Wonderful! - Wonderful! 132: FARMER, FARMER

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Rachel's favorite kitschy light source! Griffin's favorite laser games! Rachel's favorite reminiscing! Griffin's favorite restaurant freebie!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. Sorry that I'm practicing good mic technique by trying to get my body. It's all about getting the waves of your cords. Let me tell you about your cords that you got in your throat. I was more reacting to the wingspan you have right now on those knees. Yeah, there's a, listen, it's not manspreading if you're by yourself in one chair.

Then it's just expressing yourself. Just spreading. Then it's just spreading. Then it's just expressing yourself. Just spreading. Then it's just spreading. Then it's just a comfort-based sort of- Which as humans, you know, we have a right to do in our own chair. We have a right to spread in our own homes, in our own houses.

And the government? Who? I mean, the government. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Yeah, no, that was enough. Sometimes the government, mm-hmm. Yeah, no, stop now. That's enough.

Don't get me started on the government. I know, right? When the government yeah no stop now that's enough don't get me started on the government i know right when the government oh man i get so i get so that i can't even finish about the government that's not what this show is about it's not but it's hard you get me started on government it is hard for me to focus on the good stuff happening in there the show is about wonderful things this show is about wonderful things so government no not government take a hike government that's the way i shorten the word government because i don't respect the word hey do you have any small wonders i I do have a small wonder. And that small wonder I am formulating right now as I am talking. Oh, here it comes.

So maybe you should go first. My small wonder is I have had the same, literally the first thing that I saw with my eyes when I was pressed to discuss it. I have had the same bottle of glasses cleaning solution for easily two years now, right? I got it from an optometrist visit, I want to say in 2018, early spring 2018. Using it and cleaning my glasses, I feel like I have supervision. It's like a whole new set of glasses because we have a child who likes to play with the glasses, they get smudgy, dirty, I can't see very well, but I'm not very good at like realizing that. And then I'll be like, hey, I'm going to treat myself by cleaning my glasses with the fluid. And then it's like I can see through walls.

Like I can see super, super good. I've had the same bottle of this cleaning fluid I used to give myself a real touch up for two years. It's that bottle right there. Look at it. What percentage empty do you think it is? That's like 2%. It's like forever. It's like forever this bottle. It's so two percent it's like forever it's like forever

this bottle yeah it's so dope it's your forever bottle i love cleaning my glasses i love what it's like to look through clean glasses surely that was enough time for you uh i am going to give credit to the four pound bag of easter candy oh yeah that we received from my mother yeah approximately two weeks after Easter. Yes. Which was exactly when we needed it. Right. It was it landed perfectly in the in the sweet spot. It was intended to be for our son, but he does not know about that bag. No, we did steal basically a mommy and daddy. That's a mommy daddy bag of Easter candy. Listen, he's a he's a little tyke.

We don't want him to have four pounds. If I were to space it out, I would want our son to eat four pounds of candy over the span of, oh, 11 years. Yeah, exactly. But me, I'm a big adult man. Yeah. My metabolism can handle four pounds of candy. Although it's really down to about three quarters of one pound of candy at this point yeah it's been good been getting us through the hard times i believe you go first this week

my first topic yes is the lava lamp oh shit yeah the lava lamp you ever make one of them by yourself make one well i mean make a like you know low low budge water and oil lava lamp really oh man was this a science project it was a science project i feel like i made one at church i feel like there why why did i make a lava lamp at church yeah was there like a stem education component of your church absolutely not oh no there wasn't no No, there was not. Was it like a camp? Was it like a...

Maybe it was like a vacation Bible school project situation. But you could do like food coloring in the water and then you put the oil in and it would like blobs of it would float around. Was there a light component? No. Again, a very low budget. I guess it was just a lava bottle. I am excited to hear about So not really a lava lamp at all. No, just a lava bottle. I am excited to hear about the history of the lava lamp.

Yeah, so I would say mid-90s, particularly while I was in middle school, became very interested in owning a lava lamp. Yes. Because I had seen them at the Spencer's Gifts. I was just about to ask if it was a Spencer's Gifts situation. It is weird to me. I know our listenership across all of our shows skews pretty young.

I don't know if Spencer's Gifts, it's not still a thing, is it? Spencer's Gifts? Who knows? Who knows? I mean, I haven't seen one. I mean, malls aren't a thing necessarily. Yeah, we have a mall that we have frequented and I do not recall ever seeing a Spencer's in it. No. So it's wild to me that like there's a lot of stuff that I only knew about because of Spencer's gifts.

Yeah. I mean, Hot Topics still exists. Yeah, I guess Hot Topics supplanted it. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It was a novelty. It was a novelty shop. They sold rude greeting cards they sold uh if you wanted some sort of austin powers memorabilia they would have it at spencer's gifts they would have like uh if you wanted like a walkie talkie fart machine you would get that at spencer's gifts if you wanted a

plasma ball they're gonna have that right at spencer's gifts i'm pretty sure plasma ball was the like fucking foundation of their... That's what the store started with. Just one Plasma Ball. Just one Plasma Ball, yeah. In the like mid to late 90s there was a real resurgence of like I don't know like 60s and 70s nostalgia.

Yeah. Not just because of Austin Powers, although it didn't hurt. A lot of the fashion of the grunge era was like very thrifty. Interesting. You know, there was this idea of like, you know, getting that polyester shirt from your your local value village. And I feel like that kind of jumpstarted this idea of like, I want my whole life to be groovy. I would say that went all the way up to early aughts you think about that uh britney uh that that uh that paris hilton there was for sure a like bell-bottom hippie gene resurgence okay i didn't know where you were going with that no i'm saying like this

this aesthetic i think carried over into uh well well into the odds yeah so here's so here's what's interesting about the history of the lava lamp. There are a bunch of surprises. Oh, boy. Okay, so it was created in 1963 by a British accountant named Edward Craven Walker. Okay, cool last name. And originally, it wasn't marketed as this like psychedelic thing. It was actually advertised in the american bar associated

association journal uh for lawyers touted as an executive model and it could be mounted on a walnut base alongside a ballpoint pen in the ad okay yeah but then of course like the big psychedelic movement happened and it was like oh oh, this would be good for that. So this guy, this Edward Walker gentleman, who, as I mentioned, British accountant, also had a history of creating naturism films, which was nude films. Oh, oh. Yeah. Not pornographic.

No, no. Why did I say that word like that? Did you hear that? Yeah, I did. I mean, sometimes you say words funny, so I didn't think anything of it. That wasn't one of them. That wasn't intentional. Pornographic. Pornographic.

He went under the pseudonym Michael Kettering and directed several films in the late 50s and early 60s. These are just nude people films yeah so one for example traveling light came out in 1959 and it was filmed off the coast of corsica and it was just an underwater ballet of nude people all right cool uh anyway he got the idea for the lava lamp he was at a pub and noticed a homemade egg timer created from a cocktail shaker filled with different liquids bubbling on a stovetop interesting and he thought that's i'm gonna steal that so he used a light bulb as the heat source

and used a bottle which previously contained a beverage called orange squash, which was a drink in England that was apparently pretty gross. Yeah, it sounds bad. If you think about a lava lamp, it is basically in a glass bottle. It is both water and then wax. And included in the wax is something called carbon tetrachloride which adds the weight to the wax okay so that it moves when it heats up it moves kind of more um you know i don't know what the word is weirdly yeah weirdly i recognize the name of that chemical and i think it might be

from all the fucking slime videos oh maybe maybe maybe um so the heat source at the bottom liquefies the waxy blob as it expands its density decreases and rises to the top where it cools congeals and begins to sink back down so it gets far away from the heat source and then you know the process continues over and over again uh this became popular partially because it had cameos in the hit shows, Dr. Who and the Avengers. Oh yeah. I think,

I think this was like part of the TARDIS aesthetic for a season, right? The, can't you see, I may just be pulling that out of my ass, but I could see like one of the, cause each doctor has a new like sort of TARDIS design. I could see that being the aesthetic for one of them.

Yeah, so originally it was called an astrolamp. Okay, I like that. So the phenomenon, as I mentioned, kind of cooled in the 70s. And sank back down to the bottom of the trends. Where it heated up again. Right. They were only manufacturing about a thousand lights

per year. Oh my God. But then in the Austin Powers era, as I mentioned, the public again warmed to the lamps. And then it started

to float again. And in 2000, Mathmos, which was the name of the company now, sold 800,000. Oh, man. And you can find them now at like Target and Walmart. Like it's a part of the culture and it doesn't seem to entirely disappear.

Granted, it's not as popular. Like in the 90s, everybody had a lava lamp. Everybody I knew had one. Yeah, we had one and And it broke at one point. And that wasn't good. It wasn't on when it broke, which is cool, because it probably would have started like an electrical fire in our house. But it for sure broke and we lost.

I took it very seriously because I remember the package said not to leave it on for longer than like two hours. So I felt very strongly about that. But then I would go over to people's houses and they just had them on 24 hours a day. Those things got fucking hot. Very, very hot. It was like the the corn baller from Arrested Development. You would go over to a friend's house and like accidentally brush up against it and suffer a serious, serious burn. Boy, howdy, my first topic really dovetails, I think, pretty nicely with your first topic, because my first topic is laser tag.

So we're kind of like hitting a very specific sort of time window. For me, laser tag had sort of like two implications to my youth. And the first was like the more exciting one. It was like the like in the pantheon of vacation activities at like tourist trappy places it was like the shit it was like the thing i looked forward to is that and mini golf whenever we'd go on vacation to um you know myrtle beach or uh uh you know somewhere in in florida where my nani was living or uh big one was Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Oh shit.

Now, did your parents play with you guys or was this just the brothers? No, I think they would probably play with us. It would be, I remember playing at, at Cusar. Do you ever fuck with Cusar?

I don't know what that is, Griffin. Cusar. Well, it's a pretty major like chain of, of laser tag places. Yes. Cusar is probably arguably the biggest chain of laser tag places

uh quick history lesson it uh opened in it was developed in 1987 in uh perth australia and it was called quasar but because of trademark concerns when it came to the u.s they had to change it to qzar but it was in like the uk and it was in uh okay so this isn't just like a regional thing no this was like a huge huge thing uh and qzar kicked ass man it was like laser tag which there were laser tag places that existed uh all over there was uh i think in dallas what was it uh photon was the name of uh a place i think in dallas it was like the first major like laser tag establishment opened in 1984 um uh from this dude named george carter the third who saw star wars and was like

let's just do that uh but qzar was like this idea refined because you had teams and everybody had the vests and the blasters and the blasters had like ammo my experience with laser tag is it is always a room within a much larger arcade yes well no qzar was like its own it's just laser yeah and it was huge it was like this multi-story battlefield installation where there were like bases and outposts that you had to capture by going inside and like shooting specific discs. And if you got blasted,

you had to go and recharge your ammo back at your home base. Yeah, see. There were different game modes. It was like so much stuff. This is not an experience I had ever. It was so sick. It was like the thing that I would like, look, if we went to the beach

and I knew that QZAR was also in the future there, fuck the beach. How do I get indoors again? How do I get back to QZAR? So the history of laser tag is fairly interesting. It was sort of developed out of a combat training sort of program for the army called the MILES system. It's an acronym,

but I didn't look up what it stands for. So let's just say Major Intelligent Laser Execution System. Yeah, cool. Yeah, that sounds really cool. And so the technology kind of came out of that. It's not particularly sophisticated. It's just infrared technology that you might have in a remote control, as evidenced by the fact that if you had laser tag toys at home you could just use a remote control as a blaster that was something that i would do from time to time if i wanted to get tricky like oh i don't have a gun but what i do channel five um so the home toys uh photon the establishment i mentioned earlier the first sort of major laser tag establishment, released their own line of home toys in 1986. And nearly at the same time, a company called Worlds of Wonder released their trademarked lasers with a Z laser tag set. And they would both shut down.

Both companies would shut down within the span of the next couple years but the laser tag brand would go would bounce around all kinds of different companies uh i think right now i want to say no nerf has it right now uh and they're still making stuff from time to time but in the like late 90s there was like this swell of laser tag toys where you could get the dopest shit like we had a set of pistols with the vest that you could wear you could get the bazooka that would like launch in like a a different pattern you could set like i feel like there were like mine traps there was this whole set of toys uh and we would play constantly like you have to play at nighttime right like no because it seems like my experience with laser tag is that there's like some kind of you know like pointer like red dot

sight thing that helps you aim and you can't really see that in the daylight no it didn't really have that again it was essentially a pistol shaped television remote control that would just send out like an ir blast almost like a um uh well no not a light gun i think a light gun like the nintendo zapper was like a different so accuracy wasn't particularly important not the strong suit of this thing okay okay uh there was also like a target practice set there was all kinds of stuff we would mostly play indoors so your concerns about the sun interfering are not a concern of ours. When I think of children's toys, I usually think of a child being outdoors. And then I remember that was not exactly what you did per se.

No, not especially. I think we got a set for Christmas and for the next two years. We just played all the time. Our friends would get other toys like toys in the in the set and just bring them over and we could have like laser tag wars in the in the i was about to say backyard but that would be a falsehood uh obviously i have not played in a long time but here in austin there is a an establishment called blazer tag oh my gosh that was so fucking fun i think i've only been to it once or twice and whenever i've gone it was just once

maybe it was just once uh and we played and it was the most fun it's in the q's our family of just like there's uh objectives and like a bunch of different stuff multiple levels we all came out the sweatiest we'd ever i came out thinking my heart was about to fucking explode in my chest it was one of those things where i was having so much fun that i did not realize i was essentially full-blown sprinting through this place for like a half hour and then we got outside and i like could not breathe uh but it's still so fun i like laser tag a lot i like the idea of laser tag the idea of laser games it has always thrown me a little bit because the accuracy kind of eludes me like i i've never really been particularly good because you'll aim at something in those little arenas that's like 100 feet away. And it's like, I don't know, did I hit it?

Am I hitting it? You're more into the paintball scene, the airsoft scene. No, see, I hate that too. Yeah. I have nothing against laser tag i just i have no idea whether i'm good at it or not my instinct says no that i am not i believe the opposite i think you're good at everything you try to do well thank you sweetheart you're welcome hey can i steal you away yes except making the air horn noise that That's like the one, that's like the one skill that eludes you. Oh, you mean, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, bo says, to my beloved Amanda, you are the greatest and the center of my world. You make every day wonderful from your awesome attitude to your gorgeous smile. You are brave and courageous. Thank you for marrying me and making our wonderful babies. I love you so much, Dee. Wanted this one close to Mother's Day. Coming in pretty close, I think.

Coming in pretty close to that one. It's this Sunday, folks. Get a card. Get some... Get some chocolats. You know what I mean? Uh-huh. As you say this, I just assume that I am getting all of those things.

You got other things. Not chocolats. Because we do, again, have a four-pound bag. It would be irresponsible to bring more chocolate into this house. Can you read the second message? The second message is for future, parentheses, now present, Allison, from past Allison. Hey there, beautiful. Here's hoping you're making good choices and living your truth.

Remember that shining bright helps others see. So pass that confidence around like a blunt and let that vibe waft like thick cotton breathe deep we've got this i like that i've never i don't think i've ever heard an inspirational message be so sort of uh married to sort of weed uh language but i it excites me i like let that vibe waft let the vibe waft everybody's checking the vibes everybody's doing vibe checks these days don't check the vibe just let it waft hi i'm jackie cation hi i'm laurie kilmartin and we have a podcast called the jackie and laurie show who are you laurie kilmartin oh my god so much pressure uh i'm a stand-up i've been doing stand-up

since 1987 i'm a writer for conan I've been doing stand-up since 1987. I'm a writer for Conan. I've written a couple books, have a couple CDs out, have a special out. Who are you, Jackie? Well, I too am a stand-up comic since 1984, and I do the road like a maniac and don't have a cool writing job, but I have four albums out working on a new album. We talk about stand-up. We talk about all the different parts of standup comedy. So that's the Jackie and Lori show. And you should subscribe on maximum fun if you want to hear that. And I would encourage you not to. I need to hear your second thing. I need it. My second thing is very specific.

Okay. It is using google earth to visit places you used to live oh okay that is the most specific that is the most specific i don't i don't i imagine a lot of people haven't lived as many places as we have but uh real world travelers well there was that one season we spent in prague you remember you remember the wild flowers what did we do in prague oh we marched in the great rebellion and had the traditional food in prague which is spetzel okay cake spetzel cake yeah i'm sorry i've said it wrong. Special cake. Special cake.

There you go. In Prague, they make a special cake. What's in it? You're going to have to go to Prague to see. Like we have. Like we did. Like we have gone to Prague. And lived there for a season. As lovers.

Which season did we spend in Prague as lovers? Let's say it at the same time. One, two, three. Spring. Fall soon. Did we spin in Prague as lovers? Let's say it at the same time. One, two, three. Spring. Fall soon. Again, I haven't lived. I've lived in a total of three states.

And most of the places I lived, I lived for like a year in like an apartment complex or something. Right. But a lot of the places I've lived have developed significantly since i've lived there and so it is interesting to enter an address which i remember because i lived there and see how it looks oh that's a fun game right that's a fun game is trying to remember my addresses you don't remember your address i could probably okay i remember my address from when i lived in chicago i remember i think I remember all our addresses here in Austin. I do not remember my Cincinnati address. I should say that one of my Chicago addresses, I remember the street.

I don't remember the exact number. I can't remember, gun to my head, any other place I lived in Huntington except for my house that I grew up in. And I lived in like five different apartments in Huntington. I cannot remember a single one of them. I just so especially I would say, especially in Chicago, I have found this feature exciting. Yeah, I've done this before also. Yeah, with Google Earth, like it's satellite images. And a lot of times it's like street images. Yeah, street view. And so you especially in Chicago, where you walk around a lot, you can like walk through your old neighborhood and be like, oh, hey, that Walgreens is still there.

Yeah. But, oh, that Chipotle is not. Oh, no. What happened? It's shocking to me. There is an apartment complex I lived in when I was in Columbia, Missouri in college that looks exactly the same. And keep in mind, this is 15 years ago. So it's kind of like, oh, that must have the same owner

and they must definitely not have painted it ever. The place I lived in Roscoe Village has not changed because we actually visited there, I think, last year when we did a show in Chicago. It was some recent tour we did. We stopped in Chicago and I caught a train and like went walked through my old neighborhood because it was really nice outside and i wanted to see like what was different and it was just exactly the same roscoe village man it's uh you know it's we move we go things go a little slower

down here yeah see meanwhile my apartment in chicago um when i was a in graduate school has changed dramatically uh they've done a lot of development a lot of condos and so it was like difficult for me to find my bearings because what used to be like a you know a shopping plaza is now a huge like 10 story condo situation. Had that song stuck in my head. We were trying to figure out what like impressions we could do. And Rachel said I do a pretty good Joni Mitchell, which I don't. But I have had that song stuck in my head specifically actually the Vanessa Carlton version of it that she does with the counting crows leads adam durrett i don't think i know well maybe i do know this it was the version that most

people know it was the version i knew before i knew that jenny mitchell did it and there's a verse where adam durrett's comes in so fucking hard and he's like farmer farmer put away your ddt leave me words in my apples leave me the words and the bees he like fucking hits it so hard i don't remember how we started talking about that oh because i was talking about condos yeah sure yeah we went on a whole journey there anyway can i quickly tell you about google earth sure uh in 2005 is when it was launched uh google purchased keyhole inc which became niantic the google subsidiary responsible for pokemon go yeah yeah niantic made another game that was like the precursor to pokemon go whose name escapes me at the moment i didn't know that they did google earth as well though that's wild yeah

so they use um satellite and aerial imagery which is a partnership with nasa and national geographic and others uh google earth digitally stitches together billions of images taken by satellite and aerial photography. I guess when you open Google Earth, what you're looking at is a springtime in every area of the planet. Whoa. They call it, quote, pretty Earth. So they just used a composite all around the world of every area in springtime. That's wild. I did not know that. That's so cool.

Make it look extra lush, I guess. But even in like, but there's certain places like you think of like, I don't know, like Nagano, like places where like the winter is like the pretty, the pretty, the pretty area, the pretty times. Snowshoe in West Virginiaia i think probably looks better with snow on it well it when you zoom in right like yeah that's the thing like obviously even at street view like you zoom in and it may be like christmas time depending on when they did yeah that image capture uh google earth has also been used for a lot of productive purposes. This is something I didn't know about.

There was someone named Saru Briarley, who was an orphan from India who was raised in Australia. This person was able to reconnect with their birth family after being separated for 25 years by following geographic markers on Google Earth. These experiences were detailed in a book called A Long Way Home, which was turned into a movie called Lion in 2016. Sounds fascinating, right? Like if you think about it, if you can approximately remember where you grew up, then you can kind of identify a lot of landmarks and kind of relocate yourself where you were. There's also been positive results for tracking climate change through this product. They've been able to, in Indonesia, a conservation group was able to view

illegally fished and overfished areas of the coast. They've also been able to identify uncharted, untouched rainforest in Mozambique. You've been able to do a lot of modeling because you can track it over time. You can see the impacts over years. This is something I didn't know about. Google apparently partnered with Sesame Street and Carmen Sandiego to develop interactive games. Each region of the world has its own unique Sesame Street characters.

And you can do guided tours of different regions led by led by the associated character i'll say the most important contribution that google earth has given the planet is how john boys uses it in all of his videos for uh for sb nation like uh the pretty good series in 17,776 uh If you have not read that or watched that, he makes videos. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, I've shown you John Boyd's stuff before. He did Breaking Madden,

which is like the series where he fucks up seasons of Madden, the video game, but he also uses it in all of his videos as a visual aid for all kinds of different cool things. It's inspiring. As somebody who likes to, or used to like to make videos without learning really high touch techniques,

seeing Google Earth be used to really enhance a video is exciting to me. Yeah, so I think this is really nice. I really enjoy it. It's fun to kind of see when the photo was taken and be like, oh, hey, that's my car. Yeah. But they do protect your privacy to a certain degree so it's not like you're able to read license plates

so nobody nobody steal my car please don't steal rachel's car i can't believe we have to keep asking can i tell you about my second thing yes free restaurant bread when the bread that the restaurant's free whoa when you're at the restaurant and you get free bread especially when you don't expect it right especially when you're at like a place like a non-chain restaurant and you're just sitting there and you've ordered your fancy entree and you're excited about that and then just like bread shows up and you're like fuck yeah isn't it funny when you don't know that they give you free bread and you ask for bread and then the waiter is like oh bread's coming don't you worry fucking idiot yeah you can pay for the bread stupid uh i love bread

bread is good uh i think it ranks up there with some of the best foods on the planet and restaurants are just giving this stuff away when people complain they're like oh you're gonna fill up on bread and i'm like yeah good yes i am i am that's the idea and then i get leftovers this is a win-win scenario for me is i will fill up i have had several times where i've felt like filled up so much on bread and maybe a couple appies off a platter that then the entree shows up and i'm like just box it i ain't touching it that's a tomorrow meal uh you talk about like a texas roadhouse where they roll up and they got them them big rolls with the honey butter

let's talk about olive garden where they roll up and you do have infinite breadsticks yeah infinite breadsticks that you can use for dippins in your sauce. Olive Garden is built around the philosophy that they are going to give you too much food. Let's talk about Nasty Olive Garden, which is what I call fazolis, where they roll up with their little spicy bastards that you can have infinite of, and they just walk around and give it to you at the restaurant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good.

Let's talk about Red Lobster. Let's talk about those Cheddar Bay Biscuits. bay biscuits you've never been to red lobster before have you we've talked about this now i've had this is unthinkable to me i've had a biscuit i from there because you can easily recreate them as i understand it yeah i mean you can come close you can come within striking distance maybe but there's nothing like the genuine cheddar bay cheddar bay is where these biscuits hail from uh it's off the amalfi coast uh i i we gotta go to red lobster we gotta go i gotta get you to red lobster during like fucking lobster fest or shrimp fest one time i watched my brothers compete in a shrimp eating contest during Shrimp Fest

at a Red Lobster. It's the worst thing I've ever, it's the worst thing I ever saw. It's the worst thing I ever saw. They kept track by the tails that they left, sort of. Yeah, man. It was grisly. Did you not participate?

Fuck no, I didn't participate. Good for you, Griffin. Did I participate? I don't think i don't think i participated um texas here in texas like most barbecue restaurants like they will give you fresh baked bread that is a big thing at county line which is a chain here in austin yeah county line is a place here in austin they give you like a whole loaf of bread it will give you a whole loaf of freshly baked white bread that is so good and they have little cups of butter that you can spread on it.

And it's just so dope. And it goes with barbecue so swimmingly. Anytime you get a wet food, like a barbecue or a pasta, and then you get the bread for dip rooms. You came in like Adam Duritz on that wet food line. Give me the dip rooms, please. So I was curious why it's a common thing and it's not like especially surprising bread is kind of a edible symbol for hospitality uh hence like breaking bread so its origins are sort of based in that but also like not a surprise at like taverns back in

the olden days things like uh meat or certain types of produce or cheese or whatever were the more difficult kinds of food to come across uh as opposed to bread which was fairly easy you just get some grain and millet and whatever uh so bread was cheaper and more plentiful so there really was this concept of we're gonna fill people the hell up on bread so that we can serve them less of the good stuff. So we can bring them one apple. And you may have had the thought of like, boy, how can they afford to just give away the free bread? I mean, philosophically, the price is then elevated on every other object.

It's tied into the price of other things. Yeah. I didn't realize that. I've never, maybe I shouldn't. You know that restaurant i've been planning on opening uh-huh maybe i shouldn't off the coast of cheddar bay off the coast of cheddar bay in the manchego coast manchego peninsula i wonder if you didn't ask for bread if you said i'm not going to be eating bread could you discount three cents from from the price of all

of my things uh yeah so like it it became so commonplace that it became sort of unnatural for people to ask customers to pay for bread and so like that's that is why it is sort of a thing uh at restaurants but man i ain't complaining i ain't complaining god i love free restaurant bread fucking spaghetti factory when they bring you that uh the focaccia bread with like and then you have a little little bowl with uh olive oil and cracked pepper inside of it oh man that's good yeah what's your favorite bread i feel like this is a one-sided conversation i know you love free restaurant bread you know i've been trying to think about free restaurant bread. Sometimes they bring you like a basket and it has different types of bread in it.

Yeah. That's fun. Sometimes it has like those crispy cracker like breadstick thing. Get those the fuck out of there. That's not really. That's a different thing. Bring me a cracker basket and then you can put that in there. Give me some Chex Mix.

Anyway, do you want to hear what our friends at home are talking about? Yes, please. A lot of people wrote in about free restaurant bread just like everyone so like every week people write in a hundred times about free restaurant bread and i have to just sort of i have a filter for it now in our inbox which is what wonderful pod at gmail.com hit us up if you want to submit or is it wonderful podcast at gmail.com oh no one's quite sure, are they? Yeah, it is wonderfulpodcast at gmail.com. So if you have submissions, send it there. Just a sentence, please. Just one sentence,

please. Like this one sentence that we got from, okay, actually this may be multiple sentences. Michelle says, something I think is wonderful is chip clips. My husband and I recently bought a pack of rainbow magnetic ones and we've been using them liberally cereal bags frozen veggies and occasionally even chips they're so satisfying to use and when at rest they decorate the side of our fridge with a cheerful pop of color oh that is nice we need to get us some chip clips we do what i use is i use rubber bands off of other packages and the rubber band isn't always a great sealer because it'll it'll scrunch up your your chips it's not careful with that kevin says my small wonder is that extra little bonus sip you get when you're filling up a to-go cup at the soda station it's when you have to sip down the

overflow but then get it to fill back up before capping it and leaving the restaurant the world's least consequential but most thrilling crime i do like that i think that's allowed i don't think anyone's gonna prosecute you on that one yeah um man i'm just the first place that i remember there being like a self-serve soda station and that's a mouthful in huntington was the fazoles that we would go to after church sometimes and we would do the like disgusting mixture of different soda flavors oh my gosh you really painted a picture of the McElroy family in this episode I have haven't I uh hey thanks to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song money won't pay you can 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. A lot of comedy and culture shows. They just recently announced that Bubble

is being optioned for film usage, which is exciting. So if you haven't listened to Bubble, I would recommend you check that out. It's a good show. There's another new show on the network, Triple Click. It's a gaming podcast that's got some good folks in it. Kirk Hamilton, Maddie Myers, Jason Schreier, former Kotaku folk. I'm very, very excited that it's a part of the network.

They're all good. Good beans. That's a thing that people say sometimes. Yeah, sure. And let's just sort of like send them off with just like, how's your fiber intake? Oh, yeah. This is a good. And let's talk about this yeah please so hip and so trendy to be like your breathing's not right are you drinking enough

water let's let's have a moment of contemplation for your mind and it's like that's all good and you do got to do that stuff how's your fiber do you want to tell them your fiber tip i eat fiber gummies but then we ran out, and I don't necessarily feel like exposing myself to the outside world for fiber gummies. So I was looking in our coffee cabinet, and what's there in the back? A big orange tub of Metamucil?

You know I'm going to dip into that. Hello. Some people get their fiber from a leafy vegetable. Not me. Griffin says, no, thank you. I see a tub of mousse in the coffee cabinet. I say, hello, gorgeous. How can it be orange flavored?

That's what I want. Yeah. Without having to eat an orange. Bye. Hey!