Wonderful! - Wonderful! 69: The Billy Crystal Cube

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

Griffin's favorite pretty substance! Rachel's favorite extra moniker! Griffin's favorite upbeat choral band! Rachel's favorite indescribable thing! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya 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. We were just talking about Kingdom kingdom hearts like literally seconds before we started recording which is very exciting for me anytime i get to sort of pull you into my world which is kind of appropriate that's what the game's about this is a podcast where we talk about things we like it's just great it's what the game's kind of about you know this anime boy is now in the winnie the pooh right it's him and you know 100 acre wood he's hanging out with winnie

the pooh is it does it feel like when Disney characters are incorporated that it is done so in a way that is thoughtful to the integrity of the Disney character? Or is it more about the anime characters and then occasionally like Tigger shows up? The latter. The latter by an enormous, enormous degree.

My first small wonder is actually the dog man Goofy. I like his work in general we watch a lot of mickey based programming henry's like it's the only thing henry likes uh he loves the mickey universe more than he loves his parents and that's fine like well we haven't done as much for society as they have and goofy's there and he's always putting in the work he's always there trying to you know earn a buck and henry pronounces it gushy gushy which is always great it's fun um and i mean the goofy movie can't beat that and obviously like nobody thought he could

carry his own vehicle but he did and then he tried it again it wasn't as good because he went to college and whatever but in kingdom hearts you get to hear goofy say things like well gosh zayhan or tried to pull winnie the Pooh into a darkness corridor. So you started playing the game? Oh, yes. Gosh, Kairi's heart was almost corrupted in the data cube. And these are not two. Gosh, Buzz Lightyear's going to get turned into a nobody when his heart is absorbed by ultimate darkness.

Is he like the narrator for the whole game? No, but he is your partner. So Anime Boy is constantly his companions are Donald and Goofy. Oh, wow. ultimate darkness is he like the narrator for the whole game no but he is your partner so anime boy is constantly his companions are donald and goofy oh wow there's so much you don't know about king so wait donald says stuff too you're rachel's play acting right now because she's like the biggest kh fan i know and you were just mentioning how every outlet is like doing these kingdom hearts recaps so i was wondering if you could just do like we got just 60 seconds just like break down the no what i'm saying is i watch the polygon breakdown right then i got a bunch of

suggested videos on my youtube other kingdom hearts recaps which i didn't watch and they must have been so frustrating for you because you are like the ultimate lore keeper like rachel is actually the admin for the kh wiki i see i was leading a direction where I was hoping that you would do your Donald Duck impression saying Kingdom of Hearts things. All right. Never mind. I mean, it's very good. It's how you can't do words. I don't know how the fuck he does it.

Yeah. Goofy is my first small one. So you want to hear about Kingdom Hearts then, I guess? Yeah. So just recap it Okay so there's this guy and he's got real spiky hair Yeah I've said his name about eight times in the last minute What the name is

I did say it in a Donald Duck voice So maybe it didn't count Doledord Doledord is right Sounds like Voldemort and Donald Duck kind of got together and sort of spawned a hybrid, but okay. Uh-huh. And he's trying to get on the magic carpet from Aladdin.

That does happen in, I believe, KH1. To defeat the other anime guy. Whose name is? Which is... Malrako. And how many of him are there? Oh, I mean just one, right? Oh, that's the wrongest thing you've said yet.

So what's your first small wonder? You got anything good? I bought myself a stepladder and I told Griffin about it earlier this week and it didn't seem like he was super excited about it. But I have to say, as a woman that does not like to be dependent on a man for anything, having the stepladder, I feel like now I can do all the things in the house. Yeah. Like I can live fully independently now with this stepladder.

I mean, the only way I can relate to you on this is going to be so demeaning. But when I had, I had a stepladder in the bathroom when I was like a little kid and it was a very helpful friend. And it said something like clever, like if you need to get up and step up, but if you want to rest, take a seat. It was nice. It was cute. That is nice. Yeah, I know when I said that I got a stepladder,

Griffin's first question was for Henry. And I said, no, no, no, for me. So I can get paper towels out of the cabinet. Yeah. But I mean, you're looking at 70 inches of raw stretching power, just for 70 inches plus wingspan. I don't even know what that is.

How long is my arm? Probably like another two feet. you're talking about 80 80 something like that man a lot of inches of reach power i don't think my arms are 10 inches long i don't know much about spatial stuff uh hey i'm going first this week yes my first thing is get this crystals this surprises me my first thing is crystals and i'm not necessarily talking about the homeopath do you mean women named crystal i'm talking about crystal gale i'm talking about crystal bernard who was my favorite cast member in wings i just thought of two famous crystals what the fuck you got nothing. I'm talking not necessarily about the energy that crystals do. And if that's your jam, like go for it.

If that's your jam, for sure. I love it. I love that that's your jam. I'm talking more about crystals themselves. The crystals themselves. Yes, I can speak in the plural about crystals. There's lots of them. Lots of these shiny little doodads called crystals.

We watched a kwame japan video it's the most recent one they put up in which uh the creator of these wonderful knives which i've talked about this channel before and i'm still obsessed with it he made a knife out of bismuth which is a metal that i wasn't really familiar with and it sent me down sort of a crystals rabbit hole i think bismuth might be i don't know i i still don't know much about, but there's a part in the video where first of all, bismuth, when you heat it to like a certain level and then expose it to cold air, depending on what the temperature was, it can form sort of these different iridescent hues. Uh, so like he melts down the bismuth and then like pulls some out and it's like this sort of glossy bronze color. And then it's like this

sort of darker blue color but it also makes these like wild shapes so i got i got obsessed with those wild shapes that this metal made and i wanted to know everything about crystals and so i did a bit of a crystal deep dive you're looking at me i feel like you don't you were telling me that you were super into um like fool's gold when you were younger right like pie pyrite is that what it was i'm so proud. Yeah, I had like a little tiny rock collection. I did too.

We've got a Ruby Falls in Chattanooga. I guess I just have never heard you talk about crystals before, so I'm just kind of wrapping my head around crystal griffin. Well, I think they're sort of ubiquitous. I feel like I did have rocks when I was a kid. I had a rock sort of collection. I remember getting like a Christmas present that was sort of like like a a rock sifting kit oh the tumblers like a tumbler yes um and also like every japanese role-playing game has got to have crystals in it so i'm i've only i'm

about three hours into kingdom heart three but i'm pretty sure a fucking crystal's gonna show up at some point and you're gonna need to you, get five of them to save the world or whatever. I think crystals are super pretty, but I didn't know anything about crystals. I thought that like crystals were just like gemstones, but the Venn diagram is all gemstones or crystals, but not all crystals are gemstones. Oh, okay. What I learned about crystals and that's really, really fascinating. I was mostly fascinated by these shapes that the bismuth made. Yeah, okay.

Because when you can make a bismuth crystal actually really easily at home, it has a fairly low melting point. It's kind of in the lead family, which is also similarly kind of easy to melt, but it's not as toxic. It is slightly radioactive, which I thought was weird but uh it makes these shapes whenever you can uh you can make these bismuth crystals that have these shapes that the best way i can describe it is like a like a stair step kind of pattern almost like a like a ziggurat uh if that means anything to you and it's uh they can occur naturally like they can occur in nature

uh and i was like googling like why does it make that shape um and crystals can make all kinds of different shapes and in fact that's kind of what makes them crystals crystals are defined by having this very uh specific ordered microscopic structure that informs its sort of macro shape um so in an instance where a crystal's like, you know, atomic makeup naturally arranges itself into like a cube, like that's just the way that the atoms sort of line up, then that crystal can grow into a perfect cube. Like it's rare, but you can find pyrite. I remember actually when I was looking this up that I was watching this like Discovery Channel video about like, I think it was about marble mining,

but they did a segment on this pyrite vein that they found. And then you just walk into this cave and then there's these weird, dull, metallic cubes everywhere just growing out of the wall. It looks like something out of like a sci-fi movie. It looks like some sort of alien civilization planet. But as it just so happens, like pyrite can have this atomic structure that forms itself into a cube on a microscopic level. And you do that enough times within this within this, you know, cubic system.

And it's just going to naturally grow into this like nearly perfect cube. It's so bonkers. And so there's seven different sort of basic broad categories of crystal shapes uh crystallographers which is a phenomenal word uh call them crystal systems so there's this this is a cubic crystal system but there's all kinds uh there's some that have sort of more defined shapes and there's some that are a little more sort of uh abstract um but like i've never thought about it before like you think of a crystal and a lot of crystals just have like smooth faces and, you know, very defined edges.

And like, that's not necessarily how rocks grow. And the reason that crystals grow that way is just because like, that's how they're defined is because of their, their very specific ordered atomic structure. Can I say something real quick? Yes. Billy Crystal. Billy Crystal has a very specific atomic structure. He is a perfect cube i was trying to

think of another crystal and i and i just thought if if i don't say billy crystal right now you're gonna burst yeah i saw you over there sort of shuddering with uh anticipation um so like obviously like gems are usually gems and crystals you you find them in nature they're usually fairly small but they can you know obviously grow uh huge and unchecked the largest uh crystal ever found was in madagascar it was a barrel which is kind of like the family that uh aquamarine and emerald are in okay uh it was 59 feet long and 11 feet wide whoa it was extremely heavy and it was a huge huge gemstone i don't know how like the entire like region the like all of madagascar wasn't like well everybody here is now rich we found we found the biggest shit ever um and uh so i was looking into business specifically right because

of this video i almost went like i almost went on ebay and was like i'm gonna buy some bismuth and see if i can melt it down and make my own like geodes i'm gonna get full hank trader up in this shit um and the reason that it makes that sort of ziggurat shape um it's kind of i'm not acting this it almost looks like a maze it looks like a metallic maze that sort of grows naturally because it has these like raised ridges and then it looks like parts of it are just sort of hollowed out but in this like very perfect square pattern the reason that happens it's called a hopper crystal um because it grows the edges of it grow faster than the faces of it and so when that happens and it grows like a crystal grows extremely fast like bismuth does when you heat it up and

then take it out of out of you know into the exposed air and it forms a crystal super quickly like it just like the edges grow so much faster than the faces that it makes this like really weird and hypnotic pattern. And I think that's very cool. I also didn't know technically a snowflake is a crystal. It grows in a specific, it's like it grows in a specific shape, right?

It grows in a, I mean, it's a unique shape, but it has a sort of specific pattern that it follows on a micro scale that it sort of turns into a macro thing. One snowflake can be actually multiple crystals. It can be its own sort of crystal system. Yeah, I can see that. Ice can grow like this.

Like ice, you know, not even necessarily snow. Ice can grow like this. Gold can grow like this. And, you know these very very specific like cube like patterns sometimes um i just thought that was so interesting like uh i i mean it's it feels like a more of a visual thing like part of me just wants to look at pictures of crystals now yeah i kind of like i i feel like i've always been fascinated with uh i made a whole fucking arc of the adventure zone

around crystals and so like i and and obviously i think that sort of uh reveals that like i'm into i'm into the the idea of like these precious stones that grow out of the ground not necessarily for their worth but for their like uh their complexity their complexity and their beauty and like what they that these things can just sort of naturally come out of the earth. Like I think is really, really super neat and is in fact way, way neater than I had any idea because of science shit that I've done a super bad job explaining.

I hope I've done an okay job explaining. I think you did a good job. Thank you. Crystals are tight. What's your first thing? My first thing is middle names. This is, I'm going to learn so much. I know nothing about middle names.

So the three name structure began in the Middle Ages when Europeans were torn between giving their child a saint's name or a common family name. Is that apocryphal? Is that really where the middle name comes from because that seems that seems wild so the there was the first name and then the baptismal name was second and then the surname third interesting uh and it was also like a sign of nobility okay you know so like the more names you had the more connected you were to like a longer line of ancestors i will also say that uh and this is

something i found um when i was researching it in england middle names were for nobility and there was an old law making them illegal for the rest of the population whoa yeah that seems hard to enforce huh yeah i get like somebody's some middle-aged mom gets mad at their kids my name is john stewart i mean i mean oh no some mom gets mad at her kids in the middle ages and it's like dennis david smith no authorities come he goes to jail he's a kid isn't that fucked up uh so the first time you saw middle names like on a government document was uh world war one on u.s enlistment forms really um no one on the mayflower had a middle name only three of the first 17 presidents had a middle name what um only about five percent of americans born during

the revolutionary war era had middle names this isn't this is fucking wild i know i had no idea that this was such a new thing no wonder there's so many like celebrities and um you know assassins that you know have to go by their whole thing john paul gossler paul was his name you're thinking of of Mark Paul Gosselaar from Saved by the Bell. I think I'm thinking of Ron Paul Gosselaar. Ron Paul Gosselaar. That's our trivia team name. Ron Paul Gosselaar's Relo-vution. In Germany, middle names became common in the 17th century. So if you think about like Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685.

German immigrants arriving inlvania are credited with being the first american to use middle names regularly uh by the 19th century you saw a greater population boom just in america and europe uh and so that's when you saw more people with middle names because there were just a lot of duplicates i mean like there were you know probably thousands of john smiths and it was like well i've thrown throwing a middle name i'm so fucking ignorant i thought this whole time literally not just throughout time but every culture on the planet was like oh well you gotta have a middle name so i started doing some research on the multiple middle names too yeah because i was kind of curious about that um it was a german tradition a lot of members of the royal family

that immigrated from germany to britain uh had the multiple middle names uh traditionally the upper class used multiple names to indicate family connections uh and so some examples are uh george herbert walker bush jrr tolkien do you know what his middle names are And so some examples are George Herbert Walker Bush, J.R.R. Tolkien. Do you know what his middle names are? Really, Really Tolkien. Jim Really, Really Tolkien. His dad was just Really Tolkien, and then the next one was Really, Really. His grandchildren have so many r's yeah now it's john ronald rule

tolkien rule was a family name from his father's side okay george rr martin do you know what his are i mean i could do the same joke but raymond richard really really making us wait for the next i don't know i haven't read all the books do you know keifer sutherland's full name no but am i going to a good one keifer william frederick dempsey george rufus sutherland what yes sir his dad is famous like you can't hide from what you did, Donald. So his father, Donald Sutherland, picked Kiefer to honor Warren Kiefer, who directed him in the first film he did. Okay. But I don't know how you explain all the other ones. Yeah, it's a lot. I love my middle name.

Yeah, Rachel's middle name is beautiful and elegant, and I love it. It's Celia, C-E-L-I-A and it was my great grandmother's name. Yes. It's funny that you mentioned the saint thing because I weirdly don't want to say what our son's middle name is, but it's a saint and so is mine. My middle name is Andrew. I know that. Do you want to know? I knew you knew my middle name. Oh, you're sharing it with our audience? Yes. So Griffin, I have a surprise for you. I'm getting a new middle name? No, I reached out to one Clint McElroy

to see if there was a story behind your name. Oh, okay. This is new information for me. I said, hey, I'm thinking about talking about middle names on Wonderful and I'm wondering if there's any story behind Griffin Andrew. And he said that your mom was convinced you were having a girl, so that they hadn't even considered boy names. But then when you, quote, turn profile to show junk during the ultrasound. God, Dad. They realized it was crunch time, so they got every baby name book on the planet.

And they had the two-syllable, two-syllable thing with Justin Tyler and Travis Patrick. So they knew they wanted to stick with that. But they spent literally every evening for a month looking through baby name books. This is a long-ass text. Oh, it keeps going. Okay. He said that he really pushed for Clinton Emil McElroy III. Yeah.

My dad's a junior. We never, ever, ever talk about that. I've seen him referred to as Clinton Emil McElroy Jr. maybe twice in my life. They apparently were watching an episode of Amazing Stories that had the actor Griffin Dunn in it and that appealed to your mom as a first name. Okay.

Now I'm going to fucking Google this guy. Are you kidding me? Griffin Dunn, D-U-n-n-e he's on this is us no okay i think i know this guy i think it was more the name than the actor i think that's where they got the name idea it wasn't like your mom was super into him as a thespian it doesn't matter i have his name i need to i need to i need to write him a letter or something uh your dad said they picked andrew in the delivery room cool dad and i said oh i guess by the third kid you're less precious about names and he was like actually we felt more pressure for griffin because we knew he was going to be the last co-production yeah true

and then he goes on to talk about his middle name emol and how terrible it was yeah wow well it sounds like you got in way over your head um but hey can i steal you away so we don't have any ads this week but we do have gamba trams and i'm going to read the first one and do you want to alley oop it with the second one of course the first one here is for classiest miracle and it's from rajiru who says hey classiest miracle for being a Gemini. You're pretty cool. I don't think I know enough about that stuff to know what that means. I don't either. I think it's a summer birthday.

I thought for Gemini, it means that you have there's two of you somewhere on the earth. No. OK. Anyway, I just want to let you know, I think you're wonderful, even though you never reply back to my sexy emoji chain texts. A lot of give and take with this message sorry for uh commenting on it so much i'm also glad i finally got to meet one of your boyfriends so now i know they are real here's to more memes and vine compilations rajiru um do you see the

preferred time frame on this one is that this yeah holy shit this is episode 69 rajayru said episode 69 nice which i think is late february or something calendar math is hard it sure is you you scrooged it by a little bit but uh not that i knew any better oh my god i know should we go back and change the theme i don't know but i'm definitely going to change what my second thing is. What's the second Chumbotron here? This next message is for Sarah. It is from Dorian. Sarah, by the time you hear this, I'll be back in your time zone again.

Phew, I'll make this quick. You're my best friend, and I love you a whole lot. Out of all the people to get kicked out of Shakespeare class with, I'm glad it was you. Let's meet up again soon and make an obscene amount of pancakes together. P.S. Give your cat a kiss for me. I mean, you know what an obscene amount of pancakes would be, right? 69. Maybe 69 pancakes.

That's good. Hello, this is Amy Mann. And I'm Ted Leo. And we have a podcast called The Art of Process. We're talking about how the creative process is in itself an art form in our opinion. There are underlying forms and structures that serve as a scaffolding for any creative endeavor. We've been lucky enough over the past year to talk to some of our friends and acquaintances from across the creative spectrum to find out how they actually work. We weirdly don't know as many musicians as you would expect.

New episodes will be coming every other Monday. Starting January 28th. So please listen and subscribe at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. My second thing is the number 69. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page. And first of all, hey, did you know that wikipedia has entries on sex positions this is the real wikipedia there's a picture a cartoon and there's it's folks variations of 69 there's variations according to wikipedia, I guess it depends on where you are. 69, also known by its French name,

soixante-neuf. What's nine? Cat C say? Neuf. Soixante-neuf. Soixante-neuf. Soixante-neuf. Is a group of sex positions

in which two people align themselves so each person's mouth is near the other's... Genitals. My second thing is actually a band. The number 68. It's the number 54. It's the Polyphonic Spree. Oh, good.

So my oldest brother, who, who is named, who's called Justin, uh, Justin Tyler, uh, turned me onto this band when I was like just about to enter into college. And I just pretty much instantly fell in love with them. Um, I have this very vivid memory while I was like writing out notes about this of, um, one of their albums had just come out while I was working at TCBY. of um one of their albums had just come out while i was working at tcby and i had one of those old like radio emitters that you could plug into your ipod this was like before like bluetooth and everything so you'd have to like plug this thing into the top of your ipod and then it would like you could set the radio frequency that you wanted it to play to and then you could like turn your

car radio to that frequency i'm not familiar with this at all yeah so there was a radio at tcby like over the sound system and i figured out like i'll just put on this album all fucking day and so like my entire shift i would just have uh polyphonic spree blasting in the uh in the in the the room which delighted and also confused a lot of patrons if you're not familiar with polyphonic spree you are because their music was in like every movie and tv show and commercial in the like mid aughts i want to say um you've probably seen them before even if you didn't know who they were and thought hey that's weird because there's 23 of them currently uh there's been sort of more and less of them um they're the act if you have gone to a music festival and seen a bunch of people in robes that's yes sort of arranged in a very sort of choral uh choral arrangement uh the band is super

super unique and i think that's like won me over what won me over back in the uh mid aughts when i sort of got into them uh so it is uh the band is led by a guy named tim de lauder it's not laughter right because it's spelled no it's No, it's DeLauder. Thank you. I thought that was it. And his like inspiration for making the polyphonic spree, and I'm going to play some music here in a little bit

and you'll hear this, was to sort of mimic the kind of music that he grew up listening to, specifically like the choral arrangements and orchestral arrangements of like pop bands bands like the Beatles and ELO and Beach Boys um and according to Wikipedia who wanted to blend that with the vocal style of Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath which I think you could totally get um and what's so great about this band is that all of their well most of their songs like have this like cosmically uplifting sort of message and tone about them

most of the time and probably their most popular song really captures this which is a song called hold me now all of their songs actually from their earlier albums are called sections the music video for hold me now is so great it's very good it's puppets right yes yes uh i forget which section this is because i forget which album it is on but it's like this song is all about this person who like hits rock bottom and then like goes seeking for like love and help which they receive from somebody else which is like a nice message so here's a little bit of hold me now a song you've probably heard selling you a vol a Volkswagen back in 2005. so like all their all their songs for the most part of these like really upbeat orchestral arrangements uh that are very sort of uh happy but the band's origins are actually super sad. Tim's like first breakout act

was this band called Tripping Daisy, which broke up in 1999 when their guitarist, who was also like Tim's dear friend, this guy named Wes Berggren, died of a drug overdose. And like right after that, the band, I think they finished the album that they were working on when he died

and then broke up right after that. And so it was just the following year, it was 2000, when he started looking into making this band that he wanted to sort of explore doing all of these weird choral things with. And he found 12 collaborators one day. And then sort of two weeks after pitching them the project, they had this 30 minute long set that they would perform at various sort of small venues and festivals and stuff like that. And then they put that 30 minute set together as a demo, which they were like, let's just send this to some record labels. And then that 30 minute set was basically the beginning stages of which is their first album. It very, very quickly came together um and i think they were

like released from their first label because they weren't selling very well but then once it started to get sort of mainstream appeal it was on like an episode of scrubs um i mentioned the volkswagen commercial it was they had songs i believe on the uh eternal sunshine of the spotless mine soundtrack um and they did the cover of the nirvana song too they did the cover of lithium uh which i was going to close with this but rachel uh got me tickets to see uh polyphonic spree for my birthday i believe one year and we went and it was a very intimate venue it was a very very we were like right up on the stage like inches from him and tim de lauder in the band and um he like closed with lithium and got super angry because he kept like going up to people in the audience including us and like holding the mic

to their mouths thinking everybody knows the lyrics to lithium and nobody nobody knew them as well as he did and he got really frustrated and we've all felt terrible we all felt so i feel i've never felt like i've failed uh the you know a member of one of my favorite bands before that was a it was still a great concert but that that part was very it set my anxiety sort of to maximum um but yeah that whole first album and a lot of their early work is sort of informed by this like tragic thing that happened uh when they were tripping daisy um uh and like tim is super forward about that like a lot of the lyrics on the first album are kind of about um trying to bounce back from this terrible thing and becoming very reflective about your life after sort of a

pattern of sort of self-destructive behavior um which you may not get like face value listening to hey it's the sun and it makes me smile but um you know knowing that i think it's it's very clearly there um and there's also like roots for what polyphonic spree became in what tripping daisy was um there is like probably my favorite polyphonic spree song is a cover of a tripping daisy song called sonic bloom which you actually played for me the first time, the Tripping Daisy version. And I was like, wait, why does this sound familiar? And because it sounds like a Polyphonic Spree song

and then they covered it back in 2006. I'm going to play that one now because I think it's just so beautiful and uplifting. Love gets inside of you Makes me invincible and i will continue to hang on to your love a sonic bloom a total emotionless excuse i just like um i this this band more than any other that I can think of off the top of my head, like has this like nice core aesthetic that I think is so special.

I saw Polyphonic Spree in Chicago, probably would have been 2005 maybe. Yeah. And it was just one of the most joyous concerts i've ever been to yeah uh i just like felt very optimistic and very like comforting and just the like everything's gonna be okay yeah i got really into them and the Flaming Lips, which is both like sort of confetti concert. Yeah, exactly. The two confetti concert bands and weed in the same sort of year in my college experience. I went to Spencer's Gifts. Oh, no. And I bought like a light ball, like a it would like sort of like a disco ball, but

I had like different rainbow colored lights. We would just like shut the door to my apartment bedroom turn on that light ball listen to the soft bulletin and some flaming lips and some some polyphonic spree and just um not your parents listen to the show so we would just sit there and not just yeah we wouldn't do anything what's your second thing my second thing is untranslatable words all right you're bringing that fucking heat this week uh so there's a couple things that made me think of this okay first uh is the the like hygge phenomena you know the danish word that means like no uh warm cozy hygge i mean it's spelled h-y-g-g-e okay do you know what i'm talking about now no okay this is like a year ago there was this phenomenon of people trying to harness this like warm cozy danish energy

and everybody was referring to this word uh because there was a book that came out that was all about like the the big book of hygge or a little book of hygge something like that okay um so that made me think of it because that's one of those untranslatable words and also when i was in graduate school and i was writing poetry i was taking this class all about like translating from another language. And so I was trying to write a poem kind of similar to that. And I found the word alunga, which is a Chaluba word, which is the Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it is specifically a word for a person who is ready to forgive abuse the first time, tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

That's a one. They got one word for that? Yeah. And so I wrote this poem called Translator's Blush that was all about trying to translate another language. And I was thinking about it the other day. And so I started Googling untranslatable words. I bet there are infinite of them. There's a whole bunch. I was thinking about it the other day. And so I started Googling untranslatable words.

I bet there are infinite of them. There's a whole bunch. So I found this guy, Dr. Tim Lomas, who is a lecturer at the University of East London. And he wrote a book called Happiness Dictionary. Wasn't that the name of the guy from the Halloween movies who was like Michael Myers like therapist? Dr. Tim Lomas? Okay, sorry. This is for nobody. So he wrote this book called The Happiness Dictionary, which is all about untranslatable

words. And so in a Scientific American article, he talks about why they're so fascinating. And I thought he said it really succinctly. He said, an untranslatable word alerts us to something in the world that English speaking cultures might not have noticed or not analyzed with much detail, but which another culture has picked up on. The thing that like piques my interest in it is like, what is it about our culture that differs from theirs

where we didn't need a word for this? Like, what are we not, like the hygge word, right? Like, why don't we have a single word that captures that aesthetic like what's different about our two like cultures and lifestyles that like i know exactly we need a faster way to say this that's what he's saying so he he started a website which you can find if you google his name and that's l-o-m-a. So there are 7,000 languages on Earth. And he has created this, what he calls a positive lexography, which as of May 2018 had 1,000 terms in it that were untranslatable. So my pronunciation on these is all going to be terrible because it's very difficult to figure out how to pronounce untranslatable words when nobody is using them. Yeah, you can't even use them in a sentence.

Yes. Okay. So this is an Inuit word and it's ixorapok okay and it refers to the feeling of anticipation when you're expecting someone that leads you to constantly check to see if they're coming this is like when you're when you're like standing by the door when you're like standing by the door and looking out the window and you keep like checking to see if they've come that's what this word means it's 2019 and with like millennial culture and don't get me wrong i'm one of you and i'll die for you but like why are we using this word constantly

you're describing the human experience in 2019 for every single person under the age of like 45. There were so many, by the way, there are so many of these and I had a really hard time narrowing it down. Okay. But here's the next one. This is an Arabic word and it's ya'aberni, which literally means you bury me. And the concept represents declaring your hope that your loved one will outlive you because of how unbearable it would be to live without them.

Wow, that's so beautiful. Isn't it? And sad, but nice. Yeah. Sad nice. We need a word for that that means sad nice. Sad nice. Okay, here's a Hindi word.

It's jijaviswa, which refers to the desire to live and to continue living it is usually used to talk about a person who loves life and always has intense emotions and desires to live and thrive now i hate to come at you like this i hate to take your shit apart okay but yolo like sorry like yeah we do have it and what's great about yolo is you can't translate it it's a fucking acronym it's we only live okay so it's good it's a good word i don't want to take away from the word but well and yolo is timeless i mean clearly you're still hearing that all the time i say yolo constantly i i live a life i have engineered a life. I have built and designed meticulously like a clockmaker,

a life that would never require me to do anything that I could possibly say YOLO after. I do not. I have not been on a skateboard in many years. Okay, you're saying this, but I guarantee you before you have sat down in front of a large meal. Yeah. Or a lot of cheese. Yeah. You have probably said YOLO.

I have been at the samples in front of the samples of fresh fresh cheese at the costco and they're like do you want some of this i'm like i mean i'm supposed to go to a baseball game later today but yeah yolo and then my butt explodes and i'm like okay i have one last one yes and this one is perfect for our podcast wonderful okay it is a serbian word it's called mirak and it refers to a feeling of bliss and the sense of oneness with the universe that comes from the simplest of pleasures it is the pursuit of small daily pleasures that all add up to a great sense of happiness and fulfillment how and now how often are they saying this one because i I feel like I have moments.

Our podcast would be called Murak if we were Serbian. Yes, that's possibly true. Yeah. Yeah, that's a nice one too. Isn't it nice? This is neat. This is one of those things that like if I see a Facebook article in my feed that's like, you'll never believe these 10 words.

I will click on that a hundred times out of a hundred. So I would encourage you. I have not looked at the happiness dictionary myself, but this Dr. Tim Lomas, his website is just full of these words. I will click on that a hundred times out of a hundred. So I would encourage you, I have not looked at the happiness dictionary myself, but this Dr. Tim Lomas, his website is just full of these words and you can just download it and look at all of them. He's got any fun games on there? From all over the world. He's got any fun games or cool pictures? I mean, he's probably looking for support, uh, creating a game. So if you want to reach out to him, I'm sure you could put together an app. Any funny pictures though? GIFsifs does he have that one gif of like a guy like a stick guy and he's like shoveling and it's like this page isn't finished yet with like a counter construction telling you how many people have

visited yeah hey did you ever have a geocities a geocities or an x pages no i knew people that did i did not oh man everybody in my middle school had an x pages energy of cities hey do you want to know what our friends at home are all about uh tom is here and he says 69 so like tom's just like bringing that heat i guess that's not what tom said so tom has this thing to say tom says my wonderful thing is seeing landmarks that mean you are nearly at your destination after a long drive for visiting friends in biggles wade it's the windmills for going home to my parents it's the wicker man on the m5 yo the place you live sounds fucking cool as hell well there's the windmill so i'm in biggles wade but when i get to the wicker man a big giant head for you all that is true oh my god i forget yes

that's the name of our our technically the name of our business uh which you know if you watched our tv show and saw the the logo we made uh is we would drive home or we would drive to church uh and on our drive to church there was some like lawn that had like a huge paper mache head in the front i forget why it was it wasn't paper mache it was like some sort of weird huge very detailed head statue i forget the the reason for it but yeah that's why we would just point out and yell big giant head every time that's true wow my memory is so shitty and i'm glad that has you glad you got married to someone i'm glad i married somebody who can remember every like story that's ever been told to them. Alexis says something I find wonderful is that next year when I'm in college, I will no longer have to ask to use the bathroom.

I can just get up and go when I need to go. Do you fucking remember? Do you remember your first week at college when it's like time to really stretch my legs and see what I can get away with? Oh, I thought you were going to say, do you remember having to ask to use the bathroom? Because I definitely do. I did do that at least in one class. And somebody was like, you don't have to do, you don't have to.

Oh, you did it in college? No, I meant like in high school. Oh, I remember doing that. But I think I was with my college advisor. So I was lucky that I was in sort of a safe space and I was in like a journalism 101 class. And I was like, I have to use the restroom. And he was like, then stand up and leave

I'm picturing like the song like walking on sunshine playing in your head as you like go to the bathroom but I gotta say that that amount of I got drunk on that power does that explain your life today where you just use the bathroom constantly yeah I got drunk on that power but I mean it's a short walk to oh I, I don't have to ask to go to the bathroom anymore, to, I'm just going to stop going to class altogether, I think, for a week at a time. Here's one last one from Auti, who says,

I just moved to Chicago. God, hang tough. Hang tough up there, Auti. And I'm very fond of the heat lamps on the train platforms. I imagine you are, especially right now. Huddling under them in a group on a bitterly cold day like penguins makes me feel less socially anxious. And being the first in a group of commuters to turn them on gives me a disproportionate sense of accomplishment.

Those heat lamps are the fucking tops. I remember those. I'd forgotten about them. I saw a video on Facebook and it had the caption like, this is a real Chicagoan. And it was somebody with a big slice of deep dish pizza and they were just holding it up to one of those heat lamps

to get a good broil going on it. I was like, oh God, that's so beautiful. Man, it says something that it's fucking 25 degrees below zero there right now and this talking about this makes me miss chicago so desperately um anyway hey we could we should do a live show there i feel like we could totally like knock that one out of the park yeah like we know enough shit anyway um so that's it for the show. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay.

You can find a link to that in the episode description. And big thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. They got a bunch of new shows that you should definitely go check out, like JV Club with Janet Varney with a recent episode featuring Wonderful Zone. Rachel McElroy is so delightful. My wife is very charming.

You turned the pants off me that episode thank you it's true i was doing housework and my pants flew off out the window and a bear caught him ran away is there another max fun show that you want to promote um i mean i really like one bad mother yeah i started listening to it before we even had henry uh and i just i find the ladies on that show just so so funny and so relatable and i would recommend it if you have kids or if you are interested in kids or if you're just a big proponent of women i would recommend listening to it um and we have a website macroy.family where you can find all of the like news about our whole stuff about all our podcasts and videos and stuff there's a new monster factory that's coming out this week i'm excited about that oh my god it's such a good one i'm so fucking psyched. And what else?

I feel like that might be it. Thanks to everybody who, I was very, very, I missed you very much at PodCon. You mentioned that on our last episode. I know, but I feel like it left a deep wound, okay? I'm sorry it left a deep wound. And I'm just gushing over here with wound juice. Bye. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned.

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