Wonderful! - Wonderful! 155: That's One Spicy Flu Shot!

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Griffin's favorite annual vaccine! Rachel's favorite biorhythmic poem! Griffin's favorite modifiable platformer! Rachel's favorite improvised mouth noises!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaDemand police accountability and reform: https://action.justiceforbreonna.org/sign/BreonnaWasEssential/Ways to support Black Lives Matter and find anti-racism resources: https://linktr.ee/blacklivesmatterVote! - https://vote.gov/ 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. In this show, we like to talk about things that we like and things that are good and things that we're into and challenging political. What? Religious, scientific, the crossroads between art and sex. And we get real with it. And we don't.

A lot of folks just sort of beat around the old bush. But we're not doing any of that. Because people right now are looking for conflict they want well it's not conflict it's not the right way of thinking about it it's more like conflict but where it intersects with it's the crossroads with beauty and art and science and religion welcome to our podcast crossroads this one's called podcast crossroads and we talk about... We'll meet you there. We'll meet you there and it's gonna

be a rough listen. We're gonna challenge some of your ideas about science and religion and sex politics. Maybe you don't want to listen. Maybe you shouldn't listen. But this episode I think we're mostly gonna focus on the things that we like and are good and things that we're

into. And right now I'm gonna ask you if you do have any of those small wonders. Okay, let's see. My small wonder, I'm going to have to say, if I had to narrow it down, so let's say I'm picking just one and now there's a lot, there's a lot of small wonders. And so if if i were to let's say pick just one i would say wow one thing we haven't talked about um we we have a coffee grinder and we we grind wow you are really scraping the bottom of the beans you at rachel is pulling out a checklist of all the appliances in our house and she is crossing off the final one. Now we need to wait.

You haven't talked about our carbonator. We have a carbonator. I haven't talked about the defrost function on our microwave. Yeah, that's true. No, I like we we just kind of made the switch to whole bean coffee like years ago. And it just makes me feel very fancy when I grind those beans. And I notice virtually no difference. You say that, but if I were to switch.

But if we went back to Folgers, my tongue would fall off, you're saying? Yes, exactly. I know I joked, but I do want to focus on the carbonator because, I mean, I have more or less stopped drinking soda. If we go out somewhere and get some quick fast food or something like that i'll get a soda but like i don't keep it around the house and i think that's mostly because i had a really brutal kidney stone one time that i needed surgery for and the doctor was like no more brown sodas and i was like that sounds made up but okay because i really that's a thing they say uh and so yeah i just we do carbonated stuff but like i don't want to go through four cans of La Croix or Waterloo in a day.

So we just got this little carbonator. It's nice. Just grab the bottle from the fridge with my lunch and just guzzle some of it down. It's fast, although we're running out. We need to re-up the tank. Oh, okay. I think we have one more tank. People don't give a shit about this, though.

Do you want to hear my first thing? Yes. Flu shots. Flu shots. That's a big serious one, huh? You probably thought I was going to come at you with like Fritos scoops. Is this a switcheroo? Are we on sawbones?

Yeah, we're doing a trade. They're going to talk about Fritos scoops on the next episode. And we're going to talk about flu shots. No, me and Henry just went to get our flu shots last Friday, which was not something I was looking forward to because he has never loved a shot. But he has also never been sort of old enough to be kind of cognizant of what is going on whenever the needle comes out. When you bring bring this is

something i didn't think about what when you bring the baby to the doctor to get the shots the baby doesn't know what's happening no so that like it not to get too graphic but like the needle goes in and there's like a second there where the baby's like oh huh because there's no looking at it and tensing up and like freaking out and getting scared because you know fear is the mind killer uh but he knew yeah basically from the parking lot he was like oh and it was just me because you know you can't you can't double up really whenever you go to a medical facility these days uh so i was not looking forward to it and it was a genuinely not pleasant experience and uh for him for me i was like

fucking stone cold big big, brave boy. But when we got home, like he was having trouble with it. And he was like, I really didn't want to get that shot. And I was like, but you were really brave. And he was like, I really wasn't. And it was so sweet, though. I told Rachel he was there were like other kids who came in to the to the office, like, right after us. and so they were like waiting to get their shots and henry was like crying right after he got the shot and as we were walking out into the lobby i was like now listen buddy if you can do you think you could you know stay calm while we're in the lobby so you don't scare the other kiddos because they're about to go in and get their shots and

he did and it was so sweet it was like the best kid shit ever um but i talked to him about it and i was like trying to calm him down at well well after the fact about the shots and i was like explaining why flu shots are important and why they're good and in doing so i kind of like got myself hyped up about like how amazing well vaccines in general are amazing but the flu shot specifically is kind of a cool thing confess something to you like i realized that I didn't really start getting flu shots until recently. Yeah. For a long time, I just thought, well, I never get the flu, so I'm not going to get the shot because I was a younger person and I just didn't think about those things.

And now I just feel like, why not though, dude? Why not is a good question. Yeah. They're fairly inexpensive and they help you not get the flu, which is a real tough customer. It is, yeah, the flu is nothing to mess around with. Anything you can do to limit your exposure

or chance of catching the flu or limit the severity of the flu if you do catch it is a good thing, even in years where, you know, the flu vaccine is not the most effective catch it is a good thing even in years where you know the flu vaccine is not the most effective there is a huge i don't want anything i say here to be taken as like so maybe skip it sometimes because i i get the flu shot every year because i don't like getting sick uh the cdc recommends that like pretty much folks in every category get the flu shot since it's our best weapon against the flu spreading. It's especially important this year because,

you know, you don't want to soak up any hospital resources that you don't have to in a time where the COVID-19 is kind of popping off again. So I guess I would encourage you here at the top to go get one if you have not already. So the CDC and the World Health Organization recommend pretty much everybody over the age of six months to go get it. They do use embryonized, is that the right word? I don't know, fertilized, maybe, I don't know, chicken eggs to create and develop the flu. But even if you have like a severe chicken egg allergy, they still say, hey, you should probably get the flu shot. The only people that shouldn't are people who have been allergic to like past flu shots with a similar cocktail. And the efficacy and effectiveness are two different kind of like measurements of the

flu shot. I'm still having some trouble like telling the difference between the two uh but the efficacy is kind of easy to measure comparatively because it just looks at the antibodies in in people's blood after they get it the effectiveness is like the observed uh effect the the the flu vaccine has on limiting the flu that that season uh so that's like tough to say because the the flu has like pretty wild i think it's antigenic drift which is like it mutates a little bit and so now the flu shot may or may not be so effective it sometimes it's tough to know if somebody actually has the flu if it it's like shifting. But the variability is a pretty wild swing. So to give you an idea, in 2004, the CDC published, the CDC recently always publishes this table of effectiveness estimations for past flu shots. 2004, it was 10% effective, which still represents like an enormous amount of flu prevention.

In 2010, it was 60 effective in 2010 do you think when you got the flu shot you were just like oh oh damn that's a good that's a one us up i see meatball that's a good ass flu shot right your food tasted better your food tasted better faster he got a three inches taller um so the wheels of invention sort of started spinning uh unsurprisingly during the spanish flu in 1918 which was a bad one and just doctors and pharmacists were just throwing spaghetti against the wall to to see what stuck and made people not die. And the only thing using like medical technology of the day that seemed effective was blood transfusions from recovered people to like recent victims of the Spanish flu. So that kind of got the wheel spinning.

And in 1931, a dude named Ern ernest william good pasture uh who was at vanderbilt uh discovered that he could grow uh viruses in hens eggs along with some other colleagues and other folks kind of took that discovery and started to run with it including jonas salk who invented the polio vaccine which saved uh approximately 55 bertrillion people uh and it's one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind uh in the 1940s the u.s military took sort of what all of these different scientists were working on and developed a flu vaccine for folks in world war ii to use and then shortly after that it became widely available um but yeah i just think i don't know it's a it is the way i pitched it to henry is like

there is a it's so tough because you don't want to scare him like there's certainly enough things out there to scare him that we try to limit his like anxiety over while still like being like on the playground like hey you know because he will keep your mask on you gotta stay away once and he'll be like oh i'm sick i have to get under a blanket yeah so like he's he's like hypersensitive right now so when we take him to the park like we do need him to stay away from other folks but you know we don't want to scare the shit out of him for the rest of his life but it is like kind of empowering to say like here is the thing that you can do and it's gonna hurt for a little bit but then like you are

made more invincible more protected to this thing that's out there and yeah that's one way to sell it to a child but it's also a way to kind of i don't know conceptualize it yourself that that just makes the flu shot seem like such a rad thing you know what and and i am i am very appreciative of things i can control right now oh god yes and the flu shot is like oh here's something i can do yeah it's proactive and and kind of incredible i don't want to tell tales out of school i'm no scientist i'm no doctor but when i did get the flu shot i was like oh this feels like a good feel good this year oh it feels good this year feels i will say the shot didn't hurt at all and i think it's maybe because i was trying me and henry got them at the

same time and i was trying to put on a brave face but it didn't hurt this year so i don't know maybe they got smaller needles do you want to tell me all about your first thing yes okay you have your computer closed i don't know if you're trying to save battery or if it's like an eco-friendly thing. I don't want to distract myself. I don't want to get like a little notification and you're like talking about something important to you and I'm like, ooh, a sale. Ooh, there's a new Foxtrot comic strip. I'm just going to check in on Doonesbury.

I get email alerts about Doonesbury. Yeah. We all do. So what's your first thing? My first thing is poetry corner oh boy we haven't done a song in a while i wanted to do one oh griffin has tremendous range he doesn't make a big deal out of it.

You think Griffin can only go high, right? I've only heard him go high. I bet he just goes high. Like this. But he goes low too. Or I can get down low. Poetry. The poet I am bringing is kevin young okay okay uh he is a black american poet has published 11 books uh is currently the poetry editor for the new yorker okay little magazine i've heard of it funny funny strips talk. Do you want to talk about Doonesbury?

These strips blow Doonesbury out of the water. You know, a lot of comic strips need like seven or eight panels. New Yorker is just like, hey, here's some people on a street. Yeah. And you're laughing already. They're saying something so erudite. And it's like a gut buster. There you die.

And it's like a gut buster. So Kevin Young gave this interview. So he's had just a number of accolades. He was a professor of English and creative writing at Emory. He was a finalist for a National Book Award. For American Idol season four. Got just barely beaten out by Bo Bice. That season is such a touchstone for you. I don't know.

I don't know anything about Bo Bice or season four of the American Idol. Well, hold on. Okay, let's do this. One was Kelly Clarkson. Two was Clay Aiken and Ruben Steyer. Three was Fantasia burino i think four is i think i fell off at four honestly i watched the taylor hicks season was it taylor that may have been four yeah what were you talking about yeah um he uh he actually grew up in topeka

kansas uh his father was a ophthalmologist, his mother was a chemist, and they moved like half a dozen times before he was 10. And then ultimately settled in Kansas, which is not actually where he ended up. He ended up going to Harvard and then got his MFA at Brown. So he's not currently in Kansas, but I appreciate the Midwestern roots. Absolutely. So I found this interview with him in Entertainment Weekly in 2018. Okay. You don't see a lot of poets in Entertainment Weekly.

Poetry can be entertaining on occasion. Yeah, but usually it's like, you know. The new Marvel movie. Yeah, here's the new Robert Downey Jr. film. Yeah. Not like, here's this great poet that we talked to uh but he gave an interview about poetry and you know you know me i love like a i love a clever turn of phrase uh but the thing i like about kevin young is that he really identifies

moments to kind of pay attention right you know, in his poetry. He like gives kind of a unique perspective. And it's not like he's like super clever with language as much as he's just like, hey, look at this thing, and I'm going to talk about it in a way that's meaningful. So in this interview, when he was asked about poetry, he said, a poem can provide testimony, a poem can provide solace, It can provide connection, but it can also provide a sense of something you knew was there, but you couldn't quite put into words. I think they can often articulate for you, and this is true for the poet and for the reader, something you didn't quite know. The sense of mystery, but also of revelation is what I turn

to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more of that. Absolutely, we do. Yeah. I felt like he really got at kind of the thing, because it's not like I exclusively read poetry. I appreciate a lot of forms of literature. But there's something special about poetry for me, and I feel like he really kind of captured it. So I'm going to read a poem of his called Expecting. I wanted to give just kind of a content warning that this is about pregnancy, specifically his wife's pregnancy. Grave, my wife lies back, hands cross her chest while the doctor searches early for

your heartbeat. Peach pit, unripe, plum pulls out the world's worst boom box, a Mr. Microphone to broadcast your mother's lifting belly, the whoosh and bellows of mama's body and beneath it nothing, beneath the slow stutter of her heart, nothing, the doctor trying again to find you, fragile fern, snowflake, nothing. After my wife will say in fear and patience she went beyond her body, this tiny room into the ether for now. We spelunk for you one last time, lost canary, miner of coal and chalk, lungs not yet black. I hold my wife's feet to keep her here and me trying not to dive starboard to seek you in the dark water.

And there it is, faint, an echo, faster and further away than mothers, all beatbox and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing hip hop for the first time, power hijacked from a lamppost, all promise. You couldn't sound better, breakdancer, my favorite song bumping from a passing car. You've snuck into the club underage and stayed. Only later much will your mother begin to believe you're drumming in the distance. My Kansas City and Congo Square, this jazz band vamping on inside her.

I love the tension of that poem. That's one of my favorite poems I think I've ever heard in my entire life. There are a lot of poems about pregnancy. Not a lot from the male perspective, which is exciting about this one. But also just kind of the tension of that experience in the room when

you're like waiting for that baby's heartbeat uh and then just kind of the way he describes it like it's not overly sentimental it's not like you know this being transcending us and embodying our spirits as one you know it's like no it's about i mean it more sort of accurately encompasses that's not when we're in the sound for the room for an ultrasound i'm not like oh holy endeavor like for me it's like oh shit oh shit oh god oh no oh please oh god yeah like it's like absolute mortal existential terror to like the most to to like excitement. Yeah. Yeah. And I also wanted to use this poem to say that Griffin and I are expecting another child. I,

okay. So I really, really wanted Rachel to announce that. Well, first of all, this is our first time like talking about this outside of like our private like family group. And I really wanted Rachel to announce it in a joke that she told me while we were lying

in bed one night it was fairly recently after like the first ultrasound um and i like to say i like to once i've consumed a large meal and i'm feeling kind of sick i will sometimes do a dave matthews impression yeah i feel like our listeners know this i have i have mentioned this before where i you know i do that um and rachel turned that back on me in a way that is uh i'm bringing this up i'm making such a deal about it because it's the hardest i've laughed this entire awful rotten year uh and i'm hoping that that Rachel can sort of recreate the delivery. Yeah, it was one of those. So when I tell a joke to Griffin

that is gonna involve some voice work, I have a tendency to kind of play it out in my head and figure out if I can pull it off. And so I was laying there and I was thinking about it and we were quiet. And then I was like talking about how my stomach hurt and i was like um i ate too much because i'm having a baby and griffin was like that has to be how you tell the poem was beautiful literally maybe

my favorite poem i've ever heard in my entire life but i do think we missed a trick by now we've done both now we've done it my way in your way so we're having a little boy yeah another baby boy another baby boy and uh do next uh april fool's day do april fool's day most likely we'll be here earlier probably on my birthday on rachel's birthday march 29th so this is our also our way of announcing that our schedule is going to be very erratic starting end of march 2021 and then from that point onward forever probably just a little more erratic than it is now because we'll have two of them we're very excited we're extremely extremely yeah and i and i wanted to share because uh obviously it's something that is impacting our lives a lot. Yeah. I would like to be able to talk about on this show, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, Kevin Young, for your poem. For your poem. It made me very emotional in a way that I don't think a poem on this show has done before. It's hard for me to read any poem right now. Yes. Oh, by the way when rachel cried about the umbrella the umbrella mom poem if you're just wondering yes there was a there was a certain amount that was this applied some english to that particular ball a lot of times i read a poem and i think oh this will be good And then I try to read it out loud and I'm like, oh, this is much harder. Yeah. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. Hey, I got a Jumbotron here and this one one is for Carmel. And it's from Kirsten, who says, Having a mom that I can give flowers to in Animal Crossing and in person was something I never expected, but I'm so happy I can do.

Whether it's baking D&D cookies, that stands for dragon fruit. And there's not a lot of foods that start with D, if you really think about it. Durian. Durian. Oh, God, what a bad cookie that would be. Watching our fave shows or laughing so hard that we cry over our favorite podcasts. I'm incredibly lucky to have you in my life. Thank you for always being my wonderful mom.

I love you. That is so sweet. Rachel and I are back in animal crossing uh i'm doing a big a really like two million bell reno project on my entire island just tearing it down to the studs and i did sort of run dry run the coffers dry and got a letter in the mail that was like hey babe love you and it didn't have anything in it and then i got a second in the mail that was like, hey babe, love you. And it didn't have anything in it. And then I got a second one immediately after that. I was like, I forgot. And she sent me 100,000 bells.

Can you guys believe that? What a woman. Hey, you financially backed a lot of my early projects. So I was happy. And I told you, it's not a loan. This was a gift. Do you wanna read this other one? Mine is a loan.

This one is for Ian and Aaron. It is from Tan Man with the plan stand. Life basically went into hard mode last March with tornadoes destroying our neighborhood and the pandemic delaying y'all's wedding for a year.

But next year, we'll be back to getting South Central's and photos at Crying Wolf, chunky Sunday shakes on the reg, and finally celebrating your marriage with all our friends. You two are the best. Love. That is a good plan, Stan. I like that. We don't really have a roadmap. Well, especially post April 1st, 2021. But we need some things on paper, things like chunky milkshakes. I know. It's very important to have things to look forward to. And all of these are good things that you mentioned.

Are you feeling elevated levels of anxiety? Do you quake uncontrollably, even thinking about watching cable news? Do you have disturbing nightmares only to realize it's two in the afternoon and you're up. If you've experienced one or more of these symptoms, you may have FNO, F**k News Overload. Fortunately there's treatment. Hi, I'm Dave Holmes, host of Troubled Waters. Troubled Waters helps fight FNO. That's because Troubled Waters stimulates your joy zone.

On Troubled Waters, two comedians will battle one another for pop culture supremacy. So join me, Dave Holmes, for two, two, two doses of Troubled Waters a month. The cure for your ****** news overload. Available on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Can I tell you about my second thing? Yes. I'll try and keep it short i feel like we've gone we've got we went long with our baby announcement yes uh mine is a video game

franchise that you i believe you have some exposure to we've played it a bit uh it's a little big planet oh yeah you love the little bit i adore this entire franchise uh it's one of my favorite it's like one of my favorite game franchises from, uh, a developer called media molecule. Who's like one of my favorite, uh, developers. They're, they're based in,

uh, uh, somewhere in England. I can't remember. Uh, and yeah, I just, I adore it.

It is a series of games that has had three main installments and a few like portable games. And then a few, like there was a cart racer, uh, and there's like a, and there's some a there's some new game coming out on the new consoles coming out uh in next month but these games are all about

creation and creativity and imagination uh through the lens of like a platformer like mario if you're not like well versed in the parlance of video games um the first one came out on playstation 3 all the way back in 2008. And I remember really looking forward to it because it just looked so cool. And the idea behind it was really, really special. Everything in the game is customizable. Like you can make your own levels,

but also like you can change Sackboy, who is this little woolly knit protagonist, changes like face and his body parts. You can put costumes on him and you had stickers that you could put all over Sackboy. You could just stick all over the level if you were feeling like,

you know, being artistic while you were jumping around death pits or whatever. And it was a bonkers like amount of artistic creativity that then sort of got more and more sophisticated. I think we played Little big planet three together uh like pretty soon after we started dating um and by that point like

they had added things like uh logic gates and wiring and motherboards all represented like very visually and tangibly so like you could put a physical like piece of wood in the world and then stick these little chips to it to like create like logic so you could create really really advanced stuff like people were taking this platform game creation tool set and like recreating doom like making first person like shooters and like interactive chess boards and like doing all this wild stuff from it. I spent a lot of time making levels in little big planet too. And I actually learned a lot about programming through this,

through this like visual tangible method of creating logic in, in the games, which was really, really cool. There's some concepts like and or gates. And if then switches that are like actual very universal like programming concepts that i feel like i had a leg up whenever i started to like take a look at learning programming because i kind of knew that stuff from this

very cute platforming video game um it's also like a really fun co-op game like which me and rachel really enjoyed you don't't really like a lot of complexity, I feel like in a game and this one has. Yeah, I just like it to be fun. I like it to be rewarding, you know? I don't like to feel like the game is really making me work for it. Sure.

And so I really appreciate this one. We also really liked Yoshi's like Wooly World. Yeah, which felt similar. Kirby's Epic Yarn. I feel like anything that has a very arts and craftsy vibe. Yeah, I like that kind of tactile. Like, oh, I could just reach in there and hold these things. And that's absolutely what this game's all about.

Like you ride around on a giant skateboard because you're supposed to be like two inches tall. It's very, very cute. The aesthetic of this game is like out of control. It has this kind of like general hyper upbeat um like oddball creative energy that almost kind of gives me a like a bake-off vibe like that level of like always stay posi sort of intention uh it is narrated by stephen fry who like is always talking about shit, like the dream of her said,

like talking about all that stuff. Uh, the story of the games is they're always about sort of like creativity realized in some like hyper stylized way. Uh, and it's kind of like this weird Ouroboros because these, these creative communities, uh,

formed around the games in a way that was kind of unprecedented uh at at the time like i mentioned the people doing like stretching the boundaries of like what people could do with the tool set in in a way that it was kind of mind-boggling but then you would get um groups of people who would like get like communities who would congregate online there was like a web portal where you could comment on people's levels and follow them and like add them to playlists and like favorite creators and like stay in communication with them. So people would get together

and I remember this one project where like 32 different creators got together and recreated Super Mario Brothers, each like taking one level and viewing it through like a different artistic lens. It was like this hugely ambitious thing, but it was really fucking rad. Can you talk about the time period for this too?

Yeah. So the first game came out in 2008. I think a little big planet two was a few years after that. That's what feels so notable about it for me is that like people weren't really doing that then. I feel like they're doing that now, but I feel like it was just really clever to create this whole community that's all about making levels. Absolutely. This was pre-Minecraft blowing up.

Yeah. So the idea of people congregating online to collaborate on an extremely ambitious creative project was kind of unheard of. project was kind of like not like kind of unheard of um and the the the right now medium molecule has put out a game called dreams which is basically the same thing it is like little big planets like creative aesthetic and like huge ambitious tool set but they've kind of just removed the platformer side of things entirely so you can make whatever and they're like you can people are making movies people are making like big ambitious role-playing games like people are making all kinds of wild shit in a way that would be way too complicated for me to explain i think we did an episode of the besties on it um but the best thing about these games and the thing that was most formative

for me was the soundtracks which introduced me to so much cool music uh they're hip as fuck uh the go team uh battles passion pit uh there were themed dlcs so there was like a marvel downloadable content pack where now you could like put marvel shit in your levels there was a muppets uh content pack that had like the muppets theme in it that you could put in your levels which is so delightful uh crystal castle css like so many dope ass like cool bands uh that were fairly underground i remember one of the theme songs to one of the games was uh sleepyhead by passion pet which was like the summer jam of 2010 or whatever year that came out uh and here it was like the first time i heard it was in a trailer for this video game like uh the the music was so so so cool um that's so cool it's so easy to feel like endeared to creators when they like they don't have to make something cool and they

just they do and it and you know there's like there's kind of a low bar, I think, that they could have met easily. Absolutely. And then they just added all this stuff that made it so unique and heartwarming. And there's a certain amount of, and I don't want to get shitty game journo about it, but there's a certain amount of crassness

that you kind of have to accept for pretty much all video games that come out, like a certain amount of, these are the decisions that you made to like accept for pretty much all video games that come out, like a certain amount of like, these are the decisions that you made to like justify the enormous cost that goes into making video games. And it is so, I will say like so completely hidden in these games because it is so celebratory of,

of just human creativity and artistic endeavors that it is it's it's kind of hard to see the yeah the you know price price gouging that's going into uh going into it i love these games i adore them i've been jonesing actually to to to go back and play some of them uh because they're just i i i love that these games exist i love that the developer exists and uh it's it's i'm i'm looking forward to the new uh the new one that comes out here in a couple months i think what's your second thing you've closed your computer again you really really got some got some distractions on there playing farmville i'm down to 19 percent okay see i wondered if that was maybe a factor.

I didn't want to stress you out. Yeah. My second thing is something that I actually had you do a little bit of earlier in the poetry corner, and that is scat singing. Okay. I will be curious to hear about scat singing. I feel like I know a lot about scat singing. Scat singing. Scat singing.

I feel like I know a lot about scat singing. Scat singing. From like the time period where it was a thing, but I don't know anything about the origins of scat singing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, this is one of those things, you know, it's kind of like when you watch, you know, just any kind of like good improvisational work,

whether it's like comedy or music and you think like oh it doesn't seem that hard and then you try and do it yourself it's very difficult yeah it's very especially for an extended period of time i mean everybody anybody can scoot it up up yeah but then try to do that for 16 bars um so there a lot of people like associated this with like ella fitzgerald and louis armstrong um but there is a suggestion that it's been around a lot longer um if you look at some of the earliest examples you'll find like performances in like the 1910s. And there was an interview with Jelly Roll Morton, who's a jazz pianist,

who said that he cites Joe Sims of Vicksburg, Mississippi. It's like, it's a very like, you know. Very specific origin point. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, like all we have are recordings, you know. Yeah. So it's difficult. I would trust the word of fucking jelly roll morton over most people i feel like

jelly roll morton probably knows about the origins of scat more than uh anybody i've ever met in my entire life this joe sims at least according to jelly roll morton was actually an old comedian and that uh there was a suggestion that he he doing this, like, in Mississippi, in New Orleans, and then people kind of picked it up and took it all over. Like, as a goof? Well, I don't know his intentions. He was like, I can do jazz and bebop with my mouth. Isn't that funny?

And people in the audience were like, no, Joe, this is good stuff this is something though lay this down joe uh this this is something i feel like is definitely acquired taste i feel like people a lot of times find it kind of disruptive when they're listening to like a jazz song especially one that has you know like a like a lyrical song uh but if you think about it as as improvisation in the same way that a jazz musician would improvise, then it's it's like a little more palatable. I feel like I was reading this description, saying that this is an article I found from the Independent, it grants the singer the status of a solo instrumentalist like any other in jazz, thereby by extension, the social structures and power relations that condition them.

This just like this opportunity to just kind been like at kind of shitty uh fancy bars where there's just like a sort of sausalito uh that's i think that's the name of the band from uh lost in translation yeah that's just like uh somebody up there not really putting in the most passionate performance but then the other exposure that everyone has is the song i'm the scat man uh which is a which is a jam which is a jam but it's but it can't be the only sort of cultural exposure the the this this great nation of ours has to to scat i was also i was reading the differences kind of in scat performances that i thought was really interesting um there were different styles kind of depending on what band the singer was performing with so there's like a suggestion that like you know ella fitzgerald was performing with this like these swing era big bands and so she was doing a certain kind of scatting to kind of line up with those big bands, whereas Sarah Vaughan was accompanying these kind of like small combos and the kind of

the difference, the differences in scatting based on the kind of music you are performing with, which, you know, is something that you wouldn't really think about. But, you know, different types of instruments would motivate you to make different kind of noises to like blend in with the band. I mean, you think about like beatboxing, which I think you could make the logical leap to. I think it's really easy to say like, oh, there's really just only one type of beatboxing because that's all you hear. And it's all that you do when you try to beatbox. But then you hear like a Biz Marquis do it. And it's like,

Oh, actually shit. Wait. Oh fuck. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's the kind of thing that is very rewarding to kind of dig into because you,

the more you listen to it, the more you realize like how unique each person's style was. I wanted to play a little bit. Ella Fitzgerald has a performance of How High the Moon and about a minute and a half into the song she goes for it and I wanted to share a little bit of that in case anybody hadn't heard her version There's a lot that's impressive to me. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking about like I have kind of an aversion to jam bands.

And there's something very jammy about scatting. But I don't know. I feel like it's so clever and it demands so much quick thinking to get these sounds to come out of your mouth that you're not entirely sure that your mouth can make. I find it very impressive and very charming. And I realize how hard it is every time I try and do it myself. I feel like any kind of good improvisational vocal performance is rare. Yeah.

But just fucking rips like uh i remember watching this youtube video of this woman like backing up a fairly like uh gospel-y soul band and she she was like just sort of doing doing just improvised runs and then she tried uh harmonizing with herself whoa through like singing one note but then you know how you can kind of like whistle one note and like hum another like yeah kind of doing that with her with her voice like while she was doing a run and like the rest of the band was like you're fucking wild are you kidding it's like one of my favorite youtube videos uh any kind of like really good improvised vocal performances is really something to watch.

Yeah. Our friends at home are talking about some stuff. Can I tell you? Yes. Cody says, howdy. My small wonder is things being described as an absolute unit. I taught my little brother how to say it and hearing him call my chocolate cake an absolute unit is marvelous. I feel like you're the first person I've ever heard to do that.

I mean, I got it off the internet for sure for sure like most things like most things anybody says these days no there are definitely some cats i have seen that fit that description i like describing little kids as an absolute unit not all kids there is you really appreciate this when you have a a kid like in a uh a daycare setting or something like that or like seeing them in some sort of social environment where you know all of the kids are roughly the same age group but one of them is just fucking huge and your kid is quite small and it's like you're the same you are you have the same birthday it's why just kids grow it's not like a read on any particular child it's just they all grow at weirdly different rates it's true it's so man kids are crazy maddie says since working from home in my quote home office my desk is over a floor vent when i turn the heat on i get a direct source

of warmth directly to my feet it makes getting out of bed on a cold and gloomy fall morning a little more wonderful oh that is nice i had this in my uh apartment in chicago right a little office and it was all hardwood floor everywhere and there was a little vent right under my desk and oh god it was so good you had to be careful though you had to be careful i lived in a place with radiators in chicago which was a wild experience i don't know that i've ever had that it would scare me it is kind of scary my papa crawford had a huge floor vent like a huge one and it was right between the living room and the dining room like a huge enormous metal floor vent uh almost like a subway cover that i remember stepping on that so much and even when the heat wasn't on when in bare feet walking on like a floor vent like doesn't feel great but when the heat was on it was just like stepping on a waffle iron that was

that's the evil version of this but But that house was always quite warm. So thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song. It's a departure off the album, Putting the Days to Bed. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Yeah, I would encourage everybody

to go to MaximumFun.org and find a new podcast today. Another charming one I would recommend, Can I Bite Your Dog? Oh, yeah. People like dogs. I was saying, sorry. I was answering the question.

Yes, you may pet the secret dog that I've kept in this house under your nose without your knowledge for going on four years now. Man, that is some good cleanup work you've been doing around the house. His name is Brisket. He's a Shetland Terrier.

That's so good. He is cute as a button. Very quiet. He's so quiet. He actually doesn't bark or make any noises. He just does a little throat clear. He does that every once in a while. He'll cough and I'll be like, that was me. You know how I do that every now and then?

It's weird. I don't know why you do that anyway come on out brisket oh no hold on oh no i think i would have noticed that no no this isn't brisket folks wild dogs have entered the studio. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.