Wonderful! - Wonderful! 167: The Christmas Crab

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Griffin's favorite investment fad! Rachel's favorite national poem! Griffin's favorite good-smelling plant! Rachel's favorite animal movement! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya 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. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for, I feel your spirit in the studio. You ever do that? You ever feel like the listener, like they're in here with us and it's like, you know, they're like ghosts or angels or something and they, there's two of them because there's two of

us, right? And so one of them's behind me and they have their little spectral hands on my shoulders and then there's one behind you with their hands on your shoulders. But I see that. And I'm like, that's my wife. Do you ever do that? You know, I took a lot of creative writing classes. And they talked about how some writers have like a particular person in mind that they are writing to.

Interesting. That helps them kind of focus their work and their voice. So who's your ghost angel that you're writing for? My ghost angel. Mine is named, his name is Thomas. And he lives in Detroit. And he loves alt comedy and podcasting. And it's going straight to Thomas.

Mine is Connie Britton. Oh yeah. Can't go wrong there. If you make something for Connie Britton, it's going to be a crowd pleaser pretty much no matter what. Yeah. Do you have any small wonders though is what I'm wondering. I want to say Valentine's day stuff.

Oh yeah. Just like the candy, the cookies, the treats. I went to Trader Joe's. They had all of their little seasonal Valentine's things out, and I just pushed them into my cart aggressively. Yeah, I had myself a little snack attack last night, didn't I? Oh, little gummy X's and O's.

I had some of them. I had some of those chocolate-covered shortbread hearts. Good stuff, good stuff good stuff i know that it is basically the same thing i could buy year round but when it is in a little seasonal shape i'm just like well that has to belong to me now right yeah yeah uh we just started i'll say ozark we started watching ozark it's not our kind of show. It's very bleak. Oppressively bleak, I would argue. Yeah, we're only in the first season,

so it may get worse. It probably will. It's like Breaking Bad, but less fun. I'm describing it. I don't know why. There's no buildup. I was telling Griffin Griffin with Breaking Bad, you get some time to get used to this life of crime. Whereas Ozark, it is literally episode one.

Episode one is like, hey, there's crime. Yeah, so I never feel great after finishing an episode, but I get it now. I get why people have been talking about this show for a while it's i guess it's okay to watch a little you know a prestige grim dark drama like this from time to time uh not my usual cup of tea but you know we need we need something to watch yes there's a new season of the glass blowing show on netflix i know i didn't watch the first season oh so now we can experience it together no point you'll be You'll miss out on all the important plot points. I think I go first this week.

Great. I prepped this first subject without realizing that it is very kind of similar to a subject that I brought last week when I talked about trading card games and Pokemon and stuff like that. But I saw an article pop up about this thing and it's not so much the thing I like

as the concept of the thing. And it is the concept of Beanie Babies and the investment. And listen, this is not, I do not want to judge the people who got snookered into the Beanie Baby habit because there but for the grace of God went I. This feels like a real pivotal moment in our relationship for a lot of reasons.

Okay. But largely because I don't think of you as much of a collector. Are you really, babe? You don't think of me as much as, should I open my closet door for you where I have all my dark collections? You're not regularly on the ebay no you don't have a bunch of doodads that are like spilling out into all the rooms of our house like no i keep them neatly organized in my office closet maybe this is just like a

little secret little habit that i just haven't really explored with you i mean it depends on what you call a collection right i have probably 500 different video games in my closet right there i'd say i probably have been collecting those across different generations for most of my life i guess it collections can be what you hold on to and not an active habit right most of my beanie baby collecting took place through the mcdonald teeny beanies uh which even then i remember like getting a happy meal with a teeny beanie inside it and getting it and be like oh this is gonna be my nest egg how does it feel for you to say teeny beanie not great not great but people used to say shit like that all the time in the 90s

so this is 90s kids member i i really do want to talk about this because i know our audience skews young and i think that sort of through cultural osmosis, people probably know about Beanie Babies. But I don't know that everybody really recognizes the true depths of depravity that people went through to get their hands on these little guys. If you don't know, Beanie Babies were these little wildly understuffed kind of rag dolls that looked like different animals with different sort of colorful cloth exteriors that were stuffed with these tiny little, what were they, like PVC, like little beads. Yeah, like a beanbag. I mean, stuffed in the way that a beanbag is, so it's kind of floppy. Yeah, they were not very full, which some folks took as a knock on the quality of the Beanie Baby line. Ty Warner, who created Beanie Babies and was the titular founder of Ty Inc., the company that made Beanie Babies, he said that understuffing them like that made them look, quote, real.

I like that. I like that a lot. So this first line of nine Beanie Babies launched from Thai Ink in 1993. And those nine are like among the most quote unquote valuable, but I will get to the value of these stuffed toys here in a moment. until late 1995 and that's when when beanie buying fever kind of hit its zenith um and there were two main reasons why like this was such a thing in the in the late 90s and why they attracted all of these these collectors um and the first is that tie ink was vicious about artificial scarcity of these dolls. They would only release like a certain number of each model of Beanie Baby and then would just stop selling them, stop manufacturing them entirely and then would move on to the next model

and do the exact same thing, right? So there was never this like overwhelming surplus of certain models of Beanie Babies. They also all had these tags on them uh and the tags would have uh the birthday for the beanie baby and a little poem for the beanie baby and because the speed with which they were manufacturing these there were a lot of typos on those tags so if you had one oh my god from like a limited set with a typo tag or some, you know, rare tag,

then the value of it sort of multiplied, right? And the way that they really tapped into their consumer base, and this was kind of revolutionary at the time, in late 1995, Ty Inc. made a website

that they would post the link to on these tags, like, hey, go to tyinc.com or whatever the website was to learn more about this Beanie Baby and find out more about like its value and what the next line of beef. And they were really the first ones to like interact with customers through their website, which seems like every that's the only reason websites exist now. But in 1995, like nobody was really doing it like that it's true um and so you know you had this this market of artificial scarcity and then

this website for information for collectors to go and like learn all about their shit and because of that like 1995 to 1998 like beanie babies were like buck wild and people were buying them and seeking them out uh ebay uh during this period like 10 of all sales on ebay were beanie babies of people who would like find them and then flip them for for a profit uh and sell them to collectors and these like you know big clear plastic uh resin boxes that were hermetically sealed and would be a down payment on a house in the future um certain dolls that were very very uh valuable again i put that in quotes the princess diana beanie baby yeah i was gonna bring that up that is that is where i remember like realizing like oh this is a kind of a weird thing. Yeah. They made a limited run that I think they made.

They sent like 12 dolls each to vendors. So each vendor would only have a run of 12 dolls. And then of that run, there was a first printing that had a like misprint on the tag. And so in 2017, it was the 20th anniversary. They released this doll in 1997, 20th anniversary. These dolls started to show up again on these different websites of people selling them for like $60,000. Oh, my gosh. One, I think, sold it for like half a million dollars in like this pristine box.

And as far as anyone can tell, none of those ever sold. Because the cruel joke of Beanie Babies is that they aren't really worth anything you can buy one of those princess beanie babies on ebay for like i saw one for like 15 bucks i saw one for like at the max like in its like ultra rare form like 100 bucks on ebay um and so there is there is no value to the beanie baby and is that is that a cruel twist of fate for people who you know sunk some cash into this hoping that one day it would they be able to turn around and sell this understuffed princess diana bear for you know sixty thousand dollars you're really big on this understuffed thing it's like this is a shit

it's what really gets to you it's not a good i i had some they did a lot of licensed beanie babies in sort of late beanie baby era like 99 i think they i think they did pokemon i definitely had like that kind of thing uh of of like a vulpix or whatever. But the idea of people saying these little, these tiny little ragdoll toys, I have to, I have, it is my, I've been put on this earth to buy them. And then one day I will become a very rich person. And then like now in 2021,

we have the context of looking back and saying like, those were bad stuffed animals. Of course they were never going to be worth anything. But there was this thing. And I feel like it's a common thing for collectors, like baseball cards, Pokemon cards, certainly. Although Pokemon cards have bucked the curve because some of those are extremely valuable still these days. Beanie Babies never really got over the hump of being an actual worthwhile investment. Yeah.

I mean, it's, you know, it's primarily a children's toy. And typically that is not, you know, where one really makes their money. You know, on Antiques Roadshow, I feel like it's more rare that you see a stuffed animal as like, will you appraise this item? Our first hint should have been when they started giving them away in Happy Meals is that these items would never be particularly valuable. Yeah, you said that. But McDonald's toys, I don't know. There's like something about it. Like there, I mean, people will get the set and they will sell it.

Yeah. Not for a lot of money. No. get the set and they will sell it. I mean, not for a lot of money, but there's something about like a set and a number and a limited time release that you still kind of think, well, I mean, if nobody else can get it

after this time window, then maybe it is valuable. Maybe it is valuable. But then you think that there's 5 million people saying the exact same thing. And maybe it's not. It's not to, I don't want to poke fun at people who get bought into,

you know, not get rich quick schemes, but investment schemes like this. But I do want to say that like building your hopes, building your like sort of investment portfolio around these poorly stuffed bears is like as far as hopes go like pretty delightful to me there is a suggestion in the way you're phrasing this that if only they had been stuffed a little more you could know if they'd been stuffed more than nobody would have ever given a shit about these guys um i mean it's just like gambling right like like

there are opportunities to potentially make money right you if you enjoy it you know you go for it right you know i i don't see a whole lot of difference between this and like people who you know bet on horse races no i mean i i i again held on to pokemon cards for a very long time thinking that they would be worth some money and then it was worth some money yeah and today would be worth much more money so like yeah no it's sliding doors man the princess diana doll could be worth a billion dollars in some world just not this one how strange for for somebody yeah to pass from this earth and be brought back in a stuffed bear right that people then go out and seek out millions of dollars someday yes it's a strange a strange twist of fate i don't know much about princess diana but that doesn't seem like it was sort of her vibe necessarily they decide on the

animal i wonder yeah i don't know i don't know if she was a big bear person. I don't know either. Again, I know very little about Princess Diana, and I'm sorry for that. I just don't know. I know lots of other stuff. What's your first thing? So I don't typically take requests on this show. Yeah, that's wild.

I usually just kind of go with my gut. Yeah. But it happened that the requests in my gut kind of lined up. Okay. With this National Poetry Corner. Oh, yeah. Focused on Amanda Gorman. We almost went to this National Poetry Corner last week before the inauguration.

I don't know what I was thinking. I wanted to do it last week because I knew that she was going to give the inaugural poem. But not having heard the inaugural poem, it felt like a big swing. Not that she was going to come out and like, really? My name's Amanda Gorman, and I'm here to say that I love democracy in a major way. She's 22. There is not a lot to pull from. She has one book of poems out. Yeah. Her second book of poems and actually a children's book are set to come out in September. Right.

So there just wasn't a lot of content and there also weren't a lot of articles. It wasn't really until after the inauguration that she kind of blew up and now there's tons of information about her. So I wanted to bring her this week in this National Poetry Corner. I just watched it this morning. I talked to you about this, that I didn't watch the inauguration because of just sort of general,

you know, political anxiety. Yeah, of course. And, you know, skepticism, I would say, in general of what's happening right now. But it seems sort of inarguably fantastic, inarguably uplifting, like everything else aside of like, what the new administration like might mean from a, you know, practical standpoint, like putting all that aside, like, mean from a you know practical standpoint like putting all that aside like it was a fucking great poem and a really really genuinely powerful moment yeah and i this is an easy thing to track down right now if you want to go look uh the poem she wrote

specifically for the inauguration was called the hill we climb uh you can find a lot of videos of it watch the full thing it's like five minutes long i i excerpted some some particularly uh powerful little lines images that i'm going to share but yeah if you want to see the whole thing in its entirety which i recommend you do you can you can find it um but she uh told the new york times in advance of this performance, she said, in my poem, I'm not going to in any way gloss over what we've seen over the past few weeks, and dare I say the past few years. But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal,

which I think is what made it so powerful for people. There was nothing about her poem that I found to be like, you know, too optimistic, too sunshiny. You know, she's very straightforward. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like part of being America is going through some really terrible stuff. Yeah. Like democracy at its core is people kind of fighting for what they want.

And there's been a lot of that lately. And it has been kind of gross. And that doesn't mean necessarily that we're broken forever. Yeah. You know? Do you have the line, the one that stood out to me and i saw people talking about it is the being american is yeah more than the uh pride we inherit it's the it's the past we step into and how we repair it that's exactly it fucking incredible exactly i heard that

line once this morning and like it stuck with me that hard. Yeah, I actually I would plan to include that one because I found it so powerful. She went from this is this is kind of like an arbitrary measurement, but it kind of communicates the impact. She went from 7000 Twitter followers to 1.4 billion. Yeah. And it was powerful for me, like just to see all these people on twitter i mean obviously there was a range they're like oh there were a lot of people that were like that as an incredible poem and then there were people like she should be president yeah like it was but like no matter what it was like a bunch of people like hearing somebody read a poem and feeling like so moved by it and it was just like on this national

stage uh and it just particularly on twitter it was just surreal to just see all these people like i love this poem and it was like this doesn't happen on twitter yeah so i was telling griffin there's there were parts of it that reminded me a lot of performance slam poetry, particularly with the wordplay and the rhythm of it. And so I just wanted to read a little section. And her body – not body language, like her actual hand movements. Yeah, the gesticulation. Yeah. Yeah, it felt very performance poetry focused.

Okay, so here's the part I wanted to read. We've braved the belly of the beast. We've learned that quiet isn't always peace and the norms and notions of what just is isn't always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished. Isn't that incredible? Like that, that reminds me a lot of like, you know, when I was in Chicago going to these like performance poetry, like events and feeling like, kind of like, okay, I know how this

works. Like there's a formula to performance poetry and there's a rhythm and you just kind of have to find words that fit in that rhythm. But that kind of like, uh, focus on just like the meaning of word and like the, the meter of it and, and the message behind it is just incredible. Yeah.

It's like an, it was this like very, very beautiful and poignant like outline of the tremendous amount of work that is that is still that is still required in the tremendous amount of like accountability that like everybody needs to hold themselves to yeah and seeing that in like an inauguration uh which is typically a little bit more sort of like straightforward, optimistic, like here come the good days. Not that that poem wasn't saying that, but as much as it was saying like you have to work for those good days. And my God, there is so much to do.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that there is optimism to be found in that work. Right. optimism to be found in that work right you know that it is hard and that it is obviously not the circumstance you want to be in but that it is just part of what being like a good citizen yeah can be um so she is the first national youth poet laureate obviously there's been poet laureates for a long time now but she's the first national youth poet laureate and she's been that since 2017 she went to harvard uh and that is when she became a national youth

poet laureate uh and her first book came out in 2015 when she was 17 years old if i'm doing that or how old was she in 2017 how long ago was that that was four years ago so she was 18 yeah yeah uh she has started uh a organization called one pen one page which provides free creative writing programs for underserved youth. Yeah. I don't know exactly. You know, it's still kind of new. We're still finding things out about her. So it is hard for me to really know, like, how she has made all of this happen. The thing that got a lot of attention is that she had a speech impediment.

And a lot of reason that got attention was because Joe Biden also had a stuttering issue. And so she has an auditory disorder that makes her hear and process information differently from other people. And she was still struggling that while in college. She said that particularly letters like R were still difficult for her and that she, in order to kind of become better at her pronunciation, started learning all of the lyrics to Hamilton. Okay.

Which is kind of the connection. And people have noticed that there were some references to Hamilton in her inaugural poem. But other than that, it's hard to kind of find information. She's born and raised in Los Angeles. Uh, she has a twin sister. Uh, her mom is a middle school English teacher and now she's world famous. She's like, she's gotten like endless numbers of offers. Apparently she just got a modeling contract in addition to, you know, all of her accolades. It's just, it's very

exciting. You know, I think there, the inaugural poet, you know, there is, there is a clip of Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which apparently was very inspirational to Amanda Gorman. Like there are poems throughout inauguration history that have kind of changed the world yeah and i think this is one of them it's an important thing to not to talk about like the priorities of recovering from covid19 because this is you know there's so much uh but i have a lot of friends who are essentially like displaced uh theater workers and performing artists and stuff like that. And I know it was powerful for them to see this much weight and attention given to something that has largely gone by the wayside when talking about like what needs what needs help

right now. Like the performing arts are in very dire straits as are a lot of industries but uh you know unlike a lot of industries performing arts is seen as like you know frivolous and kind of unnecessary but like when it comes to sort of capturing the contents of the you know our soul on a sort of national historic level, like a incredibly good poem is kind of what got the job done. And so I know it's been sort of, um, it's been fulfilling, I think, to a lot of, a lot of my friends who are out of work right now to see people kind of like pay attention to performing arts in such a like meaningful way yeah and not

not to mention too like we haven't talked about the impact of her as a young person that is black performing a poem yeah at a presidential inauguration like uh the idea that that could inspire just a whole new generation of young black writers is really cool. It's rad. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. Thank you. Hey, we got a couple of jump drawings here, and I'm going to start reading the first one because it is for kenny and it is

from michael and david who say your non-binary journey has been deeply moving and inspiring and we are so proud to call you a sib we can't wait till we can start gathering again at the old board game cafe for all our celebratory occasions and spend all day playing board games drinking beer and eating those good good nach. Much love from your brotherly Changri Changri Chippos. Holy shit. First of all, incredibly sweet message.

Loving that. But the idea also of sitting at a board game cafe and playing board games while drinking beers and eating nachos actually took my breath away. The thought of being able to do that took my breath away and gives me hope for the future gosh yeah you know that is one food that doesn't travel well griffin and i have talked a lot about how difficult it is to get nachos delivered to your house and have them be in a condition that is satisfactory not doable not doable we could learn to make our own

i know yeah it seems like it probably would be pretty easy not to make them good like i don't know yeah we'll see we the problem is we do a lot of microwave and i feel like it's got to be oven yeah the cast iron skillet is really oh yeah way to go absolutely unless we did the trash can nacho we'll talk after the show okay we could probably find a recipe online for guy fury's trash can nachos can i read this next message yeah should i start looking on my phone for that recipe while you read it sure this message is for bunny it is from julie hi bunny thank you for introducing me to my favorite show with these two married cuties i I love you, and hopefully we can be two married cuties as well one day.

Thank you for being my wonderful thing. Love, Julie. That is so sweet. That is so sweet. Sweet and romance. And I liked it. And it made me feel good. Yeah.

You know, sometimes you see a sweet, good romance, and you're like, oh, that makes me feel good. You ever do that? Like the ever do that like the lake house like the lake house yes those are some cuties in the lake house did you see that picture that guy fieri tweeted of him with bernie sanders photoshopped into his car he said not me us i was like damn guy fieri welcome to the fucking resistance guy fieri that uh that did that did shake the internet because at first everyone's like,

oh, he's getting in on this. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What does that mean? Anyway, the romance is very good. I'm going first. It's me, Jackie Kayshun. Man, she's always this bossy.

I'm Laurie Kilmartin. We're a bunch of stand-up comics and we've been doing comedy like 60 years total with both of us, but we look amazing. We drop every Monday on max fun and it's called the Jackie Laurie show. And you could listen to it and learn about comedy and learn about anger management and all the things. And Jackie is married,

but childless and I'm un unmarried but childful. So together, we make one complete woman. Is that just what's going to happen? Yeah, yeah. And we try to make Kyle laugh just like that and say, oh, my God, every episode. That's a good job. Jackie and Lori Show, Mondays, only on Maximum Fun. My second thing

is gonna be fairly brief, I think. I don't know that I have a lot to say about my second thing. But, uh, we went on a walk this past weekend

with our son. Walked by something that I realized I kinda wanted to talk about and that thing is Honeysuckle. Honeysuckle. You like Honeysuckle. You like honeysuckle?

Are you sure we haven't talked about this? I Googled, I looked on the website. Didn't see nothing about honeysuckle. Huh. On wonderful.fyi. Feels like we have, huh? Yeah. There must have been some other sort of sweet smelling plant that we talked about.

It's possible that I was going to bring it and then thought, eh, there's not enough here. Well, but you didn't have the sort of keen, analytical honeysuckle sense. I don't have the chops that you do. You got me, now you got me freaked out. So I'm going to, no, there is no honeysuckle entry on the wonderful.fyi website. All right. So if it is a dupe, take it up with them. Honeysuckle.

It is a very, very, it's a real stinker of a plant i don't think i realized that it is a hugely invasive species yeah i mean you never see just like a little bit a little tiny bit of honeysuckle i had a neighbor uh growing up who i was very close friends with and in her backyard her like back fence was this wooden fence that was just like just completely covered in honeysuckle. And it was so deep, like this shrub that we like made a burrow in it essentially that you could kind of climb into. And we had like a little secret honeysuckle for it. So like I am not a botanist. I am not like, I don't know shit about trees or plants or anything, but I find it very

exciting whenever I am walking and I recognize through scent first, like a plant or I recognize like what that smell is. And honeysuckle for me is like one of those very recognizable smells. And it also is like deeply nostalgic for me. We would like, I loved plucking the like actual flowers off and then you can kind of pull the stamen, I guess, or the pistil out through the bottom of it and then like eat the nectar of it. I didn't realize that a lot of the berries, a lot of the species of honeysuckle, the actual like berry there on it is poisonous. Oh, that seems risky seems a little bit risky but you know you gotta risk it for the for the biscuit and by the biscuit i mean the

nectar but that was such an eye-opening thing for me like realizing that you can eat that nectar and all of a sudden like i started to look around at nature like it was like you know the willy wonka like candy rumor like what other of these plants can I eat? I could never tell, like, what made a blossom more likely to pay off, you know? Sometimes there's those real juicy ones. There's really juicy ones. Sometimes you get, like, nothing. And I could never figure out, like, what is the method here?

Well, there would be big ones that you would see that and be like, I bet that's got a lot of nectar. But they would be open in a way where the nectar wouldn't really collect on the stamen when you pulled it out. I got good at identifying those. And I would just tear down 30 or 40 of those bad boys. Just be full of nectar like a big bee. Actually, it's not bees. Do you know who loves the honeysuckle?

The moth. Moths love the honeysuckle. Drop a little larva in there and the larva will eat it eat it up come out just just strong strong with nectar energy um there is a species that is called uh lanacera japonica that is so invasive uh all over the northern hemisphere like pretty much every every every continent's got this bad boy. And it is also grown as a commercial crop because it is used in some traditional Chinese medicine.

So it's funny to think this pest, a lot of people, a lot of gardeners and botanists see it as a pest, is also grown for commercial purposes for traditional Chinese medicine, which I think is kind of delightful. But they're like a really common garden plant for their sort of aesthetic properties. Like if you have a ugly shed or some sort of wall that you don't want people to be able to see, you plant a little bit of honeysuckle there and within minutes, it is just going to be completely occupied. It'll be honeysuckle there and within minutes it is just going to be completely occupied it'll be honeysuckle country um and they are really really very very strong plants like you

it is kind of tough to get honeysuckle out it grows in a uh it's a twining climber which means it will wrap around the thing sort of naturally in a helix as it grows on it. So then, you know, once it's on there, it's kind of difficult to get off. And the stems are very, very strong too. They've been used for textiles and for, you know, rope and twine and the like. Yeah, I just like it. I really don't have much else to say about honeysuckle except that i i really it's one of my favorite sort of like herbal smells one of my favorite like plant smells um and i don't like a lot of a lot of plant smells i find them kind of overpowering but you get some honeysuckle it's just like a nice little nice little sugary treat for your nose yeah it sounds

like i just described cocaine i didn't mean to describe cocaine i just i just uh i just think it's cool yeah no there's there's something like very strong about being a kid and being able to like eat a plant yeah to just find something know that you can put it in your mouth uh and and just doing it like like you know like like you're only young once in the summertime. That devil-may-care attitude of just eating honeysuckles in the summertime. I remember once we cooked like dandelions, I think. Like her mom knew how to like cook dandelions

in like sugar water or something. God, this is a weird memory. Maybe it was just a sick prank that was played on us children well the dandelion wine is like a real thing yeah but we were children so i don't know that that was necessarily what was going on there honeysuckle catch it catch the wave what's your second thing but it's not as cool as honeysuckle but you wouldn't have as much to talk about as i had to talk about with honeysuckle which i think we can all agree was a pretty exhaustive a pretty

exhaustive discussion of the plant honeysuckle my second thing yeah and which has kind of come up in other topics but we've never really focused on animal migration just in general the idea that animals go from one place to the other to survive? Okay. Like we talked about the bats. Yeah. You know, but all major animal groups have species that migrate. Interesting. Yeah. I'm going to start whales, salmon, and a lot of birds.

I think that's about it that I know about. Well, there's also crustaceans. Crustaceans, do you say? You know what? You didn't mention wolves. Wolves. Gosh, they're always sort of roaming around. But only 1,800 of the world's 10,000 bird species migrate.

Oh, okay. When I was a kid, I thought it was like all the birds. I thought pretty much every bird went ahead and left. All the birds. I thought pretty much every bird went ahead and left. And I never, I just remember like not really seeing many birds and figuring that literally every single bird had gone south and wondering what it was like to be south and to have all of the birds. Probably shitty.

Just every bird. I mean, we see a little bit of that in Texas. I feel like an increase in bird habitants. Yeah, there's definitely a gracklepocalypse that does happen at certain times of year. So animal migration is defined as the long-distance movement of individual animals, usually on a seasonal basis. And it encompasses four related concepts, which include persistent straight movement, relocation of an individual on a greater scale than its normal daily activities, seasonal to and fro movement of a population between two areas,

and movement leading to the redistribution of individuals within a population. Okay. So it is not uncommon within a species that not all individuals migrate. So it's not like you turn around and every single bird of a species is gone. It's like some of them hang back. Some of that is due to age or sex, like just depends on the circumstance. Right. I guess that makes sense. But yeah, I just had always thought like all the geese, every goose. I mean, the geese that hang back have to be at risk, right? Like there's a reason why. Yeah, for sure. Okay. For sure. But they, I mean, there are limited resources available, but I imagine there are still enough

resources for a drastically reduced population. They gotta be cold though. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm going to go, it's still kind of cold outside. I'm going to go find a goose right now and take good care of them. Okay. And this migration is like real intense for some animals.

The caribou can travel as much as 3,000 miles in a year. The gray wolves can go even farther. So they track a lot of these animals. Scientists do to just kind of see the distance. And they found a gray wolf that traveled 4,500 miles. Wow. I remember watching on the Crab Brothers show that monarch butterflies, the distance that they travel is equivalent to if a human being walked all the way around the earth four times. That's a pretty long journey, huh?

Yeah, that's a long one. Thanks, Crab Brothers. I just impressed my wife with some zoological knowledge thanks crab brothers so i mentioned crustaceans so there is uh a crab called the christmas island red crab i love him already uh which lives on uh christmas island which is in the indian ocean is this just one crab so far i feel like you've been talking about just one crab called the Christmas crab. Don't tell me any, don't, just say yes. Just say yes, Griffin.

There's a Christmas crab that lives on Christmas Island. He makes Christmas wishes, comes true. He's got a little, he's got a little sort of sleigh made out of chitin, and he's got a dolphin with a red nose, and he goes and he gives an octopus eight presents. I mean, that's really nice.

And it's true. Just say, and it's what? And it's the truth. And it's just him and 43 million of his friends who also deliver presents to sea creatures. Okay. They all do. They work together on it. Now this is starting to make some sense. They all use their little crabs and they put together little

tiny gifts and they hold onto them with their little pinchers. I bet they crush a lot of those gifts accidentally. I love you Christmas crab. Well then you would not be a fan of the yellow crazy ant. Yellow crazy ant? Who named

that? I don't know. That's its own topic though. I didn't even click on yellow crazy ant because i want to surprise myself with that later okay but apparently there there was uh accidentally uh this yellow crazy ant was introduced uh and really to what introduced to what into the island and really put a hit on that christmas crab oh man killed about 10 to 15 million of these in recent years wow i would i would not even i would not say yellow crazy and i would say rude ant yellow yellow mean ant uh so these these crabs uh they make an annual mass migration to

the sea to lay their eggs in the ocean i like like that. But they're, I mean, they're okay. They're not like on a list of endangered or anything. Of endangered crabs. This ant is really putting the hurt on them. I'm about to put those ants on the endangered ant list because I'm going to go to Christmas Island with my biggest boots and I'm going to squish every single one of those ants. Oh my gosh, they should be called Grinch ants.

They should be definitely called Grinch ants.'re gonna they're not gonna be called anything they're gonna be called goo on the on the sand goo on the sand when i squish all every single i'm not kidding every single one of them well be careful griffin because they're crazy i don't i don't look at me i do not care i do not care i will not be defeated by ants so yeah so migration lots of fish do it 120 species of fish uh you mentioned the butterfly there's also uh dragonflies that do it there's a desert locust that uh flies westward across the Atlantic Ocean it's a thing that a lot of animals do uh sometimes by choice sometimes just just kind of their whole rhythm. For example, like birds are kind of set up to like feel this like undeniable pull to move.

Right. And it's just, I don't know, it's just a really cool thing. I would like to have a little summer place I go in the winter, you know? I think everybody does. Yeah. I think for some of us it's Christmas Island. Or it was. We got work to do.

If we want to move to Christmas Island, we're going to have to do some stuff there that we're not going to want to talk about later. Choose some ants. Yeah. This is all I'm going to be able to think about today. What is, I think, like a giant picnic basket. Oh my God. And you just lure them all in there. That's great. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is all I'm going to be able to think about today. What is, I think, like a giant picnic basket. Oh my God. And you just lure them all in there. That's great.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's all. All right. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Well, okay.

Erin says, something I find wonderful is the smell and feel of a stack of warm papers fresh from the laser printer. Ooh, that's good. That is good. My mom was a secretary at our church that we grew up going to. And I spent so much time in her office just kicking it on a weekday when there was nobody to hang out with me at home. And so I would use the Xerox printer to like you know copy my hand or my face or like whatever and the smell of that xerox printer and like the warmth of the paper as it came out of it is like

a huge like sense memory i feel like i got in trouble for doing that once oh no my mom taught kindergarten for years and years and uh i went in and tried to make some fun copies for myself. Oh, no. And the principal yelled at me. Oh, my goodness. That's rough. Rain says, my small wonder is every once in a while, the air in my town smells like oranges. I live about five miles away from the Tropicana factory. And when they burn orange peels, the whole town smells like oranges. It's great.

That is great. I can't say that I would love it forever. I don't know. It feels like if you get that smell a little too much. I don't know.

I think I would love it forever. It's like the the cookie smell in Chicago. Oh yeah. Or the Heiner's Bread smell in Huntington.

It's a real smell. Heiner's Bread Factory makes a good smell if you're out in the stand. Oof. Do you ever get tired of it? Nope. Not really because I didn't live in the stint. Like I worked in the stint so I

would go down there and get the stint. Hey I'm going to say this and you can put it on a t-shirt if you want but some smells are just always good smells. I don't know why I'd put that on a t-shirt. Hey thank you to Bowen and Augustus for our theme song Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

And thank you to MaximumFun.org for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have on MaximumFun.org. I mean, they got Switchblade Sisters and Triple Click and Story Break. That's very true. Minority Corner. Minority Corner. And a whole bunch more. Oh, hey, you've got a book out. Hey, very true. Minority corner. Minority corner. And a whole bunch more.

Oh, hey, you've got a book out. Hey, I do. Wouldn't you know it. I regret to inform you that another book has come out written by me and Justin and Travis with special guests, our lovely wives.

It's called Everybody Has a Podcast Except You. A lot of people are saying the's called everybody has a podcast except you and it's a sort of it's a lot of people are saying the definitive guide to creating a podcast yeah and i want to emphasize too because i know not everybody wants to make a podcast there was a period of time in my life when i did not want to make a podcast but then you found out how where all the money is i still would have read this book is what i'm saying oh okay yeah it's fun it's fun and it's written for people who have like no audio engineering or hosting experience or anything yeah it's it's for you to make

something and uh i think that's gonna be it so hang in there stay tough and vigilant and um safe and but also And also risk it. And unobservant. Be soft and hard. And dangerous. And dangerous. Be, I guess, everything. Just be.

Just be. Just be. Just... Ooh, that's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. Working on it, money won't pay. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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