Wonderful! - Wonderful! 164: God Knows, Davey

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Rachel's favorite animation! Griffin's favorite comic sci-fi! Rachel's favorite surf rock! Griffin's favorite safe zone!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaCALL YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TODAY: https://5calls.org/Demand 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. Who's feeling fucking funny? Who's feeling like recording a podcast talking about the good stuff going on in the world you nope me uh-uh but here we are you're listening to us which means we must have recorded this at some point today griffin like a real soothsayer said you know what i don't

think we're going to get an episode up on time and i said yes that relieves me a little it was tuesday night we were sweating the georgia election results and like glued to it and so i i was like i know we've been late lately because of the holidays and because of all the like covid stuff that's been sort of in our sphere and uh you know that's that's not great and but i know we're stressed about these georgia election results so let's hold this baby off till thursday when we're in a better headspace so now it's thursday morning and we are recording this. I don't know how, how this is a show where we talk about good things that we like and that we're into.

And that is a service that we understand. We provide folks of, of positivity and a nice positive space. And I don't know how necessarily to be a good steward of that today. And I, I'm sure our listeners understand that but it would be fucking buck wild for us the day after a like attempt to literally overthrow the government we were like but fucking combos are pretty cool i know it does it feels like we

are uh sitting at a news desk and somebody is giving a report and then they cut to us and we say, hey, Froot Loops though, guys. Yeah, it's like we had a feature about the kiddie fashion show happening at the mall, but also there's a coup happening outside. Yeah, we're going to do the episode and we have things to talk about and things that we are positive about. I really, we're going to do the episode and we have things to talk about and things that we are positive about, but I am fully cognizant of the fact that, uh, incredibly scary and,

uh, important things that nobody should stop paying attention to are also happening out, you know, outside of our windows. Yeah. I think it's, it's important to take breaks.

This is something that I try to do as a partner is I'll try and remind Griffin, like you need to take breaks. And so maybe if you have scheduled a break and this is what you're doing, that feels good to me. It is also maybe after or before or in the middle of this episode won't stop you.

A really great time to call your elected officials. Call five of them email them you know do whatever you can to tell them that uh what happened yesterday was a terrorist attack uh and that there should be consequences for that fucking obviously yeah and then do whatever you can in the following you know days weeks months elections uh to just fucking unseat everybody responsible for it yeah the thing i felt yesterday in addition to the the fear and righteous anger was this like level of determination to just fuck Ted Cruz's whole shit, like his whole life up in a way that I haven't necessarily experienced before. Yeah.

I mean, we were, we were fans of Beto. It wasn't like we were. I was, listen, everything up to this point, Ted Cruz has been my road dog.

No, fucking. It wasn't like we were like, wait, is he a bad guy i know we're preaching to the choir i also know that like whenever we talk about stuff like this we do get tweets and messages and emails from people on the other side of the aisle from us talking about how disappointed they are and like if there are any of those people still listening listening to this show if i am like begging you to really put what happened yesterday in the

correct perspective which was that ted ted cruz at all uh participated in a coup of the government and like you have to not be okay with that uh i don't know. This is a futile effort. I recognize that. And a bummer way to start out the show. But like, I don't know what to do with this energy right now. Because it's all I've been able to think about. And I'm sure everybody else has too. So like, let's just, let's do our show.

Let's do our episode. I think if we hadn't missed so many episodes lately, we fucking definitely for sure would not be doing one right now. Yeah. But we are here and please enjoy it and let it give you a moment of levity if that is something we can even provide right now. But holy shit, don't stop like staying alert for what is happening right now.

Okay. So do you have any small wonders? I wanted to bring up fudge. Yeah. So as a pregnant woman, some of my options for relaxers are gone. But I looked up fudge because I was like, how does one make fudge?

It's incredibly easy. Now, I say all this. I have not tried what I made yesterday, so I do not know if it turned out good, but it's just like you melt chocolate and butter and condensed milk, and then you put it in the fridge, and I had no idea it was that easy. Used to go over to my aunt's house at Christmas, and she would make an assortment of fudge and I thought this woman is a magician and turns out, nope.

Sorry, sorry, Aunt Sydney. It's not that crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to say text message pharmacy services. I appreciate that. Yeah, that is nice. Last week, I was running low on my brain fuel.

The gas that makes my brain go right. And I was like, oh man, I'm not going to be able to get a hold of my psychiatrist on such short notice. But then I just got a text message from CVS like, hey, do you want more of your brain medicine? And I was like, yeah. What's the catch? Yeah, it was almost like CVS was like, you are wicked gonna need it next week, my man.

So do you want us to send a text to your psychiatrist to get a refill? And I was like, yes. That was it. I showed up, got it. I know this isn't they they haven't reinvented the wheel here but i freaking appreciate it no no i have no other sort of facet of my health life that other people are thinking of me like that like call the pharmacy

and they'd ask you for your prescription number to refill it and i'd be like shoot i don't know what that is yeah but now i get like you you know, six eggplant emojis. Now they're like, you up, Griffin? And some prayer hands. You up? How's your brain? You go first this week. I go first. So this is something I thought for sure we had talked about,

but I did not see it on the website. And so I think it is untrod ground. And that is claymation. All right. Are we talking like Aardman? is that the name of the yeah yeah among others but yeah it's one of those things that uh it just instantly grabs my attention cannot think of anything other than uh parks and rec the episode where uh adam scott's character oh god what is this name he gets like very ben wyatt

ben wyatt gets very depressed when he uh gets fired and so he makes his own four second video to uh shiny happy people uh yeah that is really good about that um so everybody I'm sure knows what this is. Uh, but I, just to give some context, um, shooting a 30 minute claymation movie potentially requires making approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames, a full length 90 minute movie, 64,800, uh uh and possibly more because you you know you get a hair or a smudge in there yeah you know you got i guess i haven't thought about it are are claymation movies shot at 30 frames a second it's it would seem excessive to do anything or what like movies are some weird like 27 normal film runs at 24 frames per second. Yeah.

I'm thinking of elite gamer shit right now. Yeah. I can't watch Wallace and Gromit anything less than 120 frames per second on my 4K monitor. I need a wide field of vision if I'm going to no scope fools in my Wallace and Gromit movies. There are a lot of tricks of the trade now uh feature length productions have generally switched from clay to rubber silicone and resin cast components so just the idea like it is it's not going to get like a piece of dust stuck to it right clay would um but there's just something about it that really grabs me uh i i definitely loved the wallace and gromit films uh and it it there's just something

more endearing about it i don't know i can't really explain why a cartoon doesn't like captivate me the same way claymation does but but it is definitely the case there's something about the physicality of it there's something about the the and maybe this didn't like resonate with me as much when i was younger but the with claymation you can sort of see the amount of effort that went into the thing on on every scale whereas like with a 3d cgi movie like that is unless you kind of know how 3d animation works like you cannot imagine the work that goes into it that's true the limitations are so clear right like with wallace and gromit it was really just like on on gromit the dog there were eyes and a mouth and then just the little eyebrow fold did like

so much work and you realize like this is what they have it's kind of like you know puppeteering in a way of just like a the face is set and you are just moving the tiniest part of the face to communicate emotion right it's it's fascinating i think kubo and the two strings is not claymation but i forget the name of it i remember watching a behind the scenes like making of of just like one shot from kubo and the two strings of being like holy god how does anybody do this yeah and ardman did start moving away so the movie flushed away uh was a cgi replication of clay animation so there there are definitely some changes being made. But the big starting point.

So the first like claymation film was done back in 1908. And this is like a silent film. And it was like, it was a spoof of the presidential election with Roosevelt. Oh, I bet that was funny. I watched it. Oh oh you can watch it yeah it's on youtube and it's just a bunch of men getting in in a fight in a bar and then one man goes to jail and he goes to sleep and while he's sleeping these busts of the presidential candidates appear and you can see them like slowly be pieced together into who they are like which candidate

they are uh dang that sounds that sounds like biting criticism but these like clay busts they don't like talk they're not animated it's just like you see the clay make it and then you're like oh oh i get it you know there's people who watched that back in 1908 like, oh, he didn't. He did not. Oh, my God. Claymation, as I think we know it, really took off with Gumby and Davy and Goliath. Oh, sweet Davy and Goliath.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. God knows. Foxy the Snowman. I just remembered that my dad used to quote that all the time, like as a joke, not in the manner that it was intended, but like if one of us did something wrong, he would always go, God knows, Davy. That's really good.

I guess there was an episode where Davy was just being a real ripscallion and being like so what i didn't get in trouble god no um that was actually when i was looking at this the davian goliath was something that was given to the networks for free i remember no i've watched a making of david and goliath i think partially because how did that how did that happen how did somebody make a free claymation show for networks to use? Yeah, I mean, it was paid for by the church, as I understand. Imagine, yes, imagine that.

Yeah. But Gumby and Davey, same creator. Oh, wow. Yeah. I don't think I knew that or remembered it. So the Aardman that I'm familiar with actually started back in the eighties. Um, Nick Park joined Aardman in 1985 and the first, uh, film they put out was Creature Comforts in 1989.

I've never heard of that film. Oh, it's very good. It's, it's filmed like documentary style and it's, uh, speaking to animals in, in captivity. Oh, that's, that's fun. Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not exactly lighthearted. No. Cause it is a lot of animals. You know what I do?

We watched a documentary about Aardman. Yeah. I remember. Because a lot of animals kind of complaining about the, the zoo conditions. I remember that their studio burned down and my mind could not process the amount of film history that was probably lost in that event. Wow, this is a fun,

this is not a bummer episode at all. But Nick Park, since joining Aardman, they've received a total of six Academy Award nominations and have won four wow uh with creature comforts as i mentioned a grand day out uh was nominated wrong trousers close shave the curse of the were-rabbit uh and they're you know they're still doing stuff today sean the sheep oh yeah it's really hugely successful um and uh there's been any other number. I don't know if Tim Burton did like a pirate one.

Oh, yeah. That they were involved with. They'd done commercials. You can always kind of recognize it. Absolutely. I feel like there's something about the style that you're just immediately like, oh, that must be Aardman. If they have tall heads with two sort of conjoined eyeballs, it's an Aardman feature.

It's true. Yeah, I, this is the kind of thing that it will probably, I mean, you know, I mentioned that the Flushed Away film was moved to CGI.

I imagine claymation is not something that will, will, you know, have a huge boom anytime soon but i don't think it'll go away either you say that but then you do get the like uh coralline kuba and the two strings you get i mean technically like lego movie is not that far out like obviously they use a lot of sort of cgi uh post-production stuff but a a lot of that was stop motion as well. Yeah. I think there's enough of that stuff going on.

Yeah. Can I do my first thing? Yes. My first thing, I don't know if you've ever had any exposure to my first thing. I'll be curious to see, but my first thing is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Oh, so I played the computer game. I love that about you. I had a lot of people recommend the book to me. I never read it. I did. I did read it when I was in, I think, middle school. I had a friend in high school that was a drummer in a band called the Hitchhikers and used to carry around a copy of that book. Oh, that's great.

It was very much his aesthetic in high school. I get it for sure. So Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a sort of multimedia franchise. The books, there were, I think, six of them that I've only read, I think, the first two. And from what I understand, there's a sort of decline in quality as they go along. And most of them, though, were written in the whole sort of series was created by Douglas Adams. And it's a science fiction series, but it's a like very comedy forward science fiction series about sort of a group of misfits traveling around the galaxy, which ends up being a much stranger galaxy than you would assume. which ends up being a much stranger galaxy than you would assume.

And what I didn't know is that before the books, it was a radio series. It was a comedy radio series on BBC Radio 4. And then the book was adapted from the radio series. I thought for sure that it was the other way around, because that seems like a weird direction for the adaptation to go in yeah yeah you don't usually hear about it happening that direction yeah um but it after being a bbc radio series that was 1978 when it first aired uh i think a year later the first hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy book adaptation came out and since then, there have been books, there have been comics, there have been stage shows. The TV series is actually the first time I, I think it was like 83 that the TV series came out. That was my first actual exposure to it. And then I read the book after that. The TV

series I love. There was also a movie that came out in 2005 with Zooey chanel and martin freeman and some of it was fine most deaf i believe uh played ford prefect um so the the the books are mostly about this guy arthur dent who is on earth with his friend ford prefect who turns out to be an alien uh and an alien race called the vogons come to demolish earth because it's in the way of uh planned highway, the interspace highway they're planning to build. But Ford Prefect helps Arthur Dent hitchhike off of Earth so he's the last living human man. Okay. And he gets picked up by the president of the galaxy,

Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is traveling with a human woman named Trillian. The comfort with which you said that name blew me away. Zaphod Beeblebrox. Yeah, he is a major character. He's a two-headed alien president of the galaxy who is played by Sam Rockwell in the movie, which is really good casting. Sounds like charming casting.

Well, I think it helps that the books themselves, like the story itself is so is so charming and so so dense and so exceptionally british and that's what i think really really works and what's what what makes it it really stand the test of time is there is a style of british comedy that was especially prevalent back then like python where which was like saying these completely nonsensical things and these really irreverent things in a really dry matter of fact way that is essentially what the titular hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is it is a book that exists ford prefect is a writer for this hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and constantly throughout the book the hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And constantly throughout the book, the Hitchhiker's Guide will deploy these explanations

of what this bureaucratic alien race is like or how this thing works in space. And it's always nonsense delivered in the driest way. Like I think Stephen Fry was the narrator for the movie. I forget who was the narrator for the other series. But it's just like, oh yes, the, this ship travels by improbability. Like, it's the wildest ideas that are delivered so scientifically and matter-of-factly.

Yeah, see, that would have helped me. Because when I tried to play that DOS game, I never got anywhere. Like, I would play it for like 30 minutes, and I could never get past the opening moment. Well, it helps that old adventure games were famously completely batshit nonsensical. Like use this, use the, I think the famous example is like in one of the Monkey Island games,

you had to like use a rubber pulley with a chicken to like make something to cross a river. What kicks ass about Hitchhiker's Guide rubber pulley with a chicken to like make something to cross her. I mean, um, what, what kicks ass about hitchhiker's guide is like, you add this thing of, of dry British comedy kicked up to unknown degrees because then you start doing that with sci-fi and really great shit happens. But while it is sort of a send up of sci-fi, there are ideas in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that are really fucking

cool and really like smart and actually have been kind of foundational for sci-fi moving forward. So like the big, the concept that is brought up a lot is the babblefish is like something that is explained very early on by the Hitchhiker's Guide. And it's a little tiny fish alien that you put in your ear. And then anything that it hears, it automatically translates into a language you you can understand and so just everybody in the galaxy has a babblefish in their ear so that gets around like hey how come all the aliens speak english uh and so the book is kind of full like the series is full of stuff like that that's like you know uh sci-fi is kind of obsessed with explaining things practically to you like and here's how this works and here's what here's how they travel through uh you know wormholes and here's how

they're all breathing and here's what they eat and hitchhiker's guide had answers for all that stuff that were bonkers but they were kind of cool from time to time yeah no i love that i don't think i realized how influential that was until you said babelfish out loud, because I remember that being a search engine. trying to solve the answer to life, the universe, and everything. That's where 42, do you know how like 42 is like a thing people talk about? Like a number that is brought up a lot as a joke? Like 42 is the answer. That's where this comes from. Oh. This supercomputer determines that the number 42 is the answer to

what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And then they have to go about figuring out what the actual question is that 42 is the answer to. It's like that's a wild idea yeah that the earth has a supercomputer uh and it is like a cool sci-fi idea that's like you know jokes aside like and just i don't know a rad concept and that's what i really love about these books is like they are funny but they also bring up like kind of thought-provoking sci-fi ideas. So, and it's also just so charming. Yeah. I just really like Hitchhiker's Guide.

Hey, can I hitchhike with you all the way to stealing you away for the ads? Of course. All right. We got a couple Jimbo Grams here. do you want to hear them please this one's for beth and it's from ryan who says beth thank you for being such a kind patient and wonderful wife your constant support means the world to me i love you and all our many pets want to go out sometime ryan goose and the whole gang is ryan goose and the whole gang asking Is Ryan, Goose, and the whole gang asking Beth on a date? Is that what's happening in the list?

I think that's the pets. The answer stands. I mean, the question stands. Well, and I think, Ryan, you should have given yourself some space in that maybe Beth doesn't want all the pets there. Yeah. So I'm going to say that Ryan would probably be okay if the pets weren't there. Yeah. And I'm also wondering if the goose is a pet, is it an actual graceful long-necked bird? Graceful is not the word I would actually use to describe a goose.

That's not something I typically associate with geese. Yeah. You want to read this next one? Yes. This message is for Maddie. It is from AJ. Hey, Maddie. I just wanted to say that I'm so proud of you for making it through 2020, all the way

from retail during a pandemic to brain surgery. I still can't believe you have a 3D printed bone in your head now. We've had a great few years together so far, and I'm so excited to see what comes next. I love you so much aj that rules that i mean it's it's i i hope you are doing well and brain surgery obviously is nothing to fuck with but that's some so that is some cyberpunk shit bone i love that i do too i mean what kind is i mean griffin you've got a 3D printer now. It's true. Let me print out some bones. Yeah.

Is the bone their whole skull? Because I would just go with the Dan Aykroyd vodka skull, the crystal skull. How do you think a skull works? How do I think a skull works? I guess it's a few bones, huh? Yeah, there's more than one. That's fair. Hey, I'm Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington. And I'm Elliot Kalin. Together, we're The Flophouse. A podcast where we watch a bad movie and then talk about it. Movies like Space Hobos, Into the Outer Reaches of the Unknown and the Things That We Don't Know with a movie and also who's that grandma zazzle zippers breakdown 2 and backhanded compliment elvis is a policeman baby crocodile and the happy twins leftover potatoes station wagon 3 herbie goes to hell new episodes available every other saturday available at maximumFun.org or wherever

you get your podcasts. Bye. You want to tell me about that there second thing you got going on right there? Yeah, my second thing is a musical group called Best Coast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have been thinking about Best Coast for a while now as a topic and was kind of not sure because it was one of those situations where you assumed like everybody knows Best Coast, right? I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. And also they had a new album come out in February 2020. Whoa, really? Exactly a year ago.

Yeah. No idea. This happens to me a lot. Where I'll like have a band that I really like from like 2010 and then i kind of lose touch absolutely and then i'm like oh yeah hey it's been a while huh let me see and then it's like just so happens they had an album come out like the month before right um best coast is a rock duo uh that formed in la in 2009 it is is Bethany Constantino on vocals and Bob Bruno. It's a multi-instrumentalist.

And I saw Best Coast at South by Southwest. I feel like Best Coast is, I apologize for yawning. I feel like Best Coast is one of those bands that everybody in Austin knows about because of the exposure we got through south by southwest and austin city limits yeah although i feel like i so crazy for you was the band's debut album and it came out in 2010 and i feel like for whatever reason i think it was just the group of friends and the time period like I feel like I knew about that album actually before I went to South by Southwest

because I remember intentionally going to a venue where I knew they would be playing. So after that album came out, they spent a lot of 2011 on the road for festival appearances and tour dates. The album I didn't know about was the the only place which came out in 2012 totally missed that one um and then when they did california nights in 2015 back on board yeah aware of that one um and uh there's just something about so bet Bethany Costantino has this voice and this energy that is just like, it is dreary and poppy at the same time. It's very Rilo Kiley kind of in that you're like, it feels safe to be sad here, but also I'm kind of having a good time being sad it's like a it's like a kind of uh this is gonna make me sound kind of douchey but sort of like that sort of

washed out southern california like dream dream like sound that uh the kids are just going crazy for these days yeah so the guardian described the sound as a lo-fi 60s garage rock and surfing band. Yeah. Which I thought was pretty apt. So Bethany started writing music at age 15. And her inspiration is kind of all over the place. It's kind of like this traditional like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and also Weezer and Blink-182. Absolutely. I feel like it's a really good like amalgamation of like influences that a musician would have in that time period. But she kind of got her start uploading music to MySpace and was in a band

briefly called Pocahontid, which at one point opened for Sonic Youth. But then she left that band to go to college in New York, where she was pretty miserable because moving, and I'm sure this happens to a lot of people, moving from sunny California to congested, dark New York, especially those winters, was not a pleasant experience for her. So she dropped out of college, came back, got a part-time job, and started working on music with her current music partner, Bob Bruno. She had kind of a hard time because when Crazy for You came out in 2010, it got some criticism. I loved it. I loved that album. Very, very poppy, much poppier than her later stuff. But you know, like outlets, and I'm sure

you felt this when you're working at Polygon, but outlets like Pitchfork kind of gave her some criticism for, you know, her like, more fundamental rhyme schemes and the kind of like these topics of like, you know, being in love in California, and you know, just kind of just a little bit of a critical eye at kind of the more simplistic aspects. And she says openly, she's like, I read everything, like I read everything, and it was devastating to me. And it really like crippled me for a while and I had a really hard time moving forward. Now though, like that's the shit.

Like I feel like the albums that blow up now are not as sort of, I don't know, verbose. Like it's, yeah, it's not all like Joanna Newsom level, like poetic imagery. But you know, when you're an indie rocker and you're trying to do something. Absolutely, yeah. You know, and I think also,

and she has been kind of an advocate for being a woman in this position trying to make rock music, you know, is different in that she was kind of given more scrutiny perhaps than she would have otherwise. And so anyway, we've been talking a long time. I wanted to play a song off of California Nights called Feeling Okay that I think will give a good kind of vibe for that music.

Today I know I feel okay kind of vibe for that music. So there was a five-year gap in between the new album and California Nights. Best Coast toured with Waves, I guess, for a while. Bethany was dating the front man at the time. And they also toured with Paramore. And, and I wasn't aware of this, they released a children's album called Best Kids. Hey, that's great. Which I have not heard yet, but I was excited. And then, and there was a short-lived television show with Fred Savage called What Just Happened,

which I never watched, but it was like a parody of those like after shows. And they served as the house band on that show. That's great. But she really spent the time, she developed these like what she calls destructive patterns. And I read this interview where she said, quote, my self-care at the time was like, oh, I just get really fucked up and watch Bravo. Yeah. Which is what a lot of us do. Yeah, that's, but I think she realized that it was really kind

of hampering her artistic output. And so she has since embraced sobriety and spent a lot of time kind of focusing on being present. And that is what has led to the new album, which I listened to recently. It was very good. She said, traditionally, she would write a song and then go to her band mate and he would make the music. And during this like period of extreme challenge for her, she basically just went to her band mate and said, Can you write the music and I'll write the song like it took like a tremendous amount of humility on her part of like i am not getting anything done and that's what helped put this new album together and it's great that's cool i recommend it uh i'm gonna do my second thing real fast because i know you need to hop off here in a bit safety town you know it you know it from the hit

my bim bam tv show assuming i mean everybody was subscribed to cezo so like i'm assuming everybody knows about safety town uh i it is a thing in huntington but i uh came to learn while we were shooting that show that it is also a thing that is kind of everywhere yeah it's a modular thing in my town so safety town was brought to you when i was a kid oh interesting they did not have a fixed location like you did um there's lots of places that have that fixed location so safety town is a an educational facility for like elementary school age children to teach you about just sort of general safety uh with a focus on traffic and sort of pedestrian best practices, let's call them, but also like fire, guns, drugs, poison, flooding, earthquakes, like whatever.

So the heart of Safety Town is like there's an educational building where you go in and you get kind of briefed on all of this stuff. And then, you know, then once you're patient enough, you get to go outside to this mini replica city with go-karts that look like service vehicles essentially where you learn how like traffic works and you learn how to you learn what the signs on the road mean and you learn how to obey traffic lights and and you know walk crosswalk signals and like all of that stuff um and ours was like huntington's was very well maintained like our safety town was taken very seriously evidenced by the fact that me and justin and

travis got in a lot of trouble because we did safety town wrong as adults filming a comedy show yeah that's the level of scrutiny to be fair you did in your adult body climb into one of those vehicles and drive it around i was allowed to do that it was the stealing of the batteries and moving of the huge expensive batteries that i guess was what got us kicked out of safety town um but like you'd go there on a field trip which like i want to do a whole segment about field trips i saw somebody tweet like why is it that the air on the morning of field trips like always hit different and somebody responded to that like it's like kind of foggy and a little bit like dewy outside and i was like holy shit what's going on yes it was this is probably what got me thinking about safety town yeah um i always thought that

like i've talked about my weird relationship with school before where like i tested really well and i was i was a i was a terrible student like i didn't give a shit about learning anything but i was really good at like kind of memorizing stuff just enough to get good grades and keep going by yeah but anytime like something practical came about i was like all about it because i was like oh i've always been curious about this actual thing that i experience every day and so as a little kid you don't that is not a part of the required education like how do how do traffic do like how are you actually supposed to be safe on the streets when you are in the car with your your parents your guardians whatever and they are driving around and stopping at certain points and giving right away. Like, what does all that stuff outside the car window mean?

And this was a chance for you to actually finally kind of crack that code. And I thought that that was so huge, like so revolutionary. And it's not like driver's ed, right? Because you're essentially driving a big box with a gas pedal and a handbrake. And also, wicked, there were accidents. Like, the other thing about Safety Town is that when it is in use, it is explicitly not the safest place on earth

because you got a bunch of kids driving around big go-karts while other kids are trying to cross the streets. And there's like three adults trying to like lock the whole thing down. See, we just, well, I'm curious about the age actually because when we did Safety Town, it was like elementary school, like real early kindergarten kind of age.

And we were using tricycles. So, but you had. We were like second, second, third grade. Okay. See, at that point, didn't you kind of already know, like I should stop when the light is red? The, the, the, the accidents mostly happened because of a lack of knowledge about how to operate a go-kart.

So, like, I ran a red light in the mail truck, and I got, like, put in basically time out for, like, 10 minutes where I had to get out of the car and I couldn't do anything. It was absolutely humiliating. So, Safety Town kind of got started in 1937. There was a dude whose name was friend bowls, which is strong. My name is friend, F R E N D friend bowls, B O A L S. Uh,

he saw a car hit a kid and that like really left an impact on him. And so he started this sort of like traffic education school, which grew in 1964. There was a nursery school teacher named Dorothy child, who was, which is also like a wild name for a preschool teacher, uh, who opened the national safety town center in Cleveland,

Cleveland, Ohio. And then I guess it just kind of franchised out from there. Um, but yeah, it just kind of boggles my mind. The amount of like important practical education I didn't receive growing up. Yeah.

And that was not prioritized at all on like a state level. Uh, and so I am genuinely glad that safety town was there to like, in a very fun way. Cause driving go-karts is fun. Like teach me about safety. I mean, that's good.

Yeah. That blows me away that they have this like dedicated location in Huntington where kids get to go on field trips like that makes it like fun. And like, it makes it seem like relevant and important. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Submissions from our friends at home. Becca says, love me a casserole. That's lunch for the week, baby. That is really nice. God, we never make, we never do. Well, here's the thing. We'll always eat it the next day and then never again. That's true. Well, okay.

You're giving yourself a lot of credit there. I don't really dig leftovers like after two days. After the fact rachel will yeah i will i'll take a day off and then i'll come back on day three and be like can i griffin's like probably not uh rachel another rachel says rosemary smells great and tastes good on potatoes that's all i need agreed hard agree firm agree gotta love rosemary throw it on some steaks and sous vide them sous vide rosemary like imparts that rosemary stink in a way that is indescribable i love rose i just like walking down the street

somebody's got in their front yard you rub your hands on it that's good like why even shower that day when you get uh when you fry something that has rosemary on it and then like you're eating it you get that little crispy little crunchy little rose oh rose. Okay, we got to wrap up here. Thank you so much to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Go check out all the great shows there. Like Stop Podcasting Yourself and Story Break.

One Bad Mother. One Bad Mother. And many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more. This was nice getting to do this with you. I'm kind of not looking forward to stopping, just knowing kind of what's... Yeah. Well, just don't get back on the internet, hon. I got to.

Please hang in there. Please contact your elected officials. Yeah. got to uh please please hang in there please contact your elected officials yeah and um just stay stay safe and and take breaks take take breaks but also i know stay vigilant but take breaks you're a person you're a person you're not a robot um and uh yeah hang in there. Bye. Bye. Money in all Money in all Money in all Money in all Money in all Money in all Maximumfun.org

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