Wonderful! - Wonderful! 305: Corn Coat's Poppin' Off

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Rachel's favorite synthetic cozy material! Griffin's favorite local friend! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Harmony House: https://harmonyhousewv.com/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

i forgot how we start the show do i just introduce myself yeah wow did we do it last week we did we did do it last week it's not even like we did we were late i think too so it was more recent than typical yeah you usually start off with like an energy that's pretty aggressive like hey skanks it's me rachel so go ahead and just try that hi this is rachel mcelroy hi skanks it's me right hi it's griffin mcelroy and this is wonderful this is a show where we talk about things that we like that we're into and is good um the show we're both having a little trouble is good yeah no for sure um we are so excited to join you all today and to have you all join us in the studio.

I feel like we're opening a sermon right now. If you turn your hymnals to 420. Say hi to your neighbor. Say hi to your neighbor and shake their hand. I haven't been to a lot of services, but I know that's part of it. It is part of it. It was always my least favorite part of attending church touching somebody else's sweaty hand is yeah there was a sort of prescribed touch

moment in the in this in the the the program or is like you know we're gonna show up do a few prayers sing a song now touch your neighbor in every direction. In all eight cardinal directions. Anyway, we're so happy to have you here. And let's just get, can we just cut out the BS? Whoa. Can we be serious now? To quote my favorite movie I've never seen, Sully? And do a small wonder, please?

Okay. Pat Herman Bark? Okay. I think that's what i'm gonna go with i mean enough said it's it is chocolate with peppermint in it uh-huh you brought home a big old bag of ghirardelli beauties yeah and you were like do you like peppermint bark and i was like not really and then i ate some and i was like wait a minute me, it's like, it's not just the flavor, it's like the textural piece. Like there are like hunks of candy cane in it. Yes. So you're like enjoying this kind of

fun, like soft, crunchy experience. Yeah. And it just looks very festive. It does. You know, I prefer it to a straight up and down candy cane. Me too. I don't love, that's a lot of peppermint that you are sort of consigning yourself to.

It feels like from a different era, right? Like it's like this is before we knew how to make, you know, a lollipop that tasted like watermelon. Yeah. It's like how you go to a lot of sort of like roadside stops, like gas stations in West Virginia, and they'll just be selling like little sticks of honey. And it's like, it's not 1941 anymore. Like we have such better snacks now. I'm gonna say Coach Craig Berube,

formerly of the St. Louis Blues, released from his contract today. Why is that a wonder? It's not good that he got fired, but I will miss this man a whole lot. Yeah, me too. I would say a bummer time to be a St. Louis Blues fan at the moment. Over the offseason, we lost a lot of our faves, including our announcer, Panger, got traded off to the

Chicago Blackhawks. Chicago, yeah. Chicago got a lot of good things out of their terrible season. Including our favorite announcer, Panger, and then we lost Craig Berube, and no one's quite sure what old GM Doug Armstrong's doing up there in the booth making some questionable decisions.

They do, as of last night, officially have a losing season. And they had lost the last four games in a row. But nobody really felt like it was the coach's fault because he is the one that got us a Stanley Cup. Yeah, not four years ago in the grand scheme of things, in pretty much any sport. That's not a long enough time, I think, to go without.

I don't know. They didn't make the playoffs last year. The reasoning for it makes no sense to me but uh it is a a strange occurrence to see something like this happen where it's just like in the dead of night at 11 o'clock they just cut his contract uh and every single reaction i've read to it has been what the fuck are they doing like what are they doing i know it's it's gotta be an incredibly unpopular choice I don't know how they're gonna recover from it yeah me neither uh so it's it's a bummer day but I did just want to give a shout out shout out to Ruby big just a big fucking tough son of a gun yeah one of those coaches that like his only emotion is like stoicism.

Stoicism or disappointment. Like stoicism is good. Like if you're getting stoic, he's proud of you. Yeah. But the time he spends, like that's why I think we love him so much is you hear about all these conversations he's having individually with the players. Yeah. individually with the players yeah and the things that he says about them are so like you know we're working on this and i really believe in that and i think if he keeps doing this like he just seems like a real players guy yeah i will say i started watching blues hockey in like 2016 2017 which was you know they were doing pretty good then and then they won the stanley cup in 2019 i always felt

like a feeling of bandwagoniness a bit yeah i started because they had a long long time where they did not win the stanley cup yeah which was their entire their entire legacy yeah i know you and like your dad were just sort of riding out through that and i always felt a little bit of imposter syndrome being like did i just come on because this is a good hockey team but now that things are starting to fall apart, I feel like, okay, this is when I can really prove my loyalty to these beautiful blues.

You go first this week. What have you got? I do. This week, I wanted to talk about fur that is fake and that is faux fur. Faux fur. Faux fur. I wanted to say it,

that what I was talking about so that you didn't think i was talking about some kind of weird app that was called faux fur or it sounds like a person if you would say like welcome to the poetry corner my poet this week is jim faux fur yeah then i would have been like okay cool tell me. Tell me more about Jim Fofur. I was thinking about this because we have a gray blanket in our house that is a hot commodity. Yes. Would you call that Fofur? Yeah. Okay. 100%.

Okay. If you go to this company's website, which I'm not going to name because they're not paying us to talk about them. Yeah. Blankets.gov. to talk about them. Yeah. Blankets.gov. That's,

you heard about the new minister of blankets, by the way. Oh my God. Yeah, scandalous. These clowns. Scandalous choice. Yeah, it's just, it's very soft. It's very cozy.

I love you took this instantly in a direction away from fashion and instead just talk about how a blanket made of fake fur is good. It's comfy. It feels good. Yeah, yeah. Sure. No, I actually, I'm not, I could say that I don't wear like any kind of fur for some specific reason, but I'm just not generally a flashy dresser wild yeah it's it's not something i understand that the the fur movement uh of just wearing it for fashion i understand people's uh

dislike of that from moral grounds mine if i'm being a hundred percent transparent is mostly from aesthetic grounds i think it's fucking wild to walk around in a big furry coat. But you know, you do you but don't. Like do it fake because it's the same. Much like the candy cane. This is a different era. I did, I bought the

boys little faux fur winter hats recently too. Oh yeah, you did, yeah. I know that it's hard to think of that stuff as faux fur because it doesn't really like you know it doesn't look like a rabbit or whatever yeah sure um but that i mean that is what it is trying to model with its like softness yeah i get that um yeah it just especially in the winter time it just feels like a little nice cozy choice it does yeah uh faux fur has come a long way i was researching what it is because like if i had to ask you like what is it made out of like what would you

wool and that's they sort of make super soft and hair hairy hairy uh a lot of it is like acrylic and polyester fibers fibers yeah that was my next thing if it wasn't wool it was probably acrylic and polyester which of course is like a like an oil-based kind of thing like i really learned a lot about kind of where we have come so in the 60s and 70s there was kind of a move away from wearing animal fur and this is where you really kind of saw the rise of faux fur. So faux fur, like anything else that is made from like polyester or acrylics is not exactly environmentally friendly. So there has been some focus recently that I found pretty fascinating. Before I get to that, I want to talk about specifically the blanket we have downstairs because I looked it up. And it is made from 100% faux chinchilla polyester.

Faux chinchilla polyester. Yes. This company also has other garments, one can specify the type of polyester animal simulation to that degree of granularity. what chemicals are applied to kind of give different textures and then like whether it's made smoother or shinier um with the chemicals like silicones or resins like there's there's a lot that's involved in creating different types faux fur okay i understand that yeah uh so what i wanted to talk about is this new movement i found um about plant-based fur uh sure uh i've touched a furry plant yeah well those the little lambs little lambs here lambs here yeah that's a furry plant i was thinking of i can't i couldn't name a second one i couldn't name that one i mean moss is kind of furry moss normalized wearing moss like some sort of hedge wizard i like that shit a lot that's the future that's the next met gala is people just coming out dressed up like fucking tom bombadil

so there is a paris-based faux fur institute uh and they are leading these like competitions one called open fur which is a contest that challenges designer to develop sustainable fur using vegetable based and synthetic fibers uh this kind of became really big in 2020 stella mccartney who's you know like this huge designer that most people have heard of sure uh launched a new material because she called coba uh which co, which features 37% plant-based materials, including a polyester blended with corn. With corn? With corn. Okay.

Like a corn byproduct. Okay. A lot of what I've seen in this, what is also called bio-fur space, it relates to corn. There's corn involved in some way. Okay. uh it relates to corn there's there's corn involved in some way okay it's difficult i think just for wearability and and long-term use to do like a fully like bio focused fur but that that effort does exist um so a lot of what people are focusing now are like recycled materials like how do you reuse plastics and polyesters uh so that it at least is you know

doing less damage less impact i get it you wear your corn coat out on a hot day it just starts popping starts popping just starts popping off that's actually i've just imagined like fashion week a runway show you know some america's next top model walks down the runway reaches the end and then just what's that pop pop pop pop pop pop so dramatic so dramatic the clothes turn into popcorn and then everybody just like scoops a little bit off the runway and eats it that's huge that's huge that's something is something there. That is at the very least like a RuPaul's Drag Race finals transformation moment. Yes. And more dependable than, say, releasing butterflies.

Oh, come on. So that's faux fur. It's really interesting to kind of follow. I mean, a lot of it just started with like yarn, you know, like back in the 60s and before it was just like how do you how do you make a yarn in a weave that looks more like fur and now we've now we're wearing corn yeah that's remarkable that is amazing i just love how you're approaching this not from a here's a a cool way for me to get my fur fix no as much as it is just like i love this soft i love a soft blanket i mean what i could have done as a topic is just like, I love this soft stuff. I love a soft blanket. I mean,

what I could have done as a topic is just soft blankets, but I don't know what I say about that. Yeah, no, I know. So it seems faux fur seemed to be

the best way to go. But I guess ultimately what I am saying is I like a soft blanket. Okay. All right. You really got down to the heart of the matter.

Can I steal you away? Yes. If you're Black, you probably love you some Paramore, huh? Or what about the TV show Golden Girls? Ginger Ale? Daytime television? Don't lie. I know you love at least one of them.

I'm Sequoia Holmes, pop culturist and host of Black People Love Paramore. Contrary to the title, it is not a podcast about the band Paramore. Each episode, I, along with a special guest co-host, dissect one pop culture topic that mainstream media doesn't necessarily associate with Black people, but we know we like. Tune in every other Thursday to the podcast that's dedicated to helping Black people feel more seen. Black People of Paramore is now on the Maximum Fun Network. Check out the most recent episode featuring Char Giselle today. Throughout history, sirens have captured men's attention,

enticed men with their feminine wiles, and fulfilled men's primal needs. The sirens allure persist. They have not. Unless the primal need is I need to be smashed on the rocks. Yeah, smash me. Smash me, mommy. Smash me, mama.

Smash me, mommy. The siren's allure persists. Why do we do this to ourselves? Strand me, baby. Strand me, mom. Strand me, baby. So yeah, this is my brother, my brother and me me from maximum fun on mondays it's just like that just like that but it's just like that but more of it there's there's more of that

you ready i think so the moth Oh, have you not talked about it? Never. This is something, and I don't know if you're aware of this, but I would say most people in the country are not familiar with The Mothman. I would say that a lot of people in the country have heard of The Mothman, but do not know about The Mothman. I was not at all familiar. You hadn't even heard of The Mothman?

No. Oh, wow. Okay, maybe this is not as big of a uh a thing well i will also say you don't maybe you're not super well versed in the cryptid no i don't spend a lot of time in that area like i you know i've heard of the big ones i've heard of for example bigfoot loch ness monster like a cobra jersey devil i don't know jersey devil okay other than it's a hockey team yeah i mean that's basically what yeah um the mothman i i love the mothman it is a it is a point of pride for literally everyone i grew up with in west virginia that we have our own cryptid of some notoriety in in the mothman and personally speaking i think the Mothman is one of the cooler cryptids.

Sightings have pegged the Mothman as a roughly seven foot tall humanoid creature with great white wings and big shining red eyes. Okay, I actually don't know a lot about what specifically is pegged as Mothman traits. Yes. So that's helpful. It gets a little bit confusing.

I'm going to try and provide as cogent of a sort of background on the Mothman mythos. Because that is a fucking rad aesthetic, if you ask me. What is surprising is just how sort of insubstantial the origins of the Mothman are. So the Mothman mythos hails from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which is just up the river from Huntington. And Point Pleasant really revels in its Mothman history. Starting in 2002, they started to host an annual Mothman festival. Yeah. That lots of people come to.

In 2003, they erected a 12-foot tall metal sculpture of the Mothman, like in the middle of town. That is pretty fucking sick, if I'm being honest. So this is the history of the Mothman. November 1966, there were a pair of young couples from Point Ple pleasant just kind of cruising around uh and they were driving past an old world war ii munitions plant when they spotted a giant winged red-eyed creature uh and they got scared and it chased them off and screeched at them as they drove off and apparently they drove off and went right to the press because the very next day the point pleasant register ran the headline couples see man-sized bird dot dot dot creature dot dot dot

something that's a good headline if you ask this is a real stop the presses moment like i picture them bursting into the newsroom and being like whatever you're gonna run tomorrow throw it away it's like the um the news room you get like the the red ap news alert like guys big news coming in breaking pleasant it did sort of make national headlines a little bit um not a whole ton around this time the batman tv show with adam west was very popular so that is as, as far as people can tell, kind of where Mothman comes from. Oh, okay. And not just Big Moth. I'm going to read here from the Wikipedia article that sort of explains the most likely situation that happened here.

Wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the Sandhill Crane, a large American crane almost as tall as a man with a seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes. Wow. The bird may have wandered out of its migration route and therefore was unrecognized at first because it was not native to this region. Wow. You don't hear that a lot. Like, I mean, maybe you do. I don't obviously I'm not an expert, but like Bigfoot, everyone's like, yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know how that happened well bigfoot you could probably just say there's a lot of i mean bear or just a big guy big furry guys a big furry guy right but that description of that bird is like yeah no that's exactly what they said they saw i don't like that i don't like that this bird exists i'll say that right now i don't love the fact that i don't like that. I don't like that this bird exists. I'll say that right now.

I don't love the fact that I don't love ostrich or a tall flamingo. I don't like or emu. I don't like when a bird is bigger than me. Okay. No, that seems fair. That's scary. I think that is sort of a deep, you know, deep in my bones, genetic kind of dinosaur survival. Because, you know, humans and dinosaurs

walk the earth at the same time and that humans were so scared that dinosaurs had to find them off at the big club, eat them like a big steak at a movie theater. And the side of their car falls over. The car falls over from how heavy the steak is, yes. So I think that that's still in my bones. But when I see a big bird,

I'm like, my great great great grandpa saw the lost raptor you know and bob's your uncle yeah that's a great history lesson we just gave there yes uh so where things in the mothman there's some more sightings that come out after that because you know is, is in the newspaper. And now more people are seeing the Mothman. Where things kind of take a turn for the bizarre is in the following year, the Silver Bridge, which was this big suspension bridge that connected Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, Ohio, just across the river, collapsed, killing 46 people. It was a huge tragedy. It was, it was, it resulted in the establishment of the nation's first, like, national bridge inspection program.

Yeah. Because it is one of sort of the most sort of fatal accidents like this in American history. And thank God that exists. Yeah, fuck yeah. There's not a time where I drive over a bridge and I'm not like, this doesn't seem safe. So it makes me feel good to at least think somebody is in charge of that. And that person is the Mothman. So given the proximity of these two events, you know, big sort of national stories that happened in an otherwise pretty small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, they started

to kind of be connected, right? The most notable connector of these two events was an author named John Keel, who in 1975 wrote The Mothman Prophecies, which is a pseudo-investigative look into the Mothman and also aliens and also psychic alien telepathy powers and also prophecies it is a profoundly wild ride uh that in 2002 they made a movie out of starring richard gear uh called the mothman prophecies and let me tell you when this flick came out in west virginia it was a big fucking deal this is like we are marshall all over again we are marshall was a bigger deal on by several magnitudes yeah but when this came out in 2002 this was this was like everybody so you you remember this like i remember seeing it in theaters i was i was uh you would have been a young 15 16 years old yeah i guess yeah okay uh and it was it was pretty scary stuff man i mean it features a bridge collapse killing many people

at the end of the film. It was scary stuff. So what is the hypothesis here? That the Mothman broke the bridge? The basic premise? No. So this is important. This is important to mention. Okay.

The Mothman is basically the mythos as summarized. The Mothman is a herald of tragedy. That Mothman, much like the Silver Surfer surfer approaches planets pre-galactus like hey straight up it's about to get bad so it wasn't like him with big bolt cutters they thought like he had sabotaged no he's not fucking dennis the myth okay causing national bridge you understand though how like that would make more sense to me than the idea that he is a prophecy this is what's cooler me about – and this is what I like about the Mothman mythos is that he is not some monster going around fucking killing people indiscriminately. He's foretelling upcoming events. He is foretelling upcoming events.

So the basic premise of Kiel's book is that the Mothman is an alien with psychic powers who arrived in Point Pleasant, has appeared all over the earth and done these sorts of like foretellings in the past, but granted many people living in Point Pleasant visions of the future. Early edition. Early edition style. There is a similar bit of mythology that gets folded in here of a UFO sighting that happened like two weeks before the Mothman hit the scene in a town called Mineral Wells, West Virginia, where this guy just driving his truck down the road encountered a flying saucer

and a human-like entity calling itself Indrid Cold approached this guy and just kind of shot the shit for like 10 minutes. And how these two are associated is somewhat undetermined, right? But given, again, the proximity of these two events, there's people who are like, well, Indrid Cold is the physical manifestation of the Mothman. They're both aliens, et cetera, et cetera. But that is the big distinction, I think, between this and a lot of other cryptids, is that the Mothman will hit you up and say like, hey, stay frosty out there.

Maybe avoid this bridge on this specific date in 1967 and I will catch you on the flip side. That is very cool to me. That really appeals to me as like a quantum leap enthusiast that like the Mothman is just going around trying to put right what would potentially eventually go wrong right and he is also worth noting a flying red-eyed giant like there's so much about the aesthetic of the mothman that i think kicks complete ass and i just i love how much point pleasant has invested into this story and how much ownership sort of West Virginians feel about this, about this cryptid who, yeah, not Bigfoot, not one of the big heavy hitters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if you give the Mothman a chance, then you'll fall deeply in love just as much as I have. Yeah. And feature him in your actual play podcast one day. And, yeah. Is this an actual play podcast one day. And yeah. Is this an actual play podcast? No, I mean, the injured cold was a character in Amnesty.

The Mothman was a character in Amnesty. Oh, okay. So I tried sort of to tie those two together. I see. I just like the Mothman. Yeah, no, good guy. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about?

Yes. Colette says, my small wonders is uh when on rare evenings the moon comes up just looking enormous i'm talking vast like several times larger than it usually does i've never understood why that happens sometimes what's blender i wish i could answer that i'm sure there's a very clear i can answer it okay this is an illusion the moon is the same size when the moon is uh full and it does hit your eye like a big pizza pie. Yeah.

That is a moray. It is also an illusion because if the moon is big, if the moon, sorry, if the moon is full and near the horizon, it seems huge. Okay. If it's higher in the sky, your eye doesn't have as many like things to compare it to. Oh. That's all it is. Wow.

Thank you. You're welcome. I ruined things is. Wow, thank you. You're welcome. I ruin things for Colette, I worry. I mean, it's still pretty. It's still cool. Yeah. It's still cool.

I do like that too. I feel like it is something I note 100% of the time. If it's a full moon and we are outside and see the full moon 100% of the time, I'll be like, look at that big, beautiful moon. I feel like that would really warm the hearts of people in the past who like can't fathom the amount of technology we have but to know that people still talk about the moon yeah that would be nice to know moon yeah i mean a lot of people like look at that sunset we still talk about the sunset all the time sun the moon doesn't get as much credit as the sun

does that you're just this is my whole new whole new topic things i'm into mothman the moon crystals baby who knows who knows we'll talk about it next time um thank you so much for listening to the show please send us your small wonders at wonderful podcast at gmail.com uh we we things have been slowing down there and that's our own damn fault for not plugging that email just a few sentences just a couple sentences one to two sentences please if something that you're into this moon is good i like it moon is good big moon good why i don't know i like it though um thank you 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 um thank you maximum fun oh yeah i mean yeah of course thanks maximum fun for having

us on the network go to to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows there. And while you have your internet browser open, go to bit.ly slash Candle Nights 2023 and secure a ticket for our streaming spectacular. We have a pre-taped Candle Nights holiday special for you that has so much stuff in it. You're going to witness a real performance on my part.

You're going to witness some interpretive dance on my wife, Rachel McElroy's part. Yeah. That must be seen to be believed. It is amazing. I fell in love all over again. Oh, thanks. You can get a ticket. It's just $10 and all proceeds go to an organization in Huntington called Harmony House, which goes to help people experiencing homelessness.

It's an incredible organization that we've been working with for a very long time now. And this special is very – I mean special to us, and we work really hard on it. And it is genuinely touching every year to see how many people come out. So again, bit.ly slash Candlenights 2023. It's this Saturday, September, just September, Jesus Christ. Whoa. It's this Saturday, December the 16th

at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Come watch it, gather around. Who's to say Candlenights can't happen multiple times a year? You know, you guys made the rules. I think it's possible. It does take a long time to make this. True.

So I think we say that it can't. But it will be available for video on demand for a couple weeks afterwards, too, if you're not able to make it that Saturday. If you're somebody that does things on Saturday night. Yeah, sure. Like a cool guy. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next. Nick, sure. Like a person, like a cool guy. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next,

we will be back next week. Probably the week after that we will take off. Yeah, yeah. Our kids will be home and we're just going to be wilding out playing with all our new toys and stuff.

But next week we'll be back and we'll talk to you then. And thank you and have a good week and weekend. Go look at the moon. Go look at the moon. Go look at the moon. Right now.

Well, actually, I don't know. It may be waning. Later when you have a chance, look at the moon. Yeah. When you hear people talking about how big and nice the moon is, take a moment for the moon. Consider the moon, please. That should be our signature sign-off now. Consider the moon.

Consider the moon. I'm not sure what that means. It doesn't have to mean anything. It does sometimes, kind of, yeah. Money won't pay. Work it all. Money won't pay. Work it all. Money won't pay. Work it all. Money won't pay.

Work it all. Money won't pay. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.