Wonderful! - Wonderful! 239: I Left My Beans in Austin

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Griffin’s favorite geo-location gaming experience! Rachel’s favorite cuddly big ol' guy!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaTrans Youth Equality Foundation: https://www.transyouthequality.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. This is going to be a fun one, isn't it? This is going to be a fun one. Introduce yourself. This is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. So this is a show where we talk about things that we like, things that are good, things we're into. It's been a minute.

Let's see if we have any new friends in the studio. Oh, wait. It's us. Yeah. We're in our East Coast office. We're summering in our East Coast home. And falling. And falling and springing wintering wintering and and here indefinitely hopefully forever yeah uh here in washington

dc we've completed our our sojourn across uh this great this great nation of ours yeah and and we took planes like i don't want to make it sound like we drove across the country with our two young children like we're not heroes but we did go all over this dang country uh in during our our uh flight from texas uh it all went great sadly we did lose a friend and that friend was my office chair was damaged in the move which which I found out yesterday. I sat down to do a recording and I heard a pop, a sort of squishy pop noise come from my butt area, which is never where you want that. And I stood up to see that my chair had quite literally exploded underneath and shot ink black oil all over our carpet that we had had installed the day prior.

And I told Griffin, like when he told me, I was mostly glad that he was the first person to get a stain. And it was a bad one. I didn't want to be the first stain person. I got the stain mostly up. But anyway, the energy in the room is as such rachel sitting in her usual my beautiful chair purchased for me after much complaint rugged chair yeah survived no problem uh i'm saying a big chair on the floor as i was walking into the office i thought to myself well griffin doesn't have a chair one i, I bet he's been using mine. Two, what's he going to do when we're both there?

Yeah. And like a true gentleman. Yeah. He gave me the chair. Well, it is gentlemanly to do. And you know what else it is like to do? It's a really big Dharma move. Yeah, you are.

I'm sitting here, Chrissy Crossy applesauce-y, right on the floor. And you're in your business chair. Yeah. Looking down on you quite literally down on me and my finances i uh the mic stand doesn't reach down this far so i am holding it in one hand it feels like where you're like a real rogue reporter right now just like yeah i'm a cool camp counselor. And I want to talk to you about drugs. No, we want to talk to you about the stuff you like. You will have a chair, though.

You ordered another one. You will have one by next recording. I pray to God. Yeah. Do you have a small wonder that you want to share with our friends? That noise is good. Henry's been really into sending Memojis, those like animated Memoji videos. Yeah, yeah.

And he sent one to Travis yesterday that was just the octopus Memoji. Yeah. But he just made him go. It's really good. It's really good. I guess that's my small wonder. We sent a cat to your brother Justin, and he made meow noises for that. Oh, that's fun. My small wonder is going to be, gosh, the whole new selection of foods and groceries and just the experience when you get to a new city and you you're like what do people eat here and where do they get it from like we're we're having that in real time we've been here a week now and uh

and it's and we've eaten quite a few new establishments we live very close to a nando's which i've always been intrigued by uh and uh i got i got myself uh some some chicken wrap with the spicy french fries from Nando's. Mm, golly. Yeah. It's just as good as everybody says. They call them chips. That's wonderful. Have you noticed that?

No. Yeah. That's fun. How continental. You go first. I go first this week. I'm shooting from the hip a bit. I did not prepare.

My office is still in its, I would say, nascent pupil stage, a larval stage of being set up. So we're coming in real hot on this one. I want to talk about a game that I have always admired from afar, but it was kept out of reach based on my sort of location on earth uh and now it is it is at my fingertips and it's at henry's fingertips we've been playing it non-stop it's pokemon go pokemon go the uh i have talked about pokemon before you You're making a face at me like... Well, I didn't realize... So the Pokemon Go from yore didn't have the little clicky guy that you have now. Sure.

So Rachel is referencing the Pokemon Go Plus, which is a little accessory that I think was available very shortly after launch. I thought this was a whole new Pokemon game. No, no. It's the same pokemon game it came out in 2016 from a developer called neantic uh who specializes in making these like geolocation based uh games where your position uh in the real world references a your position in the game world

which is sort of overlaid on top of it. And so your sort of exploration and most of the game mechanics involve exploring the real city in which you live. The Pokemon Go Plus is just like a little accessory that you can, you know, slide onto your watch band or whatever. And then while you're walking around and a Pokemon is nearby, you don't have to pull out your phone and throw balls at it. You just click the button and it will do it. Yeah, I didn't really know for sure how it was working. I knew that you had to have your phone.

Yes. But I didn't understand how the little clicker interacted. And obviously it was in Austin, but our neighborhood was completely devoid of cell signal. Yeah, and just not a lot of pedestrians in our area. Not a lot of walking. I mean, not a lot, unless you live in the city, unless you live downtown, Austin is not a particularly walkable place.

You can obviously drive to one of the many gorgeous parks or walk to one of the gorgeous parks that are there, and there will be ample opportunities for you to catch monsters uh on the go uh but man we live in dc like we live in in the city just a few minutes from a metro station and i would say about a thousand polka stops which is where you visit to get your polka balls and items and stuff like that i'm glad that you brought this because i have wanted to ask questions about it uh please yeah because it is the thing most frequently that will get henry out of the house right now yes which is exciting for me very very

very we're also in this salesperson mode still for the city and it's working like henry i think is really enjoying it we've tried to do like a fun thing almost every day yeah that like kind of introduces the city to him and like an exciting way yeah uh and it used to be you could only really get him out of the house if you were like all right uh we'll go to target yeah but have you noticed he hasn't asked really to go to target lately yeah and we live pretty close to each other. Yeah, it's amazing. Like one of the first things I did with him here is I wanted to ride the bus with him so I could like introduce him to the bus. He obviously, we took him on the subway last time we came here when we were in our first sort of series. He loves that subway, man. He loves the subway.

And so we took a bus and just like at every bus stop he would like catch a few monsters and uh spin a polka stop and then we we took this bus all the way down to georgetown and uh went and saw the dc super pets movie which second small wonder pretty fun i'll say that's my review uh but and then we would just come home and look at our horde of Pokemon that we had caught during our walk or journey or whatever. And it's amazing. It's really, really, really great. So I want to ask, so you get a lot of duplicates. Yes. Because we spend a lot of time in our neighborhood. Sure.

And I heard you mentioned something like if you get enough of the same kind, you can do something else? Yeah. So when you catch a Pokemon, you can later on, you can transfer it to the Pokemon professor for research purposes. And in exchange, you get a piece of candy that is exclusive to that Pokemon. And then you feed another one of that same Pokemon that candy and it evolves them. Wow. There is. So when the game launched in 2016, I was like stoked. I was like on top of it.

We were in Austin at the time and I was, you know, I was ready and raring to get out there. Yeah, I remember you like got out of the house like eagerly to get started. But the game was in rough shape when it launched. Both sort of technically like crashing was a huge issue um just shit just straight up did not work most of the time but even when it did work there wasn't much to do uh you could walk around and catch pokemon and you could find eggs and hatch those and then there was this really rudimentary like gym battling system that was not very good now there's almost too much to do like i'm still finding new sort of features like now team rocket is all over and they'll just like post

up at the fucking nando's polka stop and be like this is our nando's now get out of here and i'll be like i don't think so go magmar and you know we'll have to destroy Team Rocket. So you battle in the game? Yeah. Okay. There's battles. There's three, like, factions that you join when you start playing. And so you are always vying for control of, like, these different gyms. So if your faction doesn't control it, you can go and try and knock out the Pokemon that are currently sort of housed there.

And then you can put your own Pokemon up as defenders. knock out the pokemon that are currently sort of housed there and then you can put your own pokemon up as defenders uh there are like big 20 player raids that you can do that like count down to like at 130 at the nondos palkia is gonna come stomping around uh and so you can you know i guess i have yet to do this but ostensibly team up with 19 other real human beings and just descend upon the nondos to get that good legendary um but then there's also like trading and and and there's a pokedex with like over 700 pokemon in it to fill out that henry is like very into uh i say henry i'm also very into it it's it is just, the community that exists around this game, because it is not, I would say, gigantic.

Like, it is not this zeitgeist that everybody's doing. I think maybe for a week it was that when it first launched, but the players who are still playing it are very hardcore about it. And I think it's because it is a game that is sort of associated so closely with one's lifestyle. Yeah. Like I'm going to be walking around anyway

because I live in a city and I enjoy exploring the city. May as well catch a few Pokemon along the way. And then these like really neat like communities pop up like there's little pokemon go uh like discord channels for like you know every little like uh area in the country really and you can team up with them and try and work together to do those raids and stuff like that. It's very, very, very cool now, I would say. And I don't know how long we will keep playing it, but I mean, we are both still very deeply into it.

And the way it has dovetailed with our attempt to get Henry comfortable in a completely new time zone has been nothing short of like kismet yeah it gives him a very kind of easy carrot you know because if we suggest

going to a place he's never been he can't really envision what he is walking into but if griffin's like hey and maybe we can catch some more pokemon like that's that's all we need yeah it's very cool i'm i'll post my trainer code up in the facebook group or something like that because you know i need i need those um those postcards those important. Every time you hit a Pokestop, you get a little postcard. And you can send it to other players. And they can, like, open it to get items.

And then your friendship level, like, increases. And you get experience points. But you get those from Pokestops. And so I have, like, a million from this church we used to live close to in Austin. Oh, yeah, yeah. And we would just like, you know, I would walk by it sometimes or really anytime I left the house, we like had to pass by this church. And so I'm still sending people postcards from this church in Austin because I have so many of them in reserve. Anyway, it's a cool game.

And I thought the idea was cool when it first launched, but the execution was a little bit off. But I would say that they have mostly gotten over that now. And I'm just having a hell of a lot of fun with it. And so is Henry. And I very much appreciate that.

Yeah. Can I steal you away? Yes. Good. Hey, it's John Moe, host of Depress Mode, a podcast about people's mental health journeys. Guess who we got? Guess who? It's Jamie Lee Curtis. I look at life now as the game of guess who, which is simply the process of elimination. I know what I don't like. That's how I found out who I am. Jamie Lee Curtis on addiction, show business, and fooling people, all on Depresh Mode for maximum fun, wherever you get your

podcasts. Well, Manolo, we have a show to promote. It's called Dr. Game Show. It's a family-friendly podcast where listeners submit games and we play them with callers from around the world. Oh, sounds good. New episodes happen every other Wednesday on MaximumFun.org. It's a fast and loose oasis of absurd innocence and naivete.

Are you writing a poem? No. I'm just saying things from my memory. And it's a nice break from reality. Are we allowed to say that? I don't know. It sounds bad. It comes with a 100% happiness guarantee. It does not.

Come for the games and stay for the chaos. You want to know my thing? Absolutely, I do. My thing. Will come as no surprise to you. Okay. It is the giant panda. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Oh, these guys. These big old guys. Oh, boy. Yeah. Oh, these guys. These big old guys. These big guys. Part of our salesmanship when it comes to D.C. has always been the pandas. Yeah. Because very, very few places have them. Aren't there only two in America?

I mean, two places, two. It's us and san diego right i don't know that they have pandas anywhere else so there there are 600 pandas that live in zoos around the world okay but i don't know how those zoos are stacked out yeah um but i mean i know that i've never lived anywhere with panda yeah that's true uh and and i mean they're just undeniable you know they're they're like they're the cutest for a lot of reasons uh there aren't many animals who are just like when they do anything anything you're like oh you fucking scam look at look at you literally just sitting down in a corner and scratching your leg they're like

their body composition and their little faces like there is no part of a panda that i don't find adorable yeah sure um and so i did like a little research on the giant panda and also a little research on how they came to the smithsonian zoo okay uh i will say it's fucked up the smithsonian zoo puts the red panda exhibit right next to the giant panda exhibit which is way bigger which those red pandas probably look at the giant panda what i mean i guess they are giant so they do need a little bit more space i don't think people would just breeze right by red poor red panda and i'm over here like red panda stan although i do think turning red has boosted the stock yeah right you would hope so yeah i i feel like it's very easy to not for me to not associate the red panda

with a giant panda you know well that's wild well just because they they're very different in a lot of ways you know why one is red famously well but also like the way they get around yeah the way they get around is different yeah you know and their tail the tail situation situation is wild yeah uh so there's a lot i didn't know about pandas okay they're venomous they have venomous barbs no basically all pandas do is eat uh they eat 70 to 100 pounds of bamboo each day. That's a lot of bamboo. I wish we could have them at our old house when we had wild bamboo all over. You get one panda in there, they knock it out in an afternoon.

Apparently the Smithsonian Zoo used to take bamboo donations, which they don't anymore. But that would have really come in handy. I would have happily kept a panda fat and happy with I know. With our own shitty wild bamboo that I hated so much. So the digestion of a panda is pretty inefficient, which is why they have to eat so much. They spend 10 to 16 hours a day feeding because they – and this is from the World Wildlife Federation. And their logo is a panda, so they know what the fuck they're talking about. They poop 40 times a day.

That's. Can you imagine? You're spending 10 to 16 hours eating 70 to 100 pounds of food, and then you're just constantly pooping. Just always kind of pooping. Yeah. This is part of the reason when they talk about kind of the crisis around pandas being endangered for a long period of time. Yeah.

Part of it is like, who's got time to get busy? Yeah. You know? I would love to. Tonight is a very special night, Melissa. I appreciate you cooking the pot roast. You know, it's my favorite and you've put on some, some really smooth music. I know what you need tonight, but I cannot give it to you. I cannot stop. I have only pooped 26 times today. I have a lot to catch up on. I want to respect you and your body, so I don't want to be eating or pooping while we're engaged.

No. So I'd like to stop both of them, but I can't. I cannot because I do it 40 times a day. Because I do it 40 times a day. In addition, when I talk about the difficulty to get pandas to successfully mate, so a female panda is only in heat once a year in the spring for 12 to 25 days. And then this is the article the Smithsonian said, and she's only receptive to mating for two to seven of those days oh right yes i can't that character is really hard to play right right sound like familiar you all know what i mean there's a between i i feel like i can make that joke but also you could very easily lay the pooping 40 times right back at my no i'm not gonna do that no and i'm not gonna do the other thing

well you kind of did a little bit there was a coon you you have an insatiable. Okay. Nope. So, yeah. So, that's it for the year. So, if it doesn't work out, like, we got to wait a while to try again. That's why most of the pandas you'll see in zoos are a result of insemination. Yeah. Like, there are panda couples you know like for example uh the smithsonian zoo has meijong and tntn yeah uh which arrived in 2000 uh and they have produced several offspring sure but not not through their love making yeah sure

um but i wanted to talk talk about how they got started. You know how we talked about presidential gifts and animals? Are you about to tell me there was a president that had a panda bear? It was a gift. It was a gift. So Ling Ling and Xing Xing were a gift to Pat Nixon when she mentioned in China that she loved pandas they were like on a visit and they just in 1972 she's like oh you know what i love pandas and so they gave her two pandas they gave her two pandas like here you go we got tons of these guys. Take two. Take a couple. That's wild. How do you...

A panda seems like it would be a pretty horrible... It poops 40 times a day, Pat. Having fun, Pat? So cute and fluff. That was probably a gift in a very sinister sense. They're like, oh, you love pandas, huh? You really love these pandas? All right.

I hope you don't have carpet. Here they come. That's two of them. That means 80, Pat. 80 a day, Pat, between the two of them. Pat, have fun. So the reason I even knew about this is that when we went to the zoo the other day, they were talking about the 50th anniversary.

It was the arrival of those pandas. It happened 50 years ago. April 2022 about the 50th anniversary it was the arrival of those pandas what happened 50 years ago april 2022 is the 50th anniversary huh were they the first pandas in in america i you know that i can't tell you i just i just know that that that's when the smithsonian got in the panda game okay i see um and then uh the the current pandas that i mentioned may shong and tntn uh have been producing cubs uh may shong actually gave birth to a panda at age 22 making her the oldest panda to give birth in the united states oh uh it's kind of exciting yeah i don't know but also i don't think i want to know the lifespan of a pan yeah i don't actually i didn't look it up i don't i'm uncomfortable with the idea of them you know oofing because it's like

they're so they're so powerful and so cute i I like the idea of just they retire. So the thing that is kind of, I mean, I get it. But so this relationship with China and the China Wildlife Conservation Association is kind of how we stay in pandas. Yeah. And what happens is we, you know, get these pandas together. They produce an offspring. And after about four years, we send them back to China just to help kind of repopulate. So pandas are actually no longer endangered.

They're considered a vulnerable species. I can't imagine there's a lot of panda like hunting. I don't know. I shouldn't talk out of my ass. It's just, it doesn't seem like they have many natural predators if they exist mostly in captivity. Yeah, no, I mentioned earlier that there were 600 pandas living in zoo and there are as few as 1800 giant pandas living just in the wild. Okay. That's not a lot. Yeah. So if you go to the Smithsonian Zoo website,

there's a panda cam. You can just watch these pandas- I like that. Anytime you want. They have birthday parties for the pandas. I like that. They also have little celebrations when a panda goes back to China.

It feels sad to me. I get that it's not, but this idea that these parents get together, they spend four years with their baby, and then they send their baby off. Yeah. You know? I mean, I'm sure it's different for them

than it is for us. Yeah, we shouldn't project our human expectations. But I guess I'm just saying, so Meizhong and TNTN are only going to be here until 2023. Oh my God. And then they are going back to China. Well, who are they going to put in that big panda bear exit? Don't tell Henry that.

Maybe we get some new pandas. I don't know. Oh, hold on. Now we're talking. Fresh, young, sexy, giant pandas. I don't know. Oh, hold on. Now we're talking. Fresh, young, sexy, giant pandas. Coming on skateboards. Coming in. What's up, losers?

I love these pandas. I love them so much. I love that when you go to the zoo, it's like half the zoo is basically dedicated to these pandas and all of their merchandise. It is such a big to do. And then you walk in and you just see these big, just slow,

just dum-dums just like sitting like, like they have four bones in their whole body. Like all of this for you, you special, beautiful, spherical boy it is it is i mean it's a it's a large habitat and it is easy to kind of tell where the pandas are because people will cluster and if you don't see anybody clustered most likely you have to go inside and so what happened to us this last time is that we were like okay they're inside and then by the time we got to the inside they were back outside again one of their butts just walking away not today but we've

gone before and seen them just like straight up look dead eye looking at us while eating just a big cabbage or something yeah it's like yeah you like this is doing it for you stick around i got something i'm to do a lot today. So that's Pandas. Thank you, Pandas. And thank you to Bowen and Augustus for using our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. We should, I don't know that we formally said this, but I would hope that people would have the, would put it together that we don't live in Austin anymore.

So please, we've shut down that box. Yeah, the PO box is no longer and we have not replaced it. We have not replaced it. I don't know what the plan is for that. But yeah, please don't send stuff to us. Thank you to everybody that has sent us stuff. Yeah, we don't mention it, but people have sent us some really amazing stuff. We appreciate it. Hey, thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have there. Maybe you'll find a new favorite. Maybe you'll find something you just can't get enough of. And we have merch at McElroyMerch.com. We got some shows coming up. You can find those at bit.ly slash McElroy Tours. I don't know.

I'll double check on that. Yeah, I think that's it. Thank you for being patient with us while we went biweekly there for a little bit. Yeah. Now we're back and better than ever. Yeah. My body hurts so much. Yeah, we have been unpacking and on our whirlwind tour of the country and of dc

and it has been an exhausting time um but and sitting in a beanbag chair yeah yeah is probably is not the i don't feel the best about myself not just the beanbag chair but like a beanbag chair we've had for like five or six years now. Yeah. It doesn't offer a lot of love, art, or support. A lot of the beans have fused on a sort of molecular level. We left some beans in Austin, I'm sure. For sure.

And so I'm sitting on the ground. Yeah. And it's not doing much for my posture. Do you appreciate, though, that I'm looking directly into your eyes and nowhere else? I mean, when you were doing your bit, you were looking a lot at your computer, and so I did feel like I was trying to get the teacher's attention, and she just wasn't giving it to me.

I'm just saying, in your position, I could be looking somewhere else. Yeah. Oh, am I? Oh. Oh, I see. But I'm not. You're not. Because I respect're not because i respect you and i respect you

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