Wonderful! - Wonderful! 108: Hot Brie and Takis

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

Griffin's favorite toy advertisements! Rachel's favorite first fancy cheese! Griffin's favorite super listenable band! Rachel's favorite challenging poem! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. We did it. We got past the spooky holiday together. I was a little bit worried there. People were talking about the skeleton, the skeleton brigade that was going to come and get us all. You know, our last episode was past the spooky.

Was it? What day is it? What is the date? What's the current date? It's November 12th. Yeah. So that's what they said is the skeleton brigade uh didn't vanish when the sun came up on november 1st like they were supposed to they hung

around for a couple extra days as like and that was their sneak attack strategy okay um so i wanted to give every i wanted to tell everybody now in case you're the first to hear from us is that we're in the clear and the skeleton brigade has died and we lived through it and the casualties were very limited so no need to fear um we also made it past david schwimmer's birthday we got past david schwimmer's birthday that one's got skeletons of its own if you know what i'm saying in the closet um so this is wonderful this is a show where we talk about things that we like and also it's the show where we forget what the date is by a pretty dramatically wide margin and it's also a show

where i ask uh my wife rachel if she has any uh small wonders that she's been thinking about disney plus rachel says interesting it does have all of them on it, huh? And by all of it, I mean all media properties that exist in the world. Disney did this smart thing where they started slowly dripping things off of the regular Disney app, which is where we get- By smart, you mean very cruel because Henry's been like, no, I want that long Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And it's like, sorry, we can do nothing for you here. Yeah, well, I was smart because I felt such relief today knowing that I would have access to not just the clubhouse again,

but all of the Disney properties I could ever want. They got fucking, I could watch Newsies and The Rocketeer in the same online platform. It is a very slick thing. Little wild, just sometimes I look at how much stuff i have on there and i go that's actually too much i don't love that they got simpsons and they have everything it's like it turns out they own everything it turns out they do own everything nobody realized it until just now well i think people realize it but this is the first time that

you've i don't know we've seen it all in one place all in one big thing but it's like it's like mtv cribs and that we just went to disney's house and we realized that disney has way too many things too many things but that's fine because i'm going to watch sandlot and flight of the navigator in the same afternoon do not sweat it uh i should have spent that time thinking of a small wonder but i did not you could talk about the movie we saw yeah we went and we saw parasite uh which is uh oh god i can't remember the director's name but he made um he made okja and snow piercer it's bong joon-ho uh yes he uh yeah this is his new movie uh parasite and rachel and i went to it we got a babysitter and went to a movie, which is a rare occurrence, but we also didn't know anything about the movie.

No, we watched the trailer, which was not particularly revealing. No, yeah. And saw it, and it was fucking great and very difficult to get up and use the bathroom during. um very like difficult to get up and use the bathroom during because it was so entertaining and so funny and also like very very very stress causing like uh you could do like a whole series just on griffin uses the bathroom during x movie yeah i'm i'm the best there is at what i do yeah that was a good one that that is uh it's amazing to me how fast you get in and out too. Yeah, well, I... Do you unzip in the lobby?

I pee right in my pants. I don't unzip at all. I just need a private little corner. Oh, you need a private space. Yeah, so I don't even actually leave the theater room. I just sort of go in the corner where the trash can lives. I go first this week. Okay.

My first thing, and I'm pulling the like ripcord a little bit fast here because i am going to start with the holiday theme topics oh my first thing is and there's a few different names for it so i'm going to say just sort of generally speaking the holiday toy catalog the uh whatever you might call it the kb uh toys catalogs you got amazon when we got uh i didn't see that we got it i have i have it here to talk about it but i i learned today that they are sort of filling in the gap now that kb toys and toys r us are both gone which is still like we got a hard copy heartbreaking oh that's so wild i'll have to take a look at it so this this has been a thing for like a very very long time like the the shopping catalogs, like date back to the, you know,

probably late 19th century. Like people figured out, like especially Sears came in in the 20s and 30s and sort of made it what it is today. But Toys R Us and KB, I keep saying KB. KB's offering was like, it was fine. I think we got it in the newspaper for the most part.

And it was a few pages and you got what you needed to get out of it. But the Toys R Us one was like a fucking phone book full of just just present opportunities in it yeah would you guys like go through and circle and and it was i'm i never received mail in the mailbox when i was a child and so when i got this thing that came in the mail that like was kind of for me uh yeah hell yeah we would go through it and circle it and like get wild about it. It was so exciting to get those, these just like novella sized advertisements for,

you know, stuff that a lot of the times it would take two passes for me because I would go through the catalog, adding to my, my Christmas list, which I think I've talked a bit before about like how uh we were not really a family that uh i didn't have like weird expendable child income like my uh my allowance i don't think i got an allowance until i was like in eighth grade and it was like

five bucks a month so like if i wanted something like i you know saved up or uh like if i wanted a video game i would have to trade in a bunch of shit at babbage's like that was until it got to the point where i had like one game left because i just funneled all of my funds all my assets into like game boy camera or something like that boy that's heartbreaking boy some of those games are worth a lot of money these days um and so like the holidays were like uh obviously exciting for many reasons but like this the the like crass commercialism will really really hit home with me um well and if you think about it this is like this is before the internet yes so if you were to know about a a toy it was on a tv commercial for a program you watched or in an actual physical catalog right exactly and i was also not the kind to like keep wish lists

and so it's kind of like fun just to make a wish list right um and so i would go through the toys r us big toy book and you know circle a bunch of stuff and then i would have to take a second pass where i say like or my mom would say like okay so i see that you've circled this like game this tic-tac-toe game that you throw the beanbags at do you really want that and i was like no no i just saw that and i got very excited um and so i did circle it uh i just they were this beautiful treasure trove of toy opportunities uh and uh there's video games in the books too like don't even get me started on that like i would have to i would do the video games part first because obviously it's a bigger investment and santa claus only has so much to to drop on

each uh of the three of us and so you know i didn't want to circle a bunch of garbage and then make it to the super nintendo page and be like oh shit there's so much good stuff in here i'm bringing out my phone because i definitely went through the amazon catalog and made a list of things that Henry might like. Oh, okay. What are we talking about here? So there's an Avengers play trunk where you can, it comes with like four costumes.

Oh my God. That you can dress as Avengers. For a little guy? Yeah. Like a little, little guy? Yeah, so it's like Iron Man's in there. And it's all the ones that he didn't have. That's fun.

I do think that you are missing something with the amazon one and that there's not a store that we can like go to to like you know see this stuff firsthand once we've that's true uh you know that's true but some of it like the pokemon battle action figures eight pack oh he's gonna be about it he's gonna be very very about that yes um i wanted to point out another thing that's great about them is now 2019 i can go back and look at them and they are like little time capsules they are like little uh like this was the only uh video games especially but to a lesser extent toys were like the pop cultural thing that i cared about growing up in middle school and and and high

school and college and now uh and so like i went back and like when i was researching this i looked at the 1996 toys r us holiday catalog how did you find this by the way there are some scans on it like archive.org like the government archive has a couple of them uh i saw i found a couple on reddit i wish there was a place that i could find that had like all of them like Like I want the Library of Congress to like have all of them. 1996 Toys R Us holiday catalog included launched Nintendo 64,

the Sega Saturn, PlayStation with Crash Bandicoot and Twisted Metal 2, Sega Genesis was still on there, Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong Country was on there, Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket, Game Gear, Tamagotchi, and Giga Pets. What an era. What a fucking year, though.

What a good book that was. It's, oh, 1994. I was reminded of the Dr. Dreadful's Food Lab. I saw that in the big toy book. I was like, gotta have that. And I did get it. And I made one one thing and it was like foamy worms and it's like oh that sucks shit dr dreadful yeah i never got into that gross

thing of like hey here's a toy that's really gross and you want to do it just because it's a gross thing right i mean i did have gack uh which i guess sort of is in that same vein uh i didn't oh we didn't really party on too many that's not true we didn't we never had like an easy bake oven around the house but we did have the two there's one that you could melt like uh little rubber uh things in and you could mold them into like spiders and like spooky shapes but then they have one where you could melt down little ball bearing like lead like things into a sort of mercurial substance that you could then like mold into uh yeah super fucking dangerous but you could make like race cars and little pewter wizards and shit like that

like uh i forget what that was called somebody on the facebook group is probably gonna remind me because they you know still have theirs and use it every day today um but yeah uh gosh yeah i just flipped through it in like 1999 the pokemon Pokemon Pikachu virtual pet pedometer came out. You know that was on my list. Wait, pedometer? Yeah, it was like a little like a gigapet, but it was like a pedometer. So you would charge up Pikachu by walking

and then you could like, I think you could also like catch stuff and transfer it to the game because the Game Boy Color came out this year. Darth Maul's double-edged lightsaber. Like all these things were like a high pry uh these i i like it now because they're like little time capsules but back in the day they were just like dream encyclopedia encyclopedias and uh yeah doing this this uh this segment really made me miss

toys r us and uh and kb it really breaks my heart genuinely not goof time like we have great toy stores here in austin that are like independently owned and rad and we go to them like all of the time yeah but there was something sort of like magical about uh going to going to toys r us when you were a kid and there was something really fun about taking henry when he was like a little little kid but we only got to do that at an age where he was like old enough to know what was going on like once or twice and then it it's gone. Makes me sad. Yeah.

So what's your first thing? My first thing. Should we talk about the fact that you have a desk right now? I have a table now. So Griffin invested some time into his office. Yeah. And bought some new furniture to kind of arrange things appropriately. And he got me a little table to put my little beverage and my phone and my little paper on. I thought you would be excited about it. I am very excited about it.

You look like Conan O'Brien over there. You look so natural behind a desk. You look so good. Thank you. I think. No, I've never been compared to Conan O'Brien. That's a flat. I mean, not physically. You're the opposite of Conan O the opposite of physically the opposite of him in a lot of ways what is your first thing my first thing is brie brie the cheese the cheese brie yes babe hell yes when you think of your first experience with fancy cheese isn't it always brie it's always always brie because it was the fancy fancy cheese that they sold it was like i think when you're in the cheese aisle at the the kroger's or whatever it's like here's that sliced orange shit that i know so well and here's the craft singles and like brie is the first yeah

it's the first little like uh lily pad that you get in the fancy cheese pond that you can step on to i feel like i remember i feel like i had brie at somebody's house when I was like in high school and it like blew my mind. Yeah. Yeah. I was so scared. Now here's the thing I didn't know then and I still will confess to not really know. You can eat it.

Moving on. Was I really your question? Let's continue. Okay. Let's continue the segment um hey brie's been around for a really long time and i was doing research to figure out the origin of brie yeah the little anecdote that i saw over and over again was in 774 that's way too early. The French Emperor Charlemagne was traveling through this area in north central France and stopped in this place where the monks were. Okay. And they had really good cheese and he liked it so much and he wanted it delivered to his castle.

Okay. So that's like, obviously nobody knows if that's like the origin of Brie, but it's like this little anecdote from 774. That's a really long time ago for us to know where a cheese came from that's so much earlier than takis that's way earlier oh god why wasn't that my small wonder your small one we just started eating we watched the bon appetit making takis they should sell them in smaller bags they need to sell them like a carton of like a pack of cigarettes because Nobody can eat more than two or three at a time.

Just 20 Takis in like a little travel pack that I can take with me. I think I could probably eat 20 of those throughout the day. But today I ate five of them within like a five minute span and it put me on the ground crawling to the toilet. So, Brie. Most people probably know Brie is the soft, creamy cheese, and it's got a rind around it. A lot of people, and a lot of people don't know this, you can eat that rind, folks. Don't worry about it. Here's what might make you not want to eat it, but this should not be a deterrent, but that white rind around it is actually mold growth.

Yeah, babe. That makes me wicked not want to eat that extremely much. The rind breaks down the fats and proteins of the cheese, making it creamy and runnier. But it's edible. I mean, if you think about bacteria and all the ways you eat bacteria in your regular life. I don't think about that traditionally very much. Yeah, a lot of people don't eat the rind, but like in, you know, French culture, it is customary. Yeah, okay. So French brie, if you are in France, the brie is made from unpasteurized cow's milk oh but it

can't be imported into the united states because cheese is made with raw milk must be aged at least 60 days to qualify for u.s importation and the average aging time for brie is one to three months. So by the time- Oh, I see. You see what I'm saying? Yes. Like by the time it hit the 60 days, it would have already have been ripened for potentially well past its prime in France.

So what they do here is they make versions out of pasteurized whole and skim milk. But apparently it has a milder flavor. Oh, I bet. Oh, I bet. Give me that unpasteurized whole and skim milk. But apparently it has a milder flavor. Oh, I bet. Oh, I bet. Give me that unpasteurized shit. Give me that. I know what I just said about the not wanting to eat the solid mold around,

but now I'm a dirty monster and I want that slime. I want that garbage slime all over my soft cheese. I definitely, well, I don't want to say definitely, but when I went to France, I did have brain. When I went to France all day like this. Tell me about it. Go ahead and tell them. Say, hey, pronounce croissant.

Do it how you do it. What? Oh, do you mean croissant? I don't remember the brie being particularly better. Brie is good. Brie is good, wherever it is. I don't remember thinking like, oh, this brie is so brie is good wherever it is i don't remember thinking like oh this brie is so much better yeah everything i had in france was delicious so i don't remember

like oh man this is so much better especially the um thing about brie it's a pricier cheese oh yeah i went on to the htb website just to see like how much is brie so like if you want to block a cheddar it's like three dollars a pound but like brie will run you like at least eight dollars a pound shit it's a pricey experience i'll just get a lot of cheddar and let it get super old so it'll turn into brie well we'll get softer though unfortunately arts uh yeah so when you get brie you're supposed to leave it out for like an hour so it gets that kind of warm soft meltiness right uhie, you're supposed to leave it out for like an hour, so it gets that kind of warm, soft meltiness. Right.

And then you're good to go. But it'll only last for like a week or so after you slice in there. Around me, it's going to last about two minutes, because I'm going to eat it. I'm so fucking bad. What about Takis and brie? What about Takis and brie? You could, and I always think about this, looking at these little guys,

they are essentially long hollow combos with just lunatic flavoring. So if you could just sort of stuff the inside of those with Brie, and then you can just sort of like stand over an open grave, and that way when you eat it, it can be really convenient for your loved ones. Because like the whole sort of procession is going to be like right there for you.

It's hard for me to know with Brie if I just like it because of the taste or if I like it because it's like the first fancy cheese I had. And like anytime I eat it, I feel fancy. We keep saying first fancy cheese. I don't think you and I are necessarily like cheese heads. Like I don't think we. No, it's just like the first cheese I had that wasn't like cheddar or Swiss. Yeah, that's fair. You know, wasn't like a cheese I could find on a Subway sandwich.

They probably fucked around with that at some point. Oh, with apples with a slice of green thin green apple slice with brie on it oh my god when i was at the airport uh in washington dc i got a sandwich that had like brie and cranberries on it and i basically just ordered it because there was brie on it and it was incredible. So good. So good. And Brie Larson, Room, Captain Marvel, Scott Pilgrim. What a talent. What a talented Hollywood star. Just phenomenal work.

Also covered in mold. Also, and she won't tell you this in any of those interviews on Entertainment Weekly. She won't be talking to Mario Lopez and be like, by the way, I'm also covered in a thick rind of mold. But where do you think she got the name? Hey, can I steal you away? Please.

Can I read you this next personal message? Yes. I thought it would be funny if I spit the water out that I was drinking. Like this next personal message? Yes. I thought it would be funny if I spit the water out that I was drinking. Like, what personal message? This message is for Lauren. It is from Jeremy. Hi, Lauren.

I love you bundles. Jeremy, not Griffin and Rachel, but I'm sure they also love you, but in a cool friend way. I know things are scary with us finishing our degrees and applying to grad school, but I know you'll do amazing. Knowing you for the past three years has made my life so full of joy. You're my favorite bear friend. Love, Shark. Parentheses, Jeremy. Jeremy, you can't tell me who to love, Jeremy.

Yeah. You can't tell me how to love, Jeremy. Lauren sounds great. So great. I'm on board. You can't tell me how to love Jeremy. Lauren sounds great. So great. And I'm on board. Unlike Jeremy, who is a shark, apparently. And those are the sharp fish with monster teeth.

Whoa. Yeah. I am nervous about you teaching our son sometimes. Well, they're great animals and they get a bad rap. But at the end of the day, and let's not get it twisted, they are the sharp fish with monster teeth. Maybe that's why things are scary. Not because they're finishing their degrees, but because of the shark. Jeremy is a shark.

Hey, I have another message. This one's for Mike and it's from Haley who says, hello, my dude. Thanks for being a V cool oldest brother and always introducing me to the best games, music, those good, good McElroys, and indirectly, the best partner, John. You're the supreme champion of bros, smoke a breezy. Whoa. Can you see it? I've got goosebumps.

What do you think that means, smoke a breezy? Does it matter? It's a very powerful, it is a, it is a, it's like a Dovahkiin just sort of power word. I feel like I saw. Somebody came up to me at a party and said, hey, you want to go outside and smoke a breezy? I would say yes.

I don't know what that means. But the answer is going to be yes. Yes. Hello, I'm Lujan Zafagari and I play a bunch of characters on Mission to Zix, an improvised science fiction podcast on Maximum Fun, and this is our incredible sound designer, Shane. Hello. Now, Shane makes it possible for me to play a thousand billion characters in our galaxy.

Such as the Bajarian Jane, Ship of the Stars. And the Enforcer Joy, prepared to eat pancakes. And we, let's get dressed up, baby. And Emissary Turk Madigan. Hey, I just got out of their air. And the Horrible Life. Ow! Oh, also there are five other cast members, and we'll give them just all a second to say hi. Uh, hello. Yeah, that's enough. Okay, so the season finale of Mission to Zix is coming out next week, so it's the perfect time to dive in and catch up with our intrepid crew as they explore the Zix Quadrant.

So give us a listen to Mission to Zix on Maximum Fun. Can I hear your second thing? My second thing is music. It's a music one. And it's going to be a quick one because I'm fairly new to this band. They are called Hop Along. And surprise, surprise, I found them on Spotify. And the reason I wanted to talk to them is because

talk to them I'd like to talk to them just for you guys I want to talk about them because like I have been listening to them in a way that I do not listen to that many artists and it's like a really special thing for me when I do find it and it's that I can just put on their whole discography on some sort of streaming platform and just let it ride and not like constantly have to dip into skip songs and not have to constantly like micromanage my listening experience. I can just put it on and play it. And I think that speaks to the fact that A, Hop Along is a very good band and B, that like they're super fucking consistent and a lot of their songs are just really, really

great. Hop Along is an indie rock band that formed in the early aughts. And it was originally a solo freak folk project, according to Wikipedia, from their singer guitarist, Francis Quinlan. And they have gone in a different direction since then, which is good, because I don't know what freak solo freak folk is. I don't either. I was hoping you would. I would imagine it's sort of more psychedelic in nature but now it is now it is a more sort of straight-laced uh very clever

indie rock uh and it's like it's very much like checking a lot of the boxes of things that i'm into uh there's like that sort of super clean guitar sound like a like a pavement uh and also the uh quinlan's vocals are very like run-on sentency in a way that like really really reminds me of of pavement and that's a very very flattering comparison i feel like because i adore that band uh there's like there's big rilo kiley energy radiating out of these songs which is a very very welcome energy energy to find in any artist. And yeah, the first thing that caught my ear when I was listening to this band, when it popped up on the Spotify Weekly playlist,

was Francis Quinlan's voice, because like, holy shit. It is wild. I could go on, but I'm going to play one of the songs off their 2015 album, Painted Shut, and this song is called The Knock. that voice is so wild it's so wild i remember when i talked about regina specter i talked about like how i like a vocalist who can go in all of these like yeah conjure up all of these different sort of like ways of singing and like this the uh speed with which like she goes from the sort of more breathy quiet sing-songy voice to like that that awesome like wail that awesome fucking like scream voice is like so radical kind of reminds me of when i brought me a phallic that one yeah yeah yeah i thought i i also had that

thought when i was uh listening to them today it's unbelievable it's got like this like tom waits like meets tommy pickles sort of timbre to it i know it's a weird comparison but i heard it and i like that's where i went but i and i don't know if that sounds flattering or not but uh it's it's it's she has a fantastic voice. Uh, Pitchfork reviewed that album, uh, Painted Shut, which is probably my favorite of their albums. Go like, if you're going to listen, just listen to that one front to back. You will not regret it. Uh, in their review of that album, the writer remarked that she quote, sings in the wild voice of someone casting out demons or having the demon cast out of them. Uh, which I, I really, really like, I don't know how

you sing. Like, like, like uh my throat is a little bit raw just from you know life and i'm about to go on the road and i tell uh butt jokes for an hour a night i don't know how you do that on a stage you do a fair amount of loud talking though i would say there is a little bit of screaming uh when you are on stage i i guess that's fair um i don't really have much else to talk about because i did i did just kind of discover them so i don't really have any like anecdotes about how i i also listened to a whole album uh on you on youtube today i don't remember which one it was but i found myself just like very comfortable just like right on and just like

riding it out it's so and and that is such a like uh i guess that's like the anecdote for me is like i can count on two hands the number of albums that i can like do that with or the number of artists that i can do that with i did that with the cigarette album cigarette yes i can i can just let that one play uh there's a couple like andrew bird albums that i can just uh armchair apocrypha i can just listen to that front to back and just like ride it out and some of the songs blend into the background but in like a super pleasant way but i'm never like oh this uh skip this track uh yeah and like all their songs are like that which is really fantastic and a really i think a a really tremendous feat you can't get better than that cell when griffin told me he was like oh hey i think you might like this band it's like a combination of pavement

royale kylie i was like oh okay, well, I'm bought in. Yeah, I'm going to stop now, but I'm going to leave off with one last song. It's off of their most recent album, Bark Your Head Off, Dog, and it's called How Simple. And I don't know, I just really, that Rilo Kylo energy is really strong with this one and yeah here's how simple Hey, what's your second thing?

My second thing is a trip. Oh. To the poetry corner. Oh, boy. Hey, baby, oh to the poetry corner oh boy hey baby i hear the poetry no i think you said toss verse and scrambled rhymes last time i feel like well i'll just cut and paste it from the last episode you used to do like an original, like, jazz composition. Okay, let me try again. Okay. We built this city on poetry.

That's beautiful. I can't really argue with that. You really hit that note. Thank you. What poem are we talking about today? Got some Shel Silverstein? No. Fuck.

Louise Glick. Oh, all right. You know. Related to Jiminy Glick, the hysterical Martin Short character. This is a hard segment to do with you sometimes. Because I cut you off because that's exactly what you're about to say next? Yeah. Because I cut you off because that's exactly what you're about to say next.

Yeah. Louise Glick is a well-celebrated poet. She has been a Poet Laureate in 2003. She received the Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Wild Iris, in 1992. And in 2014, she won a National Book Award for her book, Faithful and Virtuous Night. That's like the trifecta, I imagine. Yeah, there aren't really too many more awards out there for you. So she released her first collection in 1968 when she was 25 years old.

But lately, her big thing is teaching. So she has taught at Goddard College, University of Iowa, Williams College, and now Yale University. This is pretty common for poets, because it's difficult to make a living as a poet. But if you are able to teach creative writing or literature courses, you can do okay. And then you're constantly in the community. And that's one thing that Louise Glick said is that once she began teaching, it was so much easier for her to write, you know, because she was in this community of like-minded people

all being creative together. And that's when she was able to release a whole bunch of books. I like her a lot because she is maybe the most unsentimental poet. Oh. A lot of the poets I've brought to Poetry Corner kind of paint these beautiful, nostalgic pictures like childhood and relatable experiences. That is not her. Her first book in particular,

she came across as very angry and alienated, which I think was a little unsettling for some critics, but she's also very original and skilled in her approach. And so I think it kind of gave her a shot and she kind of continues to be very intense and straightforward, but she's so precise and clear in what she's saying that it's not like a downer.

It's not like you read these poems that have these kind of complex concepts and feel bummed. And so I found one that is a little complex, but it really stuck with me. It's called Mother and Child. It's from her book, The Seven Ages, which was her ninth book. It came out in 2001. We're all dreamers. We don't know who we are. Some machine made us, machine of the world, the constricting family. Then back to the world, polished by soft whips. We dream,

we don't remember. Machine of the family, dark fur, forests of the mother's body, machine of the mother, white city inside her. And before that, earth and water, moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass. And before, cells in a great darkness, and before that, the veiled world. This is why you were born, to silence me, cells of my mother and father. It is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece. I improvised. I never remembered. Now it's your turn to be driven. You're the one who demands to know. Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us. It is your turn to address it, to go back asking, what am what am i for yeah that's a it's kind of a dark one yeah bud yeah pal it's got some i i have no mouth but i'm a scream uh energy to it that is

a little chilling for this guy i um obviously very unsentimental. I like this thought though, of just like you spend your whole life kind of obsessed with these big questions and this big sense of purpose. And then you have a child and you're kind of like, Now it's your turn. I made you and now you are gonna make me,

you know, irrelevant. And you're going to take on all the big stuff. Right. And I don't know. I was hesitant to bring it, but I just found it really powerful. It's a staggering. It's extremely good. Yeah.

I didn't mean to dismiss it. It just freaked my bean a little bit. I didn't mean to dismiss it. It just freaked my being a little bit. I found this interview with her in 1981 from Columbia, a journal of literature and art. And the interviewer asks her about the darkness of her poems. And she says,

you know, of course I go through stages in which I'm unhappy, but I don't feel that I'm a terrifically unhappy person. I'm certainly not as unrelievedly black in my moods as the poems would suggest. But I suppose poems come out of your ultimate views. And I suppose I feel that human life is tragic. In a question period after one of her readings, somebody said, your poems are so sad. She said, yes, I know. I don't feel like I write out of despair. I think my drive is towards psychological complexity. I ask myself, have I gotten deep enough? Have I seen something in its full complication? The yes and no being

said at the same time. Jesus. It's very academic. Yeah. Very, very, like, intellectual. And, you know, kind of takes to task, like, you know, William Carlos Williams and his red wheelbarrow. Yeah, sure. You know, just like, hey, go a little deeper there, Williams. Actually, wait a minute. This wheelbarrow sucks. One day this wheelbarrow is going to fall apart. Fuck this wheelbarrow.

Wait, I'm in this wheelbarrow and I'm going off of a cliff. Oh, no. I like that there's room for this kind of poet. Yeah, sure. And there's room for Williams. Louise Glick is a heavier lady and she's taking these kind of really, what can be dark concepts, but she's saying like, hey, poetry matters and this stuff matters

and I wanna do something that is complicated and intense. It's badass. And I like, man, this is the kind of poet that if I met her, I would be super intimidated. I can't imagine being a student in her class and turning in a poem. It's just like, hey, I went to the grocery store and there was a kid there and they had a balloon. And she'd be like, all right.

Okay. First of all, I don't think that you would write a poem like that. Yeah. I think it must be challenging to work with her. But I think it also probably these people in her class probably produce their best work ever. Oh my God, yes. She is pushing hard and I think it's important. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about?

Yes. Savannah says, I think it's wonderful when the cashier finishes ringing up your groceries. You see that big number and then it starts ticking down as all the sales and coupons are applied. Sometimes it goes for so long the cashier will comment on how much I'm saving. What a rush. Hell yeah, Savannah. Ride that shit. Now see, Griffin, I feel like you hate coupons.

No, I enjoy them. Not to the extent where I will go out of my way to do them. I'm big on coupons, man. It works for me. If I'm at H-E-B or something like that and they have the little like yellow ticket guys i will like gleefully like take one of them down and and be overjoyed about it i do like the surprise coupon too where like you didn't know or you didn't realize that you know when you buy two heads of lettuce why did i say that there's very rarely sales on lettuce and when are we ever getting

two heads of lettuce yeah we're gonna have a big sandwich party folks uh josh says my small wonder is getting into a cold bed and feeling it warm up over time until it's a cozy temperature sometimes i'll even put my blankets under the open window to cool them down before getting into bed oh my god this is my favorite we We just, we last night just threw the comforter on. Yeah, we got out the big old comforter because our bed was so chilly.

It was so nice. It was so good. I did wake up at like 5 a.m. Absolutely a puddle. And had to deal with that. But everything up to that point was super cozy and good.

God, I like that. It's like the only thing about winter that I'm a big fan of. Hey, thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. I'll find a link to that in the episode description. And thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows there.

They've got shows like Mission to Zix and Beef and Dairy Network. And One Bad Mother. And Flophouse. And Flophouse. And all that is at MaximumFun.org. We've got other stuff at McElroy.Family. About to go on tour in the Midwest. Come see us for MaBimBam and some of them shows.

I think we still have tickets in Milwaukee. If you live in Milwaukee, Hey, please come see us. It'd be great to see her playing the Riverside theater. It's a beautiful venue. And when Griffin says us, he means him.

I do mean me, but we're going to be doing a live show at candle nights, which is sold out. So eat our shorts, everybody. Um, and I think that's it. So,

um, love, peace, and taco grease, grease everybody you know what i mean it's this has been guy fieri presents isn't that what he says i don't know i think he says love peace and something grease i mean it sounds right to me and i only know because there was a mural of it on the those words on the wall of his short-lived Times Square restaurant. What did it say? You did go to. Love, peace, and something grease. What was the thing?

It may have just said guy grease. Oh, was it polar fleece? Love, grease on my polar fleece. Guy Fieri's youngest niece. It got sweet at the end money won't pay work and all money won't pay work and all

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