Wonderful! - Wonderful! 190: Genus and the Edible Tubers

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

Rachel’s favorite historic thrill park! Griffin’s favorite orange root!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Support AAPI communities and those affected by anti-Asian violence: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate Support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund: https://aapifund.org/ 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. There's cheese in it today, aren't we? Yeah. Oh, boy. I love seeing that beautiful, radiant smile.

It's like an umbrella for me from the rainstorms of the world. Did you know that we have been together almost 10 years now? Oh, my goodness, you're right. It's July. It's July. We've been together 10 and a decade of love. you're right it's july it's july we've been together 10 and 10 and a decade july is when we first smooched when we first smooched i moved here you moved here i moved here we were watching c-span i know and it was a very sexy episode

of c-Span. And they were about to pass the big bill. And you looked at me and you were like, French me hard. And I was like, whoa, what? And I did. And you were like, that was the best French I ever did get. And I said, thank you. That's really nice.

It's been a while for me. And then you were like, do you want to French again tomorrow and for the rest of our lives? Yeah. And you said just once a day and sure enough once a day we French 3650 times we Frenched by my math and I remember every

single one it was August 22nd 2017 okay do you have any small wonders it was balmy outside you have any small wonders? It was balmy outside. Do you have any small wonders? Small wonders? Gosh, I don't know, man.

I did the mole as a big wonder like two weeks ago, but I've been dreaming about the mole. I'm going to talk about my mole dreams. Mole dreams. For like three nights in a row now, I've had mole dreams. Uh-huh. And in some of them,

I'm just shooting the shit with Andy Coop. And in some of them, I'm just shooting the shit with Andy Coop. And in some of them, I'm like strategizing with the other players, going through our notebooks, talking about who we think the mole is. And in some of them, I'm running around like a small Italian, like mountain town looking for people

to like let me wash my clothes in their laundry rooms yeah trying to get twenty thousand dollars but fucking jeffrey's there and he's i think sabotaging it on purpose these are the dreams i've been having we talked with our friend over the weekend who had also watched the mole and we all related how we learned how to pour a glass of wine from andy cohen or not andy cohen from anderson cooper yeah uh in a particular episode of the mole and it was amazing that all of us kind of retained that information because i really like that is definitely true like i was like oh you turn the bottle at the end yeah it's a fucking great show wow it's a good show do you have any

small wonders um we haven't talked about but the new season of i think you should leave is is on my god almighty and it is just everything you'd want it to be it's so fucking funny it's unreal it's just unreal and and like you will see people referencing it already because there are so many just like totally bizarre. I'm sure everybody's seen references to Dan Flashes, but like that sketch has contributed so much to our cultural landscape. Is that the complicated shirt one? That's the one with the complicated shirts.

This shirt's got a pattern so complicated, it costs $1,000. Man, it's a good sketch. Holy shit. Okay. Yeah, that's really good um you go first this week i do all right what do you got so you uh have talked about amusement parks true which was a really bold choice because i really waste a lot of good topics you made it difficult to really talk about that without

overlapping but that was an early episode like we've been it's been long enough now yeah i mean we're nearing we are close approaching 200 yeah i think at this point we can start getting a little more well so i decided to talk about a particular ride at a particular park okay okay uh that i don't think you'll be familiar with okay um because you have never been to the pride of the ozark silver dollar city i've never been to silver dollar city now uh and to be honest like uh i have not been in like 20 years sure sure uh i did a little research to make sure it is relatively the same park um because the whole thing with silver dollar city is that it is like 1880s themed.

Wait, is Silver Dollar City an amusement park? Yes. Oh, it's not a city? No. I always thought Silver Dollar City was a city. Yeah. Well, apparently there was an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies where they like visited Silver Dollar City and it was an actual city.

So maybe that's what you're thinking. Maybe. Yeah. You know, I'm a huge fan of that show big clamp it fan yeah um silver dollar city is like three and a half hours south of where i grew up okay uh so when i was little um and we did not have the means to uh afford like a fancy vacation we used to get in the car and drive down south and we'd rent like a cabin and go to silver dollar city for a few days awesome uh and now it's it's a it's a hundred acre park it has

40 rides damn silver dollar city it's like a big place it's a park park um the ride i want to talk about is fire in the hole sounds good so far um but i wanted to tell you a little bit more about Silver Dollar City first. Please. Yeah. So it is built around a cave. There is a cave there called Marvel Cave that was originally called Marble Cave because they saw all the limestone and thought it was marble and then realized it wasn't marble and then quickly pivoted to- Tried to play it off. Marvel cave.

No, we didn't say marble. No, no, no, no. You misheard us. Of course that's limestone. So this cave was open for tours in 1894 and just kind of was like a tourist attraction because it was a cave for a long time. But then somebody was like,

you know what this cave could use a roller coaster outside. So I didn't realize that, that, um, and this is just cause I haven't been in a long time, but the, the amusement park is built basically on top of the cave. Okay.

So like you can go to the cave and hang out and visit the cave. And then the next day you can like go up above ground and like hit the amusement park. It must be pretty scary for all the bats that live in there. Well, that's what I didn't realize. So no marble in the cave. But what they did is they mined bat guano. Yeah.

From the cave. Yeah, cool. What do you mean? It has lots of nitrogen apparently. No, yeah, I know. But like does one mine bat guano? I guess so. I guess you get in there and you I guess so. You don't just scoop it up?

You dig her up. I don't know. I'm not a caving expert. Okay. But the way I imagine it, it's just kind of a seven dwarves situation where people go down with their- Oh, that's good. Their pickaxes trying to get poop. And they just scrape away.

Yeah. I mean, we've all seen Ace Ventura when nature calls. their pickaxes trying to get poop. And they just scrape away. Yeah. I mean, we've all seen Ace Ventura when nature calls. Like, we know what the guano situation is. The bats are like, see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. And they'll be like. Oh, we got more poop coming. They'll be like, maybe boost that roughage intake

because we're not hitting our quota. Boss man's pretty PO'd. Okay, so then in 1946, this family from Chicago, the Hershens, vacationed in the Ozarks, saw the cave. At that point, the cave's owners were getting ready to retire, and the Hershens said, well, we'll take it. Okay. And they offered the Hershens a 99-year lease on Marvel Cave. And then they kind of flipped it it they turned it into like a more profitable business uh and then in the 1960s they opened silver dollar city okay uh

and it was the promotional idea was that the visitors would get silver dollars as change wait what like so they it wasn't an amusement park at first. At first it was just kind of like a little restoration village, like 1880s. It was like a blacksmith shop and an ice cream shop and a general store. And it was just like a little like, come visit this town. Okay. And the idea was that when you paid for something, you would get change in silver dollars. But what if your change was like 81 cents?

Well, then I think you would just get 81 cents. But then if you showed up and you're like, let me get this mug that says Jennifer on it, and then it says like a Bible verse about Jennifer. And they're like, okay, that is $2. And you're like, I only have 100. And you slide them a hundo. And then they're like, okay,

here's $98. That's the sound of it. People had to like be carried out because they couldn't withstand the weight of all their silver dollars. Yeah. What would a Bible verse about Jennifer be, by the way? Oh, I mean,

it would be like, you know, she, it would be something from song of psalms one of the tamer song of psalms not the one that's like her those yabos are like two big coconuts right boys i believe that song of psalms 6-1 there's a lot of i don't know i was thinking more like oh ye jennifer no i don't think... Gentle hands. Gentle hands. Oh, ye, Jennifer, with the gentle hands.

Be cautious with the thorns. Of? Of roses. John 3.16. Yeah. So tell me about this ride. Okay. So this ride, Fire in the Hole, was the first indoor roller coaster, like before even Space Mountain.

Okay. Yeah. It debuted in 1972. Okay. Is this a ride you've gone on? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, like ride you've gone on? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, like it's still there.

Like it opened in 1972, still running, still same. Like it's kind of like Pirates of the Caribbean, like same like animatronic situation. Oh. So yeah, so that's the thing. So inexplicably, so they decided they wanted to build a indoor roller coaster, and they kept it kind of in-house. So it's a little unusual for roller coasters to be built locally. A lot of times they will bring in outside teams to do it. Another example of an in-house roller coaster is The Beast at Kings Island. The Beast? Yeah.

That's not indoors. No, like in-house. Oh. They built it themselves jesus christ i was thinking about in a house like you were talking about in a house well here's the kitchen you were talking about an indoor roller coaster. I know. And then you started talking about in-house. I know. And then I was like, the beast isn't in somebody's house. What a big house that would have to be. We're going to the bathroom. Whoa.

Hey, that would be a sick roller coaster. Okay, anyway. So, yeah. So, Fire in the Hole is an indoor roller coaster. It's kind of like half dark ride, half roller coaster in that there is like there are several drops there's three drops uh but you are also going through the story and the story they chose is when uh the town burned down okay cool there is a story about these vigilantes in the Ozarks called the Baldnobbers. The Baldnobbers?

Baldnobbers. I like it already. There was a fire that a lot of people suggested was started by this group of vigilantes. But the ride depicts this fire. So you go through the town and then everything catches on fire. Cool. And then at the very end, somebody yells, fire in the hole. And you go down the biggest drop.

Okay. Of the thing. And so it has, it does, it has a very like Pirates of the Caribbean vibe. Right. Because you were like watching this kind of disaster play out. The final drop, I remember as a kid feeling like oh my gosh this is so much it's 21 feet so it's i mean that's a that's a decent draw seem like a lot to me but i also don't have real good spatial relations i guess that's true um but yeah you do this this huge tall drop into the water. Oh, it's a flume-y situation.

Yeah. Yeah. But you're in like a coaster car. So it's like the water, it's not to get you like- Drenched. Drenched. Right. It's just like it's kind of a fire thing.

A misting. Right. When you get on the ride, you go through like a fire station. And then you're supposed to be like a volunteer firefighter. Do they blast you with heat? do you get heat blasted i remember that being true but i don't know if that's true i always remember at king's island god i can't even remember what it was but there was like a haunted mansion style ride that at the very end there was this huge haunted furnace that would like blast you with very uncomfortable amounts of heat.

But if you just did like a water ride and you were all soaked, you could ride it a couple times and dry off. Life hack there. I will say there is a sister ride. This ride, this Fire in the Hole ride, the Herschins who bought the park also uh did dollywood okay and so there is a sister ride at dollywood called blazing fury okay that is supposed to be very similar i've been to dollywood i have not okay damn it i wish we could compare notes um but yeah this was for me like as a kid i was always really scared of roller coasters and this was like one of the first roller coasters i ever went on yeah uh and this kind of the narrative

element of it was always really cool and i i watched a few ride throughs on youtube and i got very nostalgic that's sweet uh just just like having that experience again because it really i don't think i've been since i was like 10 maybe Let's load the kids up in a big bus and do a whistle-stop tour of sort of off-brand Midwestern amusement parks. I watched a lot of videos, and there were people that said, behind Disney World and Universal Studios. It's Silver Dollar City. Okay.

All right. Yeah. I mean, also, it's Silver Dollar since it's 1880s themes there's all these like little demonstrations and so you can see like glass blowing and there's like blacksmiths and people making brooms bloodletting hey speaking of silver dollars you want to get Got a couple puppy dogs here. And the first one is for Mitchell. And it's from Olivia, who says, Mitchell, I'm so lucky to know someone as kind-hearted as you.

Thank you for being so uniquely you and introducing me to so many awesome, wonderful things. I love you, and I can't wait to see where this year brings us and to start this journey in kc together i hope this is sappy enough for you you and me honey bunch kc you would assume means kansas city but actually they're starting a kc and jojo cover band oh yeah so like to start this journey in our kc and jojo cover band see i thought it was kentucky chicken um not necessarily fried this kentucky chicken we boiled it it's good though uh can i read the next message yes this is for stevie and linds it is from laura stevie and linds you are the best sister and sister-in-law i could hope for stevie, you have always been my role model, even when we annoy the crap out of each other. Linz, your search for beauty every day inspires me.

I can't wait to come visit your new house. And Stevie, maybe you can play Nintendo for me and help me beat Zelda. I love you both. You got to get the sword and put in, you cut Ganondorf with it. A lot of people don't know that every zelda game that's the more or less the zelda game ends when you put the sword in ganondorf and then he gives you the triangle he has a triangle that you need and the only way to get it from him is you put your sword on in him this sounds like how I would describe it,

and I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, it's irrefutable. Since the dawn of time, screenwriters have taken months to craft their stories. But now, three Hollywood professionals shall attempt the impossible. Break a story in one hour. That's right. Here on Story Break, I, Freddie Wong, Matt Arnold, and Will Campos,

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And of course, every great movie needs a stellar pitch. In order to get to heaven, sometimes you gotta raise a little hell. Ha ha, that's the tagline! Check out Story Break every week on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's your thing? Seek Tato? Sweet thing? Sweet potato.

Sweet potato? Sweet potato? We've talked about sweet potato casserole. This is what I'm talking about. Rounding 200, we're getting more granular. I want to talk about the tuber named sweet potato because if I had to eliminate all but like three kinds of produce from the world,

sweet potato would make the cut. I thought you were going gonna talk about your like favorite potato, but you're saying like produce top three. Yeah, sweet potato is really good. Oh. What did you think I was gonna say? There are a lot of kinds of potatoes

and I thought you were gonna be like, if I had to eliminate all the kinds of potatoes. No, no. I mean, sweet potato would make the cut and regular old plain Jane potato would also probably make the cut. You know when you go to the grocery store and there's regular potatoes? Don't make me choose. There's a ton of different kinds of sweet potatoes.

I'm going to talk a lot about sweet potatoes here. We've been doing a lot of meal kit stuff and a lot of ordering food out since Gus was born. I cooked my first meal. I made curry a few days ago, and that was the first thing I had cooked since Gus had been born. We've been doing a lot of carryout and a lot of meal delivery stuff. And my sweet potato consumption has increased, I would say, dramatically during this period. And, man, it's just instilled. It hasn't instilled.

It has reinforced my love of the delightful orange old tuber that we call sweet potato. There's something about the way you say sweet potato that I find very pleasing. What's, yeah? I don't know what it is. Okay. I'll pay attention. You're going to really enjoy this then. I've never had a bad

sweet potato like experience this bad sweet potato dining experience because you talk about sweet potato fries do you remember when america caught sweet potato fry yeah yeah when you go to a restaurant and they would offer that as a side and you'd be like oh let's mix it up uh roast sweet potato in the autumn times with just some other like autumnal boys in there yeah i love putting like a like a paprika on there and garlic potatoes and some some exciting squashes all in the same shit oh man that's good uh whipped sweet potato with rosemary up in there. I think I will actually eat 100 pounds of that, please. One big thing that I've learned during these periods of having a baby and ordering food a lot is you make a sweet potato hash, you can put anything in that.

Yeah, that's true. Sweet potato hash is a base that any protein or flavor. You can have a sweet sweet potato dish. You can have a salty sweet potato. You can have a sweet sweet potato dish. You can have a salty sweet potato. You can have a spicy sweet potato. It is a crowd pleaser. It's got a good contrast. You know the whole like salt, fat, acid.

It does all of it except acid. It's a distant, distant relative of the potato. You would think sweet potato that's like potatoes brother it's like his third cousin uh because they are both part of the order uh solanales but potatoes are in the nightshade family which encompasses like which encompasses a lot of stuff tomatoes uh peppers uh tobacco is in the nightshade family uh sweet potatoes belong to another family that i can't pronounce the name of but they have more in common with the flower morning glory than they do the potato uh and in fact sweet potatoes grow flowers above the ground on their vines that are

quite lovely they're they are just these sort of heart-shaped purple flowers that are very, very pretty. And in fact, some people grow decorative sweet potato plants not to ever eat that sweet tuber below the ground, but to enjoy the purple flowers above the ground. And they call them tuberous morning glory. Unfortunately, I thought it was going to be tubular morning glory, which would have been way better, but tuberous morning glory. Unfortunately, I thought it was going to be tubular morning glory, which would have been way better, but tuberous

morning glory. They're really pretty. Did you guys ever have a vegetable garden? No. No. No. We had a Kroger's. And I guess they must have had a garden, because they always had vegetables. Yeah, we had a little vegetable garden situation, but

never grew any root vegetables. So I just didn't know the purple flowers. We had a little vegetable garden situation, but never grew any root vegetables. So I didn't know the purple flowers. We had a chia pet. So in North America, we call them yams, but they are not. Yams refers to a whole genus of edible tubers that I don't think sweet potato is part of. Every country I've learned calls different things yams. But yams is a genus that sweet potato is not of but there's like every country i've learned calls different things yams but yams is a genus that sweet potato is not a part of genus genus and the edible tubers is my favorite indie band that's yeah mine too uh they were first cultivated in either central or south

america between like the yucatan peninsula and the uh in venezuela the mouth of the orinoco river uh so if you're on that flow watch some of those sweet sweet tubers floating down uh around 5 000 years ago uh and around the 13th century they started to spread as oceanic travel became a thing that folks did uh and over the next few centuries they landed in polynesia the philippines china japan korea and europe and they became staple foods in most of those places because outside of they don't do well in cold weather in like frost they can't really stand up to but they grow really fast and reliably which is great and like uh there is staple food especially in japan because if their rice harvest was poor they had sweet potatoes to fall back on

yeah thanks sweet potatoes uh in 2019 planet earth grew 92 million tons of sweet potatoes and china grew most of those over half of those man um and i've saw a lot of talk about sweet potatoes recently in these hot summer months there's this vegan chef named george lee who went viral for this video where he showed a sort of common refreshing summertime treat in Taiwan. And all it is is you take a big sweet potato, a long one preferably, and you bake the hell out of it until it starts to sort of like sweat out its sugars and get kind of like gooey and caramelly. And then you freeze it for a long time until it basically turns into like this creamy custardy kind of like

sweet potato popsicle that's all it is sweet potato bake it freeze it eat it nothing else goes into the process yeah i want to do this so badly because it looks so dope it looks really good um and also you can use the vines in your aquarium because they suck up. Fish produce a bunch of nasty toxins and stuff like that. And the sweet potato vines love to eat that up. And they grow really fast and they keep your aquarium clean. Sweet potatoes. What can't they do, man?

It is a perfect thing. Sweet potatoes. There's nothing wrong with sweet potatoes. Nothing. It's hard to. They're kind of sweet. Dammit. But they're not too sweet are they no i mean if you don't add like additional sugar like sweet potato casserole is like a

perfect food also that we've talked about on this show very sweet food okay wow okay well uh silver dollar city it gets uh it rains there sometimes how's that feel yeah well sometimes the fire in the hole right i bet it breaks down sometimes how's that feel yeah i'm sorry is that what this show is now i'm sorry it's just when you call something a perfect food you know i feel like well actually yeah no that is i can't help it i'm sorry very very toxic facet of your personality and i'm glad the audience is finally getting to see it just say one nice thing about sweet potatoes i like i like the skin all right like if you're making like a sweet potato fry i like leaving the skin on get that crunch you're back you're back on my in my good I think, by the way, I think I like when you say sweet potato because it reminds me of when Henry was a baby and it was like the only thing he would eat.

And you used to go, want some seat potato? Or seat-tato. Seat-tato? A seat-tato is also a big chair that you can make out of these incredible tubers. Great. Hey, thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of 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.

Yeah. Hey, Maximum Fun, if you're a fan of Maximum Fun and you're familiar with Bubble, that graphic novel is out along with the Adventures on Graphic Novel. It's a twofer. It's a real graphic time for the MaxFun family. No, yeah, check out Bubble. It is a fantastic and hilarious and thrilling graphic novel. Yeah. And it would be also cool if you picked up Crystal Kingdom,

the latest Adventure Zone graphic novel. That would also be cool of you. We got a bunch of merch stuff at macroymerch.com that also I bet you'd be really into if you just gave it a chance for once in your life. Yeah, you can still get that wonderful shirt, can't you? Yeah, of course you can get that wonderful shirt. And you can get a bunch of other stuff too.

And I would eat a sweet potato raw right now. I didn't have much breakfast and I'm excited about it. Do we have any of those orange beauties in the house? No. Damn it. I didn't have much breakfast and I'm excited about it. Do we have any of those orange beauties in the house? No. Damn it. I'm sorry.

It's okay. Well, folks, I'm gonna go find a sweet potato in the wild. Just start digging some holes. Just start digging them and looking for...

Well, I think if you... Now we know, if you see a purple flower... There's probably... There's a potato under it. Smoke, there's fire. That's what I always say. Thanks for listening.

Till next time. Sing the goodbye song. Thank you for listening to our show today. We had a lot of laughs along the way. Everything is wonderful when you're with Rachel and Griffin. So sit right back and you'll hear a tale. Thank you. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.

Hey, I'm Jordan Morris, creator of the Max Funn scripted sci-fi comedy podcast, Bubble. We just released a special episode of Bubble to celebrate the launch of our new graphic novel. At SF Sketch Fest in 2019, we recorded a live show with Alison Becker, Eliza Skinner, Mike Mitchell, Cristela Alonso, and special guests Jean Grey, Jonathan We suspect he'll show signs of mutation when in a state of excitement. Now, Annie matched with him on Tinder, so she's going to act as the honeypot. I do enjoy being called a honeypot. Hey, you know what's better than honey? Gravy.

Oh, yeah. Can I be the gravy sack? to honeypots. Hey, you know what's better than honey? Gravy. Oh yeah, can I be the gravy sack? Out now on MaximumFun.org and wherever you get podcasts. And pick up the graphic novel at your local bookstore today.