The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 215, The Prison Rap with Jason Pargin

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Seanbaby & Robert Brockway welcome back special guest, Jason Pargin to the DOGGZZONE! How do you save a dying town in the late 80's? Why, through cunning use of systemically racist hiphop! Join the DOGGZONE as they spit hot bars in the face of terrible white peoples' misguided desperation and soul crushing embarrassment!

Welcome to the Dog Zone 9,000, the official podcast, a 1,900 hot dog. America's last comedy website. We outlasted the other comedy websites. We're about to outlast America, baby. We're still here. We're still kicking. It's going to be us. Well, I'm rapping Robert Rockway, and I'm here to say,

I like to bust a rap in a major way. He's got the quickest jokes he can sling them all day. It's my comedy partner. Sean Ba'e-e-eigh. Yeah, all right. And our guest today, his appearance piece of grand, and I think that's a bargain. It's award-winning author. So you're going to try to make a big.

me pronounce my own name wrong. I can see what you tried to do there. I paid you a thousand dollars. Almost got him. Almost got him. It's a thousand dollars. Hello, everyone. I am award-winning author, Jason Pargin. And yes, I was informed that Brockway has 114 minutes of 80-style rap prepared. This entire presentation will be done in that flow. It's all inverse, baby. From here on out. Oh, no, I fucked it up already. Let's take it from the top. You're going to hear a lot of that. Every time I fuck it up, let's take it from the top.

So where can people find more from you, Chase? I am Jason K. Pardgent on TikTok as long as it lasts. It still seems to be there. I thought they banned it. I was kind of waiting for that weight to be lifted off my shoulders. But every day I open it up and it still works. But if not there, I am also Jason K. Pardgeon on all of the alternatives on Blue Sky and all of those.

And also, I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of me promoting my book. It was in February of 2024 that the pre-orders for I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom went up. And I have been promoting it on podcasts almost every week on one show or another for 53 consecutive weeks since then. So thank you, everyone. And surely that's made you extra money. I literally think if I just put the book out there the way other authors are allowed to, it would sell 427 copies. I think it entirely is me just being relentless because to this day, if I do a Reddit AMA or something like that, people, by far the most common response is people being surprised that I wrote another book after John dies at the end. Like, oh, did you write another one?

It's like, yes, I've written eight more books since then. This media ecosystem, it's just hard to reach people. So, yes, if I was even slightly less relentless with my promotion, I would not have a job. I see that a lot when we pop up in discussions and the site pops up. People are like, especially with Sean Baby, they're like, what, Sean Baby's still around? I haven't heard from that guy since like 1999. Yeah, sorry. All I did is have a very popular column at the number one comedy website for,

10 years. Literally billions of views, the number. Right. And they're still like, what? 20 years later, I didn't know he was still doing anything. He hosted a TV show for a while. That's right. I mean, I don't go out of my way to put myself in your face, but it's weird that you

didn't like notice. I think the funniest example of this I ever saw. I was at a screening of Pouti Tang with the star of Pouti Teng. And they did a Q&A afterwards and some girl stands up. And this was in like 2010. And some girl stands up and says, I love the movie Pouti Teng. What's next for you, Pouti Teng?

And he got so visibly pissed off at her. He's like, I'm in a fucking working writer for 25 years. You think I didn't do anything since this movie came out? It was so funny to me. This is one great thing about watching a sporting event, like the NFL playoffs. If you're forced to now watch like CBS and you realize that an actor you thought was dead, is actually the lead in a show called something like Chicago Detective or Chicago Investigation and it's in season 14.

Right. And it's the number three show in America, but you didn't know because you're so disconnected from like network TV that your parents watch. And they do like, they're still on the broadcast model. So they do 24 hour long episodes a season like three times. Yeah, yeah. They have 400 episodes if you want to catch up. He's like a made a billion.

since you last saw me. You're like, what? I didn't. Like, I died after the one thing I saw him. My favorite is when it comes to people like us who were famous on the internet and people are like, man, whatever happened to him, use the internet. Yeah. You know us from the internet.

You can just look it up. I also get to, like, people will message my agent. They're like, well, how would we contact the author of this? It's like, I am the most contactable person in the world. You can message me. I have so many public. inboxes, I am not hard to find. I am not like a famously reclusive. Oh, that's the dream though, isn't it? Reclusive author. Guy, can you imagine though if you were like the guy that wrote the

Hannibal Lecter books and like just once every 10 years you put one out and then you just go back to your cabin or whatever? And they sell 40 million copies and you just, you don't have to go out and do, you don't have to be on Twitter. You don't have to do any of that stuff. That's the dream. That's the dream. In the meantime, we are plugging our site. Sean, what do you want to plug? Oh, yeah, let's plug this site. 1,900 hotdog.com. Contact us there.

That's where you can find Sean, baby. He's not dead. We've got him. We've still got him. If I don't reply to your message, it's because I didn't feel like it, not because I didn't get it. I'll plug the rest of our stuff.

We've got a store now. We've been pretty good about updating that. Go to 1,900 hotdog.com. Click shop. Yeah, subscribe to us on Patreon at patreon.com slash 1,900 hot dog. We're on YouTube at 1,000. 9900 hot dog use the fucking internet just type nobody else called 1 900 hot dog type it in the internet we're there you'll find us anyway today we are going to talk about what i think is one of the

most darkly funny pieces of media ever created it always makes me laugh and i just i'm so in love with the story i really genuinely have pitched it as like a movie i would like to write to hollywood executives and they've all been like what the fuck are you talking about of course i am talking about the prison rap and that of course reminds me of these 10 prison books from the from the broken pun robot at punsteria.com. Like, okay, see, you said, God damn it last time when I did it right at the end. I do it right at the start. Which do you want?

It's not like it makes me any happy. Which of the two options do you want? Okay, let me clarify for people who are just listed their first episode of the dogs something they've ever listened to. The site you got these puns from, do they say that it's AI generated or do you, have you just deduced that it's AI? I think they say. They say it's AI generated.

I don't think they're hiding it. They're saying like, hey, we have a computer. We're using the Earth's precious resources to make these puns. Yes, and every single site. I believe they've also put it in charge of crawling the internet and determining what there should be puns about. And they just let it loose to make its own art for all the pages. I think it's as close as we have to a robot run amok. And here's the thing that I love about it.

I don't think it's like one of the big LLMs. I think it's because it's too bad. It's too bad and broken to be like chat g-GPT. or something. This is, they might have written their own. Yeah. Like, this might be their AI. We did an article talking about this site, and I did some research, and I think I traced

it to Icelandic LLC, but I couldn't find anyone who would claim credit for it. And even on the site itself says, we keep our name secret for, you know, like it wasn't a clear reason. Because this is probably evil. Yeah. I don't want to die for this. Yeah. I actually contacted someone through LinkedIn because I could only find one organic mention of the site anywhere on the internet.

And I contacted him through his LinkedIn to see like, hey, do you have anything to do with this website? He goes, no, I just really liked their AI genit-a-in-rated art. Uh-huh. Yeah. So he might have been a robot too. That's all interesting. So let's talk about this prison rap, Brockway. What have you got to?

That LinkedIn guy, did he then start saying things like, why did the scarecrow go to prison? He was outstanding in his field in prison. Uh, yes. Fucking word for word? Because he didn't add in prison. He forgot to add the prison part. Because he was outstanding in his field. You go to prison for that, according to the robot.

Yeah. Why was the math book in prison? It was classified as a common denominator. Did you think about that one? Figure that one out. But there's nothing to figure out on some of these, right? Like, you don't arrive at a chain of logic if you think long enough. It just very rarely.

I was hoping maybe somebody else would because I didn't crack that one. Maybe you'll get this one. You're math guy. Why do prisons not allow penguins? Because they always break out in accentors. Oh shit. What's that last word? Accentors.

Oh, I know what that is. That's when 12 penguins merged to form one big penguin. They call that Accentor. That's like half a guy and half a horse that used to be together, an accentor. Accentor, yeah. See, that's how you do it. robot? That's how you do it. Did you hear about the guy who broke out of prison using a chisel?

He's a master of Escapesaw. Wow. Prison is like a circus. It's full of con artists, clowns, and tightrope walkers. I think that was supposed to be about Congress or something maybe? It feels like a political one. I think it's about strangling your cellmate with a towel. It's called the tightrope, probably.

Yeah, I think it's about how many tightrope walkers are maybe sexual criminals. Like, I don't know. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That's probably what it is. It's a play on sex crime. I heard the inmates at the prison were running a bakery. It's a real confectionary crime syndicate. I guess I don't understand how it works.

Because I thought that AI is when you asked him to write you a joke. It's like, oh, that's okay. We've scraped several jokes from other people. Here you go. We stole this joke from a person. Right. And here it is. I don't understand what this one is.

trying to do. I, I... Well, see, this one does that too. It will scrape, hence the scarecrow one we started with it, it scraped because he was outstanding in his field. But then it has like a little panic program that runs at the very end of the program that's like, oh shit, put the subject in there somewhere. Right.

And then the robot's like, fuck, fuck. And so it will just put the word prison in there somewhere or be like, just put the word prison at the end. So it'll be like, outstanding in his field prison. fucking I don't know, maybe. This one's insane. That's what I'm saying. I don't think this is like a real AI.

I think this is something they built. You think it's a real human trying to look like AI? No, no. I think it's something that they think is an AI. Maybe they stole an early framework and then tried to train it on just puns. And it drove it completely mad. How to inmates practice good hygiene. They always use super carefully.

I don't remember making up words before. Aren't there a lot of fake words in these? I don't remember that being a feature. Is it getting worse? That's why I love about it so much is that it breaks a different way each time. Yeah. And if you could probably put it together sequentially, I would bet, yes, it gets worse with every single one of these it does. Because at some point, there aren't that many pun sites.

I think we're already at the point where it's eating its own shit and it's coming up with. Yeah, I feel like I'm an above average, like, pattern recognition human brain thinker. So, like, the fact that I can't even come close to predicting this robot, despite you bringing these goddamn robot puns to every podcast for like a year, it's, I don't know, it's kind of fascinating that like it does break in a new way each time. And worse. This is right. It gets worse. Right. I always, I also like that one day.

Always use super carefully because I think it's pulling from like a prison rape joke. Like, that's the only thing about soap and prisons. I think it's like dancing around it. It's not quite there. Why was the computer stressed in prison? It had too many hard drives. See, I think it's getting there. Yeah.

Oh, oh, Jesus, that's dark. Oh. I mean, surely we're reading into that. Surely, the next one's not going to be something like why are prisoners great at sewing because they know how to pin someone down. Oh, Jesus Christ. All right. We got there.

Oh, the AI. That's genuinely like a successful pun. The only one it made, and it's about prison sexual assault. It's like the robots like, oh, you don't want me to make any sex crime jokes? Okay, I promise I won't. But then went right up to one and just like looked over the edge. And finally, what's a prisoner's favorite type of punctuation? The ex-conclamation mark.

That's not bad. Solid writing. That could have come out of one. of Sean's human written pun books. And I don't mean that as a compliment, but. Yeah, that's one I would have looked at and said, like, it's terrible, but is it funny, terrible? Now that we've ground the podcast to an absolute halt, let's start the podcast. Fent as Jimmy leave all of it in.

Why would she cut this? This is the best part of the podcast. You're right. Write in, if you think this is the best part of the podcast, I'll make Sean read every single one of them, just increasingly angry letters. So we're talking about the prison rap, and this requires, I wrote about it for the site a little bit ago. This requires a little bit of background before we actually get to the rap itself. So in the 1980s, Illinois Governor Jim Thompson called himself Big Jim. He ran as a tough on crime candidate, which was, I want to say, the only kind of candidate in the 1980s.

He helped make a law called Class X that sent more people away to prison for long. sentences. And there's not much funny about that except for what Thompson said in an interview when asked about the name. Big Jim says, well, I made up the name. I thought it had a ring to it. Movies can be X-rated. The X symbol was a powerful symbol in the American culture. You know, you X something out. Amazing. And this was pre-Elon trying to name everything X. We make fun of Elon for being a dipshit, but like he's copying ancient dipshits. He made a law that destroyed a almost record number of lives and uh it's like yeah all the exes are cool i'm gonna name a law ex i'll like the ex man uh so thompson was then called out on uh on how he made so many more

prisons and he says uh well if you're a law and order candidate and you have tough criminal laws and tough criminal enforcement you're gonna put crooks in jail and if you're doing that you've got to build prisons to hold them and he fucking did prisons more than doubled in illinois under his watch he more than doubled the amount of prisons in the state and filled them all up and he was he was very proud of that of turning so many of his citizens

into prisoners one of the problems with this was that nobody at the time wanted a dangerous prison in their backyard understandably so every time they'd come to a town and be like we want to build a prison here they would say

fuck no go away right So, one of his staff members came up with an idea, what if they turned the whole thing into like a fun carnival game? Instead of putting a prison up in a town that didn't want it, they just rephrase the whole thing and said, now it's a contest among the towns on who does the goofiest thing to win the right to have a prison? And somehow that fucking worked.

When Brankway wrote about this for 1-900 Hot Dog, and we were discussing it, this is when Brockway found out that the people, the place were about to talk about, I grew up about 45 minutes from that town. I've been to that town before. So more context, beyond what even Brockway has in his research, because I was born in Illinois in the rural part of it in 1975, half a century ago. So Illinois, if you can mentally picture it, and most of you probably cannot, in the upper right is Shikkim. And then everything else is cornfields. And that's an exaggeration. There's the capital and there's like it's a medium-sized city and there's a college town that has like 20,000 people in it. But it's basically, so when you say that Illinois had a crime issue, what you mean is Chicago.

And so for the rest of the state, it's kind of weird because if you do like a voting heat map of like blue versus red, you've got Chicago as blue because it's the city. and then the rest of the state is ruby red. So Trump won my hometown by 50 points in 2020. The election he lost, it was like 72 to 20, and then some of those votes went to the libertarian. So it is like the city and then the rest of this rural area. And we all deeply, deeply resented Chicago because the entire state revolved around it, like all the revenue, all the people live there. So the dynamic was that all of these criminals they're talking about, you're not mentally picturing like a hillbilly out in farm country abusing his wife. It is the crack epidemic. It's the 80s explosion of inner city violence. And they needed somewhere to put those criminals. And then down, as you go further down the state,

you have a lot of small towns that were in desperate, desperate circumstances. Like the one I grew up had an oil refinery that closed in I think 1982, and the town had nothing but that. So our unemployment rate, I think, was like 25% when I was growing up. Like it was, these places are just crumbling. So that's the context for if you're saying, well, why would you want a huge prison in your tiny, little dinky town with a few thousand people? Because that prison would double the number of total jobs available, period. Like it would be

everything. Well, it's also more than that. So the town we're talking most about today is called Flora, Illinois. And in 1987, Florida, Illinois was as a farming town, it's about 5,000 people. Their unemployment rate

was over 18%. So not 25, but really high up there. And this was for medium security, $41 million prison with 400 prospective jobs and offered $10 million payroll. So, like, yeah, it was like winning a prize of a sort to them.

What's crazy is when they turned it into a fun raffle based on the insane whims of Big Jim Thompson, which is what they did. So there were no, like, real solid rules to this. It was just whoever does the funniest thing that makes Big Jim giggle gets the prison. I don't think that's legal. That surely can't be the normal way that's done. But everybody decided to roll with it. I like that system. I think I would do really well in that system. Please understand. Okay, Illinois at one point, I think, had like four straight governors go to prison in office.

This is very typical of Illinois politics. It's just understood. This is why it was very funny when Barack Obama came out of like Chicago and there's accusations that he had associated with some unsavory types. And those of us from Illinois were like, well, Yeah, he's from Illinois. Yes, he did. You can't exist in politics in Illinois. Like, well, here's a photo of him with a known gangster. It was like, yeah. Yeah, that was, that guy was part of the state legislature.

Yes, that's. So amongst all of this raffle, Flora got excited about the prison. I mean, understandably so. It's a lot of jobs for them. But they petitioned twice, two of the years they entered with a petition for the prison. And that doesn't make big Jim gig. so they didn't get it. The next time a raffle came up,

most of the government, like really most of the local government of Florida, Illinois got together and they focused on coming up with an idea to catch his attention. They figured they would serenade Governor Jim Thompson with like a really pleading,

whiny country song where they just debase themselves. Like, it's like Camp Granada with like that whiny little boy tone too. And, uh, and, uh, And to do this, they enlisted the help of a local oil tycoon named Bill Snyder who wanted to get into country music and thought this fucking insane prison raffle was a good way to do it.

So he thought this was going to be his break into the music industry. So he went all out and financed it. And he financed the town's former police chief, a guy named Ed Giot. And together they formed Chief Ed Giot and the Long Arm of the Law Band. And they recorded a song called, Oh, We Want a Prince. prison, I don't think anybody's going to come after me for copyright, so I'm just going to play the whole thing here. It's under three minutes, but it's not going to feel that way. This is an open letter to the honorable James R. Thompson, governor of the great state of Illinois.

Dear God, I'm writing you from Florida. you might enjoy but just to jog your memory for it is in Illinois. Now I know it's just a little place

and we've got ourselves some problems though we never get much outside help you could do your part to solve them. Hard times upon us, God. Depression blues are visiting.

We're not asking for a lot of help. Oh, it wants a prison. So that's the end of that song. So what happened after this? Uh-huh. I think it's still going. Certainly that's the end. He said everything that he's ever going to say about that, right?

You know we missed the auto plant and two other prison needs so we ought to have more company than cheese and meals on wheels

if I'm lying, Gough, I'm dying so please do more than listen like Jack Thatcher says we love you, God and all we'll wants, a prison.

If we're the bakers, you're all the choosers. Don't make us free time losers. Gee whiz, guv. All we want us. A prison. So that's over. I think all the dignity is gone. No need to keep going.

Gee whiz, guv. All we want. A prison. Woff. So, if the game is to base yourself in front of big gym, God, it's tough to beat that, right? I think he mentioned that he's like, thank you for the government cheese.

We want more than government cheese. We could really use, like, a prison. It's just the warmiest, saddest shit. Yeah, it's real tough to listen to, especially the tone, the real like Camp Granada. Yeah. Gee, where's God? Come on.

Come on, go. This is the former police chief of the town. Going much, shocks, Daddy. Just a little baby. Not to get political here, which is going to be difficult in this episode, because there are some politics involved. But you have to understand, these are Republicans for the most part, in all of these places begging for this prison, because the context, and I was aware,

of this very much. Like this prison sweepstakes, my town was not up for it, but we were close enough that if Flora had gotten the prison, people in my town could have gotten the job there. Like, that's commuting distance. And it would have been worth it. Like, those prison jobs pay more than anything else would have been available in that town pretty much to someone, you know, with that equivalent experience or whatever. So this kind of groveling for a government handout, The perverse thing is this is like the only context where that's okay because it's imprisoning inner city by making air close with my fingers. Inner city bad guys. We really want to do it bad.

This is the one kind of like pork barrel thing it's okay to beg for. This military bases, that kind of thing where you are straight up saying, please, poor tax dollars and government job. into our community because we're poor and we have no private industry. In any other context, I would be shameful for like a Republican to do, but it's because it's a prison, that whole dynamic flipped on its head. And so they wind up our pleading with the governor, please send us money to save us because we can't private industry as not doing it for us. Like prisons are already pretty corrupt.

And like, I think Illinois prisons make about double what Apple does. does, like, when you give money to someone who is in prison, they basically get 30% of it, just because they're a prison and you are trying to give money to someone in there. So, like, if you imagine the most predatory corrupt nickel and diming fees that you see out here, it's double or triple that in a prison setting, not to mention all the items in the commissary, you're certainly overpriced. So even if you're not enslaving these men to make license plates, you're still squeezing them and everyone who cares about them for money.

So I don't know what I'm... I guess my point is no good person has ever wanted to run a prison. and I don't know, even one who has conscripted unwilling rappers for a grotesque minstrel talent show, I would say even that person might be a bad person for wanting a prison. Yeah, you're going to want to sympathize, but, well, no, you aren't. You heard the song. That should have turned your stomach. There's no sympathy left for the man who does the cheap wish.

Go, what we want to? No. But it seems like it should have worked if the game was just, you know, really embarrassed myself in front of big gym and make him feel like the big daddy of Illinois. like that should have done it. It did not. It did not work. They didn't win that year.

The president went to Brown County, who painted their football field for Big Jim, and they sent his secretary flowers, which doesn't, that feels like it has too much dignity. Yeah. But like, I mean, maybe they had real like, woo-woo notes in the flowers, you know,

like real just, we're so sorry, would you come down and give us a quiz? And like, I don't know. Maybe they just read it wrong and thought Big Jim won a groveling, but really would. he wanted was like a nice football field, some flowers.

Feel like Big Jim was a friend. Well, we'll get to what Brown County really did. Oh. We're assuming there's not another element of their pitch here that maybe was not. Yeah, we'll get to that. I'll tell you what. We'll get to that in the bonus podcast. That's going to be our bonus podcast, is the real winners and what they won.

I'm going to guess right now they figured out a way to give Big Jim money. So they were preparing for the next, Flora was preparing for the next raffle. and Jack Thatcher was owner of the local newspaper. He got the whole crew together again, just the heist movie, you son of a bitch I'm in for another song for a private prison. So they planned something bigger. Really just like an embarrassing song didn't work.

So they came up with an embarrassing rap. It seems like a fun idea on the surface. It really wasn't because before they even wrote the rap, they came up with this real cynical planned marketing blitz. the rap was kind of an afterthought gasp, I know. Jack Thatcher was the owner of the newspaper. He said he had the media contacts to kind of get the ball rolling once they had something. And then they determined that whatever they came up with,

not only did the song itself need to be really short, but it had to have like bite-sized hooks so that local color segments on the news could just play like a few seconds of it and then have a laugh. Smart. Yeah, it was. It was smart. They did their work. I mean, Jack Thatcher owned a newspaper.

where he had a bunch of the media context. They knew what they were doing. They even started, like, once they had it ready, they studied the media landscape, as they said, every day to try to, like, predict the news a few weeks out. So, like, if it looked like some big news story was brewing, like, oh, there's going to be a war. We won't do the prison rap yet,

because they don't want the war to overshadow their prison rap. Like, they want a dead news period. And this was in 1987? Yes, was in 1987. of it. It's just adorable that something this poorly executed, like they're trying to make it sound like, oh, we have this master plan, but it is a bunch of stupid assholes with the camcorder. Well, they came up with a master plan first, and then it got time to rap.

Okay. So when it came time to rap, Bill Snyder, he recruited, that's right, the local government of Fiore, Illinois again into like a public enemy style rap supergroup. So the rappers are a local businessman named Frank Zimmerman. If you've seen the video, there's a video you can watch of this. He's the one who kind of looks like a gym teacher's mugshot. You know what I mean? Mike Springsteen, he's the editor of the local paper.

He's the guy in the Red Longjohns who's doing the old-timey barrel with suspenders. Sure. Like I'm so broke. Only he, I guess he's too broke for a barrel because he's wearing a trash can. And it says I need a job on it. It is so dystopic. It's like something Robocop would walk past if he had a rural mission. Like it's just, it's so looking at it, you're like, God, this is so deep with meaning.

And these costumes, because they do, they had the cop, the press reporter. They had a boss hop. The press reporter, which one was the boss? Jack Thatcher. Jack Thatcher is the press reporter. He was the guy, it's kind of his idea. And he said he has the media contacts to get it off the ground. He has the big press symbol on his hat.

that you know he's press. Boss Hog was Mayor Charlie Overstreet, the actual mayor. Right. And it's not an embellishment. There's no way you go to like a tailor and say anything except for, Give me the boss hog. Give me the boss hog. The full boss hog.

Full white suit cowboy hat. He even, in his part, he even drives up in a white Cadillac with steer horns on the front, despite being from fucking Illinois. With a little paper sign taped to it that says mayor and handwritten font. A little paper sign. He even does the hatwomp. He whomps his driver when he stops. These guys watch Duke's a Hazard and said that boss hog, that's the hero of the show.

Finally, some representation for me, the corrupt, overweight mayor in a white suit. My notes only say this rap crew looks like five guys at a costume lynching. I'm just reading what it says in my notes. Not responsible for him. I think one of them is, I don't know if he's a biker or an Indian. I hope he's a biker. That's the former police chief Ed Gio. And he's doing, I think he's trying to do Willie Nelson cosplay.

Okay. But it does come across as like the punk biker, like the biker who punks. Right. There's Bill Ridgeway. He's the local parole officer. He's the one who looks like the local parole officer. Right. I put robber baron, I think, for him.

Just in his little suit. They got their crew together and they pressured, I'm going to say illegally again, they pressured a local TV station into shooting the video for them. And they gave the entire. town like an unofficial day off. They canceled school, which again, pretty sure that's illegal. But very Republican. I want to talk about, this opens with a shot of the movie theater.

It says now showing all we want, S.A. prison, which to me was like... That's the first song. Yeah, that was like really high art to me because it's the idea of only wanting a prison is already so sad, but when you're begging is spelled wrong, either because you're illiterate or your town's movie theater is down to its last two litter eyes. It's like, there's so much tragedy in one image. Right? Like, it's like Russians, Russia's most brilliant Cold War propaganda artists presenting their masterpiece.

They're like, look at the piece of shit that is America and just like, but we gave it to him. We're like here. It's more embarrassing than that because now you know it's a throwback to their first unsuccessful attempt at losing all of their dignity, the All We Want a Prison song. So it's a little Easter egg of sadness just for them, just for them and the governor who denied them. Anyway, we're going to listen to the prison rap. They're going to love this. Dear God, in Florida, Illinois, we still think that you're our boy, but as we is or is we isn't, going to get ourselves a prison.

Is we is or is we isn't? Go to get ourselves a prison. This sounds like it's over. I'm Charlotte, mayor of the town. People call from miles around. Is we is or is we isn't? Gonna get ourselves a prison. Fucking sick flow.

That was boss hard, for sure. Break time. I represent the press. Got a question. I say yes. Is we is or is we isn't? Going to get ourselves a prison. If we is or is we isn't.

We'll get ourselves a prison. They like that bass song. When I sang the prison song, God was making you so long. Is we is or is it? Gee whiz all we want. Get it. Chiefs new. My last name's Thompson.

We're going to get ourselves a prison. Is we is or is we is. A dirty hovel. Come watch us. Fucking grovel. So I've got a few hundred things I want to note quickly on that. First of all, Sean said something that bothered me quite a bit a few minutes ago. He mentioned that it was like something that a robocop would walk past. So this, I personally think, every Gen Z.

kid, there should be a moment in their life, I don't know, when they turn 12, when they should be sat down to watch the movie Robocop. Yeah. And someone would explain, the movie Robocop is not about the future. The only difference between the movie Robocop and real life 1987 is we did not have robots back then. All of the rest of it, all of it, the weird, the weird, quote. or any reality shows that are borderline murderous and the dystopian crumbling cities,

the privatization of all the services, that stuff was all real. It was a parody of what we were actually doing. So when you see something like these people doing a corny rap, try to get a prison built in their town, that's like, wow, that's like something out of Robocop. It's like, no, that's something out of the actual 1980s. This song was a part of my childhood. This was on all of our local news.

They played it on the radio. This was a known thing. And it was like a funny, like, ah, look, Flora is really going nuts. But we were rooting for them to get to prison because we could have gotten some of those jobs. It's like, no, we would pass each other on the street and say, man, this is really like Robocop, isn't it? It's like, yeah, I don't even know what that is because the movie hasn't come out yet, but you're right. I picture. I know you're using the collection.

but I picture like 11-year-old Jason Parjom being like, God, I hope we get that fucking prison. I absolutely did. We all understood. Okay, I think people, were you guys from small towns? I don't know where anything about either of you. Yes. My small town story is we lost our logging industry because of spotted owl environmental protection. So everyone in my town hated environmental protection because everybody's dad lost their job at the logging mill. What happened to my part of the country is the type of coal we had. It's like a high sulfur coal. And it got banned from, it created like smog or acid rain or something. Right.

So that type of coal we had went out of fashion due to environmental regulations. So, but the thing you have to understand is if you're not from a small town, every small town or most small towns have one thing. Yep. And you will say it's, it's the Toyota plant or it's the, refinery. It's you have one big business and half your employment comes from that one big thing and the town was built around that thing. You know, there's a salt mine somewhere around here and a town was built around that salt mine and when that mine closes or when that refinery goes out of business or whatever, it becomes, you just watch the town crumble and you watch it slowly die and they,

you keep getting all of this little false hope. There's always a rumor that, you know, well, they're going to open up that auto parts plant. You know, it's GM's got that. They may build the jeeps here. You know, there's a couple of, and you have these rumors, and then it invariably never shows up. It opens, you know, in another state or whatever, but the local towns always trying to, like, make a pitch to give them these crazy tax breaks and land, dirt cheap because they want these jobs. So the fact that everybody was like clawing for this prison, it did not, even as a child I knew was like, okay, this is pretty dark.

Like we are not living the way the people on TV live. But yeah, it was like, because it's like the prison will be your thing. Like that could be your, because you've got the prison, then you've got all the businesses that will cater to the workers there, a bunch of restaurants were open up around there and hotels for the visiting family. People coming down from Chicago to visit the inmates and you've got like it just it ripples out You know the the benefits of it now we have the prison wrap it was time for Jack Thatcher To like make his it to come true on his word

He promised that he has a lot of media influence he has the right context he can get the ball rolling so they submitted it to dozens of places and they got Rejected by every single one except for WGN Chicago and that was more luck than anything but I just love the that Jack Thatcher got this all started. He said, let's come together. Let's shut the whole town down. Take the kids, take the fucking kids out of school. Jack Thatcher has this shit. All right, I can sell anything. I can get that on TV tomorrow. And then they all did the rap. And he's like, well, they all said no. Sorry. Why did they need to shut the town down? They get like three pickup shots of outdoor places. They could have just stopped the sidewalk for five minutes and said, hey, we're shooting. Can you wait? Like, it's just like a couple old ladies like mouthing the words.

Like, this is a Super Bowl shuffle, but for like a going out of business bowling alley. There's not a ton of production behind it. I think that was the whole town. Was it? I think that was it. I think that was all of them. They were all in it. Some of those were apparently children, which, I mean, they've lived rough lives.

Doesn't look great. There was some scenes in this that, like, at one point a maniac jumps off an abandoned school bus with a shotgun. And I thought, that's a strange choice to me. Oh, that's why they had to shut school down. They needed the school bus for the maniacs. Yeah. I liked the sassy cop when he was twirling his name. nightstick. That's the guy who said his last name was

his last name's Thompson just like you. I thought it was a weird choice to film him just strutting around like a, like a dandy wad a sourdough starter. I thought maybe they should have had him beat the shit of somebody like he could have clubbed a guy off a dirt bike and then held a gun to his head while he's saying, is we, is they're going to get the prison or am I going to have to shoot another one of these kids? Like that could have been like in the song.

Add some urgency to it. I get the sense they shot a lot of stuff they didn't wind up using. Yeah, they probably did shoot that a few times. there's two or three hundred hours of footage that they shot around town and somebody came time to edit it all together. It's like, well, you can't use dad either. All these kids have their asses out. I just can't use that. Chief Willie Thompson was the guy you were referring to, just like you.

He in a later interview very proudly would say, I dreamed up that baton twirling move all by myself. That feels like the first thing you do with the nightstick is twirl it like that. I'm pretty sure 1910s cartoons police invented that baton twirl. But he put a lot, he put a lot of hip into it. He got a lot of sass. I think he was wearing high heels when he did it. He had a lot of, you had a sashet to it. Also, it may not be clear.

It just now occurred to me. If somebody out there is really young, I don't know how young your audience is, they're asking, well, what's wrong with the rapping? Why were they rapping that way? You have to understand. As Sean mentioned, the Super Bowl shuffle. There was a belief back in the mid-80s that, because rapping was just talking, that anybody could do it.

So like when a football team did a rap about how they were going to the Super Bowl before they actually went to the Super Bowl, it actually went to number one in the charts in the United States because white people over the country is like, oh, so this is rap. You can just get any group of dudes together and just talk about, you know, and kind of boast about things. And there you go. That's ramp. So, for example, if you want to know what rap was like in the mid-80s, go look, look.

look up a song called, I think it's the Rappin' Duke, or also the John Wayne rap would be another title. Oh, that sounds familiar. Yeah. Yeah. And it was pretty dire, but that was the kind of thing that was on the radio all the time. So the old people, again, rap was brand spanking new to the mainstream back then. They were like, yeah, I could do this.

Every average person thought, well, you're just, they're just talking. It doesn't even have to rhyme, really, because you may notice from this song, there are no actual, it's not like a rhyme scheme. So yeah, this was the product of that delusion on top of all these other things. Jason, let me test your hip hop history. Can you finish this rap line? They call me sweetness. I love to dance.

Because running the balls like making romance? Fuck yes. Exactly right. See, you're a true hip-hop. OG. That was wrapped. That was wrapped. thing that they just did. They set it out

and everywhere it's like, no, I don't want anything to do with that. Except for WGN Chicago, they ran it once for local color. That was apparently all it took because then ABC brought it national, like almost immediately just from that one showing. And eventually, as they called their group, the barbed wire choir,

eh? They got booked on Good Morning America where they sent Mayor Charlie Overstreet and Chief Willie Thompson, the the, I guess, sexiest and most relatable members of the A corrupt mayor and police chief, overweight middle-aged corrupt mayor and police chief.

That really is like the bad guys from Dukes of Hazard. Boss Hog and Rosco Pico train. They sent him around for a fucking media junket to fucking promote their goddamn anti-American tableau. Just this nightmare thing. Dude, there's a scene in this where they go to the courthouse and 12 jurors like snap their heads to the camera and wrap the song. it is like a scene from they live if John Carpenter was black. It's just like 12 white people

like staring into the camera and telling you they want a prison. It is very much. I think that shot, the idea was this is the POV of a black person coming to Florida Illinois. We promise we'll convict them all. Yeah. It's like a Donald Sutherland from Body Snatchez.

It's like all look at you and howl. It worked. Everybody apparently loved it. This went viral before it viral was a thing. thing. It's true. See, that doesn't just mean, that doesn't mean fad to me, because it wasn't like, it wasn't like a fad.

A fad is something even more lasting than viral. Viral is like, it flashes out and then gets everywhere for a day and ultimately nothing ever comes of it and everyone kind of dies alone. I guess that's a spoiler alert. Stay tuned for the rest of that. The town of Flora was so high off this that they landed a manager, like an actual record manager and a record deal. And they cut this into a wide release single for sale.

They sold it. They sold t-shirts. They made t-shirts of this. They wrote a cookbook. I don't get that. What the fuck would that cookbook be about? I suspect that the readers of 1-900 hot dog are going to find out at some point. I want it so bad.

If you have it, you need to send it to me. Like, is it how to make prison food? It can't be anything else, right? It has to just be how to make prison food. Right. They eventually, they held an is-we-is parade. It was a town-wide, celebration where they had the Flora High School marching band come out in black and white striped prison-style pajamas, which again, feels like a crime.

Just, I don't know that that's a crime, but it feels like it. I only took one other note, which was that it's so hopeless and desperate, which I feel like doesn't get helped by the fact that they tried to turn this into a thing, that they tried to market this into cookbooks, doesn't help that desperation. If Elon Musk cut the program that paid you disability for your mangled penis, and then they're going to be able to be a thing, and they tried to you, then you offered yourself to the first female voice you heard on Xbox Live. It could not be more hopeless and desperate. I'm just reading what it says in my notes. That's it. That's all I wrote down for the entire thing.

Someday we're going to find the guy who writes your notes. That guy's in a lot of fucking trouble. And maybe it's too far into the podcast to be pointing out this very obvious thing. But at no point in this song or in the previous song, did they ever explain why their town would be a good location for the prison? At no point do they boast of the strong employer, employment base. We've got good, you know, strong young men here, ready to work, and we've got, you know, good work ethic. We've got good, you know, infrastructure and the highway to get you

people down here is in good shape, and we've got, that's none of that. At no point do they explain why it would be a good place to put a prison. It's all just, we're very poor. Are we getting the prison or not? We're starving. We're poor. Are we getting the prison? Please, please, please. We're so poor. Like, why would that sway anyone? That's the rules of the sweepstakes. The sweepstakes was not, tell me why you're a good fit for the prison. It was, tell me how fucking sad you are. And if I laugh, you might get a prison. So funny. Because I think they almost demonstrate the opposite of what Jason's mentioning, because they hold up a sign all handwritten that says flora prison site. And then they pan out. And you can see that it's just a dirt field. Just there's nothing

for no infrastructure, no roads, electricity, or plumbing. Like, if you put a prison here, you're going to have to build a fucking town to support it. Like, we probably don't have the power plant to run it. You're going to have to build everything. Which, again, if you embarrassed yourself right for Big Jim, it's not a problem. Daddy Big Jim can make that happen for you. That's more jobs. So they went nuts trying to market this, just like everybody that's ever had a viral hit.

And just like everybody that's ever had a viral hit, they did the thing to get attention and forgot that they weren't actually good at the thing, so it did not work. The town's new manager tried to get them paid when People magazine came by and said, we want to do like a puff piece on this, and people magazine were like, oh, for dollars, for human dollars, no. Yeah. And they just didn't. They're like, if you want to write about us, you need to give us money?

Yes. And people are like, no, that's not, we're not doing that. Unusual. So they really shot themselves in the foot there. And of course, they did not. get the prison. We already spoiled that part. Brown County got the prison. So the official story is that there were legal conflicts due to some kind of tax laws. But I found a ranting insane blog by a madman who was probably long dead, the best and most unbiased kind of source.

It was for somebody, it was by somebody who worked at the flora paper at the time. And he said Governor Jim Thompson hated that flora got more attention than him when this sweepstake was supposed the sweepstakes was supposed to be like, you're all about me. You're all about tickling daddy's feet here. Everybody's supposed to make me feel special. And he was so pissed off that Flora got the national attention that he thought he would get for his wacky sweepstakes idea. That's just according to this long dead maniac whose blog almost doesn't exist anymore. His reasoning was that Jim couldn't say no now in front of all this national attention because he'd look like the bad guy and we already have a guy dressed like a literal bad guy, boss hog over here.

So he blamed the complex tax laws and he just sort of waited for the clock to run out on Florida's media attention. And then he suspended the entire prison sweepstakes concept. Amazing. And just like that was it. He took his ball and he went home. But it's not like Flora got nothing out of this. I feel like this story is going to only get sadder with the next thing you say. They did get a platinum record from their producer, Martin Lewis of Rhino Records,

who said he hoped it would sell a million copies, but if you don't, you've given America a million laughs. Okay, that is a lot less sad than I thought it be, but still, pretty tragic. They didn't sell those million copies. Yeah, we gave us, they gave America a million laughs. They remained destitute and did not get the prison. And that's it for Flora, Illinois. Stay tuned for the bonus podcast.

We're going to talk about the town who did win Brown County. They won that first prison sweepstakes. That was all thanks to a gang of plucky teens and their prison sleepover that turned into a psychological experiment and possible war crime. I said who did Frankford. The Studios Orlando, we celebrate the all-new 37th annual Circus of the Supremes with big top performances from

Aaron Crosston, spitting on a silvery web high above ring number two, our next star becomes the lovely spider goddess. It's Adrian H. Aidan Mouette. Alex Nolenberg. From the TV hit A Different World, it's Alpha Scientist Java. Anandhi, Armando Nava, Bim Talzer, Brandon Garlock, the pretty young co-star of just the ten of us,

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Harvey Pengweeney. A new look for the actor who plays Bubba on Monty. Thomas family, Hendrik Sorensen, Honk, Jabber Al Aden, James Boyd, here tonight with a sword swallowing act, the multi-talented singer, actor, and hopefully sword swallower, Jared Clack, Jared Mountain Man, Jared Ruiz, high above the Hot Talk Studios Burrito Cart, Jeff Arraski, John Dean, John McCammon, Mr. Belvedere himself, the amusing John Minkoff Joseph Searle

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Spotty reception, supernot, Tater's Tales, on the trapeze and presumably flying tonight, co-star of Out of This World Ted H. Thomas Cavatzos, Timi Lehi, from Guiding Lighty, From guiding light to circus light, Toasty God. Tommy G. Making sweet, public love to an elephant, please welcome Velo. Booster, Waylon Russell, Zach and Ava, and making their spectacular big top entrances, your ringmasters, Neil Bailey and his partner, mentor, godmother, lover, co-pilot, tailgunner, occasional chauffeur, second for all duels in matters of both heart,

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