The Harland Highway - 594 - Harland's MAGIC underwater moment, Question of the day.

Episode Date: July 24, 2014

Harland shares one of life's rare MAGICAL moments. The Question of the day involving CARS. Let's talk prevention. And a News Flash update. Ground zero a hero!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, heavenly orders of hash, hash browns. Heavenly, I'd like some hash brown. Okay. What am I talking? Welcome to the Harland Highway. What the hell was that? Idiot. Welcome to the Harlan Highway podcast.

I am Harlow Williams, your host, and great to have you here, everybody. All you pavement pounders listening out there as you roll down the Harlan Highway. get ready to have some laughs and be filled with the merriment and mystical magic. Yeah, guess what? I had a magical moment. They're very few in life, but I had a very, very beautiful magical moment that I'm going to hold on to for the rest of my life. I'm going to share that with you. Oh, my gosh, so exciting.

We're also going to be talking about a premonition I had. I had a premonition. It was a weird one, and it came true about 30 seconds after I had it, and I said it out loud to a bunch of people, and everyone was, like, creeped out. So we're going to tell you about that. I think we have a breaking news coming up on the show, some kind of biological research, and then the Harland Highway Question of the Day. Hopefully you can clear it up for me.

It involves cars and wind and noises, and that's what this whole podcast is made up of. It's the Harland Highway You just made a wrong turn On to the Harland Highway I am out here for you You don't know what it's like to be me out here for you It's like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking

I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you Like I took the wrong week, quit drinking I make you laugh, I'm here to fucking amuse you You're riding down the Harland Highway With Harland Williams I'd buy that for a dollar What was it we had for dinner tonight? Well, we had a choice. Steak, fish.

Yes, yes, I remember. I had lasagna. What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny? Like I picked the wrong week to quit am fit of me. She's got a thought for Samantha thing to sign. Welcome to the Harland Highway.

I picked the wrong week. Quit sniff and grue. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh, my God. I'm so excited to tell you this story, this magical story. I'm telling you a magical story. I don't know whose voice this is, but I'm telling you a magical story.

I think it's a little bit of Malam Brando and a little bit of Christopher Walken. But I don't, I'm not sure who it is. It could be a whole new character actor that's never even been born yet. I'm just doing this voice. And I don't know how I got pulled into it. Excuse me while I punched myself in the head. Okay, I'm back. Wow.

Whoa. Uh, anyways, I got to tell you this man. magical story. In life, there's moments that you probably classify as magical moments. Am I right? We all have them that they don't happen enough. Or maybe they do if you're lucky. Maybe every second of every day is just a fairy trip for you. I don't know. But there's moments that stand out and they're exciting and they're moving and they're, they captivate you and you're in awe and you know you're going to hold on to that moment when it happens for the rest of your life and here's what happened to me okay in the summers uh i like to travel around and then last week

i went down to uh florida and uh i went to this area where uh you can go scalloping now scalloping is exactly what it sounds like it's it's a uh it's the the the food you eat, the seafood, scallops, and scalloping is the process in which you dive for scallops. And scallops, in case you don't know, are inside of shells, specifically scallop shells. I'm exhausted. And if you don't know what a scallop shell looks like, if you've ever been to a shell gas station, and you've looked up at the big sign and there's a picture, a logo of a shell, that, in fact, is a scallop shell.

So that's kind of what scallops look like. No, they're not yellow and they don't light up at night. And it doesn't say food mart and bathroom facilities underneath the shell. But it's just the shell and the water. Okay? And there's different types of scallops. There's the ones out in the Atlantic Ocean where, you know, you get the gray big scallops that look like,

I mean, they're the size of like hockey pucks almost. They're huge. But the scallops in the Gulf of Mexico, at least where I went scalloping, in the Gulf, the scallops are about, they look almost exactly the size of one of those foam ear plugs you would put inside your ear to block out noise. Except they're not bright orange and neon green. I don't have to explain these little details. So I go scalloping, and the way it works is you throw on snorkel mask. fins and you take a little mesh bag and basically you snorkel along in about four to five feet of water and in the gulf there's areas where this four to five feet of water stretches out for like nine miles

i know it sounds unbelievable but the water is shallow shallow shallow until it finally hits a drop off and that can be miles and miles from shore to to you start to get in any serious depth And so the area where I go, there's a lot of seagrass on the bottom of the ocean floor. And I guess this is something that the scallops require. And they come up and they sit on the feedgrass. Maybe they feed off of it. I don't know what they do on it. Maybe they smoke it.

Hey, man. Hey, man, you want to smoke some seagrass, man? Come on, man. We got to smoke some seagrass before the Shell Oil Corpour Separation dredges us up and turns us into petroleum, dude. Man, I'm chipping. Look at the purple sea horses, dude. Oh, dear, okay.

So, you know, I've done this for three or four years. I've gone down to do the scalloping thing. It's really fun. It's like an Easter egg hunt because the scallops aren't just there. in front of you. You've got to swim around all over this in the gulf, over this sea grass, and you've got to search

for the scallops. And the scallops are sitting up on the sand, they're sitting in the grass, they're sitting on some coral. They kind of move around these little guys. And so it's really fun. It, you know, normally takes about an hour or two to fill a little bag full of scallops. You get

about 20, 30 scallops in your little mesh bag when you see one. You dive down and you pop it in your mesh bag and you keep going and it's really a blast and then basically you come in and you clean the scallops right there and you you suck them out of the shell and you wash them off and you drop them right into the frying pan and oh my god deliciousio i should have uh dead julia childs on to talk about this but anyways um so anyways i do this and in the process of going on this scallop hunt

you inevitably see a lot of sea creatures you know you see big stingrays you swim over stingrays you see rock fish you see schools of fish you see all kinds of stuff starfish so that's the beauty

of it when you don't see a scallop at least you're enjoying the view of everything else but in all my years of going down to this place you know I've only seen like two dolphins, and I guess it's because the water is quite warm and quite shallow in areas of the Gulf, and maybe dolphins don't like it, or maybe they just don't like

all the seagrass. I don't know, but I've been in places around the ocean where you see a lot more dolphin activity and never really see it where I go scalloping. So I'm down there with a friend of mine scalloping. And she says, oh, I'd love to see a dolphin. And I said, well, I doubt it, you know, but you never know. Good luck, you know, maybe. I've only seen two in all the years I've been coming here.

And they were just kind of out pretty deep, just motored by. And she goes, well, I hope I see one. And I was like, yeah, well, we'll see. And then I didn't think twice about it. And so we get out there. We're scalloping away. And at one point, I stopped. We're pretty far out from the shore.

But like I said, it's only four or five feet deep. So I stopped to take a little breather, and I stood up. You know, the water comes up to my ribs or maybe up to my boobies. And I'm about six, too. So, you know, it was about four and a half, five feet of water maybe. And I'm standing there, and I yelled to her because, you know, I wanted to make contact, make sure she was doing it. and okay, and she stood up and we were talking,

and all of a sudden I see a gray fin pop out of the water like 40 feet behind her. And initially I was like, oh, shark, shark, shark! That's what I thought in my head. I didn't say that to her. I didn't want to panic her. And about four or five seconds into watching this gray fin, I saw the spray, okay?

And I knew immediately that was from. a blowhole and I went oh it's not a shark it's a dolphin I'm like what are the odds so I immediately said oh my god you know that dolphin you wanted to see she goes yeah I said turn around so she turned around and at the precise moment she turned around the dolphin dove underwater she turns back to me and goes are you messing with me and then it came up again and I said no turn around there it is and this went back and forth like an old porky pig cartoon where every time she turned around, the dolphin went down. And then as soon as she turned back to me to complain that I was messing with her,

the dolphin came back up. And finally, I got kind of irritated. I said, just stop looking at me, turn around and look. And she's like, oh, you're just. Oh, my God. There's a dolphin. And there was. There was a dolphin there.

And she was very happy. And I was happy that she saw a dolphin. I mean, we can only really see, like, parts of its back and it's, you know, it's dorsal fin. and everything, but nonetheless, it was neat to be out in the water near the dolphin. So that went away. We go back to snorkeling, and I'm snorkeling along, and all of a sudden I hear a dolphin call.

I hear like the high-pitched, like, you know, that high-pitched, it sounds like a dog whistle, and then that high-pitched, like, that sonar ping they do and I said wow that that was a dolphin call right there and I thought you know what I'm going to stop looking down for scallops and I'm just going to like look around in the water here for a minute and the visibility wasn't great I probably had about 20 30 feet on all sides where I could see underwater

and I looked up and all of a sudden out of nowhere a full-grown giant dolphin in like four and a half, five feet of water comes right up to me and does a circle around me and I'm telling you this thing was probably about five feet away from me. It was that close. And he does a circle around me and then he goes around again and he turns on his side. So the first circle was just him doing his thing.

But the second circle, he actually turns south. sideways so his belly was facing me and his head was bent in and he was staring at me my little buddy timmy the dolphin was staring right at me and he was like checking me out as much as i was checking him out and at first i was scared because i didn't know instantaneously there was a dolphin i was like oh my god a shark shot and then i went no no that's a dolphin you know because they're pretty specific looking and so this guy did a couple of circles around me and he was like looking at me, so I thrust my arm out as if to touch him. I was like,

come here, let me give you a belly rub. You want a deep tissue massage? Can I pick some lice, some sea lice off you? Can I exfoliate you? How may I be of service, Timmy, the dolphin? I don't know why I call him Timmy. And why would I want to be

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Don't throw your back out. So anyways, the fact that this thing just made contact with me and took the time to kind of check me out and then I could see his head moving and looking at me when I put my arms out, he was like looking at my arms out. He was like looking at my arms and he looked at my face as if to say, well, wait, what's going on? Dude, you want to touch me? You want me to come over there? You want to rub up against each other? You want to make contact?

What's going on? Like he looked at me with that kind of quizzical like, what are you, my creepy uncle? I don't know you. But then, then again, dolphins have that permanent little smile. They have that grin on their face. and you know that that reassured me that he was kind of friendly even though at the same time I'm like geez dolphins have quite a rack of pointy teeth what if I'm sticking my arm out and he just goes okay crunch

and bites me but anyways it was the briefest of encounters it was totally unexpected and I've scuba die I've not scuba died I've snorkeled all over the world I love to snorkel. I've been in with sharks and sea turtles and manta rays and barracudas and all kinds of crazy stuff. And never seen a dolphin underwater in the wild, and especially to see it in such an intimate place where the water was so shallow. That made it even like when you're in the open ocean, it feels like,

oh, this thing's just roaming around in its environment. It could just take off anywhere. but being so shallow it felt it felt so intimate it felt like we're in a special and closed environment almost and the fact that this wild creature took this moment to connect with me was very uh moving for me i i was just like oh my god i filled up with wonderment and joy and uh it was just fantastic and i i hope it happens again sometime i hope timmy uh keeps our friends ship alive and comes to visit me often because it was it was something else i couldn't stop thinking about it obviously i still can't keep thinking about it because i'm blabbering away about it

here but uh just phenomenal phenomenal when you have moments like that that are just so out of the ordinary and so i continued on uh you know scalloping and uh got my scallops and cooked them and them and oh what a delicious treat what a so there you go a little magical moment that I thought I'd share with you guys and you know if you have a magical moment why don't we narrow it down to a magical underwater moment I'd be very interested to hear if any of you guys or gals have had a magical underwater moment I know it's obscure it's weird it's way way out there but who knows maybe you bumped into something oddly bizarre or fascinating or magical underwater.

I don't know. Share with me. 323-739-433-30. That's 3-2-3-7-39-4-3-30. And let's see what you saw. Seesaw? Underwater. The Harland Highway. Question of the day. Okay, here it is. And it's an annoying one. and I hope some of you geniuses can figure it out for me.

The question of the day is, why is it that when you're driving along on a beautiful summer day and you're in your vehicle and you decide you want to roll down the windows, you go, what a beautiful day. I want to let some fresh air in. And you've got the four power window buttons right there on your left hand side.

And you let one window slide down. It's like, you hear all the beautiful birds singing. Then you let down the window on the other side. More beautiful birds. Start smelling the forest. Then you hit the two windows in the back. The power buttons, like, the windows go down. And all of a sudden it's like,

it's like you've got a giant subwoofer in your car and suddenly it feels like you're in a submarine and all these air pressures going off it's pounding on your ear drums feels like you're in a submarine going down to 700,000 fathoms beneath the sea and you're about to do you're about to do serious battle with a giant squid in your Dodge Neon.

Dive, dive, dive, boop, boop. And your ears are like, oh, my God, it's worse than when you're landing in an airplane. It's like there's air pressure on your ears. It's like, ah, my hair, they start bleeding. You take your hands off the wheel to cover your ears. The steering wheel goes out of control.

You start spinning all over the place. Smash into a tree. When you finally come to, there's an airbag in your face. You're like, all I wanted was some fresh air and to hear the birds singing. And feel the wind blowing through my hair. I mean, what the hell was that air tunnel I went through? What did I go through a graveyard and pass through like 70,000 souls?

What is that? Holy equilibrium, scorch. Now, I'm guessing that the science side of me, the logic side of me, says it's obviously some kind of air pressure, wind-related thing of a jig. But I'm sorry, haven't we engineered vehicles to the point where we can eliminate, wanting to roll down our four windows and our car on a hot summer day without having to go through an air tunnel chamber, wind test, some kind of wind chamber where they, you know,

they experiment with the air currents. You ever seen these things where they put vehicles in a giant wind chamber and they release fog and smoke? and they blow all the wind to see how aerodynamically it works and how the fog and the wind go over the roof of the car and off the windshield. Aren't they doing these tests anymore? Why does it sound like the drummer from Led Zeppelin's doing a 40-minute solo in my ear?

Well, I try to absorb a little nature on my drive. I'm like, holy God. Let me hit my GPS and get to the nearest eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. What is that? Did someone install a helicopter propeller on the roof of my vehicle? Well, I was in the store buying some broccoli or something. Some prankster got on the roof of my car and put in some, some, some rotaries, some propeller blades?

Oh my God. So if anyone knows what the hell that is, please. Somebody tell us. Call us here at the Harlan Highway. Question of the day at 323-739, 40, I don't even know if I'll be able to hear you, Even if you do call. Ah! The Harland Highway, question of the day.

Good afternoon. I'm Gail Anderson, and we interrupt this program to give you a Harland Highway news update. Hippopotamuses Love Pringles. Yesterday, a recent study done at Yale University in the biology department, a herd of hungry hippos were feds nothing but Pringle sour cream and onion potato chips for a span of 12 months.

And here's the data. It turns out the fat fuckers love potato chips. Apparently, researchers say the fat pigs couldn't get enough of them. They fed can after can, and some of the time, they didn't even have time to get the pringle chips out of the famous tall can. That's your news flash update here on the Harlan Highway. I'm Gail what the fuck. Gail Anderson, now back to the Harland Highway podcast. Okay, Roger, was that really news?

I mean, did you really have to interrupt the podcast for that? Okay, well, I'm just saying. I don't know that hippos eating Pringles constitutes breaking news. Whatever. Don't shrug your shoulders at me. Anyways, speaking of animals, you ever have one of those moments where you just have a hunch about something?

You just get a feeling. This is a bizarre story, but it's 100% true. I was driving around with some friends. And we're on a little road trip. Driving from, we're down Florida way. driving from where we were staying over to a small little town to pick up some groceries and whatnot. And we're kind of on these back roads,

you know, weaving our way into this town. You know, it's like cottage country type of thing, like summer cottage country type of fair. And we're driving along. And out of nowhere, I don't even know where I got the notion. I said out loud, I said, you know, I have a feeling we're about to see a great big snake in the middle of the road. I could have said anything.

I could have said a million things in that moment. I said, I think we're going to see a great big snake in the middle of the road. I'm not kidding. We came around the next corner, okay? The next corner, 30 seconds later, we come around the next corner. It's a dirt road. And up ahead, there's like a little. little mark in the middle of the road.

And the people I'm with see it the same time I see it, and they're like, no way, no, no, no, no. It just looked like a black thing. It was just a black mark. And as we got closer and closer, we saw that this black thing was whipping all over the place. We get about 40 feet away. Sure enough, it's a great big black snake. Okay? and I guess someone had just recently run over at the last car that might have passed us going the other way

must have ran over because the lower part of the snake's body was squished and sadly there were a bunch of snake eggs squirted out on the ground along with the snake's guts but it was still alive snakes kind of have that thing that chickens have when you cut their head off the chicken keeps running around snakes are kind of similar once you whack them they keep kind of coiling around for a while and so this thing was freshly killed or it was in the process of dying and i was we were all like whoa like everyone was completely weirded out especially me because i'm like how did i know there was a snake up ahead how you know and i'm thinking maybe the snake channeled me in its last moment maybe the the snake

knew I was coming and telepathic. He was like, I've been, I'm falling and I can't get up. Help, help. Someone come quickly. I need some help. If there's anyone driving around here, someone, I've been squished. Someone squished the motherfucking eggs out of my ass. Okay, I don't think it was that.

God. How mean, a dying snake and I'm doing a routine about eggs coming out of his butt. But it's a, it's a hundred percent true story. very bizarre, and it was just one of these things that came into my head, and I said it out loud, and voila, there it was. Very strange. We were all weirded out by it. I thought I should go buy a lottery ticket, and did I know?

Why can't I have that moment? Why can't I go, hey, you know what? I think there's a $42 million lottery ticket at that BP station in there. No. I get a big black snake with eggs coming out of it. Oh, well. So I know this podcast has been filled with, you know, call me if you have a story,

if you met a creature underwater, if you happen to know why car windows when they come down cause your ears to explode. But I wonder if you would rather share a hunch that you had or a notion. I'd be interested because, you know, maybe I'm like the dead zone guy. Maybe I see things. And now I'm getting worried.

So if any of you have had premonitions, please call and share 323-739-4-330. Or if you just want to phone and say anything you want, you can do that too. That's okay. Nobody's going to get mad at you. It'll be fine. You're going to be okay. you can phone that number 323, 739, 43330

and you can do whatever you want. And if I like it, I'll put it on the air. Well, you're phoning. Why don't you go to the website, harloweems.com. If you forget this phone number, it is featured prominently on the website. It is there now. We have it up.

So harloweems.com get you the phone number, or if you don't want to leave a voicemail, you can always just talk, or you can always just write and send an email at harlough williams.com. That's there too on the website. Don't forget to check my stand-up comedy schedule. Lots of comedy tours beginning in the fall.

September, I start getting on the move again. So be ready. Find out if I'm coming to a city or town near you. Check out the harlowyms.com merchandise store where we have all kinds of goodies on sale for you. We will ship them out to you. And, yeah, that's it, man. Tell your friends about the Harlan Highway.

Check out all thingscom.com. That's a podcast network where you can also find my show. Lots of funny people on there, Jake Johansson, Al Magigal, all kinds of fun people. Bill Burr's on there. Check it out. And that's it. We're going to sign off. Until next time, watch out for dolphins.

And. Chicken. Chalmayne, baby.