Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - 23 Skidoo

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Alex Schmidt and special guests Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica explore why "23 skidoo" is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

23 Skadoo, known for being old-timey slang. Famous for being old-timey slang. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why 23 Skado is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cephalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode and kind of a time-jumping episode. There's a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

my name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I have basically decided that it would be nice if at the start of the Max Fun Drive, there is a new episode, even though if you've been listening to the feed for a few weeks, there's been some family leave weeks. So I'm taping this before my baby is born. Next week, hopefully you will hear from me after they're born, whole new era. Either way, I have a wonderful guest joining me today. I hope you folks know them from Greatest Generation, Greatest Trek,

and other things they do on Max Fun, Ben Harrison, and Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica. Hi, guys. Hello. Hey, Alex. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate you doing this. And I know things are busy when this releases with the drive, but we're way before it now. So it's all, you know, it's all gravy, this is ordinary time. We're going to think about this time nostalgically for its calm and peace, right?

New baby arriving during a pledge drive is, that's a heavy lift. So I salute you. And I hope folks will dig deep to support secret. incredibly fascinating. And it's future host because I think that all podcast hosts aspire to hand their podcast down to their children eventually. I don't think I told you guys, Katie, because she's also having her own baby separately, she called them our heirs.

And we basically decided, yes, it's some sort of monarchical version where they host it later. Yeah. Ben, there's still time to make a baby before the drive. Are you feeling a little behind the curve here? I mean, my wife won't tell me how it all works, but... Should we pause the show for a second so Ben can go take care of that? That sounds like that could be an episode of the show, right? You could explain how it works.

Alex, you would only have to pause for like six minutes. I'm sure he'd be right back. Six? What am I, an athlete? I mean, you want to go twice to increase your chances, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, two is one. One is none.

I'm so glad you guys are here. I was saying before we started, I've seen you guys live at the bellhouse, and I hope folks know that it's the greatest Star Trek stuff in the world these guys make. And also, they're a little bit embarrassed to make Star Trek podcasts. So be sure to needle them about it. I give a brief. Thanks for that. But, yeah, please support them in this drive time, too.

And we have a wonderful topic from you, folks. Thank you, especially to Lee Beer. on the Discord for suggesting it. Ben, Adam, either of you can go first, but what is your relationship to or opinion of the topic of 23 Skidoo? I'll go first and just say that

I was very excited to hear that that was our topic because when I was in high school, I read a book called the Illuminatus trilogy and the number 23 is like very important in the numerology of that book. I kind of

want to reread it because I feel like in retrospect it may have like have like poisoned the brains of a bunch of people and made them more prone to conspiracy thinking because the whole book is about like the the secret forces that actually control the world and 23 is one of the numbers that they use to like self-identify I guess and 23s could do as something to do with that at the book but it's been a very long time since I've read it and I thought it was a silly book about how silly it is to think like that at the time. But, you know, I sometimes feel like I walk away from experiences like that with different

takeaways than a lot of people. So, yeah, like, I've always been curious about it because I've also heard people say 22 Skadoo, which is a little bit more fun to say, but I have no idea if that's a thing or if it's like a malapropism. Why isn't it that? It rhymes so nicely. That should be what it is. Yeah. In this main show, and then also the bonus show this week is about Michael Jordan. We will talk about all of those things, especially Jordan, making more sense, kind of if it was 22. One of the famous number 22s in all the sports.

Right. Raise it into the rafters. You can't use it anymore. Ben, that was really inspiring to hear because I have to admit, I knew nothing about this topic. Nice. And I planned on doing what all podcasters who look like me have to do from time to time. I'm just going to sit back and reflect and listen for the remainder of the time here and figure out what all this is and how I can better contribute to the discourse. The one other thing that I will say is when I hear the phrase 23 skidoo, I do automatically picture the Charleston starting up right at. as it is uttered.

Like, you hit the post on the Charleston when you say 23 Skidoo, right? I definitely hear the term through an old-timey radio in my mind every time. It made me think of Star Trek because, like, I feel like they just have a thing on the ship often where they will like pop culture from 300 years ago because that's when we were alive. 23 Skidu is such old pop culture. It's so antique. Yeah. Yeah. And I've heard of that Illuminatus trilogy.

Is that William S. Burroughs or somebody like that? It is two authors. It is Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. It is a big thick daddy. Trilogy was not a lie. Did you have to pick that book out from between two El Ron Hubbard books, Ben? It does kind of look like that. It's got a pyramid.

Yeah, an exploding volcano and a bunch of dolphins coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's also something in it. This is like a very vague recollection. So somebody has the book like more close at hand in their memory. They may, this may be wrong, but I remember there's something about like at the beginning of life on earth.

There was one cell that propagated by multiplying and another one that propagated by just getting bigger. And that thing is still alive and it's underwater. And it's like part of the whole conspiracy thing. So much of the sea. is unexplored, Ben. I'm ready to believe this. And it's huge. It's so big. And I think that that's what that pyramid is meant to represent on the cover. As you described that, I realized I got very cellular and molecular biased. I'm like, it can't be too big. No way. It means to be small like I'm used to. I checked my biases before heating up the mic here today. I'm ready to be

open to the possibilities of 23 skidoo. I'm not a 23 skid don't, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, and it's such old time he's slang, my entire relationship to it is basically that I heard it for the first time like a year ago, and specifically in a song by John Prine. The musician and songwriter John Prine, he has a song where it's just part of the lyrics. and it's a song called Jesus the missing years. He's kind of pulling from all across 1900s pop culture, and I think that's why he throws in 23 Skidoo.

Were the missing years, the teengous years that I remember from righteous gemstones in the last season? Because those seemed fun. Yeah, pretty much. I've never actually checked this acclaimed fact, but apparently the Bible doesn't really describe Jesus' life from age 13 to 30. And that's the entire premise of the song is that it's what Jesus could have done in that time. But it's very silly. Like, he moves to Rome and becomes an artist.

And it's, like, not actually sacred. Yeah. He sews some wild oats. Yeah. Yeah. Guy was a lot more cosmopolitan than people think, you know? It wasn't just a simple carpenter. He really lived a life.

But, yeah, it turns out there's a lot here. And this is definitely sift it's, like, massive slang from the past. It was maybe the most popular slang phrase of the first. first decade of the 1900s. And none of us are from then, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah, so like our great grandparents were saying this? Pretty much.

If they were cool. And that too. Yeah, yeah. So it depends if there's squares. I feel like everyone was a square of them. They were all just some sort of flinty Calvinist kind of person. But, you know, some people said it. And let's get into, you know, what it is, essentially.

And every episode we lead with a quick set of fans. fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called Stats, exciting and new. Count numbers, we're expecting you. That name was submitted by Rudy Lane.

Thank you, Rudy. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And the first number here is 2008. the year 2008, that is when the movie Kung Fu Panda sort of revived 23 Skadoo. The Kung Fu Panda has a catchphrase based on Skadoo.

Okay. Yeah, but he says Skadoosh. Is that based on Skidoo or is that just an anomontopia of like chopping a board in half with your karate chop? Yeah, apparently, so Jack Black voices Poe, the panda and Kung Fu Banda and he told an interviewer he specifically improvised it and coined it. It wasn't in the script. And he remembered that the old time he slang phrase 23 Skadoo was a thing and turned it into Skadoosh. So does he get paid every time somebody says it?

Have you heard of Squadush? I feel like this is a thing that you hear people say even now. Like it means nothing. I got nothing out of that. I got Squadush. I got Squadush. Wow. I haven't heard that. Like maybe you've heard it on the Sopranos or something. Like I'd love to pay the strippers, but I got Squadoosh in my pockets. Like that's famously from the Sopranos probably, right? I want to honor their labor as strippers. Yeah, that's how he talks.

I got to save my money to get a meat sandwich at Satrials. I got Squadish to spend on these strippers. Listen to this tone. sex workers are entitled to every dollar of value they create. Squatush. Yeah, it does really feel like just a mashup of all sorts of words. Jack Black, just doing Jack Black stuff in some kind of voiceover booth somewhere. When his hand got shot off in that movie The Jackal, I remember that moment where he looked up at the stump at the end of his arm and he's like, I got Squadoosh on the end of my arm.

We all remember that scene, right? Yeah, at Kung Fu Panda is massively popular. So basically the several movies, three TV shows, that's the main way something like 23 Skadoo is in pop culture. The other big way, besides maybe a John Bryan song, is The Simpsons. There's an episode called Burns' Air Season 5, Episode 18, where Burns is doing football audibles and works 23 Skadoo into it. He's like making Smithers play leatherhead type football with him. Yeah, so it's like in The Simpsons, it is a joke about how old Burns is

because that is a pop culture reference he has from his childhood. Yeah. Yeah, it's such famous slang as outdated slang. It's probably the most famous tired slang in the English-speaking world. there are a lot of slang terms that have like a real like they burn too hot and go away very fast was 23 skidoo around for a really long time or like is our era going to be made fun of in a hundred years with six seven jokes or what like yeah that is what we're going to find out and it seems like 23 skidoo burned so bright people remember it even though it did not stay super popular

and 6-7 is a pretty perfect parallel for some kind of battered version of 23 Skidoo, because that apparently only started in February 2025, the 6-7 meme. The initial germ of it is a drill rap song. The musician Scrilla released a song called Doot Doot. And there's a line repeated in at about 6-7. I just bipped right on the highway. And then people from there have just turned it into a global meme that doesn't mean anything. but the lyrics seem to be about shooting somebody in another car from your car

and the bullet smashing the glass. That's way cooler than I thought it was. Yeah, bipping is smashing a car window so you can get into it, but usually you do that on foot with a parked car. So if he bipped right on the highway, he probably shot somebody else while they're both driving. But now people just kind of do a shruggy motion when they hear the number. And then their teachers get mad.

When someone catches me bipping someone's car window, that's often what I'll do in reaction to being caught. I'll be like, uh, and what I do in reaction is I say, 23 skadoo and I get out of there. Yeah, that's kind of another parallel is 23 Skadoo has had one pretty consistent meaning in all of its time as slang, which is that you get out of the situation quickly. You either say we should 23 Skadoo or tell someone to 23 Skidoo. And 6-7 is sort of similar where it's pretty much just the thing of someone said 6-7, ha-ha. That's it. There's not really other meanings to it.

Man, is 23 Skidu the original brain rot? Apparently, yes. It's pretty much one of the first brain rots in especially English language culture. I'm going to link to The Guardian. They did an interview with Dr. Daria Batina, who's a sociopolit. linguist at UCLA. And she says, recent trends like 6-7 and Skibbidi are, quote,

fun precisely because they are exclusive and recognitional. The joy lies in getting it. It looks like brain rat from the outside, but actually follows the same sociolinguistic logic as every previous generation's creative language play. And so 23 Skadoo is that. A lot of it was that when we talked about her great grandparents, it was mostly fun to know what it means.

they already had words for get out of here quick. They didn't need more words. And it kind of stops being fun when like your lame parents know what it means, right? Like that kind of takes the fun out of it and then you got to move on as a as a youth culture. Somebody in the Discord was saying to me the other day that if we make a SIF entirely about 6'7, we can probably kill it. Like I'm in my late 30s. as you hear this, I'm probably apparent. It would be really lethal to 6-7 if I talked about it.

Is it too late to change the theme of the show we're doing right now? I feel like we need, this is urgent. We need to do this, okay? Don't threaten us with a good time. Like, come on, Alex. What is making us hesitate? Break glass in case of 6-7. Yeah, and it's such a violence origin in that song.

Because also 6-7 is apparently right. referencing the police code of 1067 for when they report a death. And like I said, they're bipping car windows. But the musician Scrilla has told interviewers either that it references 67th Street in his part of Philly or that it has no meaning. So there's, it really is the brain rot thing, but it turns out brain rot is old. It's been going on for a long time. Man, imagine being the guy that started that. Do we know who started 23 Skidoo?

And we don't. So we'll talk about theories today. Okay. Because, yeah, there's a few super interesting theories and there's no specific answer. Yeah, like one nice thing about Rainrott today is the internet is forever. A lot of things are recorded. Like, we just have more of a paper trail for these kinds of things. I always wondered if it had something to do with 23rd Street in Manhattan.

That's one of the theories. Oh, really? Yeah. Like a flat iron. building, right? Like kind of a popping part of town? It's specifically related to the flat iron building. Am I jumping ahead? Tell me if I'm jumping ahead. No, this is great. It gets us straight into it. So we can get into takeaway number one.

A major theory of the origin of 23 Skadoo involves New York City's flat iron building and perverts. Oh! Oh! Almost all of This theory, which I don't find as believable as the other big one, but the theory is basically that strong wind patterns were caused by the shape and size of the flat iron building. And then dudes would show up to gawk at ladies' clothes getting blown off. And then they would need a 23 skidoo when the police tried to stop them from being pervy and weird. Well, they sound like real stand-up gents.

I hadn't considered that part. I have an embarrassing story about the flat iron building, which is that when I moved to New York for college, I had only ever read flat iron. I'd not heard it pronounced. And so the first time I said it out loud to somebody, I called it the Flasheron building. Say that again?

The Flasheron building. Like that letter combination does sometimes make, the S-H sound and I don't know why I assumed that it was making that. Ben, maybe part of the story you should say what your first language was. Canadian English. Okay. I get, yeah, it's sort of like a ration maybe. Yeah, exactly.

So, sort of like that. Okay. Yeah, I'm good with it. I'm open to it. So there were a bunch of women like Marilyn Monroeing in front of the flat iron building. and a bunch of dudes smoking old-timey pipes just watching, and then they were getting kicked out for that. This is the story.

This is the legend? Yes. And so I find it kind of unbelievable because I feel like that's just not a cycle of humans that make sense where the cops are staking it out, but then everybody just comes back. I don't get it. New York's windy all over.

When you said it was purvey, my mind immediately went like 23. 23. That's like a third of 69. Is that like we're like licking the back of each other's knees? Because that's like a third of the way up the body. Like that's where we begin. Then a little bit later we're doing 46. That's like thigh stuff.

You know, watch out. I'm just picturing the like geometry of this. I don't think you could lick the back of another person's knee while they were licking the back of your knee. I think it would have to be knee fronts, right? Oh, yeah, I guess. Well, I mean, it depends on how much hip flexibility you have. Okay. So if you're like an Olympic gymnast and another Olympic gymnast got together.

Which, I mean, in my defense, those are the only sexual partners I've ever had in my life. Fair, fair, yeah. My experience is going to be different for me. Gold medals hanging from Adam's bedpost, let's just say. Yeah, it is very Marilyn Monroe in that one moment. moments, per of stuff. It's so unfair too because she was just trying to take a piss, like a street piss. You know?

Leave her alone. Like, you don't want to get the dress wet, obviously. You flip that thing up. And there's a great down there. An inopportune moment. We always think about the flip up. We don't think about the reason for things. And that's what the show is about.

The reasons for things, right? Marilyn Monroe famously could not get the Chipotle bathroom code. Yeah. So what was she going to do? Sorry, customers only, ma'am. Happy Barbacoa to you. I think I'm done. In 1901, Thomas Edison made what qualified as a movie at the time.

It was less than two minutes long. phantoscope, but a little black and white movie of basically the Marilyn Monroe dress flip. But the movie was called What Happened at 23rd Street, New York City. And it was like just a very brief single shot of people walking on a sidewalk and dealing with wind. And then there's a cut and a couple walks over a sidewalk grate. And then the air blows the ladies dress up and they both laugh about it. Wow. Pretty lured for 1901. Yeah, and like it works differently than the claim about the flat iron where wind is whipping across people,

but there was this massive turn-of-the-century cultural belief that if you go to 23rd Street in New York City, you will watch the wind blow ladies' clothes off. And everyone knew. So noted smut peddler Thomas Edison may have injected this idea into the culture that that's where it came from. It seems like he helped, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to see his version of train going into station. I'll tell you that much. It's a very different film.

The train backs up, comes in again, backs up, comes in again. And the timing of this, Edison's weird movie was 1901, and we'll link the Library of Congress's clip of it. They have it and everything. But then 1902, the Flat Iron Building opens in Manhattan. It was designed by the famous architect Daniel Burnham. It also used a weird little triangle of land formed by the diagonal path of Broadway intersecting with the grid of the other streets. And it's still there today.

People thought it was too skinny and weird to stand a long time, but it's approaching 125 years. People thought that about me when I was going through puberty. Too skinny and weird? To stand up on his own. Yeah. I often heard that in middle school. Yeah. The old 14 skidoo.

15 skidoo. rather than. Yeah, and the fire iron building is 22 stories tall. I guess it would be fun if it was 23. Oh, like Michael Jordan.

Yeah. And its steel frame let it stand and be tall in a way skyscrapers weren't usually yet. But New Yorkers kind of trick

themselves into a myth that it created uniquely massively powerful wind patterns compared to other buildings and layouts of the city. And I'll link

like there's illustrations and art of people describing a flat iron breeze. They said, oh, the breeze of this building can knock people over. Even before it was done in 1902, Edison is like, it's so windy. Look at this. And yeah, and so then this claim, which I think doesn't really hold together, but the claim is that people said 23rd Street is where you can see ladies' clothes blow off. So if you're a man, you should camp out there kind of by Madison Square Park.

Watch the clothes blow off. And then if you see the cops, you do the 23 Skadoo. You get out of the situation on 23rd Street rapidly. But I'm going to lose my place in line at Shake Shack. But all I want to do is watch these girls piss. Hey, this isn't a Chipotle. Get out of here. And yeah, so that's one big theory for it.

And then the other big theory actually makes a little more sense to me. It is takeaway number two. Another theory for the origin of 23 Skidu combines Charles Dickens with Irish Americans. There's a belief that the magic of the number 23 is something you want to escape from, started with the Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities. When I'm picturing an Irishman saying this,

23, maybe they're talking about a forest. Part of this is basically a belief, at least partly true, that Irish-American people were good at slang compared to other people in the United States, and so they would add Skidoo to 23 and stuff. That's like the worst Irish stereotype, though, isn't it? Like, God, it's so ugly. Yeah.

That they speak in a fun way? We've got to stop doing this. This thing, it starts with Dickens, who's not Irish. Key sources here are a piece for the Irish Times by Frank McNally, a feature for TDM.com by Ernie Smith. And then I'm linking the text of A Tale of Two Cities, because a Tale of Two Cities was so famous when it was published. For basically the last half of the 1800s and then on into the 1900s, it was the most popular novel on Earth. Wow. According to a bookseller in 1920, they estimated that A Tale of Two Cities was the most popular novel in any language in human history.

history and had sold more than 200 million copies. Man. That was a record that the firm broke, right? In the 90s, the firm? And then, and then, and now it's the Bible. That's the most popular novel at the moment. Finally. Is that one of the ones that I remember hearing that Dickens a lot of the time

published as novels like chapter by chapter in magazines? Yeah. And it was like everybody would like rush to the new stand to get the new Dickens. That's why everyone was a subscriber to Yee Playboy. I read it for the articles, 23 Skadoo. Just birds of 23rd Street. That's like the set of women in it. You'll never believe who we caught pissing in the center bowl.

Again, they won't give me the bathroom code at Chipotle. We know what you're going in there to do. Yeah, Dickens, like you said, a lot of his stories were published serially in a magazine, and then he just sold so many copies of A Tale of Two Cities that it also became a huge hit stage play, and it reached the point where it's probably the biggest pop culture thing in the English-speaking world. and if people don't know, it's a historical novel in the French Revolution. The two cities are London and Paris. And the dramatic finale of the book is one of the main characters being the 23rd victim of a guillotine.

Like a line of 23 people get guillotined. God, that's so bad. Like, you got to want to be one of the first ones in line for that. That blade has got to be pretty dull by the time you get to 23, right? Probably pulling it back up for a seven. second chop or maybe like a third to get through? Or does the guillotine'sman? Does he have a strap like a barber?

Like a really big strip of leather that he rubs the blade on every time? Do you think there's a fun guillotine guy that does that thing that you encounter in like carnivals where he like swings a giant hammer and then pops the guillotine up and then it comes down and chops through a head? That's fun, right? He's got other bits. Like it stops halfway like, oops, it doesn't do that every time. Here, smell my flower before you put your head down on the thing.

In another era, he would be the lead flight attendant on Southwest, but in the French Revolution, he was working the guillotine. And the victims are like, you get to pick your own guillotine. You aren't assigned a guillotine. It's great. It's great. Oh, man, I'm D-40. I'm going to get the worst guillotine.

I'm going to get the guillotine right by the bathroom. This happens every time. No one likes waiting in line, even folks in the guillotine line. God, this s-h-oh! My legs are tired. Hey, could I have the bathroom code for the guillotine? I don't know if I can make it to the front in time. Yeah, the very end of the book is still somewhat famous now,

because there's this character, his name's Sidney Carton. He's the guy who says the famous line, it is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. That's the very last line of the book. But right before that, he has his head chopped off. And the way Dickens kind of dramatizes that and stages that, is that there are very morbid ladies just counting the heads as they're chopped off and just saying the number.

So you learn that Carton has been killed because just someone says 23. And that's it. Dickens doesn't say like, and then the blade, blah, blah, blah, it's just 23. It's a very evocative number. Is it like an enormous basket or are we doing transfers? Like once the head goes in the one basket, it's then taken out and put into like a laundry shoot or something. And then it's like they're all gathered into like a larger, a larger thing for sorting in the way you're describing. I know it's sort of a joke question.

It does seem like they gathered the heads. And then also they use tumbleds to like bring people to get their heads chopped off. And tumbrels are an old kind of dung cart. Like just a wooden cart for carrying animal feces was how they brought people over. Before we get too far from the thing that they say at the end of Tale of Two Cities, just because we will be murdered if I don't tie it back to Star Trek. That is also what Kirk says at the end of Wrath of Khan. I'm not joking. He really says that.

I forgot. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Hey, can we call back the fun executioner with the guillotine? Like, wouldn't it be cool if there was like a marble madness style series of chutes? The head goes into the thing and then it starts. starts rolling and it's going to and fro and like it's getting enough velocity to go like up and down and around before finally going into that secondary area where all the heads end up for for the sorting and the counting. A lot of people don't know that that's where Rube Goldberg got his start. Yeah. By number 23 that that shoot is so greased. You're probably carrying a lot of speed with the head through there, right?

that's what all the comments are saying like can you just grease it before the first head like why why are we waiting through the preamble here it's what inspired the skeleton race event in the Olympics you know that headfirst dash through through the pipes did the author of this book ever go back for the prequel and do the tale of a city I feel like a modern author would have right You can't leave that money on the table. He made so much money and I don't know that he ever did a sequel. He should have. Yeah. See Anakin in the first city, you know?

There was actually a third city also would be a good third in the series. It was the best of times and the worst of times and, you know, kind of mid. Yeah. No one ever talks about the middle. Yeah. And yeah, and so Sidney Carton is heroic for doing this. this, he was like the losing end of a love triangle, so he takes the winning guy's spot to die so the guy and the lady can be happy. This is a massive cultural phenomenon, and the theory

is basically that people started assigning 23 to the vibe of that situation. And like, I wish I could 23 out of the kind of 23 getting your head cut off situation, which is a little garbled to me as a root, but that's the theory that we've got. Like, I'd bet. get out of this much like Sidney Carton wanted to get out of death heroically. Yeah, you drop that on a conversation among friends. I think they're just going to like slowly back away. Go do something else. That's how you dissolve your bowling team.

And it's weirdly kind of like 6'7 because when kids do 6'7 today, it's just fun. But they're not saying, I would shoot someone in another car with a big gun. is not really what they're saying. And yeah, and then the book was published 1859, so that's plenty of time for this to bubble up by the end of the 1800s is slang. And then the other ingredient is that apparently Skidoo was already starting to be slang as sort of a funny version of Skidaddle, like on its own by the 1890s or so. And we think an Irish-American comedian named Thomas Aloysius Dorgan.

was the first person to popularize putting them together as like a super leave quickly statement because 23 was starting to mean that and Skadu meant that and so you emphasize it by doing both at the same time. With a name like that you could only get into comedy. Especially alloysious. Don't see that enough. It's great.

Like it. And according to H.L. Mencken, who is not Irish, but H.L. Mencken. Had you decided on baby names? I think aloecious should be on the list. Rhymes with Delicious. Yeah. I don't know about you, Adam.

I have an A name, and I thought about a lot of A names, but not that one. All right. There it is. If you knew how aloecious is pronounced and you saw the word flat iron, you could be forgiven for making a mistake about how flat iron is pronounced. Aloysius Flatiron Schmidt. That is a name. I'm going places. Yeah.

I buy the novel that has that as the author name on it, you know? Like, this sounds rad. Yeah. My child is like, why is flat iron my middle name? And I say perverts. Perverts. That's most of it. Skidoo, a memoir.

Here, I want you to listen to this 23-minute episode of the podcast I used to do before you were born. H. L. Mencken was a nationally famous writer when this became slang, and he claimed that the main reason was that Irish people play with language, more than everyone else in the United States, always attach new suffixes and flourishes to words, and quote, the Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no. He must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration. And so he and others thought Irish people really completed. this slang, not just Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, but all sorts of whimsical Irish Americans. I really cemented it. Where would we be today without the whimsy of the Irish? I have Irish ancestry. I love it. Are these stereotypes you've had of the Irish new to you, Ben, or did you always feel this way about them? Oh, you know, I've long had an axe to grind with some of my ancestors.

Right. I think there's some truth in that. Fun to talk to an Irish guy or lady or and be Irish person, you know? It's fun to talk to anyone who has a circuitous way of describing a thing or uses different words than you're used to hearing or whatever. It's exciting. Spicy. All kinds of different slang.

Yeah. You just have to have some fun to make. slang. And so I think this is partly just waspy people meeting Irish Catholics and being like, look at this. And that's it. Like that's a lot of the intrigue. But everybody is fun with words. Yeah. And yeah. And so we think both 23 and Skadoo were big slang each on their own before the end of the 1800s. Apparently there's a Midwestern writer named George Aide who was famous for writing newspaper columns about the new slang in cities, especially Chicago. and in 1899 he wrote quote

I encountered a new piece of slang about two months ago and it has puzzled me I first heard it from a newsboy who had a stand on a corner a small boy with several papers under his arm had edged up until he was trespassing on the territory of the other when the big boy saw the small one he went at him in a threatening way and said

here here 23 23 and then also Skidoo was starting to take off. So they just kind of merged in the first decade of the 1900s, and it was the most nationally popular slang at a time when there hadn't really been national popular slang. Yeah, that's kind of like the advent of like mass media that is this like you can get a newspaper from New York in San Francisco and stuff because of like telegraph and trains. Fun. Yeah, so that like created a.

especially first decade of the 1900s, this entire meme. It's really a meme, man slang all at once, and most of the point is just knowing what it means. That really is brain rot. That's great. Yeah. There's not a lot more there yet. And folks, that's two whole takeaways and some numbers. We're going to come back with the rest of the main show after a quick break. Hey, folks, as you probably know, it's me, Alex.

and I'm doing this special little message for this episode, and then if things go as planned, me and Katie will do a more robust version next week. But I want you to hear about it right away, because today is the start of the maximum fun drive. The super short version of it is that we would love your support to keep making this show and make it even better. The entire existence of secretly incredibly fascinating

is predicated on listener support. I find myself stumbling because I don't want to get way in the weeds and way inside baseball of how media works. The super short version is, especially in 2026, especially in this era of American society and also world business. I know so many of you are not in the United States. But the only way good media exists right now, and I think this will increasingly be true as time going to be. goes on to. The only way good media exists is if people directly support it and directly, without unnecessary gatekeepers, directly fund what they want to hear and see and make a thing. That goes way beyond podcasting and way beyond any small little thing like Just Our Podcasts.

I would love it if we could be one of the things that you help make exist in the world. I also know that if I mention maximum fun on a podcast, it is not clear probably to 99% of you what that even means. Because why would you know the ins and outs of listener-supported podcasting? That is an incredibly niche thing to know about. You're busy paying your bills and living your life in other ways. Maximum fun is the best thing in podcasts and in Internet media. It is the absolute best thing. I am so grateful that our podcast has been able to become something that is associated with it.

And unlike what you probably think of as a podcast network, we're not like owned by maximum fun or created by maximum fun or something like that. Because it is an employee-owned company where the shows are part of an artist's collective, I own this podcast as we make it. And most importantly, that means nobody can tell me we have to stop making it. nobody can just suddenly turn it off. I'm so grateful that a lot of people have followed me as I've made things in the past and are not like totally new to what I'm making. If you are totally new to this and to me, that's great. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome. But if you've followed what I made in, let's say, a previous decade, you might know that when I made things, I made them for scurrilous weird companies and especially companies that did not care about the people working with them

in even a basic and human way. So I'm very glad to be out of that situation. But when I was in it in the past, I experienced how media can work and how media works for a lot of artists and creators, which is where somebody who owns the thing just turns it off and leaves the people working for them without income, which is bad. But in possibly an even worse way, because of the broad impact of it, they leave the audiences of those things without what they were enjoying. They're just suddenly cut off from it.

There was one podcast I was making for a company called Cracked, where when they ended it, they refused to even tell its audience what was going on or anything about it. And that's one of the most extreme examples in all of internet media of doing things the wrong way. Since then, I've been able to build this show and build other things that are owned and on

operated by the people making it, right? The people being me and also Katie and other people working on it too. So it's an absolute privilege that we get to make stuff this way. And it is the absolute best thing for you. And I'm making a point of describing that structure now, because it's probably not clear week to week. You're just hearing a podcast that is fun. And that's great. And you don't need to think about it week to week. We pause at this max fun drive one time of the year to point that out so we don't need to be talking about it as much the rest of the year. Another thing I don't need to do because I own this show and get to decide what it should be is I don't need to take advertising payments from anybody weird, let alone anybody evil.

So that is wonderful and it means that this can be a great show without any kind of compromises or any kind of flat out evil choices. Our podcasts are entirely and richly funded by the worst people in the world. We are funded by our listeners, the best people in the world, the opposite. And so we make a show that is accountable to you because we want it to be excellent enough for you to want to keep it going. And your direct support is the most efficient and most effective way to make good media a thing. Not just in the case of this podcast, in the entire landscape of anything you enjoy and consume. And I know that's a lot of business talk and a lot of like media industry talk.

But by being listener supported and by being part of something community driven, like maximum fun, we're able to build community across the world. I've gotten to know so many of you through our Discord or through live events we've gotten to do, whether it was an episode on stage in London or last year I did a meetup with listeners here where I live in New York State. and it's just a real treat that this is a human experience. This is a human thing. When I post an episode, I don't just know that people are listening to it. I get to talk to you about it online and in comments and elsewhere.

So I like to think of listener support for the show as an extension of that. I like to think of it as something that is another way you are involved in the show and making the show. When a new episode comes out, it's because far less than 10% of listeners are directly funding it. The other 90 plus percent are just enjoying the fruits of that. If a couple more of you pitched in, that would be legitimately life-changing for me. And either way, it would make sure that in 2026 and into 2027, there is still a secretly incredibly fascinating podcast that not just you get to enjoy, but the set of listeners who truly can't afford to help, I know you folks are out there too. I want those folks to be able to continue to hear the main show for free. I think that's also

another truly wonderful element of how we make and fund this show, which is that there are people out there who truly can't afford to pitch in and the rest of you pick them up, the rest of you lift them up by funding the show and making it free on podcast apps across the world. I hope members and I hope supporters are like proud of that thing. They are in a truly, I think, charitable way creating free entertainment for people who can't afford to pay for it. Because some people can't and they still deserve to feel joy in their lives. Of course, that's such a basic and human thing that should happen. I know that's not always clear because you don't put a dollar into the machine to hear an

episode or something like that. Just sort of behind the scenes in the ether, a small, committed, and generous group of listeners make this show exist for the entire rest of the audience and the entire rest of the community. Anyway, that's what I have to say about it here right at the beginning of the 2026 Max Fun Drive. We'd love for you to participate and we'll say more about it next week, which is our other show that releases during it.

Whether it's in this the rest of April or that magical May 1st, May Day, we would love it if you join on the fun. And on with the fun of this special episode. I'm so glad Ben and Adam came through and collaborated with us too on making something special for you as the drive starts. Let's get back to the episode about 23 Skadoo. Let's 23 Skadoo over to the 23 Skadoo. Does that make sense?

I'm like half sure it does. And we're back and we have a little more of a takeaway about places you can go to truly experience 23 Skidoo. We're back. Ben's wife is pregnant. Array! And guys, it's triplets. Boom.

Pretty excited about this one. You're not going to believe how this works. But I'll tell you off, Mike. People are like, you're having another baby. You're like, yeah, I got peer pressured by a guy. That's just it. That's why. Dad, why are our names also alloysious, flat iron, and station?

Peer pressure, perverts, peer pressure. That's the three reasons. Yeah, we've got one last takeaway here about 23 Skadoo, because takeaway number three, for totally separate reasons, there's a place named Skidoo in Ireland and a place named Skidoo near Death Valley. Hmm One is named after the slang And the other is like a garbling of Irish Gaelic Okay

So you can go to Skadu if you want to In Ireland or California Is the one in California The one that's the garbling of Irish Gaelic Unfortunately no It's just It's like a people did a gold rush mining town And we're so gold rushy

And prospectory and random that they said We're not going to be here long Let's just name it after popular slang and a meme. How far is Skadu from Zizzix? Oh, I don't know. It's a four-hour drive from L.A. The California, it's good to you.

Adam, is there a cheesecake factory there? Should we go? I was just looking. So California Skidu is an uninhabited ghost town. Aw. Which doesn't mean there's not, but no, there's not. And it's according to, traffic right now about three hours from Zizzix.

Skadoo is in Inyo County. And then in the 1970s, it got added to Death Valley National Park as they added more land to that. So it's not in Death Valley, but it's near it. It's a tough place. Key sources for this are the U.S. Department of Interior, the Irish Government's National Built Heritage Service, and then some bloggy but solid sites about ghost towns in the West. because over in California, in 1906, prospectors struck gold at this remote site in Inyo County, rapidly built a town, and in a little more than a decade, they extracted $1.6 million worth of golds

in like old-timey money. It's a fortune. But then they basically abandoned the town. There was a brief surge in the 1930s, and then there's been nobody there since. But more than 700 people live there at its peak. and it was such a temporary town. They tried to name it a meme. They tried to name the town 23 Skidoo. And allegedly the U.S. Postal Service refused. That is the only reason they didn't go through with it. Good for them.

And then basically the Postal Service and the town argued until they compromised and just named the town Skidoo. So as we're doing, if you Google Maps it, you can find Skidoo, California. It is a listed ghost town in the world. As of 1907, they had a bank, a school, a brewery, a red light district, a working telegraph line, and the Skidoo News local newspaper, publishing regular local news about Skidoo. It would still be there if they didn't run out of mining the gold. That's the only reason there's nobody there now. You used to love the crossword puzzle in the Skidoo News. did a really nice job with that.

Yeah. All of the questions are 23, though. Yeah. Very confusing. Yeah, also that like 23 Enigma thing, it's partly the Illuminatus you've got Ben and then also William S. Burroughs, apparently in the 1960s,

he had a chance meeting with a boat captain who said he'd had no accidents in 23 years. And then the captain's saying, and drown that day. And then he immediately peed his pants. Oopsies! I had an accident. Should have pulled his skirt up.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then like Burroughs also heard about a plane crash of a flight number 23, and then both the boat captain and the pilot had the same name. Basically, Burroughs and a few other writers he knew decided 23 is evil in a way in the 1960s. Yeah. They made it an evil number, and in my childhood,

in the Chicago land region. It was exclusively Michael Jordan's number. That was all I thought about it. But a lot of people have thought it's evil or fleeing or something. Yeah. Nix fans believe that number is evil, I'm sure. And yeah, and then in Ireland, there is a town with the anglicized name of Skidoo. It's in Dublin County.

It's just north of that city of Dublin. The real pronunciation, I don't speak Gaelic, but the real pronunciation is more like Skaduv. Because the Gaelic name is two words. It's spelled S-C-E-A-C-H and then D-U-B-H. S-C-E-A-C-H-D-U-B-H. That's the Gaelic words for a black thornbush. That's how Shir-Sher-Ronan spells her first name, right?

Mm-hmm. Skadush-Rone. And Chavon from Marevistown also spells it that way. Timely reference. Yeah. Yeah, like English speakers, not Gaelic speakers. They basically mangled it into Skidoo, just spelled S-K-I-D-O-O. That's it.

And so you can still go there. And also there's one historically listed farmhouse in Skidoo that is protected by the Irish government. It's called Skidoo House. It's a two-story stone farmhouse from the 1920s that is under, like, government protection. So they may preserve Skidoo in Ireland for a long time. Skidoo house is what my college roommates called our bathroom. Yeah, I was just going to ask if there was any sort of landmark status to these places, some sort of thing that people would be able to tell where they were,

some sort of skidoo mark. Not if OxyClean has anything to say about it. Yeah. As this releases, I'm probably elbow deep in Skidoo. right now. Yeah. Let's go great. Yeah.

Yeah. Prepare your quad box apology now. Yeah. While you have time. You're going to learn about sceduconium. Very exciting time. I just love that the slang is like sort of permanently around in a bunch of ways. Because so many other memes I just figure will die out forever.

But it seems like 6-7 will be a known thing. a hundred years from now because we're dumb about it right now you know like there's a place that will always be in Death Valley named Skidoo because people were doing a meme that's it that's the entire reason

sorry sorry to tell you Adam this we could do something about this collectively what would we do would we like take out a bunch of of data centers, would that do it?

Like, if we could, like, get AWS to go down for, like, three weeks, people would forget about it. And when we came back, it would be, you know, there would be, like, a hard reset on all the slang and all the memes. It's the end of fight club, right? Yeah. You met me at a really weird time in my life, Alex. And then I just started six-seviting.

No, no, stop it. I'm being serious. behind Ben and the frame, like, his studio, like, starts falling. And then his house behind it. That it's just rubble, but also there's a bunch of that bug from next gen that got it to the guy's head. They have a prop up. It'll survive all this. This bug?

This bug right here, Alex. There we go. Was it a nubbin? I forget the name, but great. That's what we call it. Bluegill, I think, is the semi-canonical term for them. But everybody just calls them nubbing bugs. Yeah.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. And I want to say thanks again to Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica for making time, especially in busy drive time. And also helping me kind of tape ahead and also make sure to bring you something special this week before the birth of my baby. So next time we hear my voice, it should be after I am officially a dad. It's really exciting. And I'm so glad you've stuck with us through some leave weeks and also joined us for this

new episode. As I hope I said in the main show there, you can hear the greatest generation or greatest track on any podcast app. It is Ben and Adam talking about all things Star Trek in just the best way. It's even a sound design show. I really, really love what they do with it. And also they have wonderful entire other podcasts for people who support Max Fun. Shows about Baywatch, The Cheesecake Factory, and so much more.

So please check that out. And hey, you're in the outro of this episode. It's got fun features for you, such as Help Remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a major theory of the origin of 23 Skidoo features New York City's flat iron building on 23rd Street and weird guys being perverts. Takeaway number two, another major theory of the origin of 23 Skidoo, centers on Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and the way Irish-American people talk.

Takeaway number three, for totally separate reasons, there is a place named Skidoo in Ireland and a gold mining ghost town named Skidoo near Devon. Valley in California. And then a lot of numbers throughout the show, such as the strange kind of revival of 23 Skidoo in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, other pop culture uses from John Prine to The Simpsons. I don't know if I said 1991 is when John Prine made the song Jesus the Missing Years on his album The Missing Years. And then I really enjoyed exploring the 6-7 meme, which started in February 2025, a little more

than a year ago, that is weirdly going to be probably the biggest parallel to 23 Skidoo for the rest of pop culture history. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason that this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Michael Jordan numerology.

Because, you know, he wore 23. We did 23 Skadoo. You get it. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show. For a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows, especially wonderful, greatest gen, greatest track, and more. It is special audio just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of what qualifies as research about slang, right? Like there are people looking into it and studying it in a serious way. Experts I'm citing this week include professional lexicographer Jonathan Green and a book he wrote called The Vulgar Tong Green's History of Slang. One gem there is that 1750s. is the first printed use of the word slang. Like we created the word slang for slang in 1756.

Before that, we had another word of can't, not the contraction with an apostrophe. C-A-on-T is one of the other words that kind of mean that. Also citing linguist Ben Zimmer in a column he wrote for the Boston Globe. Also citing sociolinguist Dr. Daria Batina of the University of California, Los Angeles. She did an interview with the Guardian about what does or does not qualify as brain rot. And then I'll link further digital resources from the Irish Times, TDM.com, the Irish government's National Built Heritage Service, and more.

That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, others. Also, Ben and Adam each taped this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in our locations and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources

about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 172. That is about credit unions. And especially in this max fund drive time, I want to highlight that we make a bonus show of SIF every single week. and the bonus show for credit unions includes some truly wild stories about what has been printed on U.S. money, including an actual note from a bank in Wisconsin featuring Santa Claus. Santa Claus has been on United States money in a real way where it's legal tender, and you can hear more about that if you support the show.

In addition to recommending that episode, I recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners.

And I'm thrilled to say that we should be back next week with not just a new SIF, but a SIF taped after I have had a baby and not before. I will be in the fourth trimester. not the third trimester. And I hope I've said this all the time every time. I'm just so grateful to all you folks for not just being with us through the exciting milestone that's happening right now, but also continuing to stick with us as it goes on and as a new part of my life and new role in life and everything. It's truly a treat to get to share that piece of my life as we also make this very fun show about stuff like the flat iron building blowing people's clothes off and and Charles Dickens sparking a national slang trend and stuff like that. I expect that me and Katie will be back next week and the next week of the Max Fund Drive, too, with all new secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.