Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - The Vacation Blues

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Vacation all I ever wanted, Vacation something something take me away. In this episode Soren dives in his hatred of the alphabet and Daniel kind of has an opinion on it. As always thanks to our sponsors. Shop with confidence — get Honey for FREE at JoinHoney.com/qq

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favorite? Who did you get? When will I be remembered? What's it up to? Where did all the fireworks go? Oh, forget it. I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien.

Two best friends and comedy writers. If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time here. I think you'll have a great time here. So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of that podcast, comedy writer and dramedy spider, Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui.

Soren, say hello. Hello, everybody. I'm soren buoy i am also a comedy writer not as much a dramedy spider as i used to be uh oh no yeah it's not that i it's not that i lost the drama part just the bug yeah oh i get that that's real good stuff um dramedy spider's great dan and i that's not even like a good joke it's hacky on my part because technically spiders are not bugs. They're arachnids. They're arachnids. That's true.

But, you know, you get the bug. You lose the bug. Yeah. No, the bug thing works. The bug thing will play. Shout out in the comments if the bug thing didn't play for you. Let's thank Honey for sponsoring this episode. These these days it feels like online shopping is the only shopping we really do that's where honey comes in it's the free browser extension that

scours the internet for promo codes and automatically applies the best ones available at checkout go to join honey.com slash qq i'm getting a lot of messages a lot of chatter on twitter about how dan's account's missing. Oh, really? I thought we told them not to do that. We did. We told them strictly not to do that. I also got a lot of Talarak chatter.

People telling me how to fix my Talarak, trying to tell me what anchors are, like I don't fucking know what an anchor is. I'll pull up the text and share it with you after this, but it's so funny. My dad texted me a few days ago and was like i have some advice for soren for his towel rack thing and he gave some like very useful advice but just reading the text i just thought what the fuck are you talking about because i forgot i i do not know what happens on this show i have no idea what we discuss yeah ever you sort of black out in the middle of it and then people bring it up later and you're

like like jason will say jason Pargin will ask us stuff about it. You're like, I've got no idea what you're talking about. Yeah. Like, why is my, is my dad and Soren, are they on a separate chat? We do a little WhatsApp. We've got a group. You know, now that I think about it, it's all your whole family and not you. Okay.

But like Marty's on it. I shouldn't use people's names, huh? You could use Marty's name family and not you okay, but like Marty's on it I shouldn't use people's names, huh? Oh, you could use Marty's name. Yeah, okay Yeah, like Marty's on it and the kids are on it, which is good. But yeah, I don't know why we didn't include you Yeah, I never really thought about it. That's fine It seems like you guys have everything pretty much in hand at this point Things are good. Do you want to share whatever advice your dad gave? I mean, it'll

just take me a second to pull it up on text. That's fine. I'll tell you in the meantime that I have... There's a downstairs bathroom in our house that we... I redid all of those types of fixtures. Not the water fixtures. The sink stays the same, but everything now matches the sink. I put in new mirrors. I took off the old mirror which is that a mirror that's glued to a wall is a sketchy

thing to remove because they're giant too and then um painted put in new light fixtures and then put in new towel racks towel um toilet paper dispenser like all that hand towel racks and And the entire time I'm doing it, I'm thinking, I think I can come up with like 12 different ways this would be better. I could come up with a better way to build one of these than what they're giving me. Wow. I can't track down the text. That's all right.

And while I was looking for it, I didn't hear anything you said. It doesn't, just based on your tone, it didn't seem like there was... No new information. Yeah, and it felt like whatever my response was, which I think was wow, it seems like that was... That's fine. Yeah, I put in... That was fine. Okay, great. I did put in some good anchors.

These will stay in the wall for several years. These are fine, but still not the best system. Speaking of the best system Dan do you want to jump like directly into the show or do you want to uh do you want let's get into the show okay then I have a quick question for you hit me how much time have you spent thinking oh gosh uh grosser than that day do you dedicate to the alphabet i would say the real answer is that i don't dedicate too much of my day to the alphabet but it does it does come up okay because it's not like i don't have perfect mental recall of where everything fits within the alphabet. So I do find myself humming a part of the song every once in a while when I'm trying to order things.

That's great news because I do the same thing. And having a child that knows the alphabet now but is also still a little fuzzy on placement of letters and stuff like that. He's got to do it and I watch him do it. And also he i don't know if i've ever talked about this in the podcast he didn't talk until very late and so like there are certain sounds that he had a lot of trouble with in the alphabet uh that then he's he's come back from now but like at the time i remember thinking about how we group letters in the alphabet where everything is and thinking this is fucking nonsense though the order of the structure of the alphabet seems absolutely crazy to me no it makes sense because you start with a is the first letter so obviously that's where you'd start i i started like researching it because i was so, I was so bewildered by it. And for anyone who doesn't understand what I'm talking about,

the placement of the letters specifically in our alphabet that we chose to put a first and Z last and where we put all the other letters in between. There's like a real, if you look at like a periodic table or some other organization, there's like a real fluency to it. There's like, it's elegant. you you're gonna order your gases and your metals in different places and like our alphabet does not do that our vowels

couldn't be more spread apart they're like hidden like all the the letters that you absolutely need in every single word in the english language we've sort of like tucked away in these special little spots it's like they're separated by four letters, four letters, six letters, six letters in our alphabet. I'm not including Y in that. And the whole system has like seven parts. Like when you sing it, you're singing in seven. You have like seven chunks. And then instead of like everyone gets hazy on the back end.

And like LMNOP is maybe the hardest thing for kids to deal with. It's like one of the biggest contentions they have when they're four or five, just like figuring out how to get through that LMNOP. It's not a great system. And then we don't front load it. Like we have a lot of letters that we use very regularly that we need all the time. Like you can put all your vowels first. Then you put that, the other ones like that you use a lot, B and C and S and T. And we don't do time. Like you can put all your vowels first, then you put the other ones like that you use a lot, B and C and S and T. And we don't do that.

Like we have, for whatever reason, R, S and T are like on the back nine. Like we've put them on the B sides. And like those are some of our most valuable letters. And then you can, at the end, what we really should be doing is just like throwing in all the Xs and q's and things like that which you know a lot of them are there but like k k has no business being up front

and i sat there just like one night just thinking about this in a way that was keeping me up where i was like what are we why do we do this and so i started researching it trying to figure out why we had it the way that we did and it's a tough question to ask the internet, by the way. Because I'm laughing. I'm trying hard not to laugh directly into the mic, but every once in a while on this podcast, I find myself wanting to interject to say, quick question, what are you talking about?

Are you really feeling that right now? Yeah, and I know you're ramping up to something, but when you dip into like, here's where we should be putting the letters that's what my brain's like what's going on what does what's oh what does he mean oh okay well this isn't really going a very special place so i'm trying to like set the groundwork for why i'm so why i keep thinking about this i okay do you i just like i just in thinking about it can you think of like a logical reason that we would put the letters in the way that we do because they're there are things also called like velar sounds that you learn when your child is in speech therapy where it's like these sounds that you make in the back of your mouth your tongue is

like doing the work in the back like k and yeah g it's like slapping the back of your mouth your tongue is like doing the work in the back like k and yeah g it's like slapping the back of your throat essentially and uh we like there's it's not like we're grouping by noise we're not grouping by vowel we're not grouping by how frequently any of the letters are used and it makes sense for like a keyboard we understand that the keyboard was elegantly thought out they were like with typewriters they like, you can't put all your best word, all your best letters together because the keys can't keep up and they'll block each other. Like they'll get, they'll hate each other as people type. So you got to spread those out.

So that takes like that extra fraction of a second for you to reach your finger over. Right. But the alphabet turns out was, go ahead. I would, to answer your question, I would assume having done zero research on this, I would assume that it is lined up this way in a way that seems arbitrary to us because it was at the whims of some king or emperor at some point. So much of our lives are built around the preference of the richest person in the year 300 or whatever.

And now we're all stuck with like, oh, 12 inches is a foot because that's what the king said. So I assumed it was possibly that. And then my other immediate thought on the alphabet is like, the randomness, the arbitrariness is the point to me. I don't, I feel like we would get so bogged down deep into the weeds if uh linguistic

scientists a million years ago or whenever the past was a hundred years ago if they if they sat down and they're like well let's all decide what the most important letters are uh and and they decided vowels or they decided the letters that appear in the most words. I guess it all seems like that is a slippery slope to some kind of dominance that I can't predict but would make sense in retrospect. So I think the arbitrariness, or the seeming arbitrariness is sort of good.

It somehow feels platonic ideal democratic to me bro fascinating you like it i do you love the alphabet i'm kind of an abecedarian uh i feel like pat sajak could easily make a better alphabet just like real fortune does a really good job of being like, look, let's be honest. These are the letters that matter. These are the ones that everybody cares about. The rest can fuck off. And

they're right. Like, there are just certain letters that in English language, and has since the beginning of English, we just use a bunch more. But you're not too far off, from what I gather. The really unsatisfying answer is that nobody knows!

But there's like, what they think it is, is that the very earliest ideas of the alphabet came about in Egypt a long time ago, during the Bronze Age. It sort of followed in the tale of hieroglyphics. And they had a, that's when they really developed a letter for each sound.

And then ever since then, we've just been tracing that alphabet across different cultures where we're like, oh, they've got an alphabet. Okay, well, let's see, what's the approximate for us? Ah, they have an ah sound. Okay, we'll do that first too. And like, we've just been tracing it. And it went through the Phoenicians, been tracing it and it's went through like it went through the phoenicians went to the greeks it went through romans like it got it just kept

going through all these big um empires and everyone along the way was like no the first one's the best one that's the one we'll be using and they've just continued to trace over it and that's it and that's all we have i certainly remember now that i'm thinking about the alphabet seriously for the first time in a very long time learning the alphabet in italian class in middle school and the teacher was just like yeah we have they have 21 letters and i was like but there's 26 letters in words like no it's different it's like well what the are we doing then yeah we haven't even agreed on the right amount of letters spanish has like 28 and some of them are like yeah for real cheats one of them is two letters together and you're like no no you're not allowed to do that well i guess we kind of do a w although they've got they call it doble v

they've got double v but then they've got like the Ls together. They've got an N with an accent, the N-Y. But they also have K in their alphabet, which blows me away. We didn't have an Italian. Yes. And I can't think, just off the top of my head, I can't think of a single Spanish word, except maybe kilometers, that has a K in it. You don't need it in that language. that has a K in it. There's like, you don't need it in that language. But it's, it turns out that, yeah, it's just, and maybe I guess that makes it easier for you learning more than one language.

Like I remember learning Spanish and being like, oh great, their alphabet tracks with ours. Like you just, you can just draw a line to each letter and like that's its analog for the most part. They're not throwing them all over the place. And I guess that's its analog yeah for the most part they're not throwing them all over the place i guess that's sort of the point but man what would it really take for us to just start over universally if we've already got these already mapped to each other let's just leave a map to each other but like let's let's come up with a better organization because i don't

because there are no letters for for fluent english speakers't, because there are no letters for fluent English speakers, readers, and writers. There are no letters that you flat out don't need. So I feel like if we did your sort of ranked alphabet that I guess you're proposing, I don't, it seems only dangerous to tell people like when they're learning the alphabet, oh, it's some of these letters at the end. You're never going to need them. You're not going to use them.

But that's sort of what we're doing with the last four anyway like we're we get to x and we pretty much tell the kids like don't don't fucking worry about x we're like even when you're like in alphabet books where you're giving people like a is for apple uh b is for bear you get to x and it's always a cheat they're never actually using an x word because they don't want to give kids xyl and it's always a cheat they're never actually using an X word because they don't want to give kids xylophone that's too heavy so they're like x-ray or they say Christmas spelled X-mas

and you're like no tell them how you really use it and they're like no why what's the point no one uses X it's fine anyway well I'm convinced. I can see, as I'm telling it to you, that if we did change it for English, and we're changing it for every other language, how conceited that could be. Because there are probably a lot of languages

where they're like, no, X is very important. Like, yeah, in whatever the version of Spanish is that they use in Catalan. Is that what it's called? In like Barcelona, where there's just X's all over the place. They're just like littered with them. I think maybe it might have an effect there. But I don't know. It just feels like we never really tried.

And we just kept copying and copying. And it's like, like hey somebody along the way has to just say let's try let's just see yeah let's see what happens let's come up with a better alphabet that's easy for kids to learn so that even though they start learning it when they're four they don't really nail it until they're like five years later yeah i remember in kindergarten where it seems like you learn a letter a day or a week or whatever, something incredibly slow. And part of the practice is just like drawing that same letter over and over again and getting

to O and just being stoked. Like, this is what you guys should have been doing the whole time with letters. This is a blast to make and it's easy. Let's do that. Yeah. Anyway, that's my... Thanks for agreeing with me that we can do this and so i'm gonna get started i'm gonna get the ball rolling yeah i would love it if you uh a couple episodes from now pitched your alphabet your your preferred alphabet oh fuck okay it's a great idea i would

make me feel so good to write my own alphabet and here's what I'm curious about with a last name starting with a B that put you at the top of a lot of lists going through school I imagine it did it made me sit in the front of the class a lot yeah but it also put me next to Paula Bowman a lot and she was trouble sure she was bad she up to now jail streets dead i don't know where she is i'd have to go look last time i ran into her she was working at a gas station really yeah oh um but yeah she was she was a she was into more um mature things than i was i see and that was so scary to me. Yeah. That's why she was trouble.

Yeah. He did not understand her. Didn't get it. And so she stayed away. Stay away from Paul Bowman. Hey, have you heard about Honey? Honey is a free shopping tool that scours the internet for promo codes and applies the best one it finds to your cart.

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I got those post-vacation blues a little bit. Oh, no. Wait, are you back? I'm back now. Not New York. I am done with New York forever, I think. You're just back at work. I'm back at home, yeah.

That sucks. forever i think you're just back at work i'm back at home yeah um that sucks did north carolina for a little while to see my folks and uh my brother and nephew and then did baltimore to see some friends and and uh go to the aquarium can't go to an aquarium without uh thinking of the best time i went to an aquarium with you when we were in chicago and we got fucking shit bombed and went to the aquarium on a whim. And in a way I'm mad about it because we have been a lot of different cities together and that we didn't think to do that until Chicago is like, we could have been doing that everywhere. We could have been like, and this is the day we get drunk and go to the aquarium because

it was the most fun. It was such a blast. And like, Hey, I don't know why we didn't do that more b i don't i didn't know why uh because we didn't go to chicago just the two of us there were more people from cracked there yeah that i guess we're we're uh working i guess i guess doing what we were supposed to do when we were out there and you and i were like now we're gonna go to a brewery and then we're stumble over the aquarium and we had such a blast yeah uh they, we're going to go to a brewery and then we're going to stumble over to the aquarium. And we had such a blast.

Yeah. We go to these conventions and the conventions, there was some genuine interest from everybody else at Cracked who were like, no, there's a certain artist there that I want to go see. Oh, you cut out. I didn't hear what you said. There's a certain artist that they wanted to go see or there are some prints that they wanted and stuff like that.

I'm going to go walk the convention floor and not that like i'm not i i like all the stuff that they the merch that they have there in the art and everything but the idea of walking a convention floor where people just walk up to you yeah it was or it was terrifying to me because then i have to be somebody like i have there's expectation there and i didn't i didn't like that and so we would just go somewhere else. Yeah. We'd do another nerdy thing. We'd go to see fish.

And you'd tap on the glass and ask them why they fly so dumb. Yeah, why they fly so dumb. All right. Well, I do have another story that I want to tell you. All right. And get your opinion on. But I can start it with a question here. Outside of your Mack Weldon underwear, are you truly happy with your underwear choice? Do you like them? And let me give you a sub question. Do you think they're cool? I like my Mac Weldons. I have a lot of answers. I do enjoy my Mac Weldons.

They're the most enjoyable pair of underwear I've had. They're the first underwear that has made me, like, brand loyal to a pair of underwear. Because I would run underwear into the ground, and I thought of it as, like, because I would run underwear into the ground and I thought of it as like underwear is not enjoyable or stylish or anything. It's very functional. And then I started getting like nicer underwear. It was like, oh, I like this. And when I realized I was, I would get into the same laundry cycle over and over again where it's like, oh, I'm down to the underwear I hate.

A light went on and my brain was like, why do you have any underwear you hate just it doesn't need to be we don't need to be brand loyal it doesn't need to be mac weldon but like why do you have a system that by design a few times a month you're gonna put on old shitty underwear that is unpleasant to you yeah get rid of it and get something that you like you Marie Kondo'd yourself yeah all that said uh I I uh I think I'm I'm happiest with uh nudity or uh running shorts with the liner built in. I want the least amount of fabric between me and the world, I think, is what I'm learning about myself. Whoa.

Yeah. I like swim trunks, and I like my running shorts. I don't like it so much that I'm free-balling it everywhere I go because I definitely don't like that. I don't want, like, no underwear and then the zipper of my jeans. That's very unpleasant.

You don't want to be up against the denim. No, no, absolutely not. But, like, broadly speaking, the least amount of fabric between me and the world is what I want. But I don't think society is ready for that yet. For your gift. No. Imagine me walking into the coffee shop fully displaying my terrible burden. What would they say?

So when you run, you just wear the shorts that have liners in them and nothing underneath those? Yes. I have a couple of pairs of running shorts still that don't have the liner so i will wear boxer briefs with those yeah i've i've never in my life done that i have one pair that has that liner in there and i'm like it's just so uncomfortable because i got to put underwear under them i wouldn't even consider the possibility that i would just put on those shorts without underwear it's inconceivable to me yeah that's what they're for yeah i know it's just like there's a huge mental barrier to that um but that's not my story so i just admitted all that for nothing i was in the same i'm well i'm more or less in the same boat as you where i

i buy new underwear when i'm like oh the back of these fell apart or when i'm like oh wow there's no more elastic i can hear the elastic crumbling when i put them on in the waist that's when i would get new underwear and uh i had a real eye-opening moment recently when i was out on a run and wearing underwear, but I saw this guy who was unhoused and he was shitting in the street, but he had pulled his pants all the way down and was like standing kind of upright, like not crouched, just like standing kind of upright and leaning back and around his knees, kind of like pinning them together was his underwear. back and his at around his knees kind of like pinning them together was his underwear and i realized in looking at him that they're the exact same underwear that i have like same color same

same i got probably got from tj maxx same place i got them or like wherever that i don't know i don't know where he got them but like they're exact same underwear and uh i had this moment where i was like is am i wearing rock bottom underwear like is that is that even is that problematic for me to even think um maybe is it bad that i was immediately like i don't i don't want to wear the same underwear as that man i should be getting something different. I guess my train of thought would have been he's wearing inherited underwear from Goodwill or donation in some other way. And I would put the positive spin on that.

They're like, these were so good that someone didn't throw them out because they stopped working. It's like, well, I'm tired of these, but they've still got use in them. So maybe they can be flipped to someone else. Right. These got a few more years in them. Maybe that's right. I felt really bad as like really having a crisis after it.

I saw it because I was like, well, I should get new underwear. And I thought, no, Soren, that's a horrible thing to think. Like this is, it's just another person. And just because they are worse off than you doesn't mean that like what they're wearing is bad. But it was really like, it was very startling to see somebody wearing something as intimately close to you as it's identical to yours. Or I was like, Oh man, is that, is that me from the future? What is going on here? Um,

and I thought I need, I need new underwear and I need to check in with you to see, first of all, am I a monster? No. Second of of all do you have a pair what should i get i get i get i'm i'm all mac weldon man yeah i don't know what to tell you it's a great brand i guess uh i guess if i'm really pressed to think about it i feel like underwear broadly as a concept uh engineers on underwear you're listening, I don't think we're fully done. I think keep working on it. I think there's, there's, there's probably a better way. And it's one of those things like, uh, like printers where you had a good idea, rush it to market. And it's like, this is a good start, but please keep at it. Like, we're going to stick with these for a little while, but like, don't think that your job is done.

I think you can improve on underwear and printers and whatnot. And the alphabet. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we didn't stick with that Shakespearean, uh,

like leather comb, comb, bracer or whatever the fuck we had. Codpiece. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then we had a codpiece for so long i mean i

don't know what the purpose of that was but it seems very roomy yeah uh something like that there's there's always something in in in school where you'll see like and this is how people used to dress in colonial times isn't it crazy all these stupid layers and they have all these like ropes that bind everything together and that's dumb thank god they improved after that and i want to make sure that like the lesson we take from that is we can always be improving it's not like and then we solved it because the colonial dorks they thought they solved it too yeah they were like buckles can you believe in the world before we had buckles on our hats and shoes yeah we were living like we were living in caves basically um yeah it does seem like we need

to we need to continue and there are people out there who at least are like pretending it like they're like we've reinvented underwear and i'm like yes great what did you do and then i look at it like no man that's underwear i've seen that before right we did contour side paneling no that just looks like underwear to me man you're solving a problem that i i never said i had i don't know what my problem is yet but we haven't figured it out uh i have a friend who's a venture capitalist you've met him ed wilson yeah and he works for a venture capitalist company and like they so they're constantly looking at new products and testing them and being like yeah we would we would invest in this oh that's what venture capitalist means he's he's shark kind of yeah

i mean they're investing yeah they're helping small businesses and like taking a cut and so he there was one company that came to him and there was like underwear and he was in the same boat where he's like i don't know man underwear is underwear and they're like well we'll send you a pair and they sent him like a bag of these things and he put one on and he was like oh i see i see what's going on here and the way that the stitching had worked and like the pocketing of it worked wearing a pair of this underwear makes your penis look huge. It just like, it's very flattering the way that they're designed. There's no hugging.

Like at that one particular crucial area, there's just like, it bulbous is out. I mean, oldest trick in the book. Going to be hard to market probably. Like it seems like you just have to send it to like just put this on right and walk around for a little while and then you'll get it we'll all wink at each other you can't do it in the commercial no because then everyone sees it and the jig is up right so you've got to like be like look we'll just take some like take some and try them and then you will see and i think he went to his wife and he's like hey jill look at this and she was like oh my god immediately she saw it

and he was like yeah these are great i have no idea how you sell them everyone will want them but i have no idea how you tell them what they are uh that's it dan that's it for me that's it okay let's see oh i have an update for you okay do you remember what we talked about last time we did this podcast i never know what we talked about when we do this podcast uh we talked about uh i had a mustache as a bit. Oh. To surprise my family. Yes. Oh, I'm very curious about this. I want to hear how it went with your, let's see, you wanted to see if your mom would be

My mom, my dad, my brother, and my nephew. Yes. And let me guess, first of all, who was honest with you. I bet your nephew was the most honest. No. Okay. And I'm going to get right to it the only one who said anything was my brother and like i walked in there mustache first as one does and neither of my parents

noticed anything in their defense like it's a house full of people and we're all running around and i was starting to think like maybe maybe it's just not as pronounced as I thought it was. Maybe, maybe I should have planned this out better. And then before, hello, my brother says mustache. David sees me and he goes, mustache. I'm like, yeah, all right, good. Thank you. Good.

Someone, someone understands this bit that I haven't fully figured out yet. Now, when he said mustache. And the other person. Did he say, did he say mustache or did he go mustache like in the way that that uh ed's wife screamed oh my god it's just like mustache was the sound that came out of him in light of this new information it's like a thing is different now like that's right you spotted it you did it and i think like in in my parents defense i think we like we they're just sweet people and all the the my brothers and i we all have had like different versions of scruffy faces for a while and i think

they're my parents just like, either they don't notice or they're like kind enough or just like, he's doing this thing now and that's fine. And like, don't say anything. Just, just, just be happy that he's here.

Uh, the other person that I think did notice, we were FaceTiming with my sister-in-law and my niece. Cause they, they didn't do the trip with us. And the niece just kept demanding to see me. And she FaceTimed because she wanted to see her brother. But then as soon as I got into the picture, anytime I leave, she'd be like, no, uncle, uncle.

And she would see me and then she would laugh. And I think it's mustache i think yeah she's a she's a smart cookie who even if she couldn't articulate like he's look at that ridiculous mustache she just knew like uncle's being stupid again let me ah good joke uncle i think that there's probably something to that my so my dad has a mustache and has had one my whole life and when uh he doesn't he so he's got ms so he doesn't get a lot around great so he doesn't come to visit a ton and my mom has come to visit quite frequently and so my daughter who who knows my mom way better than she knows my dad she will still ask for him specifically when she's like she'll like pick up one of our phones and be like,

Papa, Papa, like call him. We're like, okay. And we just like, didn't get it. We're like, why does she, she's so invested in Papa. And my poor mom who was like, has really put the time in with this girl still when she's on the screen, Gilly is going, Papa, Papa. And they're like, gilly is going papa papa and they're like hi gilly how are you no papa and uh and then when she sees him all she does is just stare at him and i'm like oh she what is it about him and i think it might be the mustache i think it might be that it's such a it's an interesting thing right and it is interesting it's novel to them because no one in the world has mustaches right now yeah and here's a this person with something like fur on their lip and it's gotta be fascinating i think when i'm looking at this at my two-year-old niece and i've got dark framed eyeglasses and this mustache

and she's like let me just get a look let me just take in all these extra lines that uncle has on his all these different shapes going on. They don't know it yet, but like there's some platonic ideal of Groucho Marx. That's like the height of comedy where it's like you met, you match glasses and mustache and there's just something innate in us. That's like, ha ha.

That's a good one. Oh, you just cut, you just cut out for me. Oh, when you have my internet's bad here. Um, there's just something innate in us.

When we see glasses and a mustache that we're like ah now that's common uh you said your internet's bad there are you somewhere else right now no it's just you know it goes in and out it gets bad sometimes there's like weeks that it's bad it's like a it's like an old sports injury it's like everyone's well oh my internet's flaring up i'm not not good this week. It's going to rain. Um, I don't know why it does this. I had to pitch my episode for our show for American dad the other day to our showrunner and I got right next to the modem and it didn't matter.

And it really was like, it was so frustrating in the pitch when I would be like in the middle of it and talking. And all of a sudden everyone on the screen, which is like, we can't, we can't hear you. Yikes. Like, ah,'t, we can't hear you. Yikes. Like, ah, all right, let me go back. Let me jump out of it for a second. I'm like, let's get back into the idea of it. I'm so nervous about that because I never want to be back in an office again for the

rest of my life. I'm very happy work from home, but every once in a while we'll be on a Zoom call and I'll, I'll see someone who i know is also living somewhere in the country that they really like to be in some remote peaceful place and i see them start to pitch something and then go in and out and then i see everyone else's face in the zoom and i was like oh oh no and now now he's just cut back in to laugh at his own joke and no one gets it and and i was like this is this is bad news cut back in to laugh at his own joke and no one gets it and and i was like this is this is bad news this is really bumming me out it's really hard man i think it's all the dead i think we

have this huge cemetery hill by our house that just blocks us from the rest of the world somehow and i it's my internet no matter what there's just every once in a while it's like well we're not gonna work this this week. We're off. Sorry I'm not pulling my weight on this episode. The vacation stuff, it's not... I don't know if you get this way, where once you get back from a vacation, it's just like

just a little bit a bummer until your next thing. It's that moment when you get back and you're like, okay. What next? Here's a question I have. i don't know if i'm if i'm totally great at vacations some of them i i am like we went to zion and we were hiking or i do like a backpacking trip with my brother every year or like you know something where it's like a specific destination with a, uh, a job the whole time

I could do those. But this trip to Baltimore, cause I was like seeing my friends for, for dinner and hangs and stuff. But the rest of it, it was just, just myself staying in an Airbnb. And I do this thing whenever I'm on one of these solo vacations where I get these strange vacation goggles where I'm like, this is an opportunity where I don't, where like a child's idea of vacation, I don't have to do the things that I normally do. And I think that's the wrong impulse. Cause I get to this Airbnb and I'm like, I'm on vacation. That means I don't have to run and I don't have to cook. And I, and, and like the things that I like to do,

I forget that those aren't, aren't my job. And they're not like, like chores that I dread. I, then I like sit around and eat delivery food. And I'm like, ah, I can't wait to go home and like run and make myself a salad. It's interesting because I've never in my life. Oh, that's not true. I was going to say,

I've never taken a vacation by myself. I've been on vacation only once by myself. And it was when I was in, when I traveled abroad, Daniel, for a month, there was, I guess we had a month off of school and I traveled around Europe by, for a month, I, there was,

I guess we had a month off of school and I traveled around Europe by myself. You said, sorry, just for, for our, our listeners, you said travel abroad and you said it with a whole lot of like, uh,

smugness about it. I just want to make sure I'm thinking that this is the trip where you ran out of money and slept on a park bench in, in Europe, right? Is that? Yes, it is Daniel.

That's yeah. Okay. This was that trip. All right, proceed. Abroad. Yeah, where I was chased out by some weirdos from the Rome Forum. And I screamed at them

because I didn't know what else to do and I wanted to look scary. And I survived on a jar of peanut butter. Yeah. So you get it. You take a vacation and you behave irrationally. And that trip, it made me realize like, I'm not good at this. I'm not good at like planning.

I spent so much of that time just sitting in train stations, trying to catch trains and stuff. I'm not great at traveling alone because I need someone there who helps dictate what we do. If I don't have that, then I'm like, I'm not going to do anything. Oh, there's a TV. Oh, then I'm on vacation. I'll just sit around and watch TV. And I don't, I don't take full advantage of the, like the actual place that I've gone.

Yeah. I certainly did. What I'm saying is she can be. What was that? I certainly did watch a bunch of TV. What was that? I certainly did watch a bunch of TV. That was one of the, like, I still made sure I squeezed in a couple of runs in this Baltimore trip because I like running. But, like, I left my dumbbells at home because I thought, like, it's vacation. Why would you work out? And, like, once I'm there, I'm like, well, working out was, like, it's vacation. Why would you work out? And once I'm there, I'm like, well, working out was like, it's a thing I choose to do.

It's a thing I choose to do that occupies some amount of time in the day. And now I don't have it. I don't know what to replace it with. Right. I did find that it was really fun when we would go on trips that we would go run. Yeah. Like, we ran through Nashville and we were like, we don't know where we were going or anything. We were just like, let's just go on go run. Like we ran through Nashville and we're like, we don't know where we were going or anything.

We were just like, let's just go on a run. And we ran, we're like, oh, that was it. That was the whole city. Well, we ran through it. Okay, I guess we're at the other end now. Let's go back. And you get to see it in a new way because you're not in a car, you're like moving past things slowly

and you kind of make mental notes of the things around you where you're like, ah, I want to go see that later. That's very interesting. I liked that when I was running around Baltimore. There's some great parts of Baltimore. I was really hoping to do... I was looking around and they didn't have it. I wanted to do one of those Sex and the City bus tours, but for The Wire,

where I go to all the major wire spots. They didn't have that. That's great. Let's go make a million dollars that's like people still love the wire yeah what do you think what do you think what would we show them this is where the towers were how we go to the docks the docks yeah we'd spend most of the time on season two and everyone would be like i spent a lot of time on season two. It wasn't my favorite season.

They really cared a lot about Frankie Sabaka or whatever his name was. And this is the bar where Ziggy's goose died. Which one? Who was Ziggy? This is where they would go to get their raw egg and a beer oh okay um yeah i would think that would be great i think we could make a lot of money wait do you think a lot of that stuff is gone now that was in the wire originally like those neighborhoods have been transformed i don't know i mean the towers came down in the show yeah so whether they were up in the first place i i don't even

oh man i wouldn't know now i would love to go on a tour like that i'm surprised that they don't it's like that's probably what put baltimore on the map right yeah well that about wraps her up, huh? That'll do it. Thanks so much for listening. The show is Quick Question. You know that because you're listening to it. You can find Soren at Soren underscore LTD. You can find the show at QQ underscore Soren and Dan on Twitter.

You can email the show at QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. Our theme song is by the fabulous Me Rex. Check them out anywhere music can be checked out. We are recorded today by our special guest, Jacob. Last time Jacob recorded with us, he declined to be featured on the show, an impulse that I think is wise. And has that carried through? Have you decided to maintain your silence? I take that as a no.

Take it away jacob it really is like there's just nobody there yes we just made jacob up all right bye all right bye Bye. When will I be remembered? Was it out to hurt at all? Oh, forget it. Saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien. Two best friends and comedy writers. If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time here. I think you'll have a great time.