Wonderful! - Wonderful! 292: Dancing Fireflies of 1000 Hues

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Griffin's favorite puzzle-filled playscapes! Rachel's favorite reflective decoration! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Hawai’i Community Foundation: https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.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 a show where we talk about things that we like that that's good, that we're into. It's a podcast hosted by marrieds, marrieds like us. And it is so nice to see you with me today. And the ensemble you're wearing right now is fun. It is, I would say, neo-futuristic i bought a pair of fitness shorts that are very bright um have kind of like i'm almost like a marbleized pattern of bright uh purples and blues and greens uh and i've worn them maybe twice now and both times griffin is like

oh well it's all he wants to talk about i I gotta tell you, it's because I like the way you fit in his shorts. So smooth. So smooth. Thanks. So much Riz. We were separated for four or five days while I was in. While he was on tour, not out of any dispute. No.

I was in Seattle and, you know and I saved up this Riz. I'm not going to use this Riz on other people. Why would you want to bring it to the stage? There's no reason to have that on stage. No. People come for a very mechanical, right over the plate sort of diatribe from me. They come buy tickets to see us speak, share our thoughts, our philosophies. And then I get home and I've got all this Riz stored up.

I just open up the chamber. And I put these shorts on and it's just like a tidal wave. Good work with Riz, young people. Great, just really, really powerful stuff. That word. It saved us so much time. It does. Yeah.

It stops you from saying and like a real dummy uh you got any small wonders for me oh um i can go first if you'd like yeah go ahead crepes i had a crepe while i was in seattle oh. Ricotta. I didn't even know you liked ricotta. I like it in a crepe. I don't like a lot of ricotta. I don't like a lot of sort of curdled cream. I guess we eat a lot of lasagna.

I mean, not a lot, but we do eat lasagna. When you eat lasagna, you usually eat a lot of it. I've never had a tiny, cute little lasagna. Yeah, I just love a crepe it has a uh sort of a kind of like flabby texture that i just enjoy more than i think i'm going to every time i eat one um very very fun very fun the crepe sprinkle some fruit on there that noise you just made sprinkle some fruit don't mind if i do um i thought of my thing okay uh which is um witches are great they cast spells

cauldrons frog eyes magic, the forest, friendship. A lot of people are like, is it hard to be married to a McElroy because they're so quick? And normally I would say no, but that was hard for me in that moment. Well, I don't know what to tell you. I got excited. I thought you wanted to talk about witches. I was going to say which is going out to dinner when you have your parents visiting you which is what i had recently and griffin had just gotten

back and we had not been out to dinner in a while uh and i've never looked around the restaurant to try and find other people doing what we're doing But there is a level of joy when you have young children to go out to dinner with your partner that is unparalleled. And I'd like to think that if I looked around the restaurant, I could spot others like us. Oh, for sure. Because Griffin and I look at each other like we have been let out of a cage. And it is so exciting.

Food tastes better. The food tastes so good. It's just... Shout out to Pearl Dive Oyster Bar. The blackened shrimps were so fun yeah so tasty yeah thank you so much for the seafood guys you're crushing it over there i go first this week um this is one i'm gonna file under i can't believe we haven't talked about it before and it is escape rooms um yes i feel like uh escape rooms have been around for a little while now and have sort of made their footprint in our consciousness sort of over the last,

you know, I don't know how long decade or so. Yeah. As I say, I feel like the first escape room that I did was in New York. We went there and Sydneydney was pregnant with charlie so it would have been what like eight or nine years ago i guess nine years this it's still you know in the grand scheme of things still a relatively new thing and i think since then over

the last decade they have become something of a like shorthand goof about like frivolous ways that millennials spend their time and money and like it is it is an inherently very nerdy thing to do to lock yourself in a in a big puzzle box for an hour using only your wits well and i will say it's difficult to describe to other people you know like like when griffin did one, he came home and he was like, we did an escape room. And then there was almost nothing you could say after that. It was almost just like, you know, you couldn't really get into the puzzles. You'd have to describe the space, you know, like there's a lot of detail involved in them. And it makes it difficult to tell the story when you leave.

Well, I don't want to spoil it right i've done i've done escape rooms with like very cool mechanics in them like very very neat puzzle solutions but even that like i don't know in isolation is not uh as thrilling as it is to like be in it and uh you know be a be a part of it after we we did just do one when we were in seattle that i'll talk about but when we were coming out i was like man it would be great if there was like a reality show that was just about like um escape rooms but as someone pointed out like no because it's like being in the escape room is the thing and so yeah watching other people do it would probably not be as uh exciting yeah um i love a puzzle i love when that puzzle

is nested inside of 10 other puzzles uh and dropped into sort of a themed designed experience just just for me the being able to see the authorship of the escape room is like a big part of the of the the pleasure that I get from it. And people kind of I think people often dismiss escape rooms as just sort of a team building exercise. But I feel like I can speak from experience is saying that it can also be a lens through which the weaknesses through which the cracks and the foundations of a group of people can be sort of uh revealed and examined it's true um because i've had some not great escape room experiences never with the fam i feel like with the fam like we're pretty well-oiled machine one you're and you're very serious about it. Like nobody is like,

what's the, whatever, you know, like you all are like, we're doing this as fast as possible. It's so annoying when someone is that way. I know. In an escape room. We're locked in here. What else do you have going on?

Nothing for an hour. I know you have nothing. There is nothing you've got going on for the next hour that is more important than finding clues. Well, and also like when you signed up, you knew what it was. Nothing you've got going on for the next hour that is more important than finding clues. Well, and also like when you signed up, you knew what it was. You know, like if you would prefer not to do an escape room, then don't do an escape room.

It's so easy to not get locked in an escape room. I have never been in a room and tried the door and been like, oh, fuck, this is an escape room. Unless you like told somebody we're going to dinner and then they open the door and they're like wait a minute yeah unless you get the gamed like the film the game uh then i guess you can be excused from being kind of a jag about being in an escape room but when a team works together like there's really nothing quite like it i think that escape rooms from a like a sociological standpoint are one of a kind because they really break down the kind of like norms that you construct in the group of people that you go in there with if you go in there with a group of friends or co-workers there is a certain way of interacting and a certain power dynamic that exists between every individual person in the group that when you are in an

escape room changes dramatically by necessity in order to like to in order to like move forward with the thing i feel the same way about like role-playing games like dnd when you play dnd with a group of friends like it reveals things about them and it changes the kind of way that you interact with each other so fundamentally uh in a way that is illuminating and I think very beneficial to the group because this this is a fun question. So what would you say about you and your brothers? Do you all have like specialties? Like, would you say like if I'm going to escape room with Justin and Travis, it's most likely that Justin is going to do this and Travis is going to do this and I'm going to do this.

I think that we fall on different parts of like the spectrum of like franticness. That's what we go through, right? I think that Travis is just sort of like bouncing around the room, looking at like all of the clues and like, you know, finding those like connections. My role, I think Justin falls sort of between the two of us. I always look for what i think is the like overarching puzzle or like the end game puzzle that you need all of the other pieces to be in place in order to get to yeah because i also know that like if someone doesn't do that then the end of an escape room is usually pretty frustrating right if you don't have one person

who's like going through like has the one thing that is like well clearly this is the thing that we need to do and now let's see how all the pieces fit into that i like that part of it a lot i find that very very sad because a lot of it is like opening your drawer and being like this is a nail maybe this is something i don't know dad will that too. Cause dad did this escape room with us where he will just get in one puzzle. Like he will just find one element of the room and just kind of like work on that for a while. So, but I mean,

it takes all kinds, you know, I feel like we, I feel like we, I like to be like, like crawling under the desk, like lifting up the rug, kind of like,

where is the hidden thing? Right. Yes. That's always so satisfying. under the desk like lifting up the rug kind of like where is the hidden thing right yes that's always so satisfying it's like the prop set design of the thing it can be very very cool so it's like as a social activity it's great it's oftentimes very illuminating but like it is the game design perspective of escape rooms that obviously i adore the most because what i i really like when you're in an escape room, when you can feel like you're like in conversation with the person or people who designed the escape room, just this feeling of knowing that everything you need to solve the thing is at hand, right? And has been

placed in a way, it's just about finding the connections between the clues and the numbers and the locks and the doors that the author of the experience sort of designed, right? Can I ask, do they always have hints? I think every room I've ever done. Yeah, like there's an attendant who is watching you and will occasionally pop in

and be like, maybe go back to the phone. Yeah, the one we just did in Seattle was an Evil Dead 2 themed escape room, which is fucking great. That is cool. I love that movie so much. And like it kind of went through the plot of the movie and there were screens sort of in the walls

all over the room. So you could see like the little hand crawling around. Oh, cool. Ash would appear like in mirrors and like talk to you and there was like a lot of like very very cool set design stuff uh happening there but you also had like a walkie talkie that you could use to like get get clues if you get stuck on stuff but like we never used it no look at you well no because i feel like it is uh it is more satisfying when you don't have to because it speaks to the the uh through line the strength of the through line of the thing right when you when you don't

need it but that said like I I think the best feeling that an escape room delivers is when you walk in for the first time the clock starts and you are just plopped into this nebulous web of numbers and clues and props and secrets that it just feels like you could go in any direction, right? And you don't know how the pieces fit. And then you find that first piece that fits. And now all of a sudden you have like a direction, like the dam breaks a little bit. And now there's like a natural flow through the room that develops all the way until the end when like the list of the pile of clues has been diminished just to a few. And the momentum of it just like carries you through into the into the conclusion. Like that is when that works organically, it's it's genuinely quite magical and and very very cool um and and

this escape room was definitely like that and i have done ones that have not been like that where it's like there's no way a person could have gotten this without getting some clues from the from the uh the puzzle master um it is just very cool to be in a room and even though the like designer of the room is not present you feel their presence in the design of the thing and the mapping of the thing um and also like escape rooms are one of the few avenues that truly talented like set designers and prop designers have to exercise their craft uh and and it's just neat being in a weird place like a weird curated environment we did one i believe in denver that was like a martian tavern so like everything was just like sort of rusty neon futurist aesthetic that was just like really fucking cool to be in and obviously like

the evil dead 2 um cabin was was iconic and cool and at one point i had to put my hand down in a garbage disposal to like fish a clue out of the thing and like it was kind of spooky and fun um i think i just think escape rooms are rad i I think they're they're very, very cool to participate in. They're probably incredible to design. I'm very interested in like how one goes about designing a good escape room. And you know in just a matter of years i think genuinely says something cool about human beings that like there is this element of immersive play that we all crave that we all find or not all because i've you, been in escape rooms with buttholes before, but like for most of us, it is a kind of like, um, it is, it is an immersion in a playfulness that you don't get anywhere else. And to be a part of that with other people and seeing that like wonder in their own sort

of, uh, faces, uh, is, is very cool. And then getting together to accomplish something together is very cool. And then getting together to accomplish something together is very cool. And I just, I like escape rooms a whole lot. I think they're a special thing. I'll also say it's kind of rare that you go a place and you have no idea what you're going to see. Like the nature of escape rooms is such that they like don't want people to know a lot about the room before they walk in.

So like you and I, like when we go to a restaurant, we will look at pictures of the food. We will look at what the inside of the restaurant looks like. Like we will read reviews. But with an escape room, you really, it's like a surprise by design. Yeah. Can I steal you away? Yes. Thank you.

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Bullseye is celebrating 50 years of hip-hop by bringing you an entire month of brand new interviews with rappers. That means Jeezy. I put my pain in the music. Angie Stone. You know, hip-hops. We called them hops back then. Master P. Music is what's gonna open the doors

for us, but whatever we come up with after this, it's gonna be bigger. Plus, Chica, Saba, even the greatest of them all, Rakim. That's this September. Open up that podcast app, type in Bullseye, and hit subscribe. You're not going to want to miss any of this. Okay. My topic this week is the disco ball yes i have talked about this in the context of the one that i hung up in our kitchen yeah um it did not get its own segment i'm assuming no no i don't

even know if i made that a small wonder or not because when i looked to see on our website i didn't see it listed yeah maybe we called it something goofy i don't know um mirror ball that that is actually like kind of how it started that's how people talked about it obviously before disco okay um but the actual patent um was called a myriad reflector in 1917 yeah Fuck yeah. That sounds like a part in a spaceship. Like the warp drives are down because the myriad reflector is shattered. I know. That's cool. I love a disco ball.

I also kind of love like a prism. Anything that reflects light in kind of surprising and unpredictable ways is really exciting for me because I'm a kitty cat. Yeah, sure. surprising and unpredictable ways is really exciting for me because I'm a kitty cat. Yeah, sure. But yeah, the only disco balls I remember owning is the one we have now. And then when I turned 16, I got as a present from one of my friends, which I'm realizing now was probably purchased by his mom. Like it was one of those things that I got as a 16 year old and i was like what a thoughtful gift because it was like it was like a disco ball and fuzzy dice and a

little like cassette tape of 80s music oh wow for my 16th birthday very themed and i was like what a what a clever present and i'm realizing now like as i think about it they don't know you very well his mom probably purchased that and that was the go-to 16th birthday present i'm sure i mean there's a reason it's called spencer's gifts it's because it's where you go and it's like i don't know you but this is a lava lamp but i know that you like a coffee cup with boobs on it so i went to spencer's and i got it for you yeah that's more than i feel like spencer's has gotten so raunchy. Oh, yeah. I feel like it used to be kind of raunchy. I feel like it is extremely raunchy now. Wait, I can't even remember the last time I've been in a Spencer's.

I haven't been in a Spencer's, but I've walked by a Spencer's. Just kind of. In a mall. Well, no, just in the front shop window. It's just like they'll have a, you know know just a big nude body pillow or something shit just godzilla but his wieners out like a t-shirt with godzilla but his wieners out i was i would you wear that no but i wear a shirt with godzilla's wiener on it it's kind of funny i've got kids i've got two kids it's kind of funny imagine i went to school to pick up henry wearing my godzilla weiner shirt well no you wouldn't wear

it like when you were out with her when would i wear it when would be a good time for me to wear my godzilla weiner i don't know when you were performing in front of a crowd of thousands of people i'm gonna make thousands of people look at godzilla's wiener that's foul that's foul i could go to j i could go to jail for doing that you guys always wear costumes how is that any different you don't mean that there's no way you can mean that the gulf between my admittedly appropriative sailor man outfit and a t-shirt that has godzilla and his wiener on it is so vast i would wear the sailor man outfit to pick henry up from school before i would wear godzilla wiener shirt i can't remember how we spencer's disco ball okay i couldn't i couldn't remember how we got here.

But I guess every show at some point we end up talking about this. Godzilla's Wiener. Yeah. I don't know why. Okay. Myriad Reflector. It was sold in Cincinnati, actually. All right.

Disco capital of the world. And beginning in the 1920s, promised to fill dance halls with, quote, this must have been how they marketed it, dancing fireflies of a thousand hues. Well, no. Really, probably just the one hue, right? Well, I mean, think about like anything that reflects light can do so in kind of a rainbow way. You can get different color compositions.

So if each little mosaic tile of the thing was like different, had a different, well, no, would that work? Hold on. Let me think. If you had a mirror that had a lens of color over it, it would, yeah, sure. Okay. Okay. I don't know anything.

So the earliest disco balls were 27 inches in diameter and covered with over 1,200 tiny mirrors. inches in diameter and covered with over 1,200 tiny mirrors. They probably cost like a billion dollars because they weren't machined. I have to imagine these were. Yeah, right. Someone would have to break a mirror in a very specific way. Yeah. So what ended up happening, there was a company you may have heard of called Omega National Products.

I believe these are the people that make the watches that's my guess okay uh i'm actually not sure about that but i assume me neither uh located in louisville kentucky uh this is in the 40s and 50s they uh had experience making flexible mirrored sheets for art deco furniture um so for example like liberace with the piano covered in reflective material so dope uh and so they they kind of put that to work with making mirror balls um and it was you know dance halls roller rinks uh speakeasies yeah you know it really set set a mood it's weird thinking about people dancing like the charleston with a mirror ball there i know although roller skating rinks was something i forgot about and that's a hundred percent true

what i feel like every oh yeah every it's yeah it's legally mandated that every roller skating rink has to have a mirror ball uh so then the 70s came um and uh omega was sourcing 90% of America's disco balls. That's great. I want to know who the rogue agent is, those other 10%. They were kind of like little janky. Like the mirrors were all different sizes. Just a cube with six mirrors on it. I did it.

Yay. They would make at this plant 25 disco balls balls a day that's not very many carefully affixing the reflective sheets to the globes a 48 inch disco ball might sell for four thousand dollars jesus which roughly equates to about twenty thousand dollars today that's great yeah um and a lot of this was saturday night fever so 1977 disco ball is prominent and then disco clubs kind of shot up everywhere the movie made it so that an estimated 20 000 disco clubs showed up around the country that's so fucking bonkers i know right one movie could change sort of the business landscape of the nation i mean back in the day when people

were so disconnected you know there's no like there's no platform like the internet have you ever seen saturday night fever or had any interest in i've watched parts of it it's a little slow like it's not it seems mad boring yeah it's not what you would want it to be no which is just a romp you know yeah like a sexy disco romp like a break into electric boogaloo now that's a movie uh obviously disco not not as popular uh now um but still back the ball itself still an appeal um louisville uh in kind of of a tribute to their connection to the creation of the disco ball built an 11 foot 2300

pound ball that costs $50,000 apparently in England there was one that was created that has 2500 mirrored tiles but stands three stories tall.

That's big. Yeah. It's a big one. That's a big ball. Mm-hmm. I mean, I think they're great for, don't they like scare away bugs or some shit? Don't they like,

there's something about the way that they reflect light, that bugs see that and they're like, no way, man, I'm out of here. I don't know. I mean, I just know it makes our kitchen look real pretty when the sun's at a certain level yeah it's a very specific time there's like 14 minutes a day where we're getting light on the on the mirror ball yeah um yeah i love a mirror ball too i do have lots of sort of um lots of fond memories yeah it's one of those things that i know is kind of hokey and maybe doesn't represent the greatest design

aesthetic but um it's just it delights me it looks very cool you know yeah um can i tell you what our friends at home are talking about yes okay well here we go uh got one here and it's from uh dublin who says uh my small wonder is pop sockets phones keep getting bigger and my hands do not so these little guys help me not fling my phone into the ether on a daily basis have you ever thought about getting one of these all the time the number of times that like I've been I've like you know been eating dinner

which we do in shifts because we eat dinner while our kids are still awake and like I'm trying to watch something on my phone and I'm just trying to like like balance it against something against something to watch some shit is yeah i i've thought a lot about it i don't um it feels like a big decision it feels like a huge decision i don't know what i like enough to have permanently affixed onto the machine i use several hours a day i think because you and I will buy a phone case and we will use that same phone case

until it like isn't a phone case anymore. I've been looking at the edges of the one I use now have become sort of beige and modeled in a way. So the idea of like affixing something to that phone case and then being with that for a year or whatever. And then does it fit in the pocket good i know i don't know i don't i don't know gwynn says trader joe's bubble tea pack from the freezer section it takes 30 seconds in the microwave a dash of milk and my favorite chestnut black tea to start my

morning off with a lightly sweetened caffeinated beverage. That sounds great. Can I admit something to you? You've never had bubble tea? I don't think so. I have a couple times. I don't like tea so much. Yeah. But you can also get it in a sort of creamier, not traditional tea variety, and then you just have these little gooey guys in there.

I remember I had a friend in high school who liked bubble tea and i thought he was so worldly yeah sure of course it's like it's like how did you get your hands on this crazy tea um i remember i had it in college with some buddies when i was visiting a friend in detroit um and i remember just spending a lot of time sucking the bubbles up and then shooting them at each other. Oh, of course, of course. Which is, I think, the main reason people do bubble tea.

Yeah, I mean, that's how they get started. I bet it's good. I should find some good bubble tea. It's the kind of thing whenever I see people drinking it, I'm like, that seems fun. I bet I could get down with that. It does seem fun.

A nice creamy beverage with some bubbles floating in it. Hell yeah, it's like Orbitz. I love referencing soft drinks that 40 people on Earth ever drink. None of whom are, I'm the only one still living. Orbitz was like Sprite, but with little gel balls floating in it. And it was so fucking gnarly. No, I remember this as a thing.

I never wanted to have it. No, it was like slurping down frog spawn it was horrible but i also know how the mackroy family celebrated a new consumer product in the house sometimes that shit still sometimes some of those products are still good i had a clearly canadian uh a couple tours ago uh and that shit was a staple in the McElroy household. Yeah. And hits so good. It's so good. Clearly Canadian.

How is it different than like a sparkling water of today? Extremely sweet. Extremely flavorful. Oh, okay. But in a pleasant, effervescent way. I would crush some Clearly Canadian right now. Okay. That's it for the show this week thank you so

much to bow in and augustus for these for a theme song money won't pay you'll find a link to that in the episode description and thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network go on over to maximum fun.org check out all the great stuff that they've got over there um because you're going to find something that you have a great time listening to i bet um we have merch over at mackroymerch.com we have some shows coming up in philly and new york doing taz and mbimbam uh in october you can go to mackroy.family and find links and tickets and all that jazz there anything else we want to say anything i don't think so well that'll do it and now that we made it to the end of the episode,

we can tell you to go look for the clues that we dropped throughout the rest of it. I was going to test out what other mythic giant monsters that you wouldn't wear their penises on shirts. Okay, King Kong, obviously. Yeah. Mothra? Do you remember that SNL sketch

where King Kong had a boner that went in through the window yeah that was such a wild wild sketch i cannot believe made it to air i think a lot about the king kong's penis sketch a lot yeah um that's it really just god just Godzilla and King Kong, I think. Well, there's Mothra, there's Gamera. I don't think either of them are packing. Wow, all right. I mean, my knowledge of kaiju physiology is obviously limited. That's true. So yeah, I'm going to limit it to Godzilla and King Kong.

I mean, if I had a shirt that had Mothra with just like a comically large member on it, now that's art. What if it was like a child's flip book where there were pants on it, but it was like not attached at the bottom so you could like flip it up? So you could do like, you could flash. You're inventing whole new shirt technology

to cater to your perversions. They make shirts like that for kids with like superheroes, you remember? Yeah, but there's a little bit of a difference. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay.

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