Wonderful! - Wonderful! 286: I'm Not Sure I Believe in Powdered Eggs

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Griffin's favorite sky animals! Rachel's favorite baking innovation!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaWorld Central Kitchen: https://wck.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. This is wonderful. A show where we talk about things we like that's good that we're into. And thank you all so much for joining us.

We hope it's I hope you're staying cool out there. Popsicle. That's my number one recommendation for you. Glop one of those down. Sweet,

syrupy, beauty, cold. Keeping it cold. Lower the blood temperature and may i personally recommend a like a freeze pop that comes in its own little plastic sleeve because the cuts the mess like by 90 also cuts the sides of your mouth and make you look like a joker i say no to that i say go for it shoot for it it's a kaduzi go for a bomb pop go for uh you're okay with the drip

am i okay with the drip yeah i mean if i have to choose between getting a sticky hand or joker smile i'm gonna go with sticky hand a hundred percent of the time okay because the joker's a bad dude and i don't even want people to think i'm like of his friend or something i mean couldn't you get joker smile from any popsicle the sharp plastic sides of the Freezy Pop, when you put it in, you're laughing. Like this isn't a real, everybody at home, you're the only person right now, under the power of my voice right now, that's laughing. Everybody at home is like, you should take this more seriously. Does this happen to you every time?

The sharp plastic sides of the Freezy Pop cut my mouth and give me a Joker smile? Yeah. Yeah, every single time. I feel like this has maybe happened to me once tops. Okay. And that's okay for you to get a Joker smile one time and then have it for the rest of your life. I guess I choose disfigurement over mess.

That's very telling and powerful. Do you have a small wonder? Um, I, I am watching Fleischman is in Trouble. Okay. And I'm enjoying it very much. It has Adam Brody and Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg.

Close personal friend of the show, Jesse Eisenberg. Yeah, yeah, former guest of. Former guest of Vivivale. Yeah. And it's like one of those shows that I, it's kind of like succession and, and mad men. And a lot of those shows that Griffin and I never really watched together

because the characters are largely unlikable. But I like watching those shows by myself because I have like a deep pit of darkness inside me. Sure. And I feel, I feel seen in those shows, I guess, in those moments. Well, that's not fair, I don't think, to you. I don't watch those shows because they usually are filled with unlikable characters doing

unlikable things. You are exceedingly likable. Well, thank you for saying that. So I disagree with your thesis but i'm glad you are enjoying it i do miss seeing adam brody friend of the show adam brody on this yeah i'm gonna think for candle nights once boy our web is a wide one a yeah um i'm gonna say uh and i you know this has been a this segment in particular has been a real Brennan love fest, but we just finished Dungeons and Drag Queens, the most recent season of Dimension

20 and good God almighty, it was good. Oh, holy shit. So good. I mean. It's the only one you've watched, right? Of the Dimension 20. Well, except for Tiny Heist. Tiny Heist, right.

Yeah. Which is the one that we did. I mean, the nature of the show is that everybody on it totally has to buy in. So I don't know how they cast this to find exactly the right people, but it feels like exactly the right people. Bob the Drag Queen, Alaska, Monet X Change, and Jujubee. Yes. Four known performers, all-stars from RuPaul's Drag Race. Definitely not like necessarily like.

Who I would have thought of. Yeah, like you don't look at all those people and think like, oh, they for sure play Dungeons and Dragons. No, but it runs the gamut of like storytelling confidence, like mechanics confidence from like just sort of across the board, right? Like Bob the Drag Queen is very like, I'm going to do this like bob the drag queen is very like i'm gonna do this thing with this move that is very like clever and you know i've put a lot of thought into this one move that i want to make versus like a jujubee who's coming at it from a much more sort of amateur level but there is something very good about that perspective whenever jujubee does like a dope move or something like a very powerful storytelling moment

that is because of the newcomer perspective. It is something that is sort of impossible to recapture that feeling of someone's first time playing Dungeons and Dragons and sort of realizing what it is capable of. It's genuinely magical, and you get that in what it is capable of. It's genuinely magical and you get that in huge quantities in this campaign. Yeah, we watched it on the Dropout platform,

but I think it's on YouTube. Yeah, I'm not sure how they are rolling it out. Usually there's a delayed release on YouTube, but yeah, I can't recommend it enough. It's good shit and just wild about it. I go first this week yes you ready no you got a little smirk birds now are you wearing that shirt specifically i'm wearing a shirt that travis got me that looks like almost like a neon sign I don't know how to describe it,

but it's got a goose on it. It says silly goose. No, I just, you know, I like the shirt. No, I'm not wearing it. These guys are great though. Birds love them. I'm not like a bird guy, which I feel like I have to clarify.

That's important. Because we know bird people. Yeah, bird people always want to be watching birds they have a dedication to the craft that like i would never like pretend to possess and so like i don't want to be a poser but i do want to say to bird people like i get it these guys are great um they i mean first things first they fly that's wild like it's we were so used to it but then like you look at all the ground animals and you're like those are animals and then you look up at in the sky and there's animals there too that's fucking what you look up at like a power line and there's like 20

birds or like you're looking up at like the rafters at lows and there's animals up there i guess that's wild when you're in la guardia airport and you look up and there's animals up there i guess that's wild when you're in la guardia airport and you look up and there's animals flying around like yeah this is the airport cool this is wild i feel like i'm in jumanji structurally a bird is is surprising too because like the wings it's not like they seem muscular they seem so weak they seem very weak and the bodies are relatively dense and so it's like how are those how are they doing, how are those? How are they doing it? How are these things working? But they figured it out, man. And good for them.

They're basically the only animal that sings and they do it all the time in all kinds of different ways. And you can just always hear it. If you open up a window and wait a few seconds, you're going to hear a bird. That's cool that they're just sort of ever present. No matter sort of where you are, you can almost always hear a bird. And if we didn't hear a bird, it cool that they're just sort of ever present no matter sort of where you are you can almost always hear a bird and if we didn't hear a bird it'd be very quiet wouldn't it it's kind of like it's a bird's world and we're just living in it that's a really good way of putting it because they're everywhere they can do ground stuff too but like it's wild that they're in the

sky but they can do ground stuff uh tree stuff like i said power line stuff lowes stuff water stuff sometimes water stuff sure and also you can always hear them that's not true of any i can't always hear uh a squirrel can't always hear a dog sometimes but not always always with birds though always that's bon. A lot of them look really cool. Obviously, you got big dinosaur looking ones. You got like colorful birds of paradise and like badass looking hawks and shit. Sometimes you're like looking out the window and you see a bright red cardinal.

And I think it's a very human experience that every time that happens, you point it out to everybody else in the room. Like, ooh. Yeah. That bird's very, ooh, ooh yeah that bird's very oh oh that bird's very red i love seeing a cardinal i love seeing a cardinal or similar red bird um happened a lot in west virginia state bird we love them they're fucking cardinal crazy in west virginia

um but you know robins a blue jay if i see like a beautiful bright blue blue jay that's that's that's a i'm gonna have a celebration. I'm gonna make sure everybody within the power of my voice knows about that blue bird. A lot of them also really cute. Uh-huh, it's true. Little hummingbird, tiny little hummingbird. Yeah.

A little thrush of any variety. The littlest faces. A little big round puffin'. Oh, we love it. because they're birds too. That's what's crazy to me. Okay, so like, you know, when you're at the zoo and they make a big difference between monkeys and apes. Yep. And it's like, no, no, no, no, these are totally different things, even though they kind of look similar and have a lot of the same qualities.

Birds, it's like there's penguin and flamingo and robin, and they're all birds. I'll jump ahead here a little bit. Birds are mostly divided into two big camps. And they are, and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of this, but I think it's one that's like different depending on where you live. Passerines, which are perching birds, which make up about 60% of all bird types. Okay. And non-passerines, which is everything else, right? Passerines are sort of categorized by the arrangement of their toes.

They got three going forward, one going back. You know, you look down, you see bird footprints. That's a bird that's, you know, the traditional three toes up, one toe down. Okay. That's a passerine right so that's that's sort of like the roughest big grouping that that you have that sort of ape versus monkey type thing right um i love them no matter what camp they fall into um they lay eggs which is always fun like it's like a little slime bag like a little surprise box like what's

in there probably a bird do you have stuff on this do you have stuff on this no i didn't even that's what's this is i knew i was gonna forget something birds are so fucking cool that i didn't even bring up the fact that they build their own little houses out there i i am hoping that that everyone that is listening to this has had the opportunity to see a bird nest up close because it is a marvel. It's really cool. Yeah. I couldn't make one

with my human hands and a bunch of little sticks. If you sat me down and you said, you have a day. Make a nest. I wouldn't know how to fucking do that.

Well, it's like there's dampness in there. It seems like it's mud. I don't... I think it's barf. I think it's like spit and barf and stuff. Yeah? I do think it is is that yeah it's just they they hold together real well they hold together super duper well they're geniuses these birds um except for when they get into a house

then they're nuts then they have followed then this shit falls off the wagon real fast there's there's part of your brain this has happened to us before um because our cat cecil used to bring in birds as a gift that were not entirely dead and a lot of times they were just stunned and we would go to try and remove said bird it would fly wildly around our house uh and there's a part of your brain that's just like well i guess i live with a bird now i have a bird friend it's like i I live at LaGuardia Airport. Bird scientists aren't quite sure how many different types of birds there are. They're estimated to be between 9,000 and 10,000 species based on sort of like traditional bird identifying models. But there's some scientists who think there's just like a hidden biodiversity of like crossbreeding birds.

Okay. of like crossbreeding birds. Okay. That, you know, look like one type of bird, but may in fact be a hybrid that's sort of doing its own thing. So that number may be twice as high. That's a lot of fucking birds. Wow.

That's a lot of lots of different types of birds. Birds are important part of the whole sort of interconnected ecosystem. This experiment we call earth they help with pest control huge love that birds please keep it up uh they help pollinate plants their poop is fertilizer so there's lots of birds who eat seeds poop the seeds out and self-fertilizes the seed to like create life interesting spread plants between different sort of like biomes uh they they do just incredible work i had to kind of explain the other day to henry

uh because there was something that i was sure was bird poop and he was like well but that's not the color bird poop is and i was like well let's get into this did you the color bird poop is. And I was like, well, let's get into this. Did you know all bird poop is guano? I thought that that was just bat poop from the Ace Ventura film. I was lied to by Ace Ventura, which is like the only time that's ever happened to me. I also want to give a shout out to sort of Unsung Heroes. And this is a fact that like I really changed a lot of my biases when I learned it, which is carrion birds. They're creepy, right?

Yeah. You see them and you're like uh-oh something's dead yeah um but they also are like nature's janitors they clean up dead ass animals which helps to dramatically reduce the spread of disease and also control the populations of way more dangerous like carrion eating mammals like like wild you know okay dogs and shit like that what they do so much work to pick up i don't know if you've ever tried to get like animal control out to like clean up a animal that has passed away before its time sadly but it can sometimes just not work. You know what will work, though?

A big hungry bird that will come just like handle that for you, Bob. And it's not pretty looking work, but it's essential. And they do a great fucking job. I love this glasses half full approach. I feel like it's like me saying, like, I keep the world from having too many Oreos. Like, thank these birds that survive on these dead animals because otherwise we would have too many. And thank you, Rachel, for eating Oreos

so that we don't have too many of those either. I want to try and find this article I found about birds. It's a really interesting buzzard fact that i wish i i ain't i i'm not gonna find this i'm not gonna find this article anyway they do like they do a lot of important stuff carrying birds they help keep places from like getting overpopulated by dangerous animals and stinky disease ridden corpses and that's fucking pretty cool if you ask me um anything else i want to say about birds they're rad they're functional they're aesthetically appealing they're vital contributors to the ecosystem they're just great i think there's a version of my life where i was a where i could be a bird person i do feel like

oh i thought you were gonna say where you were a. I think there's a version of my life where I was a bird. And boy, that's the coolest, right? Like if reincarnation is like real and you come back, you go from human to bird. I mean, either way, if you're a bird, birds are probably looking at humans like they got it so good. They can just like go buy seeds at the store. I mean, while humans are looking up at birds like you guys are so fucking free you're having a good time um you're helping the ecosystem yeah that's what i think when i see a bird i think it is now for me keep it up birds you all are okay

in my book um maybe i should maybe we should just get a bird feeder. But then squirrels come and take that. And you know me. I think we see plenty of birds. I guess we do see plenty of birds. Can we put it in a way and we put up a sign that says like, this isn't for you squirrels. No. They get plenty of stuff. Like they eat nuts.

Here I'm sounding anti-squirrel. Yeah, I don't think it's fair of us to say what animals can do what in their world, you know? No, but if I put up a bird feeder, I know that a bunch of birds are going to come by and have a little nibble. One fucking wily squirrel and that bird feeder is like toast, man. Yeah. Anyway, I'm not interested in links to bird feeders that I can buy online. I'll do that research myself. 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? Thank you. And Kumail Nanjiani. I've come back with cat toothbrushes, which is impossible to use. Come get stupider with us at MaximumFun.org. Look, your podcast app's already open. Just pull it out. Give Jordan Jesse Go a try. Being smart is hard. Be dumb instead. Okay, zebras, orangutans. Oh, sorry. Hi. Not used to the animals talking. Who are you? Yes,

my name is Carrie Poppy. I co-host a podcast called On a Ross and Carrie. This is my co-host Ross right here. Okay. We investigate spirituality, a podcast called Ona Ross and Carrie. This is my co-host Ross right here. Okay. We investigate spirituality, claims of the paranormal. And we were wondering if we could get on the Ark. You did come two by two. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Though most of the things I'm letting on the Ark don't talk. I'm going to be talking all up on this boat. Do you mind both? I prefer Ark or Barge. Okay, I'm not listening. But if you let me on, then I will make my really good podcast on your boat, Barge. Can you at least help clean up all the poop? I guess I don't see why not.

Well, check out the podcast. Where do I find it? It's on MaximumFun.org. What do you got? My thing this week is cake mix oh yes just a just like a box of yellow cake mix oh boy one of the great baking innovations yes of modern of modern history yes it i feel like it i mean it equalizes the playing field in a huge way to baking a cake uh and in the way it's designed it's usually like oh do you have an egg do you have oil you're ready to make a cake

you know yeah like it's like not it's like do you have one egg and oil what were you gonna do with that fry the egg i have something better for you a whole fucking cake how about that uh-huh yeah i think i'm not somebody who would have ever thought to have like start a cake from scratch but i mean i've made a box cake before it's available to me anytime i want it and it's not even like it's not it for me it doesn't feel like cheating right it's not like you get a roll of cookie dough from the store and you slice that up and you put that in the oven. You don't say like I baked Rachel's special brand of cookies. But box cake mix, I feel like because you do have to add shit to it and blend it up, that's cooking, baby. This is so interesting that you say that because that is a big part of what I was reading about.

Okay. This like psychological sort of difference between cake mix and cookie dough between cake yeah about how people want to feel like they're doing something yeah sure because initially cake mix they had the possibility of not adding an egg they just did powdered egg like you could just add water and people were not as into it and they realized like people wanted to add their own eggs now this this gets a little fraught but i will get to that okay because i'm not entirely stepping it no i'm not entirely sure that i believe in powdered eggs that powdered eggs is something that exists no in this reasoning that uh people want to feel like they're doing something. Okay. Okay, anyway.

So 1930, John Duff applied for a patent for a, quote, invention that relates to a dehydrated flour for use in making pastry products and to a process of making the same. Sure. Okay. The whole idea is that like World War ii everybody had a lot of molasses i don't really know how that happened just world war ii like yeah we fucking got them we won oh my god i'm super now that the war is

over and we can kind of turn our eyes back towards the home there's's molasses fucking, we are lousy with this sticky stuff. There's this culinary historian, this is from an article in Bon Appetit magazine in 2013, who says, quote, what it was really about was using up molasses. People were eating differently and food and how they made it had changed drastically. So Duff figured out how to dry it and add it to a flour mix. Apparently Duff's recipe for every hundred pounds of flour called for a hundred pounds of molasses. Good Lord. Yeah.

What ended up happening, so 1933, 1934, Duff worked with like Duncan Hines, for example, to make not just cake, but like nut bread and bran muffins and fruitcake. This idea that you could like put anything in a box. At the time, it was 21 cents per can. Okay. Yeah. Per can? Yeah, I guess this was went back when people were buying everything in cans. Okay. I guess plastics technology hadn't really hit that point yet. I like it.

Fine. So there were companies like Pillsbury that stuck with the just add water approach for a really long time. In college? Absolutely. But at the end of the 1940s, 200 companies were putting out cake mixes, mostly Betty Crocker. And the whole marketing was like, add water and two of your own fresh eggs. Your own that you made. Uh-huh. So this kept up until around the 1950s when the sales of cake mix flattened out.

And they brought in this person named Ernest Dichter to do what he basically started, which was focus groups. The idea was that he was focused on motivational research. So instead of just saying like, what are you buying and how much of it, like trying to figure out why people made the decisions they made. And so he brought in a bunch of people to ask them like basically more or less what was unappealing about cake mix, you know um and his his takeaway was that people people wanted to feel their own hand in it right you know that they wanted to feel like they were doing something oh you mean oh i thought you meant

like they like to just sort of like goop their hand into the that adding eggs made them feel like they were cooking sure basically that makes sense to me. What I think is interesting, there's like a lot at play here because I think it's like the 1950s too. I think the things that I'm not seeing in these articles that I think is really interesting is the like one, the guilt, you know, this idea that you are coming into an era of more convenience, which is lessening your role and potentially like lessening what you think of as like the ideal, you know, mother or partner or spouse or whatever. Right. Like I am cheating.

I am using a box, you know, like if I were really better at this, I would make a cake from scratch and I would, you know, add my eggs. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I also think this idea of like wanting to be more involved is interesting, especially a lot of what I saw too was in addition to the eggs, they started focusing on frosting. This idea like what they called homemaking magazines at the time showcased elaborate cake constructions so it would be more like how do you make this cake look like a football field but i mean that's the thing still now right now anytime you look at any recipe like poke cakes

were like the biggest shit in the world for such a long time in the in the you know amateur baking realm and it was literally just make a cake like step one make a cake step two now to do a bunch of wild jazz to it but first you have to just just make a cake but the cake mix you know it's easy you do the one thing and then you have a cake do that first yeah because i i feel like i've talked to so many people and it's not uncommon when somebody makes a cake out of a box to admit it immediately. Yeah. To say it guiltily at the beginning of just like, well, it's from a box. But look, I turned it into Garfield.

Yeah. And that's some kind of apology in a way of like, no, but look, I put my time in. I made this cake look like an orange cat. I just be-reeled you. I just be-reeled you so hard. Sorry, babe. It went off. I had to snap you.

So, yeah. So, I think, I don't know. I think there's a lot of, like, interesting, like, levels here. I think it's interesting that Dictor got a bunch of women together to get them to- I hardly know her. think it's interesting that dictor got a bunch of women together to get them hardly know her to get them to talk to get them to talk about their feelings about cake and cake mix which i think ultimately probably turned into a larger more complicated conversation about like guilt uh and lack of time and the kind of like discomfort with this like modern convenience that is like

taking some of their agency away, but also giving them more time to do more things for themselves. Like, I feel like there's a lot happening here. But instead, it's like, let's focus on icing and make sure they add eggs. So I was reading a lot like, what's really happening here? I want to see the transcripts of these focus groups. Because part of me is just like, people really just wanted to add their own eggs because that made them feel like they were cooking more. I was like, there's something deeper happening there. Now, let me say this, though, devil's advocate. If I gave you a side-by-side taste test, one of these was just add water cake, one of these

was add oil and eggs cake. I feel like I could tell the difference. Yeah. So that's the other thing so i'm reading all these articles that say like americans just wanted to add their own eggs because they felt uncomfortable with powdered eggs and then i read another article that was like although the cake did taste better it's less dry and way better yeah so yeah so that what turned into just a like a uh a real like sincere interest in box cake because I love it and I get excited when I see it turned into, like, a deeper examination of feminism and what modern society has done to our roles in the kitchen.

Yeah. So that was a surprisingly complex topic for me yeah um but i enjoyed it hey i want cake so fucking bad right now you know what i've never made is a layer cake i'm super intimidated by it it just seems greedy to me i mean i think you just kind of cut off the round part and then you stack them on top of each other with frosting in the middle i don't think it's actually hard but i have seen a lot of people on nailed it that don't let the cakes part and then you stack them on top of each other with frosting in the middle i don't think it's actually hard but i have seen a lot of people on nailed it that don't let the cakes cool and then they turn into soupy messes but i do just want a cake like a cake i don't need a cake burger yes do you know what i mean yeah but the layer is so pretty the layer is so pretty but i'm very

utilitarian it's like surprise extra frosting the only thing i care about the aesthetics of is birds anymore. That's pretty much it for me. Cool. Got some submissions from our friends at home. Daniel says, my wonderful thing is concept albums, albums that tell a connected,

continuous story through the songs in them. With the release of the Jazz Fusion Antimai by the Deer Hunter last year and the prog rock The Fox and the Bird this year by OK Good Night, I've been utterly basking in the music. I love a concept album, even when I don't even like the music that much.

I think All Time for Me is Hazards of Love by the Decembrists. Adore that album. That's the one that's like a fairy tale sort of story about a woman falls in love with like a forest elf. I don't think I know this. Oh, really? Oh, man, it beats ass.

It's so good. It came out once when me and Justin and Travis had to go on a, not had to, we went on a road trip to Chicago, drove there, saw a Harvey Danger concert, and then drove back that night just listening to Hazardous Love the whole time. It was great. Great, great try. Do you have a concept album

that you have any particular I was trying to think. I mean, I probably do, but I don't ever really think about them that way. Was Tommy a concept album before it was a musical by The Who?

Again, I don't know. Okay. Amy says, I think to-do lists are wonderful. I make one for myself every day, always including something easy to cross off my list like making the bed.

Having my little list of to-dos for the day helps me stay focused and productive, which is a wonderful feeling. I have kind of been trying to do the opposite. Interesting. Almost like an already done list. Because I feel like at the end of the day, a lot of times I struggle to think about what I've accomplished. Yeah.

You know, like it'll get to be like five o'clock or whatever. And I'll think like, what did I do today? Yeah. I didn't do anything. And then I realized like if I at least just write down like, oh, I made muffins and I did the laundry and whatever. Like, it's like, oh, good. I did do something.

That's good. There needs to be some middle ground between a to-do list and a have done list. Because I have a to-do list I swear by. I do every day I have, there's like a website, it's called Todoist, is the name of the website platform. It's great. to each other to knock out but then i have my own like recurring daily to-do list things and then like weekly to-do list things and i keep my appointments on there and i have a little widget on my phone so it's always like in the background of my phone like i swear by it but also sometimes i'll be banging stuff out and i will also do some other thing that is good like built a shed huge effort not on the to-do list so it's like that was for nothing

so it's a to-do list that also turns into a to I guess every to-do list turns into a to-done list I promise that I will continue to make a big deal out of that shed thank you it is a gorgeous very spacious shed I love it so much.

I know. Like, we could easily hide in there if we had to. We could hide in there if we needed to. Let's hide in there. Thank you to Bowen

and Augustus for these. For a theme song, Money Won't Pay, you can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you for listening. Thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows there. We got merch over at McElroyMerch.com, including a Poetry Corner candle. Yes. We have some new stuff coming next month. It's going to be here very soon.

I mean, that's it for the immediate. You were just in San Diego. We were just in San Diego. Great to see everyone. What's next? Do you know? I don't know what is public, but if you go to McElroyTours.com,

you can find out, or McElroy.family well no it may all be announced and i just don't know about it so just go there we're gonna we have more shows coming sure griffin's name is on the tin but that doesn't mean so much and um in the words of birds Mario! Hey! Working on it! Mario! Hey! Working on it! Mario! Hey!

Working on it! Mario! Hey! Working on it! Mario! Hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.