Wonderful! - Wonderful! 116: Pooch Hooch

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Griffin's favorite buckwild Zelda run! Rachel's favorite classy writing! Griffin's favorite chamber brass! Rachel's favorite crimefighting pup! 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 Swordfish. And this is wonderful. Codename Swordfish, hacking hacking in don't even bother looking in your computer wires i'm in there you stick your hand inside your computer and you part the wires and i've been living in there you find crumbs in toilet paper that's where i live in your computer code name swordfish like a little donkey kong like a little donkey kong throwing the bits and bytes down that's how he. That's how he does his work.

This is a wonderful show. We talk about good things. And I'll go ahead and say it. Computers, not one of them. Computers, not high on the list for me today. You know that's not true. They got me pedo. And you know I don't like to use this kind of language.

But computers got me pedo. I built a new computer today. And that's usually a very satisfying process, but it took me a very long time, and then we just sat down to record, and it took us a half hour to get going because of how bad the computer was being a stinker. To be fair, your setup in here is a little complicated. It's a little convoluted. It's a little tough to follow. Critics have called it labyrinthine.

That's a tough word to say, huh? Labyrin uh called it labyrinthine labyrinth that's a tough word to say huh labyrinth labyrinthine anyway do you have any small wonders uh i do um i am going to say uh the movie we just watched the farewell the farewell very, very good. Man, I do not want to say farewell. Hello to good acting from Awkwafina. Do you know what I mean? Uh-huh. When I say that? Yeah, I do. Yeah, it's good.

I thought it was going to be a sort of emotionally devastating. Me too. I think I actually used the word devastating when I was thinking of what I was getting myself into. It's certainly like, you know, emotional, but it's not as manipulative as you would think. It's about a family in China. Awkwafina's character lives in the States with her parents and their grandmother is dying, but they don't tell her. They like lie to her about the state of her health. And that sounds extremely sad, but of her health it's and that

sounds extremely sad but it's like it's actually a really really subtle flick it is it is pretty sad but it is also uh very funny it's a very very funny i really do like aquafina a lot i was thinking about uh crazy rich asians how just fucking hysterical she is in that uh i'm gonna say uh connect the xbox controller that you do with your body we've been playing some stuff with henry and it's just it's a uh been digging some stuff out of the boneyard reminds me of how uh how much i enjoyed some of those games we were really into it for a while there that was kind of like our go-to weekend activity yeah we had party we did a lot of dance central with our friends i was a big fan of

fantasia the uh fantasia harmonics from the rock band folks uh played that picked that one back up it's like falling off a lock it's good stuff uh let's keep that nerd ass train a rolling with my first thing if you don't mind go right ahead my first thing is uh a speed run that was took place during uh agdq awesome games done quick uh this past weekend or this past week i guess and i i missed most of it this year i wasn't watching a whole lot uh and so the past couple days i've been getting caught up and i watched one speed run that really uh boggled my mind of how wild it was and then i was talking to like everybody in slack and everybody's like yes that is the wildest run and of how wild it was. And then I was talking to like everybody in Slack and everybody's like, yes, it is the wildest run.

And I know it's not really your scene, but I'm hoping I can get you as on board with it as you did with Dr. Fatbody's sort of seminal Sonic the Hedgehog. His crowd work made it. It was, well, and his play. I mean, he was- Yes, he's very good, but he was also like an excellent hype man.

Right. The run I'm talking about for this year's event is The Legend of Zelda Link to the Past Crowd Control Randomizer Speed Run. So there's like four layers of things to sort of unpack there. The Legend of Zelda Link to the Past was the Super Nintendo game in the Zelda franchise.

Is this the one that you always used to try and speed run? No, that was ocarina of time and i didn't try to speed run it i did no i did pretty bad uh i just didn't know the strats anyway we can't start unpacking that this super nintendo game linked to the past is like a staple of the speed run community it's like for a lot of people it's like the best zelda game out there just top down 2d like action adventure sort of rpg thing uh a couple years ago this new scene developed around the game called the randomizer scene and it was because uh folks developed this piece of software where you could drop in uh an emulated like uh you know computer executable version of

the game and it would switch everything in all the chests like all all around so you play link to the past you know where everything is you know where you're gonna get the boomerang you know where you're gonna get the hook shot you know where you're gonna get the bombs this would generate a randomized version of the game where every time you played it you didn't know where anything was going to be oh that's cool and because it's a zelda game like you could really sequence break the whole thing so instead of having to go to this dungeon this dungeon this dungeon and then get the master sword and then you can travel back in time and do this dungeon this you may open up the first chest and like oh there's the master sword so i can just

go ahead and skip the first half of the game and just like run straight ahead uh and so it kind of becomes a puzzle of like how can i continue to progress in this game and there's lots of other fun modifiers you can just turn the sword off. So you just like have to play without a sword, like hitting things with your shovel and hoping for the best. It's been in a lot of GDQs. So this run is randomized. The person playing it, this guy named Andy,

has no idea where anything's going to be. It's being watched by, you know, thousands and thousands of people, a lot of which are watching on Twitch, which is the online streaming platform. And here is where the other layer comes in. And this is nothing I'd ever seen before. And it was the wildest shit. And even if you don't care about this stuff, it is such a fun watch. Crowd Control is a plugin on Twitch where everybody watching could donate bits, which is like a Twitch currency, to the

Prevent Cancer Foundation, which is the foundation that they were raising money for with this event. And by donating bits, you could do things in the game. So if you donated like 150 bits, you could give Andy like an extra set of arrows, or extra bomb or here's some rupees or an extra heart container and it would show up in game or you could pay some bits to like remove one of his like health bar pieces or just get rid of all of his bombs or take a look keep that item from being able to be used for a little while uh those are like the cheapest options uh like while the game is happening or live live while the game is happening or live live while the game is happening everybody's watching the game and spending donating money to

do things to change the game so those things like adding or removing certain items are like the cheapest options uh hysterically you can also mess with the controller so you could donate like a significant amount of money and you would switch the face buttons and the d-pad on the controller left to right uh or you would switch it vertically so up would be down and down would be up and x would be b and b would be x uh and so you would just watch this guy playing as link just like running and then immediately turn left and jump into a pit it's like ah they just switch the controls on you. And then you can do like wild, wild, wild stuff, like triple the speed of the game all of a sudden

with no warning whatsoever, or turn on like ice physics. So everybody's sliding all around, all over the place, or turn on swarms of like killer chickens or turn it into a one hit kill mode where if he gets hit, he just dies instantly. And then the highest price item on like this menu of things you could donate money for would just kill him instantly and so people

would just do that while at sort of significant parts of the run and just out of nowhere link would just fall down dead because somebody just donated five hundred dollars to nuke him from orbit andy the guy playing this game is like an experienced random zelda speed runner uh-huh was this sisyphean tortured heroic figure the likes of which i've never seen a performance the run took almost four hours and this he get legitimately pissed off? No. That's what's so incredible is he kept his cool. He had a couch of commentators behind him who've played this mode before, providing commentary on what was happening. And they were just badgering him, really picking on him a lot in jest, but just nonstop, just

like riding this guy's jock and then you know you have the game that you're playing you're playing a video game so that's a kind of challenge you have the pressure of the audience washing you right so you're like playing against yourself you have the randomization you don't know like where anything's going to be and on top of all that you have like an audience who are actively trying to kill you all at the same time. This seems terrible. It is a man against the elements. It is.

But at the time where he would like use his tremendous skill at this game to overcome, like it's one hit kill and all these flying chickens are coming at him and his controller is reversed and the ground is ice so he can't move. and his controller is reversed and the ground is ice so he can't move and he's just trying to stay alive until the timers run out on all these shitty effects. It was so fun to watch. It was so hysterically funny. And it's not like anything I've ever seen before. And I think it's just rad

that this kind of technology even exists. Yeah, it's really hard to fathom how that works. I know, it's like a game that I played so many times in my childhood and watching it be played in this like complete bizarro interactive like online way was like one of the coolest things i've i've seen like come out of the the speed running scene in a while so that's my that's my highlight from uh this year's event and uh i had a real good time watching. I skimmed it mostly.

I couldn't watch four hours of a speed run. I'm not at a place in my life where I can do that. But it is super, super entertaining. What's your first thing? My first thing is not anything that I have any personal relationship to, but that I appreciate. And that is good penmanship. Yeah.

I feel like you're coming at me a little bit with this. I have terrible penmanship. Whose is worse? I have had you fill out birthday cards before. I don't think mine is noticeably better than yours. Okay. I think mine is more legible, but it is not remotely artistic in any way.

A lot of people would argue that legibility is a sign of good penmanship. I feel like my handwriting looks approximately like it did when I was 11 years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is kind of a problem, I think. I think it's not great for me. Part of this is because handwriting, just as a practice, kind of disappeared in the 80s once computers took over.

Mavis took it down, huh? Mavis stranglehold to the ground until it died. The emphasis became on, you know, keyboarding and typing more than, you know, handwriting. Yeah, it's wicked fast did you know do you think the handwriting people out there know like people i see i see people doing calligraphy and it's like this is taking forever um but i don't know if this is the case for you but like i have noticed like my mom's handwriting and my grandparents' handwriting was just like incredible. Yeah.

You know, and I always thought like, how did this happen? And how was mine so terrible? And that's because handwriting was something that was actually valued for a very long time. Yeah, but they didn't have like memes, right? They didn't have all these funny memes. Yeah, it's true. It took so long to say like hello my dearest i write to you on a saturday you know when we're like you know on our our

nintendos they were like writing letters they were writing letters and i was over i was on my nintendo like lol yeet uh so handwriting there are like different schools of handwriting. In the mid-1800s, a abolitionist and bookkeeper named Platt Rogers Spencer developed... Are you sure that's not like a last name presented first, like a formal surname presentation? Well, because the system is known as the Spenserian method. Okay. So I'm assuming that's the last name. It was a cursive writing system.

And it can, he's known as the father of American penmanship. And his book, Spencer and Rice's System of Business and Ladies Penmanship was the first. Are those the two schools is business and ladies? So this was the thing. Back in the day, there were professional

penmen responsible for writing things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. People with super great handwriting, that was all they did was write things for people. Is that like John Hancock or is that apocryphal he didn't write well that was his signature but it was his but it was tommy jay who wrote it yes well this is supposing that it wasn't i mean thomas jefferson may have drafted it but the actual formal document was written by a professional penman who that's the real father of our country what the fuck we don't know that

i'm gonna go national treasure i'm sure we do i just personally don't have i let you down today i'm just i want i need to go pull out all of the bills out of my wallet and start folding it until i find out the answer to this fucking question um the most popular of spencer's book was the spencerian key to practical penmanship that came out in 1866 were people not writing good it wasn't like an art form you know i think initially well first of all there were like for a long time there wasn't like standardized spelling for example you know like the idea that there was like a set way to spell and communicate was was not something that always existed okay in the turn of the 20th century uh charles zaner and elmer blosser uh came out with the what has become the new kind of uh fundamental guide to handwriting uh and this was uh something that was called the zaner method of arm movement and it was developed

especially for elementary age children so especially for kids coming up learning how to write are we talking when you say a book about i'm thinking about what a book about handwriting looks like and it's the wildest shit i'm just imagining that the like charts that they would hang up on the chalkboard of like the three lines with the big okay that's what we're talking about okay that's the zaner yeah and just like practicing like workbooks just like practicing over and over okay okay um i thought i was imagining like a literary book that's like okay let's begin with a uh this one's uh big round like an o i hear you asking me if it's like the o and the answer is kind of but there's a lot more going on there's a line where does the line go well i'm gonna get

to that i'm gonna get to that in the next paragraph if you just wait the line goes on the right no not like that god i wish i could just show you what the cursive a looks like instead of having to fine um zanier blaster is actually still around in 1972 they became owned by uh um the highlights for children oh shit yeah and then in 1991 they launched a handwriting contest uh for kids age uh through eight. Okay. Now I'm just imagining like, you know, two harried businessmen like sweating, leaning over their desks like, what are we going to fucking do, man?

What are we going to do? A contest. A contest for children. Now the, like that whole organization is more founded on like reading and literacy. They had to do, they had to change it to something else. To like stay true to their roots, have this handwriting contest. It was for, you know you know 120 years it was all about good handwriting and

then for like a year while they tried some stuff out it was about pogs and then they were like we need it's it's got to be more endemic slammers used to be called zaners they were called zaners to begin with it's a brief time period uh now see when i was doing research online a lot of this is from history.com uh they said that in many european countries students still get handwriting instruction of course i don't doubt that yeah at all which i i would have appreciated i remember when i was learning cursive for example there was a little bit of that but even then i was not particularly good at it i would also be surprised i i'm almost certain this is not limited to Europe, right?

Yeah. I imagine in- No, what I studied primarily was American, and then they just referenced that European countries, they're still doing it. Okay. I was thinking of countries with representative character sets. I forget what that category of handwriting is called, know hiragana and yeah yeah no i'm talking about english okay yes primarily um this is a little fun fact to just kind of end it um

illegible handwriting is called uh griffinage are you kidding me g-r-i-f-f-i-n-a-g-e g-r-i-f-f-o-n-a-g-e i love that that's so good i have found this website that listed all these kind of obscure words and what they meant and then i came across that one that's so good because it's true and it's not great when it happens at my child's daycare when I have to write his name on something. And they're like, who's Hedry? Oh, and I also read about different, there were a lot of tips online about how to improve your handwriting style. And one of the things I read talked about how the grip of the pencil, there isn't actually one preferred grip. It really depends on your hand shape. You're kidding me. Yes. So all the times I got yelled at, I hold, how would you describe my pencil holding technique? Most people take their index finger and that's kind of the

main player in what they're doing with their writing implement. Griffin? I kind of use the side of my middle finger. Yeah yeah he's got two fingers out there um it looks like he's just picked up a pencil for the first time it is and it's how i get you know what i'm thinking about now you know i have crooked middle fingers oh i'm wondering if that's why just from real intense gripping yeah just from gripping a pencil like for you know the times in my life where a pencil was still relevant god what if keyboards hadn't been invented what would my your hands my hands would be like a wild like roots of a tree like an accursed monkey's paw uh hey can i steal you away yes Can I share a message from our first sponsor this week?

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so I want you to just be a little serious here for a moment. Okay. Because this is for... Me, Tigger, I'm going to bounce all over your HoneyBook. This is for small business owners, Griffin McElroy. Like me. Someone has trusted you to own a business. That was Eeyore.

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pouch that you can tuck everything into? And then I was going to, maybe this could be another Winnie the Pooh reference. But less sticky, I think is probably what they'd want you to leave with. You think they don't like it saying that their service is very sticky. I don't think most businesses would like that. But it's good for your allergies and stuff. If you have a cold or something like that. Hey, did you have a long day at work or a tough day at school? Are you still at the office?

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Yes. It is for Justin. It is from Bree. You are the best bae a goblin could ask for. From the amazing care you take of our long snake son and trash cat baby to the unwavering support you show me, no matter what creative or athletic endeavor I think I can tackle. Thank you.

I can't wait to marry you this Halloween and spend the rest of my spooky life with you. You better be careful with that. I wish you great love and great success with your love and your wedding and congratulations. Halloween wedding though, I feel like you're inviting in some spirits. That's all I'm going to say. I mean, it sounds

like Brie is a goblin based on the message. So that seems like a great environment. Maybe this kind of all hallows trickery is exactly what they are looking for. Okay, I'm just going to say be careful skeletons like to hide in big cakes oh so here's a message for tommy and it's uh from courtney who says dear thomas surprise here's a jumbotron i just wanted to thank you for enduring my silly

songs playing board games with me parenting our kitty boys and most importantly loving me unconditionally i love you so very much and i'm so thankful to have you in my life. I hope you have a wonderful day, Love Courtney. Love Courtney. Do you think that that's a sign-off, or do you think that that's sort of an order? Love Courtney. Good day. Thank you for the kitty boys.

Love Courtney. Hey, gang. Jesse here, the kitty boys. Love, Courtney. Hey, gang. Jesse here, the founder of Maximum Fun. And with me is Stacey Molsky, who is, among other things, the lady who responds to all of your tweets. Hi, everyone. I also send you newsletters. So anyway, something really awesome. You, MaxFun listeners, have given us the chance to do something really cool on behalf of our entire community, and we wanted to tell you about it.

Last summer, following the MaxFun drive, we put all of the enamel pins on sale to $10 and up members, with proceeds going to the National Casa GAL Association for Children. Your generous support and enthusiasm raised over $100,000. raised over $100,000. Our bookkeeper, Steph, would be quick to tell me the exact total is $109,025, to be exact. Your money will go toward parent kids who've experienced abuse or neglect with court-appointed advocates or guardian ad litem volunteers.

In other words, kids in tough spots will have somebody in their corner. Knowledgeable grown-ups who are on their team through court dates and life upheavals and confusing situations, whatever. The money we raise together is going to help a lot of kids. Whether you bought pins or not, you can help us build on that $109,000 foundation. Make a donation to support National Casa GAL and help some of our nation's most vulnerable children at MaximumFun.org slash C-A-S-A. That's MaximumFun.org slash Casa. And seriously, thank you.

Our community rules. Can I hear your second thing, please? My second thing is a music thing. I'm really excited to talk about it because it's a band I discovered like last fall sometime. And I just assumed that they were like a pretty big deal that lots of people

who are fans of this type of music knew about. And then I was like researching them today and they're like wicked not. If you base a band's like sort of mainstream appeal by spotify plays like there's there's uh i don't know they're a bit more underground than i thought they're called the westerlies uh and they are a four-piece chamber brass band i'd heard that term chamber like in reference to to a band before, and I never actually knew what it meant. Me neither.

The definition is it is a small band with one player to each part, as opposed to an orchestra, which would have, you know, here's five flutes and here's the violin section. The chamber literally referring to a band large enough to fit into a palace chamber or large room. So like a string quartet is probably the most common form of chamber band. Westerlies, I don't think they actually fulfill the requirements because they are two trombonists and two trumpeters. There's just four folks. Uh, but they make the most beautiful, just dreamiest, biggest sounds with their, like with their limited roster. Uh, they formed in 2011 and, uh, I think their like biggest exposure at this point is they've done some collaborations with

the Fleet Foxes. Um, I think they played like a show or two with them. And I think that they have provided like backing instrumentation to one of their albums. But their sound is just so unique. And I am always on the lookout for like nice, chill, atmospheric work music. And this has been like my jam for a few months now. So I'm going to play one of their songs now. It's my favorite song of theirs. And it is called Sorrow. it's it's like super cinematic and that's like another sort of thing i'm always like into i'm always surprised by like your interest in that like not in context

you know just by itself to like listen to that kind of music i don't it's just some way that my brain works where and it's why i started to like get into music when i was doing taz is like i like to listen to a song and like imagine this kind of scene that it would uh that it would underscore uh and i just cannot not do that while while listening to the to the westerlies and they have like a pretty broad range of sounds like they they have more like sort of poppier uh songs and they have more sort of traditional uh you know classical uh format songs uh all just four-piece brass. But this type,

they have a few songs like this that are just really just, I don't know, cinematic and big and beautiful. It is really tough to categorize as evidenced by they have, of course, done a Tiny Desk concert for NPR.

Oh, okay. And NPR wrote of the band, young musicians today routinely resist being pigeonholed into a single genre, such is the case with this unconventional band, which through its compositions and tight ensemble playing reveals a built-in sympathy for improvised jazz, rigorous classical structures

and sunshiny pop. Another neat thing about them, I've been listening to them for months now, but it wasn't until I researched them that I learned that they are actually a nonprofit that is like supported by a like board of, of donors, uh, that, uh, they are also sort of all about like education and community building, uh, through music. Uh, and that's through like going out and actually like teaching seminars in underserved schools and, uh, participating in, uh, you know, panels and conventions about

sort of equality in jazz or, uh, you know, music composition or whatever. Uh, their mission statement is the Westerlies are committed to dismantling racism sexism and economic inequality in their field and aim to reflect their values of diversity and inclusion in the music they make in the spaces they occupy uh they're just like doing dope shit like across the country they don't actually tour that much they the a lot of the shows that they play i was trying to picture like what a concert would be like uh yeah i mean i've seen a like a string quartet play in it's you know it's not dynamic right i imagine that there's not pyrotechnics or anything like that um but i don't know i just love their music and i i love like the cool shit that they're doing outside of it they're also on top of all that like recording artists they have a new album out at the end of this month which i'm very excited about called uh wherein lies the good

uh and there's a few singles out for that album so just to leave this bit i'm gonna play one uh and it's called robert henry and it's it's also very much in that just like you know cinematic soundtracky sort of vibe. So here is Robert Henry. what's your second thing my second thing and i told griffin like i had a hard time coming up with my second thing yes and then this kind of hit me like a bolt of lightning and i like furiously like did all the research i could in the short amount of time i had left in the day what is it mcgruff the crime dog you like this dog i love this dog okay he's kind of a narc right no all right i don't know anything about you don't understand what mcgruff is about i think i'm pretty sure my mom had a mcgruff puppet in her classroom okay this was like a big movement i i don't think i my school

was ever visited by mcgruff i don't think i don't think i ever had any mcgruff exposure to speak oh no griffin it may have been you know after my time it may have been i was getting like slim good body like that's who i was that was the heat i was getting but how did you know, after my time, it may have been, I was getting like slim, good body. Like that's who I was. That was the heat I was getting. But how did you know to prevent crime? I didn't. That's why I did. You did all the crimes?

I did so much like, you know, stealing and, uh, hurting and, uh, you know, jumping on the grass that I wasn't supposed to be on.

Littering a whole man. That wasn't really the kind of crime McGruff was. Stole an airplane from the airport. Just like as a youth? Uh-huh. And dug a hole way too deep. I didn't call before about power lines. I just started digging. I did some time for that one.

Anyway, what's this narc dog all about? Okay, so McGruff was an animated bloodhound that was designed to increase crime awareness and personal safety in the United States. McGruff debuted in 1980 with a series of public service announcements educating citizens on personal security measures, such as locking doors and putting your lights on timers when you go out of town. So personal measures you can take to reduce crime in your own life. Okay.

Not like. I got super worried that it was going to go like a Clint Eastwood direction of like McGruff was like like are you strapped you gotta be strapped no the idea was that you know that you were reducing the potential for crime you know how like if you're in a parking lot and it tells you to like hide your belongings pre-cog shit that's what mcgruff was all about rough was a pre-cog there were three mcgruffs floating in tanks of goo people always reference minority report like it's a part of our like shared understanding fucking bangs dude that movie is that everybody's seen minority report

the way you think they have well i know what my segment next week's gonna be brush up suckers i'm talking minority report that movie bangs uh so m So McGruff was a hugely successful campaign. In the first year, over $100 million in free airtime was donated, and it reached over 50% of adults. For a dog that just said, lock your doors, everybody? Oh, babe, so much more than that. In 2008, they did a survey survey and nine out of ten people recognized mcgruff this is 2008 this is like significantly later he's people still see mcgruff and they're

like oh yeah i know that he's a brown bloodhound with like a fedora on a trench coat and a trench coat okay i do i do i'm familiar with this pupper so uh the Department of Justice in 1977 reached out to the Ad Council to create a public campaign. Ad Council passed it on to an agency, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, who was the agency that worked on Keep America Beautiful. Okay. So they conducted focus groups and people in the focus group said that the police officers should be the one to prevent crimes, and we're not going to pay more to support more officers, which was a challenge. But they said, you know what, if you're able to emphasize individual actions and come up with easy, accessible opportunities, then we'd be willing to help out, basically, is what the focus groups came down with. Okay. Tell us little things we can do, and yeah, that's okay.

So the EVP of the agency was kind of channeling Smokey the Bear when he came up with the idea of an animal. And he quickly came up with take a bite out of crime as kind of the slogan, which McGruff ended up using. What do you think crime tastes like? You can do it as like a punitive action, this bite, but you're going to end up tasting some crime. Batteries.

Ooh, interesting. Like you get that, like a shock. Yeah, it's like unpleasant, but very specific. There's a blood, like an irony taste to it, like blood or something like that but then it's also like oh i shouldn't it's like a there's because there's power in it you know there's power in the crime and you should be afraid of it yes i gotta tell you about these dogs okay were there multiple takes yes so here's the thing so first dog um kind of looked like snoopy wearing like a

keystone cop hat okay and his team was like there's no way that dog's going to be taken seriously and so the evp said okay you've got a day to come up with some proposals according to the article i read the rejected proposals included a bulldog version of jag. Edgar Hoover, a golden retriever, a, quote, aggressive-looking deputy dog, and, quote, a mongrel who became a wonder dog. Do we need an origin story? Was the first Moon Gruff the crime dog, like, PSA? Like, so anyway, I got bitten by a radioactive cop.

You might wonder how I became interested in crime. Let me tell you a little bit about where I came from. Well, this is a magic hat that lets me talk. What the EVP decided on was the dog in the trench coat who, quote tired had seen the world and had epitomized all the detectives we had seen from raymond chandler to desheel hammett and even colombo yeah there's big colombo energy in that that there is sure there's nothing about mcgruff that's kind of like rough around the edges no pun intended of like shit like i've seen some stuff kids and let me tell you put your lights on a timer in every psa did he like sneak just like a finger a hooch just a nip of it from a little like uh like maybe a um uh saint bernard with like a neck

cask came over and just like gave him a little, just a finger? Not that I saw. Okay. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. I haven't seen all of McGruff's work and there has been a lot of it. When they came up with the design that the agency was really proud of, the attorney general at the time

was really disappointed that they had, quote, been spending good money on a talking dog. And he ordered it to be shut down, but at that point the advertisements had already been distributed to the media and were set to run. You can't stop the signal, baby. This thing's bigger than you.

It's bigger than the Department of Justice. In November 1979, the dog was introduced at a press conference in New York City, which I really wish there was video footage of that. All right, guys, we figured out how we're going to solve crime. First, let me show you a picture of this dog. Second, his name will be determined by a contest, which is exactly what happened eight months later.

Please tell me, do you have other names? Do you have other names? I have the runner-up. Okay. Nationwide contest to name the dog mcgruff was the winner obviously the runner-up was sherlocked homes locked being a reference to the idea of locking your doors that sucks that sucks as bad as that one episode of sherlock where that was like the solution to the big mystery at the end do you

remember that one I will talk about it I don't want to go about spoiling Sherlock for people um yes that's how we came up with McGruff I was reading like up until 2012 they were still using McGruff's image and like campaigns to like uh guard the elderly and to prevent cyberbullying. McGruff still gets trotted out every once in a while of like, you can prevent crime by being better. Yeah, it's a little presumptuous. You know what I mean? It's like, lock your doors and don't get cyberbullied

and also don't cyberbully. I'm McGruff the Crime Dog. And I done done it again. Ruff ruff. Take a bite. Turn around in a circle and lay down. Lock your doors. Okay, they smashed in my windows.

Bar those up. Okay, well, they used C4 and blew a hole in the wall. Dig a big hole. You live in there. You live there now. I'm McGruff the Crime Dog. You're a hole dweller. Dig a big hole. You live in there. You live there now. I'm a gruff, the crime dog. You're a hole dweller. Speaking of crime, let me open this trench book.

I'm selling some bootleg DVDs. You said trench book. I'm imagining that would be. Did I say trench book? You did. And that's like the new, that's like your new dark underground Facebook. I loved this time period this like idea that like a little spokes animal was gonna like motivate people to do things have we talked about louis the lightning bug before we haven't but i didn't know if that was a regional thing or not because we had that we had

that as well i think it must have been must have been yeah we had that we had smoky we had mcgruff we had mr yuck did you have mr yeah oh McGruff. We had Mr. Yuck. Did you have Mr. Yuck? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Slim Goodbody may not be as universal. Yeah, there was a lot. Louis the Lightning Bug was always my favorite because he had like jams. Yeah, he was jazzy.

He had like, you gotta play it safe around electricity. It was fresh. Hey, can I tell you what our friends at home are excited about? Yes. I'll tell you about Beauregard says, one of my favorite small wonders is when people ask you to take their picture, partly because it's cute to know that they want to have a picture badly enough to ask a stranger, and partly because I'd like to start taking pictures before they're ready,

just in case I can capture something cute. Something fucking real. Griffin always gets asked to take photos i do i have that face of a person who can't run away very quickly with your camera david says my small wonder for this week is neil pert the drummer from rush who just passed away his drumming was unbelievably good and watching videos of him is really exciting even if you don't know a lot about drumming he just works so hard to make that giant drum kit he plays put out a bunch of interesting rhythms and sounds he also wrote all the band's lyrics and most of it is really interesting poetry oh i didn't know that i didn't know that either uh neil purd is like one of the drummers that i gained a deep respect for through

playing like rock band for five years non-stop just, like holing up in my room and just practicing playing Rush songs like Limelight on drums, like over and over and over and over again, and figuring out like all of the different kinds of drumming that there are. And I feel like that gave me a weirdly like detailed look at like how weird a drummer Neil Peart actually was. Like he pioneered a bunch of

like very very strange mathematical ways of playing the drums uh yeah he kicked ass uh hey thanks to maximum fun for having us on the network they're uh good friends good family good times great oldies and uh hey thank you to bowen and augustus for these for a theme song money won't pay you'll find a link to that in the episode description. I went backwards with those. I know. I'm a little thrown. Maybe you can say something nice about Bowen and Augustus.

I absolutely love that song. Yeah, Money Won't Pay is a good one. You can find a link to that in the episode description. You're all tripped up now. And thank you to Maximum Fun. We have other stuff at macroy.family uh we're doing some a couple shows in cincinnati uh here in february and we got more announcements coming up soon uh is that it i think that might be it we got shirt we have shirt thank you guys

that have taken a picture of yourself wearing the shirt uh we also got our shirts in they are in fact very soft very soft very soft these shirts are surfed they're surf shirts we also got the christmas ornament which is very sweet i've never um never had an ornament designed with my likeness on it or a shirt for that matter so that was a real treat yeah uh it's uh it's good i have all day it's all rachel wears is this shirt, and she carries around the ornament. She's always got one hand occupied by the Christmas ornament. And when I go grocery shopping, just everybody I run into, I say,

Eh? Eh? Eh? Eh? Anyway, that's the end of our show. Can you come up with some other names for McGruff the Crime Dog that you would have liked to have heard? Spanky the No-Nonsense Police Pooch.

Barry Beagle, Chief of Police. Terry the Anti-Terrorist Terrier. Shit. That's really good. Hey! Working on Hey! My home Hey! Working on Hey! My home Hey! Working on

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