Wonderful! - Wonderful! 220: Folding Chair Zone

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

Rachel’s favorite urban oasis! Griffin’s favorite partially-illustrated stories!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum: https://www.napawf.org/about Harmony House: https://harmonyhousewv.com/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Hi. Hi. Oh, hi. What do you think of that new flavor of the sparkling?

So we're working with a cherry limeade Waterloo sparkling water. Yeah, what do you think? I enjoy it quite a bit. Okay, good. I am always in a quest for a flavor that I actually like. Yeah. Well, it's gross, isn't it? Yeah, it turns out.

I always like a sparkling water for the first half of the can. Yeah. And then the second half, I'm like, I'm not enjoying this at all. Well, by the second half, you can no longer sort of suspend the disbelief that you're drinking a real cherry lime. I say that. This is good stuff. Yeah, I think so. I think this is just fine.

Yeah. And what a boring sort of conversation to start you have a good did you have a good bit ready yeah yeah i was gonna do one where it was like um i was gonna do like i'm a mummy and i would try to like scare you and i would do like a toilet paper all around me and then i you would be like what are you doing you're such a goofball uh-huh and then people would be like, what are you doing? You're such a goofball. And then people would listen to that and be like, they're so in love. That's the formula. That's the magic formula we have.

And we are in love. We don't need to put on sort of Dharma and Greg style goof-em-ups to sort of make people believe. Like we're so deeply in love and we work so hard for each other and oh i just got an idea oh thank god nowhere with that i just got an idea for a bonus episode oh yeah maybe we watch an episode of darman and greg oh that's fucking great babe that's so good yes the max fun drive is coming up we've been wrestling with what to talk about and as it turns out i think we're going to watch. One episode doesn't seem like enough work for bonus content.

I think maybe the whole first season. Okay. No. I just visualized a full season's worth. I had to pot you down a little bit. You've been laughing really hard about Darmy and Greg. I had to turn you down so you don't blow out the Vox. But, oh, man.

No, I'm not telling you not to laugh loud. I fixed it. Man. This is wonderful. It's a show where we talk about things we like, things that are good, things that we're into. And I'm into Rachel. Real, real deep.

I'm feeling you. I'm feeling you. I'm vibing. Are you feeling this? I guess. Okay. All right. I was just caught off guard.

We've been parenting so hard. Yes. These last couple weeks. Yes. And you're so good at it. And it makes me so happy that I i'm the one you're the one i'm doing this with you know what i mean that makes me feel really good well good i will tell you i feel like there's things i could do better i know there's no i feel like unconsciously you and i have like picked a team yeah and and that's always kind of challenging for me.

And I feel it sometimes when like you are not around and I realize I am used to being on team Gus and I'm used to you being on team Henry. Yeah, we kind of divide and conquer a little bit. You'll be like, I'm gonna take a shower. And then I'm just like sitting with Henry and I'm kind of like, so what you been up to? of like so what you been up to uh it's it's i think that is it comes with the territory of having two kids yeah is that when one is a baby they require about 500 times more work than the one

that's not a baby yeah and big son is like a person now big son's a real guy he's got interests and a personality and and i feel like i really do have to be like so what do you like these days well um he likes a trampoline he likes a wee bear bears yeah that's very recent he likes chocolate well chaboy did win him a wee bear bear stuffy yeah at the crane game this past weekend. Don't want to brag because I won't because I did try to win all three of the bears and did only successfully retrieve Grizz from the device. But yeah. Hey, do you have any small wonders?

I do. Actually, I wanted to talk about this last week, but I forgot. There is a Twitter account called Pay Gap App. Oh, wow. Have you heard of this? No. Is it like anonymous reporting of your salary? but I forgot there is a Twitter account called pay gap app. Oh, no. Is it like anonymous reporting of your, of your salary in it? So here's,

here's what the bio says. So it's pay gap app, APP. And the Twitter bio says employers. If you tweet about international women's day, I'll retweet your gender pay gap. Whoa. So it's been,

I've been following it. It just started this month, March, or no, no, no, sorry. Last year.

It's 2022. Turns out it started March, 2021. Okay. But yeah. So anytime an entity like gives their little, Hey, in honor of international women's thing.

Yeah. Here's an extra commercial with the green M&M in it. Yeah. It'll say in this organization, women's medium hourly pay is 31 percent lower than men's how do they get that how do they get that i don't know that's the thing i i imagine a lot of people have like gotten at this account and said like hey figure this out i i don't i don't know how they do i will say um you know it's it's usually not the big dogs and this is also a uk account okay so you know maybe you're not gonna see like your beloved applebee's on here yeah um but it's i don't know i i really i enjoy it especially when the like tweets are like super like pompous like

look out for how much we love women and then the things like you love women about 31 percent less than yeah it's delicious um speaking delicious i gonna mispronounce this but um sambal olek is that the chili paste uh that is uh i was gonna do a whole segment about it and then i realized like i don't actually know a whole lot about i mean it is it is a a wild mixture of spices uh that is used in like a lot of different types of cuisines uh we we purchased it it's it's vaguely in the sriracha family but i've been doing a lot of sort of uh more like east asian cooking and uh i enjoy this stuff so much i feel like it adds just the right level of spice to the to the things i cook because i always wrestle with

that when i'm cooking something that's like add this spicy ingredient and I always either like way undershoot it or way overshoot it ruining the dish either way yeah I feel like soundball olek it's like just the right amount of right amount of stuff and it smells amazing it's like chili paste garlic uh like fish sauce there's like a ton of stuff in it and it's all good, baby. It's a very complex flavor. Yeah. You go first this week, I believe. I do. What do you got?

I am going to say your city's best park. Your city's best park. Yeah. Okay. I'm talking about like the central parks. In St. Louis, it's Forest Park. Right.

For you, it was Ritter Park, right? Oh, yeah. Except no substitutes. And I'm talking today about Austin's Zilker Park. Zilker Park, a phenomenal park. I actually like had no real sense of how it's stacked up to other parks. So Zilker park is 350 acres central park is 843 acres and then forest park where i'm from st louis is 1300 acres wow i had no idea central park was that

big yeah i guess that makes sense you look at manhattan on a map and it's like it seems really big when you're in it like the way that they have the paths all snaked through, like you feel transported. Yeah. Like when I think back to my early days in Austin, like Zilker Park is such a big part of that. Like not just because of Barton Springs. Barton Springs being the natural spring fed swimming pool. It's always like 68 degrees and it's lovely. Yeah.

It's got like a natural rock floor and it's very nice. Also, Austin City Limits Music Festival. Like that was like every fall for me was there. When we were first in our courtship, we went to Blues on the Green. We did. Who did we? Oh, my God. We saw Los Lonely Boys.

And just got like wine drunk and just boogied to How Far is Heaven. Yeah, that was a great night. And then we used to bring like a croquet set. Yeah, you could play big croquet down in Sultry Park. And just like set it up out there. Yeah, we would set the wickets like a hundred yards away from each other and then just like blast shit into the parking lot yeah we brought henry out there and we have pictures of henry and our friends kids playing

out on the park yeah it's a great park uh there's not there's like one tree and it's like a huge ass tree. And then the rest of it is just like wide open, lush green pastures. So that, so that area is called Peace Grove. It's also known as Rock Island. And the tree is like a hundred inches

in circumference and 70 feet tall. It's a pecan tree. Oh, beautiful. But yeah, I was really curious because i didn't really know the story of zilker park yeah you know uh used to have a train doesn't anymore i don't does now they brought it came back people freaked out so much about the absence of that train they brought in a new company to like it's like a little train for kids yeah we've never been on it we haven't no uh scared of

trains little ones big ones don't scare me little ones do little ones yeah what are you worried that's gonna happen i'll break it and it'll go off the tracks and it'll fall on me and i'll die and people people my obituary be like this dummy got squished by the little train. Can you believe it? Okay, so Zilker Park, named after Andrew Jackson Zilker, who made his millions, or probably not millions, probably made a million. It was like a hundred bucks,

but with inflation, it's about $300 trillion. Selling ice. Great. Back in the day when you needed somebody to sell you ice. Sure. Back in the day when you needed somebody to sell you ice. Sure.

So he moved to Texas when he was 18, and he went from foreman to opening his own plant in ice manufacturing. Ice plant? Ice plant. Okay. Part of it was purchasing property surrounding Barton Springs used to kind of raise the horse and mules and then also, you know, make the ice. Yeah. You got it. You got to make it ice.

So he also built a pool and amphitheater at the site for the members of his local elks club i have no idea if any of those like relics still stand today but like clearly he recognized like this is a space where people want to party yeah uh so in 1917 he donated this land to the city of austin with the stipulation that an endowment be produced to create shop and home ec classes in local schools. But just for elks. So Zilker Park, a lot of stuff on this property. You know, there's Barton Springs, which we talked about. There's the Zilker Botanical Garden.

Beautiful. There's the Austin Nature and Science Center. Cool beautiful there's the austin nature and science center cool i do not think we've been to never been to it henry went once and he won't take us we're like waiting for him to say come come with me to the nature and science center uh the sculpture garden have you been there uh yes okay i have but i don't remember if we were there together why would we have not been there together well because i don't remember if we were there together. Why would we have not been there together? Well, because I don't remember going recently. Maybe I haven't gone. I remember I went really early on in living here.

I may be thinking of a different sculpture park. That's possible. Yeah. It's pretty small. Yeah. And this is also the home. So part of the thing when I moved here is I felt like, you know, I had come from the Midwest where everything's pretty old. And I moved to Austin and I felt like everything was brand new.

And it kind of bothered me a little bit that there wasn't like real like history in this town. At least that's what it felt like when I moved here. But Zilker Park is kind of part of that in a way that I didn't really realize. Like the Kite Festival has been around since 1936. i didn't really realize like the kite festival has been around since 1936 holy shit that's an old kite festival that is a very old kite festival yeah uh the zilker holiday tree has been around since 1967 uh the hillside theater where we have seen many a production well two maybe oklahoma and little Shop of Horrors. Name another one. That's two.

Been around since 1959. Wow. And that's a big deal. Yeah. For a city that feels like the skyline changes 100% every five years. Yeah. It's cool to have this place in the city that is still hosting some of this stuff. You just sound like you're about to spin off on your own little like randy newman adventure the skyline keeps changing

you do the worst randy newman i do the worst randy newman impression every time i look up the skyline is changing that doesn't that's just not what he sounds like. No, not at all. I'm sorry, everybody. So the train that you were mentioning earlier, so in 1961 was when the little mini train was built. Cute. It was the Zilker Zephyr and then went out of commission in 2019. Now it is the Zilker Eagle.

As of 2022, it is back. I don't like that name as much. Oh, really? The Zilker Zephyr? It's great. Zilker Zephyr. You can't really replicate that, though. No.

The Zilker Zipper. Zanies. The Zing Zilker Zipper. And then, as I mentioned, the Austin City Limits Music Festival, which has been here since 2002 austin city limits music festival which has been here since 2002 yeah great music festival probably my favorite like accessible music festival and that you go to it and then you i guess that only works if you live in the city but you go to it and then you get to go home yeah i will say like lollapalooza is enormous and i remember when i used to go when i lived in chicago walking from one side to the other side was

legitimately tiring um but acl is pretty easy like you can stand at one end and pretty much see the other end uh it's like grant park where what park grant park grant park uh but yeah and then they have like all like local foods in the little yeah it's really nice which is fun um they like work really hard to try and keep everything kind of regional a lot of what our friend evan would call czs or chill zones uh which uh i appreciate in my tremendous number of people bring folding chairs and so much so that they have created folding chair zones. Yeah. That you put your chair and you can't get any closer.

Or FCZs, if you will. Yeah, I love Slugger Park. I do too. Turns out. out i i i don't love how there's one road that goes all the way around it and there are red lights on either end of that loop and so like if you are there during rush hour you're going to be stuck on this one road with no way to get off of it we were on it with henry for close to an hour i think just trying to leave Zilker Park. And it was pretty terrible.

Yeah. So they have had city council meetings about just that, of what the future of Zilker Park looks like. Because they're limited by how much parking they can do. Like they are pretty much, they've maxed parking. And so now the age old, what does transportation look like? Yeah. Question is coming up. If there was a way

and this is probably impossible but for people to i know what i just said about small trains but what if there was like a somewhat smaller train that you could go on to get to different places in the city uh instead of having to drive a car how many people could ride this like two or three no i mean it would have to be more than that in order for it to make sense for it to not be a car. How many people could ride this? Like two or three? No, I mean, it would have to be more than that in order for it to make sense for it to not be a car. I was thinking like maybe 10 or 20. 10 or 20.

People. And they could take this somewhat smaller train instead of having to do a car. And what's good about that, not as much parking and good for environment if we make the train not,

you know, chuff a bunch of diesel or whatever. Well, I think that's just the plan i think we just have to wait 15 years right 15 20 years for this technology yeah sure oh what am i saying you can't have a train that runs through the city because people would just drive into them and not know how to like a train in the city dangerous much never been done right it's never been done and this is a skit that i've been working on to present at the austin city council meetings um about our lack of a light rail system and um

it's coming yeah sure we paid a bunch of money for it yeah taxes yeah a lot of good our taxes do us right hey just because hey this is wonderful not andy rooney that's wario andy rooney and wario are the same could i steal you away yes go knock out the gumbo trons by myself here today because we're recording them later here's a message for maybe and it's from raya who says my beautiful silly maybe every day you remind me that life is wonderful i can't wait to spend more time doing great goofers playing star wars ttrpgs and listening to basket yell let's kiss now also pee pee poo poo i win the game forever and always for all time now love your very amazing girlfriend raya and i know you you all at home are wondering did they just

make griffin say pee pee poo poo is that something that i can do um if i managed to to get a jumbotron and the answer is apparently yes so um pee pee poo poo everyone uh here's another one for carly from sean who says i'm so glad you joined my wonderful theme minecraft server i never would have imagined i'd meet the love of my life in a video game about a podcast during a pandemic but now that i know you of course that's how we'd meet i love you so so much and i'm so excited to nest with you in our polycule compound in the woods. My heart is so very full. That's the purest, that's just the purest thing. That's just the wonderful thing. And people say love can't bloom on a battlefield of blocks and creepers and skeletons, but obviously the opposite is, of course, and frankly, this is for the

best, very little actionable advice. But now as they enter their twilight years, I'm as surprised as anyone to admit that it's gotten kind of good. Justin, Travis, and Griffin's witticisms are more refined, like a humor column in a fancy magazine. And they hardly ever say Bazinga anymore. So, after you've completely finished listening to every single one of all of our other shows, why not join the McElroy Brothers every week for My Brother, My Brother and Me? Are you ready to binge watch something old? The Greatest Generation is a podcast about Star Trek by a couple of hosts a little bit embarrassed to even have a Star Trek podcast. Hosted by me, Ben Harrison.

And me, Adam Pranica. We get into the critical, the technical, the science fictional aspects of the show we love while roasting it and each other at the same time. We've completed an entire series about Star Trek The Next Generation and another one about Star Trek Deep Space Nine. And we've just begun Star Trek Voyager. So now is a great time to start watching a new Star Trek series with us. So subscribe to The Greatest Generation on MaximumFun.org

or wherever you get your podcasts and become a friend of DeSoto today. Mine's going to be pretty, pretty quick. And you just started drinking my water like it was like, and this is I want you to be hydrated. You're the love. You're the love of my life. You just really go for it these days.

I used to ask, and you used to make fun of me for asking. No, I used to make fun of the way that you would ask me. Okay. Sorry, Bart. And I love this about you. I love your brain. I love the way it works. But you used to say.

Do you remember? Yeah, you would say, is there water in your water bottle? Which then would make me think about the Tune Yard song. And I would sing that back to you like, no water in the water bottle. But then I would say yes, and then I would say that most people when they

would ask that question would say, is your water bottle empty? Or simply, can I have some water? Do you remember my reasoning though? You didn't want to ask me to drink water that wasn't there? I don't know. Yeah, my thought was if your water bottle was empty, I didn't want to ask for water in a way

that would make you have to get up and get it. God, our love for each other is too strong. So I thought, I'll ask if there's water in it and he if he says no i'll continue to sit here and be thirsty yeah what am i gonna do if i say no and you say oh okay and then i won't go get water for my my partridge wife i just i didn't want to ask in a way because i recognized like i could have my own water if i were you could forward thinking i would also have a water container yeah but i was asking to have yours and so i thought i i want to make sure there's water in it before i ask you go through the effort to yeah this is also like the other day when i asked griffin to

get me grapes and then decided i didn't need water also because wow this is a whole nother thing where i was like do you want anything from the kitchen and you're like yeah let me get some grapes and i was like okay do you want some water too because i i keep my head on a swivel and i notice when you don't have hydration and i said do you want to go get you water too and then rachel said no i won't need the water i'll have the grapes as if the juiciness of the grapes, as if you could go, I'm thirsty. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Now I'm not thirsty anymore

because I made grape juice in my mouth. All of this is true. You're not wrong is the thing. I also love that about you. I'm gonna talk about kids' graphic novels. Oh. I guess this is a broad, I don't wanna be reductive, right?

Like, you you know young adult graphic novels too there's it's a it's a wide range of ages that they are making making these things for these days but uh henry has been ravenously reading graphic novels it's so perfect if you think about it it's not anything that would have occurred to me yeah uh because henry is at an age now where he's kind of past the picture book but he's still well past it yeah yeah but he still needs like an illustration you can't just like straight up read a chapter book to him yeah man i i remember the first time i was like let's read flat stanley and we read it and it's like where's the pictures flat stanley yeah where

are the pictures a lot of words flat stanley don't make me read flat stanley is so flat show me a flat stanley you know what i mean anyway there's like a renaissance of of graphic novels for young people that is happening right now and it is so rad in every way because i feel like it is uh for so many reasons a more accessible and exciting thing for new readers uh and i have like there's i couldn't find any like formal studies about this but like a lot of different sort of uh places like scholastic and other sort of book publishers wrote sort of extolling the virtues of graphic novels and comic books for young people. Henry has been tearing these down. I think probably where we got started was Captain Underpants, where most people do sort of start. I was surprised the first time I read a Captain Underpants. I was like, oh,

this is a graphic novel. It is about, underpants-wearing bald man fighting a living toilet. And it's not the most erudite sort of concept, but there's fun stuff in there, and there's also a billion of them. into Dog Man, which is sort of the spiritual successor, also by Dav Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants, which Henry is more into Dog Man. I think they're much funnier than Captain Underpants, myself personally. And from there, like we have branched out, basically you have been bringing home like graphic novels from the library. And pretty much every one of them has been a hit yeah there's the magic treehouse series by mary pope osborne it's about two kids that find this treehouse in the woods filled with these magic books that when you read them they like transport you to the worlds that they did yeah so the books have been around forever but they have just now started turning them into graphic novels and and i looked on Amazon and they're like, they're staggered.

Like the next one comes out this summer. Yeah. They're very slowly translating them. Yeah. And that's true of actually a lot of like classic literature too. So there's a lot of, I forget the name of it, but there was this recent adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, which is, you know, not Henry age appropriate,

but a lot of graphic novel adaptations of heavier books that are much more accessible in this different format. We just started reading Super Sidekicks by Gavin Ong Tan, who, and it's a more sort of straightforward like superhero series,

but it is like really smart in the way that it still tells like a really good superhero story just one that is about kids who are uh you know the the jilted sidekicks of crappy superheroes and uh now they've started their own team and it's like i don't know it's it's you know obviously that's been done with team tit and The Runaways is like that, but The Runaways is more YA than Henry is sort of ready for. Yeah. We're just really lucky in that our libraries have a really large graphic novel section. Because at this age, it's really hard to buy a book knowing that your kid may not like it at all.

And the library gives me this opportunity to kind of like hands-on look through it. Yeah. And see like, how long is it? Like, what kind of action is happening? Like, what are the illustrations look like? You know, like, is this something he's going to be into? Yeah.

The answer has been almost unilaterally yes it's making me think i should have been a librarian uh yeah maybe i'm so glad you finally turned around on libraries by the way you've talked so much shit about libraries but you're right they are places where you can just try books out yeah and they're good uh the one that we have really fallen in love with is a series called hylo by Judd Wynick, who has done a bunch of stuff in the comics industry. He was also, when I revealed this to you, it was a shock. He was on The Real World, like an old season. I forget which one.

San Francisco. San Francisco. One of the first seasons and was like kind of a character on there. He was like, he was a cartoonist, which was wild. Yes. Like, you think I would have have, I don't know. I guess there are a fair number of people named Judd. That is, yes.

Who wouldn't necessarily have automatically made the connection. Sure. So Hilo is a book about a little blonde boy. So of course Henry's into it as one himself. Who falls to earth and has all these powers. And then has to befriend these human beings and fend off this like robot invasion from his home world. last month maybe uh is so rich and so complex and like satisfying for like me to read and also henry like now at bedtime henry only wants high low bedtime stories he like wants to create his own high low fan fiction which is fucking amazing uh it's like it's it tells a mature story sometimes

about like grief and loss and tackles all of these things while also threading the needle of being like funny for a five-year-old to read and exciting for a five-year-old to read. I mean, there's so many, right? The Bad Guys is a big one. Bone is one that we have had recommended to us a few times that has been around for a very, very long time. It's been around for a very, very long time. There's countless graphic novels for young adults to young kids like Henry's age. And that's so exciting because I feel like Henry would read virtually anything in this format. why like there's resources out there explaining why comics and graphic novels are great for kids this age and should be encouraged and not sort of shunned because they are funny books a big thing

is that they are just straight up easier to read right like there is less reading involved yeah by the very nature of what they are um and that alone that they are easier to read builds a uh builds self-confidence in the kids who are reading them uh which is the most important thing for like encouraging more reading or you know happiness sort of in general well and they're also like they're big books like because because of the number of illustrations and the amount of like real estate words get, like sometimes I'll be reading about a book trying to figure out whether or not to purchase it

and I'll see that it's like 150 pages. And I'm like, okay, that seems like too many pages for a young child. But then I realized like, oh, most of that is illustration. Because it's all dialogue, right? Like there's not a bunch of floral descriptive prose, which is where for, for, for, you know, new readers, like that's where you get in the weeds a little bit.

It's all dialogue in short sentences that is way, way, way more digestible. And then if there's things that you don't understand in the, in the words that either you are reading or is being read to you, you get the context of the illustration on the page right and that helps you feel even more confident in your your reading and your comprehension of the book which is awesome for a kid henry's age who is like a new reader um but for kids who are like on the autism spectrum or kids who are dyslexic, like it's huge. It's huge. It helps them sort of put together the words and the meaning and everything way easier than it would be in a more sort of, you know, straight up book format.

And there's a lot of writing about like how amazing that is. But it just builds on this cycle, right, of kids reading these graphic novels and feeling confident in their ability to either read or understand the book that they're reading, which makes them want to read more, which builds more confidence. And I'm just focusing on the reading side of things. Like there is, you know, when graphic novels are sort of present in the school, like it builds art appreciation also for, you know, kids who enjoy sort of the illustration side of things more than just the writing and reading. That was part of why the one I got recently was like Dot and Jot, I think. And it's about these kids who make their own graphic novel. And I just thought like, oh, man, I hope Henry gets into that.

Yeah, like it is a boon to creativity in general. I'm reading off this Scholastic article. They offer a plethora of learning benefits, critical thinking, sequencing, imagination, storytelling, and creativity, specifically even graphic novels that are wordless. Like there are graphic novels that are that that are sans writing entirely that like pretty much most kids can can pick up and understand the story that they are telling just through the illustrations and in doing so like builds their their creativity and capacity to like their their hunger for more sort of advanced storytelling and that's fucking amazing uh i did not i didn't have any of this girl like i did not well i feel like when we were kids it was just like mouse it was mouse yes which is which is like you know there's been recent

controversy about some school i think in like jacksonville or something i i i'm not gonna credit that to jacksonville maybe they're not the ones who did it but uh that that band mouse which is a a graphic novel uh about sort of interviews that the author did with his grandfather i want to say who was a holocaust survivor and uh it was banned from schools and then became like an amazon number one best bestseller um but yes there is there's much more of it happening right now like there are much more people writing it there are way more publishers publishing these kinds of books uh they are becoming more successful right the bad guys is a book about um like the I don't know if it's explicitly the Big Bad Wolf, but basically who teams up with a piranha and a venomous spider and a big snake.

There's like a shark in there. There's a big shark in there. And they're like evil guys, but they want to be good guys. And those books are very charming. And they've done very well. And they're making an animated movie out of it. Obviously, the Captain Underpants- averse has been very successful yeah um i just think it's amazing i think it's amazing i i was not the biggest reader growing up outside of you know

anamorphs and harry potter and goosebumps and stuff like that yeah it was always begrudging for me i would i would have yeah i would have wrecked these books i would have read them until the the the bindings collapse uh and it's so it feels like a whole new ball game now like i do not uh it it has activated something in henry that is so amazing to see as his dad. Like it is, it is so cool to see him like story time before bed. We always tell a story together before bed.

We're like, I ask him what he wants to do a story about. And then we kind of just go back and forth doing like his capacity to like think up new scenarios and ways that those resolve is, is way richer than it ever was before we started reading these books and i think that's incredible he has kind of an inherent understanding of like like how a story is developed like he knows like there has to be conflict you know like there has to be like a good guy and and the good guy has to be coming up against some obstacle. And he just kind of absorbed it,

which has been really helpful. As long as that story doesn't involve somebody disobeying their parents and getting caught or being embarrassed in any way, which made our attempted viewing of Turning Red somewhat unsuccessful because there's a lot of that in that film. Delightful. What we've seen so far, Rachel and I are probably gonna have to polish off the a lot of that in that film delightful what we've seen

so far rachel and i probably gonna have to polish off the back half of that film ourselves because yeah it was the same thing with coco right like it was just like uh oh no he's fighting with his grandma and we say that out loud it makes it sound like we're terrible parents he's so afraid he's so afraid of disobeying us but it's that that's it's not bad as much as he's just a very sweet boy who uh is is very anxious about breaking the law but yeah uh yeah it's it's uh you know i'm sure that most parents of kids you know around henry's age are are tuned into this but if not like check out some of the books i've recommended high high low, especially like I'm, I am in love with this series.

Yeah. I feel like, I feel like we really kind of found our way to it on our own. Yeah. Just because I have always like, it's very rare that like two weeks will go by where I don't get Henry new books just because I'm like so excited. And just very recently really with like

captain underpants i realized like oh i can't i can't really get him books that aren't novels anymore like he's like he's in that mindset now yeah if we get him more sort of traditional i mean he'll he'll fuck around with like a seuss seussian sort of fun book like that. But he needs a story, like a story to be in there. Yeah, so that's why the library has really become like a regular thing. I'm putting stuff on hold again. Yeah. I'm really, I'm in it. I want to make clear I'm not self-promoting

because I would never consider the Adventure Zone graphic novel series kid appropriate. Actually, you should look um we i i was exploring whether or not they were an appropriate donation for austin batcave and the executive director sent me the common sense media posting oh i've never read it oh shit here yeah i can pull it up but i was saying like i think it would be appropriate for you know maybe 13 or 14 year olds and he said okay he's like actually i included a snippet from the common sense media which is honestly pretty funny and then it says parents need to know that adventure zone here there be gerblins is a fantasy graphic novel based on a popular podcast, blah, blah, blah. Swearing is frequent with at least a dozen uses of fart and shit and less frequent uses of hell, damn, bastard, and goddamn. Wait, does it say fart or fuck?

No, it says F dash dash T, which I'm assuming is fart. I think you only use the big one in the abrica. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's fair. In the abrica sense. It has to bleep out fart? I don't know. That doesn't seem like common sense to me.

Violence is mostly directed toward trained wolves, giant spiders, and the gerblins, small, annoying, orc-like guys who bleed green blood until the climactic magical firefight. One character drinks brandy and cocktails i don't even remember that happening okay um yeah that's not as bad as i thought it would be uh anyway yeah well that's just the first one yeah they get they get far raunchier yes uh thank you all for listening thank you to bowen and augustus for the use for a theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us

on the network. It's a great network. Great team. Proud to be a part of it. We have stuff over at McElroyMerch.com that it would be cool if you checked out. And we're bringing Mbimbam and Taz on tour throughout

the rest of the year. We're also Mabimbam and Taz on tour throughout the rest of the year. We're also doing a show. We're doing a show in St. Louis. It's like our first stop, I want to say, in mid-April. Yeah, I think it's on 420. It's on 420, which is very funny. And I think we're going to try and do wonderful. And Minneapolis is the next stop, right?

Yes. Or is it there's something in between St. Louis and Minneapolis? We're terrible at this. If you go to macro.family, you can find all the info about the tour um i think we're going to try and do wonderful in st louis though yeah that's the plan i gotta i gotta like flex in front of my my old stomping grounds you know um that's it let's let's let's stop thanks Thank you for being here for us, with us, on us, to us? No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. Thank you. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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