Wonderful! - Wonderful! 91: A Nice, Oaky Greg

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Griffin's favorite reflex! Rachel's favorite online list! Griffin's favorite floating color blobs! Rachel's favorite narrated TV show! 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 Celia McElroy. What? What? What are we doing? I just thought I'd bring my middle name out. What? This is Graham from... I just thought I'd bring my middle name out. This is Grafen. And that's my real first name. And I've been waiting too long. This is Grafen.

Andrew McElroy. And this is wonderful. I thought I'd just say it this time. If it was all sort of fucking chopping and screwing it and throwing out the rule book. I like my middle name and I never get to say it. Welcome to Griffin's Poetry Corner. Whoa. This week I'm going to do. Oh, my tummy hurts because I ate too much. Welcome to Griffin's Poetry Corner. Whoa. This week I'm gonna do-

Ew, my tummy hurts because I ate too much. Oh, that's fun. That's your segment. Okay, yeah, that's cool. I'm so pretty and competent. I'm really smart and funny. That's you.

It ended with you ripping a big one. Yeah, okay. Because you're always doing that while you're being funnyunny and fart. Oops. What's going on over there? Ah, you know. You're loosey-goosey.

Case of the Mondays, I guess. I had a few Starburst jelly beans that I snuck while I was in the kitchen. Hey, how old? Easter. Okay. They're fucking jelly beans, though. They're wrapped in a candy coating

that I don't think mold is, you know, remotely a problem for, is it? So, yeah, I'm a little fucking jacked, baby. Do you have any small wonders besides Easter jelly beans? I mean, I assume that you're going to mention Stranger Things Season 3. I am not. So go right ahead. It's freaking good, man. I feel like my interest in it was minimal because I just kind of liked season two.

And, you know, I am plugged into certain entertainment outlets and saw some sort of lukewarm reviews of season three. But, man, I like it a lot. There is so much action. There's a lot of action. It's moving at a, like, wild clip for this show. And everybody's getting really good performance opportunities you know like all the characters really have a chance to shine it's super well written and like my shit like they are on some full-blown like thing level uh like grotesque gore horror a lot of tributes to uh

great films yeah i mean that's been true of the whole thing the whole series arguably but this one they wear it right on the sleeve like they're doing some red dawn shit they are doing uh they're doing some terminator thing stuff oh god they're doing some terminator stuff but like i am so into the old i feel like there's some alien stuff there too i think so i think thing is probably the more sort of because thing is very much about like we're not finished yet melting in the monster maybe an alien bursts out uh i guess there is some sort of face hugger comparisons i love that era of like old practical effects horror movies like i am obsessed with them um and i don't know they're leaning into it in a way it's it's tv 14 which i cannot believe because of the level of like i

understand that this is like not people's thing but it is wicked my thing and like they are going so hard in the paint this season hey what's my small wonder i was just about to ask you jeez i'm trying to keep this one uh keep it tight keep it tight i also wanted to say super mario maker 2 it's really fun i just published my first level check it out pubbed it on it's on insta check out the deets on Insta and hit it up. What's your small wonder, though? My small wonder, did you see what University of Texas Austin announced today? Yeah. Starting fall 2020, if your family's income is $65,000 or under, you can go to college for all four years at UT for free.

That is so wild. I assume you still have to like, you know, apply for the school and make it in. Of course, yes. Yeah, but all your tuition and fees are taken care of. That is so buck wild. They said that's a significant portion of UT's population too.

I don't doubt it. Like, I don't understand. People always talked about the Promise Scholarship as being a, which was a thing in West Virginiaia i went to well i went to marshall i got in on a really big super nice scholarship that i lost instantly and luckily had the promise scholarship to fall back on but it was like if you maintain a 3.0 gpa you got to go to any school in west virginia for free that's incredible if you were a west virginia resident and but then like after i had it there the like state congress was talking about like well this is not sustainable so i don't know how ut could go about doing that that's so what i read is they have a bunch of oil money oh okay well

that makes sense and i imagine they have a vested interest in increasing like the diversity of their campus and this is a really good way to do it oh yeah i didn't mean to make it sound like i was against this i think it's a great thing it's just like it's uh no it seems like it would be hard to sustain i know here we go yeah uh i go first this week yes my first thing is really tough because i did i could not think of a name for it and after much googling i could not like find a name for it which i thought was weird because it seems like a fairly common thing, but maybe I just wasn't searching the right terms. But as far as I can, I'm calling it like sympathetic effort response reflex thing.

And it's where you're, we were watching American Ninja Warrior as we are wont to do, as we were just doing before we came to record the podcast. It's our inscrutable guilty pleasure and I will not hear you judge us for it. It's the perfect eating dinner television program.

Yeah, it doesn't take much attention from you. You can just watch people do stunts. But sometimes when you're really rooting for someone on Ninja Warrior, and they're about to go for a big jump, I, as they jump, will jerk my leg up. Or I will, you know, watching the Olympics was just like this all over where you're watching like the ski jump and you see somebody go for the big jump and you like lift your body up out of the

chair as they as they jump i don't know what the name of this is and i googled everything from like people move moving when see people do sports you know what it makes me think of what's that a lot of people do that during video games so that yeah i was going to mention that too that is probably that is the most sort of widely observed like uh portion of this phenomenon and you mostly see it on like exaggerated in like movies and tv shows where they have to show somebody playing a video game yeah and i that's i i think that shit is so hysterical first of all like um mostly the sound effects that people who make tv shows who don't know what video games are like that they put on a video game you'll see somebody like playing a

game on playstation 4 and the game will sound like it's like dog games haven't sounded like that for a really long time things to do with you is when we're watching a program and there is a video game on it, I just turn to Griffin and I say, what is that game? Is it real? And usually within a few seconds, you can identify it. Yeah, do not sweat. I know a lot of games by a blurry, distant shot of their user interface. That's my cross to bear. So, yeah, it happens during video games.

I still couldn't find it. I would Google, you know, why do you move when you play video games why because that's a super common thing especially when you're playing like an intense uh first person shooter i play a lot of a game called destiny 2 and sometimes in that game like you're in these really high stress like platforming things we have to like jump from thing to thing and if you die like it's super super bad and when i get in that stressful environment and i have to like do one of those platforming segments when i jump i like tense up and i lift my torso like up and out of the chair and i won't release that position until i have safely landed yeah and i don't know why that is and googling gave me nothing yeah it's a hard thing to google it is a hard thing

to google because i don't think anybody has a name for it. I thought something like sympathetic reflex, right? Because it's your brain watching something happening and then your brain going like, oh shit, we're about to jump over a big Ninja Warrior stunt. You better jerk your leg up. And then it realizes like what it has done wrong and it feels embarrassed, I imagine, in that moment.

Or thinks like, oh no oh no master chief you gotta jump because the flood are coming oh jump jump oh shit wait that's a video game because it makes sense right like we spend a lot of time moving around the physical world with our bodies and so like our body knows what moving feels like and if we get so like uh i'm pulling this out of my ass but it's like the only thing i can think that makes sense is like our brains see this movement reflected either on a tv show or in some sort of virtual environment and if you like catch it off guard your brain will like try to mimic the physical response of the thing that you are saying you know what it made me think of when you said sympathetic is it reminded me of when you are watching somebody perform and you are nervous

for them and you start sweating while you are watching them perform sure that's more of an emotional i don't know i guess that's why i think the word sympathetic is maybe a little misleading because it because it you your body is like kind of like thrusting in the direction of of what you want to accomplish yes which feels more like like literally physical yes you know also there's already a thing called sympathetic uh reflexive disorder something like that so it's it's not this um so yeah i don't know what it's called it's weird to me uh and again couching this saying that like maybe i just googled the wrong stuff but this is do you you do this right like i the when you when we're talking about video games i was thinking of

like car games where you're driving you're trying to like go around a turn i feel like i will like physically move my body into the turn and i know i know i get physically active when i am watching sports uh i don't know that I do anything with my body that correlates to what needs to be done on the playing field. Yeah, I wondered about this too. I knew I did it for games. But then like when I did this watching Ninja Warrior the other day, I was like, well, that's why did I do that? That's, that's pretty, that's pretty strange. Yeah. I don't know, man, reflexes in general, I think are cool. And also kind of like weird and scary.

Like that are. Yeah. Obviously, we have a lot of autonomous functions that like gets me real weirded out when I think about like all the things your body does. Well, that you don't have to think about. Yeah. And then like you're you're more front of mind reflexes, I think, are like neat and interesting that your body will just decide to do stuff when presented with certain stimuli and this seems like such a wild sort of innocuous harmless one and i don't know why i couldn't find a name for it but again that might just be my my failing and also i gotta say that it does lead to some pretty good episodes of law and Order SVU of just like gamer murderers and the brand new apparently like Pac-Man game that they're playing in 2019. Hey, what's your first thing? My first thing came from a real place of nostalgia, which is sometimes the best thing to bring.

A common vein, I would say, for this program? Craigslist. Wow. Okay. Now, admittedly, I this program? Craigslist. Wow. Mm-hmm. Okay. Now, admittedly, I don't use Craigslist today. No. But when I think about what I have achieved from Craigslist-

I can't wait to hear this. It's substantial. Okay. From Craigslist, I have not only purchased furniture and a bicycle, I believe, yeah, it's where I got my first cat. Through what? Mm-hmm. There's a pet section. Okay.

And when I was in Chicago and decided I wanted to get a cat, just went on Craigslist because that's where I got my bike. So I thought, why not get a cat? Interesting. Yeah. Do you think you could find a date on know, a date on Craigslist? You can. Yeah, you definitely can. It's also like when I was job searching in Chicago, it's what I used. Like I used it all the time. Okay. I think I, I, I, I remained ignorant of

Craigslist. I think I sold when I was living in Chicago, I sold a drum set and a poker table there. Cause I did not want to move those down to Austin, but I did use it for literally anything else so I guess I guess I do know that it's like basically the personal ads of the internet uh but I just I yeah I also used to spend a little time on Miss Connections just looking to see if anybody happened to see me doing something that always seems so the the odds of that seem even in like when I was living in Batavia Ohio the odds of like that actually happening seems so astronomically low. You'd see that a lot after music festivals and shows and stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would get on and search Lollapalooza and see what's going on. Damn, I wish I lived in Manchester, Tennessee right after Bonnaroo rolled out of town and just hop in the Craigslist and be like, You were very dirty and your butt was dirty. And my butt was dirty too. And your hair was really dirty. Anyway, was that you? I love you. So Craigslist is now in like 700 some cities and 70 plus countries.

Okay. Are people still like? Yeah. Wow. I went on today just to make sure it was still happening and it is still popping off it's actually a really good place to buy baby stuff too if you are looking for like oh that makes sense a lot of time this stuff happens on facebook now yeah but for a lot of folks that are still using craigslist like it's a really great place to sell stuff that you used for like a week baby stuff's's wild, y'all. You will pass the point of relevance

for developmental baby toys in the span of a month. It is like that wild. And then it's like, well, what do I do with it now? And a lot of people don't use Facebook for that purpose. And so Craigslist is a really good option, especially if you're doing stuff locally. A lot of times people will put stuff on eBay to ship stuff out. But if you think doing stuff locally you know like a lot of times people will put stuff on ebay just to ship stuff out but if you think somebody you know three blocks away might want your stuff this is a

great way to facilitate it i lied i sold a mattress on craigslist you remember that when i moved here to austin and i'm i sold it to uh a recently divorced woman yeah came in and sort of told me what was what was up i up and that she needed a bed. And I was like, oh, that's, that's, and,

but she like walked into my bedroom and like sat down on the bed and was like really getting comfortable in it. And I was getting really uncomfortable. Talking about her divorce. Yeah. I remember you told me, you were like, what was,

is something happening? I mean, it wasn't like I was like running through my own penthouse letters in my mind, but like I'm an uncomfortable person around strangers to begin with let alone ones that I've just let into my home let alone ones that have come into my bedroom and like rolled around in my bed while talking about their recent divorce that was a precarious situation for the g-man do you think she looked at a lot of mattresses and and just tried that out just to see like is this a good line am I

getting somewhere with this if memory serves she bought she did buy my mattress and she she got the price down to something preposterous bed zeppelin that was bed zeppelin oh shit okay so it was two beds that i'd pushed together and wrapped up in a huge no no no you just waved your finger at me no no no you just waved your finger at me like you were Dikembe Mutombo. What was that? Because this is an instrumental part of our relationship. Okay. You bought a coupon for a mattress before you moved here.

It was like a Groupon. And you purchased a mattress. But then when we decided to move in together, we kept my mattress. Right. Because we decided it was better. It was, yeah. This was not a very good mattress. So I shaking my fingers yeah you it was really wild historically important to the foundation of who we are as a couple okay so how dare you it was a filthy it was a filthy

bed anyway uh that was a long long story of the last time i used craigslist okay so i think part of the reason i was using craigslist so much in Chicago was that it was 2004. And it was hot then? It was pretty hot. So Craigslist started in, actually started in 1995. Wow. Which is wild to me because I had no awareness, but it started in San Francisco. I was going to say probably. Specifically San Francisco-based, and it was Craig Newmark. he had just recently gotten laid off from charles schwab and had some programming knowledge right and so he decided he was going to start this real casual like email chain about local events uh and then it kind of turned into a list serve as more people requested like oh i would love to get on your email list and so then it became a god i love old internet i know it's so good uh and so then at the end of 1997 he turned it into

a website uh and then a company in early 1999 um but he said that he was getting volunteer help in the beginning of it it was like 97 98 and he was still working like a full-time job and it was just growing and growing and growing and so and in 99 when he was 42 he just started this website and it looks pretty much the same as when he started yeah i was gonna say this this thing has not gone through a lot of changes i'm assuming he said that they like did outreach to figure out what people wanted. And people were like, we don't really want anything fancy. We just want to be able to click on something.

It is so viciously functional. I remember the first time I used it was to sell one of those big, big things in Chicago. And I'd put it off because I didn't know what to do. And eBay really stressed me out. But it's literally like you type in what you want. You click a link and you get an email. And that's like it now craigslist is uh a pretty successful company yeah i would uh even if you're not somebody that's using it currently newmark while he doesn't have an active role still owns

42 of the company uh and that company is estimated forbes estimated that it is worth at least three billion dollars holy shit and so at 40 percent of the company he owns at least or he's worth at least 1.3 billion damn just for this like little website where he said like hey you want to advertise your job that could buy you a lot of old beat up ass bicycles on Craigslist. Part of it is that they started charging for job postings or for like very high traffic, you know, revenue based opportunities. So like New York City apartments, you have to pay to when it began in 1998, they charged $25 for job postings to cover costs. charge $25 for job postings to cover costs. And they also charge for things like ticket sales and automobiles, stuff that are like high revenue, high traffic items. But I don't know. I think it's

great. I think it's great that it still exists. I think it's great that it's all over the place. I know when I moved to Columbia, Missouri briefly after Chicago, I was still using it. I mean, it's like if you move to a new city and you don't know kind of what the regional job search engines are, Craigslist is a great place to get your toes wet. Yeah, it filled the need, I would say, in the early. what i would be curious i don't want to take it to a bummer place but i would be curious to hear like how craigslist and its development affected uh which is to say like devastated the like actual print uh uh like personal ad uh industry like i have to imagine it just to be honest the internet in general yeah i guess that strongly impacted the print yeah i guess in every conceivable way that i don't think you can blame craig on that i'll bring blame craig for whatever i want do you know

any craigs in your life by the way do i know any see i'm gonna say no and then i'm gonna get an email from like my best friend craig and they'll be like what the i knew exactly one craig in high school you know what I'm struggling with? Is I keep thinking of them and then I realize they're Greggs. Can I say something? I know a lot of badass Greggs. I know a lot of really, really, really good Greggs. Wow.

Yeah. I think I only knew one Greg growing up, but he was okay. Yeah. As I've put away my childish things, i've sort of grown a mature nose and mature taste for a nice greg a nice greg a nice heady oaky greg 2003 greg from the southern california vineyard this is greg you're going to love him. Smell him first. Smell Greg first. Do you want to smell Greg's cork? Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. What is the cork? It's a cork. Oh, okay, good. Yeah. He just pops it out of his mouth. Let me smell that.

All right. Yeah, I'll take this, Greg. Hey, can I steal your wife? Sure. I got a couple of Jumbotrons. Before we get to them, we have an important announcement. Yes. Yes. Jumbotron spots for the rest of-

Starting today. Listeners can head to MaximumFun.org to enter the Tron. Oh, okay. I thought it was like a real quick thing, but no, it's- Yeah, no,'ve got some time but you know if you know you want to get in there you can start today get in there starting today you can head to maximumfund.org jumbo tron drawing and you can enter a drawing to purchase one of the limited jumbo tron spots on wonderful just to say that again because i think at first glance it's of strange, but you enter a drawing to purchase one of the spots. Usually the, you know, we only do two of these a show and we do what, 52 episodes a year. So there's not a ton of availability for these. So this is how we,

we manage it. Uh, and the drawing closes on July 24th. So we're only accepting personal messages from now on, uh, if you haven't picked up on that so no more business messages but if you have a shout out that you want for uh you know a buddy a loved one whoever uh you you should enter this drawing uh also the air date that you pick is estimated not guaranteed because again it's real real tight out here so uh for for all the details go to maximumfund.org slash jumbotron drawing uh or you can email daniel at maximum fun.org if you have any other questions but it closes on july 24th did we say that i think i think that's the third time okay but people know for damn sure what day this thing is over uh here's a jumbotron for mike and it's from maggie who says i wanted to get you a regularly scheduled dnd game for christmas

but instead i got you a few seconds of McElroys. Happy four- should we like prolong? Just get him a few extra seconds? Like, oh, happy four year anniversary? Mike? Mike? To a kick butt partner, friend, and co-dog parent. Piglet and I both love you very much, even when you eat cheese. Here's your forever reminder that sharks aren't mammals and crabs are definitely not fish. Jerry's still out on the last two sentences in this jumbo tree.

Yeah, sharks are mammals, right? Sharks are mammals because they blast them out. No eggs, right? They just blast them out what about crabs though crabs of fish it lives in the water forever crab fish crab well crab crustacean is like a thing crustacean's a thing crab come out of the water though doesn't it well piss i don't know anymore here's one uh for delaney bloomquist and it's from Hannah, who says, Dear friend, you may

be in Chicago by now. I tried over and over to write you a suitable ode or villanelle, villanelle, villanelle, villanelle. Villanelle. You know about where, like, writing. It's villanelle. Okay. I'm pretty sure.

Villanelle. I'm going to just take all possible permutations of it real fast. Villanelle. Villanelle. Villanelle. I'm going to just take all possible permutations of it real fast. Villanelle. Villanelle. Villanelle. Villanelle. And I'll just edit in the one that's right. It's almost certainly not Villanelle.

But anyway, I am limited by words and word count, so I will just say that we slash you slash I miss slash missed slash will miss you slash us slash me. Write me a letter or just yell real loud. I'll keep my ears open. Give my love to tomorrow. I'm sure I'll see you there. Oh, that's nice and beautiful. I feel bad for just taking so many swings at that one word.

But that's what you get when you step to us with these messages, assuming that we're smart and can read them good. Because guess what, folks? Only one of us is. And it's not me. Hey, I'm Janet Varney. And like many of you, some more recent than others, I used to be a teenager. In fact, just about all of my friends were, too, including wonderful women like Alison Brie.

I'm dead center on the balance beam. And this is like a big gym. All the kids' parents are there watching. I have to stop, like, you know, when you have to pee so bad and you can't even move. And then I just go. I just pee right in the middle of the high balance beam. So join me every week on the JV Club podcast, where I speak with complicated, funny, messy humans

as we reminisce about our adolescences and how they led us to becoming who we are. Find it every Thursday on Maximum Fun. Hey, you want to know about my second thing? Yes. Get it. Check it. Ready? Bubbles. And this is not a thing of me, like,

infantilizing myself for comedic effect. Henry is really into bubbles right now. And... Oh my gosh, yes. It's a nice phase. I get it. Like, I've always gotten it. They float and that's fun.

You see it right now, but he's pretty much always been into bubbles. He's always been in the bubbles. That's fine. This past weekend, you got a new bubble blower. And I really looked at these bubbles. It's called fubbles. It's called fubbles. And it blows a... I think it's called fumbles and it blows a i think

it's called that because it blows a fuck ton of bubbles i think they originally were gonna call it fuck ton of bubbles but they changed it to just fumbles and i was looking at these bubbles and man these things look cool yeah they look really neat like the colors of them and the way that they swirl around and stuff. Yes. Griffin and I had like a real moment of appreciation where we realized we knew nothing about bubbles and how they work. And I have had lots of opportunities to learn about bubbles and how they work. I've been to many children's science museums and just I guess it's been in one ear and out the other.

Have you stood inside a bubble? I haven't stood inside a bubble. COSI had the thing that i think every children's science museum that's the columbus science institute or whatever uh the thing where you like drop the rope in the bubble fluid and you lift it up and it makes like a huge ass bubble that's my jam i love that um so yeah i i i never i guess really paid attention in bubble class but here's how bubbles work a bubble is just air and it's trapped in a soapy film. And you probably knew that much already, but did you know it's actually two layers of

soapy film? There's an interior layer and an exterior layer, and they are sandwiching another layer of water. So it's technically two layers of soap that are sort of containing a water layer. And when that water layer evaporates, which can happen just naturally, or if you poke it and break the seal, it'll evaporate very, very quickly. That's what causes the bubble to pop. Oh, that explains why if you've got like a soapy hand,

they don't pop right away. If you have a soapy hand and they won't pop, yeah, hardly at all. Because when you stick your finger in there, you are just forming a new seal of the bubble stuff. Bubbles are round because a sphere is the shape with the smallest surface area possible, which is, I guess, what air likes to hop into. But when you blow two bubbles into each other they will fuse because now they can just share one one wall and you can form like a a hexagon of uh of bubbles it is so they get the they get horny power just like bras it's just like you're my bubble oh baby

and together we're one bubble. Well, two bubbles sharing a common wall. Okay. That sounds actually really bad, so we're not bubbles at all, okay? We're one big bubble. Okay.

Uh, so, the color, the color of these bad boys. Yeah, how does that work? Uh, it's,

it is an effect, like, it looks like some labyrinth shit, and it's so so good it's an effect of water refracting off both layers of film on this thing off the like external layer of film and the uh internal layer of film and the water sort of swirling around through it so when you look at a bubble and you see like the color like moving and morphing like around the surface of the bubble it is an effect of essentially like three different things kind of moving around and refracting light do you remember that time where you blew smoke into a bubble oh yeah you popped the bubble and the smoke would just yeah we had

a hookah at a uh a like lake house weekend and also bubbles for some reason this was this was a long time ago back when we we used to go to lake houses and just fuck them up. And we would still buy frivolous purchases. Yeah, oh God. And not functional sandwich bread. And smoke a hookah without death, without dying instantly.

And so bubbles are also reflective. They not only refract light, they will reflect, like if you get real close to them, you see all these cool moving around colors. And then you also see your own face. And that's nice. Bubbles are just cool, man. I don't necessarily, I don't enjoy blowing a bubble very much.

Because I'm very inconsistent with it. And I feel like every bubble brand you buy, their wands are different. And some wands are just bullshit and there's no way that you can generate a good, like I never know when I've done a good enough job. But we have machines for that and that's really nice and Henry will just lose his mind

as he dances around in thousands of bubbles. Oh my gosh, he likes fighting the bubbles, which is just wonderful to watch. Well, yeah. I don't know that it's a good, he's very into superheroes, which is a lot of punching and kicking, except for PJ Masks, which is boring. I watched Spider-Man and I'm like, does he have to punch so much?

Well, Spider-Man, though, Henry has picked up on the web slinger. Oh, my God. And so he'll stick his hand out and say, sticky web. Oh, he says, sticky web. And then he also makes, no joke pitch perfect really great noise i can't even do it in my mouth he's better than i am but it sounds just like thwip uh but anyway bubbles are cool i got some bubble records here for you and know some bubble records oh like like bubble high water marks yes uh this is from the uh guinness world records site yeah uh and it's amazing for so many reasons the most of which being the names of uh okay i think i only have

one in here um but there are certain like bubbles teams they're like bubbles events and like bubbles brands like you might find in like the skateboards industry oh so there's a john eric uh of extreme capital extreme bubbles who in october 9 2005 blew the guinness world record largest free floating soap bubble it was 105.4 cubic feet in size. That's nearly three cubic meters. If the bubble were filled with water, it would hold 788 gallons and weigh 3.2 tons. To give you another idea of its size, 13,627 baseballs would fit inside it. Pretty big ass bubble.

I gotta check this out on YouTube. Can we do that tonight? So there's a website that the Guinness tried to redirect me to called something like worldsbiggestbubble.com, and it did not load. Okay. They have not re-upped their domain purchase. But we can find it. Hopefully. Alan McKay of Wellington, New Zealand created a 105-foot long bubble on August 9th, 1996.

He used a bubble wand, dishwashing liquid, glycerin, and water. And I saw a picture of this bad boy. This is a big mother. 105 feet is so big. And this is just one continuous, huge, long, proud bubble member. And then one last one. Ray Macareg of San Jose, California, blew 119 soap bubbles from a standard child soap bubble container in 30 seconds on September

5th in 2001 on the set of Les Missions des Records in Paris, France while having a live tarantula in his mouth. The twist ending on this record.

The twist, the Shyamalan-esque twist ending on this record. The twist, the Shyamalan-esque twist ending on this record. Does that mean that there's another record out there that's like, he blew this bubble while having a garden snake in his mouth? Yeah, maybe. And he blew this bubble while having a small child's toy in his mouth yeah couldn't think of a small child's toy which is wild because we have so many of them i'm gonna call bullshit on this though because there's no way that tarantula wasn't helping out if that tarantula was like blowing a little bit i think if you're a tarantula and you're in some dude's mouth that's not a good situation for you

but if you see the cameras you know the guinness people are there and you know he's trying to blow a bunch of bubbles you're gonna put a little bit of back into it i think well and you also have to imagine this tarantula has been training with this man oh i don't think this was a lark so like there's got to be a reward system associated with this oh yeah like if you do good i'm gonna let you out of my my human mouth. That's not where spiders like to be. Hey, what's your second thing? My second thing is the Wonder Years.

The TV show? Yes. Not the years themselves? The TV show. Okay. The Wonder Years were like, I would say like 98 to 2002. That's a pretty good time. Oh, yeah. Okay.

I don't know this show at all. So that's literally all of my input on this segment. So I've kind of touched on this a little bit. So way back on episode seven, I talked about how I like TV shows with narrators. Yes. And I've also probably mentioned it casually because it was such a huge show for me when I was growing up. Yeah. I love it so much.

Oh, so you want a French Fred Savage. So... You want a French Fred Savage. It's fine. Like, it's fine. You've always wanted to. The only fan letter I've ever written was to Fred Savage when I was a small child. Yeah.

Do you remember any of the details? No, I don't. I just know that I got the address from the back of a book at the library. Nice. I have seen a lot of Fred Savage vehicles, by the way. Oh, yeah. I was reading about the Wonder Years, and I've seen movies like The Boy Who Could Fly and Vice Versa was another Fred Savage.

Didn't see that one. And, you know, The Wizard. The Wizard, of course. Yeah, of course. And Grindr. Oh, Grindr. Pour one out And Grindr. Oh, Grindr. Pour one out for Grindr. My sweet shadow boys.

So The Wonder Years was on ABC from 1988 to 93, 115 episodes. So it hit that 100 mark that gets them syndication. Yeah. Fred Savage played Kevin Arnold, which a uh adolescent boy growing up in 1968 so it was great because it was something my parents were interested in and me too because it kind of reflected their childhood and it was also interesting to me because it was very relatable french fred savage that's fine like you i think you've grandfathered in fred savage like you've wanted a friendship for so long here's there's this wild about this i'm just gonna skirt right past this jealousy you have

for fred it's not jealousy it's complete understanding well i mean you were a winnie cooper fan right i didn't watch the show have you you've seen it though right i have yeah but i wasn't i mean you would be more you're talking about the wrong savage to this kid if you want to talk about that's fine you're ben savage seen wrong Savage to this kid. If you want to talk about Topanga, that's fine. You're Ben Savage. Seen every episode of that show. Love the shit out of it. That is the easiest way to describe so many differences between us.

It really is the perfect, literal perfect. Are you Fred Savage or Ben Savage? Bellwether, yeah. So Fred Savage was the youngest person to ever be nominated for uh outstanding lead actor in a comedy series after the show had only aired for six episodes it was nominated for an emmy award holy shit in 1990 or sorry 1988 so what was kind of remarkable about the show um was that it was a single camera setup, used a narrator and didn't have a laugh track. So for some context,

the top shows in this time period were Cosby show, Roseanne, a different world cheers, which all had either a laugh track or a studio audience. Huh? And this, it was nominated for comedy series. So that's what they, it never hit me as like a comedy it hit me in a comedy as a comedy series in the same way that like kind of freaks

and geeks did it's like this isn't laugh out loud funny but it's a nice yeah it's like a what the people would call it dramedy sure um that's so interesting because i feel like uh i i forget what i was watching but malcolm in the middle kind of did the same thing in the 90s where it was like every but everything was the sitcom multi-cam live studio audience or some approximation of it and then malcolm in the middle came out and was like actually we can do a single camera comedy uh and have it have the production values of a drama yeah i feel like and that's that's the thing that kind of brought me back to the Wonder Years, is I feel like it was so motivating for shows like my so-called live Freaks and Geeks, How I Met Your Mother, Malcolm in the Middle, this idea of a narrator that is kind of telling you a story while still being like kind of an active participant in the show. Sure. You know?

kind of an active participant in the show. Sure. You know? And I feel like the thing I really liked about Wonder Years was that if you think about the time period, again, it was like shows like Full House and Home Improvement, you know, of like these quirky, goofy families, you know, and everybody was kind of a specific kind of character. And it didn't reflect a lot of depth it was more about like

kind of what was happening on the show than who what the characters were experiencing you know i mean home improvement had layers i'm not gonna listen i can't talk about that without thinking about that clip from the the uh oh shit what was the hulu documentary about the oh dana carvey show where they had the dana carvey show was like complete nonsense wild inscrutable humor and they had a commercial showing like some really really like a very special episode that they were doing following the the episode of home improvement where i think like they found out that mark might have cancer or something like that. And then they showed that clip in the documentary of their like wild, like.

Yeah. Just. Stephen Colbert just like cracks up. And then they show this Home Improvement commercial. Oh, my God. It was so funny. So there was a lot of depth to the Wonder Years and and the narration, I feel like, was, I don't know, just so beautiful and poetic. And so I wanted to read you a little example from some of the narration.

So the big thing with the Wonder Years is that they make a big deal out of taking place in the suburbs. Because in the early to mid-60s, suburbs were relatively a new thing. In 1950, it was the first year that people lived in the suburbs more than anywhere else um and it's a big it's a big thing for the show so here here's some narration from the show there was a time when the world was enormous spanning the vast almost infinite boundaries of your neighborhood the place where you grew up where you didn't think twice about playing on someone else's lawn the street was your territory and occasionally got invaded by a Isn't that beautiful? Yeah, that's really nice.

And that's just like the narration on the show. Right. isn't that beautiful yeah that's just like the narration on the show right like that was like every episode like had this very like beautiful like nostalgic but precise way of kind of addressing that time um and the pilot the pilot's great the pilot's the only thing i ever watched i watched it with you like a few years ago so it starts the summer before kevin enters junior high uh and so you meet his family and his friends and his school, and you get a sense of the time period. It's also where they,

Kevin and Winnie have their first kiss. And it was also the actor's first kiss. Cause the Kevin, as I mentioned, was played by Fred Savage. He was only 13 years old. Right. And,

and it's also, and this is, I guess this is a spoiler spoiler but not really a spoiler um but winnie's older brother uh they find out he has died in the vietnam war um on that first episode and it's and it's a really heavy uh reminds me a lot of that first episode of frying lights where you just kind of swing for the fence and say hey this is the reality we're creating and there's this horrible thing that happens episode one that kind of informs a lot of the show.

So yeah, anyway, I could talk about the show a lot. I feel like it had a huge impact on me to see characters on television that I felt like were smart and complex and episodes where it wasn't like, like oh this week there's a monkey that time period that was pretty rare just really going for for friends right now huh friends have layers to know that's i was actually referencing an episode of full house oh yeah there i guess they did have some monkey some monkey action in that one do you want to know what our

friends at home are talking about this please uh gr says microscopes are wonderful what an intricate and beautiful world we live in what wonderful things exist beyond what we can see through the naked eye microscopes are very good i was just thinking about microscopes recently i think it was because i was watching something with henry yeah we're talking about microscopes uh well we watched that uh kiwami japan knife video oh that's what it was uh here's one from um marika i probably pronounced that wrong sorry uh my wonderful thing is going back to your hotel room after a long busy day of vacation i'm all about sightseeing when i travel but there's nothing better than crawling into a fresh hotel bed at the end of the night with your partner and watching something on tv it's the ultimate vacation chill time yes yes yes yes yes i will never forget the time when we were on our

honeymoon in japan and we were in hakone and we had just done the whole like free pass loop which is this huge circuit of different public transportation options all around the entire city and we got back to our hotel room and we were so tired and we just lied in we laid in bed for like six hours and we watched that fucking horrible passengers movie with anne hathaway yeah we just wanted to watch something and it was like we just turned it on and just refused to turn it off it was just so nice to not be on our feet it's one of those movies you figure out kind of in the first seven minutes seven minutes you know exactly what is happening. And then they like coyly like, is it? Do they?

Don't watch it. It sucks. Sometimes I hear people talk about the twist endings of bad movies. And I'm like, ooh, well, I got to know what that's all. Don't. It's not good. Please. And last one here. This one is from Cheyenne, who says, my small wonder is heat lightning.

I love seeing the whole sky light up for a brief moment with that signature faint orange or pink glow especially at night it happens pretty often around here but it never fails to leave me awestruck yeah Texas non-stop get that heat lighting all the time I didn't know that was a thing I think until I moved to Texas we I definitely saw it sometimes in, in, in West Virginia, but tech, I mean, Texas is like, you know, big sky country. It gets hot and then it will get weirdly wet very quickly.

And then it just is heat lightning city. That's what they call Austin. Sometimes is lightning city, heat city or lightning city. Sometimes. Yeah. We have a lot of names. Thank you 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. Maximum fun. Maximum fun.org hey it is just a superior place to find incredible podcasts i would recommend if you haven't gone to maximum fun.org and just kind of browsed around i am 100 sure you will find another show that you like as much as this one. Poke some links, man. JV Club, Janet Varney. Check it out. It's good stuff. Did you know Sydney, Teresa, and me have all been on it now?

Oh, really? That's great. Yeah, it's a very, very good show. Yeah, but they have a lot of good shows. All at MaximumFun.org. We have other stuff at McElroy.Family. Hey, buy my book. You know, you guys made that same joke.

Buy my book. I'm moving them. Probably, yeah, we're hacks. But our second graphic novel for The Adventure Zone comes out next Tuesday, July 16th. It's going to be so good, you guys. I'm really excited about it. I hope you all like it.

It was a lot of work, but it's... It's a murder on the rock port. It's rock port, yeah. So it's a murder mystery. Such's it's it was uh a lot of work but it's uh murder on the rock it's rockport yeah so it's a murder mystery it's a good story it's a lot of fun and griffin this is where griffin really hits his stride well thank you baby i appreciate that i would argue that mid pedals is where things start to go uh but yeah it comes out next tuesday i would really appreciate your support you can pre-order it now at theadventurezonecomic.com. Who's that character with the bow tie? Jameson? Jenkins.

Jenkins. Jameson's a good name, though. I'll save that. Jenkins is a great character. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, we're also going to be doing some live shows for, not live shows, like book tour stops where we're going to do some Q&A with a moderator and we're going to do some live readings.

Special guests. We got special guests. Yeah. Doing the live readings. I'm very, very excited. Uh, your special guests are in Austin, Texas.

Uh, we're, we're getting some help from the, uh, from the rooster teeth squad. Uh, yeah, they were kind enough to come out and help us out.

Uh, so yeah, uh, you can find links to like those at macro dot family too. We're going to be, Justin and I, uh, are going to be in New York with Carrie, the artist on the book, Carrie Peach.

And then we're coming to Austin the day after that. And then Dad and Travis are going to be doing Portland and Los Angeles. And then we're all regrouping in San Diego for Comic-Con to do our last stop. And then the day after that, we're going to be doing a live Adventure Zone episode of Dadlands, the game that we made up during the last Max Fun Drive. That's going to be so good. It's going to be doing a live Adventure Zone episode of Dadlands, the game that we made up during the last month's fun drive. It's going to be so good. It's going to be very good. We have a special guest DM where it's going to be a real hoot.

We're really looking forward to it. All that's at macro.family. Thank you all so much for indulging me for that. I'm not good at promoting. You are not, actually. I will confirm that. But here's something i want to promote i'm gonna end the podcast so we could go watch the finale of stranger things and i'm gonna eat

a dilly bar who's his character this is dilly bar dave he's gonna go downstairs and watch him netflix spooky drama is he a professional wrestler as well He used to be in a past life. Do you believe in reincarnation, man? Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. MaximumFun.org

Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. Listen, we already know that you love genre movies, film craft, and female filmmakers. So, if you love all those things, then by transitive property, you love my podcast, Switchblade Sisters. Hi, I'm film critic April Wolf. Every week I have a conversation with a different female filmmaker about their favorite genre film. Each episode covers the filmmaking process, working in the film industry, and just like general geeking out about awesome movies. I've had such great guests like the big sick writer Emily Gordon.

To me, indie movies as of late have come to be a catch-all term for a movie that kind of defies genre. Billy Madison and half-baked director Tamara Davis. When a comedian comes and enters onto my set, they're just there to be funny, and we're all ready and waiting for them to be funny. Horror industry veteran and actor Barbara Crampton. That's where real drama lies for me. What's between you and I speaking right now? Where are we meeting? And what's the energy that we create between us? And so many others. So check out Switchblade Sisters every Thursday on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.