Wonderful! - Wonderful! 78: Abstinent Grimace

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

Rachel's favorite new indie rocker! Griffin's favorite classic phone game! Rachel's favorite regional terminology! Griffin's favorite car movement! 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. Hey, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Oh my goodness, everybody. oh my freaking gosh hello hello did you see how many donors we did how many big ones we got for max fun drive it seems like a lot it was so many freaking people i was blown away i rocked my socks off man can i provide an update uh-huh sitting in my new chair. Rachel's sitting in her new chair.

This is not a thing that money has bought. Well, money did buy it, but it was brother money. It was not Max Fund Drive money. Well, I would like to think that Justin McElroy wouldn't have been as inspired without the Max Fund Drive. Yeah. Now, don't be ashamed to say it on the air, just in case Justin does listen, that it's a piece of shit chair and it doesn't feel as good as my $15 Target chair that I bought you because, and let me finish, mine had more love in it and behind the act of buying it.

And don't make a face. I wasn't doing bad things to the chair. Unless it's opposite day. Is it opposite day? No, it is April Fool's Day. So it could be like I'm doing a prank on you, but it's not because I love that chair. The chair is very comfortable that I'm sitting in right now. And which one, just so I'm clear, which one are you sitting in?

The one your brother bought me. Ah, shoot. I'm sorry. But the one I got you is still very, very good, though, right? Maybe you'll switch them in and out. Is it like you're going to see what your tush feels like and then swap them as needed? I mean, maybe I'll get a hankering. Who knows? Yeah. Well, yeah. feels like and then swap them as needed i mean maybe i'll get a hankering who knows

yeah well yeah just think about i guess the love that went into it and um my my small wonder is uh just keeping old friends i guess okay it's keeping old friends near and dear and close i mean you still got that brother printer. That's true, but I bought that with my own dang money. And I've got brother chair. You have brother chair, I guess that's true. But like my love chair is sitting in the corner right now. It's like we've left a chair for Elijah open for our podcast in case he wants to jump on the mic

and make some good observational jokes. My real small wonder is jeans that make your butt look good and i mean that i guess in the you sense and the me sense jeans that make your butt look good is very good but jeans that make my butt look good i feel very good about and i just put on some um some new jeans uh i tried on all my jeans from from uh stitch fix and honestly throughout history because i need to get rid of some jeans and a lot of them are ill fitting. But this one tried on. I was like, what's up, caboose? I find pocket placement is really critical to that.

Absolutely. I have tried on several pairs of jeans where the pockets are put in a very unfortunate place and it is not flattering. They can be too low and then they can be way too high and give you that long ass. Or too wide. And then it's like, how do they even walk with a butthole like that? Just a butthole you could throw a dime up, you know? That is a picture you have painted. Evocative.

What's your small wonder? Do you have any? Okay. So I have a perfect small wonder. And this is actually brought to you by Linda. My mom emailed this to me. What's up, Linda? Have you heard about the baseball player who plays Baby Shark as their walkout song?

That's extremely powerful. Elvis Andrus of the Texas Rangers. That name again, one more time. Elvis Andrus. I'm loving every freaking part of this story. On the opening day, he played his new walk-up song, which is Baby Shark, and he had three hits, including a two-run home run. Wow, that's like the best thing you can do. He told fans that he will not be getting rid of Baby Shark anytime soon.

It is toddler son Elvis Jr.'s favorite song. I love that. His son is 20 months old, and he said, if you don't like it, you better get used to it. It's not going away. I wonder how many baseball players could claim like, no, no, no. My son's favorite song was Ba With Da Ba. And so that's why I had that as mine for so very long. There's got to be somebody still using Ba With Da Ba, right? If you're an MLB player and you listen to our podcast, change your stuff to Bawit Dabaw. It's just fun to say, isn't it?

I mean, yeah, I guess so is tub thumping, but I don't know that I necessarily want to hear that either. Bawit Dabaw, Da Bang Bang, Diggy Diggy, Diggy Said the Boogie Said I'm Drunk. That's taken from something, right? That's taken from Sugarhill Gang, is it? Because the Sugarhill Gang didn't call their song Bawit Dabaw, because it's not a word. I'll stick with Baby Shark. All right. I think, in this case.

What's your first thing this week? My first thing is Niloufer Yanya. You sent me some, and what's that name? Because I definitely thought I was going to say it wrong. And your take on it was different than mine. Niloufer Yanya. Okay. I watched an interview with her, so I could pronounce it correctly. Really split the uprights?

Yeah. She is 23. Her debut album, Miss Universe, just came out on March 22nd. You know what's wild? I got an advertisement for it just after you sent me the music video. Never mind. That's how computers work. It's 2019.

So she, I was really excited when I heard her music because it reminded me a lot of the Strokes. And hey, turns out she grew up big fan of the Strokes. I couldn't really place what it was. I was getting more like I just like that fuzzy ass guitar sound and this song has it in spades. Her interest growing up was very much in indie music like the Strokes and The Libertines and The Cure. She grew up in West London and was going to pursue a degree. She was rejected, though, twice from this popular music program in London. And so she was really kind of self-taught.

And she also was taught at at her high school which was since the arts program has been scrapped entirely from that oh that's a bummer that's cool but they had like real musicians teaching yeah the students uh so she started performing at 18 uh has since opened for artists like mitski oh wow okay. Oh, shit. Cool. They've got a new EP out, I believe. Just to kind of give you a sense of why I thought she reminded me of the Strokes. I wanted you to play a little bit from In Your Head. So in addition to the Strokes, she also identified Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse, and the Pixies.

She's got kind of a lo-fi sound that kind of goes between indie rock and R&B and soul music. She's also got that like low voice that like smoky voice yeah and then there's even like kind of jazz elements in it too um but it's funny yeah nina simone is like a funny comparison but i completely how have we not talked about nina simone on this how have we not brought nina at all yeah i don't know i i was just i was excited. It was what I've started doing to kind of find new artists is I'll just go on YouTube and find like the new music from the past month. And that's how I found her.

She was actually at South by Southwest in 2018. Oh, wow. But we missed her, obviously. Yeah. Her music is really cool and exciting. I'm really excited that she's got an album out. And she's so young she's like 23 like who knows where this woman's gonna go these young indie rock ladies are scratching all these

like indie rock music itches that like i did not know i had until i i hear this music like this sound was over you know i had this like fear that this like kind of real indie rock sound was kind of gone that real shit yeah that uncut that not that corporate shit that real shit yeah like back in the day like we used to listen to right right sonic youth is a band i've not heard that much of but i've established my bona fides i feel like and so now you're going to- Just by saying those two words together. Hey, everybody, fugazi. Heard of them?

I've not listened to very much, but just by saying that. Can I tell you about my first thing? Yes. Snake. And that's not me in a cute way saying that I'm going to talk about snakes, although I'm sure there's a lot of snake- That's what I thought you were doing. You do that all the time.

No. I know there's probably snake people out there who listen to this show and i'm proud to say i'm not afraid of snakes are you talking about the game talk about the game snake that you play on your phone i'm not afraid of snakes but if i see somebody holding a snake like at a park or something which just happens from time to time or at the farmer's market they're like hey what's up everybody i a snake haver, and now you are going to experience me. I don't want to touch that snake, but I'm also not afraid of it. I just kind of walk by, continuing on my way to get the—

Yeah, I see a lot of people taking pictures of themselves with a snake. It doesn't do anything for me. No, and the reason is because there's snakes everywhere. When you go outside, you are never more than like five feet away from a snake. It's just that they hide their shit really well. So enjoy that, everybody. i'm talking about snake i was inspired to talk about snake the game because uh google did an april fool's day thing where they did a google maps version of snake where you could control trains in these different metropolitan areas and you would uh you know move around and pick up passengers and, you know, plow through major landmarks for

different cities that you could choose from. And I was like, Oh, yeah, I'll dip in and see what this is all about. And then I ended up having like a wild, like, seven minute long match where I was just like, crushing it. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's right. Snake is extremely good. Yeah, I remember when like, so I was in college when everybody started getting cell phones right and i remember that was like that was the game that was it people would just lose themselves in it yeah i'm going to talk more about the nokia 3310 here just a little bit in case you don't know in case you you miss the nokia 3310 era and are not familiar with what snake is um you are basically on this kind of like grid based arena where you control a line

that kind of moves one spot at a time and you're trying to collect stuff in like base snake we're talking about dots for the most part but you could pretend it's an apple or whatever um and every time you collect whatever you're trying to collect your line gets longer and you have to see how many of things you can collect before you either run into yourself your own big ass snake body or the the boundary of the playing field um and really that kind of describes a whole genre of games that people have been playing in various forms for decades for me my first exposure was q basic nibbles was the name of the game that I cut my teeth on. Rachel made a face when I said QBasic Nibbles.

I have no idea. Those words together all make sense individually. I don't know what it is though. There was a programming language called Basic that you could goof around with in a piece of software called QBasic, which came with, I think, every Windows computer, like old, old Windows computer. Oh, okay.

So it was like a free thing that we had on our computer and somebody told me like, hey, there's free games on your computer you don't know about and snake was one of them there was another one where you controlled it was a two-player game and there were two gorillas on a city skyline and you had to type in uh angle and like velocity and then you'd throw a banana and you had to try and hit your opponent and so you had to like dial in the numbers until you could hit the other gorilla. It was a fucking great game. Sounds like Battleship a little bit. Kind of, except you could like math it out because you can actually see where the banana,

like the follow the arc of the banana. So you were like doing math a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I actually started learning basic because of that. And I made my own Final Fantasy choose your own adventure game that took me like a year to make. And I have sadly lost to the annals of time but anyway that's where i kind of grew up playing it it had sort of uh levels with

different obstacles that you had to kind of steer around what was nibbles like was it like snake it was basically snake yeah it was essentially snake there's very little variation um the origins of snake actually comes from an old arcade game uh it was monochromatic, which tells you how old it was. It was from 1976. It was called Blockade. And it was actually a competitive game where you and an opponent controlled a line and you tried to box each other in to make them crash into you or themselves or the wall, which is, of course, the inspiration for light cycles in Tron, as well as a bunch of other games that were essentially clones of of that whole idea uh the first single player variant of that game where you collected dots and got longer which is what snake is uh was a an arcade game called nibbler

um and there were a bunch of different mazes that you could explore to collect these dots while still you know avoiding shit umibbler, weirdly enough, has a special place in history because it was the first arcade game to have a nine-digit scoring system, which meant that you could get over a billion points, which, you know, back in the day, people going to arcades were just on that score chase.

The first, I learned this from Wikipedia, the first person to score a billion points on Nibbler, the first- Was named A- billion points on nibbler the first named ass was named ass his name was aaron salvador sterling um no his name is tim mcveigh and he did it at twin galaxies which is actually like a huge like yeah that's the documentary the king of kong yeah yeah yeah they like track you know game high scores and yeah shit like that it's in iowa uh tim mcveigh scored 1 billion 42 270 points uh playing nibbler and it just took him 44 hours of playing the game straight and he said like i could have gone higher but i i was i was so very

very tired um that's wild but even like the version of snake that we can play at home you can technically win it by which i mean you can fill the whole screen with your snake with snake and it requires like so much coordination and precision because you have to like plan out what your pattern is going to be exactly and if you mess it up even a little bit like once odds are you're gonna you're gonna lose like watch a youtube video of people playing a perfect snake game it is like really wild to see um i just find it a very meditative game to to to play um until you become long enough and then it's kind of a stressful nightmare um but i do hold it in a special place in my heart because in high school all my friends started getting 30 and by friends

i mean people who were cooler than me that let me sit with them at lunch got started getting nokia 3310s uh which did have snake on it and all of a sudden like i was never very athletic i didn't have very many sort of uh credits to my name but they were all like oh i got 17 on snake and i was like oh can i see it and they would hand me their phone and i would bust out that q basic nibbles knowledge and just like became uh and that's how you got the nickname nibbles that's how i got the name nibbles nibbles and shades you know me you know this i would watch that show nibbles and shades two hard-nosed not detectives one of them is hard-nosed well listen if we're gonna get this show on the air it's got to be either cops it's got to be firefighters or it's got to be medical ones.

So take your pick. Maybe they are cop firefighters. Oh, I like that. You're under arrest, house fire. It's kind of like a little Paw Patrol mashup. Yeah. And then one of the other cop fighters, and that's not going to be the name of them, but they get caught in the house and they get burned. And they come outside and they're like, don't worry, I'm also a doctor.

And then they start kissing. ABC just got so fucking horny for that idea. I like it. I didn't establish who was Nibbles and who was Shades, but, you know, we'll punch it up later. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. it up later hey can i steal you away yes got a message here for is and it's from uh uh anissa or anissa perhaps uh is you are the light of my life i love you to the moon and back and not even your avion rambles can turn me away well that's a series of RPGs made with RPG Maker.

I'll tell you all, I definitely didn't just Google it. I did. Oops. I'm so glad that you're in my life and thankful that we aren't. Oh, this is going to be fun. Tayalahad. I believe that's a ship name if I'm reading it correctly. It seems like two names kind of smooshed together.

I love you like Xander loves Galahad. You know, Winky Face. All right. There's a lot of coded messagery in there. And then that might not even be a word. These two people sound like they've really found each other with their interests. Yeah. That we do not understand.

I got every second of that. Oh, yeah? What's the other Jumbotron here, though? The other Jumbotron is for Wyoma. It is from Bryn. Hey, Wyoma, it's me. I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you. I can't believe we've been friends for three years already.

Time flies. Writing our stories and watching weekend TV on Rabbit has truly been wonderful. Thank you for getting me into Taz and for putting up with my weird questions about Homestuck. I love you. And now as a special treat, Rachel's going to recap the entirety of Homestuck and everything that happened. And while she does that,

I am going to also jump down the well. So Homestuck is a program. Whoa! You already got it wrong! It's a game. It is a program. Wow! You already got it wrong! It's a game, it's a book, it's a movie, it's a... I'm so glad I'm in the world for this! Hey everybody, this is Jake Heath Van Straten, host of Go Fact Yourself, a live game show here on the Maximum Fun Network. Make sure to listen to our next episode of Go Fact Yourself with guest Kurt Braunouler.

I did a show in Flagstaff, Arizona, where the venue just didn't list that the show existed. Amazing. And it is the smallest crowd that I've ever done a full hour of stand-up for. It was three people. Oh, my God. And Sarah Schaefer. Yes, I i love crafting it's my hobby i have a craft nook in my home you do i do it has all my supplies displayed in an adorable manner wow yes applause applause for a nook that's go fact yourself here at maximumfun.org or wherever you get podcasts.

My second thing is regional dialects. This is going to be, this one, finer than frog's hair, this one's going to be, yep. Yep. Listeners of our show will know that I appreciate a lot of Griffin's colloquialisms, but it's not just Griffin's. There are others. There are more like me. I thought I was the only one. Um, so I, I found my way to a New York Times article that they posted. So there were two linguists, Bert Fox and Scott Golder, who surveyed more than 30,000 people from all 50 states in the early 2000s to compile some of the regional divisions in American English. And so they turned that into a quiz available on the New York Times. It was published

in 2014. And then a graphic artist illustrated a map of the United States and kind of colored it to match, you know, the different regional expressions. Soda versus pop and soda is blue and pop is red and it shows you like where everybody lives so this was published it's kind of like a heat map yeah uh this was published in his 2016 book called speak american so it breaks down some of the things like um whether you say soda pop or coke uh whether you say crawfish or crayfish or crawdad can we check on both of those soda right you're not yes st louis actually if you look at the map um st louis is very distinctly soda wow and then the

rest of missouri is pop oh god little bastions of sanity and what do you call the little little tiny lobster guys um i think crawfish yeah i'm a crawdad boy really crawdads huh always call them crawdads so if you were going to a boil of these you would say i mean i would say crawfish boiled to like fit in with you normies you sheeple but i would call them crawdads if i was among my own folk this is this is a fun one can i can i move on to the next one here so what do you call the little gray insect that rolls up into a ball when you touch it a roly-poly yes but some people call it pill bug and some people call it potato but you know i i think i used to call it roly-polies and i think since i put away my childish things i think i i think i go with pill bug more these days but do you still call them roly-polies

yeah that's i don't know which one i do i got that one on the quiz and I was like, oh shit, I do a few of these. Anyway, I took this quiz and it like matched me exactly to St. Louis, which was kind of incredible. It was like St. Louis, Overland Park, Kansas, or Irving, Texas. I got Irving, Texas as well. Oh, you did? It did not get me. It got Irving, Texas, Oklahoma City city and i believe like santa clara

california or something but interesting because my shit's weird because i do have a lot of like yeah regional dialect i have a lot of regional uh colloquialisms although that's that's its own thing obviously um but like uh i think a lot of people i think west virginia says coke more than the abba ridge bear and also i i say that it asks how you say the word a-u-n-t and i say aunt which i do not believe is an appalachian way of so i have a weird if your brothers say aunt i don't know i'm not sure i saw some shit on this quiz i was like oh nobody says that but i'm assuming there is people who say that i was excited to see so the part of the reason this came up is that when i recorded the my sister--law, my sister-in-law and me, I talked about crayons.

And I say crayons. Crayons? Crayons. C-R-A-N. Crayons. You're kind of doing one syllable almost. Uh-huh. That's a thing.

That's like a thing on this quiz. They say like other people do that too. Oh, that's. Okay. That was one that i just like and then there's there's people that say crayon and people that say crayon like yawn crayon crayon passing that crayon yeah i say crayon yeah that's wild people in texas say crown that's the worst one yet i saw one category that was like what did did the people of your homeland call the night before Halloween? And I was like, oh, do you mean nothing?

And it was like, oh, here's 50 different things. Some of them, it's like a very specific region of a very specific state says the one thing that nobody else in the country says. And then it's just one town. We learned from the Groundhog's Day segment I did. says and then it's just one town we learned from the groundhog's day segment i did this there's some towns that are just like hey everybody let's get tricksters midnight cabaret a thing and we can be the home of it so the one thing i found because i was trying to find stuff that was specific to your region and the only thing i found that was appalachian was what you call what you put on a cake to decorate it uh uh icing okay you say frosting i say frosting see i is that there was also an option in there that said uh do you say icing or frosting

and it said i say both but they're two different things and i selected that one so what are the different things to you icing is icing is for cakes icing on the cake right it's not the frosting on the cake but like what's frosting frosting goes on like a donut or like on a cookie has frosting on it or like a like a right i think that you have your way do you not say the word frosting at all no i say the word frosting okay and i say the word icing but i use them interchangeably they don't mean different things oh they mean different things to me. Interesting. Icing is like a glaze.

It's more liquidy and frosting has like some substance to it. I don't, do you think that's real though? Or do you think you're making this up? No, I think I'm making it up. Okay. You're so confident. So here, here's what I wanted to talk about specifically to St. Louis. So I have a regionalism that I don't think you'll be familiar with.

So I'm really turning the tables on you right now. All right. So in St. Louis, the term Hoosier is a bad thing. Right. Well, is that a sports rivalry? No. Oh. No.

So what we would call, so somebody that is like viewed as like country or backwards or like, you know backwards or low class is called Hoosier. Oh, okay. I was reading this article, this linguistic anthropologist, Paula Kavanaugh Carter, says that the history seems to say that there was a manufacturing plant that moved to St. Louis from Indiana. The people who were native had some resentment to the people who had moved in and the differences in the culture they looked down on. So they began to say anyone that was not doing something proper was called a Hoosier.

But I grew up thinking that was like a thing. And it wasn't until I left St. Louis that I realized this is not something that is used anywhere else. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, so that's the only thing I have to compare to your like, just multitudes of Appalachian expressions. Let's be clear. A lot of my stuff also probably came from my dad who was just making stuff up as he went along. That's very possible.

But some of them are like, the very first question is like, how do you refer to a collective group of people informally? i clicked the y'all button so fucking fast and hard that i punched a hole through my computer keyboard they made the country look like it was totally divided between y'all and you guys yeah some of the options were like use guys and it's like calm on i'm almost certain right i also saw catty corner versus kitty corner. And then I couldn't think of what I said. When you say both back to back like that, I'm like, wait, which one do I do? I think I do catty corner, but I never say that.

Isn't there one for what you call the rotating piece of furniture that you can put food on or put in a cupboard to spin it around and get the things? I mean, Lazy Susan. Yeah, I've heard that. What's the other one? I thought there was another one that wasn't so derogatory, but maybe not. Oh, yeah, we've talked about it because I brought Lazy Susan. I think you did, yeah. Man, we've been doing this show a while, huh?

Yeah, we have. The other one is how you say C-A-R-A-M-E-L. Caramel. See, I say caramel. Caramel. Kind of like crayon. How is it that I am the one who says it like more sort of extravagantly? You're just very pompous, I guess.

I guess, but I shouldn't be. How did I get so above my freaking raising? I do say pen. You know how sometimes people say pin? That's one of those words. I very deliberately say pen. Yeah. The thing I get called out for more than anything is I have certain words that are homonyms

that I just all say the same, like pass me that pin or stick a pin in your jacket. And I have a lot of those that I can't remember any of the other ones. One of the questions you see on the quiz was like, how do you say M-E-R-R-Y versus M-A-R-Y? Versus the name M-A-R. Yeah. Yeah. M-A-R-R-Y. M-A-R-Y.

Do you say them the same? M-E-R-R-Y. Yeah. Or different? I was like, who says them different? Everybody said the same except like a very small region in the Northeast. Yeah. Maori.

Maori. Maori. Also tennis shoes versus sneakers yeah tennis shoes for for life yeah i guess they're this is actually makes sense to me so up in like the northeastern part of the united states people say sneakers and that reminded my grandma always said sneakers she's from the northeast what about um the things you wear on your legs to when you're uh when, when you're going swimming, like, uh, traditionally,

like, uh, short pants for men, short pants that you wear when you're about to go swimming. Oh, like trunks. Yeah. Trunks.

That's gotta be one, right? Why are they called trunks? What's the deal? We need your brother's soundboard. Yeah, no, no,

we fricking don't. Um, what's your second thing my second thing is drifting drifting doing the cool car stunt drift i promise you i did not know this was a thing until i met you drifting yes that makes you very excited because if i can be an evangelist for this one thing a lot of times when we would play mario kart you would mention it and i didn't know what so mario kart is my main sort of connection to drifting. Because you drift in Mario Kart, you can get those blue sparks, those red sparks, and they give you a little boost of speed.

And y'all, like your friend group in Austin that I kind of invaded when I moved here was playing Mario Kart, and more specifically, Cario Mart on the reg. But none of y'all knew about that drift. None of y'all knew about those blue sparks. So I showed up and was like, oh yeah, I'll try playing this. It was your digital snake. That was my snake experience. And I won my way into y'all's hearts. I was driving over to a friend's house on Saturday and I was on Mopac, which is one of our beautiful highways. And I got off of that exit at 35th it does like a whole full circle loop around to like get to the higher road and it just started raining and i fully hydroplaned going like going like i was going like 25 miles an hour i was not very fast because i'm a good boy and i

slow down on the off ramps but i fully like fully hydroplane but i know my shit i kept it on lock i didn't like lose control uh but I did end up doing like almost half of that loop just completely sideways and it was very scary. Oh my gosh. It was very scary but it also is the coolest

I've ever felt while driving a car because I was just Tokyo drifting the shit out of it. What were you listening to when that happened? Do you remember? I believe I was listening to a gaming podcast

which probably reduces how cool it was. But it was the longest drift I ever did. It made me think about how cool drifting is. I should say right now that like drifting as a filmed stunt or as like a drifting based competition is very cool. But do not do this at home. Obviously, I don't think I need to say that. Yeah, no, it's super scary. I have a friend who was a big like car guy growing up and probably still is and um

he jay leno was it jay it was jay and he would uh jay and that's either jay or jerry but anyway uh this this friend of mine would drive me home from school uh for like two years and he liked cars very much and once he did a cool drift drift to show me how his new tires worked. And I was like, this is very cool. But also, I need to get out of the car right now. This is for professionals only. Drifting was tough for me to define in this segment other than turning a car cool. So I got to Wikipedia and found a more specific definition.

It clarifies it as a, quote, Driving technique where the driver intentionally oversteers with a loss of traction in the rear wheels of all tires while maintaining control and driving the car through the entirety of a corner. And when I put it that clinically, you start to lose what makes drifting so neat. Basically, there's two ways you can do it.

There's lots of ways you can do it, but the two most common ways are you're driving real fast and you're about to hit a turn and right at the apex of your turn you slam on the brakes and you sort of change the momentum of your car so that you're you know doing a brake slide you're going sideways the other way to do it is to it's called clutch kicking where you hit the clutch after entering a turn and you just send a ton of torque to the rear rear wheels and they lose traction and causes them to lose grip this sounds terrifying to me basically cargo sideways cargo sideways yeah

yeah um and like i said i know about it from mario kart and any number of other racing games that i got into i didn't play that much racing it's not like my favorite genre but the games that i did really attach to like there's a series called burnout that had the tightest drifting ever and it felt so good like there are racing games that are like these realistic sort of like fine-tune your car simulators and then there's like wild arcade games where you just steer for you you drift for like a half mile and it looks and feels super cool that's like my main attachment to it. But obviously there's movies, there's, well, Fast and the Furious and more specifically Fast and the Furious 3,

Tokyo Drift. Have you caught that one? I don't think you've caught that one. If we haven't watched together, I haven't. You weren't watching these before us? No. I told you drifting, just car stunts in general, not in my wheelhouse.

The plot of that movie, I'll break it down, is that Japan loves drifting. And that's kind of true because it's where the technique was basically invented. Oh, okay. There was this racer named Akunemitsu Takahashi who was actually a motorcyclist who then became a automobile racer. And he was part of this circuit called the All Japan Touring Car Championship Series. And he was just this super flashy driver. Like all, he got this huge following

because he would start like using these drifting techniques to get through corners. And he started winning like actually a bunch of races like that. And people would like see the smoke he was kicking up from his tires by taking these drifts. And folks like went wild for it. And he was followed by a guy named uh keiichi tsuchiya um who's also called the drift king uh who basically like

worked on and developed drifting techniques and then made them really really popular he would practice on like these winding dangerous mountain roads in japan uh and uh and and his like style his his drifting style earned him this huge following in 1987 um he got sponsored by a bunch of different car magazines and garages to make a short film about his techniques uh and it's called plus p p l u s p y and you can watch all of it on youtube i watched all 21 minutes of it it's just this guy drifting down like japan mountain roads and you see it in first person perspective and it was it's got like 1987 vibes all over it and it is so fucking good i can't recommend it enough um and that like started to spread and other racers started to like use these techniques uh this this uh guy tsujiya he invented the d1 grand prix which is like the the first like big drifting competition

um and you know since then since the the sort of spread of it in 1987 it has become like a technique that is common in all kinds of racing uh because it's i guess a fast way to turn cars i don't think you get blue sparks in real life i think most importantly people want to know how do you drift a mario kart oh yeah you uh while you're driving and you uh you move blue sparks in real life. I think most importantly, people want to know how do you drift in Mario Kart? Oh yeah. You, uh, while you're driving and you, uh, you move the stick in order to take a turn and then you do a jump, you do a bunny hop. And then obviously when you land, you've lost all traction, but you hopped mid turn. And then as soon as you land, you got to start turning those wheels in the other direction or else you're going to fully spin out. You don't want to do that. But that friction of driving into uh the

the the corner uh is actually what's going to get you those good sparks so you gotta you gotta sort of nurse that stick you gotta nurse that analog stick um obviously that is that's a japanese game uh a big thing that came out of japan that actually made it an international thing there was an anime series called initial d and i've actually i had actually seen a little bit of it before i've never like watched the show but people reference it all the time and it's was an anime series called initial d and i've actually i had actually seen a little bit of it before i've never like watched the show but people reference it all the time and it's just an anime about a high school student learning to drift uh on the the mountain roads of japan and it uh it became actually really popular amongst like car enthusiasts in the states who weren't necessarily anime enthusiasts uh because it was basically like, it was super stylish and it had all of these Japanese performance

cars. It was just like car porn, kind of, but for cartoons. Now that was a home improvement? This show wasn't called Car Improvement. But he liked cars. Did he like cars?

I remember him liking cars. I guess he did like cars, but he would do things to, he didn't like cars. He liked himself and he liked his wild experimentations that got him so much attention. I've totally thrown you off, haven't I? You've really, really taken my legs out from under me. I'm not a big car guy rachel can attest to that true um i do enjoy driving and seeing cool like drifting videos or stunts or whatever like it really it does it for me i sent you a link to uh jim kana which is a series of

uh like just super hot stunt videos a couple minutes of that uh it's very it's quite a loud video but it's basically just this very talented driver in a stock car doing the most buck wild drifting stunts like drifting around a corner over a train track like a foot away from an oncoming train and like driving full speed towards a person on a segway and then like drifting donuts around them and drifting right up against like the banks of a river, like all of these wild, wild stunts. And they're very, very scary. But the person is so talented that you get over the fear of it very quickly and are just

like, how is this person this good at driving cars? I wonder how you legally get good at stuff like that. I mean, it's got to be like you have a lot, right? You have a lot that you can do all these these tricks on yeah i mean that's how nascar does it is that you drive on the nascar track i don't think you're allowed to do it in the on just the street and i think that's like a special driver's license you can get for stunts oh like a like a class s for stunts oh no i've got a chase sapphire driver's license so i can actually go 150 there was a book i read in middle school and it was it was a book about how

to remain sort of pure um sort of uh you know biblically and there's a whole chapter about, I'm getting somewhere. There's a whole chapter about your new body and your... Wait, did you read this for fun or were you instructed? It was just laying around. And so I kind of just dabbled in it. Maybe it was just like at church. And so I started to like flip through the pages. Do you think it was intentionally laid around for wayward youth?

Maybe, but there was an analogy in there, and it was about your new body and your feelings and urges and what you can do with those urges. And it's like, those urges can lead to beautiful things, but using them now is like driving a NASCAR stock car through the McDonald's drive-thru. It's not an appropriate place to do it. I remember reading that thinking like, did you just call my wiener? Wait, and is it the person you're driving it through, McDonald's? But I think it's saying like,

yeah, your wiener can do some cool stuff right now but using it now don't put it in a mcdonald's don't don't fuck a mcdonald's i guess i don't know that mcdonald's would license that yeah i don't maybe it said a a popular fast food maybe that's what it was i was reading grimace's sort of abstinence paraphernalia. Oh my gosh. Hey, I got some submissions from our friends at home. Can I tell you? You know Grimace is nasty.

Grimace is probably the nastiest. Who's the nastiest one and who's the like. I mean, people would think it's the Hamburglar, but I think it's Grimace. I think that Grimace is down to, well, to clown i don't want ronald to be that no i think it's oh mayor mccheese probably has a scandal or two hiding behind those buns so anyway kyle sent this and kyle says something i find wonderful is going to bed without setting an alarm no uh knowing i don't have to do anything early and can sleep as long as i want is an amazing feeling remember those days is it kyle is it nice kyle i will say on the weekend i like not setting an alarm even though we have a human a human alarm

uh we i went to houston with some friends and uh had a bit of a wild night and then went to bed at like one without setting an alarm. And I was like, let's just see what happens. And I woke up at 9.30. It was like 9.45. I mean, I felt extremely bad if it makes you feel better. And also, I was almost late because we were supposed to leave the hotel at 10. I didn't know my body was still capable of doing that.

But you do enough dumb stuff to it. It'll get you there. Nia says, cotton candy grapes. Grapes that taste like fairy floss and not like grapes because magic and farm science have both decided to bless us with these sweet and tasty bite-sized babies. I've had some of these and honestly to me they just taste like grapes. That is absolutely wild. To be fair, I've only had cotton candy like once or twice my entire life what that's true it doesn't appeal to me i don't like sugar that much

you know like nerds and stuff you know you love nerds i i don't and so the cotton candy i just thought i'm probably not gonna like that and so i've only had it like once or twice so when i had the cotton candy grapes i was like these just taste like really sweet grapes because okay i'll give it to you i think they taste exactly like cotton candy i know i've heard that i think they taste completely about like cotton candy and you can't just say cotton candy is just sugar because they don't make it like a jelly bean flavor called like you know sugar it's got its own thing going on it's got its own thing going on. It's got its own stuff going on there. So thank you so much to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

Thanks to, I mean, y'all for helping us. Thank you again to everybody who donated or encouraged others to donate during the Max Fund Drive. I have not forgotten my promise to do a live wonderful on our McElroy family YouTube channel. I will do that before the month is out. Yes. So stay tuned and enjoy that. This one's going to go way smoother than the one that got goofed up on Facebook. The Facebook one, yeah.

Let's think. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. You can go to MaximumFun.org, check out all the great stuff there. They got shows like Mission to Zix and- Friendly Fire. And JV Club with Janet Varney and a lot more all at MaximumFun.org.

And you can check out our stuff at McElroy.family, including new April merch, including- New merch. Oh my gosh, you guys, this was such a treat because I did not know it was coming. But as of this month, you can buy a Rachel's Poetry Corner pin. It is very cute. It's like a purple book and it looks real good.

And it says Rachel's Poetry Corner. Oh my gosh, you guys. I'm on a pin. Rachel's on a pin. And I think we both got the fire in our bellies now to get more merch going. So yeah, a shirt would be nice, I think. Yes. Maybe a baseball shirt.

God, I love a baseball shirt. Oh, we do love baseball shirts. Yeah, I'm wearing one right now. And that's going to probably do it for us to be ending. Bye. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Hey! Maximumfun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. All right. This one is about some books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hi, everybody. My name is Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. And together we're the hosts of Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. What does that mean for you, the podcast consumer? Well, it means that you're going to get a lot of stories

about how we used to do weird stuff to people in order to try to fix them. Do you know that we used to think diseases were caused by bad smells? And that we used to eat mummies for medicine. That's super funny. I kind of like it. Well, thanks. And we hope you'll kind of like our show, Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. It's available every Friday wherever fine podcasts are sold or at its beautiful picturesque home at MaximumFun.org.