Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - A SpooOOktacular Episode of QQ

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

We Vant, To Suck, Your Atteeeeeennntion! This episode the guys start with a lot of Halloween steam, but then honestly it turns in to mostly a regular episode where they talk about mosquito bites and dairy free ice cream. Still great though! And as always big thanks to our sponsors.  Thanks BetterHelp.  Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/qq . Thanks Express VPN, Get an extra 3 months Free on a one year package. Expressvpn.com/QQ . Thanks Everylwell, For 20% off your at-home lab test:   Everlywell.com/qq

So, hello again and welcome to another episode of Sick Questions with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where boo best friends and comedy frighters ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of that podcast author, founder, president, and staff writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Daniel, no Brian, joined as always by my co-host Mr. Soren Bowie. Soren, say hello. Hello, everybody. I'm Soren Bowie.

I write for a show called Hell-merican Dad. Ooh, I'm sour, sour? Mm-hmm. Because you get the candy eat? Yeah. Sour and bony. Ooh, that was pretty fun. In case our listeners couldn't tell, it's our Halloween episode,

which is, as a theme, will be dropped shortly after the intro because the stuff we prepared has nothing to do with Halloween. Thanks to BetterHelp for supporting Quick Question. For 10% off your first month, go to betterhelp.com slash QQ. Start living a better life today. Thanks to ExpressVPN for supporting Quick Question. Keep your data private from data harvesters when you go online. Visit expressvpn.com slash QQ and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. Thanks to Everly Well for supporting Quick Question. Everly Well is offering a special discount of 20% off an at-home lab test at everlywell.com slash QQ.

But I guess we can jump right into some spooktacular stuff. What are the kids going to be for Halloween this year, Soren? Okay, my son is going to be a construction worker. Perfect. He's got, got oh he's so excited and uh my daughter is gonna be a snail adorable it's very cute it's a very cute little costume there's one uh child's secondhand store in all of los angeles as far as i know and it's in culver city and it's called Noodles and every year I go get my costume there because they're just loaded down with them for good reason. Your child wears a costume

once and then can't wear it again because the next year they're two feet taller. And I got this snail costume that's got this huge cushy shell on the back and it has these little ears over the top. It's just so damn adorable. And this will be the first year that they really get to trick or treat in our new neighborhood. Oh, that's fun. back and then it has these little ears over the top it's just great so damn adorable and this

will be the first year that they really get to trick-or-treat in our new neighborhood oh that's fun yeah i'm very excited i don't know who will actually take them my wife and i i'm sure will rochambeau or something because somebody has to stay home and man the house yeah you know hand out the candy but uh i decorated this year for the first time too. And I'm very pleased with my decorations. Oh, that's cool. What did you do? Skeletons running up my house. Oh, tight.

Yeah. I've got kind of a zero scape situation in my front yard, which means that it's all native plants. And there's kind of swells. There's some topography to it. There's like swells and hills and things. And out climbing out of one of these swells is this, is a skeleton uh

that i put a green light down below it so that it looks like this is some sort of pit and then uh have i've placed skeletons going up my house and up on my roof as though they are climbing up to try and uh attack the house yeah and it looks so cool but man skeletons it's tough to find cheap skeletons yeah i'll bet and then they've just got to be in storage for for 12 whole months after that well you've just pinpointed exactly why my wife didn't like this idea she was like i brought home six skeletons and she was like where are we going to put those? Anyway, I've got some ideas. That's good.

I don't have, I'm going to get like some kind of Halloween wreath, I guess, for my front door because the way things work in my apartment building, it's a very formalized

and sterile affair where if you want to participate in Halloween, then you need to let the building know in advance. And then the families who have children in the building are given a list of who to go to on what floor. Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

Like Logan's run Halloween. They get off on the floor and they're like, okay, we go to these six doors and then we ignore all these other doors and that's just going to be our night. What? That sounds terrible terrible that's not yeah so i want to have uh i don't think i'm going to dress up but i'm going to put like some kind of decoration on the door to reinforce that this is a halloween friendly affair and jackson will be dressed up against his will as a cute purple octopus oh that sounds great i already put the octopus head on him

and he fucking hates it perfect yeah good yeah as well he should yeah and his reward for enduring this terrible costume that's very uncomfortable is the sound of the doorbell ringing multiple times throughout the night uh i guess i've nearly even thought about how uh halloween works in a city like that in a city where everybody lives in apartment buildings do you are there actually kids in the streets too that are wearing costumes and running up and down the streets or does that just not exist there it doesn't exist for me i mean i like i'm in an area where i'm only surrounded by apartment buildings and office buildings so and like kids have no reason unless you are a kid who lives in this building you will not go trick-or-treating

within here so like i'm we're servicing the people who live here period no one's going to come off the street and and try to trick-or-treat here it seems i mean everything that is that is different from your childhood uh seems sad and wrong so this seems sad and wrong to me i'm sure to people who grew up with it it seems very normal but uh i don't care for it yeah i don't that does not sound nice to me i i think you know i said i've been in i've been in offices before where they do like a thing for the kids where kids are allowed to come to the office for the day in their costumes and then they can walk around to the different desks and get candy and it's always such a grim affair it's really tough

because it just does not feel like halloween it feels so forced and uh hollow yeah and you imagine those kids do like do like proper trick-or-treating after that right yes exactly yeah you assume that they then go home and then they get to run around in the streets and be crazy uh man it just sounds like that sounds like an apartment complex it's just and now we go to this door and now we go to this door yeah which is very strange because, like, it's... The... A huge part of Halloween, for me, once you get past a certain age, has very little to do with the candy. You're in between that period of your life where it's all candy and the other period of your life where Halloween is a more, like...

is a much hornier affair, indeed, with late teens and early 20s being sexy at each other that period in between that nice Twilight period where the appeal of Halloween is going out for hours with your friends and just like wandering around the streets that's just like a fun bonding thing to do and like you really you know you're sort of over candy at that point. You really look forward to it for like, there's no parents around. I'm 12 years old, just hanging out with my friends and running into other friends in like the one night where it feels

socially acceptable and safe to just be out wandering for a couple hours. Right. Yeah. I wasn't super into the property destruction as a child that usually accompanies that, which is the kids who are sick of candy and still want something to do. And they're like, all right, well, we're going to teepee. We're going to egg. But there was something really valuable about you were unchaperoned at a certain age. You didn't have to go with your parents anymore. And you were allowed to be out at a time when ordinarily you were not out. Yeah. You couldn't just be outside in the dark by yourself when you were that age it's

it's hard to forget that uh i mean it's it's very easy to forget that yeah so yeah it's really nice to like just seeing your friends in that new environment and being it felt very freeing and i don't i guess you just don't get that you just in the city yeah maybe you do maybe they just wandered the streets but it doesn't seem very safe yeah they i i imagine maybe like different parents will coordinate different events and things to do but i feel like kids in in my apartment building they're just gonna have like a list printed out on a white piece of paper that's like okay these are the house these are the doors where a person inside will give me candy all right good let me check them off the list yeah my old neighborhood i think there was a lot of people who did not want to participate

in Halloween. And the way that you would identify who the houses were is it was like a depression era hobo situation where you had like some sort of marking on the door. Right. That allowed everybody to know, ah, oh, there's, or we do glow sticks. Like if there was a glow stick near your front door, they'd be like, oh, okay, these people celebrate Halloween. We can go up there, we can ask. That was as Logan Runnish it ever got for us.

It's, I think here in my new neighborhood, it will just be pandemonium. It will be kids. And it's, you know, it's a street that dead ends. So it's, kids are just going to be out in the streets. It's going to be wonderful. I'm very excited about it yeah i was excited my first halloween where i was uh like living not in in college my 22 years old i moved to los angeles and i was in an apartment complex but it was still like it seemed more it seemed friendlier to people who could wander

around off the street because it was like an open complex. Now I'm in an apartment building. No one's coming in here. But that was a complex and I was on the ground floor. And I was so excited at the prospect of having trick-or-treaters that I was like, I'm going to be the guy who has full-size candy bars. Of course. Absolutely. The dream.

The house that people go to every year. Like, that's the house. That's the guy. And so I bought so much candy and fucking no one came for the entire night except at the end of the night i was looking out the window and i saw kids walking by with their parents and like kind of looking through the window and i was like yes yes yes please come and i brought like this this whole like giant tray of full-size candy and this this kid i was like yeah take it take it and

he grabbed a Hershey bar and like no judgment but some judgment there's a lot of different options on there he grabs a single Hershey bar and I'm like hey I didn't get a lot of trick-or-treaters so you can have more and he looked at me and he looked at his mom and like I'm serious like what am I gonna do with all this candy please take more and he takes a second Hershey bar and leaves. Oh my God. Oh. Oh no.

I've still never had like being in a place of my own and having like a real, what I view as an authentic trick or treat night of having trick or treaters come to me. It's so nice. I love it. And I did never have the experience as a child. I lived in the woods, as you know.

Yeah. Where the only thing coming to your door each night is ghosts and mountain lions. Right. And it was all like, if people did go trick or treating, it was always like, my dearest Everlyn. It's been three days since I left for the second house in our street. I grew weary at the thought of candy. If somebody had come to our house on Halloween, I would have hit. I would have at the thought of candy. If somebody had come

to our house on Halloween, I would have hit. I would have, there would have been a problem. Like there would have been, this is somebody who has hit somebody with their car

or something out on the road and wandered here. But having actually kids, having a neighborhood where I get to actually hand out candy is so much fun. And seeing the kids

is so great. And I know all their costumes and i can identify their costumes and they're terrified every single time they walk up to a house because they have no idea how to interact with human beings yet so like they come up and their moms are in the background or their dads are back they're gonna be like you gotta say trick or treat they're like uh trick trick or treat and then i'm like hey oh optimus prime looking good and i love giving the kids shit, love playing with them. And I even love when it gets to be like 1030 at night

and all of a sudden the 14-year-olds are coming to your door and they're like, they're wearing, like one of them has some toilet paper on their arm and the other one has a Burger King crown. And they're like, hey, trick or treat. And I'm like, yep, I was expecting you. Here you go. Here's some sour gummy worms. I love every single aspect of it. So excited for it this year. Anything can interfere with your happiness. Anything can prevent you from achieving your goals

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candy you're giving out i've got a few different options i've got i did a the gummy fruity type candy so i've got some sour patch kids some watermelons um swedish fish. So I've got some Sour Patch Kids, some watermelons, Swedish Fish, and then I've got the chocolate varieties. I've got Take 5, which I've been eating a lot of. I made sure I got a selection pack that had some Take 5s in it. There is

some Almond Hershey's in there, which I'm gonna I will judge any child that takes those. I mean mean you're you're if if kids pass that test that's only becoming your problem i know then i have to have you're gonna be the guy who's stuck eating these for breakfast every day yeah i know the there's only one candy that i'm worried about so i got reese's i got kit kats i those will go those will go easy there's one that I'm curious about and that's I have some mini paydays and I'm not sure what kid has refined enough taste to eat the

paydays and if they don't that's fine I don't mind being stuck with paydays remind me what what's going what are what are the what's the bones and blood of a payday yeah so you start with a nougat a very simple blue collar nougat on the inside then it's got kind of a caramel over the outside of it that holds on peanuts salted peanuts and so this candy has no this is like the skeleton of candy it doesn't have a chocolate skin it doesn't have anything going on other than just this coat of peanuts that are constantly falling off of it while you eat it and inside is a nougat. It's the simplest, simplest candy there possibly is. And my daddy ate them when I was a child.

And I was like, why? Why? Eat a three musketeers at least. Like that seemed like the lowest tier to me. And payday was below that. And since I've become an adult, I've really graduated into enjoying them. So I've become my dad, I guess. Maybe I'll give them a shot.

You know what I've been doing lately? This is a Halloween adjacent. I mean, yeah, obviously I've been eating gummy worms. And it's under control. We're slightly moving off halloween into the the proper episode but this is this is a late in life life adjustment that i'm quite famously lactose intolerant and my reaction to that has been to replace certain foods with dairy-free alternatives i do that with a lot of cheeses with my cooking. Sometimes I will

play Russian roulette and eat something with dairy in it and bear the consequences afterwards. And some things I have just completely cut out of my life and found no replacement for. And that's how I've operated for 20, 22 years at this point. And one such thing was ice cream. I didn't, I would never like poison myself with regular ice cream and I would never try to find any of the dairy-free alternatives until recently, until like two weeks ago. I was in the supermarket and they have so many dairy-free ice cream options now that I'm just like, let me just, fuck it, let me get it. I'm not a dessert person. I don't usually eat anything after dinner. Those two things mean the same thing but i uh am a very reward based animal and i've started using dairy-free ice cream as my reward for a good day's work and after a like a run or something

soren is delightful i'm having so much fun eating ice cream again for the first time in 22 years what's the base of it what are they using instead of milk some of them use coconut milk and uh if you like coconut you'll like that that sounds like that might sound like an obvious thing but there's in the way that some uh like vegan meat alternatives don't actually try to taste like the meat. They just try to taste like something else that's tasty. That's what coconut replacement things does. They're not trying to imitate strawberry ice cream. This is like strawberry with a little hint of coconut to it.

And if you don't like coconut, it all tastes very overbearing. And the other ones that I like use soy. And that's what I've been going real hard on these last two weeks well it can be sometimes it's a little thicker like some i've had uh chocolate milk that's either almond milk or soy milk and i find that it's more like a milkshake than regular milk i kind of enjoy it more there's this soy ice cream that i that i've been eating is uh this it's gonna sound unappealing sandier than normal ice cream but i love it there's something about that texture that really does it for me oh that's troubling it's got like a sawdustiness to it yeah haven't you ever like fantasized about eating a bowl of

of uh a little bit wet sand wait when you when you put a big uh spoon into this does it just sort of crumble around the spoon yeah i know what you mean okay it's not it's not it's not perfect there's there's there's a lot of aspects of the the ice cream dna that we can't crack yet even though we've got some of our top minds on it. We're just that last code sequence. We're not dealing with it. Right. Right.

You couldn't put that on a cone. No, absolutely not. And I love that some of these different, because I'm trying a lot of different ones to see what I like the best. And a lot of them have fun little rules on them where it's like, sometimes our ice cream gets too cold. So you have to leave it out for a little bit before you enjoy it's like sometimes our ice cream gets too cold so you have to leave it out for a little bit before you enjoy it let it sit on the counter and like good i like an extra

step in this in my dessert process the not to throw my wife under the bus but the way that she enjoys ice cream is wrong uh she i i get so confused because like the ice cream will just be out and i'll be like well i'll it's out like i don't want it to melt put it away she's like what are you doing i'm getting it ready like i don't know what that means and if uh we're all eating ice cream and she wants to eat some ice cream she likes it real soft she likes basically i think she likes milkshakes and she only pretends to like ice cream because what she's always the consistency she's aiming for is milkshake yeah to the point where my wife has been known to microwave ice cream.

I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's headfirst crazy. And I tell her that at every opportunity. But it is really strange. The way, in ice cream sandwiches, she doesn't care about structural stability at all. She wants it to be melted in the middle.

And so she just leaves these things out on the counter. And I'm staring at it because I'm like, that's, you're ruining it. You're ruining it. Also, the problem with ice cream is when you leave it out like that, it melts and then refreezes and then melts and refreezes. It starts to get that ice on the top. The top of it becomes like milky sherbet and it's so gross. And she's just, she's ruining my ice cream. Yeah. I'm sorry to hear that well this probably sounds like boring podcast fodder and it is but i can't stress enough how novel this this brief dip into ice cream has been for me as someone who like because unless you're at a very specific restaurant dessert does not really cater to the dairy-free crowd no and it's just been been

years of thanksgiving where it's like dessert is served it's like all right well guess i'll go home it's not gonna have some pie and ice cream or anything and so it's just it's it's very foreign to me and now that i'm i i have this little treat for myself it's it's been it's just it's just wonderful i'm really happy for you dan thanks it's nice to find out that there are things out there that you thought weren't for you but are yeah it's just like oh this is so nice um well we should start our show i guess um dan i have a quick question for you go when you get a mosquito bite are you do you scratch it do you scratch first of all do you scratch it and you do you scratch it do you scratch first of all do

you scratch it and if you do scratch it do you scratch it until it bleeds so that you don't it doesn't itch anymore uh i do not scratch it the most i will do is that possibly that apocryphal possibly bullshit technique of doing a little x with my fingernails are you familiar with this what what what? Really? Okay, I think I know what you're talking about. Are you making a Phillips head screw on top, screw head on top of your mosquito bite?

Yes. And that works? I don't know. That's something that, like that's why I say it's possibly bullshit. It's something that's, it's like a, like an old wives tale where it perhaps works, I've never looked into it,

or perhaps it's just something that parents do to trick their kids into not scratching because they'll say here's what you do you make a little X with your fingernail and then it'll stop itching and so you do that and then you don't scratch it and if it works I think it's all inside your head I've never heard of that Wow very interesting maybe I'll try maybe that's regional my son what i've always done is if i have a mosquito bite that's beyond itching where it's just too much is that i will do a uh imagine this my two fingers i spread my middle finger my my

index finger i spread them apart around the bite i never actually itch on the bite i itch in proximity to it i get like a force field around it essentially in both directions so i'm making what are you fucking edging yourself what is this what do you get from it very little relief but maybe just enough that like eventually it will stop itching my assumption is always that as soon as you start touching the mosquito bite and actually putting some pressure on it, that you just make it worse. You're just going to make the itch worse.

So I try not to touch them at all. So this is my one release that I have, which is I make what will end up looking like a hashtag with my fingers around it. Okay. Now the reason I ask is because I was at a play date

this past weekend and the dad had a scabbed over mosquito bite on his leg and then I looked up and happened to notice he also had a scabbed over mosquito bite on his arm and for me that is always 100% a red flag on a human being's character

that if they don't have the impulse control to not scratch a mosquito bite that's a problem yes i would that that feels like uh a common problem for a child yes and we all know we all know if you just don't scratch your mosquito bite it can be you can it will not itch the next day even you can solve that problem in like a day and a half basically but if you just don't scratch your mosquito bite, it can be, you can, it will not itch the next day. Even you can solve that problem in like a day and a half basically. But if you itch it, it's going to continue to stick around. And then if you itch it so much that it scabs over now, you've got a scab to deal with for a week. Yeah. Like you just have to have some impulse control to not scratch your mosquito bites. Go ahead. I don't even think, I don't even think of terms of of like when the itch will go away

if you leave it alone or or having to deal with a scab there's just for as immature as i could be about a lot of things there's something ingrained in me that was like yeah you don't need to itch that because you're not a child you know that you're never supposed to scratch almost anything on your body that irritates you that's like a law that we all have to live with you deal with it because and if you don't you're a you're a clown you're a brain dead clown idiot and that's what i was thinking of this man um and i was thinking also that it says not only says a lot about you as a person because you don't have the impulse control to deal with that, but also as a parent, because I started to really go down this rabbit hole thinking about how having a toddler, having a young child is like, is like a mosquito bite in

that they want very specific things. They're going to like nag you for that thing. And if you just don't relent, like if it's a thing you don't want to give them, it's something they can't have. Then if you just don't relent in that, that first, thing you don't want to give them, it's something they can't have, then if you just don't relent in that first day that they're asking for it, then you're fine. At that point after that, they know they're not allowed to have it. But the minute that in a moment of weakness or whatever that you cave and you scratch that thing and you're like, yeah, fine, here, have it, then not only do they think they can get anything out of you as soon as they wear you down far enough, but also no means nothing anymore.

That initial no does not mean anything. And like, it becomes infinitely harder to raise a kid after no doesn't mean anything anymore. Right. And how you can be that short-sighted, like as a parent, you learn very quickly not to be that short-sighted to the point where you're staking your flag in the sand over things like you're not allowed to

use that pencil. Cause like it just becomes this thing where like, Oh, maybe you were using it at one point. Like, could I, can I see that? And you're like, no, I don't think so. And then they, if they keep going like, well, why not? Can I just have it? Can I just have it? Then you have to be like, no, no. Suddenly this pencil is very important. This is now our new battleground. This thing is important to me. And you have to pretend that like shit, but like there's reasons that they can't have this thing because you already said no once and you fucked up. And so you have to be very careful about the things that you say no to and the things that you say yes to.

And in that way, I was like, it's just like a mosquito bite where the minute I give in, I fucked myself. Like that's it. Now this is no longer just a 10 minute problem. This now becomes a week long problem.

Yeah. How was the play date otherwise? Sucked. I hate hate play dates especially this time of year it just feels like the sun is harsher it's always outside for good reason but the the sun is just i don't know how it does it this time of year because it's so low in the sky it's always in your eyes and i'm never comfortable i'm never happy i the the if we're gonna park the there's gonna be three slides we're not we can't use because they're in the, if we're going to park the, there's going to be three slides. We're not, we can't use because they're in the sun and they're just too hot on your kid. And you got to choose the one slide that everybody else is on. And then all the kids are going to be climbing up

that slide. And if I want to play games with my child, I'm going to make it fun. Cause I want to play the game. I want it to be something that I'm not bored by. And the minute that happens, all the other kids are like, well, they're're having fun i want to play that game with them because their parents are sitting on a bench on their phone and so that's the that's like the dream that's what you should be doing by the way don't ever play with your kids in a park because you'll fuck yourself you go sit on a bench like every other parent and you're like no you kids figured out you learn how to play with each other now i'm curious uh not about playground stuff uh mosquitoes were not a problem for me when i lived in los angeles in jersey they seemed like they

were everywhere and they're certainly uh they're a part of my life here in new york now uh but i didn't think there was enough like swamp ass water anywhere in la in in like the civilized la to breed enough mosquitoes to be part of your life well i don't even know if i believe me when i say this i think they're new oh yeah there's something maybe called a tiger mosquito they're like a smaller mosquito they really go for your legs they don't want anything up above that that's like their their bread and butter is your legs okay and breaking report just googled mosquitoes los angeles from october 7 2021 officials warned of invasive mosquito species surging in and then i have to click the link if i want to see where the inn is uh with regarding and i'm not gonna do that but i assume los angeles yeah invasive does aed 80s wow

climate change lets mosquitoes flourish and feast in los angeles man i got out at the right time you really did it's a you're right for a long time mosquitoes just weren't a thing here and it feels like this is brand new and they're bad. They're bad here. And to the point where I went to Minnesota over the summer and everyone warned me about the mosquitoes there.

And I got there and I was like, no big deal. These mosquitoes are fat and slow and there aren't actually that many. And maybe it's because they were having a drought in Minnesota too. And they've got their own weather related to global warming.

Yeah, climate change affects us all in quirky and specific ways. You know, horses for courses. The mosquitoes here are like a nightmare. And you don't even have to be near a body of water. We're nowhere near water at my house. And they're still, they love it here. And they love us. And they love, it's, they particularly love my wife and my son for

whatever reason their blood's different i guess but my daughter and i we can kind of skate by a little bit man that is well that sends my my brain reeling because your wife and your son look so similar and you and your daughter look so similar and And I know that that's not because of blood. Maybe it is. It's a good theory right now. Yeah, it doesn't seem wrong yet. I'm putting a puzzle together. I'm like, yeah, that kind of looks like a corner.

I think that looks like sky. Yeah, for some reason, they both get really bad reactions to mosquito bites, bug bites in general. But my sons are, this is part of the reason I think so much about mosquito bites is that if he but my sons are this is part of the reason I speak so much about mosquito bites is that if he's outside he loves to take his clothes off so he loves to be in his underwear no matter

what and for the most part we allow him to be feral around the house and in our backyard but and when it's in the like the late evening twilight twilight you did your best era hour I mean then I'll make him put clothes on. And I get mad if he's out there without them because it's so reckless for him. Because if they bite him, they blister on his legs. I don't know what he's doing. If it's him itching it or what it is. But the mosquito bite doesn't just act like a normal mosquito bite.

It starts to get really, really big. And it starts to get clear. And there's clear fluid inside of it. So it starts to just like blister and looks terrible and when they pop it's just so painful for him so i'm trying to like i'm just trying to try to get through it dan yeah i'm sorry that you guys are dealing with this this surge of mosquitoes that's a real surprise that's that's such a bummer. Hey, listeners. Quick question, titular moment. How are you feeling today?

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to a CLIA certified lab with a prepaid shipping label. Then your physician reviewed results and insights are sent to your device in just days. Over 1 million people have trusted Everly Well with their at-home lab testing. And for listeners of this show, Everly Well is offering a special discount of 20% off an at-home lab test at everlywell.com slash qq. That's everlywell.com slash qq for 20% off your at-home lab test. For 20% off your at-home lab test, everlywell.com slash qq. qq i guess that makes me think about um the the impact that bugs had on my life as a kid that i thought was going to continue on for the rest of my life and and simply didn't i feel like i was always getting mosquito bites as a kid and like bee stings were an ongoing concern i was

constantly worried that i was gonna get stung by bees I would get stung by bees every once in a while. My brothers and cousins were always getting the shit stung out of them by wasps in various parks. And it was just like a part of life that disappeared as I got older. I guess I'm just not outdoors enough or not in the woods as much as I used to be. I think you're not rolling around as much. Yeah.

It's really, the times that my son has gotten stung. It's because he's rolling around on things. It's like out in nature. You're generally the only thing that's touching the ground is the soul of your shoe. And as a kid, first of all, you're not wearing shoes some of the time.

So you're getting stung on the bottom of your feet, but also you're just like, you're on the ground. Yeah. That makes sense. I get like, I feel like it would be it would be a whole new narrative if i ran into an adult who was scratching their arms like yeah i got poison ivy like what

the fuck that's for kids what happened i got poison ivy and pink eye jesus oh no you can't come to work today in fact you should not even have a job yet. You should have a mother who takes care of you. So I took Colleen and her friend on a hike when we were younger. We had just graduated college and I didn't understand the habitat of Los Angeles yet. All I saw was a hill behind the house that I lived in in Burbank. And I thought, I will climb that. And they said, can we come? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. And so we made a day of it where we climbed this thing, but there was no trail.

And the way that chaparral habitat works is that it's just this scrubby thorny bushes that are unrelenting and awful. And you're just sort of like pushing through them is next to impossible. And it was such a bad idea for us to have gone. We went, I finally, at a certain point they turned back. They thought this wasn't worth it smartly. And I,

I pushed onto the top, realized there was a road that went down the back of it. As I was getting to the top, there was a woman at the top, just smoking a cigarette and watching me. And I was like, what the fuck? How'd you get up here? Um, she had driven and then went back down. I thought, well, that was a, that was a lost day. When I got back down, my wife and then girlfriend and then her friend were just covered in poison oak on their legs. Whatever we had walked through, we didn't know what it looked like then.

We were too young and they had gotten it so badly and I had none. And I started researching it and realized that there are a lot of people who just poison oak and poison ivy don't affect them at all. Oh, that's handy. Yeah, so I'm curious about my children. I mean, obviously, I don't want to test it.

I don't know a way to do that because it spreads even. If you itch it even, it starts to spread. But I'm just sort of hoping that they inherit that from me, that they aren't allergic to that. Not even an allergy. They just don't have an effect from it yeah uh hey sorry i got a quick question for you yeah shoot what a time to stretch uh uh hey what do you what do you do when you mishear a lyric in a song and i'll expand on that a little bit um this is i was listening to

uh seth rudetsky on broadway on sirius xm and he was talking about a lyric from lin-manuel mirandas in the heights that he uh just got for the first time there's a lyric in the opening number where usnavi says uh they gossip as i sip my coffee and smirk and because of his uh his accent and and the dialect that he's spinning into uh those phrases rhyme they gossip as i sip my coffee and smirk and it's something that a cute rhyme that i liked when i first heard the song but seth rudesky the host of this radio program uh didn't hear it and until recently and for years the entirety of his time listening to that song assumed it was a word he didn't know he thought it was they gossip azazip just like a word could have been in a different language could have been an english word that he hadn't learned yet and he just accepted it as part of the song and until he

learned better and i realized that that's the same thing that i do with songs if there's a word that i that doesn't scan to me and doesn't make sense contextually i won't dwell on it at all and i think there are a couple of different ways to react to a misheard lyric one of them obviously is to like google it so you can find what people are saying one of them is to embrace the nonsense as i do and one of them is to try to to to square a circle essentially and take a lyric and make it fit into what makes sense for you for context. Like there's a, my brother does this.

There's a Ben Folds five song, um, called Jackson Cannery. And one of the lyrics in the, in the first verse is saying, stop the bus over and over again. And he ends that chunk of dial of lyric with, I'll get off here. Like stop the with, I'll get off here.

Like, stop the bus. I'll get off here, blah, blah, blah. And my brother misheard that as get on the wheel, and he assumed, like, and that fit with his brain, because wheels, bus, like, maybe it's the steering wheel, maybe something, but he just assumed, like, stop the bus, get on the wheel. It's like, yeah, okay, great.

And then we told him the proper lyric. That, I think, is harder to do, get on the wheel. It's like, yeah, okay, great. And then we told them the proper lyric, uh, that I think is, is harder to do, but it's another reaction to mishearing a lyric is like, how do I make this make sense with what I know previously? Right. I'll just choose words that see fit and that fit enough. And that are related to what has been seen versus me,

who the first time I listened to under the sea from little mermaid, uh, what do they got under the sand? We got a hot crustacean band. I heard that as hot bustacean. And I was like, yeah, bustacean. I'm 12. I haven't learned that word yet.

I assume. There's lots of words I don't know. It's a bustacean. Yeah, it's a hot bustacean band. Come on. It's one of those bands that's like hot. I'm sure one day someone will teach me bustacean as a word. I'm in your brother's camp i will yeah i will the sentence won't necessarily make sense like i won't fully rewrite a lyric because i don't understand a whole sentence to be something

that i get can like get my head around but i'll just choose words that feel close enough to the context like uh there's a i do this a lot with bands like the shins the shins i find very difficult to understand when they're singing and for a long time my old roommate dan also a dan uh big friend of the show dan campana we designed our logo he did uh we would listen to The Shins, and there's a song, New Slang, which I think everybody knows because it was in that terrible movie. Yep, there's the one. Did I say Garden State fast enough that it overshadowed whatever you were going to qualify that movie with?

No, I think that's perfect. I haven't checked in on that movie in a long time. That would be a good one to go back to and be like, is this actually? I loved it at the time yeah but does it hold up um so i was we've listened to new slang and there's the the chorus of the song is like you know it goes new slang when you notice the and i didn't know what these next lyrics were i thought it was new slang when you notice the strife caught dead in your life and that that's just how I would sing it.

It didn't make a ton of sense, but it was like, okay, these words fit in a song. Strife feels like something you put in a song. Dead in life in the same lyric. Like those two things go really well together in a song. And crucially, they're all words. You're singing words. Real words. And not assuming that you haven't learned this word yet.

And so I was singing it. We weren't listening to the song, but Dan and I were in the car and I just happened to be singing it. And he was like, you know, it's the funniest thing. And I'm going to feel silly for this, but I thought it was when you noticed the lines of dirt in your fries.

I was like, of dirt in your fries? I was like, that's very, very funny. That's one of those moments where you're like, just hear a song lyric wrong and it's complete nonsense. That's, I was like, that's very, very funny. That's one of those moments where you're like, just hear a song lyric wrong and it's complete nonsense. That's very silly. And, uh, and so then from then on, when we would, there'd be like something going wrong in our life, we'd be like, oh man, it's dirt in my fries. And then we looked up the lyrics at some point. We, I don't know why we didn't do it for years, but we looked it up. It's he's right. The song is new slang. When you notice the stripes of dirt in your fries.

Stupid. I was like, I don't think I like the shins anymore. I didn't understand the other lyrics, but I really don't like that. Yeah. Another one that I do that for a lot is Bon Iver. Are you familiar with Bon Iver at all? Oh, yeah. Justin Hernon.

Yeah. Bon Iver, I can't understand a single word in any of their songs. And so I just sort of like make stuff up that sounds right. If I know the title of the song, boy, that helps a lot because then I can just choose approximate words. Yeah. But it's always, it ends up being nonsense. It's just their actual words. It reminds me, or not reminds me, but makes me realize how long i can listen to and

like a song without having any idea what the fuck it's about yes and like not even sitting and thinking about the lyrics because sometimes when i do learn lyrics for a song that i've been miss singing as nonsense for so long i'm like oh wow this whole song is like about something huh there's like a story to it i see he wasn't just doing like weird mouth shapes to make noise come out yeah in fact it will just like new slang like there's a lot of songs that are ruined for me once i actually learn what the lyrics are i love a song and i'm very excited about it and like i have no idea what's being said in it until i listen to it and i'm like oh no that's not so good i'm not as excited about it anymore yeah um there's only one time that my method has ever worked out for me,

and that's a song. There's been a lot of like, this Broadway shit keeps coming up for me today. There's a song from the last five years where the lyric is, without some new suras in our relationship. That's not the lyric, but like suras, and then the rest of the lyric continues.

But the word was suras, and that's like a word that sounded like nonsense to me. But I sang it every time that part of the song came up. And like in my head, knew how to spell it. Didn't know what it meant. It was just the noise that happens in that song. And then eventually bought the sound book for last five years. And it's Tsuris.

It's spelled like it is in my head too. It's T-S-U-R-I-S. And it's suris it's spelled like it is in my head too it's t-s-u-r-i-s and it's uh like a yiddish word what it's the only time i've ever like heard a nonsense word that i assumed was either a word i'm i haven't learned yet or a word in another language saying what it sounded like and then was proven to be right later i just looked it up. And the first definition says, first of all, it's a noun.

It's informal North American. It says trouble or woe or aggravation. And then here's the sample sentence they give. The NBA has its share of surrists these days. That's such a bonkers. Can you use it in a sentence please it's it's also i i guess the plural is the same as the singular the nba has its share of these days it would have to be plural there yeah it's it's it would have to be plural there yeah it's it's if you're someone who pays attention to a lot of basketball suras probably doesn't come up like that no that's not that's not the color commentator saying

like watching a game be like ah tell you what i'm a broken record about this but the nba sure has its share of suras these days am i right joe absolutely right marv um yeah it doesn't it doesn't come up that's very also if you're like trying to just not to paint with too broad a brush but it's a yiddish word that i learned from musical theater so if i'm trying to learn the definition and their go-to pull quote is the NBA has its share of service these days. Well, you're lucky that I watch basketball, but that's a, that's a, a real swing for you. Oxford length, Oxford English dictionary.

I will say though, that to your credit, there are songs that are, that I sound like nonsense to me and i enjoy memorizing the nonsense like it um sublime was a lot like that when i was younger where sublime he would occasionally sing in really broken bad spanish yeah and uh at the time i just thought it was oh he knows spanish and so i would memorize his spanish and really enjoyed doing that like i i liked knowing a song so well that I could just do that. There's another band called Orishas, which is like a,

they're a Cuban band and they, they're a hip hop band, but they're, they rap in Spanish and it's so cool. It sounds so great. And throughout my life, I've just sort of enjoyed memorizing nonsense to me. What I shouldn't,

I shouldn't call Spanish nonsense, but like what is nonsense to me what i shouldn't i shouldn't call spanish nonsense but like what is nonsense to me yeah i uh went on several dates years ago with a woman who listened almost exclusively to french pop in her car and so whenever she was driving that's what we would listen to and it's it's uh it's really contagious you really want to to sing i think we can still make fun of french people you want to sing french nonsense you want to sing that bullshit and be like and like do what it sounds like to you with some some tones under it yeah it gives you like the sense of mastery over a language that doesn't necessarily exist. Yeah.

And it's, if you got writer's block from a songwriting perspective, it's so much easier to write lyrics in nonsense French than it is in English. Oh man. If you ever tried to rhyme stuff, it's hard. But in France, in my version of French, it's super easy. The song can be whatever you want it to be. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm more in your brother's camp, though.

I will just, if there's something approximate that's even close. When we were kids, my brother and I would listen to the Beach Boys and the song, what's that? Key Largo, Montego, baby, where do we go? What is that? What's that song largo montego baby what do we go what is that what's that song called kokomo floor kokomo yeah kokomo um we'll get there faster if we take it slow is the lyric but my brother and i heard it as we'll get there faster if we take a boat and we're just like makes sense better than swimming i'm just learning now i thought it was we'll get there fast or we can take it slow oh like it's such a relaxed journey that that he doesn't even care how we get there they just know

they're gonna get there right he's given options at that point he's not telling you the way we're gonna go he's like but the actual lyrics are we'll get there faster if we take it slow yeah oh maybe he says we'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow oh boy came out hot with the kokomo and i don't think i know it we'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow and then we'll take it slow. And then we'll take it slow. Yeah. Well, we'll get there faster if we take a boat. Just made sense.

Is that long enough to be an episode of this show? Absolutely. Great. Absolutely. Okay. Well, anybody, if you want to tell Dan or I about songs that you don't understand the lyrics to and that you've made up your own lyrics to,

you can do that on Twitter at DOB underscore Inc. And that's the only place you should do that. Daniel's in my Twitter account that we share together. Just go to that one. You can also follow us on QQ underscore Soren and Dan. You can email us at QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. And you can find us on our Patreon. If you want to support the show, I don't know why you possibly would.

You're already doing a lot. You're listening to the show, and I appreciate that. You've listened clearly to the end. That's valuable to us. You can go to Patreon slash quick question. You can find us there. Also, if you want to donate to our Patreon, I think if you donate the $5 amount monthly,

you get to ask questions. And then we do bonus episodes in which we answer those questions. I think there's only the $5 amount now, right? Oh, is that the only option? I think so. If it's not the only option, that's certainly the option

that we're trying to steer people towards. Yeah, the best, the best one. Gold tier is what we call it. Please do not give us more than $5. I don't think they're allowed to. If you have to give us anything, give us five. Yeah. All right. Thanks everybody. Bye.