw Vanilla Ice, it was like with Tone Loke and Young MC. All for One. Do you remember All for One came out? They started with the music from Thus Spake Zaruthra. Am I saying that right? Oh, yeah.

Dun, dun, dun, dun. Like real dramatic. Oh, man. Tone Loke was great. I loved the 90s tour. And then also because Coolio was on it for a long time, Fidel did sing Gangsta's Paradise himself. He did.

Which is, nobody wanted that from him. But it did sort of descend into chaos because at one point tone loke had started it he started inviting the sexy women of the audience on stage with him during wild thing and then a lot of them just got on and never left and were there pretty much throughout the entire rest of the show and by the time the end yeah when vanilla ice finally came out like I think the last 20 minutes of that show was Vanilla Ice on stage with, like, all the Ninja Turtles, the Polar Bear, the Clown, the disco singer, the DJ was dressed like Bruce Lee,

and then all of his kids, and then everybody else's kids, and then all of these women, and it was, like, 50 people, and they were just, he was out of songs by this point, and he was just chanting, ice, ice, ice.

Because he was at still. still that was not it wasn't the end of ice ice baby he's just doing it all right now it's just let's just go back to basics no woman no cry he couldn't hit any of the good notes in that and then he just was yelling ice as the place slowly quietly cleared out having seen this is the seventh act you're probably yeah you're worn out. If you aren't closing with the hit, don't just shout your name at me. He was also going like, things were better in the 90s, weren't they? People didn't have phones.

Let's give it up for the cops. He was trying out all these weird kind of cheer lines. Cops had their own show back then, remember? They made that go away. Everything I ever loved has been taken away from me. Whose fault is that? Not mine. I did everything right.

You had sex with Madonna. Suge Knight dinkled me out of a window. It's PC culture that caused me to stop having sex with Madonna. She'd be down. I know she'd be down. Oh man. I also went to, so my, my previous experience,

I, I had gone, I went in 2017 and I did some, it was somewhat to see the fair cause I'd never done it. And I had a decent enough time, but it was also kind of the prelude to a concert, which a very like yeah we got nothing to do why not try this which was boys to men and baby face oh that's um yeah we were we were excited about it but like it had no particular affinity for either and just thought maybe this this will be fun um then baby face is

opening act this is one of the 10 best concerts i've ever been to oh really i never had any feelings about baby face like producer and he's always on the grammys and his that's why his 90s hits were kind of kind of boring you know like there's like adult contemporary kind of like will i like this it was so fucking good it was the most energetic just juiced upset where like okay i don't know any of these songs, like whatever songs from Boomerang or whatever, but they're the best. They are all awesome. And he did this medley of all the songs that he wrote for other artists that took a half hour. It was so long. And by the end, you're like, this was all you. I didn't know any of them, which I'm trying to remember the,

uh, uh, all the Bobby Brown hits every little little step tevin campbell can we talk rock steady by the whispers then i'll make love to you and end of the road by boys to men who are coming on after this he does them already yeah he sings them yes yeah yeah and so good like absolutely as good as they're gonna do it by the end of that medley he's up in the audience one person not four he's like i'll show you guys yeah yeah yes um why should i wait in here i think they're down to three i think somebody left so it's so you guys you guys three boys i think it's been that way for a while i don't think they replaced the fourth um is he replaceable uh yeah yes um why bother but uh by the end of it he's up in the grandstands which it is like where you watch horse races also so he's climbing stairs he's going way the hell up there his shirt comes off

by the i really at the end of this i'm like babyface is god and i've listened to him ever since he had this old group called the deal that's fucking great i didn't know any of those songs um but anyway it like it wore us out so much we were so spent and we're like in the like in a good way in the best way it felt like babyface had fucked us like we had personally been fucked by babyface and we felt great about it and it was on and it was like all right do you want to watch boys to me yeah maybe and we got one song in and we're like they don't have they don't have what babyface had we got i don't have the baby face gave us three concerts in one why do and we just we just filed out of there we're just we're fine that's great yeah yeah yeah so i i had that

coming into this that like truly one of the best the most surprising great concert i've been to uh came from this but it just had not been begged to the fair for whatever reason i guess covid being one of them. But now I got to do it with a kiddo, which was great, which thank you both for inspiring that. That was wonderful. Let me say this though,

just early on, because if you're like in terms, we definitely had a good time more than we didn't. But I did get in there there parked kind of hot on a weekend afternoon get into like the main midway like the fun zone would i be crazy to walk in and think oh my god this is very stressful and very crap am i crazy like are you if i say that are you like oh oh, Scott, you Scrooge.

No, weekends are really crowded, yeah. And all the cool guys have big stuffed animals on their back, and it's really hard to walk. And people are eating 24 inches of pork on a stick, which is basically a weapon. There can be a very long line for a beer. Yeah, imposing lines for everything. And I'm probably the least crowd amenable

of the three of us, at least. Mike, your crowd tolerance is... It's not even tolerance. I think you prefer being in a crowd. I'm uncomfortable here. Only not enough people. Yeah, no, I'm okay with crowds.

I'm tall, too, though. That's probably part of it. I can see for miles, you know? So it's part, but also, yeah, Jason and I both, we like lines fine. I don't know about crowds, but there's more of a comfortability, I would say. Sure, sure.

If there's an option to go on a weekday, I would recommend a weekday fair trip. Because it usually runs Thursday through Sundays. I think so, yeah. And by the way, as you're hearing this, if you're in LA or not in LA, you can still go to the fair, I believe. But it would have to be a weekend, right? Given when this is coming out. Yeah, I think so. So now that we've said that.

The dates this year were May 3rd through May 27th. So you still have a little bit of time. All right. Yeah. Still worth going. We went on a Sunday. We went on Mother's Day. It was great. It was absolutely wonderful. There are people winning prizes for their time. Still worth going. We went on a Sunday. We went on Mother's Day. It was great.

It was absolutely wonderful. There are people winning prizes for their moms. Oh, yeah. Wow. Can I just confirm, are you both blue ribbon winners? Oh, yes. Let's get into that. What's this?

Yeah, because I wanted to get the terminology. I didn't want to insult you. I wanted to get the terminology right, because I feel like I've seen pictures of your cookies. The terminology. You want a blue ribbon for your bunts, right? I want a blue ribbon for one for the lemon bunt cake and one for some chocolate chip cookies.

2019. Great. Do you change it up based on, do you ever feel like you see an opening? Did you go like in a previous year and see some real shitty bunt cake and think maybe i can take it there yeah i was all bunts all the time and then i started like just i got blue ribbon i got third

place which is red and then i got pink ribbon which is fifth place and then i was like well i need second place and that's a really hard thing to aim for and then i was like and then i started just like just not getting in the cabinet every year and these ugly bunts did and i was like, and then I started just like, just not getting in the cabinet every year. And these ugly bunts did. And I was like, I'm out. I'm making something else. So I started making other stuff then. Wow. You did get your second place for sugar cookie last year.

Yeah. So now I've completed everything. I've got all the ribbons. You got every place? I don't know where they are, but I did get all the places. And then fifth, which is insulting, which is they just don't give me anything. Don't say I got pink ribbon. That's not real.

What are the, what is the ranking of the colors of ribbons? Blue is the best? Is that right? I think actually it's blue, red, white. Isn't that it? Yeah, it's blue, red, white. I mean, they say that they judge everything based on what they call the Danish system, which is the Danish system of judging is they say that they're not judging you against your competition.

They say that they're judging you against the best execution of the effort that you are trying okay you know so they're judging you against your own limits i guess which when when i read that i was like oh that's basically how i'm a movie critic you know it's how i like i review a movie as to well you know i'm judging garfield against garfield and not garfield against el topo but like but boy that would be an article to read. But also, I don't really believe them because at the end of the day, they are doing the American thing

where if you really believe in Danish system of judging, everybody gets a blue ribbon if they do a good job. And here there is a winner and a loser. Yes, and there's also best in class. So in order to talk about this any further, I think we need to change topics a little bit. Sure, yes. To talk about, so further i think we need to change topics a little bit sure yeah talk about

so two two or three years ago the first you know it was two years ago first uh post pandemic fair i went um i did not ribbon that year well you did not make it in the cabinet it was another bunt cake which i shouldn't have done i knew my my limits but i do want to say really briefly they don't tell you how you did you have to go to the fair and look for yourself and that's when you find out oh really or somebody else would go and take a picture and send it to you yeah they don't contact you no um and then after the fair is over you get a check in the mail for around 25 if you got you get a little money for it that's nice but okay um so i it was one year it was a year amy that you left your tickets at home and you had to go back home that was such a bad and so i was waiting for like a couple hours for you and adam to show it had to be physical

tickets well because i like to go and get my tickets at superior grocers because they're cheaper and you can get this like ride pass where instead of buying individual tickets you can just be like i get 12 rides for 40 bucks flat and i prefer thinking that way it's easier for me than counting out tickets and amy's a rides girl she loves to do all the rides okay yeah and i i'm sorry to say i have to report that i went on no rides because i have a four-year-old who's uh startled by any ride at this point so could he go in the haunted house or anything like that the little like we didn't try yeah he go in the haunted house or anything like that? We didn't try. He's in a very not trying phase at the moment.

Okay, so I'm... It was like five hours of solo ride, fair time for me while you had your whole adventure. Yeah, because we basically got to the fair. She got all the way to Pomona and then had to go back to Koreatown and then come back to Pomona and then she couldn't find parking.

So I was just wandering areas of the fair I had never been before. And at this point, I've been going for like 10 years on and off. And I round a corner and I spot a costumed character, a walk around character I'd never seen before. Yeah. I was like, who is this? And he's just waving. He's in a little weird corner kind of by the animal competitions.

And he's in a little suit and he's a pig. And I asked his handler, like, who is this? And he was like, this is Thummer. Thummer. And that's how we met Thummer. Now, I want to say, Thummer, I think, has been looming for a while. I feel like you may have even pitched some kind of episode that isn't even about the fair, that is about Thummer. Yeah.

So this, I guess, is also the secret surprise Thummer episode. And I would encourage the listeners to Google Thummer, L.A. County. And to be clear, there's no b in there it's not thumb thumber no uh it's it's thummer and you will see a very dapper pig who i guess sometimes you'll see him in current mascot mode but probably like the the classic version of thummer seems to be like original kind of 40s era hobo Hobo. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Which like what else about what's like what are the primary

facets of Thummer? Thummer's yellow weirdly. Not pink. He carries a suitcase which could contain I don't know money, bribes. Brushes. Yeah. It's suspicious. Yeah. What are door to door salesmen? I don't know.es. Brushes. Yeah, it's suspicious. Yeah, what are door-to-door salesmen?

I don't know. Yeah, combs, harmonicas. What would you sell if you were an industrious guy in 51? He's dressed like Robert Mitchum from Night of the Hunter, basically. Like a weird traveling or like, yeah. Orange vest. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Yeah, a yeah a case he's like he's on the go say fella i gotta i got a tail for you and so he was originally made as the mascot for the original

fair um and he uh was just kind of ripped off of a pig iron mascot because the guy had already drawn this pig for a pig iron company because the guy had already drawn this pig for a pig iron company and they're like here just take this as the mascot and he was hitchhiking because they didn't want too many people to come and fill up the parking lot so they were encouraging people to hitchhike to the fair this was about this was they wanted hitchhiking to happen yeah they were like yes share a car wow and it's it's also it's hard to convey the hitchhiking when you don't have a thumb which ironically and and maybe we need to get into that too what does the name isn't about thumb or is it it is it is and is it about hitch is he's thumbing

a ride so that's why he's thumber well it wasn't what his name was originally though guys you saw his original name was porky for years he was porky pig and he looks almost hiking pig porky the hitchhiking pig a pig that like this modeled almost exactly the same as porky pig yeah and this is the same shoes they both wear kind of like cloven hoof slippers. Oh, he has the same face. They're both fancy pigs, professional pigs. And this is in the 40s, right? So Porky's around. They can't deny. We know Porky.

We know Porky more than ever. He was a decade in. They were like, we're going to call this Porky looking pig, Porky Pig. Which is sort of like today, what's your snowman, Olaf? Like it's a recent. Yeah. Yeah. So Warner Brothers lets him go for a couple years

and then they're just like, no, stop it. You can't just steal Porky Pig. But they had made so much merchandise with him on it with the name porky oh i saw that they they were promoting the fair with napkins that were distributed to restaurants and bars across the city and they'd already printed up and sent out a million napkins even knowing that the copyright was shaky so what are we gonna do not to have the napkins napkins are gone that ship has sailed um but yeah they just had like oh here i'm pulling up this article really quick so um yeah they they

were like real quick we got to change this name uh we're in trouble with the brothers warner so they uh they did a quick, name the pig contest. So people voted and were like, Thummer. Thummer. This is why we live in a democracy. You get the best results. Has there ever been a name this thing contest where the good name was chosen? Bodie McBoatface.

That's your idea of the best version? Yeah. Bodie McBoatface and the I Voted sticker are the only two times, like, the good thing one, I think. Oh, the grotesque I Voted sticker. Yeah. What's the story of the I Voted sticker? Just a kid.

It's just like, they were like, make it our local vote stickers for I Voted. And just one kid just drew, like, that screaming head that says I Voted that's, like, dripping color. Jason's finding it. Yeah. It's like a color jason's finding it yeah it's like a little monster head okay oh okay so the year though they're like we have to change this but yeah this is from the quote from this article from the daily bulletin some 100,000 decals with

the character were distributed and uh so we're 500,000 attractive four-color cocktail napkins so that's probably how the napkin ended up at Warner Brothers. Instead, they were like, what the hell is this? That's probably because they were trying to get the word out. Because they advertise so well. They're at the smokehouse. Yeah, they're at the smokehouse. So, Scott, here's the I Voted.

Oh. They're calling it a spider crab. A kid drew that. I like it. Everyone voted on it, and then it became the I voted sticker for some city. That's great. I love it. So they changed it really quick to Thummer, but still for the next year, some 90,000 Thummer

buttons were distributed to children, but like Porky, but still a million napkins of Porky were still in circulation. Come see Porky. Porky the pig who you can only see by buying tickets to the fair. And Jack Warner himself was staring at this. I can give you this napkin. I need to spill a little booze on it first so it covers up the name. Let's just melt that away.

So then in 1981, thummers around then in 1981 uh a young pig was donated to the fair ceo ralph hines who spontaneously named the pig thummer said he represent the spirit of the fair soon it became clear that the pig was a she not a he and was pregnant in response the fair's mascot was made a female and named mrs thummer mrs thummer yeah so they just they made her a pregnant female pig this is a real problem this is definitely not an invented problem the real pig is female what else what other choice do we have we are a livestock fair where everybody coming will learn how to sex a pig pretty quickly we have a huge pig display i'm sure they're paying a lot of attention.

So then they, three years later, were like, what were we thinking? And they just went back to original Thummer. But then they were like, we should change. He looks too old-timey. So they made him a farmer. They gave him overalls. So he looked like Whittles.

Yeah. Not very far. And everyone hated that, too. So they had to turn him back into a weird traveling con man they did a competition of which did you like better city thummer country thummer right and city won by a lot which is weird because it's a fair and he's a pig in front but everybody vastly people preferred fancy thummer yeah i guess it makes sense now that but now he's got this kind of like dumb it's almost like you know bad latter day vanilla ice look he's got like this bucket hat that's what

they're pushing lately which i'm not like we've gotten away from maybe just no one's paying attention anymore and we're allowing base thummer to just have this kind of they should dumb red bucket what does he look who who dresses like this? Smash Mouth Guy? What? Rest in peace, Smash Mouth Guy. Who's like a current red bucket hat wearer? Well, he looks like one of the CG chipmunks. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. When they're like cool.

Yeah, he has too much detail now. He's got freckles and too much shading. I don't know how I feel about this kind of detailed Thum. He's like, I don't know. He's like a pet boy or so. He's like meant to kind of stay 40s forever. But Eva,

I feel like when you saw Thum for the first time, that one year at the festival, it was kind of like that moment in Spider-Man where he sees Venom and you're just like, that's evil me. This is like the creature that I will hate. Like you just have hated this animal on sight. I hate Thummer. Yeah yeah i wasn't clear on this i didn't know your the opinion i

find him to be loathsome i i mean the comparison to knight of the hunter like that's not a guy you want to be yeah and the fact that he's just like a series of rip, he's a ripoff, was a ripoff name. He's just like a bunch of stolen, you know what he reminds me of? Is like that, it's that theme park that was in Shanghai that looked just like Disneyland and they had a Minnie Mouse that was named Girl Cat. That's what, that's how I feel about Thummer.

Like Thummer is just like a shitty, like brush salesman mascot who was named porky until someone was like stop it and he's like okay whatever sorry i can't i can't even drive myself to this fucking place i gotta get a ride can you guys give me a ride i don't exactly have a car right now could you I only come out and walk around an hour a day and then I just go back to wherever. Would you like me if I wore overalls? Make America great again. I need new clothes.

My clothes broke. My suit isn't nice anymore. It's got holes. All this background on Thummer kind of adds a different level to this post on the LA County Instagram a few weeks ago. A single rider looking for a fair buddy. Ew.

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Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. riding solo slide into the dms oh he's a dm slot no no no john cusack pose those romantic bows there is oh god oh yeah that's i'm this is i've caught this that on the instagram presence gets a little bit like they're like someone is looking up the modern phrases and giving them to thummer because one was like just kind of a basic photo of him and then it says that does that felt cute might delete later no they're doing that stuff that was a few years ago that phrase i'm impressed they made it that far honestly yeah but they're like county fair is making vaguely modern another one he's similarly holding up a sign and the sign says main character

energy. Oh. Friend chasing. Also once you see Thummer you can never unsee him. He's everywhere. He's painted on the ground. He's on the walls. You can take pictures with him. He has his own corner now in the barnyard area. Yeah Thummer's house which I

believe you went to Scott. Yeah I went to Thummer's. There were areas set up for not just thummer but also his his friends yes uh lily the sheep and what i now know is daisy the cow but i swear i copy and pasted this from another article that maybe multiple times called her daily the cow and i was trying to wrap my head around that i was even i'm glad i figured out it was daisy when i saw daisy in person because i was trying to wrap my head around that i was even i'm glad i figured out it was daisy when i saw daisy in person because i was ready to start doing like now why daily the cow right uh is there a walk around daisy um not a there was like kind of a stand plywood one in the area where actual cows are i took a picture with daisy daisy's like trying to kind of like look feminine and cool but then like so like using

the bell around the neck as jewelry yes i still wear the i'm a cow i wear the bell but i'm trying to be make it like kind of my thing make it a little trendy that's nice um yeah there's this kind of up your alley is it in the mini mouse uh neck of the woods like a nice set of pearls they're trying to do a kind of a Mickey's house thing, but they just, it's like, it's just a really shitty sign that says, Thummer's house. It's just like a porch. It's really nothing, and when I

pass by it, literally nothing. Now, I don't know. Maybe I should have looked up the times that Thummer would be there, but I was sure anticipating some kind of specific Thummer interaction, and there wasn't even a comeback later for Thummer. was no lily there was no daily the cow none of them were there so i got nothing out of that and not even a good yeah yeah this this photo that's just a that's a bad banner it's a bad stretched vinyl banner that just says thummer's neighborhood and that's how they

label the area where thummer is i've only seen him once in 15 years i guess so he's not really so oh so that i where there was no way i would show up if you and all those times you can look for him but he doesn't he's not working he can't get a ride he's a lazy he's a taker i i'm still in azusa could somebody grab me I overslept oh no I know I keep doing this I swear it is not I've had a lot going on

I'm gonna have to bring my briefcase to work so I can change I can shave do we get comped on the food I mean I work there so could I just grab just some prize what's the surprise what's the per diem for the fair i here's the thing i was sort of i like oh yeah thummer i

knew you had an opinion about thummer everything you've said makes me like thummer a lot more oh really because i long for the day when a mascot of a place was a big scumbag we've talked about it a lot of times the chucky cheese the original, the original Chuck E. Cheese was like, I ain't think this, you dimwit. Like he was really angsty, like an angsty asshole character who was a scumbag, who was up to no good. He was scamming people. And this was a trend, I think, for a long time.

And then, of course, now corporate America's come in and smoothed all the edges off. And maybe Thummer is a throwback to this old type of character I like. I think maybe he is. I don't think no one's got eyes on Thummer. No one has eyes. No one cares. They don't even know if it's a man or a woman.

People don't care that Thummer might be making children uncomfortable with his weird comments or his weird posting where he's trying to... Like if Chuck E. Cheese was still his old shitty character from the 70s he would be like i slide into my dms come on that would be happening so maybe thummer is trying to keep this keep this going thummer is weaponizing therapy tall and like you're manipulating me

so i should probably say though like i entered baking for the first time this year. Yes. Yeah. I have never entered baking. I don't know how to bake. I've been learning how to bake in the last two years as like a project to learn how to measure things. Oh. Yeah, because I like to cook, but I don't like to bake because it involves like following somebody else's recipe and believing that what they say is right and that my way isn't necessarily better. And that's really hard for me. Wow. To like trust in other people's wisdom

and you're not you don't get to bring enough to the table maybe yeah i've never been a good baker because i would just like i'd be like you don't really need four sticks of butter either like i would just think that they're wrong i come into things with like a level of distrust so to unwire my brain and become a better person i've tried to learn baking for this reason so i entered cookies for the first time this year i should also say that amy got me to take a sugar cookie decorating contest i mean a class like a year and a half ago and it was really complicated and i was like well i'll never use this skill and amy made it just she did it all the time she's been doing sugar shape decorating really fancy sugar cookies for a year and a half now constantly and she's gotten so good at it that she could like

open a shop if she wanted if she wasn't a professional film critic with a lot of other stuff going on it has become my passion um but because of that when i entered the cookie fair for the first time this year when i entered the county fair with you i was like i don't think my ego can take losing yeah i'm not as resilient as eva is so i decided i was gonna just suck up do the absolute best i could work my ass off on these cookies spent 14 hours on these cookies she spent 14 hours on them and i made thumbers because i was like i know my audience i'm gonna go all in and do thummer cookies i'm gonna do a little briefcase i entered under like um the cookie themes are to do a little briefcase. I entered under like,

the cookie themes are kind of all over the place. So I entered under best representation of festival theme, which was a terrible theme this year. But yeah, it was Star Stripes. Yeah, that's strangely specific. Star Stripes and fun. Star Stripes and fun?

Terrible. Fuck off. Yeah, fuck off with that. That's not like if you do red, white, and fun, and then the third is the... There's no third of stars and stripes. No, stars, stripes, and fun. Yeah, it's nothing.

So I made the most pandering-ass cookies I could. I was very proud of them. They're Thummers. He's not wearing his little suit, but he's not wearing overalls. I put him in a series of different striped and starred mixing, like an old- bathing yeah old timey bathing suit yeah so he is it is a bathing suit that dirtbag would wear yeah in his time it's a

dirtbag bathing suit yeah and then i made him little suitcases and i made you a special thummer that i didn't submit to the fair that kind of expressed my rage at thummer where his briefcase says what i think is inside which is dirty little secrets so i made brownies and amy and i the morning of like you have to drop off your stuff the day before the fair opens or the week before the fair opens in person so you drive to pomona there's a window and we did the drive together you get to go into the empty fairground we happened to walk in and drop the stuff off at the exact time that they did the rope drop for tablescaping. Which is intense because they

get to pick their own table, which we didn't know. Like table placement. Oh, so everybody like runs to where they want it? Whoa. Because they want the corner so you can get like real views of all your table. We talked to the lady who got the corner table and we were like, did you get a sign table? She's like, no, I picked this one. Are they all

the same table? Yes. Okay. I think so. yeah there's like one wobbly one that's we everybody's trying to avoid they're definitely the same door but it was so we walked in and i handed over my brownies and the guy was like oh there's a lot of brownies this year good luck it's like total like you're gonna lose oh yeah go all the way way there to get brownie attitude. And then he took Amy's cookies, opened them up, looked at them, his, like, face lit up, and he's like, always smart to do Thummer. And I was like, God damn it.

Wow. Which is also, at the same time, a compliment that you don't get, Eva, but still the always is get, Eva, but still always is like, well, you're not the first to do Thummer. He also was like, you could tell Amy had brought

it home. She had hit a grand slam from the look on the guy's face who was checking in. I gave him those pandering ass Thummers. One briefcase said he had cotton candy. Another briefcase said that he had caramel apples. He had ride tickets. He had pig race prizes.

Oh, I was like batting my eyes. You didn't make one say counterfeit cash. He was so beautiful though. They were the most beautiful cookies she's ever made. Eva was a lot of help because I was having problems with like blush placement and stuff. Like how do I do his eyes? So Eva served as Thummer expert? Yeah, he looks great. Yeah, isn't he amazing? having problems with like blush placement and stuff like how do i do his eyes so eva's a thumber expert yeah he looks great yeah isn't he amazing so thumber on model well well i guess we could

post a picture um but like when you're doing the any of these cookies not just thumber are you drawing by hand a little design or are you sort of doing it like so you just kind of on a piece of paper will draw like what the cookie is going to look like yeah like i take the cookie cutter and then i trace on a piece of paper a couple times i sort of work out the proportions of where the eyes should be the people who are really into the sugar cookie game and like i'm in some facebook groups and they're just intense yeah like they all use projectors that's kind of like basic cookie 101 which i'm not ready to go there okay trace it with a projector wow uh like if I posted my cookies in the sugar cookie group, they would be like, nice try, sweetheart, keep practicing.

Like, they're really, really intense. Then I'll kill them. But I should say I came in first. Wow. She got best of class, which is a level above. She gets a special rosette, which is, like, very few people in the cabinet there's like a handful of best of class and it's like one step below like best of entire big goods

division so amy amy absolutely you saw these right from well i saw them in person i found them and i knew there was something i either you sent a photo or you posted i knew like once i figure out the cabinet system like like, okay, I think I know. But where are they? And then my eyes went straight as soon as I, oh, Thummer, got it. Okay. And then, yeah, they look great and they aren't rotting and the rats haven't gotten to them. Yeah.

At least as of yesterday. Listeners, if you go this weekend, I can't, fingers crossed, no rats. Although also it might be interesting to see what the rats do to Thummer. It's not what your work deserves, but it's what Thummer deserves. Did you see what second place was? Some girl just tried to enter some stars. It's like, good job, girl. That's right.

She did some stars. Yeah, yeah. Red, white, and blue. You're just going to enter stars? But you're the one. You know what? I did not really clock the multiple ribbons. First and over that best in cloud. That's great. Wow. Congratulations. So that's going to get mailed to your house and you have to frame it. stars but you're the one you know what i did not really clock the the multiple ribbons first and

over that yeah wow that's great wow so that's gonna get mailed to your house and you have to frame it oh yeah and i'm one and done i'm never entering again oh i was gonna ask you take it and then go hey she took it can i can i suggest an idea that it would be time intensive but would be funny you do another series of thumb or cookies but you put like one of his briefcases has like just like loose pills or something or yeah like counterfeit money as scott said like a real fu to the cookie contest now sort of like you won and now you're now you're asserting like dominance in a different way i mean i do feel like i was going i was i was planning a future i was going to rest on my laurels of now every time i go to the county fair i can just

mock all the cookies like i can now become the middle lady but the idea of using this cabinet placement as a plant like we could do it for like an escape room kind of thing some sort of like living game if i could put subliminal things in my cookies right then they would be here we could gamify this if i could do like a qr a qr code that takes you to a website about like how thommer is uh a pedophile antifa i've seen thommer on the college campuses he's planning those ideas why would thommer need this length of rubber hose and a syringe if he wasn't a heroin user like if we find out what the theme is and it seems like something we can do next year to manipulate

yeah like the year before it was spring into fun which whatever but i think we could make a jigsaw kind of we could also do a summer door and we could really oh that's weird because i feel like we could have gotten a door very easily the The tablescaping fills up really fast. But we were thinking about doing doorscaping right up until we changed our minds. And the learning curve on doorscaping, I think, is a lot. Because with your mythical menu that you make up, they judge you on, you know, if you say you have a soup, but you don't have a soup spoon, you just absolutely lose. Like, you're tanked at that point. Like, there's so many ways to lose. There was this fine table that was representing the coronation dinner

of Nicholas and Alexandra. It was a beautiful one. A feast fit for the last czar. And they have the actual menu. It transports you to Russia and then it just said there is extra silverware that is not reflected on the menu.

Actually, it said of the menu. They didn't even get the grammar right in their snippiness. Who are the judges, by the way? Sorry, Ryan. I don't know. Iiness. Who are the judges, by the way? Sorry about that. I'd love to watch the judges. What about a table theme of Thummer's

last meal? He's on death row and you're making the menu for whatever he's having for his last meal. Pork and bacon, please. I want to eat myself. Because they hate myself. Or if it was a horrifying door where on the other side it is Thummer. And you can see him coming at you or trying to get a paw.

He's got his little hoof coming around the corner. Or he's at your door trying to sell you garbage. Here's Johnny with Thummer. He's been chopping through the door. And he's like, here's Thummer. And you could have the Lily. lily is she lily the yeah the one of the yeah the shade maybe we can date like daily we're calling her daily yeah that's good yeah but then you'd have to update it so he's not gonna say here's johnny

because johnny carson's been off the air for so long so he says like here's Jimmy he's like here's Porky or Porky he's re-imprisoning his real that's my real name they made the suits made me change it and since he doesn't work

we have to say I'll play and no work because he's just a lazy bastard yeah right right right oh yeah he has no motivation and then we do have to

recreate the ballroom photo with him in the middle yeah see I will enter the fair again if I can do it to troll the ballroom photo with him in the middle. See, I will enter the fair again if I can do it to troll the fair in some way. Yeah. Do you think there's fair? There he is at the 1924 fair. He's always been here. What about a Thummer stealing Porky Pig's clothes or something somehow?

Can we visualize that? Oh, yeah. An embarrassed, ashamed Porky Pig's clothes or something somehow. Can we visualize that? Oh, yeah, an embarrassed, ashamed Porky Pig. Like Porky Pig locked in a closet. He went to the YMCA to take a swim and while Thummer waited. Hey, I live here. I'm trying to maintain more stable accommodations right now. Has anyone been kicked out of the fair permanently?

Do you think they have that ability? Well, I think something must have happened because on the tablescaping rules, they do say fair reserves the right to reject any table sitting that is objectionable or unsuitable, which makes me think somebody did try to push it further than they were ready.

I mean, the question is, how are you going to know if you don't try yeah permanently ejected from our favorite place we've been there enough it's time to get thrown out forever at this point we've eaten everything yeah we've tried everything I got a shrimp bowl that had

fruity pebbles on it this time is that in half a pineapple? It was in half a pineapple. It was disgusting. Yeah, I was going to say. It was okay. It was gross.

I was trying to find the grossest thing I could find. Yeah, what is the stunt food? That's a big thing. The deep fried Oreos are kind of par for the course now. Yeah. But now there's like- Fried Kool-Aid. Fried Kool-Aid-aid yeah every year they

seem like they're getting into new trends like this year it was very spam heavy like spam fries spam sliders spam pot stickers pickle has been huge for a while explain the one you heard about yeah well a couple years ago there was one that i like had to find it took me all day to find it but it was a it was a giant dill pickle and I've been hollowed out and stuffed with nacho cheese and then also hot cheetos and inside the nacho cheese so it was like a hot cheeto pickle nacho burrito and that was not a winner and I think they've been like retooling it since then so now you get it more in the form of pickled nachos because it's hard to eat you know yeah yeah yeah yeah but they've been trying they've been really pushing hot cheeto pot stickers which I think is a failure we tried it last year yeah we had those last year

but the pickle split the pickle split i was looking for and i couldn't find it they said it had it but it is what is it a banana split with a pickle basically yeah it's banana split but there's a giant pickle instead of the banana and they use pineapple dole whip in between the pickle things and then they cover cover it with spicy tajin candy. There's a lot of chamoy stuff everywhere there. And strings of sour spaghetti candy. This didn't seem... I saw this on the eater roundup of food.

This is a slice of pizza, but it's pickles and hot Cheetos and i guess ranch like that looks good that does look good yeah i don't think i'm i think the hot cheeto area doesn't have any appeal to me i'm like i don't i don't know am i am i missing out have you guys tried hot cheeto stuff it's tricky because like you know in 2020 when there was a pandemic uh i tried to make my own county fair just for me and my boyfriend in the backyard because we missed it so much and we had to do the triple cheeseburger krispy kreme because that's our favorite and we also tried to do like elotes covered in hot cheeto which was really difficult we couldn't get them to stick and it made me really appreciate whatever science they're doing

to get hot cheetos to stick to things it's probably science or mayonnaise it's like leeches or mayonnaise we also made a balloon pop and that was so hard to make your own balloon pop that takes forever oh yeah that seems i don't know where to begin wait wait what do you mean by balloon pop uh like i blew up a bunch of balloons and stapled them to cardboard and it took me like six hours okay and then you were throwing and darts yeah i bought a bunch of darts oh i don't know this is a snack okay okay oh yeah i'm missing the balloon yeah um the the triple cheese but the krispy kreme triple cheeseburgers is mentioned at the top of the show. I had been thinking about it. Didn't end up going for it. But like you were describing it a little bit.

I think my boyfriend and I were both attacking you trying to get you to eat it. Yeah, I know. He really did the hard sell. And he described it almost as if he had been that you guys share food typically but it like made him go feral or something like no not in this case yeah i am hoarding this yeah like the first year that we tried the triple cheeseburger uh krispy kreme burger like i thought it sounded gross he bought it we usually do trade off bites and when he took his first bite and i said can i have some actually i'm curious he said no which has never happened before.

But he said no like a raging wolf. Like he kind of curled his body around the burger. It was like you cannot have any of this burger. Caesar's first word in Planet of the Apes. It is the most primal bite of food you've ever had in your life. Like I cannot explain it. Like I've had good things. I've eaten good food before.

I'm a human. But this, it hits something in your brainstem where you're like, I'm a caveman. I'm supposed to eat charred meat. I want sugar too. And you're just, boom, straight there. And it's all you can think about is eating this burger as soon as you have your first bite. It kind of scared me. I didn't know that you had that reaction.

We had that giant pretzel this time. That was actually the best pretzel I've ever had in my life. That was really good. Wow. It was really good. It was like this big pretzel I've ever had in my life. That was really good. Wow. It was really good. It was like this big. So we all three of us shared it.

I've learned that I can't eat gluten, but I ate a bunch of that pretzel and I was sick all week, but it was great. It was totally worth it. That description kind of scared me. And the one that you just did too, we're like, what is this going to unlock? What if I don't come back? Does this have like a werewolf effect? I want it to scare you. Like my life has been divided into before and after. Oh God. Well, it's, you know, it had, it had kind of a hold on me through the day. And I,

eventually my son too, because I was thinking about it and I was doing the, like the, the parents math the whole time of like, when are we going to do dinner? We got to keep him on schedule for dinner. And do we do it here? Is this plenty he'll eat here? Because he only eats chicken fingers and burgers and stuff. But he was kind of getting a little tired and wanted to get out of there. And I was proposing options to him. And I said, like, oh, you know what they have is like a donut burger.

Like, the bun is a donut. And, again, I was saying he's not really trying a lot right now. So his initial reaction, like, no thanks. He's very polite at this stage. And I was like, you know, I'm going to back off that too because he doesn't eat cheese on burgers. And he might think it's weird and gross when it comes out. So I kind of, you know, backed off it. And then we do a long walk from where we're kind of close

to the cheeseburgers all the way to the entrance of the fair and at the end of it he does the saddest um dad i do want the donut burger and he clearly had just been like going over and over it in his head for 15 minutes and like i just lost my opportunity i made the wrong choice and he doesn't go back on stuff like that he usually decides and that is it but he clearly he just like wrestled with it so again something primal about this and then i thought do i go back but it was so far back and i didn't know if he would actually like what if he doesn't like it and then we do all this effort for he probably will what if he likes it too much what if like what if it breaks him the way it broke me and there will never be anything as good as that triple cheeseburger with the two donuts and then he's gonna be in his imagination

of it is maybe better than it could ever be what would it do to a child you were at least an adult imagine if yes he's still forming where's nobody more raw than a four-year-old boy resets the floor he's drinking the dune water of life as a little boy he becomes the twilight zone kid who can control stuff with his mind sends you to the cornfield that was my what that was the true juncture point of am i a good dad or not? And I made the wrong choice. Then I was like, well, we got to do something fair. And I, again, just a little exhausted, not wanting to go all the way back. I didn't reinvent the wheel, but I have not had fried Oreos before.

Certainly, he has not before. So I did that. You had fried Oreos for dinner? No, it ended up, no, no, no. You're a good dad. That's a good dad thing. Okay. Fully that as the dinner i don't know if i'm good dad but going for it at all um but yeah we did we did give him a taste and like yeah this is not like as jason was saying these have been around a while

now this is almost like the standard of the crazy fair combo and i'm having it like and you guys know i'm i'm far from the treat boy of the podcast. This was just like, there's nothing weird about it at all. This is just like good primary. There is no like bizarre or bizarre, but it works. It just works. Those are great. They're just so, so good.

They make all the sense in the world. So just fully satisfying experience there. Sidetrack, then the rest of it is like i gotta get out of here and get dinner on time and he wants burgers so what do we do uh and i end up like i'm then feverishly looking for burgers in sandemus like not far from there and i find oh wait this is interesting n NASCAR refuel tenders and burgers. And there's three locations in San Dimas? Is this like a thing in the Inland Empire?

I gotta figure, and this is something for the show too. A NASCAR chain. And then I start, my gears start turning like almost like 30 seconds before I get into the parking lot and I was just ahead of it because I pull up and I go to the address and I find an IHOP.

This is a ghost kitchen, folks. There are no physical. What a fool am I? I would know if there were lots of NASCAR refuel stands everywhere. This is a sub-brand of... But anyway, now I have that to bring to the table, that if you do want to ghost kitchen order nascar themed food you can get talladega tenders wow are they at least in a fun nascar box or anything

it's like checker pattern but yeah that's kind of all you get and the theming's not much more from there and then i start looking it up and like where are the other ones and i find wait there's one at city walk no. No, that's different. That's NASCAR Refuel Wings. So we got two different. Is that at Buca di Peppo? It is, in fact, at Buca di Peppo. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Jason, how do you feel? Yeah, I'll let you put in your words, but how do you feel that there's another ghost kitchen at Bucca de... De Peppo. Yeah, got it, nailed it. Fine. Yes. As always, you nailed it.

I don't know why we even made that a thing. I guess I'm just flummoxed. Like, how many more ghost kitchens can they run at once? In that one location. Yeah. Because I also, I'm looking at burgers in that area and I'm like, tons of Mr. Beast burgers, too. Oh, yeah. I think San dimas is ghost kitchen city there's this old-timey um i think i've

talked to you guys about billingsley's which is by my house which was barbara billingsley's prime rib restaurant which is where i was at the bar when i saw tim kaine had been announced as the vice president for hillary clinton is barbillings they leave it to beaver yes okay anyway it closed during pandemic it turned into a ghost kitchen for a thing called burger bitch so it's this beautiful old restaurant that then had a sign up front that just said burger bitch it feels so insulting that they kept her initials i know and then burger bitch collapsed and now there's just a rotting burger bitch a sign on top of the billingsley sign and it's falling apart too and the whole thing is like boarded over that reminds

me of the um the chain that was a scam burger rim oh yes burger rim yeah it was pop it was everywhere for like a really short time not well reviewed and someone found out like they all missed like quickly closed i think because they got sued or it turned out to be a big ponzi scheme it was like an israeli ponzi scheme or something crazy like that yeah burger m there was one by ucb i feel like i think so yeah i never ate there did you somebody sent this to me i don't know if it was from our facebook group or some other facebook group that the Ford Motor Company has a series of restaurants. I've learned about the Ford restaurant. We put it in the, this was in the Club 3 poll once.

It was one of the worst performers, worse than yours, Mike. Ford restaurant? Where are they? Is this like the Ford filling station that used to be by the Staples? No, that's Harrison Ford's son's restaurant. Oh, really? Yeah, Benjamin Ford. We're going to start talking

celebratory too, Eva. He was on Hell's Kitchen one of those seasons I worked on. That had a really good marshmallow ice cream. Really? I didn't even know you could have marshmallow ice cream. He's a good chef. I totally forgot it was even in that poll,

but it's a lot in Florida. But it's just like a chain restaurant that's owned by Ford? That's Ford. We learned about Henry. I guess. That's fun. We learned about Henry. I guess. That's fun. Yeah.

I'm not mad at it. Ford's Garage. I feel like I would trust a chain restaurant about Levi's. I wear a lot of Levi's. I like Levi's. I feel like a Levi's restaurant would probably serve pretty decent food. Yeah.

Sure. So probably the containers and boxes and silverware are all denim. Maybe not literally denim. Although, I mean, sure. You could, yeah. During pandemic, I took my stepdaughter to the Grove because they had opened a restaurant inside Brandy Melville at the Grove that just sold folded over pizza sandwiches and iced

coffee. And she just really wanted to go. And I was like, I can make this happen for you. So we drove to the Grove. She got the little Brandy Melville food. Brandy Melville is a sexy teen girl clothing. It's like the gap for teenage girls. There's a documentary called Brandy Hillville.

It's on HBOX now. Oh, I always thought Brandy Melville was like a real housewife. I didn't know that. No, it's like cheap's like cheap really cheap clothes for teenage girls and i think it's kind of like minimal sizing where you're supposed to just sort of only wear one i think i might be there's only one size there's only one size yeah isn't it that name is close to a real house i'm looking at brandy glanville there you go yeah you're really close i've been getting confused but for some reason they had opened a restaurant in the peak like i think it

was christmas 2020 they had opened a restaurant inside the store wow and we we went and got our little sandwiches and then ate them outside and then she's like okay thanks is it kind of neither good nor bad is it like the clothes are stretchy or you just can only be a size it's it's the second thing they're encouraging a specific type of shape of. So it's like when there used to be 5, 7, 9 when we were kids and you could only be 5, 7, or 9? Or else you don't get clothes. Or else you have to go to Torrid.

They try to jazz it up with a cool word. See, it's not so bad. You get a cool word with it. Torrid. Yeah, it's crazy. Wait, get a cool word with it Torrid yeah it's crazy wait what's the what's your your ranking of the

how do you rate the Brandy Melville restaurant it was better than it should have been oh wow okay but it shouldn't

have existed at all so it's in like existing not totally offensive more clothing companies should take a stab at restaurants yeah

well I'm a fan of Nordstrom's Bar Verde oh Bar Verde get's of course it's great yeah yeah isn't bar verde like for angry like traditional husbands to drink at while their wives are very fancy hats bar verde is for everyone spending my paycheck on who knows what you He'll get some disgruntled people. Brasiers and jumpsuits. One more pour, please. Three fingers of Jack Daniels.

Leave the bottle. My hard-earned money. That's Thumper. I thought we were going to Ford's Garage for lunch. I'm stuck on the top floor of goddamn Nordstrom's for the third Saturday in a row. And Mrs. Thummer gets pregnant immediately upon her existence. I'm going to tell the fair they should discontinue her.

I was flying solo. Everything was going great. Then they made me be here for two, three years like Robert Durst. Hiding out in Louisiana. then they made me be here for two three years like robert durst hiding out louisiana wearing a dress so nobody notices my crimes is that what robert durst did really yeah he hid out as a lady as a lady and then he killed another person as the lady and got in trouble for that i haven't watched jinx 2 is this the this is what you learned that's not even what that's about wow he went on trial for that one

and he got off because he was like I didn't kill him but I did chop him up because I got scared when he died accidentally and they're like checks out

a lot of people would do that remember the other day when you reminded me of the guy from Dogpatch USA and I hadn't thought about him in a while I looked it up there's no footprints of the guy it was just usa and i hadn't thought about him in a while i looked it up there's no footprints of the guy was this really like backwoods theme park in arkansas

and the guy was a scam artist little abner seemingly just fully disappeared he like stole all the town's money and let and i was i'm now i'm like i think that i think that's i think he did all this dirt stuff oh yeah he was like in disguise somewhere and got into his next scam. It's like end of Dark Knight Rises where you'll be at like a cafe. You'll see what's his name? Something hair. Michael Hair maybe? David Hair. Thank you.

Yeah. No, there are no Google results since the episode that we did. He convinced the landowner that he was going to redo the Little Abner Park as like an American dream park. And then he just didn't do anything and he ran the place to the ground. He just did a YouTube channel that was half songs and half apologies

and explanations of why none of the stuff was happening. And all of a sudden he was chased out of town by the cops. See, I think this was Stummer's original plan. I think Stummer wanted to start the fair and then take all the money and run away. And then Mrs. Stummer got pregnant and he got stuck. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No one's got eyes on this place, Pomona.

Who gives a shit? I can't believe they're still doing this crap. I was going to burn this fairground to the ground and be done with it forever. Well, look, it was a very good time. It ended up resulting in a very fine half-Jersey Mike's meal for the two of us out in San Dimas. That was nice. And then before that, at the fair proper, here's what I have to thank you two for, is that I hatched the plan to go, let's go, and then realized, oh my God, two big train things, which are year-round apparently and always there, maybe accessible even when the fair is not going on.

There's a train museum where you can climb up onto big, giant working trains, which they turn on, Turn on the motors. Kids can pull the whistle. These are the most poorly guarded. They're just climbing up onto real trains, like very steep ladders with railings that don't block little children from falling off the side 25 feet. So I'm really watching him there. But he had the time of his life getting to go uh onto some real trains and then also a model train that's been there for a hundred years that is

the side that is half a football field i love model trains so much oh really i don't know why i have this like very intense reaction to them it's just when they we create things like little drive-in movie theaters and stuff that It's all the little dioramas. Like making the little city stuff. I like dioramas. That stuff's really nice. It's like Playmobil. Have you been

in any of the stores in Burbank? The model train stores? Yes. I've peaked in. I could never do it. Can't have another thing? No, I can't.

Guys, I don't know if I've ever told this story on the podcast, but when I was in college, I met Gary Coleman and I was wearing a train conductor hat because I was being random like Amy was random in college. I remember you had that hat.

I used to have a hat like that too. We've all been there. And Gary Coleman said, your hat's the universal sign for I like trains. And I was like, yeah. And he's like, do you want to come check out my model train set? And he gave me his phone number and he wrote on the note ho scale american trains and so i like got back to my dorm and i like called and left a message for gary coleman and then um you called you did it oh my god yeah i called him i left a message saying yeah i'll come check out your train set and then i talked to someone else but they're like what are you

doing don't do that you can't don't do He's like, he beats people up and stuff. He's gotten in trouble. And I was like, oh, right. So then, but I got back home and there was like a bunch of messages in a row from Gary Coleman on my answering machine, like escalating rapidly, even in the messages. And then I stopped whatever dumb game I was playing and I just ended it there. Did you learn anything from this experience? Obviously not.

Because I'm the person I am. But I didn't show... You've got to have a stronger cretin eater at this point. This creeps around every bend of all the stuff that you're into. But sometimes I look at you, and I'm just so relieved you're alive. Aw, you too, babe. You only dated Gary for like a year and and a half it wasn't a big thing you're always in control you always had your eyes on the door i kept the note though in my like

cabinet of oh yeah cabinet of curiosity your museum of the weird he did have a model train set though he was an enthusiast wasn't he wearing a like when he was on the simpsons didn't he have like a train conductor hat or there's some appearance he had like where he cameoed somewhere where he had like a train train yeah like he would like him in trains was like a thing yeah he was really show it's possible i could have just seen the train set and left but that's like one it might be a bit of a risk it's a multiverse of possibilities one of the great mysteries of my relationship is my boyfriend hated my train conductor hat like really actively hated it in a way that he doesn't hate almost anything at home but he hated my train conductor

hat and it went missing and three years later i found it in the neighbor's yard buried under a bush just in the middle of the night he buried your hat he? He denied it, but his cat went missing. I was hunting down for the cat. I was behind the neighbor's gigantic bush, and my hat was there. And I took it back, and I was like, can you explain this? And he said, no. No, and I choose not to, and you have no proof. Why would he do it so close to home, though?

That's such a mistake. He should take that into the National Forest. Yeah. A shallow grave for it. He tried to convince me the cat took it back there that's if i was looking for his cat there maybe it was his cat's hiding place so we both had a train conductor hat yeah of course these stories are really taking a turn for the hummer dark side uh summer thummers oh i was gonna say is that a phrase hummer dark no

did you have a train conductor's hat uh i, I think so. Of course you did. I didn't have a train conductor's hat. Maybe when I was five I did. I was picking up the name because this place closed a couple years ago called Roadside America in Pennsylvania and it was just a giant

miniature train. Trains going every which way, towns, mountains. It was a big roadside tourist attraction but yeah the pandemic kind of did the man san diego in the their balboa park has a model train museum that's we went to that all of our travels are so much train motivated which is why i have to thank you for that because like that there's, you can climb on trains and look at model train. He lost his shit. He was so excited. And all of my,

my dad calculations at this point are like, how much time does it kill? How much does it cost? And how much is it trains? So this satisfied all of that very nicely. Like the, probably the biggest one he's ever seen, right?

The biggest one I've ever seen. I mean, I also like I'm unemployed right now. And I probably the biggest one I've ever seen I mean I also like I'm unemployed right now and I saw the thing I was telling you Scott that said be a volunteer at the model train and I was like am I gonna do this Eva if you did it this could be our way

to troll the fair next year if I'm there every weekend just like painting and dusting little guys if you made miniatures of us and you put them in tiny cars. And we're flipping off Thummer? Yes. If we put a tiny Thummer on the side of the road

trying to hitchhike. We murdered him and he's in the trunk. Or Thummer tied to the tracks. Like Dudley Do-Right. Bradley Whiplash. I was going to say like a double indemnity sort of thing. Or if you're a more cultured person, a double indemnity. We're on fake crutches.

We're on the back of the train. We're going to throw Thummer off. Fucking Mrs. Thummer. Yeah. If you're flipping them off in the process and they call you out on it, you could always just say, no, we're giving thumbs. Yeah, we're hitching a ride. That's on theme. And Amy's a prize winner

for being on theme. Oh my god, that is flipping us off. He's not thumbing a ride. Wait, you're right. And thumb being in the name is a way to throw you off the trail. He's either flipping you off or he's going to drag that hoof across his throat.

That thing's razor sharp if you get close to it one false move and you're gone the loathsome summer just just have a little some characters and someone's having an affair with thummer's wife and he doesn't know yeah we do like shadows like in a window of a motel and Thummer's outside with a gun in his mouth. Or Mrs. Thummer's pushing a stroller, but it's like two pigs and a cow. Oh, yeah, that's good, too. She says it's recessed DNA. I still have to pay for it. It doesn't make sense.

It's sixth generation. You end up with a cow. I still have to pay for it. It doesn't make sense. Thummer. It's sixth generation. You end up with a cow. Jesus. Thummer also has a pile of lamb chops. Back in his recesses of his neighborhood. One of the rooms in my house has a bunch of lamb chops. One of them's really big.

Shut up. I'll make the fucking moon disappear. All these cows and sheep coming after me. They'll never take down Thummer. Until the SWAT team

is at the door of my neighborhood. Except for the world. They're going anywhere. They don't know it's just a plywood flat with nothing behind it.

I got nothing. Been alive for 65 years and I got nothing. I also, I saw an article. I found an interview with Thummer. Oh, yeah. In which they ask, last question, how did you get your name? A long time ago, a local TV station put on a name the pig contest. Thumber was the entry I liked the most, so that's where it came from.

So we got to pick? He existed before the name. I mean, we know he was Porky, but that's a weird way to answer it. I watch television. He's probably stolen from another contest. Thumber won a different name the pig contest And he took it I like Jim and Pam So many great characters

And you know what It has heart And that's why the office still works to this day I like TV I need to tell you something The real Thummern died in Korea and I took his dog tag. Living his life,

but I don't feel much. That's why I drink. Don't you see? I do have to volunteer to go to Pomona and work at the train music okay yeah i think yeah i think so yeah well somebody worse isn't it yeah isn't it disheartening to find out that that train work is volunteer based seemingly yeah weird because you're probably

thinking like maybe i can make a little scratch becoming a train person but no probably competitive and there's clicky like everything else at the fair and everyone you're against has been doing it for 70 years yeah you're new yeah you will never get seniority no i won't well i'm sorry i'll be dead first leave anything you'd like to plug uh yeah upcoming very sad train volunteering career. A freshly dusted train set that I want you to all come and see. I've only had time to dust one. They take forever.

We've got a new tunnel you can take a look at. It's bigger than the other tunnels. The lights work again. Ronald is angry with me again. I don't know what I did, but I think i remind him of his niece or something i guess let's make our way to the to the door any closing i mean there's boy like uh you know tales of horror withummer, Tales of Victory with Amy, going all the way from not baking in two years to winning two ribbons at once. Incredible. Clearly, yes.

Yeah. And inspiration from me. This seems like a microcosm of the friendship and of the support and the inspiration that's there. And that you both are glad the other isn't dead. So it's really nice to see. Despite taking the other person to places where they'll probably die and then we both wind glad the other isn't dead. So it's really nice to see. Despite taking the other person to places where they'll probably die and then we both wind up surviving.

Yeah. Cuba. Chernobyl. Oh yeah, Chernobyl. Chernobyl. Parting thoughts on the fair though? Anything you're looking forward to next year or something that you haven't done fair-wise that's on the list? I mean, if you're just not at the fair though anything anything you're looking forward to uh next year something that you haven't done fair wise that's on the list i mean if you're just not at the fair

what are you doing it's mostly just the threat to all the people listening go to the fair if there's a fair in your in your county go to that fair oh i was gonna say any thoughts on the orange county fair amy's i love the orange county fair the orange county fair has the most tribute bands like every weekend they have a different tribute band. So if you look even on their website, it's like fake ABBA, fake Pink Floyd, fake Fleetwood Mac. Like you could just really

live a whole fake dream. They had fake Alice Cooper, but then he disappeared. Like he was on this calendar and then they took him off. So I don't know what happened with fake Alice Cooper. I recently stayed at the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido, California where I was delighted to find, they have a little,

it's like a little shopping center and a little theater where they have entirely tributes also. We got a fake Huey Lewis on our hand. Wow. I'm kind of amazed that there's enough tributes out there

that you can be a full-time That's wild. Huey Lewis. Oh yeah, there's like a fake No Doubt. They're really serious about it. You would think in Orange county like a fake no doubt you gotta be chased out of town like not being authentic uh but i don't know maybe they want because the no doubt's not gone besides this year's good yeah i will say that the competition and sugar cookies in orange county is

a lot more intense like when i looked at their cabinet last year, I'm not up to snuff there. Oh, really? You are. Stop comparing yourself to other sugar cookies. Their floral work is like intense. But that said, I made a new batch of cookies this weekend and I only had two left.

I know there's three of you guys here. It's them. Go with that. These are the treat boys. They get it. But you can break them in half if you want. As much as I want. They're very small. Wow burger guys. But you can break them in half if you want. As much as I want. Wow, jeez. Thank you.

Sorry, we made Hodor House cookies because we went to go see El Topo. El Topo cookies. But they're the same recipe of the Thumbnail Cookies. They're chocolate. Yeah, the chocolate cookies are bangers. The vanilla is very good too. Jeez. She makes them for this smut book club we're in.

Smutty book clubs. And she makes themed cookies to the book every month. I bought like a six inch dick shaped cookie that I haven't had a chance to make yet for any smut club ones. Cause we've had different themes. Jason shoved the cookie in his mouth already. So fast. They're delicious. Yeah.

Genuinely good cookies on top of being beautiful. Wow. Wow. Jeez. Wonderful. Amy, you can keep adding things. I don't know how you keep adding things. I'm done.

I'm quitting. You're done? I'm a retired baker now. You just bought a dehydrator, though, so you could make the frosting. That is true. I bought a dehydrator to keep my icing puffy. Like a month ago. That icing really does.

The icing is very aesthetically pleasing on this. Yes. Wow. It's got a nice poof. Take a picture of it. Take a byline before he grabs yours. And I saved my thumb where I didn't need it. Wow. I'm keeping it forever.

I will say for people going the ride to ride, there's two rides that are just the best. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Alien Abduction is one of the ones where you're just in the dark and spiraling around really fast and it's like crazy and your feet lift off the ground yeah but the other one uh joker is at the county fair and that one's amazing it's like there's 12 people on kind of a long tall spoke and you swing back and forth and finally just start swinging all the way upside down and around and around and around

and you get completely head scrambled like you're taller than palm the way upside down and around and around and around. And you get completely head scrambled. Like you're taller than palm trees and upside down and it is probably the best ride there. Wow. Also Beer and Wine Pavilion where you can taste the award-winning beers and wines and behind it is a nature walk where we learned about bees

and they had a lot of other original characters teaching you about camping. And you could take home a tiny palm tree if you wanted. No, a tiny, what is it? Like a bonsai? They had little trees that you could take home and tiny palm tree if you wanted. No, a tiny, what is it? Like a bonsai? They have little trees that you could take home and plant. Yeah. The nature walk area is really underrated.

I just got into that in the last year. Oh, geez. Wow, wow. And you haven't even seen the train area that's there. Oh, I don't know the train museum. Oh, there's full corners of it. It's so cool. It's great.

Well, clearly, do they still have kind of a weird dinosaur zone called Jurassic Planet? I didn't see that. That was something in 2017. I remember that, though. Because every year they kind of do a different theme sometimes with the back. Like one year it's all light up paper insects. They have some year-round Halloween stuff, like a Halloween maze area, which is fun. This year they added a roller rink.

Oh, yeah. I saw. Which is included with admission and skates. You don't have to rent skates separately. Yeah. My boyfriend did it because he loves to roller skate. We watched him skate around. Amy ate a four foot long stick of pork.

Two foot long. Wow. Half is like, yeah. Yeah. I've really mainlined that thing. More than half your height? Yeah. I usually get like the-pound pork top,

but I thought it'd go a little different this year. Yeah, it was delicious. Two pounds of a different meat. Yeah. Well, same meat, but a different formation. Fair enough. No, excuse me. Excuse me.

I'm sorry. Well, does eating a ton of pork get out some aggression against Thummer? I think it is why I do it. Yeah. Yeah, I want him to know that he's not the boss of me. But Thummer gave you the gold this year. But I feel a little dirty.

I feel dirty. To pander to that level and have it win makes me a little disgusted with myself. I'm not disgusted. Oh, it's me. You're kidding. You did me. That's so sweet. Here's the prize.

No, I think accept your full congratulations and not just for for your victory but for a great episode of the show thank you Eva and Amy you survived podcast the ride wow wow what a what a fun time so happy to have you both let's exit through the gift shop. Anything you'd like to plug? Amy? Not much. I'm still doing Unspoiled with Paul Scheer. We just are Mad Max, the original 1979 one. We just did that one this week, which was honestly when I went back and watched it and you see just the through line of all of the little visual pole vaulting and tough old women, how he just has been building on that. I remembered Mad Max people being like the original one's boring and it doesn't get cool till two but they are actually completely wrong i've like now

turned around and i very much love mad max one i think it's scarier to watch the civilization slide into disrepair that's cool um i don't have anything to plug but i did discover this website yesterday morning for this company called Brave Books, which is owned by Kirk Cameron, and it's children's books written by important cultural figures. Like Kirk Cameron?

Well, this one I'm just plugging is called The Night the Snow Monster Attacked, written by General Michael Flynn. What? Michael Flynn? You? Oh, man. Michael Flynn. You can get a signed copy of it for $50. $49.99. Michael Flynn, is he the most famous author they have?

No, I mean, it's a lot. Kimberly Guilfoyle posted a picture of herself holding a children's book called The Princess and Her Pup. And I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And then I looked into it. And it's all, they're all written by like, Your morning check-in with the Guilfoyle account. Dinesh D'Souza has one.

Of course. Yeah. It's great. The cookie's very good. I'm eating it. Oh, I'm so glad. It's marshmallow flavored icing. Oh, okay.

I actually didn't even identify it. You might also, once I learned a recipe i tripled the salt that's my own little flavor oh nice is another potential plug like you know if we're kind of you know if we're given the finger to thumb her a little bit would you be mad if people went to the fair this weekend punched through the cabinet and took your cookies and ate them no in fact I hope they send me pictures of them flipping off my thumb. Do you want to eat a

six-week-old cookie? And as for us, for three bonus episodes every month, check out Podcast The Ride The Second Gate, or get one more bonus episode on our VIP tier Club 3. You will find all of that at patreon.com slash podcasttheride. I think now we're going to do a Memorial Day break.

I said we were going to do one, but we did this instead so we could tell people to go find Thummer and give the finger to your Thummers. So now we'll take a break, but I hope this gives everyone the lead time to flip off Thummers. Yeah, you're flipping off the character of Thummer, not Amy's cookies. It's what Amy wants us to do. You can also go and take a detour and just flip off the brownie winners because I had Eva's brownies on the way up and they should have placed. I was pretty mad they didn't. They were malted milk flavor.

Incredible. They're very kind of you, but like I said, a lot of brownies this year. Shouldn't have done it. It's political, I'm sure. Someday I'll be the mean old lady. We should figure out how to be judges. Yeaheday I'll be the mean old lady. We should figure out how to be judges. Yeah, we will have to probably kill someone.

That's the only way, yeah, yeah. It's a Supreme Court appointment, basically. I need a lot of enemies. I need you to pare down the list. I mean, an easy way potentially is to plant some poison brownies. Yeah, they eat them that night. They eat one of your things that night. We suddenly need two new judges.

Something terrible has happened. We're ready. We'll do it. Do you think anybody's ever spiked their cookies out of revenge? I mean, that's kind of fun. Like, do you like, with like, what, ketamine? Probably ketamine. Probably.

It would be so easy to put liquid LSD in royal icing. Oh, yeah. It wouldn't even make a difference. You just lick the cookie. It's like a big stamp. I'm not saying if this ever happens, we have anything to do with it. And I'm sure you can retroactively delete all this. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And also, like, you know, there's hundreds of competitors in that cabinet how are they to know that you are the one that's a great idea how would they know it was somebody else's yeah there's so many names so many yeah you planted the idea on the podcast and somebody else took and ran with it a lot of brownies this year there There's a fungus that naturally occurs in some grains that actually can cause hallucinations. So it could just be naturally. It could be natural. It could be natural. Your flower went bad.

That's great. You had a natural answer. Right. Go for what happened. Yeah, yeah. No, no. It was a fungus. Well, we're covered.

Great. Forever Dog. This has been a forever dog production executive produced by mike carlson jason sheridan scott gardner brett boehm joe cilio and alex ramsey for more original podcasts please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com and subscribe to our shows on apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts keep up with the latest forever dog news by following us on twitter and instagram at forever dog team and liking our page on facebook