TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Midwestology 2: The Humble 24-Hour Diner, and Wrestling

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

On this unlocked Britainology from October 2021, we got Joe Kassabian and Francis Horton back to discuss the Midwest--a reverse Britainology, if you will--and we're discussing 24-hour diners, terrible fast food jobs, and the cultural weight of professional wrestling in the Rust Belt / Greater Midwest. Hope you enjoy! Britainology appears twice a month on the Trashfuture Patreon--one episode at the $5 tier, and a second at the $10 tier. However, we eventually unlock the special bonus episodes, for example the one we did about UK pub songs, now available on the $5 feed here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/70969449   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hey everybody welcome to another bonus episode of what a hell of a way to die no bitch we're not this is fucking Midwestology this is me I'm I'm in charge got down you didn't start fucking talking so I didn't know you did the countdown I'm an ROTC cadet who wants to prove he's in charge and he's yelling and being a freak and everybody's everyone who's actually been in the military is like God this guy sucks at his job really bad welcome to Midwest ology on the $10 tier talking about America you guys haven't heard this but but on the $10 tier for or actually for the all the bonus episodes of Trash

Milo and Alice have gotten into a thing where they just make sex noises at the beginning because it's the extra special bonus or as Milo says exactly and so this has gotten gross but then Alice has this sound clip that we know as moan dot wow which instead of it being instead of it being like like sexy girl noise it's basically a dude going oh what's amazing is that we worked out that it's what the sound actually is is it's from Dark Souls 1 it's the sound when you get hit so what is an orgasm but a tiny death you know yeah or getting slashed in Dark Souls as they call it in French yeah

so in the ass that's a that's that's how Gaddafi died every time every time I have to cut this shit out and I sort of fucking guy I read the green book this is the podcast of the Jamahiria yeah he wanted to divide Switzerland starting when you have a point you have a point go ahead divide those Swiss up yeah I agree yeah fuck the Swiss they're weird so I brought you guys back because we wanted to explain some stuff to Milo about the great region notice the Midwest we talked about the origins of the Midwest last time and a bunch of other stuff to include in saying clown posse and I wanted to talk about some Midwest

culture whoop whoop and I'm not talking about tenderloin sandwiches which is the thing I've seen some photos recently of people posting big tenderloin sandwiches where like it seems like it's a fucking joke that is like the world's largest pork chop sandwich however we're not gonna talk about that we're gonna talk about some food culture and I want to talk specifically about restaurants so off the top of my head I realized when we were talking prior to starting recording Milo had never heard of ponderosa steakhouse I had not but I was glad to learn yes now what he has not realized what ponderosa is that it is

ponderosa Spanish for like heavy yeah yeah but it's also kind of tree it's kind of like a ponderosa pine and so you'll be heavier when you come out so ponderosa is always have like this mural of like pine trees and shit and like pine trees everywhere and stuff but it is crucial above all else to understand that they're disgusting so universally I would like I would like a disgusting dream you disgusting when I was in college sometimes with friends we would go and just have like a Sunday afternoon defeat meal at ponderosa and I remember the ponderosa on I think College Avenue North College Avenue in Bloomington

Indiana and I never had a good memory of being there like the battle royale of a lunch like many will come only one will leave and so I wanted I wanted your ponderosa stories yeah a lot of my ponderosa history is also couched in the military because during drill weekends they have to feed us lunch so either if they didn't have cooks and they didn't have any way of like you know feeding us at the drill hall and like they felt that it would be too mean to just throw MREs at us they would they'd be like okay look we can go to a buffet and there is a ponderosa that was not too far away for those of you who have never

been in the army reserve army reserve bases are never in good parts of a neighborhood ever because nobody ever wants a bunch of rich people don't want a bunch of army trucks and a bunch of soldiers around because it looks bad so ponderosa is already a gross place but they're like you know what we can feed everybody for like seven bucks there you know you could get total you get you could get the the buffet you couldn't get a steak steaks were extra so you had to you you were only allowed into the buffet where everything on the buffet line tasted like chicken I love the idea of there being like a poor door at the

ponderosa steak house where you're like you're in but you're not allowed at the beef anything that's not beef so Milo I'm going to give you some photos it's very funny to me because I looked up ponderosa steak house on google oh god everything's in vats and this is truly this is food for the hogs and it's very funny to me because it's like your nose in that little trough and have at it do you not have buffets in in england they do but do but that's like a powerful vibe yeah but it's just funny to me because uh because I have got one the ponderosa for in pulaski north new york in vidalia ohio uh vidalia calling somewhere in ohio vidalia is just taking where the onions come from baby

yeah ponder ponderosa on a scatterfield road uh I'd love to be from like al-qaeda or Idaho yeah so it is absolutely the name of a town in somewhere in America I know that much so this is what they look like on the outside Milo like shit oh yeah nice that could be a tool store that could be anything like that doesn't need to be probably will be in about a month yeah and like the the vat thing is like that's how most midwest food is is served is in a vat because it's the only thing that can properly contain it because it's always weirdly wet and we yeah that is true isn't it well because it's always got to be in its own juice otherwise it dries out under the heat lamp so everything has to be like half submerged in some kind of liquid

to to properly to keep steaming it because they have like little burners underneath too to keep it warm so you get the heat lamps up top and then you get the heat down below so you've got to be constantly steaming like those green beans that just came out of a can let's be honest like they just yeah lop a big thing of uh green beans with the bean juice in there and they're just like 750 a person here you go come on in beans that are there is like an offering to the gods because no one's taking them everyone's just out the generic meat yeah i mean i was thinking about this because yeah when i think about other restaurants i can remember you know mongolian barbecue clone places that are just like you know you basically pay an entry fee and you know for

bucket of slop basically you fill up your slot bucket and they cook it on like the cooking thing in the middle or you know chinese buffet similarly you pay like the entry fee and you you all you can eat slop or ponderosa and then if you look at places that have table service or like are less are not buffets i was thinking like okay cracker bales a national chain that's an obvious one but you guys had bob evans too didn't you oh yeah hell yeah we have bob and bob evans um i guess denny's is is national as well yeah denny denny's was very uh denny's was a very important part of my life during that time when i was too old to hang out at home but too young to go to bars so we just all we all just smoked weed in the denny's parking lot and hung out at denny's and got like

like bottomless pots of coffee for me it was perfect got denny's and you could go in the smoking section and the waitress is working that late at night really don't give a fuck about carding you and stuff or like are you old enough to smoke so you and like your underage friends go and hang out and sit in a booth till like four in the morning at denny's just smoking and drinking coffee which i'm sure is great for your brain oh yeah the people the people working the overnight shifts at denny's on a tuesday are not they're not your a team basically but they were also the nicest denny's operates on strip club like a tuesday night like it's not the it's not the it they actually share a staff joe was it was it denny's for you or was it perkins or someplace

else in michigan is specifically the detroit area has a unique aspect of midwest culture known as conys um okay now conys like everybody well not everybody but most people are aware of like cony dogs which is just a hot dog with chili and shit on it and we act like it's a pinnacle of food um but they have restaurants they're just like called conys and there will be like eight in any given town owned by the lord's resistance army named by the origin of the cony dog joseph cony everybody in detroit knows this we just want to we just want to admit it we had great taste in jar dogs that guy some of his other work a bit juvious but on that one thing yeah but like all of these conys absolutely look like shit they're in the worst buildings in town because

there's like i said there's like eight of them in any given shitty town whether it be detroit or paniac or any of the other little suburbs that surround it so they're all competing against one another so nobody can really pay the rent they're always owned by like a weird greek guy and uh they're open all the time and they'll employ virtually anybody so your friends your shitty friends in high school also probably work at a cony uh and they'll work the night child soldiers yeah exactly yeah it's part of it's part of cony thought um and there's no like understanding of he'll labor laws uh so like your 15 or 16 year old friend from high school also be working at like 3 a.m at a conys yep and you can sit there and drink coffee and chain smoke

and like the weird goth girl you had a crush on would not charge you for like the 18th pot of coffee or whatever but i was i know that that's that's pretty much all gone away like stuff indoor smoking has really gone away but like when we were growing up it was still definitely a thing that like uh perkins i remember because i went to perkins and steak and shake those were those are my denny's not so much but perkins steak and shake like they would have a smoking section or sometimes the restaurant was just all smoking area like yeah the shake was because you're on your ninth coffee and well it's it's funny because i actually have some perspective on this because i actually worked at steak and shake as well so when i was in college i worked uh so they can

shake in bloomington you've made adopted steak and shake but i uh but i i i worked i worked uh i was born with the steak burger i would say perkins is better food wise and like overall vibe wise than steak and shake and and the reason i'll give is that and you guys can weigh in on this if you want is it denny's and perkins like they try to make it so fucking home spun and they keep the lights relatively lower yes you know so it's got this kind of living room feel and they have like curtains and like it just it feels more like home where a steak and shake it's like fucking germ research facility bright all the time it's just intensely bright lights the only place i've ever i really would hate it the tiles are all white or black it's a very a lot of very

bright fluorescent light yeah we didn't any on shit too yeah anytime that we did do like sometimes you'd be like me i'm tired of hanging out at the denny's let's go hang out at the steak and shake and we always always regretted it we did have like another denny's that we kept in rotation on occasion though like if we were just like uh i'm tired of this denny's let's go to the let's go to the good denny's out on brown and there's no good denny's they're all there's no there's no there's only worse denny's yeah denny's i mean it was funny because people who grew up in the south they have fucking waffle house which is trash but has like a much there's just more like waffle house has more to recommend it like house is a vibe oh i'm into a lot of energy uh waffle house is a part of like

our our national emergency system like people like specifically it's just like look no if waffle house closes were fucked because waffle house never closes it doesn't even close for shootings uh when i was stationed in kentucky someone got lit up in the parking lot and there's like go around the police tape all right i got i got your hash browns back here man go on a guy on the ground bleeding out and they're just giving him the coffee i was i was i left the midwest i was traveling to go to florida and we were driving overnight and we stopped at a waffle house which is also 24 hours in chat nougat tennessee and everyone was there was a great part of the world was fucking were wolfing because it's like three or four in the morning on like a friday night or something

and i'm waiting in line for the bathroom and there's a line for the men's room but not for the women's room but the women's room is occupied and then the women's room door opens up and a probably 45 50 year old black man in what i can only describe as an immaculate pimp costume sunglasses on at night with a feather in his hat steps out he's like yeah yeah yeah i was i was just using that for a minute and then everyone just looks like what all right and so i went into the room was like fucking i guess it's gender neutral bathrooms and he had managed to piss all over the roll of toilet paper and i thought that's real pimp shit that's a real oh my god but see this thing that's

waffle house like you said waffle house is an energy it's a vibe we don't really have that like there's something more kind of i don't know like laid back about it whereas in the midwest like nothing's really laid back things are always a little more more uptight but i don't know detroit's conies are they can't i will say they cannot compare it to the waffle house energy but they're close no and i think that could be because like the people that own the conies they don't give a shit um and it's detroit so generally the vibe is i don't care i'm going to die anyway like the people who own conies are busy fighting a bloody civil war again kind of like um uh the waffle house things everybody who's kind of werewolft or you know

stumbled out of one of the various music venues in detroit and needed you know like eight cups of coffee so they could drive home sober from all the alcohol and whatever else they're in um yeah would there was i know one of my friends um she got fired because she had sex in the bathroom i got fired for buying weed in the back parking lot amazing it sounds like those things would be encouraged at conies like the manager did you get fired because the manager's like you know i got better weed why are you not buying weed off of me you buy weed in the women's toilet yeah i was selling weed at the women's toilet to a pimp uh i got fired because i sold weed to a cop in the back alley i uh i almost got fired during the busiest time of

year because someone tried to run out on their check but we had a security guard during the the busiest like the big college weekend like the week prior to for what they call little 500 which is like uh basically it's a stupid bike race at indian University but it's also like the biggest party week i thought it was going to be the indy 500 but driven by children because that would whip that's really bringing kony together it kind of is so basically it's it's not 500 miles but basically like it's around the same time as the indy 500 but it's a bicycle race and it was really funny because it's like a track like a velodrome track track bike race where like you you know you trade off in relays and stuff like that um and it's very funny to me because

up until like relatively recently like they didn't have a women's version they just made the women ride tricycles like this was your volume of sexism like this until like the 80s it was like a trike race for girls the natural bike race for guys now it's now it's it's uh there's there's a men's and women's version but um it was super busy right like fucking i'm talking the whole shift every table was full and there was a line like normally i would float i would work the women coming in and they're like big clown pants and shoes you know for the kony 500 it's just fucking it was just like it was it was kony i mean it was insane like every like i would normally float i would do i would work milkshakes and drive through as well as busing and doing dishes

sometimes i'd work the grill if i had to but because i wasn't super good at like i wasn't as experienced like it wasn't a thing you wanted a new person working and i was always busy right but during during that shift it was i just literally i would i would never have a time to take a break my whole shift just busing tables and washing dishes it was so intense and people would try to run out on their bills but they had a fucking security guard is catching people and we caught some guy trying to run out and the guy was the guy the guy the guy was i was like look man you got to pay and do the thing and he and he was just like yeah i should have fucking run i'm not i just kind of snapped because i was tired i was like i don't know how fast you would

run you fat piece of shit and my manager was like Nate we're trying to de-escalate this what the fuck is wrong you're in a stacon shape you ain't never running you never run in your life bitch and uh and so yeah needless to say i um i almost got fired but i think because i i showed up on time and didn't skip shifts my manager was like fuck you i'm still gonna make you work but um yeah your punishment is you have to keep showing up stacon shape was yeah and making five fifteen an hour oh yeah i remember that deepest hell bro i worked i i've told this story on twitter so many times i feel like fucking full on dad story mode but like i worked 54 hours that that pay period and i made like two hundred and seventy

five dollars after taxes amazing like this fucking sucks man yeah this is awful and i was a full time student and doing rotc it's like yeah it was killing me man it sucked i was in high school making that much money and my first job was work or sorry my my first longest shitty teenager job was at a mcdonald's uh where i was relegated to working on a working the grill section with with the romanian immigrants because they assumed because of my last name i was also a romanian immigrant um and like yeah man you don't sound very romanian the guy the guy whose name was uh i i can't remember is like you're not romanian like that's right uh but anyway i was banished to the grill and i i worked way past labor hours um that i was allowed for someone that was 14 or 15

and i made like a hundred and fifty dollars like man this fucking sucks if we go back to selling weed yeah i mean i i worked i worked at a fucking the in the butcher the meat section like a butcher shop in a grocery store and yeah 515 an hour uh when i was 15 16 and yeah it's it it sucked i mean i don't know francis did you did you work in worked fast food i i didn't i worked in a restaurant place called fits is um and it's you know i i missed like i've worked shitty jobs but i always skipped over like the absolute shittiest job never worked fast food never worked any of that like never done a drive through but i was a kind of a busboy slash floater so i made 515 an hour but i also made tips so it was like i would get the paycheck and be like whatever because i'm

walking out of here with you know um 60 70 bucks in in cash and when you're 16 um there's nothing better than that you know i would just love how how many jobs in like american fast food sound like they're things that could be like classifications in the like gay community like busboy like what do you mean by floater is that you're you float between stations like yeah so so i started out on dishes because there's not enough floaters in this club that was the uh that was the most self-explanatory or like like figure it out on your own was doing dishes and most nights because i worked third shift on weekends most night but nights like it wasn't that busy that you couldn't catch up on dishes and so you know i started there uh i still have my steak and shake

apron i still have my steak and shake name badge on my apron because it's a reminder to never you never know when you might get cold back out of retirement gonna call up the steak and shake reserves nathan it's been a long time it's a reminder to never get ahead of myself to never think that i'm above anything like you know shaggy famously was on mtv cribs and he your wife making you had the steak and shake apron in bed shaggy that people asked him when he did mtv cribs why he had this fucked up tv when he was like a multi multi multi millionaire and he's like that's that's the tv that literally like i had to pawn numerous times to make rent like before i joined marines before like i you know had a career he's like shaggy was in the marines shaggy was in the

risk shaggy's a gulf war veteran are you talking it wasn't me not uh our lord and savior too dope correct correct shaggy shaggy from the the the the the the the reggae rd hip hop artist not not icp um same thing like it's just a reminder having the steak and shake apron is just sort of a reminder to never to never think i'm above anything but i will say that there is a heart-rending slash blood-curdling phrase that occurs to me periodically and can just just snaps me back into an alternate and bad reality and that is and i quote having a great day at steak and shake my name is nate how may i help you oh because people don't understand you can get ptsd from anything and and i'm sure that you had that fucking problem of like the person who pulls up the drive through and immediately

accuses you of some bullshit to try to get some fake fuck that's like free food oh yeah it's just like god like oh and you have to be deferential that's always some fucking loser but like they know they can do it and bully your manager into giving them free food the greatest thing about working at fits is was it was like i knew i knew the owners the owners were there it was not a corporately owned thing at the time so when like one time i was working i you know we had two bars we had the upstairs bar which was the drinking bar and then we had downstairs which had alcohol but that's where like shakes and floats and stuff were made so i generally worked down there and the bartender down there one time accidentally knocked a soda over that was on the um on the counter and

it got onto a guy's pants and so they're like oh sorry you know help them clean up and everything and one of the owners was down there and he's just like hey man sorry about that give you a free like fits has bottled their own soda so that was their kind of big thing they had a whole bottling line and everything so they're like yeah i mean here's a six pack of uh of whatever sodas you know as an apology and the guys just like well i mean you know you fucking soda jerk here got all this stuff all over my pants i think you guys should buy me lunch and the manager's like i'm not doing that i gave you soda you can leave now and uh and it was it was phenomenal to like because at the time i had no really like i had no other experience i was like yeah obviously

everybody you know just talks to shitty customers like that and then you know you get out and i started working at an apple bees and i was like oh shit no you uh you have to you have to count out of these people fuck that yeah it's awful joe you you had one you were gonna tell me so i i worked at mcdonald's and that was back in the era of supersize i'm that made out of the united states right i don't i don't know you guys have supersize here no we didn't know it was i don't think it was legal in europe i think it was genuinely illegal in europe you gotta get a brief the audience on what supersizing well i'm i'm familiar with it as a concept but but i don't remember the exact sizes but take a large and make it two times that um and it's illegal for a reason

um yeah because even here now like as as america eyes as britain is like our health care is free that could have brawled the british state down america needs like our health care is free when you get a regular size fries here in britain like at mcdonald's or burking or whatever it reminds me of what the sizes used to be like when i was a little kid like in the 80s and early 90s like when like a small you know what i'm talking about when like a regular size fries was like the little tiny envelope of fries like that's kind of close to that's what you get here where well our sizes are like a size down from a hundred percent yeah yeah yeah whereas like so i would assume that clothes as well convenient in like like hand and glove yes perfect uh yeah i have i

recently had to experience attempting to buy russian clothes and that that doesn't work for someone my size but uh yeah well i mean never buy russian clothes for a kid go up under any circumstances they're not a nation known for their fucking fashion i remember once i was on a plane to cry mia and there was a person on the plane with me who's like a young guy about my age i guess who had a denim shirt on and on the back of the shirt in sequins it said uh let me it said in a like a massive serif font the style this is all in english and underneath that in a different front it said it's time for flashlights and i'm like yes i was only on a fucking market in russia could you buy that shirt i was i was i was waiting for a flight connecting flight from tokyo to

sol i'd flown new york to tokyo and then tokyo to sol there was a another flight that was at the gate where people were waiting to board from tokyo to vladivostok and the best way i could describe it is everyone looked like they were wearing counterfeit bathing aid just like like like like camouflage patterns to blend in in the club basically like just everyone looked everyone looked like it was the weirdest most garish shit i'd ever seen in my life i'm wearing banya simu i encourage everyone to inspire to get to experience yurivan style because you get not only really good russian knockoffs but also iranian knockoffs which are knockoffs of the russian knockoffs it's incredible iranian and like central asian stuff they're

really still into distressed denim and like bleach denim and stuff yes and you just get like the wildest fucking shit man i remember being in georgia everything was insane because like for some reason i don't know if it's the same in armenia but in georgia everyone loves japanese minivans from the 2000s but they're all imported from japan so they all got like the wrong side the wheels on the wrong side of the car and everyone drives at like 100 miles an hour there's like no rules of the road every one day we hired this um guide who was actually armenian but lived in georgia for a long time and he only speaks like armenian georgian and russian so i'm there with these two american girls and he is like talking russian about the shit that's going on

and i'm translating and then at a certain point he's like okay i i say something to you but you do not translate for that when i'm like okay and he's just gotten like we're on uh we're on george bush street in tbilisi is that where he had the hands of george bush on the roadside and then um funny it's appropriate to this story because this woman cuts him off in traffic and then and then he says like don't translate this to them and he goes i'm saying in georgia and a woman with car is like monkey with hand grenades sooner or later something will go wrong yep he's armenian listen so joe you were talking about fucking supersizing so what was your supersized story

so i was probably 15 and i wasn't at the drive through but i was inside the lobby and this woman came in and there's this particular kind of person at least back then in mcdonald's that would come into where the lobby is where like the seats and everything are and they would literally stay there for three meals like they would eat breakfast read a newspaper for a couple hours get lunch read a newspaper for a couple hours like smartphones aren't a thing yet uh and then they'd get like dinner and then a dessert it was the weirdest thing uh i guess that's what you do is excuse me gosson i would like to speak with the clown he's available send me the purple one um yeah i think it's send me his mentally impaired friend if he's in a meeting

i'm going to go burn a little bit of this off in the playland make sure nobody touches my stuff please the sandwich thief is he in today man i speak with him i i think it's like what old people do when they don't have like a church group to keep them alive um yeah yeah yeah yeah she was probably 60 ish i don't know pretty pretty big lady came up to the kind of like i would like fudge you know we have fudge for you know uh was it mcflurry's or whatever not as like a menu item um and i was like would you like that on something uh like no i would like a supersized cup full of fudge on my fucking tongue oh she wanted to i'm trying to induce diabetes i've got a foot i need to get rid of i don't know exactly what measurement of fudge

that would be but i'm going to assume like two pounds it's a lot um and it's something that's like in the computer and i can't like freelance after that you you just fucking die like i think you just die of like a seeming shock um and i was like ma'am i i don't know if i can give that to you uh in my mind and she's so she gets very very mad and she starts yelling at me not like angry old lady shit like she's called me some some nasty shit i'm like wow i have never seen that come out of an old white woman's mouth before um trying to send you back to all media bring me the cloud i want to speak to the cloud about this i i will talk to the grimace the grimace has ice connections you'll be in the next flight to uravani little shit yeah this lady this lady

this lady similar thing to me she uh she said that i that i i dropped some napkins and i picked them up to throw them away but she said i put them in her bag and i'm like i i threw them no ma'am i said i threw them in the garbage can here's clean napkins in your bag and she's like are you calling me a liar i'm like no i just didn't put your i didn't put the dirty napkins in your bag i threw them in the trash and then she came around she's like your guy the drive-thru called me a fat liar and i was like well you are fat but i didn't call you fat man and uh needless to say my manager was like i'm whatever you bitch here have some free food because that's the thing that's the skin i have a free cup of fudge and kill yourself love the revolver with fudge do the

rest we call and we call that a problem that solves itself so so joe like did did you your manager just just ring her up like like a specialty item like you know 10 times on the fucking fudge topping for an ice cream yeah oh christ really he was like i like he was i mean what three years older than i was his managers aren't even like legal adults yet either they've just stuck around long enough through the attrition of the McDonald's warfare he's basically like a company commander in the first world war yeah a child soldier in ronald mcdonald's army yeah except the the child so the child officer as at least comes from like a rich neighborhood we're talking about like the guy that joe was buying weed from is now his mcdonald's manager

he was buying weed for me i'm an entrepreneur this mcdonald's manager like theatrically washing his hands like Pontius pylon before he dispenses a little dose of fudge to this woman give the sign of the cross of like go with god god has left this fudge how about this supersize cup of barabas would you like that instead he he like is like look ma'am if you stop yelling at my employee i'll give you what you want and uh is something to that effect and then filled up a supersize cup of fudge which took forever because like i can imagine it is pounds and pounds of fudge what's the dispenser here is it like a squeeze bottle is there like a machine that has the fudge in it it was a very slow moving machine because like the

the fudge only went into like a dollop on top of mcflurries at the time yeah i'm pretty sure it cashed out the machine like i don't think there's any fudge left this is why all the mc this lady is why all the mcflurry machines are broken she broke all the mcdonald's ice cream machines across america hit all the fudge there's there's a fudge shortage in america now because of her well i was uh i remember for because that's when we make milkshakes like we trade secrets being revealed here at stake and shake there is no flavored ice cream there's just like even the ice cream isn't even vanilla it's just sort of sweet milk ice cream and you mix whatever flavor the customer asks for so you've got like 30 different syrups and then you basically just

scoop out this thing and mix in whatever syrup into it and then whatever they asked for in the order and shit you know fucking whipped cream and cherries and sprinkles and whatever the fuck else um and like on busy nights i would go through it came in five pound blocks of milkshake base and like it was pretty pretty it was pretty common for me to go through three or four blocks so like 20 pounds of milkshake base in a night and so like i had to wash on my shit when i came home because like i'm not joking my apron would be like like crunchy like it would be like frozen solid but not frozen so covered in milkshake goo that it was like holding itself together like imagine our son works at the cum factory you should see his uniform when he gets home

me just driving home in my full stake and shake outfit with my apron on just smoking a cigarette and my honda pulls you over like thank you feels like a honda civic just fucking die just hating my life man with a bumper sticker that says jalal about dick sucking union man yeah i wasn't doing the army yet it was i hadn't i wasn't i wasn't in yet but um yeah man like i just i think back to that stuff and just like midwest restaurant like that could be a story anywhere in terms of like working fast food something very industrial about american food culture where like yeah you get you get the block of lard and you feed into the ice cream machine like that kind of prides itself on trying to sell itself because it's a sit-down restaurant you have table service and stuff that

it's not we've got fucking chairs you hogs you have to stand on your little trotters and stick your nose in the fucking swill i remember they used to have steak and shake used to have commercials that were scenes from a worker rot where they would say if you have to go to mcdonald's you have to like throw your own trash away which like every time i went to a mcdonald's nobody was throwing their trash away so yeah just leave your trash on the table i forgot yeah restaurant versus worker rot i just the thing for me that i remember is uh like they want to sell it like it's a real production restaurant right but everything you get at steak and shake is pre-packaged from distribution so like like they would make the tuna salad on site but that was about it like the

burgers came in you know like a big bag from a freezer and you would put them on trays because they were like these hockey pucks and then you have to like smush them down on the grill uh all like the tiny fries that they sell at steak and shake like they those came in huge bags too like nothing is made on site we didn't do any prep on site like even stuff like having sliced onions or things like that like that would come pre-sliced like they would genuinely like it is a fast food restaurant that just has waiters but yeah sounds like the exact same as down's kitchen when i wear i just trapped it through me yeah i just think it's really funny too because yeah like scenes from a worker on like yeah was you know what never happened to me at mcdonald's and

did happen to me at steak and shake is someone went into the men's room and fired off a can of pepper scroll and like all the customers started coughing because it was coming from the men's room and i was the only guy that was working that wasn't like on the grill at the time my manager was like date could you go check it out so i go in the name immediately like tracking it's like coughing i'm like yep it's pepper spray us you gotta put on your steak and shake gas mask and go and decontaminate the toilet is this steak and shake employee songly smacking two metal bars together outside the bathroom and then i went outside and tried to smoke a cigarette i just fell over and thankfully the waitresses were nice that night they gave me some of their tips because

like yeah i was kind of bullshit what they did to you but i'm like oh sweet nice for seven dollars that's like working an hour yes but it's not but it's not taxed so you know that is true that is as long as as long as the tax man doesn't listen to our podcast i mean that is that is legitimately like the the midwest tea oh this is actually just i feel like a just a teen experience where it's like a very dumb version of the squid game scene where you're purposely inflicting pain upon yourself to get money in the subway but like yeah i'll do something incredibly dumb at work to make seven dollars why not yeah why not i mean they're asking me to well so now i gotta ask then before we talk about the big subject which you guys know more about than i do which is professional wrestling

i have to ask so like if you had to pick because i've been to a perkins in new york state i've been to steak and shake in the south in georgia i've been to denies all over the country because there's denies everywhere in america of all the places we've named what do you feel like say you went outside of the midwest what would you think would capture the most midwestern shitty diner experience i think my my opinion is a bit stilted because i think kony is perfectly encapsulate the yeah midwest experience in michigan especially and uh the the gander diner experience i mean not only do you get um jesus because you know lord resistance army but joseph kony makes a mean chili you know yeah you know we haven't talked about skyline chili

which is very funny to me because it's like the skyline chili skyline chili is a chain based out of cincinnati ohio and it's like cincinnati chili is like a special recipe but they serve it over fucking spaghetti noodles yes this is why i don't recognize ohio's existence cincinnati chili dog is also one of those gross sex moves that nobody actually does it involves shitting on somebody's chest so i mean that was that was we call that a cleveland steamer this is just appropriating german culture yeah well there are a lot of germans in southern ohio let's be kind of doing it yeah a restaurant designed purely to upset italians yeah so they serve chili on spaghetti noodles with sliced like diced up raw onions as a garnish like genuinely i just i can't make

fun of it it's it's poverty food that uh they're trying to they're trying to dress up a little bit like we've got a thing in st louis called the saint paul sandwich it's basically egg food young on two slices of white bread um and i'm just i'm waiting for it to become gentrified the saint paul sandwich that's either that or it's like something you get in some like really fancy restaurant in london well that's that's one of the things too is like in rochester for example they have the what is the meal called like the garbage plate or something like that these things are disgusting but amazing and simultaneously yeah i've pulled i i've pulled up a picture of it basically it's yeah it's a fried potatoes baked beans hot dogs onions mustard and a chili like

meat sauce this is what it looks like sounds horrendous and it looks horrendous right don't give me that that's oh it's fuck that's nothing like a british fry up if you're hung over it's really hard to beat a garbage plate because it's the consistency is mostly mush so you don't have to work very hard what i was going to say was that because that's like an upstate new york thing but that that also ties in the fact that midwest culture in a lot of ways is rust belt culture which extends up to bad parts of areas that are not considered the midwest like upstate new york anywhere where it sucks things will suck like yeah the only the closest equivalent to these kind of places i can think of in the uk and that this chain doesn't even exist anymore but when i

was a kid and i would go on like road trips with my family there they used to be a like a kind of british dino type chain which was like at every motorway services like anywhere in the country called little chef and like you could get like a fry up whatever it was saying like a lot of child labor um a lot of like people taking stuff out of bags and putting it on a grill yeah just like very bleak like they used to like run like weird promotions like for kids because there'd be something like families on day trips or whatever where like you know you could collect the fucking little chef figurines or whatever but the food was all like you could get stuff like real like old school british fry up stuff like fucking black pudding and fried bread um yeah no i'm not a big i'm not a

big lover of the fry up i love it like a bacon and egg sandwich or something but an actual full fry up i'm like i actually like the fry up but i can never finish it when it has all of the items that they're asking like they're supposed they're supposed to come along with it like it's just too much like putting mushrooms beans beans i fucking hate it's too much sugar man so yeah bread beans eggs toast or uh yeah that was under a certain bread and butter and toast yeah mushrooms white pudding black pudding yes wild um all right so listen i feel as though we have to talk about the subject that we brought you guys on to talk about which is professional wrestling sports entertainment yeah no no no i i had a very good friend uh who's actually still in the army who's

going to be a battalion commander soon i can't believe this considering how many times we got blackout in college uh he got me into washing wwe uh during the john sena rob van dam rivalry era the ruthless aggression period yeah i don't know what you would call i just remember uh that there's a whole like epistemology around fucking wwe this very very funny to me but you guys know a lot about john sena became the actor we know and love today he wasn't in movies yet but he was already he was sort of like the like respect the troops guy in wwe you still couldn't see him no exactly and see him but i got to ask what would you guys call the essentials if you were to explain american professional wrestling culture specifically as it manifests in the midwest to

a british person uh it's it's hard uh for me i i think like this with me it's soap operas for guys soap operas for dudes it's it's muscle ballet right like yes it's muscle so it's not just ballet yeah um like because the specifically like the the was at the attitude area which had you know the rock stone called steve austin mankind well undertaker but undertaker wrestled for like 30 god damn years um that definitely rings the the the truest of that term like muscle soap opera because that was the era of like vince bickman who is legitimate site it's like psychopath who owns the company was was caught uh supplying steroids to his wrestlers um the vince likes a vince likes a beefy boy he likes uh he likes him he likes some big and muscle

lady does not like big fat guys he doesn't like little flippy wrestlers he just wants you to come out and look big and strong and go right guys with like well look like tumors between their neck and their shoulders like that kind of a vibe yeah i love about vince bookman is he owns the world's widest suits i've never seen a man look that wide in a suit and i've seen like british gangsters from the 1960s and vince bookman is fucking jacked himself it's like he's also doing steroids yeah yeah i mean the man is like 70 years old uh maybe even older at this point and not to mention the story lines back then were legitimately some of the most unhinged storytelling that you'll ever see on tv and i don't mean just in wrestling i mean period um like for instance everybody knows

about crispen while murdering his entire family like everybody's aware of that um but one of the weird it really wasn't a storyline no but it did interrupt an even dumber storyline because the night before the bow flex sent in crazy oh god jesus christ the night before he got too powerful that's a that's a real selling point for the bow flex that could snap his neck because he really didn't have one um but but uh he the night before that occurred there was a storyline on tv where vince bookman was killed via car bomb um like we've had enough of you vince mcman vince mcman was a fucking holster unionist in the IRA finally got him well they've done a lot of things to vince bookman's cars they've blown it up um somebody filled it with concrete at one time

get sprayed with beer and milk um not at the same time uh but uh yeah like and it had to be retcon because there's there's this concept in wrestling called kayfabe which is like an old carney term for you have to treat this ridiculous shit as serious as possible on and off camera um and the fact that we're all army veterans i feel like it's that's one of the best explanations i can make for like the brain mentality you have to be in in the army that you have to care about shit that you know doesn't matter and it's genuinely kayfabe like that's the best explanation i've ever been up for you have to call bomb your commanding officer you know like to be like i have to be mad that this grown man didn't fucking wear his hat and that exact right angle like he's supposed to

like that level of caring you have this kayfabe yeah pretty much and uh like it it it's dead now kayfabe isn't really a thing because you know the internet's a thing but uh back then it was still kind of real so you know this car bomb occurred um which by the way ended with donald trump calling wwf and asking if vince mcman was okay um his beautiful vince i want to check is he okay i've heard he's had some car trouble it said you know it's hard to get people who can repair your car well these days enough for me i know i know very good people very very good uh but they had to call it off because the next day vince mcman had to come out and be like uh you know chrispen was dead uh and so is his family but uh but at the time they did mcman with like comedy black face

and like hair blown back like wily peyote when the guns miss fire but like at the time they didn't realize that chrispen what had murdered his entire family so they did this entire tribute show for three hours and then the next day they're like uh our bad will never talk about it again and they never did contrary to my earlier post you do not in fact go hand it to him yeah chrispen while went full finland on his entire family and then there's another honestly when the weirdest career arcs of any wrestler is kane um but real name is i believe glenn jacob's um info wars guests with tommy robinson once upon a time wow weird crypto libertarian guy who played kane which was the undertaker's twin brother who was disfigured and burned

in a house fire that also killed their family which also kane apparently did that but it's weird undertaker's also a wizard did i mention that yet no i didn't realize he was a wizard he was a wizard and at one point turned into the american badass biker after nine eleven and came out to live biscuit the biker the biker taker was a weird time because it's just like all right here's this guy who they keep killing and then he comes back alive and now it's just now it becomes this i am a real love man you're hulk hogan um yeah but the now the music is let him have john sena they didn't have john sena at the time so they're just like dead there brother because uh because america truly did keep on rolling into the last war um but the the weird the wwe had to

cancel that plot line where someone crashed a plane into mix with that there was scheduled for september 12th 2001 oh god i do so this is specifically has to do with england um they did have to cancel one storyline because they did a terrorism um there is a character named hasan this is getting as bad as you can imagine yeah um yes and he was originally just like a normal guy who happened to be named hasan and then vince mcmahon decided because he was a minority he'd have to be a terrorist um and i don't think the actor who plays mohammed hasan is actually arab i might be wrong on that though i think he's italian or something he's just like mexico yeah um let's so he um uh randomly turned into an isis type character uh before isis and uh him and a whole

bunch of baklava wearing uh terrorists strangled and murdered the undertaker big fucking filo pastry with all this on the head you know filo pastry and cheese in the middle of their face uh but uh there was they did that in the middle of the ring and then the next day the london bus bombings happened uh and the wwe confronted with the the idea of we should take this off the air before heirs in london said no fuck it air it and they did so i respect wwe had to get away from doing terrorism um lines of uh plot lines because like they could literally could not predict will an actual terrorist event happen because it's already happened a couple times with them and it's just like you know let's uh we can do racism in a

different direction let's uh stop bombing things though then they just vanished mohammed masan from tv because uh i think tbs or t into you whoever the fuck cared the show's like you can't do that and they just deleted him without another word i wanted to ask you guys though growing up in michigan and missouri like what was your relationship to professional wrestling because like my friend who got me to watch a bunch of it with him when we were in college he was from croffordsville indiana and like that it was this shit was like it was like the thing on tv that all like like the way that people care about prestige shows now like when he was a kid like it was the thing that all the kids like all the boys his age that's like all they watched on

tv well joe was mohammed hasam exactly yeah he's he's armenian not italian it's all right there's currently there's currently an armenian character in uh all elite wrestling who's italian so thanks guys amazing um look you just gotta show up and be swervy his name is is is is literally like shant miss robyn but it says his character's name is like joseph pizzeria yeah i drive onto the stage in on the minivan and i really like that i keep getting tagged in in shant miss robyn's shit because i'm the only one that kind of legally call him shart and not do a racism and i'm glad that's that's a job that i will do uh but you know i think the the the connection with wrestling to the midwest has to go back to the regional wrestling days before

yeah vince mcmane bought everything up um because a lot of those were in bumfuck egypt midwest towns and also really weird places like smoky mountain wrestling in tennessee but yeah very very um uh small regional things are very popular with with white people for the most part because like even smoky mountain wrestling which employed a lot of black wrestlers did them as heels which are bad guys um building characters yeah to be to make racist white people angry so like that was something that they could harness and i still think that booker t is basically that character though yeah because all the booker t plot lines that i saw i was like this is making me uncomfortable wrestling wrestling character in a full pimp outfit who you see him in the on the

big screen pissing on the toilet roll and the other wrestlers playing with the godfather yeah the godfather in his hose yep and but yeah i mean there was like a character called new jack in smoky mountain wrestling who uh went on like he was his whole thing was to play new jack from new jack city and upset white people as a heel and you know the day of i mean to be fair he was very very good at it and he knew his audience the day that oj simpson got away with murder he went on and cut a promo where he said i would just like to give a shout out to my boy oj simpson two less white people to worry about keep up the good work new jack is a fucking master rested piece man you psychopath he had a white baby doll he bought from a corner store and hung

it from a noose and carried it around with him um and his uh critical respect his main his main opponent which is frant one of france's favorite people mostly because of how insane his story lens i was a guy named big boss man whose entire thing was he was a literal slave overseer dressed as a car oh christ but like quite literally that's what early i mean not even early wrestling this is all the way up until the mid 2000s they'd still pull shit like this and the w w f before it became wwe there was a wrestling stable known as kai entai which were used they're japanese they're very big wrestlers in japan as well um they were used as a comedy bit where they would have their lines dubbed over like a godzilla movie where they would go and speak at length

doing a promo or whatever and japanese and then the only thing that would come over is indeed in like a very over the top boy it's like it's like oh okay i get it they're they're doing a wrestler because i i saw a bit of american professional wrestling growing up and one of the ones that stuck that stuck out to me was uh rakishi oh yeah i think he was supposed to be japanese he was known for his move the butt slam he was a big fat guy and he climbed up on the light on the ropes in the corner and then he would just like jump on people at the state phase yeah um and he was in japanese who's actually sumoan uh which happened a lot uh in in in w w f is like close enough and because like they know they know who their their audience is they won't care um i just i just remember that

one of my lieutenants when i was a very young captain uh was from the greater midwest aka upstate new york and grew up in a trailer park and was his name was catlin sardina he had a very strange name and he told me one time he showed me his first tattoo he had gotten his mom took him to get his first tattoo when it was he was 15 and it was and i'm not joking hulk a maniac on his right arms so like i realized that like the professional wrestling had this appeal in that region but like me not being from there originally and my parents not being into this shit like i just i knew it existed i remember when that weird game what was it fucking revolution x where like it's like wwe villains and you have to like save fucking aerosmith or something like when that game was in arcades

and shit i knew it existed but i never really knew the story lines and then like the more you guys describe it the more i realize how like it's genuinely like coronation street in the uk slash days of our lives in the us soap opera level of complexity yeah the one thing you can't save steven tyler from is looking increasing like every english auntie you know that's that's very strange to me too because as you say that like also at disney world there's a roller coaster that's called the rock and roller coaster where you have to help aerosmith get to the gig in time really and they end up in a lot of games it seemed like aerosmith is really trying to be kissed and they're just like yeah we'll license ourselves out to anybody in revolution x it was

like time crisis except you it was like a shooter on rails but you had a gun that shot cds at people not joking man i think something to do with um why this i don't know spoke to a certain group of dumb midwest kids myself included is because for most wrestlers they're all poor trailer trash in one way or another because like you didn't you didn't necessarily have to be a great physical specimen to be a wrestler you didn't necessarily have to be good on the mic you didn't have to be good at promos steroids for that yeah they have steroids for that or you could just be like a job or that doesn't have to fucking talk on the mic uh like cayndon talk on the mic for 20 goddamn years and you could still through like virtue of grit and dealing with horrible injuries pain and cte

you too could become chris benoit or whatever you know who's effectively from the midwest of canada um but you know that's that i think that was one of the things like one of the biggest stars like the hearty boys the uh the i afraid matt and jeff who are like the biggest white trash fuck ups you've ever seen like they've been arrested for spousal abuse and meth and like you name it like one of the multimillionaires get their trailers rated for drugs on the daily basis but they're awesome but they're still on tv so they're like that's just like my uncle or whatever you know representation matters on tv oh yeah another fond memory of mine is scotty too hotty a small guy he would like swing around people his big thing was like doing a double leg kick

which always strikes me as like not a clever move in any kind of yeah his finisher was doing the worm on to somebody it was like it was awesome i mean it is absolutely incredible that's a finisher but it also has to do with like buying into the drama of soap operas like of course that person's twin cousins didn't get the evil rock that killed their clone or whatever right like very obviously this 185 pound man doing the worm on to the undertaker isn't going to like pin him for three count but you're like holy fucking did the worm it's over yeah scotty too hotty's finisher was gently making love to the other wrestler and them enjoying it well the thing that the undertaker comes he has to submit nobody ever sees the thick rope worm coming yeah oh you hit my peace

butt there brother that was one of the things that got me too though was some of the thing like telling it representation matters that rob van dam reminded me of dudes that i knew who like had yin yang tattoos and like man buns before we called them that you know with like the shaved side man but this smoked a lot of weed and so like in a way you could recognize sort of care you know yeah young clothes brother right like that looked like you and then you know the guy who joins the marines from high school it becomes a fucking like a huge meathead like john sena basically rob van dam singlets look like a trapper keeper like a fucking elvin they did like a fucking lisa frank folder also fucking uh fucking batista who would wear like knee high

boots and a pair of speedos and that was it i've always been curious how they keep their like junk in those speedos that everything that they're like is there double stick tape in there i'm honestly curious he looked like a roided up christiano ronaldo so i've read if you ever read any of mik foley's books he he wrote about that one time like how the wrestlers would fuck with each other when they had like singlets on like those briefs kinds and like how he like i think he said he was wrestling al snow and he uh did something to like pull the singlet aside and it's just like and it was he's like it wasn't a televised match but like you know he did it because it wasn't televised because he knew he could get away with it and it's like you know when

you're wrestling and you're in that tight singlet you're not it's not helping you know you're not gonna look good when that comes out which is specifically why he did it uh yes al snow a wrestler famous for having an on-screen love affair with a mannequin head at least al snow did not birth a hand um true that's true mark henry mark henry and uh fuck what was her name um i don't remember help me out here oh fuck uh yeah there was a hand that was birth and then on the raw 1000 the 1000th episode which was shot in st lewis and i went to see it um because i at the time had nothing better to do with money um they we got to see that hand all grown up and it was basically like somebody had went to like a spirit halloween and bought a hand costume and put it on

may west i think that's who it was and oh no they were just yeah and i was like and also may west is very old at the time and they power bombed her through shit constantly may west put her through a table when she was in her mid 60s yes they're just like yeah we're just gonna may are you cool with this and apparently she's like yeah power bomb me through a table my power like i'm 38 my shoulder is in like the hollywood actress uh no it was her stage name uh may she was um a very well known early pioneer of women wrestling in the united states and the w w f signed her to physically and emotionally abuser we own you now just the thing about pulling the pants aside reminded me of i think it's a thing one of my turkish friends was telling me

this in like sorry may young i'm sorry before people start yelling that's oh shit yeah you're right i think it may old as is the case um apparently it's a thing in turkish oil wrestling which in the greatest traditions in the great nation of turkey is of course done naked um that the way you win is by getting your finger in the other guy's ass all right i mean i have learned something new about turkish culture thank you by all so i was gonna say too that's very funny to me now because i realized that it sounds like it's entirely possible that if somebody went through and was reviewing old uh old matches that were shot in various midwest cities that there might seem like some ratty fucking you know early teenage francis or joe

holding up a sign that said austin 316 on it or something to that absolutely if i could have afforded it yeah i i did not i did not actually go to see wrestling matches when i was younger um i didn't have cable so i didn't i could only watch wrestling like a friend's house so it wasn't until it is actually i came back when i came back from iraq in 20 in 2010 my roommate at the time was just like look i watched monday night raw and you can either sit here and watch it with me or not i don't care but i watch it and that's what ended up getting me into wrestling and now like i i i keep up with like a lot of local stuff i actually saw um the first time i've ever seen billy corrigan the lead singer of the smashing pumpkins was like a month ago at a um uh an all-women wrestling

pay-per-view that was shot at the chase here in st louis uh so good good to you know like wrestling was weird back then and it's um i i want to say that it's better but like also there's a lot of storylines like when when big show this guy who he's just a massive dude the really big guy yeah yeah big show when yeah yeah when his father died in real life they used it as a prop and the prop was a big boss man crashed the funeral tied the uh tied big show's father's coffin to the back of his police cruiser and drove off with it but big show jumped on top of the of the coffin as well so you have this scene of these mourners around this coffin i believe they've used his dad's real funeral for that as well and the real body that you get a ghost ride the corpse

yeah that's right and you know it just it really speaks to you just like how insane these wrestlers have to be to just be like man my dad died how can we make this a storyline how can we make this into content basically they were podcasters of their day yeah exactly it was uh eddie grero before his death uh no sorry it's ray mysterio uh used his own why so many of these people dead steroids mostly uh and untreated brain injury smashing things into their heads constantly like eddie grero died of a very rare heart condition that was made worse by the fact his heart was six times its normal size awesome but i think it was ray mysterio and eddie grero had a storyline where they were fighting over custody of their actual real life child of one of their

children um to the point that when he went to school uh like there was teachers at at school that were asking him like is like which one of them is actually your dad uh are you are you okay are you all right like i watch tv but are you all right and i think it was ray mysterio it was technically it was ray mysterio's kid but like eddie those whole storyline and eddie and ray mysterio were both like little flippy luchador kind of wrestlers so a lot of times they were you know they were very good friends in real life so like it was it was that wasn't even the worst storyline i mean there was a beautiful story there was the storyline where i mean triple h who's now pretty much second command of the entire company after vincent man married vincent

man's daughter but it started as better than double h it started as a storyline where he kidnapped drugged uh and married her while she was unconscious and also it's insinuated that he raped her uh like all right like on screen um and that was just that was like 2002 three something like that um and then that was fine that was on like network tv at 7 p.m a different time was it cain that fucked the dead body his dead girlfriend he tried to fuck a dead body yes uh his dead girlfriend at her uh what at her funeral uh he that's uh now mary glenn jacob's of somewhere in tennessee where i cannot remember this is absolutely unhinged who's an anti-mask guy right yeah oh yeah yeah yeah that's why he took that's why cain took the mask off and this is like very very rude i think

that wwe wrestlers can make a fucking plot line of that whereas i got in school suspension for making a fucking funny version of the don't drink and drive poem that ended with that same sort of phenomenon of fucking a court because you know what i got called an asshole for doing that yeah date the first true victim of kidsal culture that's right you know what's funny is i actually remember this poem right because maybe you guys got this too in school you like right before christmas break or spring break or something they made you really like where they passed around like this fucking garbage poem that was like a aol forwarded message kind of thing and i don't remember how the poem went but it was about like the guy going to like his girlfriend's grave like at the funeral

and it's like something something something this is what happens to man alive when friends let friends drink and drive like it was a total fucking shit poem maybe you guys remember just like okay i won't drink and drive that i'm sorry so me at age age 14 i saw this poem and i was annoyed that they made a statement and they for balance they have to show you the drill tweet as well so i i i wrote an extra stanza on this poem on the piece of paper they gave it on that it says and what is it said the opener casket and saw her cadaver he tried to look hard for memories together he thought to remember was better than not so he fucked her cold body right there on the spot very lyrical well i was 14 but i was good at this shit anyway it's my teacher saw it because all

my friends were laughing at it and i got fucking in school suspension for that shit fuck you i should have been a storyline writer for wwe we're relitigating that exactly right now right here on this podcast um what i was going to say was going back to the thing about the signs uh is there's like a really famous british meme which is a screenshot of a wrestle mania i think that was in atlanta georgia like in like the mid 2000s where someone who i presume was british in the crowd or either or like an anglophile american uh is holding up a sign in the crowd that says youth hosteling with chris you bank in massive letters which is a reference to i'm alan partridge like this like cult british sitcom where like alan partridge is like a failed x tv guy we've

talked about this on britannology and he's always trying to pitch shows to get back on tv and so he has like a dictaphone of show ideas at the the running joke being that all the show ideas are terrible and one of them is just goes youth hosteling with chris you bank and there's just like a tv executive just like shaking his head so it all comes together and so it's like the undertaker on stage and then just this sign like hundreds of feet above it and just like youth hosteling with chris you bank how many people died in the ring was it just oan hart um in the wwf just oan hart uh there's been a couple that have died um in like independent shows one i think two people have died in um like the triple eight luchador show uh one the great mysterio killed

him um that it was a botch i mean shit happens someone's been paralyzed in the ring i've tried to take my kid i mean like d low brown paralyzed the guy in the ring uh his name's draws and it was an accident uh like and and you know we're coming up on to the end of this uh you should you should talk about the mass transit incident because that's probably one of the most infamous um parts of wwe or wwf attitude era and like of just how insane wrestling is well i mean the mass transit incident was an ecw not wwf but i mean the same same it wasn't like ecw and wcw like the really crazy one wcw was crazy storyline wise like they had like david archett become champion at one point uh but like uh wait yes that david archett yeah yeah i remember that but uh ecw

was crazy into the extent of like let's see how far legally we can go and that first i think one the first times it ended up in core was in what's called the mass transit incident the mass transit was a character's name who was a fat guy just as a bus driver um awesome and he was booked to uh uh wrestle new jack who had so who had completely lost his mind at this point um and mass transit was actually a 16 or 17 year old boy who had never had any wrestling training at all uh lied to paul heyman who works for the wwf now is a pretty big name um and that he was like 21 or something like that and he'd trained with the hearts which is completely false um and uh mass transit his real name i don't remember went up to new jack and told him that he wanted to bleed like he wanted to get

bladed which is how they used to make people bleed uh on say which is you know slicing yourself with a razor effectively above the eyebrow where you just gush like a stuck pig um and also he said other things to new jack that new jack took his disrespectful because again he's insane uh and everybody knew new jack was nuts uh but they put these two in the ring together anyway and new jack proceeded to shoot fight on him which is literally beat the fucking shit out of this kid um and then pick him up and stabbed him in the fucking face with a scalpel not like a razor blade which is normally used an actual surgical scalpel that he had brought into the ring with him and severed an artery in his forehead and nearly killed him and uh while he's on the ground bleeding um he's

still beating this shit out of him his dad the kid's dad is in the crowd is calling new jack the n word which is causing which is causing new jack to beat the shit out of this kid more and then like when it quickly becomes apparent that this this is you know a bot like this is a serious emergency and like refs are coming in to try to separate them and nursing and their unfirst aid staff which i don't think they actually had ambulances on standby because ecw is fucking insane and like people are trying to separate them and new jack picks up the mic he's like i don't care if this motherfucker dies or something like that and just keeps kicking him like legitimately in the head and then walks off and he got brought up on charges for that because he's stabbing minor in the face

of the scalpel and got away with it because it's on stage and it was like under the idea the old carny rules of wrestling which is like hey if this happens in the ring it's probably because we both agreed upon it um and uh yeah he got away with it um but now you can watch all of us on youtube if you'd like oh my god i love just like the extremely powerful redneck vibe of like you know what's going to de-escalate this situation throwing in some end bombs i mean this this isn't even the first and only time new jack stabbed a guy in the ring he did this two other times uh and another situation again ecw he threw a man off a 30 foot scaffold and attempted to murder him there's a there is a hulu documentary or i think it's a vice but you can stream it called the the life and time of

new jack or something like that and people are saying no new jack didn't actually try to kill him that's just a rumor then it goes the new jack is like yeah i tried to kill him absolutely i did i'm doing it again well thank you for recounting that this is insane i'm learning a lot too because i knew a little bit about professional wrestling but nowhere near as much as you guys i didn't i didn't remember it being this crazy i remember it being kind of like soap opera like stupid story lines and like like ridiculous overacting but i didn't remember it being quite that insane which it still is but it's also fun though like i go like i said i go and watch local shows um because that's where you

can see you can watch wrestling and it not you know cost an arm and a leg like wwe tickets and shit do but cost them an arm and a leg right cost them a face i mean there's a there's a wrestler that i follow now called dan housing um who just like has a weird painted face and he just adds housing to the end of everything um there was one there was one guy which yeah uh there was one guy whose gimmick was he uh pretended he was an owl and the way he got defeated was uh by a guy who his gimmick was he would drink pbr's and then crush them on his forehead and then he's definitely gimmick that's just all of our uncles yeah well that's it yeah he was drunk uncle um that oh there there is uh there is also a guy whose gimmick is dan the dad um where he dresses

like a dad and comes out and uh and you know tells dad jokes and wrestlers yeah yeah and a hat on a baseball baseball hat on backwards and everything trying to be cool still you know the millennial dad look like uh like i rock every day so find your local wrestler find your local wrestling um it's not going to be as weird and insane as uh the old stuff i guess but uh i don't know it's it's still entertaining to me it's still real to me dammit thank you guys for making time for this early morning in hawaii mid-afternoon in st louis and evening in london never has so much time zone coordination gone into discussing the stupidest shit on earth just wait until i move baby

milo you're you're forgetting the entirety of the 20 years of the afghan war where uh that there was a lot of communication over many time zones about a bunch of dumb ass shit so this is very true well anyway uh francis uh can be found what a hell of a way to die with me when we talk about military veterans stuff from a leftist perspective joe please plug your show as well i'm the host of the lion's head by donkeys podcast uh not the british one not that one and we talk not not the centrist yeah um we talk about ad campaign military history war crimes uh dumb stories from throughout history and all of the things that you're probably lied about in history glass yeah the history of various wrestlers the history of various wrestlers yeah but uh once again this

has been midwestology thank you so much for listening and you'll learn so much thank you milo for uh for your open mind about hearing the big virtual dine our beautiful beautiful culture of the place that none of us wants to well francis stayed there but joe did not and neither did i'll never return no yeah me neither i fucking love the midwest it's so cheap it's so inexpensive it is inexpensive that's about all it's got going for it but it's so easy to get a gun like i mean just so ridiculous you could in the midwest you can end your life at literally anytime everything is cheaper when you point a gun at someone yeah exactly i mean britain might be the big midwest but you know what it doesn't have captain d's and i don't like captain i thought you were going to say firearms

because if the britain had firearms the homicide rate would be like it would be 10 times america's homicide rate but what i'd also say is that because captain d's may not be good but if you're a teen boy from indiana captain d's his name is extremely funny that is the one thing for milo's not laughing but joe and frances are laughing because they know exactly what i'm talking about so uh i will leave you with that all right goodbye