Wonderful! - Wonderful! 264: We Should Freeze Tennis Balls

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Griffin's favorite world conquest simulator! Rachel's favorite special little prison for naughty boys!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFoundation for Black Women’s Wellness: http://ffbww.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Happy Valentine's Day. Oh yeah, hey! My sweet, romantic param Day. Oh, yeah. Hey. Romantic paramour. My darling love, my purpose, my...

I had a bunch in my pants. So while I was doing that, my jeans were riding up and it did look like I was maybe making an untoward gesture while I was describing you as my paramour. And I'm really sorry about that. You were pitching woo at me, and then you had your hand on your crotch. I was pitching a little bit more than woo. I didn't know. No, that was an unintentional, completely separate sort of pants adjustment situation that was happening. But I know everybody out there loves Valentine's Day an equal amount. And so to all of you celebrating, just keep it safe.

Keep it safe and have fun out there. Chocolates, kissing the whole nine yards. Roses. Steak dinner. Whatever the order of the day is on this most sacred day we all love so much. We just hope you're tearing it up out there. Just getting crazy. This is a show where we talk about things we like, things that are good, things that are into.

And we like to sometimes kick things off once in a blue moon with a segment we call Small Wonders. And this segment usually begins with me trying to flummox my darling dear. Oh, yeah, What you got? Danny, go. Danny, Danny, go, go. Yep. We, as we have mentioned on the show, we have taken in quite a bit of children's programming in the past six plus years.

And our youngest was a big fan of Blippi. And, you know, Blippi's fine. I don't really dislike Blippi, but he's not my favorite. No. So every once in a while, I'll like look around for other children's entertainers that have songs. And, you know, Blippi's fine. I don't really dislike Blippi, but he's not my favorite. So every once in a while, I'll, like, look around for other children's entertainers that have songs. Yeah. And, hey, Danny Goh. Hey, Danny Goh, what's up?

Danny Goh and Cuckoo Kangaroo. Cuckoo Kangaroo is good. Danny Goh, for me, is next level genius. Yeah, Danny Goh has songs that it's like, I don't know, I might listen to them when Gus isn't around. That's wild. That's what you just said is fucking bonkers i mean i haven't done it yet no but it's there yeah he's got some bobs he got razzmatazz i also appreciate that you cannot find any information about this person's real life yeah from what i can tell i went to his website i did some googling all i can figure out is he is a performer living in North Carolina. Great. That's all I need.

That's, I don't want any more from Danny Go. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, I want him to get out there and sing songs about being a math whiz. I want him to sing songs just sort of about just sports. Yeah, just a general. From a kind of agnostic. General enthusiasm for sports. General enthusiasm for sports.

That song rules because i think there's a line in it that's like no matter what the uh the ball is i'm gonna play and then there's people in the background background singers who are like hockey basketball football running fucking great danny go keep it up uh Oh, no. What was I going to talk about? Oh, no. Oh, Poker Face. Hey, Poker Face on the Peacock platform. Crushing again. Have we talked about Poker Face? I don't think we have.

It's just fun. It's just fun. Natasha Lyonne, anytime she's in a role, I think nobody else could have played that role. Yeah. And that is especially true with this show. Literally nobody. Yeah. The whole thing wouldn't work, I think, without her. It's a sort of mystery of the week show by Rian or Rian Johnson. One of these days, I'm gonna learn how to say that name.

If you put different music behind it, it would be a little bit like a Law and Order television program in that the episode tends to start with a murder and then you watch Natasha Lyonne figure out how it happened. It's so neat. You see everything, right? And so you're while you're watching this murder take place and it's a big portion of the episode, like the first third of the episode is just sort of going into detail about like this heinous act that took place and looking at all the ways that they tried to cover their tracks and trying to figure out like, oh, how's charlie kale gonna crack this one and then the rest of the show is her cracking but like she's not a cop which is great and so when you take that the the authority of you know the law away from the the person who's trying to solve these crimes then like half the thing is like well she can find as many clues as she wants but like how is this going to be actionable for this person who is who wields no authoritative power whatsoever yeah and who also like has some some troubled history yes so it's not like she can go to the police and say i've

figured this out yeah like she's on the run herself it's great man we've watched i think the first four episodes uh and uh it's been. Really, really, really fun guest stars in each episode. I'm wild about it. It's fun. It's not necessarily like, I don't feel like it is, I hate the term, like, binge worthy as much as other shows I've watched, watched because it is like I feel like every episode is so standalone. But at the same time, like I'm kind of enjoying having a show that we just kind of have in our back pocket that we haven't just devoured. It's kind of nice because there's like there's no real like cliffhangers, you know, because each show kind of stands on its own. Yeah. So you don't. There is a through line, but it's not, I don't know. It's not, it's not the thing that keeps you coming back.

The thing keeps coming back is like, these mysteries are really clever and the guest stars are fantastic. And it's a very, it's a great show. I'm really liking it. And another. Peacock, man. Peacock, man. I go first this week.

I'm talking about a board game this week, but it's a board game that I love and didn't know anything sort of about the history of. And then when I read about the history of it i was like that's good stuff the game is risk le conque du monde le conque du monde i don't know that i have any connection to risk when i look back at like the golden era of like when i was playing a lot of board games uh there were a few but one of them was like late college like 2008 2009 i would play pretty much always risk with different groups of friends like my brother's friends all were wild about risk they would have these big like you know fancy whiskey and cigars

and a game of a game of le conclument and i would play with my friends sometimes when we just like didn't really have anything else to do it was a guaranteed way of just like well we have our activity for the night we're going to be playing risk and it's going to take a long time and no one can leave until it's done can you remind me like what it is sure so risk is a strategy board game you control countries on a map i think there's 42 different territories spread across six continents. And you control these countries using these little pieces representing like military units. And the rules are like, Risk I think is an intimidating game, but the rules really are pretty straightforward. At the beginning of your turn, you get more reinforcements. You get more of these little units depending on how many countries you control

uh with some bonuses for like if you control a whole continent you get bonus troops that you can sort of assign wherever and then after you've drafted like that you can uh move your troops or you can attack neighboring countries that are controlled by other players or you can just pass your turn sometimes you want to just like add a bunch of troops to your borders so nobody comes and tries to start shit and then when you attack you roll dice depending on how many attackers there are and how many defenders there are and whoever rolls highest uh knocks out the other team's troops and then when you knock out all the troops in a territory you move into it and take it over and that's more or less it uh obviously when you take

over a territory all of a sudden now you're drafting more troops. On your next turn, there are like cards you draw every time you take a territory and you can exchange those for more troops. And classic Risk was just that. And it could last like days because you could get in these huge wars of attrition because it only ended when there was one player left standing and all the others had been knocked out. I have mostly played versions that introduce like objectives, like take over a certain number of territories in one turn or control all of Asia. And then once you get a certain number of objectives, you win the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is the only way to play in my book

because it's more fun and it is much faster and much more digestible. And it's also easier to get friends to play the game with you when this prospect of playing a multi-day war gaming affair isn't hanging over their heads. That version that I mentioned with the objectives is colloquially called Risk Reinvention. And it actually came out in 2008. There are a few versions that introduced like these objectives before. But in 2008, Hasbro re-released Risk as Risk Reinvention, and it had all these different mechanics. Like you had a capital city you had to defend and the objectives that you had to control. And it added a lot of things that made the game a lot faster while still sort of maintaining the strategy that

makes the game fun. The origin of... So you've never played Risk? I feel like we have now that you're describing it. I think we played it with our friends. I think we played this reinvention version. Yeah, it sounds familiar. I was getting it like I was trying to differentiate it in my head between the game. Catan? Yes.

I mean, this laid the groundwork for a lot of strategy games like Catan or war games like Axis and Allies, which is like a big one. Risk was the forefather of a lot of those. And it came out originally in 1957. So this game's been around for a long time. The origins are wild. It was the sole board game invention of a French filmmaker named Albert, and I'm gonna fuck this right up,

Lamourie, I believe is how you pronounce the last name. It seems okay. It seems good. He was a filmmaker and a documentarian. Have you ever heard of a short film called The Red Balloon? Yeah, of course. That was him. He made that movie. He also fucking made Risk, which is bonkers.

This movie, The Red Balloon, it won the Palme d'Or Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. And the dude made Risk. What a bonkers career trajectory that this man was on. He partnered with a French game manufacturer to release the game as Le Conque du Monde in 1957. What are you saying when you say that?

Le Conque du Monde. Yeah, what is that? What is the direct translation? Do you know? It is the Conquer the World. Oh, okay. That makes sense. I think that's what it is.

The Conquest of the World. And Parker Brothers, in very short order, bought the rights to the game to release it globally in 1959 as Risk the Game of Global Domination. I tried to find some details about why Albert L'Amoury, honored French filmmaker, also made Risk. Like, how did this come to pass? But details are like really scant about how this board game was invented. All I could find is that in 1953,

he filed a patent for this game idea after he came up with the concept of it during a family vacation. That's about as fruitful of a family vacation as I think you can hope for. Well, as when Lin-Manuel Miranda read the biography of Alexander Hamilton. Yeah, relatively equivalent. So sadly, LaMaurie died in a helicopter accident in 1970.

He was just 48 years old, and he never really got to see Risk take off because it made a bit of a splash when it was first released. But it really wasn't until the early 90s when Hasbro acquired Parker Brothers and started to do a bunch of stuff with the Risk franchise that like it became a staple board game in a lot of people's households. Hasbro also did the reinvention and a lot of the secret objective stuff that I mentioned before. It's just wild to me that this game that launched a thousand ships of other board games uh that did a similar kind of like world level strategy stuff was the result of just a family vacation project from a

famous french filmmaker who never did anything obviously like his life was cut short a little over a decade later but he never did anything like that ever again he just dipped in he was a a masterful creator in this one field of film and it was like i'm gonna make one board game it's gonna be risk yeah and then deuces i'm out right back to films uh that's about as inspiring as i think it it gets for me just for somebody to be able to make such a just a wild off the cuff hit like that and then, it's a good reminder that there's really no reason to pigeonhole yourself. No. Like, to think like, oh, my only skill is film.

Yeah. Maybe there's something else in there. Percolating. You don't know. Let it out. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. I'm Jordan Morris.

And I'm Jesse Thorne. On Jordan, Jesse Go, we make pure, delightful nonsense. We rope in awesome guests. And bring them down to our level. We get stupid with Judy Greer. My friend Molly and I call it having the space weirds. Patton Oswalt. Can I get a Balrog burger and some Aragorn fries?

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Being smart is hard. Be dumb instead. Hi, I'm Hal Loveland. And I'm Mark Gagliardi. And we're the hosts of We Got This With Mark and Hal, the weekly show where we instead. Versus spoon. Chocolate or vanilla? Best bagel? What's the best Disney song? We got this with Mark and Hal. Every week on Maximum Fun, we do the arguing so you don't have to. Oh, all answers are final for all people for all time. We got this. Okay. Okay.

This week, I am talking about the penalty box. This is a special little prison. Yeah. That they put naughty boys into. We were describing it to Henry. I don't remember why, but it's so clearly timeout. It is just timeout. It's so easily described as timeout, and it's so unique, you know, in that the person sits in this little glass box that everybody can see them sit in for two minutes and then the game goes on without them

goes on and they have to watch and hope that the team other team doesn't score because of their their bad playing yeah i mean it it fundamentally changes the game all the time yeah you know somebody will get in a situation where they feel like if i don't go above and beyond here this person is maybe gonna score or this person is going to do something that is going to be a problem. So I'm going to go ahead and trip them. And then they get in that penalty box and then the other team scores and they're like, oh, shoot. Yeah. You know?

Coach is going to be so PO'd. I tried to do some research on this because I thought, like, there's got to be some stories here. It can't just be a box. And, I mean, it is very much a box. It is a box, yeah, famously. I thought it was interesting. You know, hockey's been around for a long time. And apparently until 1916, transgressions were punished by monetary fines.

That's good. That's cool. So it was like, hey, hey, hey, just so you know, you owe me 20 bucks. Keep going. Yeah. You stick to me in the face. I'm going to need corrective dental surgery done. That will be $25, please.

And then in the 1930s, they started putting penalized players in a single space shared by both teams. What a fucking bad idea. You are putting the naughtiest perpetrators in the same zone together? I know. I know. And that apparently blew up in 1963. Two teams started fighting in the penalty box. Where do you go from there?

Yeah, I know. I know. Well, I mean, you get ejected. I think there was a Channel 101 sketch called Prison Prison Break. And it was about in prison, you get caught trying to break out of prison. So they send you to prison prison. And then you have to try and figure out how to break out of prison prison. Penalty box.

There is another expression for it uh-oh you're making a face it makes me think it's a impulse i had never heard it the boo-boo the boo-boo box the sin bin the sin bin i like that i wouldn't describe i don't know that there are a lot of hockey transgressions that are also defilements of the Ten Commandments. You know what I mean? I will say there are some very dangerous plays that happen, which could result in a kind of harm that could eventually like end somebody's life. I don't think, yes, that seems like a pretty far outside case, but I don't think those tablets say anything about like thou shalt not um hold on to another person from behind keeping them from going where they were trying to go or thou shalt thou shalt not hit

the puck over the glass in one's own defensive end uh thus causing a delay of game i don't remember that one so this used to happen a lot more yeah um this used to happen a lot more. Yeah. Hockey used to be a lot more violent sport. Yeah. We've remarked on this even in the time I've been watching hockey, which I think I started in 2018. It's gotten less punchy. Like, yeah, there's way less fighting. Yes.

There used to be fighting every game. Yeah. Refs tend to call things a lot closer than they used to. So back in the day, teams had what was called an enforcer. Yes. Which apparently has a technical definition. It's a player who averaged fewer than eight minutes per game and more than 1.2 penalty minutes per game. That's a pretty bad ratio. They were just brought out to fight.

What's a good amount of ice time for like a staple, a Pavel Butchnevich is out there for what, like 20 minutes? 20 minutes, yeah, that sounds right to me. I don't actually know what what the technical amount is but that seems about right games are three three periods of 20 minutes so boy it's it's exhausting being out there on the ice yeah people don't usually stay out there for more than

two minutes yeah uh so a lot of these enforcers like ended in the the early 2000s. So I looked up the players that had the most penalty minutes. And the number one leader had almost 4,000 penalty minutes, 3,971 penalty minutes in the 14 years that they played. Give me that they played. Give me that number again. 3,971. If you're looking it up, it's about three days worth of time in the penalty box.

Yeah, that's 66 hours of penalty time. Man, did he have like cross stitch that he would like get out when he was in there? Like, oh, okay. This guy, Tiger Williams, Daveiams is what they called him tiger because of his ruthlessness it was like i was reading about him and he like he had like literally like broken sticks over people's heads before yeah you can't do that yeah like really brutal like really brutal stuff. When did he retire? 1988. Okay, so this was a long time ago.

Yeah, I didn't recognize a lot of the names on there. I did recognize the name of Bob Probert, who retired in 2002. in 2002 uh again a rough guy uh also um had been caught uh trying to smuggle cocaine across the canada u.s border so the perfect crime the kind of guy that um was disreputable in multiple ways did he do it like on a team bus or something? No. No, okay. No, but his legal troubles like did make him a liability. Yeah. I will say something I found charming was that he passed very young, actually, like age 45. And his wife had Chris Chelios sprinkle some of his ashes in the penalty box. That's adorable and a hazard, I think. Number seven on that list of players

leading in penalty minutes is one Craig Berube. Craig Berube, current coach of the St. Louis Blues. 3,149. Jesus Christ, Craig. I know, I know. You know, they always talk about him as like a rough customer, but I didn't know he was the seventh roughest customer in the history of hockey.

Yeah, I did not know he was top 10. Like, it's one of those things a lot of, you know, like any sport, a lot of former players become coaches. Yeah. And so occasionally the announcers will reference his kind of like scrappy career. I didn't know it was that scrappy. You see it in the way he reacts to when his players get penalties i remember uh david perron when he started to sort of take a more like aggressive role on the team when he was still with the team started to get like a lot of penalties

and like other unlike other coaches who would like flip the fuck out when one of their players made a mistake like that bruby's like, that's cost of doing business. When you're hitting people, sometimes you do have to go in the box, David. Other kind of alterations that have been made to the penalty box. When did they put a camera in there? That's what I want to know. Oh, I don't actually know about that. I do know that they raised the glass in the penalty box because there was a player

also on the top list. This is number three, Ty Dommy, had 333 career fights, was doused with beer and grabbed a water bottle and stood up and turned around and squeezed it. And then the audience member came flying down into the box and they like fought in the box. So now they have taller glass. So did they put the audience member in the penalty box after that? Where did he go? I guess he just gets kicked out of the game. Yeah, you just kick him out of the game.

where did he go i guess he just gets kicked yeah you just kick him out of the game uh so yeah now the the bench must be uh five feet taller than the dasher boards so somebody sitting directly behind can't just crawl in yeah um other things i thought was kind of charming like teams have used it as like a kind of a gimmick and the nashville predators apparently if you donate a hundred dollars you can sit in the visiting team's penalty box during pre-game warm-ups so if people like pay a certain amount of money they get to hang out in there while the teams are warming up that's fun uh the same little notes like for the opposing team you could go in dingus uh st louis blues St. Louis Blues unveiled this season the Purina Dog House. Purina is like a big company in St. Louis. And so when the Blues opponents take a penalty, it triggers a $100 donation from Purina.

That's fine. But is there like a penalty box full of like dogs? I think it's just labeled. Oh, okay. I don't think they put puppies in there. Let's get fun with it. You know what I mean? Like as long as we're going to get fun with it, let's get really, really fun with it.

The other thing I will say that I thought was interesting. So in the penalty box, apparently the dimensions vary from rink to rink. But on the visitor's end, spare pucks are chilled inside a mini freezer set to around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which I guess makes sense. Like if you want something to slide effectively on the ice, it needs to be cold. But I never thought about pucks being chilled. That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense at all.

I don't think that thing's temperature makes it slide here as much as the substance that it is sliding. Well, here's the thing. If you put a warm puck on the ice, isn't the friction going to be kind of a problem? Yeah, but why is the puck going to be warm? Well, if somebody's- It's the same temperature as everything else in the hockey arena. If somebody's holding it in their hot little hands.

Yeah, I guess that's a good point. If they're carrying it around in their pocket, you know, like a tennis person would. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You know how tennis people- We should be freezing tennis balls too, probably, just to be safe. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. You know how tennis people- We should be freezing tennis balls too, probably, just to be safe. Also, boxes have water bottles, athletic tape, ice bags, and a metal bench, and towels because people just spit all the time. People spit a lot in hockey. It's probably my number one thing. Just a lot of spitting.

It's amazing to me that there's not just like little stalagmites all over the ground, just from where people spit is kind of like you know accumulated yeah i don't know how that became part of the sport i don't know if it's something with the temperature i guess all athletes spit do it yeah but it seems like it happens a lot in hockey yeah i don't really well maybe it's something to do with the cold we should ask our friend pete he plays he plays hockey he probably knows i have thousands of questions for him freezes in your gets cold in your mouth. And that's unpleasant.

And you have to get it out there. You know what I mean? Maybe playing hockey makes a bad flavor happen in the mouth. Oh, I would believe that. You dry out. You dry out. You're skating around. Gross in there.

So that's the penalty box. I love it. I love, to me, when I was first watching hockey, I was most interested in the sort of psychology of it. And seeing the faces that people make as they go to the penalty box is a breathtaking human experience because it ranges from like anger like that wasn't holding to resignation of, yeah, that was definitely, I definitely, definitely hit that guy right in the head. I definitely should be going in here. And then concern where they're like, come on teammates, don't let him score. So I don't feel guilty about going in the penalty box. It's, there's so many emotions.

I also love when you see the player looking up at the big jumbotron of like trying to figure out like what did I do? Yeah. And like seeing the reaction sometimes where they're like, oh, come on. And other times where they're like, oh, yeah. Yep.

That was me. Bye. Whoops. Thank you so much for listening to our show. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Hey, we have a book coming out next week. It's the Adventure Zone 11th Hour Graphic Novel.

And when you say we, you- Me and Justin and Travis and Dad and Carrie. I am not a participant in this book, although I endorse it. Yeah, thank you for that. Two thumbs. It's our fifth book in the series, which is wild. And it's my favorite one so far. It's an adaptation of our sort of Wild West time loopy adventure that we did in the Adventure

Zone balance. And I'm super duper proud of it. It's a lot of book. And you're going to enjoy it, I bet, if you enjoy the Adventure Zone. It comes out the 21st. We are doing a special virtual live streaming event next Tuesday, the 21st, to celebrate. You can find all the details for that stuff over at macroy.family. You can also find merch at mackroymerch.com we got some new stuff for february up in there that you should check out and um i think that might i think that might do it i think maybe we'll do a quick one unless you have anything else to what do you have to say for

yourself oh wow oh i was gonna recommend the mackroy family youtube channel sure you guys have been doing a lot of streaming yeah we've been doing a fun thing called NES Party, where we all log into like a single Nintendo room and we play NES games together. You get a big sense of the McElroy family energy when it came to playing games collaboratively. Yeah. Which I have enjoyed. Or competitively, as is the case with our most recent episode. Yeah, thank you.

Please watch that. It's been a lot of fun. That's it. We're going to go now. I'm going to – I got big plans for today. I'm going to sweep you off your feet with lots of romance gestures, by which I mean I'm going to make pasta but good pasta yeah romance pasta romance pasta love spaghetti sexy gnocchi I do think there's something sexy about the way one says gnocchi

yeah it's the it's the that whatever that is, dip thong. The word dip thong is also a really sexy word. I mean, that's, it's all right there. It's everything you need. Dip thong. Do you want to say something else? Because I don't want that to be the last thing people hear. I was wondering if Weird Al ever considered doing a song parody of Cisco's thong song, but with the dip thong song. Probably not. Goodbye, everybody. song parody of cisco's thong song but with the diphthong song probably not goodbye everybody Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it.

Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Money won't pay. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.