Wonderful! - Wonderful! 386: Coming Back to Hooty-Hoo

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Griffin's favorite little fun breaks from frustrating RPGs! Rachel's favorite Napoleon-loved grocery store staple!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaWorld Central Kitchen: https://wck.org/

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Welcome to Wonderful. It's a podcast where we talk about things we like that is good and are good and that we're into all of them. Uh, here this week, a very normal episode, recorded at a normal time. And under perfectly normal circumstances, I feel like it's been a while before we've really been able to step up to the plate and give the people what they expect, what they... Consistency. Consistency has been lacking here at Wonderful Co. And I will be the first to admit it. But this one's going to be rock solid.

Griffin and I are wearing shirts and pants. We're sitting on chairs. We're talking into microphones. No alarms, no surprises, as Radiohead once said. Did you know, I feel like the teens have really discovered Radiohead in a big way. I know you're probably not. This isn't anything I know. No, but like I feel like the number of TikToks that I see that have got Radiohead in them, it's like good for you guys.

Like, okay, computer, get it. I am so grateful for TikTok now Because it used to be When you would tell me about things on the internet That I had never seen or heard I used to think like where is Griffin going on the internet It doesn't make sense that he knows all these things that I don't know Yeah

But now like I can very clearly say oh TikTok TikTok. TikTok is where he's going And it's where the and it's where the children are going And they're learning about kid A And I'm so excited for them to go on this journey Yeah I remember when I learned about radio head for the first time when I saw him live at Bonaroo while I was positively racked with acute prostititis.

It was one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life, folks, which is a testament to the small wonder, just radio head in general, I guess. Do you have a small wonder? Mine's going to be different. I'm always, I'm always distracted when you talk about your Bonarue experience. Oh, yeah. About your illness. Yeah. And how terrible that must have been.

It wasn't great. The car ride home was especially laborious. To be in like a hot, dusty, dirty area with a bunch of other young people. I mean, I guess at the time you were also a young person, so maybe that wasn't as terrible. Well, that actually made the prostititis sort of extra embarrassing, I would say. I would never shame anyone going through that, walking that particular journey on that particular path. But it was, I did struggle with it. I'm being really vulnerable right now.

You are. A lot of people say I don't open up and I'm pretty closed off. I think I'm pretty vulnerable, specifically when I talk about my bonnery prostate. Well, specifically about your medical illnesses. Yeah. I would say a lot of people know more about your medical history than I think, you know, doctors. Yeah, it would really help me fast track with a lot of medical specialists. If I could just say, like, are you a fan?

Because if so, like, we could skip through a lot of the bullshit. You're familiar with my various ailments that I've had. in different parts of the country. Yeah, absolutely. Small wonder. Yeah. We found a new noodle spot that we got some noodles from the other day and really, really grooved on it.

Got some vermicelli noodles with some roasted pork up on there and some other stuff. And it's so exciting. It's always exciting when you get a new sort of restaurant in the Rolodex of like staple places. But to get a noodle spot, I don't know. We haven't tried the. other stuff. Maybe the ramen is bunk, but it's a promising start for this noodle establishment. So I'm just going to say noodles.

No, that is exciting. Yeah. That is exciting because our neighborhood is not flush with restaurant options. No. And this one has been long coming. And so we're excited to have something new because we definitely do order out for food more often than we would like to admit. Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, that should have given me enough time, huh?

You got so excited to think about noodles. I do not blame you, hon. I got brown bananas right now. Shit, man. Small sun has gotten really into baking with me. Yeah, I love it. And I got those brown bananas, and so I know that I will have an activity to do with him this weekend,

which is making banana chocolate soup muffins. God dang, they're the best, babe. Which our boys both really like, and they are very picky boys, and the fact that both of them like them is exciting for me. I'm not a picky boy. I'm a cultured man with taste in a refined palate, and they are still my favorite muffins.

So these are top. You could quit the podcast and grant writing industries, and you could go full-time banana chocolate chip muffin if you wanted to. That is something similar to what Large Sun has said to me. You could sell these at market. He was like, you could sell these. If you went to the farmer's market and you set down a chair, and you just held a half dozen of these beauties in your lap,

and you said five bucks a pop, I think you would make $30. These are not very large muffins, $5? They're so good, babe. I think you could demand $5 for these. You give out free samples, then you say if you want the real shit, five bucks. I mean, the recipe's just from food.com.

I didn't do anything magical with them. Well, don't say that, babe. Okay. You've just completely undercut your whole thing. Now you're going to have competing banana chocolate chip muffins. Sorry, if you want to make it. make them. It's from food.com.

Food.com is such a kick-ass place to get a recipe from. I know. I bet they felt really good about securing that domain. What a beautiful era that must have been when that website was established in like the internet's history where it was like, I got an idea. People are going to want to go on the internet about food. Let's snack. I got music.com.

They probably typed in like food website.com and they were like, wait. Wait, that's crazy. Let's just try food. I mean, it seems unlikely, but let's just try food.com. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if it was like, did you hear the new Taylor album? You got to go to music.com because that's the website that music is at. Yeah.

How simple, beautiful. That would be and monopolistic and perfect. I go first this week. Yes. I would love to talk about mini games, many games, the little games. The little games that sometimes happen inside of bigger games. they don't sometimes there's just a little game somewhere sometimes it's on a phone game that you're playing on your phone all of a sudden you're playing a different little game on your phone for a

little bit sometimes it's in the middle of a big japanese role-playing game no matter the form I like a mini game I was wondering if there was like a definition for this like what makes something it's blurry the definition is because these things can pop up in different contexts and I'll go into those but I would just describe it as like a game that is um you know profoundly different from the rest of the game within which it is contained um so that covers a wide variety of things i have a tendency to replay old like role playing games on all these retro consoles that i keep acquiring uh and i think it's the hallmark of like a great RPG if it has like a bunch of extra little stuff that you can do in it whenever you get bored or frustrated with

of the story, like Final Fantasy, all those will include, like, a card, a collectible card game you can play as you're going about your quest. Stardu Valley has some fun ones with the, I don't know if you ever spent enough time playing with, like, the Junimo cart and the Prairie King, like, little shooter that you could play at the arcade and, uh, yeah, I didn't really get into those. No, you were all about the money. You couldn't take a second away from here. Can I tell you, I don't, because I played that in Animal Crossing in like, such a tight time frame. Yeah.

I have a really hard time remembering much about Stardy Valley. Yeah. I don't blame you. I mean, I do, but that's just because I've played it many, many times over. Animal Crossing is a good example. The original one on GameCube, you could find, like, at Nooks shop, NES cartridges, and then you could just play those classic NES games or, like, little bits of those NES games, which was crazy.

They never did that again with any of the later Animal Crossing games. But I would say that technically qualifies when you, in... include a whole old game. The new Wolfenstein games, for example, have a little secret Easter egg where you can go and play all of Wolfenstein 3D, like the classic one if you find that Easter egg. So any game that's smaller than the game that contains it that is different from the game that contains it is, I would call a mini game. And I don't know, man, like if it is designed well enough, I am not sort of averse to playing

a minigame longer than the game that it is wrapped up inside. There's a series called Yakuza Like a Dragon that some of my favorite games of the last like 10 years have been in this series and they are very famous for having a bunch of big mini games. The most recent game included basically Animal Crossing. Like you built a resort island and defended it from like trash pirates, which wasn't necessarily Animal Crossing like, but the rest of it was. And There's a mode where you go around collecting and training and battling perverts like Pokemon. Like they're like perverts, but they're collectible perverts like Pokemon.

It's a weird game, man. But the game, the mini games themselves are so, like, rich and detailed and deep that probably more than half my playtime playing that game was spent doing these other little side diversions. And it's also good when, like, and I think phone games do this a lot, like, when the mini game feeds back into the main game like if you play this little mini if you do enough chocobo racing and final fantasy seven you're going to get like equipment that's way stronger than anything you've got right now or on your phone like oh you can get a bunch of this currency if you go in and do this

fishing mini game in the middle of this like you know twin stick arena shooter that has no reason being in there uh that's especially liable to to get its it's hooks in me and get them in there real bad. But I also enjoy an idle time-waster minigame, too. Back when I was playing EverQuest a very long time ago, that's a very slow game with lots and lots of waiting. There was a secret, like, Tetris-like mini-game. If you knew what to type in, you could play.

It was called gyms. So you'd be, like, waiting for some monster to spawn and just playing this very rudimentary Tetris, which probably should have been evidence that I was wasting my time and potential by spending so much time playing EverQuest that I needed a second, even more boring game to play while I was playing EverQuest.

Where this definition gets blurry is when you start talking about a Mario Party. Because a Mario Party is only mini-games. Yeah, it is mini-games. It is only mini-games bound by this board game sort of structure. And I have fallen wildly out. of love with this series. But I did really, really like it a lot when I was a kid. I would spend

a lot of weekend mornings into afternoons playing like 30 round matches with my brothers, which took absolutely forever. And the idea of a game that was just kind of like these little mini games that would last 15, 20, 30 seconds, and then you're done and off to the next thing was so novel that I just really, really, really got into it, despite. the fact that they were all smaller pieces of a much larger really bad, really unfair sort of board game experience on top of this. There's also a version of this I don't love, which is like the mandatory mini game that you have to do over and over and over again, like in Skyrim. Anytime you pick a lock, you have to do a little mini game that stops being fun after like the third time

that you do it. But when it's well designed and there's like reasons to play it, I just love of a mini game that can pop in there and tickle your fancy, break up the monotony a little bit. I was looking up the history of minigames. The game that is widely credited with introducing the concept was a Commodore 64 game from 1984 called Lazy Jones. And in Lazy Jodes, you play as Lazy Jones, who works at a hotel, and he has to go from room to room, doing all these different duties as his job as, I guess, hotel manager. And each of the rooms would have a different little mini game that was.

basically like a really stripped down version of games of that era like Space Invaders and Frogger and Snake I've never played it but it sounds like a very novel concept for like an 8-bit eerie game but yeah that's all I really have to say about many games I've been thinking about them a lot because I've been playing I've been getting a lot of these old retro consoles

and playing a lot of those old games and I realize now that I have a lot of fondness for those games but I also have a lot of fondness for like little secret bonus games that live deep inside them. Is this anything that you have played? No, I mean, my farming game that I play has many games in it. I've noticed sometimes you'll be playing that game and I'll look over and then you'll be like matching gems.

Wait a second. Where did that come from? I know. It doesn't make any sense. There's this whole side plot where you're working your way through this map and in order to get through it, you have to get through these little gem matching levels. I have no idea what it has to do with the farming. But you can, like, earn stuff in the gem matching that you can use in the farming.

Hell yeah. It doesn't make any sense to me. But it doesn't need to. But it passes time while, you know, I'm waiting for my, you know, plants to grow. Yeah, sure. I love that. That's a perfect example of many games, which I love. Can I steal you away?

Yes. Okay. My thing this week is rotisserie chicken. Oh, baby. Yes. When you come home from the grocery store and you've got a rotisserie chicken, it's like... What is the feeling for you? For me, great feeling because I know, one, I'm about to eat rotisserie chicken. That's very exciting. Two, it just seems like a wild thing to bring home from the grocery store.

A whole cooked chicken. Yeah. Like, I don't get a lot of other whole cooked stuff from the grocery store. They don't really offer most of them whole cooked things. But for whatever reason, we have standardized chickens to be rotisserie prepared. It feels fancy to me. It does kind of feel a little fancy. It feels like a real, like, refined, like, dinner choice.

I don't know how to herb up a chicken in the way that they do it. You know what I mean? And so it feels like a chef's touch. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that you couldn't really. replicate at home very easily. I mean, the only time I have a lot of experience eating, like, an entire bird is, like, a Thanksgiving turkey. Yeah.

And, like, obviously, that just happens once a year. Yeah. But the fact that any day I want, I could go to a grocery store and bring home, like, a rotisserie chicken is wild. It's really, really too much power. Um, which is interesting because, like, uh, I didn't come upon a rotissory chicken. And I mean, I don't know that I bought one until I was, like, in my late 20s. I mean, I don't think I would have had the finances to buy one until I was in my late 20s at the earliest.

They're not expensive, honey. I mean, compared to, you know, ramen or, like, the dollar menu at Wendy's. Oh, I'm going to blow your mind here, honey. Okay, I can't wait to hear it. But part of the reason that I'm not familiar with it is that it didn't really become popular in the United States until the 80s. That doesn't surprise me. Which explains it. And really, like, widely across the United States until the 90s, which makes a little bit more sense now because I was just like, was I just living my whole childhood without rotissory chicken and everybody else was enjoying this delicious tree.

Yeah. And we said, don't tell Rachel. we said we don't want the competition for these guys is going to get fierce we don't need you know newcomers to add to the lineup on a Saturday morning at the grocery store I would love to see if we could get our children into a rotissory chicken I mean probably not they don't love things where they look like the animal no nor do I particularly I'm willing to forgive a rotissory chicken if I could make a chicken muffin. I bet the boys would be into it. Babe, I bet you could actually crush that. It may sound

gross on the tin, but like it's just like a chicken sandwich, sort of. It's just a different shape, huh? I don't like thinking about where the chicken goes in it. No, me neither. Okay, so the idea of like bringing home a rotisserie chicken started from a little restaurant that we know as Boston Market. Okay. That clears up a lot of shit for me. That one sentence. I've never, I feel like Boston Market's one of those things that I just started seeing commercials for when I was an adult. And they're like, the oldest in the game. I was like, I don't fucking know you, Boston Market. I mean, it started in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Yeah. In 1985. And their whole thing was Routis Reaching. Well, it used to be called Boston Chicken. Just a Boston chicken?

No, the restaurant was called Boston Chicken. Oh, I mean, that's pretty good. Like, they specialized very precisely in this item. Yeah. I think, I'm not sure exactly when they switched to Boston Market. But, yeah, this whole establishment got its roots founded in the rotisserie chicken. Yeah. I'm trying to think if I've ever eaten Boston Market.

Boston Market is not something I had until I was older. And I remember that also feeling fancy to me, says a lot about me. Yeah, for sure. I felt that way about Shlaskis, too. Schlotsky's deli is, I mean, compared to a subway, it's a fucking, fancy. Really, really, really, really fancy stuff.

God, I destroy some Schlosskies right now. One of them little pizzas. This is what puts on that green togasco. This is what really connects us to the people, Griffin. I feel like. I don't think love of Schlotsky's deli makes you connected to much of anyone. No, I'm saying for us to sit here and talk about these like national chains as fancy, I think reminds people that you and I were not, you know. I mean, shit, man, like not a joke. Schlazky-Stelly was among the more upper crust sort of fast casual dining establishments in Huntington, West Virginia in the years, I don't know, 1997 on.

For those of you that may have forgotten now that Griffin and I live in the big city, we are both from, you know. you love to lump us together saying we're from small towns and you know it drives me crazy i'm from missouri though you're from missouri Missouri is not that different than west virginia and you are from a city that has a huge metropolitan area and three major sports teams national sports teams that's true i know that st louis is not huntington but i'm just saying that i as a uh missouri girl yeah not thinking that i am that much better or different than someone from west and i appreciate that. Yes. Because you know how like intense about class I am. Okay. So 80s Boston Market, rotissory chicken. By the 90s, grocery chains like Costco and

Kroger started selling rotisserie chicken. What was the price? Can you give me a price check on a rotisserie chicken in the 80s? This is what I was telling you about when you were talking about how expensive it was. So the big famous rotissory chicken is Costco. Costco's rotissory chicken is $4.99. Now. Now. That seems pretty good.

Costco's rotissory chickens have been priced at $4.99 since 2009. And they have kept it at that price. I have not checked this recently. This article that I am looking at, though, is from 2025. So I'm assuming that, yeah, I'm assuming they are still $4.99. That's weird, though, because Costco's weird about their prices where they're like, we'd sooner die. They'll charge you more for these hot dogs. I know.

It's one of those things that like chains identify as a loss leader. So this idea that somebody's going to come in for a roast hitch three chicken and then ultimately buy 40 other things. So that's why they continue to keep it at that price. And apparently they just leave it out for two hours on the shelf. And throw it right in the garbage can. But yeah, it's still like an incredibly popular item, and that's why they continue to kind of push it the way that they do. Well, it's this, it's the smell of it, isn't it? Because you're walking through Costco, and maybe you'll get a Sanpilino here or there.

But then you turn the corner, and then there's a beautiful, aromatic, erbid, erbid chicken. Yeah. Hot, wafting, hot and wafting and ready for you? That's crazy. I know. It feels, it just feels like they're, they're so beautiful. Yeah. And I've never had a bad rotisserie chicken. I think I've probably had a bad rotisserie chicken. My, my problem is when they get really wet. Like when they show up and they're just like really, really, really wet. That's not my, that's not my favorite. Yeah, I mean, that is the thing when they cool off. And if you put it in the fridge. I don't love a rotissory chicken like after it has been cooled and then you try and warm it up the next. No, yeah, rarely will it survive. It's not an overnight stay. But the whole thing with rotissory chicken, you know, it's like cooked on like a spit using direct

heat and then the chicken is like right next to another chicken and all the drippings from the chicken above it and below it like coat. And they spin them, right? The one near it. Yeah. And I mean, they rotate. That is where the rotisserie comes. I have a very sharp image in my mind of a late-night infomercial about like a home rotisserie roaster that was a big. Like I'm seeing, I'm closing my eyes. I'm seeing Suzanne Summers. She's there. She's helping.

I think I'm, I feel like I'm seeing Ron Popil and I think he's there. Did he invent it? I don't know. I remember the name. I don't remember the face. Can you imagine having that appliance in your kitchen for that? like that's it's only use yeah and it's a lot it's got to be a large appliance yeah to like purchase that and to have it take up such a significant portion of your cabinet space yeah uh sometimes

rotisserie chickens are like injected with brine um that's the wet sometimes too much sometimes yeah sometimes too sometimes too sometimes too um i don't i don't have a whole whole lot more to say about rotisserie chickens. They've been around obviously a lot longer. I just talked about their kind of their big popularity of bringing them home. Apparently Napoleon was a big fan of rotissory chickens. Damn. So like the whole idea of cooking chicken while it's rotating is not like a new thing. I'm more talking about like like the idea of going to pick one somewhere. The grocery store staple. And bring it at home. Yeah. Yeah. I love it when they have their own little place at a at a grocery store. They have their own little hot box.

Their own little ship that they're all sailing on. I know. And it always excites me. I always think about it. I rarely will spring for it, but I always see them. And I'm like, that's it. You've tempted me. A lot of times if I want to make a chicken pot pie and I don't feel like doing all the work of like preparing the chicken, I will just get one of those and I'll shred it up.

A sandwich? Grab a couple Kaiser rolls. Yeah. Oh, fuck yeah, dude. Hey, hey, can we? Hey, babe, I've been so good, can we? Let's go chicken chopping. Hey, do you want to know what our friends at home?

are talking about. Yes. Courtney says, I'm shopping in a big store and keep hearing two adults calling Marco Polo to find each other and I think that is great. Only problem is that I have to fight

every urge to yell Polo myself. Hootie Whoo. Hootie Who is where I immediately came back to. Carla, I think, was her name. Top Chef. Had that system of finding her husband in a grocery store. I love it.

I love a call and response. A utilitarian call-and-response sort of inside joke situation. No, we would never. I would never. I can't imagine. What would you do? What would you do if I was like- I would do the Hunger Games whistle?

No, if I, if I just like full volume, just like shout it out. Who do you? I would text you, hey, I'll catch an Uber home. You take the car. I can't be seen next to you. I simply can't. Maria says With emotion by Carly Ray Jebson

Turning 10 I've been re-listening to it And has brought me so much joy To rediscover one of my favorite albums Oh my gosh, that makes sense! What a fucking trip. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense because our friend Pete was talking about how it had been

like 10 years recently And that was a big song at the wedding Yeah, of course. At his wedding. Yeah, I feel... That's where the good sax boy photo came from Oh, is that? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, she very famously has some great sax bits. Yeah, those of you that are old, old school Rose Buddies listeners may remember that there is, was a photo of Griffin doing some air sacks from a wedding to that song.

10 years ago. And a lot of people turned it into a drawing challenge. Oh, of the runaway with me sex, sex boy challenge. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if she's put out like a, you know, Carly's version, like extended cut of emotion, but it's been a while, man. It's been a while since I've dipped in. I think it's probably time. It's also time for us to wrap up. Thanks to Bowen and Augustus for these for theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. You can go to Maximumfund.org. check out all the great stuff we have over there. Still running our back-to-school sale over at Macroymerch.com, get you some discounted backpacks and whatnot. It's probably be the last week, right? Because when August is over? I assume so.

I assume we're going to be putting some new stuff up in September also. Hey, if you live in Atlanta or around Atlanta, we're going to be doing my brother, my brother, and me, the Adventure Zone, and some other panels and stuff. But DragonCon, the shows aren't associated with DragonCon. You can just come see those, whatever. But then we are doing a bunch of stuff. For attendees of DragonCon, you can find tickets and get all the info at bit.ly slash

Macroy Tours. And then there's more Mbimbams and Tas is coming up later in the year. You can find tickets for those as well there. I think that's it. Thank you so much for listening. Told you it was going to be a straight across the plate one. I feel like nothing unpredictable. no big twists no big turns oh wait rachel's whoa holy shit rachel's sprouting feathers she's

anamorphing what the fuck she's turning into a big bird yes whoa and you think there'd be a sound she'd make you think she'd make a sound when she became a big bird but nope it's wow what a crazy episode Maximum Fun A Worker-owned network Of artist-owned shows Supported directly by you