Wonderful! - Wonderful! 214: Drywall Matchmaking

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Rachel’s favorite processed meat! Griffin’s favorite construction destruction!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaCenter for Reproductive Rights: https://reproductiverights.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

hi this is rachel mcelroy hey everyone this is griffin mcelroy and this is wonderful this is the wonderful show thank you so much for i almost called it the besties like dead ass because I just finished recording it like a minute ago. Do you want to take a swing at besties? It's an easy show to do. Hey, this is Rachel and I've got the best game of the week. Okay, what is it? Yeah, it's when you pick up socks off the floor with your toes that is i am the amount of things

that i am able to pick up with my toes since we had a baby that needs to be carried around all the time has has gotten so much larger yeah like i can pick up a bag of like little Debbie muffins with my toes and like sort of do a like a hacky sack kick up to my hands. Can you pull off that maneuver yet? Like the transfer, the toes to hands transfer? Oh, it's so satisfying when you do it. That was good. Thanks. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we do there.

This is wonderful though. It's a show we talk about things we like, things we're into, things that are good, things that are fun and nice. And I don't know, man. I feel like I'm in a bit of a better mood than I have been in past weeks. That makes one of us. Yeah, I was gonna say, the sleep situation is pretty bad.

Pretty bad. Pretty dark right now. But, you know tomorrow tomorrow we'll you'll still be sleepy tomorrow our baby has one big tooth i feel like i feel like our baby has one big big big cartoon tooth that refuses to come out yeah the bottom teeth were a dream compared to the top teeth yeah. One came out and it just seems to be getting bigger. While the other one. The other one just stays inside hiding. What do you think that, I usually think of our teeth as being sort of symmetrical.

In pairs. Yeah, coming in pairs. But he's got one tooth that's just like cannot be fucking bothered. I think it's because the one that's out is so big. It's like, hey, you do the work. I'm going to hibernate. That's interesting. I got worried that the one tooth would absorb the other one in his mouth womb and just form a huge one.

But anyway. That's my favorite punk band. Mouth womb? Yeah. Yeah, me too. So, yeah, this is a show where we talk about things that are good. Do you have a small wonder though one of them a small wonder all right didn't have to be nasty though

so they have chocolate sun butter chocolate i don't know if you've seen this on the counter in our kitchen but i thought it was i thought you just had some nutella out that's chocolate sun but those are three words that i feel like should not be able to form a compound thought. Those of you that have nut allergies will know that sun butter is kind of the go-to replacement for peanut butter or almond butter because it is made out of sunflower seeds. And the flavor is not exactly what kids crave. But they make a chocolate kind that I just got. And it's like, it's almost like, I mean, to me it tastes like chocolate peanut butter,

but I know that a lot of people can distinguish between the seed and the nut. There's a lot of allergen substitutes that bill themselves as, you'll hardly be able to tell the difference. But back when henry was in daycare uh which i think was about 560 trillion years ago technically he still is but he doesn't go anymore he's very he's very truant yeah um we couldn't send him with like peanut butter yeah in his lunchbox because of nut allergies and so we just got some sunflower

butter like this will fix it. And then he came home the first day we did that. Like, this was terrible. Do not try to trick me again. I'm going to say, God, I know it's... Listen, I get that too hot to handle is garbage. And it's unhealthy for me to shove it into my brain there's just a lot that's unhealthy about it yeah there's so much that's bad about it but god almighty watching watching those

those goofballs try so hard not to bone but then they keep doing it it's like no guys for the first time ever there is a couple that is determined to get around the rules of of no no smooching yeah and watching them engineer ways to try and trick a uh a sentient robot which is not actually i don't know if they realize a sentient robot but a huge team of production people yeah who can see everything they're doing yeah justin tweeted about this and then we saw it last night they used a pair of shorts and held it between their faces and then kissed through the shorts and there was something almost like shakespearean romance about that. The one female contestant was so adamant. She was like, we respect you guys so much. And so we thought for sure this would be a way for us to be intimate without, you know, compromising the rules.

You know, like we tried to find a loophole because we respect you guys so much. Yeah. Yeah, it's garbage. But as goes it hits it hits the spot yeah yeah um hey why don't you kick things off huh my thing this week is spam yes baby yeah yes i thought this this is another one of those weeks where I thought maybe we would do the same thing. Spam? Yeah. Have you been eating spam lately? No, but recently you, well, actually every time we order poke, you get some musubi.

Of course I do. And I know that you love the stuff. Yeah. So I thought maybe this would be the week where we're at. You like it too, right? You just don't eat it because of the soy. Yeah. Well, it's not that there's soy in it.

It's just that often it is marinated in a soy substance so yes i haven't been able to have it lately but uh i was real curious about the stuff yeah can you explain what musubi is for the folks at home who maybe don't know yeah so so there's spam right which is pork with ham added salt water modified potato starch to hold it together sugar and sodium nitrite which is a preservative and it's all in a can and if you want to make musubi so you take the spam you put it on rice you wrap it in nori kind of like a onigiri uh and it's delicious it is good it's very very good i mean part of it is the salt right right? Like it's super salty. Yeah.

Like I was looking up the nutrition facts. I don't need to know it. I'm going to plug my ears. It's got 57% of your sodium intake for the day. I bet that was a good number. Whatever it was, it was a normal amount of sodium. It's also got 41% of your fat for the day. What about all the vitamins though?

There's nori. They wrap it in nori. That's green. Oh, I was talking about spam in particular. I wasn't talking about musubi. Spam on its own is like half your day's work right there. Spam rips, man. I did not get into spam until I started eating musubi. I think part of people's hesitance towards spam is the fact that it is meat in a can. Yes. uh traditionally uh you like to think that your meat came from an animal and that's easier to picture when you don't have to open a can to get it yeah when it's not a sort of pink cylinder uh spam introduced by hormel in 1937 gained popularity during the world war ii the war the world war the world war ii uh as a way to

get meat to people sure uh by 2003 it was sold in 41 countries and on six continents apparently it was developed potentially this i don't i don't have facts on this this is some spam apocrypha you're about to give us but they were trying to find a way to sell more pork shoulder which was not a very popular cut uh it's good yeah i don't know you know how food trends are yeah i guess um but yeah also you know it was a way to get food to places outside of the contiguous U.S., so Hawaii, Philippines, Guam, Okinawa. Sure. Hawaii is kind of...

Yeah, at least in the U.S., that's our kind of main reference point. That's where musubi comes from. Also in Hawaii, you can get different kinds that you can't get here, like honey spam, spam with bacon, and hot and spicy spam. I think I'm good with just a regular vanilla spam, by which I mean normal spam.

Yeah, not vanilla. Not spam tinged with notes of vanilla bean. Hawaiian Burger King and Hawaiian McDonald's also sell spam. In what manner? I mean, I don't know for sure, but it seems pretty easy to guess, huh? Like a spam burger? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know for sure, but it seems pretty easy to guess, huh? Like a Spam Burger? Yeah. Yeah, all right. Yeah, sure.

This was, at least Hawaiian Burger King started in 2007. So this is... Flame-grilled Spam actually doesn't sound so great to me. Another place that's popular is the Philippines. It's commonly eaten with rice, as it is, you know, in Hawaii, and a sunny-side-up egg for breakfast. They fry it,

serve it alongside other condiments, or use it in sandwiches. There's also Spam spaghetti, Spam nuggets. Spamgetti? Well, I guess so. If you want to do that. and why wouldn't you okay i did spam getty i don't i'm trying to imagine is it ground spam like i don't i don't know about i

mean i imagine it's like meatballs right but it's spam instead oh you just wad it up we're not really doing this meat a lot of favors we We are not doing it many favors. Other kinds of flavors that you can get in various places. There is Spam cheese, Spam garlic, Spam teriyaki, Spam chorizo, Spam oven roasted turkey. What? What? I imagine everything is starting with that kind of like pork base. Including the turkey? Or, I don't know.

I guess it's just turkey. I and this may be old fashion to me but i feel like turkey should have a turkey base it should it should be based in turkey if it's going to be turkey it may be um a novelty flavor that came out in 2019 was spam pumpkin spice spam pumpkin spice that's a tough it is i don't know spam pumpkin spiced spam pumpkin spice that's a tough it is i don't know spam pumpkin spiced that's gross you don't don't go changing trying to please me spam you are you are salty pork you are good to go already uh there is a spam museum in minnesota is that where hormel is based or something i don't know why it's in minnesota to be honest um there is also a spamorama which is a yearly festival and it is in austin texas you're kidding me it has not happened recently for a variety of reasons yeah uh started in 1978 golly um there was a joke kind of among the two founders that there was

like a chili cook-off like every weekend but so they were kind of doing something and it's like a counter play on that and so they came up with spamorama also if there was a chili cook-off in austin every weekend this would be the best place on earth. So it was held at a place called Soap Creek Saloon, which I don't think exists anymore. But there was kind of different categories. There was a best tasting dish. There was a worst tasting dish, which I kind of find charming. Winners have included a Spam dairi uh made from fruit meat and a garnish of that's the worst thing that's the worst thing i ever heard thank you thank you starting in 1981

they did a miss spam beauty pageant okay and then uh they were contacted by hormel to say like hey stop it stop don't put our shit in daiquiri. Stop doing it. So then they, they negotiated an agreement so that they could give out like Hormel. Oh, so Hormel was really like, don't do this.

Well, no, they were, they were like, Hey, you've got to involve us if you're going to do something like this. And so then Austin started involving them. So they said,

spam daiquiri. We got to get the Hormel brand name up on this, please. Uh, it came back in 2019, but again, hasn't happened since then. Apparently, the founder tried to take it to other locations like Dallas, and it was not as much of a hit as it is here. Well, they're not as weird, are they? As an awesome bunch of freaking weirdos. They also have, you know, eating contests.

They had a Spamlympics that started in 1990. Yeah. It's a real phenomenon. Did you ever see Spam a lot? No. It's the Monty Python musical. Yeah. I saw it on Broadway.

Oh, really? Yes. It had the Monty Python musical. Yeah. It was on, I saw it on Broadway. Oh, really? Yes. It had Alan Tudyk. It had a great fucking cast. It had Alan Tudyk. It had Hank Azaria was in it. Yeah. It had, who played Callie on Grey's Anatomy?

Do you know who I'm talking about? Anyway, they were in it. It was an all-star cast. All-star cast. Yeah, so I would encourage y'all, maybe don't just open a can and dig in. No. But go somewhere that really prepares it, you know?

Like marinates it or seasons it or puts it between two slices of bread. You know, somebody that would make the claim of here is a spam dish on our menu is pretty likely to know what they're doing. Right. Yeah. It's a high risk, high reward meat. Yeah.

I mean, I would give it a shot. I enjoy it. And that's, I mean, do you need more recommendations now? Hey, can I steal your way? Yes. Wow, we have a couple primo jumpa jams here. Again, I would love to read the first one because it is for Nick. And it is from Mac, who says,

Happy 26th birthday, Nick. Thank you for feeding me jerky on road trips to no cal getting me is that north north california yes excellent getting me atticus at pooh's corner to wear on my head and chatting while i walk floyd and describe his floofy antics i'm so grateful we get to love each other more every day, and I'm stoked for the week when we'll be one year apart for candle nights. Thanks for being my person. Coming in a little bit late here on this message by over a month. But listen, love, you can't put love on a schedule.

And by love, I mean us, I guess. We are love. We are love we are love okay yes can i read the next one i want you to this is for jessica it is from zach hi bubby i just wanted to say that i love you so much i can't believe that baby number three is going to be here to join our family. Happy birthday to you. Thank you so much for how you love us. We would be lost without you. You'll always be my buttery crispy crust. Is it my night or yours to do bedtime?

We'll have a baby. It's a question mark, question mark, question mark? I mean, I know. Oh, yeah? Yeah. How do you know? Can you just feel it through the message? I feel it. Well, I mean, I know. Oh, yeah? Yeah. How do you know? Can you just feel it through the message? I feel it.

Well, I read it. I read how the, like, the syntax. Uh-huh. And that shows me a lot of stuff about genetics and stuff. So I can say that they'll have a baby and it's going to be a cutie. Oh, there he goes. There he goes with that. Hey there, I'm Ellen Weatherford.

And I'm Christian Weatherford. And we've got big feelings about animals that we just got to share. On Just the Zoo of Us, your new favorite animal review podcast, we're here to critically evaluate how each animal excels and how it doesn't, rating them out of 10 on their effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics. Guest experts give you their takes informed by actual real-life experiences studying and working with very cool animals like sharks, cheetahs, and sea turtles. It's a field trip to the zoo for your ears. So if you or your kids have ever wondered if a pigeon can count, why sloths move

so slow, or how a spider sees the world, find out with us every Wednesday on Just the Zoo of Us in its natural habitat on MaximumFun.org. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Somewhere between science and superstition, there is a podcast. Look, your daughter doesn't say she's a demon. She says she's the devil himself. That thing is not my daughter. And I want you to tell me there's a show where the hosts don't just report on French science and spirituality, but take part themselves. Well, there is, and it's Oh No Ross and Carrie on Maximum Fun.

This year, we actually became certified exorcists. So yes, Carrie and I can help your daughter. Or we can just talk about it on the show. Oh No Ross and Carrie on MaximumFun.org. Can I do my thing? Yes. My thing is housework where you demolish stuff. I mean it in like this thing needs to be fixed or replaced.

But before that new good stuff can go in there, the old bad stuff has to get smashed like the fucking hull. I've noticed on a lot of home renovation shows, they like to involve the featured people specifically in the demolition. And that's probably because that's the most fun part of it, right? I would assume so. I don't have that much experience with this. Like my dream is to take out a wall with like a big hammer. Like that seems so dope.

That seems so good. A lot of this feels like weirdly taboo, like to smash a hole in the wall. Yeah. You're not supposed to do that. Well, and you don't really know what's behind there necessarily. You don't, do you?

And I'm not talking like Narnia. I'm talking about like pipes and wires. The opposite of Narnia. Yeah, every time that I screw a shelf into a wall, there's a chance that I might get taken to Narnia, by which I mean heaven because there's wires behind it. It's just, I think about those rage rooms, which rooms which are i mean i don't know if they're actually popular but they are in like every reality dating show ever where it's like you

come in and you can smash bottles and a tv and dishes and stuff exactly yeah which i don't know how much that costs i have to imagine it's quite a bit of money if you're smashing a bunch of tvs and dishes and well but i mean all they all they would have to do is like go out to a curb on bulk trash pickup and be like now we have all of our yeah i guess that's true i imagine it's more like a liability yeah i know that that's probably satisfying but like you can break a house up for free kind of i mean i guess you have to have a house right we we are lucky enough to own our house here in Austin, but if you were renting, they wouldn't be so stoked. Although there should be like a matchmaking app where it's like, hey, I need to get some drywall replaced.

Does somebody want to come to my house and I'll pay you some money and you smash up my drywall? And it's like, fuck yes, I will. I will be right there. Do I need to supply my own hammer? Okay. When you said matchmaking, I thought that- No, not today. I thought that it was all like, hey, I have a household task and I would also like it to be romantic. If there was an app that I could get on and it was like, hey, Griffin, we'll pay you 50 bucks. Come over here for a couple hours and smash apart this room with a big hammer.

Like, yeah. Like, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on my way. Do you want to talk about the particular project that motivated you? Right. So the house we've lived in now for a few years, the previous owners did a few things that were curious.

A few, I would probably guess um self home improvement like amateur production situations uh which we've discovered like little little hidden easter eggs all over the house like when a ceiling fan almost falls on us we're like you stinkers got us again with another one of your great traps um and i would say the piece de resistance is on the under, underneath the house. We're on like elevated beams on the back of the house. Yeah, our house is built into a hill. And so in order to keep it flat, the back half is on beams. Is on beams.

And under there, they had started to, I guess, make a room. Which like, okay, there's a lot of space down there. Sure, sure, sure. If I were a person who, I don't know, wanted, we had talked about maybe like a model train room. I would think to myself like, I'm going to turn the underside of this house into another bonus area for my hobbies. Right. The order in which you would do that would probably be dig out the hill part. Yeah, or seal it up. Or seal it up to make it sort of room

shaped instead of leaving the the dirt gravel and everything in a pretty steep incline with beams all over the place but then putting ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights above the dirt and hill and all i want to know is what the purpose of that room was going to be because there is there's there's ceiling tiles and fluorescent lighting underneath our house uh shining on the dirt and the the raw ass ground yeah so anyway i don't understand what was intended but we have to take that out if we want to insulate our home appropriately right so when we got uh our shit busted up by the freeze last year, we lost a lot of good soldiers down there. We lost a lot of just sort of floorboards and the insulation that was down there, which wasn't very much, got drenched and ruined. And so we have to get

re-insulated, which we discovered when we stepped foot into our finally finished non-destroyed bathroom and our feet turned to ice cubes. So like, okay, we'll get it insulated. And they're like, you got to take down all this ceiling tile stuff. So me and a friend came over for a couple hours to help out. And then i spent most of the day yesterday doing finishing it up i just smashed that shit i smashed that shit cut wires that were like hanging this aluminum grid that the ceiling tires tiles were on so that like every few wires or so just the ceiling would just come tumbling down like the walls of jericho and it was so everybody upstairs could like hear me whacking away at this grid.

And then just occasionally letting out a shriek of joy. Yeah, I definitely hurt my hand a couple of times. And so there were a couple of loud explicit words also being shot out, but mostly like, yeah, baby. Just every few minutes from downstairs. It was the most satisfying sort of like home project

i think i've ever had and probably impossible to replicate because i can't imagine anybody else would have this singular experience of removing ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights from below their house outdoor ceiling tiles essentially is what we are talking about yeah it was it was uh it was very very gratifying because there was a huge pile of ceiling tiles and uh ruined insulation and like aluminum uh like grid stuff just in huge piles and to look at that and be like yeah i did that that's great the insulation team actually showed up in the middle of this episode about 10 minutes ago and so i had to run down to like greet them and and uh show them where to plug stuff in and they were like wow did you do all that yourself and i was like a friend helped me out for a couple hours they're like you did but you didn't bring in contractors and i was like no

they're like wow that's impressive and i was like oh gr hear that from a grown-up? Griffin, I'm so happy you had that experience. It was very, very, very nice. Because, like, I can offer my support and say, like, hey, that was a lot of work. Good job. But I'm not a grown-up. Right. So there are theories about, like, the catharsis of aggression that sort of those rage rooms are built on and i think like uh yeah is is what i could be talking about here where you smash things to express anger or

frustration to have a cathartic release right only there have been lots of studies that have shown that those kinds of practices don't actually relieve or inhibit the anger and frustration as much as it does, like, enable it and cause it to flourish. actually about how I never get angry, how I just don't have that rage button, and how I get jealous of people who are able to get like super angry and like, you know, like, like, throw a chair. And I'm like, wow, that must be satisfying. But apparently not. I don't think it does it most of the time. But for me, it's like, that's a weird way of approaching it. Because when I am doing a big smash on some big home improvement project it's not it's for me it's not like an anger relief as much as it is like a stress relief like a i i am very um cautious as a rule which i think stems from just sort of general perfectionism like i want things to to be right i want things to be right like i want um if there's

like a big crack in the wall in my office that i'm like staring at all day like that would drive me bonkers yeah so i would need to get that fixed so this is the opposite of that where it's like somebody tried to make this right maybe it is is a sort of anger expression towards these terrible half-done projects that we keep discovering around this house. But that's not so much a, I need to relieve this anger as much as it is a celebration of how angry I am

at this shitty outdoor ceiling tile situation. So it's not, there's no projection happening. There's no like secondhand, like, visualization. I'm looking at the thing that makes me angry, and I'm killing it and destroying it. So that is singularly enjoyable. I went down yesterday just to spot Griffin, because a lot of this involved him being up on a ladder. And it was very easy to become instantly angry in that space because it was like what was the plan what were you doing who starts at the top of the room to make a new room it's buck wild

i will also mention that in our kitchen there is a cabinet that you open up and there is just a pipe in there uh as if it were attached to a sink uh but there's no sink. And there's just the remainder of the pipe where I guess the sink used to be. But that doesn't make me as angry because I can just close that cabinet. Yeah. I just don't open that cabinet. Right.

Also, you say money when you do that stuff yourself. We obviously, when our bathroom was destroyed, that was a little too ambitious of a demo. And by ambitious, I mean like dangerous of a demo project. And also like mold can grow immediately. There's mold and wet drywall and wet like wiring and like a bunch of busted pipes and all this stuff. So that was a bit above our pay grade, which I mean quite literally because it cost us a fucking fortune just to demo that room. So much that basically our insurance covered the demo and

the water uh remediation or whatever it's called and then rebuilding it was all on us because insurance is a fucking scam all all over but wow i just it's what's the what you know it's not a scam like i guess like auto insurance, like you got to have it. But like home and health insurance is just fucking carbo. Yeah, there's just a lot that isn't covered. Anyway. Anyway, I just, I don't know. I think that it is, it is therapeutic. Not so much in an anger relief way, but in like a stress relief way, definitely.

And also you save some money. If it's something that you can do yourself and that's, that's fine. And also you save some money if it's something that you can do yourself. And that's fun. And also you learn new things, right? We smashed down fluorescent lights and then there were just live wires sticking down from the ceiling. And I was like, well, I don't want the insulation team to die.

So I better figure out how to fix that. And I figured out how to secure those. And it was awesome. I will say we're not advising people to do this. And also this could have very well turned out to be not a wonderful thing if you had maybe accidentally hurt yourself in some way while doing this. Well, yeah. I just want to say all that because what about the listener right now who's like, Griffin told me to break down a wall. But I also did a bit on skateboarding. and told me to break down a wall.

But I also did a bit on skateboarding. And it's not like I was saying like, but it would have been bad if I hurt, if Tony Hawk broke his skull, then that wouldn't be bad. That would be bad thing right there. No, actually I hate skateboarding. Yeah, I'm saying do it.

Don't break down a wall. I'm saying break down a wall. Open up that living room into a big, into a bigger space. Open concept is 100 always going to be the popular thing so definitely break down definitely break it down just turn it into like a big studio apartment essentially um hey thanks 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 phone for having us on the network it's such a great time to be here. It's such a great time.

Hey, I imagine we have a lot of people that listen to our show that might enjoy, I don't know, The Greatest Generation. Yeah! Yeah! Oh, so loud. I'm so tired. Anyway. You know, there's other stuff, but that's going to, no, actually we should talk about merch. There's merch at mackroymerch.com and it'd be dope if you check that out.

And then I think that's it. I, I have the problem, babe, is now I have the hunger to do smash. Oh, to break some more things. Yeah. Ooh. I'm sure, I'm sure there's something else we need to break. Yeah. Oh, I bet there's parts of our deck you could break

oh yeah yeah not the standing parts you know but around the standing parts yeah i'll smash that right the hell up yeah we will find i bet you treasure if i keep if i keep creating and or a raccoon skeleton or a person person skeleton. But what's that? It's me from the future? How do you know it's you? Because it's wearing glasses? Well, it's because of my one platinum tooth that I have, of course. And inside that tooth, a very small treasure map.

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