Wonderful! - Wonderful! 115: Experimenting with Conditioner

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Rachel's favorite chilly sliding! Griffin's favorite shower friend! Rachel's favorite cyber artists! Griffin's favorite porcine holiday tradition! 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. Let me hike this leg up, and we throw it on over the big old horsey. Get it up on over there. Back in the saddle again. Oh, yeah, you are.

Good for you. I'm up so high. They don't tell you that about horses, do they? The first time you get on a horse, you're like, here we go, baby. Time for an equine adventure. I've always dreamed. Whoa, I'm like fucking 11 feet off the ground right now. When have you been on a horse?

I was on a horse one time. Oh, I'm like fucking 11 feet off the ground right now. When have you been on a horse? I was on a horse one time. Oh, it was like a church thing. It was my youth pastor's farm. And I climbed up on a horse, bareback baby. Really? Yeah. How did you get on there? Gumption.

No, but you don't have like a foot to put in the saddle. I was helped up by the aforementioned youth pastor and got bucked pretty quickly. Just one little buck as if to say like, no child. You're not ready. And just so they also don't tell you about the bones in there. There's bones in the horse. And so those got me just a little bit in my delicate little china cabinet down there. I can't believe your youth pastor thought it would be a good idea to put a person who had never ridden a horse before on one without a saddle.

Well, he wanted me to have that obviously very spiritual connection between man and beast. But anyway, this is wonderful. This is a show where we talk about things that we're really into, things that make us happy. It's been a long time since we've done one. It's been 800 years. Yeah. But we're really into, things that make us happy. It's been a long time since we've done one. It's been 800 years. Yeah. But we're here, we're back. It's a new year, new you, new me, new us, new them.

And do you have any of those small wonders? I mean, I have a lot. Oh, shoot. All right. I'm not going to share all of them. It's just been a long time since we've recorded. Yeah, that's true. But I'm not going to share all of them. It's just been a long time since we've recorded. Yeah, that's true. But I'm really liking my e-reader.

Yes, I got Rachel a paper white for a premise. And it is so, I like e-ink. I like it. It's my favorite type of ink is this e-ink. I was really hesitant because I thought, oh, this is such a small screen. You're going to read like two paragraphs per page. That must get really old, like constantly swiping. But it actually increases the sense of accomplishment.

You see the little percentage at the bottom? That's great. Yeah, I love mine. I love it. I love the idea of it being like your cyber knowledge companion. There's a Neil Stevenson book called the diamond age or an illustrated manual for young women or something like that and the whole premise is just like this uh young poor uneducated like little girl somehow happens along this magic

essentially like wikipedia book that teaches you how to become like and she turns into like this superhero i like that idea just like this is my this is my knowledge bank yeah fits in my purse battery lasts forever yeah i've been uh i've been my small wonder is i've been reading medallion status on it oh isn't that good it's such a good book it's uh it's the new john hanshman book uh we had him on the show on my bim bam to talk about it and uh i am i'm late to late to read it but um i am i'm enjoying it quite a bit it's it's very he's so fucking funny and this is like one of uh a handful of books that i find like kind of deeply relatable especially the sort of chapters about like uh more menial observations about like a travel-based lifestyle uh which is you know hence the title

also friend of max fun uh city of girls by elizabeth gilbert oh how is it it's so fun she in a lot of interviews she's given about the book she's described it as a romp and i thought i don't really know what that means now i do that's exactly what it is it's a romp is it madcap in any way is it yes is it are there capers yes oh boy so fun hey what's your first topic for today's episode of wonderful my first thing is the wintertime pastime of ice skating oh okay one of mine is also a wintertime pastime but if you had duped mine it would have been pretty wild this is gonna happen some week and i'm kind of excited about it i think 2020 is the year where we dupe it. Okay.

So ice skating. Ice skating. Give me some background here. What's your background? So I went roller skating a couple times, but the thing where I was growing up was ice skating. And your parents would drop you off at the ice skating rink for like an hour and a half, two hours. You'd maybe get like a few stickers out of the vending machine uh and you'd skate around if you were lucky like me you had your own skates i had hockey skates that i asked for one christmas uh which is much easier they're much easier to skate on like the figure skates with the toe pick it's a real hard time but i skate for with hockey no toe pick i

would have to imagine that there they would be a little bit broader blades yes because like you don't gotta like you know fucking spin on them you don't got it true yeah although what if there was a hockey player who was like nah i want that very very slender delicate blade mighty mighty ducks mighty ducks you remember the woman on mighty ducks who was the figure skater that they brought on their team? No, it's been so long. She'd spin around and distract all the players and then she'd score a goal. That's probably, that's maybe not how it would pan out.

No, I don't think so. But, you know, she did it. She did it. It's a fantastical, it's a fantastical movie. Also, I super have always loved watching figure skating during the winter olympics oh hell yeah i could name like a dozen figure skaters what's tokyo what's the summer's the next one the summer's this year right in tokyo the next winter one is 2022 right this is summer until it's summer on lola ah shoot i like summer it's just you know swimming swimming it's good but you've seen one wet person

you've seen them all okay nobody tapes knives to themselves and goes really fast on a hard surface in the summer ones you know what i mean true so ice So ice skating. Ice skating. Been around for a super long time. Used to be primarily for traveling. In the 15th century of the Netherlands, people used to use it to get around. This probably started with like a sled, right? And then somebody was like, that's cool, but what if it was just our shoes? Ice skates were made from leg bones of horses ox or deer so it used to be like bone skates then my thing is probably that's way wilder than my thing their

thing is like oh look at that leg bone i'm gonna put that right on my feet oh i'm going really fast on this cold stuff they were attached to the feet with leather straps okay so you know using all parts of the animal you know that is taking it in a very literal direction um it didn't really become a sport uh until um well first so that first there's ice skating uh it's like races the oh the fens uh in england they would flood the the meadows and then they would race uh the fastest uh skater would like go around a barrel and whatever and they would win so not really like figure skating as we understand it just like skating as a race i mean they're on that apollo anton ono shit it sounds like yeah exactly i can't believe you remembered his middle name too who calls him apollo ono me really yeah for me this is like a like a judge lance ito like you can't not say lance

that's judge ito it's apollo anton ono all right um so the fastest skater, this is a world record that was set in 2015, 36 miles an hour. That is wild. Isn't that incredible? If you bump into something going that fast, that's it, right? Like 36 miles an hour is quite a bit of- How do you even get up to that speed? Like was it a really long track? Or were they going downhill?

Were they doing that subasa shit were they going down like that um the red bull like uh bmx track except it's fucking ice and you're on ice skates i don't know um can i tell you about about figure skating though as we know it today i wish you would so it So it's actually an American named Jackson Haynes, who was a trained dancer who brought dancing to skating. In the 1860s, he would play music and he would dance around with his twirls and his jumps. At the time, people were just used to skating for like racing purposes. They

weren't used for this like kind of graceful art form. So he couldn't really get it to take off in America. So he headed to Europe, set up a skating school in Vienna, and his style of ice dancing became known as the Viennese and later the international style apparently so he's seen as kind of an icon because he did the first pair dancing with another man the man uh and him did a routine where one of them dressed as a bear and the other dress as a trainer fuck yes and they did a whole like routine on the ice as a pair y Yuri on Ice Season 2. Fuck yeah. It first started at the Olympic Games, actually in the Summer Olympics

1908, and then moved to the Winter Olympics in 1924. Because that makes a lot more sense. I love it. I don't know what exactly about ice skating really appeals to me, like whether it. I don't know what exactly about ice skating really appeals to me. Like whether it's the athleticism or the grace, uh, I don't know.

I just have always loved it. I mean, I don't, it's not the whole reason obviously that I love hockey, but it's a big part of it. Uh, I do too. It's been a very, very long time, uh, since I have done it. It's been, I can't remember the last time I did it. I was on the ice when we went curling that I've been curling much more recently than i've been ice skating uh hey can i tell you about my first thing i'm glad you went that deep i hope your second topic you go deep on too because both

mine are pretty little um but my first one here is you know me i like a product that like i know accomplishes what i use it for like i can rely hundred percent of the time that it's going to do what it's going to do. And today it struck me while I was in the shower, how much I like conditioner. This is the, this is the soft gooey stuff and it makes your hair feel really good. And you,

are you going to speak? Are you going to speak to your complicated history with, I have a tough history with conditioner, which is to say I thought it was a myth. I didn't think it was a thing that you had to use like an extra step that you maybe didn't need that. I didn't think I needed all the way through college. Probably about 2010 is when I started. Like when I met you, you were still doing the two-in-one uh that's not possible i'm pretty sure maybe that was i mean that was what 2011 yeah i was still kind of a fucking dirtbag back then uh yeah so i didn't really know that conditioner was like a

thing that people used i think if you go back and i think maybe even the first episode of my bim bam we really dive into my like sort of complicated shower. Yeah. Well, not knowing that like soap is different from shampoo is different from conditioner. I thought it was all kind of just the same. That wasn't just like a bit. That was real. No.

Yeah, that was tragically very real. So I didn't condition for, you know, 23 years or so. A real bristly hair. like a real bristly hair? I had very bristly hair. It was incredibly bristly. It was very dry, very poofy. Just huge dry ass hair. And I think I am a very special

like supporter of conditioner for that very reason. And then I was late to the game and the first time I put conditioner, well, it's not instant. But like after i started conditioning for a while i was like oh hey my hair is like resting tenderly on the top of my head like hair does sometimes for other people how wild i think and and nowadays like i it is it does feel kind of instant like if my hair is feeling really dry and kind of gross yeah i know

if i go in the shower and i do put that cream on it it's a confession for me sometimes i still skip it oh i still skip it too because you do you do got to like use your natural oils your natural oils are are you know are still fucking tough somebody with real fine hair like i don't want to put product on top of product on my that's fair to weigh it right down that's fair uh for me though i still get very dry still get very crispy up there rub a little bit of conditioner now i had no idea how conditioner works so i looked it up and the explanation is very scientific here's a quote and the outermost layer of a hair follicle is called the cuticle and it's composed largely of keratin, which is rich in cystine group. Okay, I'm going to skip past all of this.

When the hair is washed, these groups can deteriorate, giving the hair a negative charge. Positively charged quaternary ammonium species, such as big word or big word, can then become attached to the hair via electrostatic interactions. There's a lot of, I expected it to just be like, this cream is creamy. Like you put it on and it's soft. It's lotion for the hair. Maybe this is what lotion does to the skin anyway. Anyway, it just lubricates the surface of each of your hair follicles.

And so it reduces that that rough sensation uh and it reduces it also sort of uh pushes the hairs away from each other electrostatically which is another benefit so it can like reduce that's why it feels so smooth to like run a comb through it it's because it's not clumping the tangles have gone away uh the frizzing goes away the outsides of your hair gets all lubed up uh one last fun fact in the 1800s before conditioner was uh came around they used to use what was called macassar oil uh have you ever heard of that no it's just an oil this is an oil this is oil like an olive oil but it's an oil and you just put it all in there and you lube it up in a very like non-scientific sense uh everybody was using macasara oil and it started to fuck up everybody's upholstery on their chairs so this led to an invention called the

anti-macasar uh which is a washable cloth that you drape over the like head of a chair uh and to this day you can still find anti-macassars in like buses and uh some like trains will just have those like cloths draped over the the headrest that you can uh just pop i didn't know that those were called anti-macassars wow which is a very very long name for what should just be like head oil catcher stopper anyway can i ask you a question yeah it's personal in nature do i do it on my bush yes whoa really that was exactly my question i remember not that didn't even occur to me And then I remember being in college and talking to some girls that I was living with and then suggesting that that was an effective way to make your downstairs softer. And I just didn't believe it.

So I never tried. Oh, you never you never try. You never even accidentally try. You didn't experiment with conditioner in college. Because the idea with conditioner, right, is that you like put it on your hair and you kind of like wash your body and do other stuff and then you rinse it out so it sits on your hair for a little while but kind of like put it downstairs and then wait wait keep your business out of the stream of water yeah yeah just do some heavy butt work uh yeah sure based on your

response have you found a noticeable difference i mean yeah, yeah, it's fucking hair, man. It's hair. It's not like the conditioner particles are like, wait a minute. Are these pubes? I'm out of here, dude. Guys, it's pubes. Let's get the hell out of here. The hair down there is coarse in nature.

And so I figured like. I don't know how to break it to you. 23 years without using conditioner, my hair and my pubes in nature. And so I figured like. I don't know how to break it to you. 23 years without using conditioner. My hair and my pubes in college were indistinguishable. This got very real. Can I steal you away? Yes. Ah, it's Rothy's. Here it comes. You you know i'm your go-to spit some righteous rothies game

yeah so here's the thing about rothies um a lot of people wear flats it's not unusual or flats but do you have flats in a variety of colors probably not no no no probably have like a black pair and a brown pair and whatever listen Listen, I've got a red pair. Holy shit. I've got a black pair that has little gold stripes in it. I've got a teal pair. Yeah. These are colors you don't find in the wild.

No. Rothy's provides them to you. And they also have diverted over 35 million water bottles from landfills. Yeah, that's a- Through the creation of these shoes. That's a ton. That's a lot. A lot of them.

You can check out all the amazing styles available right now at rothys.com slash wonderful. That's R-O-T-H-Y-S dot com slash wonderful to get your new favorite flats, comfort style, and sustainability. These are the shoes you've been waiting for. Head to rothys.com slash wonderful today. MeUndies is here. They are here to cradle you.

You are sad because the holidays are over or maybe you are stoked out of your mind. In either case, you deserve to be comfortable. MeUndies are here for that exact purpose. They are underwear. They are lounge pants. They are big, big onesies. Socks.

Socks. They're all so comfortable. They all look so good. And they are kind enough to send us packages of MeUndies with most of the new designs, which is pretty, pretty rad. It's a it's a pretty it's probably the best benefit of this life that we lead together. It's real surprising every month I think they're going to cut us off. Surely they'll cut us off. Like yeah but and you know what and I don't want to keep revealing too many sad things about sort of my hygiene. But when I do reach sort of the end of the rainbow. You put off laundry. I put off laundry and I'm down to like

the snickle fritz. It's not unusual for Griffin to do four loads of laundry in a day for this reason. Right. Thanks mendies. I will ride that shit till, you know, the needle's way past empty. And then what's that in the mail? It's more MeUndies. That's what I'm wearing.

I'm wearing currently my, like, break glass in case of emergency MeUndies. Oh, have you not done laundry since Christmas? Anyway, so it's a, they're great. Anyway, if you want to get 15% off your first pair of free shipping and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, go to meundies.com slash wonderful. That's meundies.com slash wonderful. Can I read a personal message to you? Uh, oh yeah. This one is for Peter. It is from Tiffany. Hey Peter, I just wanted to let you know I think you're a cutie and you know it it's official because I paid $100 to do it. I hope your day is going great.

And hopefully this will make it just a little better. You're my best friend. Here's to lazy Sundays, drinking mimosas, and playing video games, and the occasional train town party. Love you. Lazy Sunday. That's what I took away from that message. Do you remember that funny video?

Yeah, Red Vines. Red Vines, crazy delicious. Yeah. Matthew Perry. What's a train town party, do you think? That is a funny, it's funny that you bring that up. So train town is a very special town. Your improv skills are incredible.

Train town. Train town. You know Thomas and the Tank Engine? Yes. It's not that. Oh, that's what I thought of. No. No.

You know Shining Time Station? Yes. It's not that either. No. What about Soul Train? Or come on, ride the train and ride it. That's what it is okay i know that party uh so you go you go there and um if you feel like dancing if you feel like

dancing you go for it but if you don't if you don't feel like dancing nobody's gonna pressure you can i tell the other jumbotron this one's for Natalie, and it's from Carlin, who says, To my Wonder Woman wife and favorite D&D buddy, Natalie, when I'm writing this, you're on the road to starting a new career in programming. I hope when this gets read, you're super successful in coding the Matrix like Neo. If so, please let our robot overlords know how much I love you. I mean, that's going to confuse them. That's going to confuse the robot overlords. Do you think robots don't understand love?

Um, the ones that are programmed to, I think probably do. Maybe that's what Natalie is, is working on is just like, you know, robots. Well,

they'll sort of love algorithm. You know what I mean? Yeah. It sounds like a Michael Crichton novel. Uh, a bad one. Yeah. It sounds like a Michael Crichton novel. A bad one, yeah. It's like if colon, you know, personality equals good.

And if, you know, single, then let's do this, baby, Michael Crichton wrote. And then 10 dinosaurs showed up. He has to put big dinosaurs in every one of his books now. Hi, I'm Allie Gertz. And I'm Julia Prescott. And we host Round Springfield. Round Springfield is a new Simpsons podcast that is Simpsons adjacent. In its topic, we talk to Simpsons writers, directors, voiceover actors, you name it, about non-Simpsons things that they've done because, surprise, they're all extremely talented.

Absolutely. For example, David X. Cohen worked on The Simpsons but then created a little show called Futurama. That's our very first episode. So tune in for stuff like that with Yardley Smith, with Tim Long, with different writers and voice actors. It's going to be so much fun. And we are every other week on MaximumFun.org

or wherever you get your podcasts. What's your second thing? It's actually interesting that we're talking about robots because my second thing is kind of a trip to the poetry corner. Kind of? That has to do with robots. So I guess the Poetry Corner song would go a little bit like

I think that's just six. I was trying to figure out that's not a very big nut. The robot just. One, zero, zero, one, one. Okay. Yeah. Zero, zero, zero, one, one, one, zero.

So it's a song then. One, one, one, zero, zero, zero. Okay. Is that enough? Yeah. You've just said actually that was the word poetry. You spelled it. What do you mean this is kind of a trip to

the poetry well because it is about robots that write poetry okay yes sir okay are we talking about robert frost because i've always had my suspicions no we're not we're actually talking about literal robots that have composed poems using code are we talking about like some deep mind shit like uh uh like cloud-based ai like generating scripts for like an episode of seinfeld like that a little bit that kind of shit a little bit uh so this was actually a new yorker article that i saw today uh called uh fromical Muse, and it was about two different poetry robots. One that was an art project in 2012, and one that is a little bit more recent, like 2015,

2016. Okay. The first one is Patamatron. is patamatron um and this was an art project uh created by ranjit bahat nagar uh who made tweets into sonnets okay so not really a robot not exactly it's a well he created code that right did this for me if you don't put it into some sort of lifeless metallic husk, then it's just software. So you wanted like an actual conky that was like spitting out full sonnets. I mean, he doesn't have to print them out of his chest. I'm just saying there needs to be hardware in addition to the software.

So what should I call it then, if not poetry robots? One day they're going to put these applications inside of a robot a sleek robot body okay so i should what poetry programming uh no i think poetry robot is still actually the best it's way catchier okay so do you know what a sonnet is a sonnet is it's got 15 syllables it's got 17 syllables it's got iambic pentameter yes that's true it's four lines it's eight lines all right it's six lines 14 lines each is 10 syllables in iambic pentameter uh i had the i i had the ideas right i just had the numbers very wrong uh three stanzas four each, and then they end with a couplet following the A-B-A-B-R-I-N-S-K-E-N. Right.

So the first line. AB-AB as we call them. Yeah. So Potamatron would use a pronouncing dictionary created by Carnegie Mellon, which counted syllables and recognized meter, and then use tweets. The code required that each line be an entire tweet or essentially one complete thought. And so he put together for National Novel Generation Month in 2013,

put together a collection of 504 sonnets that he called, I Got an Alligator for a Pet. Okay. Is that the title of one of the sonnets? That's the title of the collection. Okay. Did a robot also generate that? Oh, I don't know.

I'm assuming so. I have not read the work. Okay. More recently, so here's the thing with these that unsurprisingly they seem like they are written by a robot um and so when he did a second collection of computer-assisted sonnets he relaxed his rules a little bit he had like a law of all the lines that had been rejected and many of them were because he had such rigid constraints around you know the iambic pentameter and the complete thought and so he built a new program to comb through the sonnets with enjambed lines so enjambed lines is

where like the thought carries over into the next line okay uh and made a new collection based on that um and he he talks about kind of the difficulty of you know in order to make it sound human generated it can't be perfect but then you can't make so many mistakes that it seems fake i love this shit this is so absolutely my shit this like turing test robot poetry stuff well it's funny you bring that up because the next robot actually they did submit it for like a turing test robot poetry stuff well it's funny you bring that up because the next robot actually they did submit it for like a turing test competition uh so this next robot hafez uh came um came on the scene let's say uh in a little cafe in paris rolled up to the microphone it was an espresso maker they just like kind of got yeah uh it came

from marjan gaz vaninijad uh and there were two parts to her project first was figuring out the rules and then deciding obviously what the content was going to be uh and so the rules were easy because it's just programming but where were they going to get their source material? And what they ended up doing was building their program around the 95,000 songs in the music's lyrics database. Okay. So they used like existing songs to pull from to create the sonnets. Okay. How did that work out for this robot?

Well, it's pretty sophisticated, actually. So for each poem, the robot was given a topic, so like presidential elections, and then programmed to collect rhyming words from within the database and string them together in kind of like related content to the topic. Okay. I'm just now thinking of,

it would be a really, really fun recurring segment on this show for you to read a robot poem and then read a regular poem. And cause I, dollars to donuts. It's pretty obvious though. So they, so they submitted it to the 2016 Turing test competition at Dartmouth. The machine obviously would pass the Turing test

if it can prove itself to be indistinguishable from a human. While the robot won the competition, it did not pass the Turing test. Yes. But it can generate a four line poem in two seconds. That's faster than I can do it. Obviously, like, I don't think robots should take over poetry. But I do think it adds some importance to poetry because, you know, like anytime a robot or code is created, it is to fill a need. And the idea that they created this to fill the need of poetry suggests that poetry is a need. I feel like if we don't read one of these robot poems on the air, people are going to revolt. OK, so these are from the article I mentioned in The New Yorker written by Dan Rockmore. okay so these are from the article i mentioned in the new yorker written by dan rockmore uh do you want to hear patamatron or do you want to hear hafiz or uh i don't care okay they're both they're both soulless robots creating human art um okay so i'll i'll read uh the twitter ones are a little bit rough although so i mentioned his how

his second collection was a little looser on the rules right this one's kind of neat uh okay i want to be a little kid again i'm feeling kind of empty on the low. You should unwind a little now and then. Team Stacy looking like a sleepy hoe. Back to the sunshine state. The devil is a lie. I hate myself a lot sometimes. I mean, possessive holy shit, this is the second time. I'm always catching dimes. I'm not the only one.

I'm pinning this again. I love a windy, sunny day. Not coming out until tonight. I miss the happy me. I gotta find a way. I always fall into the bullshit. Why? Socks on in bed.

The devil is a lie. You don't think that seems like a robot poem? No, but in my defense, I didn't go to school for poetry for 200 years. That's not true for me at all. Okay, and then, so this is the poetry robot that took song lyrics and turned them into poems. People picking up electric chronic, the balance like a giant tidal wave, never ever feeling supersonic or reaching any very shallow grave, an open space between

awaiting speed and looking at divine velocity, a faceless nation under constant need without another curiosity, or maybe going through the wave equation, an ancient engine offers no momentum about the power from an old vibration and nothing but a little bit of venom surrounded by a sin omega t on the other side of you and me that's fucking good that's a good it's definitely i like i like robot 2 better than robot 1 yeah but if you think robot 2 is using actual song lyrics whereas robot 1 is using using Twitter. So the source material is maybe a little better. Yeah, I guess that's fair. That's neat.

I thought so. I like these neat little robots. Neat little robots. See, isn't it better if you think of them as little robots? It is. With like little quills. With little faces. Yeah.

Little mustaches. I love them. Here's my second. Little berets. Oh, dang. Forget about it. I was going to do for my second thing i was looking at some new year's eve traditions because there's a lot of fun ones uh like you know black

eyed peas eating black eyed peas or the 12 grapes uh which we learned about like a few years ago uh which i believe is a spanish tradition where you eat the 12 grapes with every chime of the clock at midnight. And so I was looking around, but then I found out about this topic, and it's not exactly a New Year's Eve one. It's sort of a general holiday end of year tradition I never heard of before, and it is the magical holiday peppermint pig. Do you know about the peppermint pig?

This is totally unfamiliar to me. This is, well, this is what it says on the tin. This is a pig made out of peppermint candy. And it's about like a softball-sized chunk of smooth pink peppermint that has been sort of molded into an incredibly realistic-looking pig. How big is this? About that big. I mean, it's about like a grapefruit. Like a a piggy bank almost uh kind of small for a piggy bank you could you could easily hold it in one hand sort of like a like a a piglet like a newborn piglet but it's it's very realistic this big uh

this big peppermint pig uh it looks like google it it looks like it's got a nice heft to it it's a very attractive looking just like object where it's just the kind of thing where you see it and you think, I'd like to hold one of those. I bet it's got good heft and I bet it's really smooth. These peppermint pigs are made and sold in Saratoga Springs, New York. And that is more or less where the tradition resides. It's a very, very localized tradition. It is based on a Victorian holiday tradition where the pig, the animal, the pig

is sort of honored as, you know, a symbol of good health and prosperity. And so there were candy makers in the 1880s in Saratoga Springs back when it was sort of a thriving resort town. So I guess that the like prosperity symbolism was working out for them very well. They started to make these pigs as this holiday tradition that people would have. And then the, you know, there were a couple

big wars in the Great Depression. And so they stopped temporarily. But now the peppermint pig is back, baby, in a big, big way. The tradition is back baby in a big big way the tradition is this after a big holiday dinner with your family your friends whatever you all pass the pig around this peppermint pig oh no and you say a fortunate thing that happened to you that year and also for this next part you got to understand when you do buy one of these it does come with a cloth bag and a small metal hammer because what you're also supposed to do is you tuck the peppermint pig inside the bag and then you'll be like oh i got a promotion at the big office job and you fucking smash it with the hammer like you're fucking candy gallagher i was picturing people holding this pig in their hot little hands

saying something just doing a big and then passing it that's horrifying yeah i know i know that's what i was worried you were gonna say i'm talking about taking this attractive looking smooth destroying extremely masterfully crafted little candy pig and then tucking him in a little cloth bag for his discretion and comfort. And then you take the pig and you say like, well, I met Susan this year and that's what's special to me. And you smash it up a little bit and then you reach inside the bag.

You grab a little piece and eat it. He passed it to the next person. They take it. They say something great that happened to them that year. They say some bullshit. They take this little hammer. something great that happened to them that year. They say some bullshit. They take this little hammer. The hammer is awesome. The hammer is like a little, I don't know how to describe it.

It's like a rock hammer that Andy Dufresne uses to escape the prison. It's essentially that. And I don't know, just aesthetically, it's my shit. It is this like, these pigs are so beautiful they're like this bright neon can you show me a picture oh wow i didn't expect that level of detail it looks like an actual pig it looks like i thought it would look like a little like a little like a animated cartoon pig no i'm saying it's a real ass looking pig. It just looks really nice. And you smash it up and you eat it.

And it tastes apparently a lot like candy canes. My actual theory as to the origins of this is some candy makers fucked up making candy canes. And so the red and the white mixed together to make this pink. And they were like, well, I guess let's shape it into a pig and say that it's a tradition now here in saratoga springs uh but i i like it i like it and you know next year i want to import we're gonna import they do sell them online it's like 25 bucks for a pig a bag and a hammer and and the courage that you need my favorite song by the way a pig a bag and a hammer it does sound like some, yeah.

Anyway, hey, do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes, please. Ain't peppermint pigs. Aurora says, it's wonderful when I'm in the middle of cooking and missing an ingredient, and I actually have all the things to make a decent substitution. Christmas morning, everyone was psyched for waffles, and we actually could have them because I had baking soda and cream of tartar. Cream of tartar?

I've always heard tartar. Yeah, I have too. Cream of tartar. I know. To make up for the missing baking powder. I like that too, but I also feel like it never, ever, ever happens. And I'm so chicken shit.

I did that recently. We didn't have eggs and I read online how you can like substitute eggs using, you know, substitute eggs. Yeah. Using, you know. Play-Doh. Vegan ingredients. Roll them into egg shapes.

Erica says, my small wonder is going through the car wash. It's fun to experience such a super powerful cleansing process and get all the benefits of cleaning while sitting still and letting a giant machine do all the work. I haven't been through a car wash in forever. It's been a while for me too. We should take Henry through one. I bet he'd like it. I bet he would too.

Or be scared. Or be scared and then there's nothing we can do about it. And they're trapped in there. Yeah. Hey, folks, thanks for listening. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You'll find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Yeah, thank you, Maximum Fun, for hosting our show and other great shows that are funny, that are insightful, that are poignant, that are, you know, topically relevant in a way that ours is not. You can check out all the shows at MaximumFun.org. And hey, thanks to everybody who came out to Candle Nights for our live show and for bearing with us as we sort of took some time off during the holidays.

But now we're back. This episode, has this episode felt weirdly like even more chill than usual to you? Yeah, it does. I'm not hating it. Like I'm liking it. God knows that like I could use like a nice chill sort of 45 minute period.

I feel like we just went out to lunch together and just caught up on things we like. I did too. I like that. Maybe we lean more into like the npr fucking just like we start lying down while we record maybe we start lying right down when you record that would be a weird energy to talk about like cube maintenance during but maybe we'll give it a shot well we have any number of shows left to talk about pube maintenance.

We can try it in any number of positions. That's a fair point, babe.マリオ ワークインオフマリオ ワークインオフ マリオ ワークインオフ マリオ ワークインオフ MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported. Friendly Fire is a podcast about war movies,

but it's so much more than that. It's history. It was just supposed to be another assignment. It's comedy. Under no circumstances are you to engage the enemy. It's cinema studies. It's a hell of a combination. So subscribe and download Friendly Fire on your podcatcher of choice.

Or at MaximumFun.org. And also come see us at San Francisco Sketch Fest on January 16th. You can get tickets at sfsketchfest.com. Accomplished.