The Worst Idea Of All Time - Ep03: The Tech Ep

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Tim ate a chicken but it's okay cause the chicken was basically a fascist for a bit. Guy tries to figure out what nationality the badies are. According to Guy, the technology in this film SCREAMS Tim Batt. Wrist cam. Microchips. More laptops than a Neil Breen movie. We chat about whether Sony is till a good brand and if we're allowed to speak ill of Steve Jobs. Guy remembers seeing an old man almost perish at a performance of The Curious Case of The Dog In The Night and Tim HATED the Green Day musical. At least we can all enjoy the beautiful sound of a boy hitting a pillow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

that's what leaving is i've only done that i there's only one live show i can remember that i've done that too and it was the uh green day musical oh man that i would have loved to have It was insane! It was wild! Hello and welcome along to the worst idea of all time, emergency season. It's your boys, Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery, hot on the heels of both separately yet spiritually together watching Home Alone 3. Lost in a franchise. That's the subtitle of this movie. Tim, before we talk about the movie, let's talk about Tim. How the bloody hell are you? I just ate a fantastic roast chicken dinner.

The thing about going vegan for a set amount of time and then you're gonna say a set amount of tim i guess uh is that it's a good reason to do it to go like either vegetarian or vegan for a little bit as it resets all your expectations for meat uh both taste but importantly cost as well because if you just eat meat the whole time you're like a roast chicken costs 12 bucks and i'm outraged if it costs any more than that but if you stop eating animals for a while then um having the odd chicken roast becomes a special occasion and you're willing to pay more to get those um happy chickens that are that are raised correctly and cost a little more you know what i'm saying you're willing to pay more to get those happy chickens that are raised correctly and cost a little more.

You know what I'm saying? You're telling me that the chicken you ate was living a full and fulfilling life. The chicken I ate was an industrious and productive member of chicken society, and it had fulfilled all the hopes and dreams that a chicken could want to fulfill. It had built itself a media empire in the coop.

It had briefly veered in its midlife into a right-wing blogosphere-style enterprise where it was actually whipping up the other chickens into a sort of anti-government fever, and they were trying to take over the farm. They weren't successful, and interestingly, and I think this is so often the case with people who hold extremist points of view, within a few short weeks, that same chicken was able to turn the entire ideology of the empire on its head and became quite a strong and vehement voice of the left.

And then what happened then it died um you got killed and then i ate it fuck what a life yeah it's interesting isn't it because you you never know what's around the corner and the life of that chicken is no exception you know from hatching out of its little egg and to, you know, begoring its first begot and scratching around on its first little nibble of chicken feed. And what I imagine was quite a sumptuous and expensive grounds. Never would have known that it would absorb and then espouse these sort of uh deliberately misleading ideologies and then moreover i'd say it was even less likely at that point to realize that at some point it would it would learn the error of its ways and veer so sharply in the other direction the chicken became a philanthropist yeah i mean if giving your your body over to an entirely different species isn't philanthropy, Tim,

I don't know what is. That's a really good way of looking at it. It's not that the chicken was killed against its will, it sacrificed itself for me to have a really yummy meal. For the greater good. It's put you in a good mood, and that's what we like to hear. Because I can't imagine Home Alone 3 did much for you. Hold on, hold on hold this feels

unfair and lopsided how are you doing oh look man i'm um i'm doing really good uh i actually also just had a delicious dinner not unlike yourself uh presently elapsed vegan i have allowed myself to consume uh some meats during this uh lazy hazy time of year i don't have any qualifiers for it other than the stuff tastes good and i my housemate bella just prepared a delicious sort of tuna and rice dish. And tuna is one of the worst ones you can have. It was little tins of tuna. It was a family recipe handed down from one generation to this generation. And it was just full of flavor. It had a really nice sort of acidity to it.

And there's a really beautiful tang in my mouth right now. It was very healthy. There were some greens involved, beautiful tang in my mouth right now it was very healthy there was some greens involved some uh tomatoes and like a vinaigrette with some sort of pickled red onion all all done in the house and um after that i had a a santee bar right out of the freezer a little thin bar of delicious whitaker's milk chocolate and then after that tim i've had about half a glass of uh natural red wine and i've i've smoked just a very very very very end of a very thin very finely rolled um marijuana cigarette and i feel incredible this is very close to as good as it gets. It really is. It's been a really, quite a wonderful day.

And the evening's been good. The low light undoubtedly was watching Home Alone 3. And I'm aware that I am on the record as saying something entirely different at a different point in time. I would say this. Home Alone is an enjoyable movie. Just like the chicken guy. Just like the chicken, you two are allowed to evolve

your opinions Thank you Be like the chicken Be like the chicken Yeah, Home Alone 3 is an enjoyable movie once I think and I don't see

any way that it can improve again. I don't see any way that it will become fun as it was again. Let me ask you something, because that's an interesting point. I've got a magic potion that I think you know about that was given to me by a man that i trust do you do you think we should um have the magic potion and watch home alone 3 when all all of this lockdown blows over and see if it can improve the quality of the

product i think that would be um for a myriad of reasons tim i think that would be a really wonderful thing to do yeah uh i imagine that at that point in time we will be concluding our emergency cast and so there'll be a real genuine sense of freedom from fucking you know pulling up to each other side by side cheek to cheek bloody you know ingesting some of this magic potion and just and i've said it online and i'll say it right now for you again just raw dogging the ever-loving shit out of a podcast just yeah a real one uncorking one straight from the bottle. I do think in that instance, and only in that instance, will Home Alone 3 soar to those lofty heights again because I found this to be arduous.

I found it to be really, really boring, really excruciatingly slow and boring. And let's not forget, is the um technology special so this is an episode where we really both made a point of zeroing in on the technology available to the characters namely the the bad guys and uh discussing their merits their feasibility and just you know any other stray thoughts that came up so having something like that to sort of hang your head on as you work through the movie provided very light relief. But otherwise, oh, this was really tough work.

And it seems unbelievable to me. And, you know, Lord forgive me for how many times I've contradicted myself on such matters before, but unbelievable to me that as recently as two watches ago, I was singing from the Home Alone 3 is a good movie song sheet. Yeah, but you zeroed in on some points that still ring true. Character names, for example. John Hughes, he knew what he was doing. Oh um character names for example john hughes he he knew what he was doing oh character names i've got in big block letters here i now pronounce you burton jernigan and alice

ribbons that's mr unger's first name because that's also quite a good one yeah Yeah, it is. I can't remember. I'll get it up at some point. I would actually like to say, because you did call him Mr. Anger, and it's incredible until, it was really until this screening that I've almost accepted or interpreted the idea that these villains are in some way competent.

Like, even though from the outset, it's a disaster for them them the very first thing they do is they hide a missile chip in a toy car and then lose it on their way to a domestic flight yeah i never i never kind of analyzed that that's quite stark isn't it it's quite a boneheaded move like there's a yeah there's always an assumption in my mind that these guys are well put together and that's because they call each other mr jernigan uh miss ribbons and also i think also the music but there is there is something about it where it's like that that using of the sort of formal titles uh really endows them with a sort of, I guess the assumption of competence that there's no reason to believe in at all.

And, I mean, we know at this point, every time we watch it, we know that they've got another thing coming for the last 40 minutes of the film, Tim. 40 minutes of booby traps. It's a good trick. It sort of reminds me of how this is probably still the case now, but I think it's relaxed a little bit. But in the 80s and 90s, there were just all these men going to work.

Especially I think of Wall Street, you know, all of these men who have developed a lingo and a dress code and sort of would address each other in these similar jocular terms. And they would sort of convince you that they knew something that you did not. Maybe about the stock market or the economy or their specific business, what have you. But in actual fact, I think what we've found out is no one knows anything about anything, and everyone was kidding themselves. But they had sort of given themselves this visual veneer of professionalism and expertise, and I think that's what these villains do.

Yeah, it's sort of like a coordinated version of power in numbers where if you have enough people around you using the same jargon, dressing to the same sensibility, sort of mimicking the same body language, it does give it sort of an air of competence or like a semblance of unity that then impresses the idea that they know what they're doing but i would argue that these four villains not unlike the men you've described who wear suits

and talk about things going up and things going down that are immaterial uh they're they're a fucking hapless bunch and um you know easily outwitted by a hyper-intelligent nine-year-old boy or eight-year-old boy. Do you reckon they're all Russian? No, but I think they have all spent some time in Russia. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they all live there now. I think, well, no, they're all in prison now, Tim.

It's true. They all get caught and also catch the chicken pox, which is a neat little button they put on the movie that we haven't really talked about yet and probably for the reason it's not worthy. But should we dig into some of the tech? Ah, please. Because I do, I believe this even after three watches

and, you know, it's starting to enjoy it less and less. There is something about the tech in this movie that screams Tim Bat. It is in many ways ahead of its time, but the sort of the leaps of what was available to them in 1997 and, you know, the idea of the future or what technology they present is really nice. Obviously, we should probably go through it chronologically but i just

want to talk about the one that made me that keep getting back to me and being like tim would love that is glove cam yeah it comes very early it's like the first bit of tech in the film is that mr hmm it's mr jernigan mr jernigan burton, Burton Jernigan Are you Jernigan my chain? You know, it's fun with words like that They lose sight of the microchip And they realise that And it's in a bag With Mrs. Hess

And she gets in a cab and drives away And they just miss her And they just miss the cab But they've got enough time For Burton Jernigan to Lift up his arm and produce this heretofore unseen hidden spy cam which pops out of his uh the top of his sleeve it's and then you're gone it's such a fine and i i mean fine in the sort of thin and small sense of it it's such a fine piece of technology. Yeah, it is.

And because this film came out in what, like 98? 97, I believe. To my knowledge, there weren't any digital cameras that kind of looked or acted like that back in the day. So it sort of has all the appearance of like a spy micro, what are they called? Like microfiche, I think, camera. micro what are they called like micro fish i think yeah but it isn't because that is quickly complemented by a palm pilot which he produces and it wirelessly transfers the image onto there

and it's like some early version i mean bluetooth was around in 1998 but you couldn't use it to data transfer an image yeah an image rendered in crunchy 1080 yeah you know k on this uh color palm pilot um they use they really take a lot of liberties with the use of wireless technology like the volume of technology that relies on bluetooth i guess blue was the only operating system they had at the time well yeah i mean there's like yeah there's all kinds of wireless you know transfer protocols so they this but it's it's fine you know it's a movie you just make up your own one it's all good can i say though and i don't want to jump the gun too much but there are more laptops in this movie than a neil breen film there are so many fucking laptops everywhere like alex's house are lousy with laptops there is about four different laptops in that house that you see the baddies have

and i what i love the most is that they're not uh all apple products or like all windows they're totally agnostic they're all over the shop i like do you can you imagine a world where they sort of had hedged on uh bleeding some funding out of various different tech companies and so shot a variety of different options whereby they're like if if we go with compact we've got these great compact shots if we go with uh macintosh we've got these great macintosh shots and then none of the tech companies nibbled and so they were just left with sort of all these different shots with all these different computers and they said well well fuck it we'll use them all

yeah yeah that's it if there's a lot of movies from around that time um sony fucks with product placement in such a dramatic way it is crazy if you watch any of the early uh spider-man movies or um resident evil or i think weirdly even james bond movies i can't remember what sony pictures involvement is with the bond franchise but it's like sony via laptops everywhere everyone's got a fucking uh sony lap sony phones uh happy madison films were lousy with sony as well so he was slinging their shit around man i reckon they're paying top hollywood dollar to get this stuff in there do you know as a boy growing up i sort of looked at sony as the prestige tech company like i would i would associate their brand with the highest end products in terms of you not now no absolutely not they've dropped off a cliff i have uh no use or time for sony products

i still really i in my head they're still they're that childhood prestige brand that you held close to your heart i feel like you'd have more information on this than i do i thought that at some point they dropped the ball i felt like they were sort of near the forefront of cell phones for a while and then they got their phones are fucking great they still make great they make all of the cameras for everyone they make apple's cameras um those little modules that sony makes man they're everywhere sony's the shit hey fuck you guys they got playstation you know they got they got the best stuff yeah they do have the good stuff. Well, you go. The baddies use a particular PowerBook,

a Macintosh PowerBook 5300C, which was absolutely reviled back in the day. It was a notorious bit of tech. This is in the, I'm pretty sure, because the laptop came out in like 95, I think. And it was the bit of Apple's life where Steve Jobs wasn't there. So Steve Jobs started Apple and then he went fucking nuts and the board, well, he was always nuts.

The board fired him and the whole company almost bankrupted itself. And then he came back on board because he started his own competing computer company. And then Apple bought them out and the board brought him back on as CE. And he pulled out the iPod and saved everything. Yeah, he was obviously a visionary. But I hate that he was right and that they did need him. Because by all accounts, the guy was such a fucking asshole. Yeah, he's

a baddie yeah and we can speak ill of the dead on this podcast right for some reason you can certainly speak ill of you know various different members of the dead and the guy i read that walter isaacson biography the guy by all accounts was an absolute visionary and a total social monster who like you know like so many of those people the reason that he was such a high achiever is because he lacked you know the understanding of basic social grace or etiquette or decency um they get in the way those things worrying about other people occupies valuable mental real estate where you could be thinking of the next fucking single button i know flicky music player that'll fit in your pocket how long has he been

dead for and how many new apple products have rolled out since then how was it how big was this guy's succession plan yeah i know right tim cook's doing okay but i tell you what it can't last forever you can't just make the eye you can't make the macbook a millimeter thinner each year and think that that's going to keep your stock price up you're going to make something new at some point my god so this particular power book that they brought out the 5300 it got um a lot of hoopla and the the company really beat the house on it supposed to be um real kind of standard bear for where the whole company was going but but there were a couple battery fires that happened quite early on. This was like the original Samsung Galaxy, was it 8, I think, Note?

Note 8? That exploded. So, yeah, the 5300 was one of the first high-profile consumer bits of electronics that caused some big fires. It started a house fire at one of the employees houses who was like testing a unit so they had to swap out the um actually sony made the battery that caught on fire but it was a lithium ion battery and then i think they needed to swap it out for nickel metal fucking sony man i'm telling you they've been dropping the ball since the late

90s well and then the battery suffered because they weren't as good as the original flaming battery um plus the computers were kind of dog shit they had a lot of issues well i'll tell you one thing that they could do is uh they could pick up on and reroute outgoing calls from houses within a two milemile vicinity, which is exactly the application. Do you think this was a thing? It's in a lot of TV shows and movies. Was this a thing that you could do? No.

I don't. But again, I don't know anything. That's why I'm so excited to talk to you about all the tech because so much of what happens in this movie, I'm like, I understand this is a silly movie and it's got really cartoonish elements, but I think for how seriously they present the villains and then just the leaps of assumption they make

that we will accept the technology they're using. I guess in 97, you're looking at it and you're like, wow, that's a really cool, imagine if we had that, that's a really cool futuristic piece. There's something that always shits me actually is a lot of the equipment they're using is like top-end spy gear.

And when you're a kid, you get given these great spy kits with like magnifying glasses. And know if you're lucky a telescope you'll be able to dust for fingerprints and stuff and you're really encouraged to get into spying and then i don't know when it is it's usually around the same time you hit puberty uh but immediately spying becomes something that is very dirty and creepy and untoward and there's just this huge incongruence between like you know encouraging you to get into it and then all of society taking it away from you and saying how the fuck could you ever have gotten into this it's it's bad news

you've raised a very educated pest who has this amazing toolkit knows how to use it and now you're saying not to apply that to my newfound hormones i mean come on one or the other you gotta pick a path for me here society undoubtedly but yeah i think um because the the the when they use the mackintosh power book is uh not long after they've analyzed on a totally different laptop they've analyzed like a very they've analyzed the neighborhood using a sort of very early sort of burglary version of google maps where they have a vector view of the entire neighborhood and like very primitive basic blueprint architectural outlines of the way all the houses fall um which again i i think that's i mean i know that these guys are crooks and you know they've

probably got the best of the best to to do their dirty dealings but it just i just thought it was totally bullshit i think though interestingly that one is on a think pad which is fucking cool because those things have come back in a big way so i'm pretty sure back when this movie came out um think pads were created by uh compact i'm pretty sure and they were like people who fuck with computers in a big way love think pads because the design hasn't a lot of aspects of the design has not changed in 20 years so they've got these big chunky tactile mechanical keyboards and the little red nipple in the middle of the uh i love i love that little red nipple yeah they're still around i remember that makes them now the first laptop i remember uh seeing my dad used had a little green nipple and i would like use it to move the mouse

around and i thought holy shit and then i'd start using it to play minesweeper and then i played so much minesweeper that when i'd go to bed and shut my eyes i'd just see visions of different minesweepers did you get minesweeper eventually i never like understood how yeah i totally got yeah i totally i totally got it i used to play um like obsessively wow and i really identified with the the lead character and the curious incident of the Dog in the Night Time. I thought you were going to say I really identified with the lead character in Minesweeper, the guy sweeping the minefield.

I really did, actually, because as he would die, so too would I. And when he would put on sunglasses, I would also put on sunglasses. Quite the same, you and he. But sorry, did you massively personally identify with the, I think it's revealed to be an autistic autistic lead character of that book oh that's certainly the the mind sweeper playing element i i did um i can't remember if i told you this or discuss it on the podcast but

when chelsea came and visited in america last year it was in the summer and we went uh to the hackmatack Playhouse in rural Maine to watch a sort of summer repertory theatre company's production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. And we were in a large-scale barn that was at about 250 elderly country folk to watch like a really funny not actually you know how bad something needs to be to be enjoyable in the moment is uh really challenging it opened very strong in terms of we are in for a rollicking bad ride here just when like the the actor was doing some very heavy and deliberate sobs that were obviously meant to i think denote you know some sort of um

social difference in the character's disposition and it was like oh wow this could be really good uh but then they sort of pulled it together there was one guy in the cast who was a member of the sort of ensemble who would have been 80 years if he was a day. And it was really hot in there. And at one point when he was standing to the side, he was sort of like staring into the middle distance and then started really staring into the middle distance. Until it was like, it was 15 to 20 seconds where you could literally see the cogs turning in his brain

while he thought about, I don't know, what was left in the fridge for dinner that night. And then you watched him catch himself and bring himself back to the room he was probably about to faint poor old bugger i would have been surprised it was too hot in there we actually left at half time wow but i didn't return no that's what leaving is to a beloved text i've only done that i there's only one live show i can remember that i've done that too and it was the uh green day musical oh man that that sucked something unique and specific i would have loved to have been that with you tim dude it was insane it was wild it was the craziest shit i've ever seen it was so poorly thought out

like fuck man it was the most juvenile thing i've ever seen on a stage and i couldn't believe musicals cost so much money and i couldn't believe it got to the point of them putting it up. It would have lasted in Auckland at the Civic. Someone lost a tremendous amount of money on this production. Fuck, it was bad. God damn it. You absolutely love to hear it. The x-ray machine in the airport, that looked pretty high def, eh?

At the start of the movie? Yeah, it really was. And I'll tell you who else was revealed in crunchy high definition was the security officer operating it who was totally doing an impression of the man I just described

in their performance of just I don't know if it was an actor's decision or not but they were very much sort of absent mindedly just staring at the screen and actually that totally makes sense because he let a missile disguising chip slip through like in the very rudimentary cloak that is a remote control car also can we talk about how when they get into the car after they've picked up this chip and there's like so prominently displayed

in the middle of shot almost taking up the same amount of space in the frame as the two humans who are acting in it the box for this remote control car and the car itself and it's like just screaming at you pretty much in subtitles they are going to put the missile chip in the car yeah they still decide to have the line of dialogue put the missile chip in the car and it there is it gets me every time in a lot of ways home alone 3 is just a toy commercial that is 90 minutes long for that specific remote control car oh you're telling me man the capabilities of that car as as displayed by alex are literally even in 2020 unbelievable it has the range the power the battery life the responsiveness of the hauling ability as well like they put a not small home video camera on it and it doesn't it doesn't slow it down whatsoever it doesn't blink um that whole situation that alex brings up there i i always find confusing

he unplugs like the tv antenna plugs it like how does the camera have wireless capabilities that connects to the tv he unplugs this is the stupid thing they've gone to some details on this which are good and then they've missed a big thing which makes the whole plot stupid so what alex has done he's got two wireless systems happening one controls the car and one is beaming back the video signal from the camera to the tv that he can watch right but the stupid thing is is that he's only recording the video on the camera itself but he's got the picture on the tv so if he just chucked a video in the vcr and connected that to the tv boom he's got the tape recorded there because the big plot point in this is that the crooks steal the little video cassette out of the camcorder and then he's got no evidence

but if he just had a fucking recorded what was happening on the tv which was the same video being broadcast back to him he would have been fine he would have been sweet ass take that to the cops yeah give that little fucker what for he thinks he's so smart i actually really like him and uh i don't like the situation he's repeatedly putting himself in but i do yeah people wave guns at him and he's eight yeah i do i do like him and i actually that does bring me I looked into some details about that car specifically because it's operating on 27 megahertz which you see for two frames when he lifts the

controller up to the screen it says on the back of it 27 hertz I looked it up, that is a frequency that the FCC has reserved for remote controlled toys in the states, but it's only got a range of about 150 feet, which in meters is what, like 40? 40 meters?

Yeah. And it showcases 800 to 1,000 meter range. Yeah, it looks like close to a mile that he's driving that thing around. And look, I know it's a movie. I kind of fell down a rabbit hole because i was so bored watching the movie i did this while the movie was on which was naughty of me but i felt like it was related so it was okay there are ways to like illegally modify those remote control cars to beef up the amplification on the the radio controls so you can get more range out of them but they're not exactly street legal monty

well i i would have liked to see a scene where alex is tampering with it just to really emphasize that that is why the car has these capabilities um it is ridiculous i i guess it's uh you know it's an outcome of what we're doing to the film but how frustrated i have become by the power of that car um well they put it so front and center you're right if there was like a little scene of alex with a soldering iron that would be fucking cool it's one shot it would take like 20 you know it'd take two seconds on screen to show us we know exactly what he's capable of as well when he's uh booby trapping the house the power tools the vision and like the liberties he is taking on

the family home are phenomenal also way to believe that he achieves all of this by himself in about an eight hour period in addition to being like an electrical genius he also briefly becomes a carpenter of pretty good talent yeah and then And then a strong man, briefly, because he has to lift this bookcase, laid him with all these books up on this ramp on the roof. It's incredible stuff. There's some holes, Monty. Yeah, big holes. Big old holes.

Big enough for a villain to drop through. Namely, on the deck, I did want to say before we started talking about the car again, talking about Alex has brought me to my shining light, and it's a really wonderful little moment of Foley action. It's when Alex is sort of thinking aloud to himself after they have taken the car, and even after they've got the tape,

they're obsessed with the car, and they follow it back, and he's going, they really want the car. You know, there's something inside the car. The question is, what is it? And he's sitting up on his bed and he sort of puts his hands behind his head and he leans back and he drops onto the bed in a way that is very satisfying to see and very satisfying to do. And the noise that he makes when he sort of, his head lands on the pillow and his body lands on a combination of pillow and mattress it's this very sort of soft comforting uh very gentle thud that has really positive and warm connotations and it actually makes it feel like you're sort of just lying down for a think on on your own bed and um it's incredible to listen to and i imagine it was a

lot of fun to do i imagine that there is something really nice about that shot because he's cross-legged yeah and then he puts his hands behind his head he's like i'm having a think yeah i know that they're after this car but surely they can afford their own car and they don't have enough time to play with it properly why do they want it so bad and he flops back and it's just like something funny about seeing an eight-year-old doing such an adult thinking pose absolutely there's so much to love about that scene and i think the the rug that ties it all together is the foley artist's performance on i imagine like maybe very gently punching a pillow or or dropping something that is the weight of an eight-year-old boy into a pillow what okay take me there i'm the recording engineer

what how am i replicating that sound like a watermelon onto a yeah one of those pillows they used to sell on infomercials i yeah i think they probably had up to three pillows on site one of them would have been a down sort of goose down pillow maybe on top of a down duvet and another one would have been like a post-trapedic like memory foam pillow yeah and then probably a more sort of synthetic as a safety net uh like one of those you know cheaper sort of um more throw pillows that you'd have on the couch whatever yeah and i think you'd find they probably started with a bowling ball and they would have had a bit of bounce back on that cheaper pillow and then it would have been too heavy the sound would have been traveling through the pillow instead of sort of stopping on it and so probably bowling bowling balls too dense yeah i'm thinking like a bag of rice like a 5kg

bag of rice yeah but then we're suddenly asking the questions whether or not you know this boy's got rice on his head why is there why is there multiple sounds when it's one head hitting the pillow? I think a watermelon is on the money. A watermelon could be. You'd have to sort of tape up the rice bag. I just think a 5kg bag of rice sort of replicates the weight distribution of a kid. But you'd have to sort of put masking tape on it so you don't hear the rice coming through like a maraca. One thing you're going to want to do if you've got a 5kg uh bag of rice to is you're going to want to come over to

this house here and you want to give you know about a pot's worth of that to bella and just watch her make absolute magic in the kitchen because this dish was a pectin punch flavor wise and it's incredible to think that rice you know uh, in many cases, you know, the pastor of the rice world is capable of what it was this evening. What spices did she put in there? Did you cop a load of any of that? Literally couldn't tell you. What color was it?

The rice. Yeah. The rice was white, but the colors on the table were vibrant. There were some greens grown in our very own veggie garden in a little planter box. The tomatoes, obviously, are very sort of vivacious. I want to say curvy sort of red. The broccoli.

You want to fuck a tomato. I get it. We've been locked indoors for a while now. I don't want to. Mind evolves. I don't want to fuck a tomato tim but you need to fuck a tomato yeah i do i do need to fuck a tomato and speaking of getting fucked i have reason to believe that mrs h mrs hess herself the greatest horn dog in the history of

cinema and the uh cab driver were up to no good on route from the airport back to the house i think some sort of chemistry was sizzling through the air and on the way back you know not unlike some of these um you know really reprehensible sort of um fake pornographic videos i've come across where there's a cab driver and some customer and you know there's some miscommunication which actually leads to a moment's connection and all of a sudden they are just absolutely fucking each other's brains out back there in the cab i've reason to believe something not dissimilar that happened between the two of them which is why when he is uh questioned by the crooks who have located his cab thanks to the hashtag glove cam uh he's immediately a little bit sheepish he's a

bit nervous he's a bit coy and then when he realizes they're only asking for the details as to where he dropped her off he sort of relaxes and folds and just volunteers all of this highly confidential information without being put under the least amount of pressure that cab driver fascinates me so much i can understand why mrs hess would want to fuck his brains out because he's dishy as hell and he's got a very sharp mind on him obviously because when he is pressed to give the location of a fear that he did earlier that day he recalls instantly with near photographic detail what the house was that he dropped off some random fear to and also a little note on that exchange did you happen to notice what time 420 happened yeah boy yeah fucking i got no doubt that this guy's

burning one down for jar after absolutely reaming one of his clients on the way back from uh o'hare airport to the sort of upper middle class suburbs of chicago and for the train spotters of you you would have noticed towards the tail end of home alone 3 it is the very same cab driver who is dropping off alex's father after he returns from his i've got to imagine incredibly unsuccessful business trip to cleveland to try and describe a product to his boss that he couldn't even do on the phone. Did he ever get there? I thought he waited at the airport and his flight kept getting delayed by the snow and then he just drove back home.

Any way you slice it, the guy's out of a job and the cab driver on the way back has a very mischievous glint in his eye as he thinks to himself, well, I know that I'm dropping this guy off just over the road from an old flame. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to go and knock on the door and just slip in there see if there's a pie on the windowsill for old absolutely dr bosconovich if i can't find myself a vivacious tomato pie that i can just plunge my dick into was that the original american pie was a tomato pie it's not even a thing hey did you play um tekken 3 back in the day you put a tomato pie. It's not even a thing. Hey, did you play Tekken 3 back in the day? You put a tomato in a quiche.

A quiche is like an egg pie. And sometimes. Do you remember Dr. B? Sort of a mad scientist type character who probably looks in passing quite similar to our famous horned up cab driver driver yeah that's what that's what was racing through my mind when i was watching home alone 3 today i was like man i don't know if this is because monty called this episode the tech special so i'm looking for tech connections

but that guy looks like dr bosconovich from teken from the iron fist tournament the um engineer who i'm pretty sure perfected Yoshimitsu's armor and brought, I think, what's her name? Alicia into the world. A robot that he modeled on his own daughter who died. So many examples of that in Japanese anime and art. Astro Boy. Always fucking scientists losing kids.

Maybe if you paid more attention to your kids you wouldn't keep having to lose them and then building an android in their image and isn't that a lesson for us all home alone which probably at this point in the franchise should be called occasionally home

alone glimpses of bachelor life the franchise could learn something from this lesson you're saying which is less time on the on the work and more time on the family actually i will champion um alex's mom for this one she fucking lays into one of her colleagues mary lou when her boss is leaning on her really hard to come into work and balance her home life and work life a little bit better he uses the example of someone at her office called Mary Lou and she's not afraid to just dismiss that in his argument saying Mary Lou's got no life

and that is you know on a work call to her boss you can only imagine the sort of underhanded shit she would be smearing against the wall when discussing Mary Lou in private. She deals with that whole exchange so beautifully, I think. Graceful. Because she sort of says, look, this is the situation. I've got a sick kid at home. You fuck. I'm doing what I can.

And then I'm paraphrasing slightly. And he says, the client is expecting you. You've got to get in here. And she says, I will come for one hour. If Alex buzzes me once, I'm leaving immediately. And by the way, while we're here, I want to let you know that you are making me choose between making a deposit, making a payment on my mortgage

and looking after my sick kid, and I do not appreciate it. Fuck. And that speech alone and the performance of it by haviland williams is sort of what qualifies this film as one of the preeminent late 90s sort of second wave feminist texts uh tim we're running out of time so before we wrap up it's important to get any other stray thoughts you had about the technology and also of course your shining light um i had written down a couple of things like sensational battery life on that rc car but i think we've we've talked about that i do want to

mention that that power book 5300 is the same model of laptop used to deploy the virus in independence day by jeff goldblum to the mothership wow a very terrible laptop that had a very storied career in film weirdly um shining light i would just like to say and we'll probably talk about this in future episodes holy shit is alex's dad hot he is like the most fucking handsome man I have ever seen in my life. That guy is like designed in a laboratory, all-American hunk. Yeah. That is wild. The guy is an absolute smoke show,

and you've got to imagine it would be disappointing to him to have to look at that oldest son of his. I know. Where did those genes come from, man? Because the mum's very dishy too yeah but there's something going on with that kid obviously early adolescence is a challenging age even for the best of us but yeah but they made scarlet johansson so maybe all the good genes went to her yeah that's how it works right and alex has potential he's a cute kid i actually

looked up pictures of the actor recently and um it looks very different yeah it just looks like a sort of normal guy whenever those child stars have facial hair uh you know it's always sort of confusing i actually saw a photo of jonathan lipnicki who was the very cute kid from jerry mcguire uh when he was attending a movie premiere in what would have been his mid-teen years or maybe slightly before and the guy was dripping in ice um really really good stuff i'll see if i can dig up those pictures for you tim sounds good oh speaking of things that looked hot just to tie the tech theme back in uh this is another shining light of mine i have to say the chip itself that everyone's hunting down looks fucking cool.

Yeah. It's a good booty like system on a chip, but of Silicon wafer. And it is, they've done a good job there. Absolutely. It's desirable. And here's to you,

Burton Jernigan. Catching kids is really hard to do. Woo, woo, woo. I'll help you please, Burton Jernigan. Let's make that boy Alex go away. Hey, hey, hey. That's it from us.

Really enjoyable episode considering how much I hated the movie. Now, if you'll excuse me, Tim, tim i'm gonna go and bake myself a tomato pie and uh just force myself upon it while i think about mrs hess i hope you have a wonderful evening and i think i'm gonna have my wicked way with myself while thinking about alex's dad so don't you worry tim's getting his i'm not worried and now i'm even more relaxed um well maybe we'll stop the record but we'll we'll keep going face to face on the cameras here because i know for one that is something i would really like to see hope you're looking after yourselves see you soon do you want to fuck Mrs Hess, my bro? Oh, no, no, too wild for my taste.