Wonderful! - Wonderful! 162: Hydropunk Cowboys

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

Rachel's favorite abandoned entertainment complexes! Griffin's favorite bleak genre! Rachel's favorite handheld holiday food! Griffin's favorite Scottish synth-pop!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/blacklivesmatter   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. Ho, ho, ho, clump, clump, clump. Santa Claus up on the roof. What's he got for you? Come down the chimney. This is a new podcast episode.

Wrapped it up in a big box. And I said, you don't need that. It's sound. And he said, put the box to the left of the menorah, which is also lit right now because it is also Hanukkah. Yeah, no, he brought us a Hanukkah podcast, too. He's, it's weird. Yeah, he's, it's really. Seems like we shouldn't need Santa to bring us Hanukkah.

Well, he's more of like a sort of Amazon Zappos sort of delivery. Drives around in an unmarked van. Etsy. Yeah, he's doing all that. They're keeping him busy. And here's the episode for you. And it's the one that we hope you enjoy because it's holidays. Look around.

You can't deny it anymore. It's holidays. Yeah, it snuck up on me. It's next week. You know, Hanukkah. Hanukkah really took a lot of my attention. Yeah, we've been hitting Hanukkah real hard. We've been hitting Hanukkah hard this year.

And then I looked at the calendar and I said, oh, wait, guess what's right around the corner. Next week, yes. Henry's making out like a bandit. I don't hear any complaints from him. I don't know how we return to a life that doesn't involve a present every day. Every night, yeah. But we'll have to figure it out.

My man is basically like a vampire with the amount of attention he applies to the setting of the sun. Because that is, that means it's Hanukkah time, baby. Or as my small wonder, Smokey Robinson on that one cameo would call it Chinooka. It's very powerful and very pure.

If you have not seen that now viral tweet, it is a genuinely sweet story about Smokey Robinson, who there's a way he says the word Hanukkah that is altogether new, bold, and invigorating. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that that was just a spelling he was not familiar with. Sure, yeah.

But it is pretty surprising. Context clues, I think, would lead one in a certain way, but Smokey Robinson just barrels on through, and God bless him. Do you have a small wonder? I want to talk about that vaccine rollout. That vaccine rollout, it's coming for you. But it's good to come for you.

So many great pictures and videos of health care workers getting this vaccine and people that are at very high risk of exposure getting this vaccine yeah it is it's a nice way to kind of close out this terrible year there was a video of uh like a man in like his mid-80s in london who was one of the first people to receive the vaccine in london and he goes off on the best story ever like yeah i went in and they had me wait a while and they said okay come back here in a little bit and so i went out for a lunch or just a terrible sandwich like he goes so deep on his like kind of okay day and then he's like yeah and then i got it and it didn't really hurt like you fucking rule i i have noticed that a lot of you know the news media have

been asking people to tell their story of getting the vaccine and for anyone that has gotten a vaccine before it is a you know two second process so i imagine he was told to expand yeah i really just enjoyed that very pure uh You go first this week. What are you, what's on deck? So my first thing is inspired by a few recent discoveries. It is the abandoned water park. Okay. So we, months ago when it first came on, HBO Max watched Class Action Park.

Right. Enjoyed it and very much and then watch mostly because of chris gethard who is uh absolutely hysterical in that in that documentary he's he makes the whole thing yeah like if it weren't if he weren't in it i don't know if i would recommend it so heavily yes uh and then we watched it again when my parents came to town for Thanksgiving. And then we kind of stopped talking about it. And then one of my friend's husband posted another abandoned water park that he had been reading about called Ebenezer Floppensloper's Wonderful Waterslides. Holy shit.

What? What? What? What? What? What? called ebenezer flop and sloppers wonderful water slides holy shit what what what what what what uh one more time hit me again one more time with that ebenezer flop and sloppers wonderful water slides flop and sloppers this sounds like a fucking joke name that we would come up with uh thank you to uh my friends amy and patrick dean for sharing this on social media so that i could find it uh not intentionally for me they they mentioned that they have been singing this around their house in the style of alexander hamilton that's really good um i don't know if you if you had like abandoned artifacts in your area that people would explore. I remember hearing this about this a lot when I was like a teen and there wasn't a lot you could do. Like friends would go find like old buildings and explore them.

Oh, sure. I mean, there's a very famous abandoned asylum in West Virginia that I think like all those like ghost hunter shows and the MTV Fear show. I forget what it was called. All went to my brothers went to it one time. I was always too young whenever they were venturing out to it. But yeah, I mean, we always had a just a bunch of pseudo abandoned stuff. Like we there was an Olympic pool that I think was like closed for a couple of years. So folks would just break in there and run all run all hither and yawn yeah so we had in st louis we had something called wet willies okay uh which was uh like 16 acres of land right near the uh six flags okay like right across the street basically uh and it was just one of those like big two concrete slide kind of places

that just disappeared without a lot of fanfare and sat vacant for a long time. I was looking, and I saw there was a proposal to annex the area and turn it into a large office building in 2009. I don't know if that went through or not. But, I mean mean that's the thing about a water park like an old abandoned building you can knock down and put up another building like a water park is a lot of real estate yeah sure and a lot of like construction that went

into these very specific slides that you can't easily convert into like an arby's you know spiritually also nobody wants to be in charge of the bulldozer that knocks over a big water like what a fucking bummer that would be you know what's interesting so back to ebony's or flop and slopper please please take me back there so i did some some research on this water park so this is was in oak brook terrace illinois uh near the intersection of Route 38 and 83. So this was originally a gravel pit and then a landfill in the 50s and 60s, known familiarly in the community as Mount Trashmore. Okay. When the landfill reached ground level, it was covered in concrete

and then left unused until the late 70s. Where they built a water park on top of it? Yeah, at which point, so this is the Robinette family that owned the Mount Trashmore. Mark Collar, who had a water slide in suburban Kansas City, was driving along the highway and saw the big hill and signed an agreement with the Robinette family to build two water slides on the property.

Okay. The park's name came from a story Collar's brother-in-law had told him about meeting a man in Joplin, Missouri named Ebenezer Floppen. Oh, okay. So the slop, they just kind of tossed on there for funsies. Yeah, just to kind of keep the rhythm going. Yeah. So the park opened in 1980 with two 800-foot concrete slides.

You said that many times now, and I'm struggling with what that means exactly. Concrete water slides? Yeah. So you're just going down on concrete and water well so there's a rubber mat involved okay still shit this was true with wet willies too you would be given a mat when you entered the park and it was your responsibility to hold on to that mat what fun what fun this babysitting project this school home economics project you've given me where oh and you're

saying if the rubber mat goes out from under me while i'm on the the slide then all my skin comes off yes that's fun yeah so so ebony's are flop and slobber's wonderful water slides oh my god it's so every fucking time you say it it's so it's like the first time uh as i mentioned opened in 1980 uh after two years collars sold the park uh having paid for the installation costs uh and then in the 80s they added five additional slides and the slides were lined with blue rubber foam oh baby's fucking participation trophy snowflakes. Around 1987, they added various,

what they call in the Wikipedia entry, humps and bumps. And they incorporated the inner tube and they renamed it Doc Rivers Roaring Rapids Waterpark. Oh, snoreore are you kidding me uh it closed in 1989 the site is still owned by the robinettes who operate a demolition business huh isn't that it's not like it must have sentimental value because they have the equipment to tear it down yeah But it is still there vacant. From what I can tell,

there's fully graffitied slides and trees growing through them. And it just is there. And they just spend all their time trying to keep people out. I'm telling you, it's they get in the bulldozer, they drive up to the big fun water slides

and they say, I just can't do it. I just can't knock down this this edifice of fun um gosh i don't know if they made ebonies or flop and sloppers t-shirts but how great would that be oh i would i gotta get on the ebay we have to get on the um i i don't know if this is the reason for all of the the demises of the water parks i mean there's a variety of reasons obviously one is that they are incredibly dangerous yeah we we joked about the class action park references a uh water park

slash car park action park called action park in new jersey new jersey that the documentary is fun because it's like look at this hugely irresponsible place where all these you know uh weathered new jerseyans and new yorkers would uh come to risk their lives and you're like oh that's fine and then people do eventually there there are fatalities and then the movie gets significantly less fun uh but yeah i have to imagine any water park that closes has something that happened well the other thing that happened uh and i'm intimately familiar with this because it uh really started in st louis but uh six flags started using its own brand to have their own waterworks. Right, yeah.

So Hurricane Harbor started in 1995. And then in 1999, Six Flags St. Louis was the first Six Flags park to construct its own intrapark water attraction. I feel like every place. For me, it was Kings Island. Kings Island had their own water park section. Yeah. Six Flags purchased existing water parks uh and then in st louis started building them attached to their own so that that may be part

of the reason they closed too as well is that like you know this big huge chain that like had all these protocols and infrastructure in place opened and if i'm a parent choosing which one to send my child to yeah um but but yeah so that i don't know there's something there's tons of these all over the world you can find online just these photos of these like relics uh a particularly interesting one lady dolores water park uh they rebranded so many times and used it for various events like raves and skateboard competitions and just trying to find ways to reuse these slides that's amazing yeah that's so great um can i tell you about my first thing yes i have a question for you first um do you know anything about hackers

like can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace. There it is. Have you ever read Neuromancer? Ever experienced the new wave? Next wave? Dream wave? Or cyberpunk? I didn't think so. I was not aware of this clip until I met you, by the way. This segment's not about the clip. It's about the cyberpunk genre.

But I, God, I do love, that's Julia Stiles in- Ghost Rider, right? In Ghost Rider. Just really giving an amazing performance. Everybody talks about that quote. They don't talk about the thing that comes next where they're like, how did you learn about this stuff, Julia Stiles?

And she's like, in here at the internet where they only judge you for your words and your thoughts and not what you look like. Wow. Damn, Julia. So Cyberpunk, there's a game that just came out called Cyberpunk 2077. That is not my wonderful thanks the game is uh on virtually every level an enormous mess uh but it did remind me that i do enjoy this genre a lot although like mea culpa i also recognize that there is a lot of sort of

toxicity that came out of the cyberpunk genre because it is largely about misanthropic dudes who become messianic figures because of their like computer know-how. Yeah, that's a minefield right there. That's a minefield right there. But there's a lot else about the genre, like its aesthetic and the concepts behind it and the reason why it sort of came about

that I find like really, really interesting. Have you ever read anything like, have you ever jammed with the console cowboys inside? No, I don't know. There's a certain kind of like sci-fi that appeals to me and that it does not fall in that category. Yeah, it's interesting because it is, cyberpunk was sort of created as a contrast to the sci-fi that

had come about at that time like the big sci-fi works that you got from like isaac asimov who did the irobot uh series and he did a foundation which was this huge no pun intended like foundational uh space sci-fi series and dune uh all of the many many dune books from frank herbert um but a lot of the times whenever sci-fi authors would write about the future it was viewed through like a far future outer space lens or through through a somewhat like utopian lens and cyberpunk was like let's do the exact opposite where it's on earth near future dystopia does the matrix count as the matrix absolutely counts as this matrix was informed by a lot of these formative like cyberpunk works that i'm going to talk about but also in a lot of ways like became a a very important like cyberpunk work yeah uh i i think you don't get

quite as much as the aesthetic of like the dystopian future world as much as you get that weird robot apocalypse shit. But a lot of the concepts of consciousness and that consciousness how society is transformed through like unchecked technological developments and how corporations can sort of seize those as a means of like taking control of literally every aspect of society which is i think an exaggerated version of what's actually happening a little bit like uh and and so the protagonists in in these stories are often these like anti-heroes who are rebelling against these these systems who that have like marginalized them and disenfranchised them uh and sort of concentrated power into the hands of people who have taken advantage of these like technological developments uh which is where you get the punk in cyberpunk it's like never a cool like wealthy person who's

like doing cool shit it's always these punks who are trying to dismantle the system with their you know technological know-how um and the genre also leans a lot on like film noir and like detective fiction uh things and deals with stuff that had been dealt with in other like older sci-fi things like ai and like uh altered consciousness and post-humanism but it does all that stuff through a lens of like it's 50 years from now and it's in earth and everything is super super shitty um so the big inspirations for cyberpunk there were two kind of big ones uh blade runner which was based a film based on a philip k dick short story have you ever seen blade runner either of

them i guess no i haven't man they're fucking cool movies i don't even i don't even love them a lot but um i think that they are so unique and so like you watch them and see how it is the bible for all of these different things that came after and it's so rad and as miss styles referenced uh neuromancer by william gibson who was actually working on that book when blade runner came out and he was like well shit everybody's gonna think i copied blade runner yeah and he almost didn't release the book he was like this is going to ruin me everybody's gonna call me a plagiarist so he rewrote the book like a dozen times until he came out with it still thinking like this is gonna suck and he put it up and it

became the like rosetta stone for all cyberpunk fiction that came after it like to a weird extent where anything else you read will have terminology that william gibson like established in neuromancer things like flatline instead of things as small as that insisting they died, they flatlined like cool cyberpunk shit like that. It's just everybody aped it so much so that my favorite cyberpunk book is by, um, uh, Neil Stevenson and it's called snow crash,

which in a lot of ways is like a parody or like a, um, uh, what's the word a satire on cyberpunk because it goes so fucking wild in in that direction i saw somebody refer to it as like the um uh shauna the dead uh hot fuzz the way that those movies like have takes on but at the same time are very much like entries in those genres like snow crash starts out with this like incredibly intense bleak like samurai street fight pizza delivery which is like okay you guys i didn't recognize at the time when i first read it that this was like

so intensely cyberpunk that it was kind of a joke uh but man i really like that book but like all my fate like so many of my favorite stories like the matrix trilogy for sure uh akira which is this like absolutely remarkable uh anime and manga series is like super super cyberpunk oh i didn't know that was cyberpunk absolutely sure uh johnny mnemonic with uh keanu reeves i don't know if you've ever seen that one that movie's's not great, but also a fucking trip. There's a movie that came out in 2018 called Upgrade that I really fucking dug that was like almost a horror movie that is like super, super cyberpunk.

I don't know. This is a weird thing, right? Because the stories often like don't actually do a lot for me because they are that like, I think there was something noble about it back when the genre was first coming out of this idea of just like,

there are a lot of trends that we are seeing with regards to how power is concentrating around whoever can like seize the technological power of the day or take advantage of whatever new developments there are, which is for sure certainly still happening. And back then it was like, we're going to fucking fight the system, man, because we're punks. But then it kind of did turn into like, I'm a loner. While you were while you were hooking up with babes at parties, I was studying the blockchain. And you know what? There's there's a lot about Mr. Robot that is inspired. Absolutely. There is.

Yeah. It wasn't necessarily like aesthetically cyberpunk, but it was. Yeah. Here's one loner who's, you know. He has the hacker skills to overthrow this disgusting monopoly. That doesn't do a lot for me because of, I think, the type of person that it has informed. Yeah. But man, I don't know, playing this cyberpunk game, which is a fucking disaster but like the the city looks so cool like the dystopias that they create are so weirdly alluring like i would never want to live in them because they seem like a genuine hellscape to be in but

watching blade runner and seeing like oh fuck that all looks so cool though that all looks so rad the aesthetic is like so up my alley i just pictured like a west side story scenario where steampunk and cyberpunk battle i mean steampunk came out like every blank punk that came out after that came like was a sort of like take on cyberpunk it was like steampunk is we're gonna fight the system of people who have taken advantage of steam-powered technology to seize control of the world uh i guess you could do that with anything hydropunk hydropunk is fucking cool i just said that that's a we have a we gotta fight the hydroelectric dam i guess something like uh water world is hydropunk it really is actually now that i'm saying that yeah

and then like uh mad max it would kind of be hydropunk too but it's more desert punk i don't know anyway hey can i steal you right away yes please cyber future check in to the advertisements Oh, it's Jumbotron time, ain't it? Ooh, check your clock. It's time for Bumbo Bombs. Here is a message for Leslie. It's from Allison who says, We met when you decided to wear a Mabim Bam shirt

to a Nicolas Cage themed burlesque show. What an amazing way to start a friendship. I am so excited to visit you again the minute that Americans are allowed to back into Canada. I love our friendship, except for that time you told me about the Omegaverse. What the fuck, man? Love, Allison.

That's delightful. Got a birthday coming up December 28th. So I celebrate that. And also I feel like wearing a Mabim Bam shirt to a Nicolas Cage themed burlesque show is, I imagine everybody there was wearing Mabim Bam merch. It seems like our type of people. So many face-off references.

Absolutely there are. Can I read this next one? Yeah, please. This is for Alex. It is from references. Absolutely, there are. Can I read this next one? Yeah, please. This is for Alex. It is from Alex. Hi, Alex. This is you from the past to congratulate you on moving out and making your own life choices. Guess what?

You're great, and chosen family is more important than blood family sometimes, and that's okay. Love from past Alex, and yes, there's a lot of Alex's, but this is from you. The one with stuffed animal named Bobo. I mean, that's great and a beautiful message, but also Alex, you got to think about the law of large numbers. There's a lot of Alex's out there. There's a lot of Alex's out there

who have stuffed animals. The odds that another one of them doesn't have a Bobo are like are like nothing i like thinking about the like the line graph of alex's were like oh this isn't me but wait wait a minute wait did i do this uh for those of you that are interested in doing uh personal messages in the new year you can still enter the drawing uh you have until december 29 29th to share your information and see if you can get a chance to get a personal message on Wonderful. Yeah, go to

MaximumFun.org slash Jumbotron Drawing. Thank you, Rachel. And yeah, if your name gets picked, you can do a message for $100. And yeah, may the odds be ever in your favor. Hey, I'm Janet Varney, host of the JV Club podcast.

Ah, high school. Was it a time of adventure, romance, and discovery? Class of 95, we did it! Or a time of angst, disappointment, and confusion? We're all tied together by four years of trauma at this place, but enjoy adulthood, I guess. The truth is, it was both. So join me on the JV Club

podcast where I invite some great friends like Kristen Bell, Angela Kinsey, Oscar Nunez, Neil Patrick Harris, and Keegan-Michael Key to talk about high school, the good, the bad, and everything in between. My teenage mood swings are getting harder to manage the jv club find it on maximum fun what is your second thing my second thing is the tamale

oh yes can i tell you something we uh central market is a grocery store here in austin that's like the fancy heb uh and they do holiday dinners so you can just like reserve one swing by the day before we did it for thanksgiving so because we didn't want to mess with it and they're doing one for christmas and so i did reserve a ham because we wanted it's just us for christmas but damn it we can still have a big ham and some sides and what i loved is one of the other options on there is like six different kinds of tamales. It's like, fuck yeah.

Central market. They know exactly what's up. Did you do it? Did you do it? I didn't. Well, we already have tamales in the fridge. If we want tamales,

we can eat those tamales. Yeah. But you know how many of those you can eat in one sitting? Like 60. Yeah. Like a lot. Yeah. That's a good point.

Exactly. I should have. It's my, it's not too late. I can alter it. Ham and tamales, ham and mashed potatoes and tamales i mean we can have them at separate meals if that makes you uncomfortable you're right you're right anyway tamales uh so this is a like a christmas holiday tradition that i was not familiar with until i moved down south are you i know about it in chicago because yeah that makes sense did you ever did you ever

get tamales from the tamale guy no i think i just lived in a different part of town oh man have the access literally like there was a bar i can't remember the name of it it was something like playing card base like the four jacks or something like that that we would go and do karaoke at sometimes and literally every time i was, he would roll up with his hot box of great, great-ass tamales. That when you've had a couple drinks and it is negative 10 degrees outside, there is nothing better than a boiling hot little tinfoil-wrapped tamale in your hands. Tamales are a food item from the Latin tradition that vary a lot depending on where you're from. Most often it is just kind of a filling that is wrapped in a husk or a leaf and steamed.

The ones that we're familiar with here in Texas have the masa. That good masa. And then they have the corn husk. But you can also, depending on where you're from, you can get it in a banana leaf. Oh, interesting. The masa is basically just a thick ass crumbly tortilla that isn't like fully set, basically. Yeah. And it's a whole process oh for sure

that's why they make them a thousand at a time is because it would be a pain in the ass to do them you know a la carte yeah because you i mean you not only have to get the masa in shape you have to get the the filling in shape then you have to like wrap them in the leaf and then you have to steam them and you can form a whole assembly line. So a lot of times this is something that families will gather together to do around the holidays and they will make them in bulk and they will eat them for a very long time and or share them with friends and other family members. In Guatemala, you eat them at midnight on december 24th and the 31st um i love that yeah

yeah they there's something you can find them here at the uh heb you can find them like frozen but more often than not people are looking they're looking for that handmade they're looking for the hookup uh around this time of year there's also a lot of just like on the street vendors here i think tamale guy like stands out in chicago because he's like a magical elf that can teleport uh all across town and hit every single bar in one night much like santa claus does but i mean you wander around downtown here too and you can very easily snatch one up. Tamales originated in Mesoamerica as early as 8,000 BC. Wow, that's a long time ago.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Like it's wrapped in a banana leaf or a corn husk and you can carry it around. It's transportable. Yeah. It's like Gogurt it's like mesoamerican gogurt if you think about it but way better is that how you you just squeeze the bottom is that how you're eating is that not how you're supposed to do it you squeeze it out of the bottom like it's a push pop. I will say there is also a version in Puerto Rican people will eat something called pastels, which have no masa whatsoever. Oh, it's just pure filling?

Yeah, it's a different combination of ground ingredients. But it's, you know, the same kind of vehicle. I would go for that. Yeah, I would need a dip for that, I feel like. I think there's something like so delightful and surprising because of the way it is put together, you really have no idea kind of what you're going to experience. I have read a lot about people,

I mean, obviously it varies so much family to family and region to region. And so everybody kind of bites into it remembering the last time they had and deciding whether or not this is actually going to be the same experience there was a place we used to get uh like chicken mole tamales which is just like a hat on a hat of just like food jazz just like shit. The mole is like its own unique thing and the very unique tamale that you've made too. And there's nothing like it in the whole world. So tamale is an anglicized version

of the Spanish word tamal. You know, when you pluralize it, you add the ES and English speakers interpreted the E as part of the stem rather than the plural. Oh, that sounds like us. So that's why we say tamale instead of tamal. We done done it again. But yeah, this is a cool thing.

Just like for me, growing up, having those family meals were pretty much, you know, everybody's coming together, they're making food. It's an enormous meal and an enormous task. And kind of growing up with the same thing every year to find out about this tradition was very exciting. Yeah, for sure. And obviously to have the taste experience was just as good, if not better. I'm going to add tamales to our order now. Because now if I don't eat tamales in the next like 10 days i'm

gonna go berserk um hey can i tell you my second thing yes it's a music one it's a band called churches culture and a lot of people see the name and they say chiverches because there is a v in there but the v is pronounced like a u like you would see it like in the old times like where you i remember there's a building in huntington i think like the courthouse or something that has like the inscription over the doorway with the v's for use and it always like as a kid walking by it i was like fucking did it wrong that's a v guys the u has the curve on the bottom but nice try somebody should clean up this town uh i've actually talked about them on the show before because they did a collaboration with wednesday campanella that i

think i played on the show back when i did a segment on them uh they are a scottish synth pop group that just really checks all the boxes for the things i like about like pop music uh they also weirdly i would say kind of have cyberpunk vibes like i think they did a song in drive i guess drive wasn't cyberpunk but it had that like 80s synth feel that like really reminds me of like blade runner uh so they are a trio there's ian cook martin doherty and lauren mayberry who's like the front woman vocalist for the group uh and cook and doherty started out playing in like bands all the way back in college like a lot of them but didn't have the sound that they liked until they bought like an old moog synth from the 80s and started

to mess around with sounds like that they found lauren mayberry who was the drummer and singer for like a rock group so like this genre was nothing any of them had any experience with but they like fell in love with it and got like really really hardcore about like this, even though they'd been in a bunch before, just because of the sound that they'd discovered, which I always like really think is the coolest. I imagine being in a band like that and having that excitement of like, oh, that sound, we finally found that sound.

Lauren Mayberry was actually supposed to be the backing singer, but then the other two heard her sing and they were like, oh, nevermind. You're in charge now. You're gonna do the singing now uh her voice is like out of control like super super super powerful uh and it kind of has to be because she's singing over these like very let's say assertive 80s scents um

and the name churches they all just like liked it they thought it was evocative but they didn't want to lose seo to actual churches there's also a sort of like micro genre called witch house which is like um like chopped and screwed hip-hop beats and grungy synths with like occult vibes all throughout that they were also kind of in into which the v was sort of referential to. Lauren Mayberry did an interview where she said, we did consider putting upside down crosses at either end of our name, but that would have dated us, I think. So if you've heard one of their songs,

it would probably be The Mother We Share, which was like their big breakout hit here in the States. And like basically launched them into the States. They did South by Southwest like a few years in a row hit here in the states uh and like basically launched them into the states they did south by southwest like a few years in a row and took home like all these awards from from doing those shows uh but their favorite album of mine um came out in 2015 and it's called every open eye and every song on this album it just like just rips like it just hits that super big 80s synth sound uh and it has the most danceable like hooks imaginable i got to see them in concert a few years ago it's the only concert i think i

went by myself because we had tickets and i think you were like very pregnant with henry and just didn't like didn't want to go and so it's the only concert i ever went to by myself and i was all nervous but i had a fucking great time because the music was just so fun and the audience was really into um and my favorite song off that album is called clearest blue which I'm gonna play right now What I really, really like about churches is how steady they are, how reliable they are. They are really good at making this kind of music. And unlike a lot of other artists and bands that i really like who make stuff i really like and then take big swings away from it to like experiment with other stuff which is totally their prerogative and i would never be like a dick and say like just do just play the hits trish is like just continues

to kind of hammer down on this synth pop genre that they have proven that they are really really really good at making um what they explore instead are like different like themes and like uh lyrical ideas and inspirations for the songs which range from uh so graves was the unlikely um theme song to the latest season of Terrace House uh in Japan in America we got another sort of like uh extreme music uh like not knockoff that's a mean way to talk about the music but it wasn't they don't do licensed music like they do in Japan where they had the Taylor Swift yeah we are never getting back together for like the first season of Terrace House um and that song is about like gun violence in American schools.

So it's like watching, you know, 20-somethings in Tokyo trying to find love to this song. But the song I want to play now is off their 2018 album, Love is Dead. It's called Graffiti. And it's all about just like the slow dissolving of ill-fated young love. But it like is a bop. So I'm going to play it now. I've been waiting for my whole life to grow old And now we never will, never will Yeah, I just really like them.

They're never the first band that comes to mind when I think about my favorite bands, but when I think about how almost every musical artist that I like has made a whole album that I just didn't care for because it wasn't kind of what I wanted from them. Like Church's just bangs out really, really good synth pop shit. Like every album that they make has a bunch of bangers on it. And I really like having a band like that that I'm a fan of.

Yeah, it's nice to have a band like that too where you will kind of fade out for a few years and then you return and you say, I wonder what they've done while I've been gone and you love everything universally. And it launches, like for real, that's happening right now where I was like listening to music for this and I was like, wait a minute, they're fucking great.

And so I just have been going back through all their albums and listening to it again. If you've never listened to Churches, they rule, just don't forget about that tricky V. Don't just search churches in your music listening program of choice because you'll probably find, I don't know, some sermon podcasts.

I don't know what else is on there. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Mary says, something I appreciate every day is how considerate other parents are in the parking lot of the daycare

I take my daughter to. Without fail, everyone leaves an empty space between cars to make it easier to load and unload kids. Parking lots tend to be stressful and weirdly competitive places, so to see such a consistent and thoughtful cooperation is wonderful. I do miss this. Oh, yeah. Henry's not back in daycare, but we had him in a couple for a couple years there.

And it always was weird. I think it's honestly more like I don't want to make myself the asshole of the whole student body uh by you know being a jerk during drop off yeah no i've never really thought about that but it's true i remember that fondly of just like oh i have so much space here to pull my child who may or may not want to be here yeah out of the car and also like if somebody's like pulling out of the parking lot like i'm always super slow to like yeah please you go ahead you go ahead because we're gonna see each other again our kids might end up being best friends so i can't burn you right now uh one more from braxton who says one thing that i find wonderful is that

since working from home i get to see the garbage truck come by our house every week i'm always amazed to see the speed at which the drivers can line up their trucks with the cans and it's quite fun to see the robot arms shake the cans midair it reminds me of what it felt like to see those big machines go by as a kid i mean those big machines didn't have the wild robot arms that they do now i gotta tell you i am very thoughtful to the distancing between cans because of that robot arm yeah i think a lot about it um i have a lot of uh say yeah in the placement i would say because i i tend to be the one to remember to bring the trash out and i'm very thoughtful like i actually in my head try and and create six feet in my mind so that i can give enough space for that robot arm see i put them close together and you know why

because i'm cyberpunk as fuck and i'm fighting this system this is the system ai garbage eaters that are taking away our freedoms one by one and you think about it and you're like haha griffin very funny joke for another one of your funny podcasts but here in a few years when what nextcling trucks come by to eat up all our bottles and cans. And then what happens next? When the garbage trucks are all of a sudden doing your eye exam for you. Doing our eye exam. Just opening your lids and turning them. What's that coming down the street now?

It's the free thought truck. You're going to scoop up my liberties and dump them right in the back. Crush them down into a little yeah putting the cans close together should solve that uh-huh i feel like you've got you've got it right there you've figured it out no hacking involved just put those oh there's a little bit of trash hacking if you know what i mean i put a put little viruses in the in an old can of soda okay okay so that when the truck eats up the old soda that's a funny joke right now it gets the well no i don't mean like sickness viruses i mean computer viruses

jesus anyway somebody's not a console cowboy uh thanks for listening and thanks to bowen and augustus for these for a theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description and thank you to maximum Fun for hosting our show. Yeah, you want to talk about cyberpunk. There's nothing more cyber or punk than this amazing group of podcasts. We should talk about

shows. Yeah, Triple Click. It's real good. A lot of video games happening right now. I'm sure they have way more salient thoughts about the Cyberpunk 2077 video game than I could generate. I actually meant live shows oh yeah well i mean as long as we're at it though um stop podcasting yourself is a really good show you know i love that show i know you do literally every time i walk by you when you're doing some some errand or chore you are listening to stop podcasting yourself and jordan jesse go are both right on that 666 episode yeah

that's weird yeah there's a lot of podcasts there's a the giant bomb cast another podcast i listened to they just hit 665 so like i guess all these shows started at the exact same time and are all about to hit the do you think that that's the apocalypse gonna happen the pod you got a lot of theories over there today, Griff. The Apodcastlips. Oh, no. Okay, anyway, we have a bunch of shows coming up. Yeah.

December 19th. And you can still get tickets for Candle Nights. Candle Nights are a Candle Nights charity special. You can find tickets at macroy.family or I think themacroy.family. There's a lot of ways to get there. Me and Rachel have very brutal fights about this every episode. We've gotten a lot of complaints that it's getting hard to listen to.

But yeah, we have a bunch of special guests and all the shows got together to make a very fun holiday spectacular to end all holiday spectacular. Holy shit. I mean, I'm really going to oversell it because I think it will deliver. Okay. Well,

it's tickets are 625 and all that goes to charity is pay what you want with a minimum donation of $6.25, and then you get to watch this fun thing. We have so many guests and friends. And skits and sketches. Skits and sketches, and you're going to like it. And then me and Rachel are doing a wonderful live show the week after that, I think. Yeah, so it is December 29th. Yeah, 9 p.m et wow we're really cutting it we're really banking

on henry not waking up during that special i know i know we may we may want to set up a backup plan for that like what i don't know we have the one person that's allowed in our house come sit in yeah that's not a bad idea uh so tickets can be purchased at McElroy.family, and they're five bucks each, and all that goes to benefit Austin Back Cave. Yeah, so Austin Back Cave, much to the chagrin of a lot of bat enthusiasts, is actually a writing program for young people. They go out into the schools.

Lately, they've been offering a lot of online programming, but it is all to nurture the creative talent of young people. It's a really, really great organization. It's cool. Griffin's been involved for years, and I just kind of got on board to literally get on the board. And I've just been really impressed with the work that they're doing to really kind of support the growth of young people as they kind of find their voice and tell their story. Yeah, that's very cyberpunk too.

If you think about it. Okay. I'm starting to realize I may not know what cyberpunk means, even though I just did a whole thing about it. Like when I use my phone and I do Apple Pay at the gas station, when I'm buying like sweets and gummies for myself, is that cyberpunk?

Is that, when I use my card at the gas station machine, instead of going inside, I'm paying for the pump. That's cyberpunk, baby. Don't you think? When I am at the grocery store and I'm dodging the ones and zeros. Oh man. Is that cyberpunk?

Yeah, because they'll bonk you. Yeah. Won't they? For sure. When I'm at the library and I have to put on that headset that does the wires in my brain so that I can absorb all human knowledge at once,

but then I say, no thanks, corporations. And then they're like, this is a library? i'm like that's exactly what a corporation would say to me that's a cyberpunk Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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