Wonderful! - Wonderful! 423: This Year's Pie for Papa

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Rachel's favorite textured wallpaper!  large rotating drum with holes Griffin's favorite small-scene young female indie rock act! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Lambda Legal: https://lambdalegal.org/ Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinwonderful

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hey, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Welcome to Wonderful. It's a podcast. We talk about things we like that's good. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Griffin, dear husband, what are you upset about? I couldn't get the freaking video recording of this podcast to work for this episode. And I went and changed my shirt. And you look super cute. Thank you. So dang cute. And, but no one's ever going to know. No.

They were not going to believe me, babe. I look super hot and huge muscles. 6'3, built like a fucking truck. Wearing a vintage hooded sweatshirt. Vintage hooded sweatshirt. I'm here. Fucking Clooney's here, but he can't talk. But they'll never know because I couldn't get the GD video to work.

This clip is great. This clip would be huge. on TikTok. But it won't because I couldn't get the GD video to work and the narrow sliver of time we have to make this beautiful podcast again. It's just eating me up inside. I pivoted so hard

to video that I hate audio now. Oh no. I hate it. I hate this thing. Well, we watch a lot of YouTube to be fair. That's true. It makes sense that we would want everything to be on there for convenience. Yeah. When you pivot to video hard enough, you're unable to, you do a full 180, your neck

can't actually crane backwards far enough to see the audio just years and years behind you. That was a really confusing image for me. To see the audio. Yeah, no, I mean, there was a lot about it that didn't work. Do you, this is, but this is wonderful. We do talk about things we like. Do you have any small wonders? I am going to say that I, for the first time ever yesterday, made lip cream by hand.

And it was delightful. Yeah, Rachel made me a yummy strawberry pie for Papa's Day. It was, I don't know, one of the more quaint things you've ever done, I think. Every year on Father's Day, he says, what is the pie for Papa this year? Papa's got to have a slice on his special day. And I said, this year, it's strawberry pie. And I'm going to hand-make whipped cream. And I did.

And I can't imagine doing it with just a whisk. because at first I was like, maybe I'll do it that way. And then I was like, no, and never mind, I'll use a mixer. And even with a mixer, it took way longer than I expected it to. Yeah, but it was worth it. But it was incredible. These peaks were stiff as hell, gang. Such stiff peaks.

You could hang paintings on the wall with this cream. Well, that doesn't sound good. No, it doesn't. It was delightful, as was the pie, and I do appreciate you. I'm just going to say in general, my Father's Day was wonderful this year. Oh, good. You and the boys really came together. I imagine you did the lion's share of the actual effort in making it, but I had a wonderful little spa appointment in the morning.

Got a new croquet set and some flippy flops I'm super excited for. Gus was really into croquet. Yes, hitting balls with a hammer. I was not surprised that he is very enthusiastic about it. I was playing it with him and then he was struggling and then he said he didn't want to play the game anymore. So I don't know. Well, he just needs the touch.

I don't know if we're going to get another round, but he wanted to play a lot yesterday. The trick is to just wait because Henry's like a huge frisbee guy now because of that frisbee. If we just wait until they're old enough to achieve competence at it. But yeah, have me a great father's day.

Just a good time. Went to the mall. Got a big Lego set. So crowded at the, The mall was so crowded and it's always embarrassing to carry a huge Lego set in like a giant box through the mall because it's like, what are you doing carrying that big box? What do you do? Where did you get a big box at the mall? That's not what we do here.

There's no way to look cool. There's no way to look cool. Unless you, what have you carried it on your shoulder like a boom box? Yeah. I did appreciate the folks at the Lego store for putting my big Lego set in a big cardboard box so that I didn't have to show them. show them that it was the baradour tower from Lord of the Rings. Your pronunciation, I imagine. But they did write it on the box in Sharpie.

It did say baradour on the side of the box. Nobody knows what that is. That's true. That's true. You go first this week. I do. What do you want to talk about? This may have been a small wonder at some point.

I don't think so, though, because I didn't find it on our list. but it, gosh, I have to imagine we would have mentioned it. And it is bubble wrap. Yeah, dude. Boel wrap, I realized much like our children are cats, you know, in the way where you used to get like a box in the mail and you would just put it on the ground for the cat because you thought like, oh, cats love this. I feel that way about bubble wrap. Yeah. If we get a package with bubble wrap, I just like pull it out and put it on the floor and like scream like it's like the dinner bell.

Like, hey boys, bubble wrap. Bubble wraps here. Popping time. You say. And then especially in our kitchen on the wood floor, like, it's so loud and delightful for them. Yeah. And it just makes me feel like they're having like a timeless experience, you know? And as I've grown and older and more mature and wise, I also appreciate Bubblewrap for its fundamental purpose, which is protecting things in transit.

Well, you're already the expert. I don't even have to tell you anything, I guess, this week. Well, I'm sorry. Was I not supposed to know that you used bubble wrap for shipping things? It's just... Did I spoil the concept of bubble wrap? I don't have a whole lot to say about bubble wrap, and you took one of my big points, which was it's used for wrapping stuff. That's true.

Justin shipped me last year, a gaming handheld, one of the many, many ones that we have circulated. I don't even think it was last year. I think it was a few months ago, right? It was probably a few months ago. And he raw-dogged it for reasons beyond my comprehension. And that little soldier did not survive. You know what? If I know, Justin, maybe he was expecting to get some there.

Yeah. And they didn't have any. And he was like, well, I'm already here. Yeah. Maybe. So tell me everything. I don't know. Hey, babe, I don't know fucking anything about bubble wrap.

There you go. That's what I expect. I think if you squeeze it, it pops. But even that. How do we use this thing? How do we use this guy? So how I fell into this topic really was I really like when inventions are created for an entirely different purpose. And then they like stumble into what it actually ends up being used for.

Yes. And bubble wrap is one of those things. With bubble wrap, it was originally created in the late 1950s by two and two and who were trying to make 3D wallpaper. Awesome. It's two engineers. Alfred Fielding from New Jersey and Mark Chauvin, who's a Swiss engineer, sealed two shower curtains together with the idea that they were trying to figure out,

like, how do we make textured wallpaper? And they started by sealing two shower curtains together. Yes. I'll never understand how engineers because. the way they are. It's truly a completely different operating system that they're running. And I, it's marvelous to me. I'm so jealous of the, of the kind of mind that they have. But it's so, it's so alien to me. This may be confusing to people who are engineers. But in my day-to-day life, I don't think about inventing anything. I don't think about how stuff works,

unless I am confronted by that, by that information. Like we have to fix it or. Yeah. You're watching a YouTube video. Yeah. So not wallpaper. Okay. No interest in wallpaper. But they patented it and tried to come up with other uses for it because of that, like, that air bubble in between when they were like sealing it.

There's like, there's got to be something. They thought originally greenhouse insulation. Oh. Not a huge market for that. Was not successful, I guess. No. Do you think if we could travel back in time? and take some of our bubble wrap back to them and then pop it in front of them, they'd be like,

no, stop it. We worked really hard on that. Oh, like we must retain the bubbles. Yeah, do you understand how hard it was to make a bunch of little bubbles in these two shower curtains? Stop that. There was an interview in one of the articles I read with Alfred Fielding, one of his children, who was like, he brought it home and I couldn't help myself and I had to pop the bubbles. And he's like, so I tell people I'm probably the first child to ever pop bubble wrap. Oh, yeah. Because, yeah, it's irresistible. Yeah.

So I had to find out how it was made. So I watched a video. Okay. History of Simple Things was the platform. And so it's made of polyethylene, which is used in plastic bags and cling film. And it's put on like a belt, you know, kind of like a lot of industrial material. But the big, like, spinning wheel that it goes through has little holes indented in it. Oh, okay.

So one side goes through that and like a vacuum sucks the film into those little holes to create the pockets. And then when it comes out, a film is put on top of that. Okay. So that's how you get the air trapped in kind of a mass production way. I bet that video was really satisfying to watch. It's really good to watch. And, yeah, so it's a large rotating drum with holes. I find that a lot of the time when I wonder how a thing is produced, a lot of the time, I mean, not a lot of the time.

Every time it involves a large rotating drum with holes. I know. It's true. It's true. Most like candy and like crayons and all the stuff. You enjoy a skittal. You're like, how do these skittles hit? A large rotating drum.

with holes. That's the secret. Whoever invented the large rotating drum with holes is probably... Probably the world's greatest mind. Yeah, it's like penicillin. Yeah. Large rotating drum with holes. They couldn't have made penicillin without large rotating drums with holes.

I would say it goes wheel, which was arguably the precursor with its cylindrical kind of concept. And then we didn't really do much for several thousand years. Yeah. Then large rotating drum with holes. I love large rotating I know this about you So they founded sealed air corp Which I thought great name

Yeah You're sealing air That's exactly what you're doing Put it in the name In 1960 And then they hired a CEO 1971 Who said as his first day as boss

He received a report That listed 204 potential product applications for bubble wrap. Sure. 204. I love the idea of them just sitting down and being like, all right, bubble wrap, bubble wrap, what can we do with it? What can we do with it?

And one of them was pool cover. They made bubble wrap pool covers to help trap the heat in the water so that like you wouldn't, you know, the fluctuation of the temperature wouldn't be as bad. We've got to throw some of this over the old reflecting pool downtown, huh? That's, that ought to fix it all right up. I don't think the temperature is the issue with that one. I don't know. I haven't been, I don't, I don't get down to the reflecting pool often.

I didn't before it's renovations. But I so desperately want to fix it. I want to help. I want to be abuse. Everybody's down there like laughing and you're like, how can I help? Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's a, it sucks. Yeah. Like so many things he's done.

It sucks so bad. But I feel compelled to help do something about it. Maybe you go down. there with some pool skimmers. Yeah. You just start scooping. Thought about it. Yeah.

Be the change. It's not a river. You know what I mean? Like it's, there's just so much of it. You could clean that thing out. I don't understand what the big fucking deal is. Can I continue? Please.

So their first big client for bubble wrap was IBM. Because they were, you know, making their big computers and wanted to ship them around and didn't have like a really effective way to keep everything safe. Yeah. I also saw that the larger, the like bubble pocket is, like the better it is, obviously, like protecting shock. Yeah. And then the smaller is more for like, you know, like the full coverage of the fragile thing. Hey, IBM, I'm just thinking about it, is a pretty funny initialism. Just because it sounds like they're saying, they're saying like that they poop.

I've never thought about that once in my life. You know, I don't think I have either. It's good, right? I mean, kind of. This shows about things that are good that we like. And I think it's cool to call them out when we see them. I don't want that kind of thing to be stuff we talk about every week. You're right.

We get enough of that in our household. That's very true. Do our boys, I'm going to ask you this on air. Cool. Do our boys talk about farts the same or more than you remember boys talking? I love that less was not an option. No, because it's constant, it feels like. Do you remember as a child having like daily multiple times a day conversations about farts?

No. But I don't know. Dad was pretty strict. Oh, yeah. It's so impossible to imagine. Yeah, yeah, because it was impossible to happen. Okay, so I will just finish by saying, obviously, plastic, not great for the environment. the latest reinvention of bubble wrap

is made with at least 90% recycled content. Okay. Is there a reason? What's that extra 10, I wonder? What rare earth metals are required in the... I mean, the way bubble wrap is, it lasts for a long time. Like, that air pocket is pretty tightly sealed. Like, you have to get pretty old or pretty damaged bubble wrap for those bubbles not to pop.

And so I imagine, like, they have to use... some kind of durable material that is not recyclable for that last time. I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know anything about products, really, and how they're created. Anyway, we definitely recycle it in this house. Sure. Another thing I saw online is like an art project where you like paint the little bubbles

and then you kind of can push it down like a stamp on paper. I've seen that too. That one's good too. I do like that. Anyway, bubble wrap. Bubble wrap. There's nothing it can't do. Can I steal you away?

Yes. I want to talk about a musical artist that I discovered about a week ago that I am so excited about, if you can't tell, from the tone of my voice, been listening to her stuff nonstop. It's Francis of Delirium, which we listened to a bit of in the car. And I sent you a couple links. I don't know if you had time to check them out or not. I did. Yeah, super cool.

It's the shit, man. It's like so, so completely up both our alleys. Yeah. I realize we have a tendency to flood the wonderful zone. so to speak, with like young female indie rock acts, but, uh, God help me. Got to talk about Francis and Delirium. It's kind of our taste. Yeah, I guess so. I think Spotify just clocked the fact that I got us tickets to the snail male soccer mommy like doubleheader show coming through town later this year. And they were like, we got to pump this Algo with as many

like acts as we possibly can. And wow, they got us dead to rights. So Francis of Delirium is a A singer-songwriter, her name is Yana Barich, and she's from Luxembourg, which is a country that I don't know anything about. It's small. It's quite small. Yeah. I do know that. If you look at it on a map of Europe with all the countries sort of outlined, you think, like, there's been a mistake. There's something's gone terribly wrong.

Something happened in one of the countries kind of just like broke off a little bit. Spit out another country. Which is maybe what happened. I don't know anything about Lux's work. Or it's history. It's fun to say. It's awesome to say. Her shit is just so high energy, just shredding all the time.

I've been listening to it nonstop. And I want to start by playing a little bit of my favorite song of hers called It's a Beautiful Life. This one's off of her new album, Run, Run, Pure Beauty, which just dropped like a few weeks ago. So this one's hot off the presses, folks. This is, it's a beautiful life. There's in the kitchen with the scissors. Cut a head off turn and left the apartment just a little, we'll do the drive so damn close to pushing daisies, man.

I think this heat makes me crazy. All alone stuck in my room scrolling through how. It's a beautiful. There's so much to love there, man. It's so like high energy, like stream of consciousness kind of songwriting, which I'm always a fan of. and it just propels itself forward for like the whole span of the song. I love that squealing like guitar riff over the over the whole chorus is so rad.

Her voice is like so expressive, uh, which is, you know, suits, suits the, the lyrics so, you know,

well because it's all sort of vulnerable, uh, songs about love and young love in particular. Uh, and, you know, despite how vulnerable it is, it's also like super duber catchy.

and all of that stuff is true of like most of the 11 tracks that are on this album. It's so good. It is a no skipper. Just wild about it. So Yana Baric was actually born in Canada and her family relocated to Luxembourg, which, again, don't know anything about. In an interview with Slumber Mag, she was talking about moving to Luxembourg when she was a child, and she said, I have biked to Belgium. It's that close. If you go to four shows here, you've met everyone in the Luxembourgish scene, which is kind of nice.

It's easy to get to know each other and feel the love. The best part as a fan is that someone like Lucy Dacus will come and it's a 10-person show. You're guaranteed a great spot. It can't be great for her, but as a fan, it's incredible. Which I really love. I really struggled to find like a ton of stuff about Francis of Delirium because, you know, she's a fairly new, fairly small act. but I found out like a Reddit AMA that she did talking about like she wasn't stoked to move to Lexenborg with her parents, but they moved around quite a lot,

but that she's like really settled in there and found her sort of cultural niche. And apparently it's like one of the bigger kind of indie acts to come out of the country. So she grew up playing French horn and then took up the banjo specifically to learn a specific song called Foggy Mountain Breakdown, which is just a ripping banjo tune. And I find that fact immensely relatable. Buying an instrument and learning to play it just to learn how to play a single song is like that's a goal that I find, I don't know, like one I have definitely pursued many times in my life. And there's also like some wild like brass instrumentation. I don't know if there's any banjo on the new album.

But she cites a lot of different acts as influences. Pearl Jam is a big one. but the one that she credits most that I've seen in all the interviews I read from her and this Reddit AMA for like her songwriting and her instrumentation is Sufion Stevens. Which is really interesting to me because I wouldn't have clocked that at first. But there's like the arrangements on this album, it's really fascinating because it will move between like absolute thrashers. Like it's a beautiful life to songs that are more kind of like, I don't know, instrumentally. varied and orchestral in nature. But I also think there's something to like the stream of consciousness sort of songwriting that she does that also feels very very suffion coded.

Yeah, I listen to this whole album, man. Dude, yeah, I listened to it front to back today while I was getting this segment ready. This is only her second album. Her first album came out two years ago. It was called Lighthouse, which was more, I didn't finish listening to the whole thing, but it seemed like more of a sort of straightforward like indie rock coming of age. album that got tons of great reviews. Like it was very much a darling. And she started touring after doing that and putting on these apparently kick-ass high-energy shows, which I would love to go to. I think she's coming through in November. If we can secure tickets to that, I think it would be a

pretty kick-ass show. But on that album, Lighthouse, a lot of the songs are, you know, also about love through the lens of someone in that kind of like early adulthood transitory period. And I found another quote from her in an interview that reminded me a lot of what snail mail said when you did when you covered snail mail and uh her album lush i always forget her actual name i think it's lindsay jordan but i i'm never confident in that uh talking about sort of writing songs from a just about young love and how you just got to kind of commit to the bit and go for it here yane abarich said there's a purity to the love songs of the album they feel youthful in their presentation like there's no trick or sense of being jaded it felt important to commit to the feeling and to have hope in what love can give you,

even if it doesn't work out. That kind of just like earnestness is just all over that album. It's all over this one too. And it's such a rad, just cathartic thing full of emotion and bangers. Like this other song that I'll close out with called Little Black Dress. That's Francis of Delirium. Get there. Get on board.

do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Zander says, My wonderful thing is spotting bus drivers waving at each other. I take the bus around town a lot and always makes me smile, seeing two buses cross paths on their routes because the drivers almost always share a little greeting. That's good. That is good.

That is good. I have to imagine that when you're a bus driver, the street is your workplace. And those are your coworkers, the other bus drivers. Well, I remember seeing a lot of like changeover. Yes. Like people ending their shift and like somebody waiting at the stop to take it over. Yeah, that's cool too. Yeah.

I like the when you ride the boats at Disney World to go to the Magic Kingdom Park and you see the ferry drivers that give each other a little wave. Well, that's totally different. I mean, that's sea life. That's sea life. You're right. I shouldn't compare street life and sea life because it's two completely different things. Not the sea. definitely definitely definitely not the sea lake

buena vista is not it's pretty far from oceanic in nature i was being more great lake life yeah uh Ashley says my small wonder is when I pour the exact number of pills I need to fill my weekly pill organizer into my hand without counting it feels like a small superpower especially when it's in a pill you need more of more than one of per day I feel like we've done this one before I feel like maybe we have two I've just got I have pills on the mind. I just got a pill cutter. And it's a special machine you put your pills into to cut them in half if you need to change your dosage on a thing. And man alive, nothing better than lining up a little row of these guys. And then there's a little wheel. These two rubber stoppers push them together. And then a blade perfectly cuts them in half. I got to see this thing. And you got to. And it affects the math of what Ashley's talking about here. It does affect them because there's only seven days in a week. And it's very difficult to split a number and get. seven as a result. Or I guess to multiply a number.

Seven is, there should be a word for a number that is not divisible by any other number but itself. It feels like math should have come up with something like that already as a prime number. I do enjoy this a lot. No, because what, I mean, I have to do that with the boys allergy medicine and I just leave the other half on the counter for the next day. And you just trust that no one's going to pick it up. and smash it. I think about it sometimes. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, I see there are little children's claritin that you've got cut in half because Gus can't handle of, he can't, are you kidding me? He's not six yet. He's not six yet. He can only take a, we're micro-dosing him on children's claritin.

But I bet it works up for adults too. Probably wouldn't do any harm for me to pop the children's claritin. No, I don't. But I take enough medicine. So why are you forcing this on me? I'm really, really vamping here because we got through both of our segments fairly quickly, and I want to provide our friends

at home with at least one half hour of quality entertainment. So I'll take- This is why I was so mad when you jumped to the big reveal on my bubble wrap. I fucked it all up. And I'm so, I am really, really sorry about that. It's going to be like, hey, did you know this thing is for wrapping packages so that they can mail safely? And but you just started there. I ruined. I ruined everything. So thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Bowen and Augusta for the use of our theme song, money won't pay. You find a link to that in the episode description. Thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Go to Maximumfund.org. Check out all the great stuff they've got going over there. For the rest of the month of June, we got some merch in the merch store over at Macquariemerch.com. We got a, you're going to be amazing shirt inspired by Taz Balance. Got some Make It Stick, sticky notes, a bunch of great stuff over there. The last Adventure Zone graphic novel,

the Adventure Zone story and song, comes out, very, very soon, just a few weeks away at this point, and you can pre-order it at theadventurezone com. It's getting close. If you think you're going to read it, pre-ordering helps us out so much. It helps us a great deal, helps, you know, booksellers know how much of our book to order, which is a major, major thing. So think about that if you're going to pick it up. And also, if you live in the sort of Boston area, or I guess specifically Medford, Massachusetts, It's we're doing an event for the book launch on July 16th at the Chevalier Theater, which I found out from someone today who lives there.

That's what they call it and not the Chevalier Theater. Okay. I was wondering about that. Yeah, I've been, but I'll probably just keep saying it the wrong way because it's fun to say it that way. I wanted to say also, well, you kept referencing video content. Yeah. It's on the Instagram, right?

Is it on TikTok too or just Instagram? Is what? When they do little video clips of our video. Oh, yeah, it's TikTok. It's Instagram. Oh, it is TikTok. It's all of it. Yeah.

I just wanted to slip that in again. No, that's not true. But I just want to say if you are curious and have not seen the video stuff, it's on Macquarie family Instagram page. Go follow the Macroy family on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. We stream almost every day on YouTube doing a lot of gaming stuff. Again, and when he says we, he means him and his brothers. Yes, but the shorts for Wonderful are also on there. So put that in your.

pipe and smoke it. I just don't want people to think like I'm going to log on and see Rachel. Rachel hates video games so much. Splatoon live. That's a poll. That's a great poll. Thank you. I started doing a new video series called Every Game Ever where I make a giant fucking spreadsheet of every video game I've ever played. It's an ambitious undertaking and it's been a lot of fun so far. That's on every Friday. But yeah, follow Macroy Entertainment System if you want to follow our gaming stuff and you know follow macroy family on instagram and ticot to get those great clips of us um being so in love in a visual format not this one though not this one not this episode they won't catch this one there why are we even still doing this dang thing let's wrap it up

this is we're wasting we're wasting this and that i'm pointing towards our faces yeah they look so good right now. And George Clooney, poor George Clooney, that really thought he was going to get his break on this one. Say something, dude. I'm getting so tired of this fucking handsome gargoyle. Purched on my, perched on my shelf over my shoulder. Maximum Fun. A Worker Own Network of Artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.