Wonderful! - Wonderful! 136: Mancala on My Mind

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Rachel's favorite childhood development! Griffin's favorite ancient game! Rachel's favorite revolutionary poem! Griffin's favorite imaginative song!Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFor more info on The Okra Project: https://www.theokraproject.com/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Welcome back, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Wonderful. This is a show where we talk about things that are wonderful. The name is what we do. And I think that that's important for a podcast, don't you? I do. You know, I wanted to, I came up with kind of a way to describe what it is like trying to do this podcast right now. Yeah, please.

So one could argue that the times in which we are living are not wonderful. I think that you could make a case for that, yes. But to give the example of, say, a shit sandwich can still be made on great bread that is something babe so you've painted an incredible picture there for us perhaps what we are doing is describing the great bread on which the shit sandwich is made yeah to there's another metaphor where the shit sandwich has also always been there and now everybody's looking and now the shit sandwich smells so bad that we're noticing the bread and everybody's looking at it and saying like what a

terrible terrible shit sandwich uh yeah it's uh obviously so yeah we did not have an episode last week uh it did not feel uh appropriate i think especially i would say this show where tonally we try to uh focus on the good and that is not the best thing to do right now. Like straight up just trying to shy away from the horrific truth of the moment and the reality that we live in is not what any of us should be doing.

We hope you enjoyed Fanti. I am like fully in love with that show now. I've been listening to it. I don't really listen to podcasts anymore, especially during this quarantine time where, you know, I don't have my commute or anything like that, but I have been diving into the backlogs.

And again, a huge, huge thanks to Jarrett and Travelle for letting us do a feed drop of that episode. Please go subscribe to that show if you haven't already. But I don't know what else really there is to say. We hope that you all are staying safe and staying involved and staying sort of... I know it's been a while since all of this started, since the protests sort of hit critical mass but it's it's uh i have felt myself

like wanting to let up off the gas already and i think that that is an instinct that yeah you know you gotta kind of push against yeah um so yeah it's been it has been like also a challenging but very very like educational time and that is always like a thing i feel good about is when i feel like um you know there are so many resources out there um available to people that want to learn more and it has been really great to see kind of the wealth of information that you can track down if you're just interested in looking yes we will keep putting uh links to that in the in the episcode descriptions for the time being um i think also that we're doing for our shows uh here on on wonderful our ad revenue we are going to be donating uh to a

cause that is uh involved in the moment that we are all in right now uh this this week we're going to be donating our ad revenue to the okra project which is an incredible thing if you've not uh heard about it uh fans i recommended it last week and since finding out about it it's it's just such a a great project they uh it's a collective that is working to feed black trans people uh healthy and like culturally sort of uh specific relevant meals uh and and provide other resources to to black trans people so uh we will again provide links to uh them and where you can support the okra project uh in the episode description but um yeah it's uh it just hang in there just uh stay again stay safe and stay active and um and

we're gonna keep doing this and we hope you'll keep listening. Yeah. Do you have any small wonders? Now, I haven't listened to the whole album yet, but I have been listening to some of those new Run the Jewels tracks. Ooh. And, whew, fire. I have not listened to that. I just saw that they have a new album out and that it is getting like critical sort of like perfect reviews across the board.

Just as the kids might say, hot fire. Is that what the kids? I don't think the kids might say hot fire is that what the kid i don't think the kids are even saying that anymore i'm always like 8 to 12 months behind yeah i just usually boot up tiktok and then like if i hear a word i don't understand i'm like that's the that one is the cool one now um i'm going to say uh there is a game for switch called clubhouse games that is a sequel to a nintendo ds game that i also loved and it is just a collection of 51 games mostly board and card games you have your solitaire both the spider and other main solitaire mode but they sell they got free sell

i don't think they have free sell on there no but they have uh basically like uno on there uh they have all the like uh classic global board games like chess and uh other stuff uh and there's certain games on there that like i have known about for a long time that i just never really like learned about like shogi which is like uh uh japan's sort of chess-like strategy board game. I saw you doing that Mahjong the other day too. Yeah, Ritchie Mahjong is like fucking wild and incredibly complicated. But like, you know, I've known about Mahjong for a while

and never really learned how to play it. And so it's been like cool to finally like invest in that. I see Griffin with that switch and I'm like, hey, what are your turnip prices? And he's like, oh, I'm not on that right now but i can tell you about the the hand i'm working for i'm one from tin pie right now so i'm very excited about that development yeah it's incredible if you have a switch get it it is like uh an incredible value um you go first this week oh great tell me what you got so my first thing is language development in children okay as a one my wonderful

thing um i became kind of fascinated with this when henry started using the word very in a very unusual way yeah but like it doesn't take a whole lot of thinking to like figure out why he uses it in the way it's so interesting can you explain like how he uses very uh so a lot of times he will ask for something and he wants to express the urgency of this request or he uh wants to really you know put a lot of uh put a lot of energy behind it. And he will say like, I very like that show. I very want that show. Uh, I very don't want to sleep right now. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, he uses it as a, like a catch all modifier for like, it covers really, and like all kinds of other words. Yeah. Uh. And that kind of reminded me.

So I took like a child psychology class in college that talked a little bit about language development. Yeah. And it's kind of fascinating. I think a lot of times as a parent, you think that a child is just kind of mirroring what they hear. You know, and then when you hear them construct kind of a sentence that you know for a fact they have never right it becomes kind of interesting to think about like how they're how they're doing this so i did a little a little research a lot of this starts with chomsky oh you're familiar with chomps fucking not even a little bit oh really the name is uh familiar

familiar yes uh so chomsky talked a lot about language development and he specifically talked about the nativist theory which is that human beings have this language acquisition device just built into them okay so there's there's this idea that instead of language being something that you know you could teach a person like a robot right uh there's this idea that we have this device in us that kind of gives us the ability to construct sentences like a like a yak back that's in our mind but not a yak back because you are using rules to create brand new thoughts and ideas. More like a talk boy where Kevin McCallister was his name.

Kevin McCallister could take clips of his terrible uncle yelling. Not even that. No, but he could remix them into different clips. Yeah, but there's not even remixing. It's brand new. Oh, man, you're right. Both of those things i said were wrong so it's more like a speak and spell where there is no recorded element okay you are instead punching you were so

desperate to find a toy a child's toy of some kind um there's been a lot of studying this uh over time there there was this idea of uh kind of empirical, against the nativist theory, this empirical thing of, you know, it's not like we have any kind of innate ability as humans. We just, over time, can put together these phrases, and we're not like blessed with any kind of hardwiring. But I think as time goes on, more and more people say like, no, you've got it in you. Right. Steven Pinker is another kind of leader linguist in this field. He had a book in 1994 that came out called The Language Instinct.

Steven Pinker is kind of like the rock star of linguistics. Oh, you're telling me? I'm a fucking full-blown Pinkerhead, dude. What are you talking about? Trying to talk to me about Steven Pinkerhead. Like, I don't know about his theory of linguistics. Holy shit. I saw him play.

Who opened? Who opened for him? Oh, Chomsky. Chomsky? Chlumsky? Anna Chlumsky. From My Girl and Veep? Oh, I thought that was like the

tribute band for chomsky anna chlumsky is from veep and my girl and also does the is the tribute band for chomsky yeah she fucking brought the house down dude yeah her on that speaking spell yeah uh so in the language instinct stephen pinker said, language is not a cultural artifact that we learn in the way we learn how to tell time or how the federal government works. It is a distinct piece of our biological makeup. And the test he did was the wug test. Wug? Wug. So wug is a made up thing. He totally made it up. He put a picture of like a bird on a chalkboard and said, this is a wug. And then turned to kids and said okay now there's two of them there are two and kids would just naturally say wugs which showed

that like this isn't something they are parroting or memorized this is something that they have learned how to construct based on this kind of understanding of how plural yeah sure yeah uh and so this kind of explains why henry will say i very want that you know like he understands the very is is something that expresses you know like uh esteem like increased desire right and he knows that he has that and so he's just throwing that into a sentence because he kind of understands innately how sentences work. And we chide him every – folks, don't worry about it. We chide him every time he gets it wrong.

It's very important that he doesn't – no, it's just kidding. It's the fucking cutest thing in the whole world. Obviously, development varies per kid. And there's no evidence to suggest that a kid that develops early is going to be any more advanced in the long run than another kid. But by their second birthday, most kids have 1,000 to 2,000 words. So there is what they call like a language explosion that happens that is super great for people like us who just want desperately to communicate with our child in an effective way. Yeah, between birth and adulthood, children learn about 60, words on average amounting

to eight to ten words a day that's so many words man i know it's just it's it's a really cool time uh especially since we're spending a lot of a lot of time with our child right to just kind of see day to day um kind of how he is is putting sentences together that just totally surprise us and are delightful it is uh incredible it's a as uh as much as he is like leaning on the same words to form uh sentences like that in a way that is like very very charming he also has like stepped up his adjective game in a way that is like like hearing him say that he is very disappointed for the first time instead of just like i'm sad is like whoa holy shit yeah he started to say things are disgusting and adorable yeah it's just like it's so good it's incredible um can i do my

first thing yes i almost i almost stepped on my first thing to doing my mini segment because my first thing is a game that was included in Clubhouse Games. And I have been playing so much of Backgammon. Backgammon. Or as some people call it, Backgammon. I love Backgammon a lot. and it occupies sort of the same space as like chess or, you know, any of the like classic ancient sort of board games. The name of the game makes it impossible for me to remember what the game is.

Backgammon? Yes. When you say it, I cannot remember what it is because nothing about the name of it gives me a clue. That is true. I will give you, well, I mean, the same could be said chess or true checkers works perfectly actually because checkers is takes place on a checkerboard well i guess it's only called a checkerboard pattern because it is a checker by the way checkers is not a very good game no it's not i i've been i've been playing a lot of

this clubhouse games game trying to like beat the ai on the hardest difficulty checkers against a high-end opponent when you are also trying to play a high-end game of checkers sucks shit because it always comes down to like you have two kinged pieces and they have two king pieces and you're just like jumping all around the board for an hour and a half until you realize it's all a futile effort backgammon you don't get that what is it again backgammon is the game you play where you have two dice and you have 15 checkers on a board with the 24 sort of like spike spaces that you try to land on. And you are racing essentially to get all of your checkers off the board. You are moving in a horseshoe pattern sort of around this board while the opponent is racing in the opposite direction.

So you roll these two dice and the numbers that come up on the dice determine like how many spaces you can move any of your checkers that you have on the board. So if you roll a five and a three, you can move one checker five spaces. Yeah, okay. And another piece three spaces or you can move one piece, you know, five and then three. And so you do that in an attempt to like get all the way across the board. And once you get all your pieces like in the home stretch, then you can clear them off or bear off all of your checkers first person to do that wins um if you have if you land on a space where an opponent has just a single checker you capture it and you

knock it basically all the way back to the start right uh but you can protect against that by having two checkers on a space at a given time if you have two checkers on a space your opponent can't land on that space okay okay so all of this is familiar it kind of sounds like mancala but it kind of mancala is like its own sort of thing where there's always kind of a legal move and you all are trying to capture like landing your stone in a space opposite uh a space that your opponent has uh seeds in but um this this game this game is more about sort of like building walls that your opponent can't move past. So if you capture one of your opponent's pieces

and before they can move any of their other pieces, they have to get that one back on the board. Okay. You can also make it where, you know, you have six spaces in a row where you have two pieces, right? And so you have built literally an impenetrable wall where there is no legal move

for them to get back on the board and you can cause them to what's called dance, which means they can't move. And then it's just like you get free move after free move after free move after free move. So what I love about the game is there are dice involved, right? So there is a heavy luck component to it.

And there have been all kinds of debates like across the world across the the centuries about whether or not it is like strictly a gambling game there are backgammon clubs where people play backgammon for money typically over multiple rounds and uh much in the same way that like pinball was legislated as is this a game of chance and then you know you get like a pinball expert in there to show you like actually no it's a game of chance and then you know you get like a pinball expert in there to show you like actually no it's a game of skill uh there have been you know literal court cases about like whether or not this is just a game of luck and gambling uh when really like there is of course

an extremely heavy strategic component to it uh that is really really satisfying i find that blend of the two things like really really entertaining uh i think that it is a great just kind of like chill uh two-player board game that there aren't like a lot of it is not sort of mentally taxing in the way that a chess is or a scrabble is see i like a game that does have a little bit of luck because it is an equalizer a little bit it is yeah i i feel like in this way it sort of occupies the dominoes space where dominoes is a game of you know having to uh build good chains and try to end with multiples of five if you're playing with that rule set but mostly it's just like i sure hope that i have a move that i can play when my turn comes up again right uh backgammon is that as well. So I did not know how Backgammon was played

until I moved to Austin and we had some friends who had a Backgammon set and just like we'd be in their backyard drinking, just like hanging out and you can like play Backgammon while talking to people and like doing other stuff. And it's a two-person game. And it's a two-person game.

That's so important. There's two of us we could be playing backgammon right now we could be playing backgammon we're wasting time when we're not playing backgammon uh backgammon is an ancient game it's one of the oldest games there was uh there were uh sort of there's there's evidence of a backgammon like a game being played in like ancient mesopotamia like,000 years ago. They found sets of dice and checkers and a patterned board game. I'd never heard of the Royal Game of Ur, which was a board game that was discovered in an ancient Babylonian game of acts as a precursor to virtually all board games that uh we know of now

uh and it is like batgammon has spread across a bunch of different countries in the middle east uh where it has different names and different variations on the rule sets but it is like an incredibly popular game in uh coffee houses and other sort of lounge type settings uh in you know i i have a list of uh in uh iraq lebanon egypt syria jordan and just like a bunch of other middle eastern countries um and i think that that's really fucking cool that like it has it has these ancient roots that have allowed it to sort of like propagate across the the known world uh and i think that just speaks to how fucking good a game it is oh yeah and also that you could like make it you know like it's like a kind of game that you could like pick up you know like

coins and buttons and like a piece of paper and john lock do it and lost like there's a whole thing about get back gaming that he does in loss because they like make a set or something like that i feel like yes that or mancala no i think it was i i think you are you have mancala i really do i'm insisting upon it mancala is a great game i really like it uh i this is also kind of like a weird like thing to state but like i think backgammon feels good there is a tactile like taking the dice and rolling them inside the box and then like picking up like the smooth checkers and like moving them around the the the board like there is a tactile sort of thing for you you're big on that with like video game controllers and stuff too. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate it is important to you and phones and like any kind of phones.

I feel like everybody, like a phone is the thing you interface with, like literally constantly. And so the, I just like, uh, uh, you know,

you play a chess set with, that's what has like these hollow cheap plastic pieces. Then you play one that has like good heavy wood pieces. And that feels good. Like, I don't know. I just, I like that. I like that a lot.

Backgammon. It's fun as hell. It's a good game that I feel like I did not know about for much of my life until I started playing it with our friends here in Austin. And then it became one of my favorite games. And this video game, Clubhouse Games, has reminded me of that. So Backgammon, check it out. get involved with the backgammon scene it's like yugioh but with far fewer dragons there's no dragons i feel like i should say that because now i don't want to get

emails from people like i was told there would be dragons okay can i steal you away please do got a couple of jumbotrons here and uh these are messages from our listeners to other listeners and sometimes themselves this is a message for chloe and it's from ben who says i had gotten this message to celebrate our previously impending nuptials but now i just want this to be for you i know it's been a really hard time and i hope by now things have gotten easier no matter what happens i'm so grateful for you i'll love you always thank you for everything let me know if you want your symbolic ring substitute item uh i mean what are we talking like a sword yeah if we hadn't exchanged rings sword is what i'd want like a cool like a but not like some i don't want you to go to fucking some hobby shop and get me like you want me to break into a museum and take no not even

that i want you to make me a sword oh and i and i don't want you to i know you just work in a half asset and like get some boxes some cardboard boxes i would i would say pipe cleaners no i want you to like take some smithing lessons you know what i mean like i want i want there to be some forging involved i want there to be forging and tempering what would you want uh i mean mancala a mancala set i could make you a mancala set you could and i would like that okay all right uh this next message is for sarah it is from mitch hi my sweetie bear i love you and you're super wonderful i can't wait to marry you unless we already are which in that case hooray i love you so much a lot of weddings a lot of marriage a lot

of marriage talk it is the season i suppose is it i think people say june is the marriage season yeah that's when people have weddings because it's like reliably um hot and people like that well son you know you don't have to worry about rain as much. I guess. I mean, we had a 23 degree Fahrenheit wedding. And I can't imagine doing it any other way. No, I can. No, man. It's great how all of our guests look like Jack at the end of The Shining. Just sort of icicles hanging off of their various.

Did we just do that to save money? Is that why we did it? I think we were urgent. We had some urgency. We wanted to do it. Well, we did invite Olaf from Frozen and we didn't want him to die, did we? I'm sorry that I'm so conscientious. You're saying that, but in Frozen 2, he has permafrost.

So he is able to transport in any weather. So it's not as much of an issue. I'm such a dumb asshole. Hey, I'm Jared Hill, co-host of the brand new Maximum Fun Podcast, Fanta. And I'm Travelle Anderson. I'm the other more fabulous co-host, and the reason you really should be tuning in. I feel the nausea

rising. To be Fanta is to be a big fan of something, but also have some challenging or anti-feelings toward it. Kind of like Kanye. We're all fans of Kanye. He's a musical genius, but like, you know. He thinks slavery is a choice.

Or like the real housewives of Atlanta. Like, I love the drama, but do I want to see black women fighting each other on screen? We're tackling all of those complex and complicated conversations about the people, places, and things that we love.

Even though they may not love us back. Fan Time. Maximum fun. Podcast. Meow. Hey, can I do my second thing? I want you to. My second thing is a soothing, relaxing trip to the Poetry Corner.

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Baby, I'm here in the poetry college. Don't sell it. Scramble eggs. Tom Waits is here. That's not what Tom Waits sounds like. What do you think Tom Waits is here. That's not what Tom Waits sounds like. What do you think Tom Waits sounds like? It was until you got real quiet.

Tom Waits' voice is a little bit more abrasive than that. Hey, baby, I hear the blues are calling. That's better. It's a little bit, but it's still not very good, though. They put a side up in our town. I think I just try to make him sound like a scary monster. Like that's all my brain is like, oh, time to do the Tom Waits impression. Let's click the scary monster lever all the way up to full.

I love your impressions. I don't know what I would do without them. I mean, you'd still probably be okay. Hey, can I tell you about the poet, though? I am talking about Jacqueline Woodson. Ooh. This is a poet that I did not grow up learning about. Okay.

But I think should be learned about. Okay. So this is somebody who is currently writing today, written a lot of books, not just poetry. The book that I'm talking about, though, is Brown Girl Dreaming. And it is a autobiography of sorts, but it is done entirely in verse. Holy shit. Cool. It is an incredible experience to read front to back. It took me about two days to read it. And she tells her story, and she's got kind of a unique one. She was born in Ohio,

Kind of a unique one. She was born in Ohio, but her mother was from South Carolina and wanted the family to move back there. So for much of her childhood, she lived in South Carolina, and this is during the 60s and 70s. So she's talking about her experience as a child that is black during that time period. And it's really incredible she won a lot of awards for it it was awarded the national book award for young people's literature the coretta scott king book award and the naacp image award uh it is incredible um and she in 2015 began a two-year term as the young people's poet laureate oh so she's written a lot of children's books uh this is kind of more in the adolescent territory uh she's also written

some adult novels um she's just incredible and when i say adult novels i don't mean like erotica uh so i wanted to read one of her poems. Please, please. Oh, is that a signed copy? Yeah, so my dad got this for me years ago. He's big on the signed copies. He really, really is. For me, it's, I mean, it's nice. It's cool.

I don't display it per se. Yeah. But it is a very good book and I'm glad to have it. Yeah. I love how many bookmarks you have in there. I bookmarked all my fave poems. You have like seven bookmarks in there. So this poem is called The Revolution. Don't wait for your school to teach you, my uncle says about the revolution. It is happening in the streets. He's been out of jail for more than a year now and his hair is an afro again, gently moving in the wind as we head to the

park, him holding tight to my hand even when we're not crossing Knickerbocker Avenue, even now when I'm too old for hand-holding and the like. The revolution is when Shirley Chisholm ran for president and the rest of the world tried to imagine a black woman in the White House. When I hear the word revolution, I think of the carousel with all those beautiful horses going around, as though they'll never stop. And me choosing the purple one each time, climbing up onto it and reaching for the golden ring as soft music plays. The revolution is always going to be happening. I want to write this down, that the revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere.

And maybe for a short time, we're a part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over. We walk slow toward the park where I can already see the big swings empty and waiting for me. And after I write it down, maybe I'll end it this way. My name is Jacqueline Woodson, and I am ready for the ride. That's so fucking good. It gives me chills every time I write it down, maybe I'll end it this way. My name is Jacqueline Woodson, and I am ready for the ride. That's so fucking good. It gives me chills every time I read it. She is really incredible at writing in that voice of a young person.

Yeah. Which I think is why it's so appropriate that she was the Young People's Poet Laureate. I imagine that's like a really tricky needle to thread. Yes. Yes, because you don't want to be too juvenile um but you also want to um respect yeah respect that time period yeah sure there's there's value in it um she gave an interview to npr uh and said quote i'm writing about adolescence for adolescents. And I think the main difference is when you're writing to a particular age group, especially a younger age group, the writing can't be as implicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the adult experience from which to look back. So you're in the moment of being an adolescent. And the immediacy and the

urgency is very much on the page, because that's what it feels like to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so big, so traumatic, and all of that has to be in place for them. That's really remarkable. I've never thought about writing for young people in that way. I've never thought about the voice that you have to use whenever you're writing for young people. Yeah. to use whenever you're writing for young people. Yeah.

I just like that poem in particular starts in a very kind of nostalgic way and then becomes so big with this idea of this carousel. And I just love it. I really would recommend more than a book of poetry where you can pick poems here and there like I just did. I would really recommend reading the entire book. It's called Brown Girl Dreaming. And you go through her childhood all the way into adulthood. And it's just so well done. That's a hot rec from Rachel.

R-E-C-C, not W-R-E. Get there. Okay. Can I do my second thing? Yeah. My second thing is a song that I've had stuck in my head for about a week. And I must have been like whistling it or something recently because I heard you like humming it yesterday. And it like weirded me out.

If it wasn't that, it's pure imagination. Yes. I think you must have been doing it it freaked me the fuck out because like i prepped this segment and then like a half hour later you came downstairs and you were like well what the fuck just happened i realized as i was doing it this is a song that griffin normally hums so so it must be must have been like a recent yeah i mean i can i you do this a lot it is it may be pound for pound like the prettiest song ever uh i uh i'm bringing it up because it showed up in my uh spotify like weekly thing but it was just like a guitar uh like a jazz guitar cover

like a very very simple one and it made me realize just like the melody of this song is so like incredible uh it is i'm assuming everybody has heard it it is from uh willy wonka and the chocolate factory and features a like incredible performance from gene wilder who like yeah he's got pipes he does have pipes and i love that he uh is like who was cast in this film to like sit in this musical to sing it because he did like he has a nice voice, but he is not like a. So some of the other people who are considered for the role of Willy Wonka is Fred Astaire, Joel Grey and Peter Sellers like begged Roald Dahl to be considered for the role. But Gene Wilder came in and like read two lines and they're like, yep. I can't imagine anybody else doing it there's such i mean gene wilder was is like historically just like a real real big comedy presence but there's such a like sensitivity to the way he does this role that is just so charming uh i i get i get this okay gene wilder

and particularly like willie wonka in the chocolate factory makes me emotional in a way i don't really understand yeah that's that's fair to say i don't know if that's true for everybody but like for for me like i get a little bit there is a sweetness to uh to to his performance in this movie that is like truly sort of gut-wrenching um and the song itself is like a masterfully sort of written song because it kind of perfectly encapsulates the entire vibe of this movie which is like uh has a vibe that is so unto its own uh and to have it all kind of like captured in this one sort of wonderful uh mysterious comforting maybe even just like a little bit ominous song is like, it is a just, it's a masterpiece.

I'm going to play a little bit of it because I know people have heard it before, but couldn't do you wrong to hear it again. We'll begin with a spin Traveling in the world of my creation. What we'll see will defy explanation. To break it down, like the lyrics are gorgeous. I think it is timeless in a way, like on par with like the fucking ABCs,

like it is on that level. But the bridge of if you want to view Paradise, simply look around and view it. Anything you want to do it, want to change the world, there's nothing to it. Like you can't beat that. So fucking good.

And so like meaningful. And like, obviously it ties into the themes of the film, but also sort of like transcends them just beautifully. But the melody of the song is like, what really, really wins me over that. The,

just hearing the first sort of three notes, the first three chimes, the boom, boom, boom, no matter what context they are in i remember there was a trailer for ready player one which is not my favorite uh film but like it had a uh like a orchestral sort of reimagining of pure imagination to like play into the oh there's this huge virtual

world where imagination is blah blah blah blah blah and i was like so not sold on it but then i hear that i'm like oh here we fucking go here comes the waterworks um that scene also uh that the the song is over is like so fucking good and so i want an edible room that's the edible room scene with the chocolate river where they're like walking around they've just come out of like the little hallway and uh you know there have been strange things and everybody is all of a sudden like they there's your introduction to the to the uh to the factory is so disarming because it's like you know sign this waiver that says if you die it's fine and then like here's this weird elevator and oh no we're all getting shrunk isn't that weird anyway here's a huge beautiful room that you can eat anything in like it is such like whiplash and then you have this like gorgeous

song so like thematically that is staggering but also as a child watching this scene seeing them like pick up the little flower and then like drink the tea out of it and then take a bite out of it like it is so magical and inventive and lovely and then augustus goop has to fuck it all up augustus gloop is it gloop or goop gloop i think yes has to fucking ruin it i think if he hadn't fallen in the river they would have just like chilled in that room for like the rest of the movie and everything would have been fine and there wouldn't be so many like fucking child fatalities and instead we all just could have had a chill time in this incredible edible room uh this song has been covered approximately a billion times because it is you know gorgeous and um just a just a complete classic uh a lot of jazz artists

have covered it and i didn't realize this it's because it uses like a lot of jazz chords, a lot of like wild 11ths and stuff like that that you don't typically see in a non-jazz song construction. I love a jazz guitar. My uncle Chris plays jazz guitar so beautifully. And I always love listening to his performances. I think that's why this like version that I heard on Spotify like really, really got me. performances i think that's why this like version that i heard on spotify like really really got me um the it is in the the like chill hop lo-fi genre is also obsessed with this song uh so like a lot

of that uh will show up in the like playlist that i listen to from time to time fiona apple also i saw you go i saw you read it for your phone. Like, didn't, didn't my girl, you know what she did? Do you, do you remember what she did the song for? No. She did it for a Chipotle commercial. Which I always thought was so funny. Like it was the, the, it was the short from, oh God, what's the name? There's a studio that does that like stop motion animation. I feel terrible that I can't remember.

No, I'm not going to be able to get it. Somebody is for sure going to be able to correct me in the comments or on the facebook page or whatever very quickly but it was a chipotle commercial about a scarecrow yeah it's a beautiful commercial it's a it's one of the better it's one of the more beautiful chipotle commercials i will give them that it's certainly more beautiful than the ones where it's like come on in we won't give you horrible horrible uh you know e-coli anymore with our lettuce or whatever the fuck i think it's probably more better than the like we won't give you diarrhea commercials for sure for sure for sure did you say more better honey i did i think i'm are you henry i'm henry again um uh but like

i feel like fiona was attracted to this song because it is a little creepy like you can like take it in a creepy direction uh the my favorite version of this song outside of the original gene wilder version is the lou rawls version because it's just straight down the middle like it is it there is very little sort of rearranging that is going on except it is just like soulful as fuck uh and so i want to play Lou Rawls' version of Pure Imagination to take us out. Just because I love it so much. I love this song. I love how many beautiful versions.

It's a hard song to mess up and an easy song to make absolutely remarkable, as you're about to hear from Lou Rawls. If you want a new paradise, simply look around and view it. about to hear from Lou Rawls. know to compare with pure imagination living there you'll be free if you truly want to be uh hey do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about yes and by the way in a moment of panic yesterday when i was trying to uh think of wonderful things i tweeted and like i got over like 400 responses from people that were like, here's my wonderful thing.

And it was incredible. It was very encouraging. Lucas says, I love when you're cutting green onions and it forms a gradient of chopped vegetables. That's really pretty and satisfying. Oh, that's so true. That's so good.

I read that and I was like, fuck yeah, Lucas, that is so powerful. I love, I love cutting up a green onion. It's probably pound for pound the most satisfying vegetable to cut whoa you sure you want to say that i am gonna say well okay when i learned how to cut an onion good like really dice an onion really really well without like

fucking it up or making myself what about a green pepper when you take that no i hate i hate cutting green pepper hate it hate it hate it but green onion when you're cutting it and you like watch the color change and then you get to like the fork sometimes in it where they're like now you're cutting two green onions for the same amount of effort kicks ass uh david says my small wonder is koji kondo who composed the music for the early super mario and legend of zelda games the overworld theme for super mario brothers uh 1985 is probably his most iconic work with the ocarina of time soundtrack is by far my favorite of his compositions uh if you don't know like all of those like old tunes are like koji kondo's work uh and so like he wrote a bunch of like really really uh still use just video game

masterpieces from the early nes era but he also wrote the music for uh super mario world 2 yoshi's island for the super nintendo that has the most like playful the overworld theme in that one goes like it sounds like a supermarket commercial i like that's a nice one i fucking love it uh yeah koji kondo is very talented and so is bowen and augustus who let us use their theme song uh money won't pay for our theme song it's not their theme song it's ours but they let us use it and you can find a link to that in the episode description uh alongside links to the okra project again please consider supporting them

and um supporting other shows on the max fun network uh like fanti which uh i'm going to bother you about subscribing to and listening to until you have done so. I know we've hacked into your podcast app. We're looking at your bits and bytes in there, all of the data. What else? I mean, just thank y'all for keep on keeping on. Yeah. I think, I mean, usually we give like action items at the end of this episode and there is no shortage of action items We could give you this week and you know, hey, hey, this is what i'll say because this is something that happens to me

Okay, sometimes i'm like doing pretty good, right and i'm like i've got this i've figured this out. I hacked it 100 Nothing can stop me and then I have a bad day and i'm like, oh I was totally wrong Hey, you know what? You're still gonna have bad days. You're still gonna have bad days. You can hack this system and then, hey, guess what? Something sucks. Something sucks and that's life, you know? And then, you know, maybe the next day

you'll get a new hack. But don't give up. Don't give in. Keep on going. Yeah. Keep on powering through. Because that's what they want. They want you to give up.

They do kind of want. That's what they want. They do actually wicked want that. Jokes aside. yeah stay stay involved stay uh you know fighting for for black lives matter and uh against police violence like i don't think there's a more important thing you could be doing right yeah well i'm wearing a mask well yeah i mean wear a mask while you're doing it that's that's also very very cool uh defundund the police, but like cover your face is like super important.

And we'll see you next week. We don't usually say that. We don't. But we fucking will. We probably should have been. That's so easy. Bye. Hey! Hey!