Wonderful! - Wonderful! 94: 109.9 The Whammer

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Rachel's favorite cinematic poem! Griffin's favorite outdoorsy kids book! Rachel's favorite satire! Griffin's favorite technological convenience! 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. This is wonderful. I have smooth stuck in my head again. So it must be the end of July, huh? We must be pulling into August if I've got Carlos Santana and the other guys smooth stuck in my head, huh? You know, what's interesting is that somebody that I'm friends with on Facebook just posted some pictures from a Carlos Santana concert they they went to and you have to wonder obviously carlos

santana has a long and storied career before his uh fabled partnership with robert thomas just lots of lots of shredding lots of shredding i don't actually know that much about his career there was a guitar hero song it was fine uh but does rob show up at the live shows probably not probably not he's got other stuff to do is there a particular lyric of smooth that makes you think of the summertime and you know what's funny i mean well that's a hot one oh there you go yeah that's you watch that music video it's a lot of people sweating in the sun yeah okay uh no, it's the official summer jam. You know what's funny, though? I have it stuck in my head,

but I don't know a lot of the lyrics. Mm-hmm. It's the part that's like, just like the ocean under the moon. Oh, no, I do know it. Shit, I know every word. Yeah, this reminds me, you know, how you said it's a hot one in the voice?

It's a hot one. This is? Yeah, it's a hot one. This is like after we have dinner and you're very full and you do the Dave Matthews. Are you too much? Yeah, I do that sometimes. Yeah, it was fun. Did I tell you the best thing about having an infant is the number of times that you're allowed to bust out, I'm a pretty baby. pretty baby i didn't mean to make a sort of like post-coital release sigh at the end of that but it is what it's what happened so i needed to i had a post-coital

release do you have any small wonders you know i always mean to think of these but you don't is the thing and then i don't actually do it is the problem. Can I swing in here? I'll do mine real quick and give you time. Yes. The reason I probably have smooth stuck in my head is because we just finished watching the new Veronica Mars stuff, which was created by a different Rob Thomas. Really good.

Yeah, that's a good one. It's really good. It's way better than like it's way better than it has any right i thought it was gonna be like fan service of like oh and remember this guy he's back but they do do that but they do it in a way that is like feels necessary it feels necessary and earned and uh there is a pretty dramatic tonal shift of this season compared to obviously when she was in high school and the movie which i don't remember anything about uh but they like make that tone work and so even though it is like way more adult way more mature it still feels like old veronica mars it

is like even if you don't care about veronica mars or whatever like it is it is beyond my comprehension how they have managed to pull off a reboot or whatever. I think if you make something like 15 years after it goes off the air, I think it counts as a reboot no matter what. But yeah, I was blown away by how good it was. Yeah, I am. Blown away because there's bombs. Oh, that's good. I was going to say that I was telling Griffin since it takes place during spring break i was getting real oc vibes it did give me some oc vibes oh

you know you said that and it activated that center in my brain where i started running the math on how long it's been since i've watched all the oc and if i can if it's okay for me to i'll tell you what's i'll tell you what is. We don't have a beach trip this summer. You and I are not going to the beach this summer. And so maybe we need to head to California. California. Oh, you're close. Keep trying. California.

From the wizard. It changed. Yeah. I gave you so much time there. You gave me so much time. And during that time, I came up with a small wonder. Oh, yeah. Which is the little video that somebody in the wonderful Facebook group posted of how those I Spy books are photographed.

So cool. I never thought about it you meet the like photo artist who invented them and like i had i had so many of those and like it's real pictures yeah it's real pictures every one of those is a real picture yeah like it's it's composed it's not like a bunch of images layered on top of each other one big, he really like, he lays it all out. My man lives it like little F.E.O. Schwartz. Got all kinds of stuff. Did I say F.E.O. Schwartz?

You said it real fast, so I just, I gave you the credit for A on that. Thank you. Who goes first this week? I believe it is you. I think it's my turn.

Then grip and rip it, baby. I'd like to take you to the poetry corner. You said that so gently. Look at your sound wave on that. It's barely visible. You're trying to rip it, baby. I'd like to take you to the poetry corner. You said that so gently. Look at your sound wave on that. It's barely visible. You're trying to get it. Now I have to boost your audio,

but I think you're just trying to give me ASMR vibes. All right. Do you want me to retake it? No, it's fine. It's the poetry corner. Now look at your sound waves. You know that's not ideal either. Yeah.

All right. Just playing a little game over here. Yeah. Fuck whoever has to edit this, right? Okay, we're in it. Do you need the song? I would like it, yeah. It's the Bulls.

We call it 109.9, the Warhammer. Does it go up to 109.9, the Warhammer. Does it go up to 109.9? I think it went past 107. Okay, well, this is 109.9. It's pirate radio. It's the Warhammer. Now, in this radio station you created, do they do things besides poetry?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how do they transition, let's say? So like what comes after the poetry corner in the schedule? Well, it goes from like musical to less musical, less musical, less musical until we land on poetry, right? So we start with like the most pure, like all music all the time, which is Christian ska. And then we take a step down from there and we

get to zydeco that's a lot of music look at some sheet music for zydeco folks and you know classical uh hip-hop and then dubstep and then scat and then poetry scat oh and then scat poetry. That's a nice transition you created. Then we go back up to dubstep. Oh, okay. But acapella. Oh. Then poetry. I love that.

And it's all commercial free, folks. Is it the same DJ? It is. He's a, yeah. He doesn't need to sleep. He brings to Poetry Corner is a little more high octane. You know that they cut those together in Nashville or iHeartRadio headquarters, and then they send them out. You think that every radio station hires somebody

who can go, 109.9, the whammer! Can I take things to where I like to be? Yeah, please. In the corner? Yeah, please. And out of the like to be? Yeah, please. In the corner. Yeah, please. And out of the whammer. Yeah, please.

So the poem I'm bringing is by the poet Simone Munch. That is a fun name. So in a way, it's my own Munch Squad. Hey! It's spelled M-U-E-N-C-H. Still. It was fun though, right? Guess what? The people listening, they can't know how it's spelled M-U-E-N-C-H. Still. It was fun though, right? Guess what?

The people listening, they can't know how it's spelled. They just hear it. So I could have started this with like, I want to munch. I want to munch poetry. And then you'd say, Simone.

Oh yeah, yeah. Simone Munch was born in Louisiana. She got her bachelor's and master's in Colorado and then a PhD at the University of Illinois, Chicago. And she currently directs the writing program at Lewis University in Illinois. Still alive? Yep. Fuck yeah. It's so much better when they're still alive.

She's written six books of poetry and has worked collaboratively on three books. So this is what's kind of exciting about Simone. Okay. She has been kind of exploring working collaboratively with other poets on a book. By submitting pieces to the book or actually working together on poems? No, like literally, yes, literally a poem that is collaboratively written. Interesting. I never think about that as being a thing that people do. So for example, there's a poet, Dean Rader, that she worked with, and she would work on a line and then send it back and forth. And they would put a whole sonnets together, just like that.

That's really neat. It's like Mad Libs, but artistic. I like it too because it's a good motivating device, right? Like it takes a little of the anxiety off because you're just doing one line at a time. Well, and also like you are being held accountable by this other person who sends you one single line. But then wait, hold on. That could get really imbalanced

because then I could write like, I wanna eat a tasty asparagus and send it to you. And then you're like, well, shit, what rhymes? You know, somebody's always doing the setup and the other person has to figure out how it rhymes with it. I appreciate our elders because they take care of us. Care of us. Like us like asparagus yeah but then but then do you really want to after i've just done to you do you really

want to send that back to me to pitch another you know poetry doesn't always rhyme right uh it does or else it's just talking okay uh so the other kind of inventive approach she took started with a book that she released in 2014 called Wolf Centos. And this is not something I'm familiar with, but a cento, which is also called a collage poem, is made up of lines by other poets. So what they would do is they would take a line of poetry that they really liked by another poet, and they would use that as the first line of their new poem. And they would kind of build from there. Is that allowed? Yeah, of course. Not of course, it's IP or whatever. Like it's my, that's my, you can't just, you know what I mean? Well, like a true sento is apparently just all

lines from other poems. So you didn't write a lick of it? No. This is your mashup? But you composed it. It's much in the way that a painter does not necessarily make the paint himself. Okay, that is a wild. This would be like if somebody took like a little pieces of all the water lilies and then put it together in one turbo lily painting it was like this is mine now i mean that is that is collage right is taking but collage isn't necessarily

taking other people's stuff i don't know i think it's cool right like i think it's a cool idea but maybe you know i'm a content creator and so i'm always thinking about i'm saying this poem we get so many youtube strikes i'm saying that simone's channel would be uh demonetized quicker than than you know split to lickety split see that's why i can't do poetry art art is is usually some degree of theft you know that right okay well then this podcast is now called Old Town Road and you can find it on anywhere that other Old Town Road is available and it's going to be indistinguishable. This is Old Town Road, a podcast about things we like. Do you want to go ahead and get us started on that one? Yeah. I'm going to take my horse to Old Town Road and walk it all day long. My name is Lil Nas.

This is my horse. And together we'll sing this song. Old Town, Old Town, Old Town Road. The street cleaners come on Tuesdays. Old Town, Old Town, old town road. And shit, help me, babe. What rhymes with Tuesdays? See?

And this is what I do. I would take all that and I would mail it to you. And I'd say, you fucking finish it. I don't know. But you needed to know when the street sweepers came. Yeah, because that's what moves the story along. Because later, you have to move your horse because the street sweeper is coming on that side of the street. So you have to move your horse to the other side of the street.

And you can yell, the street sweeper's coming. But that dumb horse will stand right in front of the whirling blades of the street sweeper. Blades. the whirling blades of the streets. I became familiar with Simone Munch while I was living in Chicago. And it was the book Lamp, Black and Ash that I first got my hands on. That's kind of excited about her. Kind of a little poem right there.

I know. So she is currently a professor, as I mentioned. She also teaches film studies courses. Wow. Has a real interest in film. Multidisciplinarian. Particularly horror movies. You can find a lot of commentary from her on horror movies.

She has like a series of poems that are just based in horror movie themes. Actually, it's pretty interesting. Ooh. Mm-hmm. Freddy's Coming. Uh-oh. Sharp Blades. Sweet Dreams.

Down to that rhyme. But like, imagine it rhymed and was a poem. Is the whole point of this that you want to impress me as a poet and so that one day I bring Griffin McElroy to Poetry Corner as my favorite new poet? Yeah. I mean, somebody could probably take things I've said over the thousand hours of recording my voice audio that exists out there and turn it into a pretty banging poem.

And then it's mine because it's my voice. So the poem I want to read you is from a book called The Air Lost in Breathing. There is a review actually of that book from Stephen Malcomus from Pavement. Oh, wow. Yeah. It says Munch has composed her book with the killer poet's sense of timing, drama, and tenor. The Air Lost in Breathing is written in an unpretentious yet biting style. Terrible escapes and violent interruptions.

It's all here for the taking. Have we done Pavement on this show? I'm pretty sure. I don't think we have. No? I don't think we have. Huh. We could. We could.

We like pavement. We do. What's the poem? The poem and just a mild content warning. There are some suggestions of abuse, but not described in detail. Okay. The poem is called

On Hearing My Father Pulled a Shotgun on My Grandparents During Thanksgiving Dinner. And this is from The Air, Loss, and Breathing, which came out in 2000. All my relatives seated, Llewellyn and her new husband, Aunt Nan and Laura May, Uncle Buddy passing mashed potatoes, toasting God, good food, and the lack of family deaths this year. Strolling in, uninvited, shotgun on hip, his red hair tangled and cowlicked, beer gut protruding from the hem of his t-shirt, shooting the turkey and everyone splattered, not with blood, but grandparents, my mother, and I sink while my father floats there weightless and grinning.

I refuse to see my father's grief, a wife who divorced him, a daughter who hates him, his liver dissolved, his angular cheeks now pockets of flesh, veined and sallow. I only saw how the nights he didn't come home were a relief to us all. But for once, alone, a thousand miles from the south and not part of the argument, I think about my father as a boy rising at 4.30 to milk cows before school, an ache in his stomach from too little sleep. And on days when he was too sick to get

out of his bed, his father, my grandfather would jerk him, belt in hand, and he would trudge to the dairy with the crack of a belt echoing in his ears. A young boy with hair shooting out in bright red spirals, his body wiry, pale as cream, perched on a stool, waiting for the sun as his body shook with anger. The sting of leather, the chill of southern dawn, and the only heat came from the cow's moist noisy breath as he squeezed her udders for milk formed clouds with his mouth in the dissipating dark jesus isn't that cinematic can't you see her as a film studies yeah for sure uh yeah that's a that was a very uh affecting story there i um it was interesting because you know, whenever I like a poet and I look for a poem to bring, I want it to be something that's like emblematic of their work, but, you know, kind of like a nice, succinct, you know, generally uplifting poem.

Sometimes. Sometimes, though, you cannot shake a poem. Sometimes. Sometimes though, you cannot shake a poem. And I looked at maybe 20 of Simone Munch's poems and just kept coming back to this one because it was so powerful. Yeah, no kidding. And it stuck with me just all day long.

And so I had to bring it because it kind of shows the power of her voice and of her storytelling and the kind of precision with which she like puts an image together. Yeah. And kind of the fearlessness of it, too. Yeah, no kidding.

That's obviously a lot of challenging things are being referenced in that poem, but it feels so brave that it is really powerful to read, and I really enjoyed it. You do know that I can't follow that up with like my first things clown farts are like you know that is the danger of the poetry corner i don't know what to tell you yeah because poems are good poems are good poems are good man i don't know a lot of intensity there uh so you know go ahead, you know, tootsie roll pops or whatever. Jesus.

Mine is a seminal work of literature for me. Highly respected in the annals of history. And it's beloved. By Toni Morrison? By, yes. Toni loves it. Crazy about this one. I want to talk about a book by an author named Gary Paulson.

And the book is called Hatchet. I'm so glad you brought this. I loved Hatchet. I was on a kick where I was like thinking about, I don't know how I got on this. I think I watched a little bit of like Wrinkle in Time on a a plane it got me thinking about like all of the books that were so formative to me yes like uh like like wrinkle in time and uh bridge of terabithia and the giver holy shit the giver and uh brave new world and like all these books i read when i was a kid uh and i keep i just can't stop thinking about Hatchet because man that was

the first book I remember reading that I was like in love with it was like the first book I remember reading where I read it again like after I finished it like pretty soon after just because I had such a good time being uh in that world um if you're not familiar with gary paulson he is um he like a wildly prolific outdoorsman author uh who who wrote this book hatchet about this 13 year old kid named brian who uh survives a plane crash in the like northern canadian wilds and then has to survive out there uh and he ended up turning that into like a whole five book series and how did you read the other books i'm not familiar with the other ones yeah i'll do a little plot synopsis because they get pretty wild okay uh but like a few years after hatchet came out they made an adaptation

a film adaptation of it called uh a cry in the wild it was a big hit um despite that success and like all of the things that he has written like over a hundred books uh i i think not all necessarily big chunkers but uh he still lives in like relative obscurity and like not you know he's not flexing necessarily he had just like chills in new mexico he got really into i did a rod racing for a long time uh and then uh like was like race raising i didod race dogs. Oh, my God. Until he had to retire from that in 1990 because he had some sort of heart condition. But then in 2004, I guess he licked it because he got right back into Iditarod racing. He's like he he I don't know much about the man.

I didn't like do a bunch of research on interviews and stuff like that. But he just sounds like a like super outdoorsy dude, which you definitely get from Hatchet and all these books. Well, and then he made all those those cartoon strips you know with the the far side that's pretty good can i confess to you that when you first said gary paulson there was like i was gonna there was about five seconds where i thought wait is he gonna oh paulson never mind yeah uh so hatchet if you've if you haven't read it it was published in 1987 uh it won a newberry award uh and like surface level like it's a pretty straightforward book this boy crashes he was flying to his parents are divorced he's flying to to see his dad up in northern canada pilot has a

heart attack plane crashes into a lake he survives pilot dies and all he has to survive in this like huge huge huge uh plot of uninhabited land is a hatchet that his mom gave him as a present and he uses it to survive uh and you know he eventually gets in the sunken plane again and gets the radio transmitter and is saved bada bing b bada boom. That's it. There is a lot more to it than just like the survival story, like a surprising amount of exploring the isolation that a young person goes through when facing some sort of family challenge like a divorce like this, which is like, I don't know. I think it's easy to sell the children's lit sort of genre short in this regard. But I feel like it's got a lot of other stuff going on for it.

And all that is relatable, like not necessarily the torn family thing for me, but like angst, 13 year old angst. There's loads of that in this book. Well, yeah. And I don't know, when you think about movies like castaway for example that are very based on this kind of like survival right premise there's something different about the idea of it being a kid i mean for obvious reasons but also like you can't even like you're not preparing that scenario you know i feel like the older you get the more you're kind of always trying to plane crash always trying to think kind of a step ahead of how you would react or how you would respond but when you're younger like that's that's no part of your experience and so to to be in that

situation yeah it's kind of i don't know it's it's fascinating and paulson like wrote about surviving like um hard situations like this like hard physical situations but he like wrote about surviving like hard situations like this, like hard physical situations. But he also wrote about like, you know, surviving psychological trauma and, you know, shit from your youth. And, you know, there is an element, I guess, of some sort of autobiography in there. But I don't think he's necessarily ever been especially forward about that. Anyway, all that stuff's great. It's not why I like the book. I like the book

because it's a badass adventure about a normal kid who has this godlike instrument in the form of this hatchet. And he crashes and he's like hurt. Oh no. What do I got?

A hatchet. Well, shit. It's just a hatchet. What am I supposed to to do you can do anything with it i know you can do anything he gets it he like uses it to get all kinds of dope stuff it's like minecraft the book like he starts out and he punches a tree and he gets a you know he makes a spear and a bow out of it and he starts hunting and pretty soon builds like an awesome shelter that when you're a 13 year old kid, like you want to have that shelter and live in it and eat, you know, the turtles that you caught that day. And you want to fight off the fucking big porcupine who's a major dick and you want to somehow survive a tornado that comes to like this book gets a lot. This book throws some shit at young boy brian uh and he's just this normal kid that when pushed to into this like horrible circumstance

uh not only survives but thrives and he starts with nothing and turns it into this sustainable life out in the forest and as a kid who doesn't have any outdoor expertise like that was so enticing for me that was so so gripping for me uh and i would actually be curious to see how hatchet sales were affected by the release of this book because to this to this day if i see a nice hatchet at like rei or something i'm like oh you think there were parents going out and being like oh yeah sure i'll get you a hatchet i think if henry reads hatchet when he's 13 and is like this book is incredible and my birthday's coming up you're gonna want to get him a hatchet not a super sharp hatchet no it's got like a doll no it's got to be sharp because if he gets in a plane

crash in the canadian wilds he's going to need the hatchet. But see, Brian didn't have the benefit of reading hatchet. He was the hatchet. He went before us as the hatchet. I almost said the hatchet man, but that's a different, that's an entirely different thing. Yes. So the rest of the series, there are four more books in the series.

Wait, can I ask you, is it Brian every time? No, it's mostly, oh, it is Brian every time. Sorry, sorry. I thought you were asking if the word Brian is in the title every time. No, no. I'm wondering like how much stuff happens to this poor guy throughout his life. It's Brian. And most of it is still like pretty close against 13.

Like he doesn't grow. I don't think there's a book where he's like 52 and you know quits his office job or whatever actually one of those books is kind of like that let me okay okay the second book is called the river and this is the second book in this series and in the second book the government comes to brian and says we want you to teach us how you survive so that we can teach the military your secrets 13 year old okay and so he goes out into the wilds with this like like military liaison uh and they go out there together and he's like no we can't bring any other supplies it's got to be authentic and the liaison's like okay whatever you. And then like he gets struck by lightning or something like that. And it's like, uh-oh, here, back at it again. Gotta get this dude down the rip.

The next book, the third book in the series, try and follow along here because the timeline's gonna get a little convoluted. At this point, you know, it's a big book. Hatch is a big book and it's big enough to even pre-internet blow up era, get a lot of detractors saying like uh you know what are the odds that this kid would actually do it he finds

the radio transmitter at the end that's deus ex machina so fucking gary paulson's like okay he writes a book called brian's winter that destroys the second book in the series entirely and in this one he just doesn't find the radio transmitter so he has to survive a winter in the wild. It is literally a consecutive sequel. Uh, and things get very, very rough for Brian. It's like this weird, like paralog,

like story, uh, that apparently Gary, now you got me doing it. Gary Paulson wrote to shut up his detractors. Next one's called Brian return, Brian's return. And in this one, he is actually having struggles uh fitting into urban life and he talks to a

therapist who's like yeah you should just move back to the woods so he moves back to the woods because it's worked out so great it's worked out so good so far and in the final book it's called brian's hunt he just hunts and fights a big fucking bear. It like kills this like trapper family that he met in one of the earlier books. And he like was upset about that. So he's like, I'm going to find. So it's like a fugitive style. It's literally fucking. What is the movie with Bill Murray?

The Life Aquatic. Where he's like, I'm going to find. Hi, it's me, Brian. You may know me from Hatchet. This bear killed my friends. So I'm going to find it and I'm going to find, hi, it's me, Brian. You may know me from Hatchet. This bear killed my friends. So I'm going to find it and I'm going to tear it in half. Aren't you like nature, man? Yes.

Yes. But I just, this one. Let me kill this one big bear. Anyway, Hatchet kicks ass. I just, I wonder about the decisions that Brian is making where he keeps ending up in these life or death situations. I know. I know. I know.

I got to tell you, I mean, I don't know that I've ever been in a situation where I had to Kill a bear. Kill a bear. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there but for the grace of God, go Brian. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Brian. Can I steal you away? Yes. that was an edit point that wasn't me clapping like some sort of roman emperor for you to read the first film oh lord this is how griffin and i communicate in all situations the diaper cream the situations. The diaper cream.

The boy requires the diaper cream. I have a message for Brad. It is from Jacqueline. Well, don't keep me waiting. Brad, happy birthday slash anniversary slash whatever holiday this airs around. Living with you and our little loaf cat is wonderful. Here's to many more days filled with adventures, breweries, popcorn, and nap time. The world is a better place with you in it,

and I love you with all my heart. You're the best. Is there a word more challenging to stick the landing on when sandwiched by other words than breweries? Breweries. I feel like when Merriam-Webster was like, all right, breweries breweries i feel like when marion wester was like all right uh breweries how many syllables is that and everybody in the room just like seven i think it's two shit funny word though huh thanks for the message brad and jacklyn here's another one for xander and it's from tiana who says hey xander Xander. I doubt I'm going to win this Jumbotron. Uh-oh. I hope there's nothing scandalous in here.

But if I do, thank you for introducing me to Wonderful. I love sharing my small wonders with you every day and I love spending time with you. Thank you, my best friend and wonderful boyfriend. I miss you as always and I know Haru does too. Time to change the litter box. So bye. Update update omg we won

this one tells a nice little story uh i don't i don't know if that ending is like time to change the litter box anyway i've got to go or are they changing the litter box oh oh do you think it's like an instruction i think it's i think it's like hey instruction? I think it's, I think it's like, hey, Xander, I hope you've been enjoying this message, but you better go change. Xander, what's that smell? I've got to go. My car alarm. Hi, I'm Dave. Hi, I'm Graham.

And we're two house DJs who have been trapped inside our drum machine. We love it here. And we'd love if you stopped by and visited us every week on Stop Podcasting Yourself here on MaximumFun.org. We're just a couple of doofuses from Canada. And listen to our show or perish. Stop Podcasting Yourself on MaximumFun.org. Hey, can I tell you about my next thing? Yeah, just yeah. It is the onion.

The onion. The humble layered fruit. The salty, humble, layered fruit, the onion. I mean, nothing against onions. I love onions. But I was actually talking about the satirical digital media company and newspaper. Oh, yeah. They're pretty good, too.

You familiar with the work of the onion? Of course I'm familiar with the work of the onion. I think most people are. But I think it's worth discussing because it's incredible and just like such a nice salve in this troublesome time. Yeah. So this started in 1988. Holy shit. Really?

It was a weekly print publication started in Madison, Wisconsin. This was conceived by University of Wisconsin students, Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson. The Onion was founded as a weekly print newspaper. And then beginning in the fall of 2000 to early 2001, the company relocated from Madison, wisconsin to manhattan to raise the onions profile um it's so funny thinking about it and i know this is like maybe insulting but thinking about it like an actual business and like i know it is and that's not trying to short sell them but it's i know so this so this is around the time period where they turned into a full production company and started making the books and the digital content. I'm not going to talk about that as much, though, because I actually haven't consumed a lot of it. I've always been kind of a devotee of the orig. And I actually, I don't know, when you were in Chicago, were they still doing the print version? Yes, I think so they actually i think they only officially

ceased the print edition in 2013 okay um but you could still get it in some major cities um before that so uh in september 2011 uh the onion moved back to Chicago in the Midwest. And by June 2014 is when they launched ClickHole, which I know you're a big fan of. Oh, man. Also a former wonderful segment, ClickHole, for their amazing Gatorade video. So I wanted to talk about some of the great headlines, which will be a nice segue into the one that you want to share. Yes. Which may be on my list there are a lot of different media outlets that have kind of identified their favorite headlines

so i kind of pulled okay so from salon.com uh this is when they talk about the origin of the onion article titled no way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens it's funny like the onion's a very funny website but now every time i see that pop up it is also like a gutting horrible mirror a pitch black terrible nightmare mirror so they've they've used this article several times um in response to uh mass shootings uh every time it's used it just becomes more and more powerful. Right. Uh,

so that's kind of an example of the way that they can kind of shine a light on a particularly ridiculous aspect of our culture. Satire, right? Satire doesn't have to be gut bustingly funny if it's, you know, also, uh, uh,

just horribly observational. Uh, so this has also come in handy recently. In 2016, there was an article titled, Nation Throws Off Tyrannical Yoke of Moderate Respect for Women, which I really enjoy. In the time period when Trump took office, there was a lot of good fodder there.

Well, as there was for most satirical, most satirists in general. Pitchfork, 2017. This is one that I wasn't familiar with, but I absolutely love. Sugar Ray thrilled to be playing in man's head. Here's an excerpt. here's an excerpt although many members of the band claimed the performance was their best in years the show was reportedly not without a share of mishaps rachel just clutched her chest halfway through the third repetition of his opening number McGrath began unexpectedly singing Rock Lobster a song written and recorded by pop sensation the B-52s

only to return to his original set list moments later that whole article is so great because I think at the end, the person is like, I don't even know why this song is stuck in my head. I don't even like Smash Mouth. It's just so great. Okay, now this is maybe the most famous and most like prescient Onion article that came out in 2004.

And it was titled, Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. This is a parody of the chic gillette razor wars uh which actually predated gillette's actual introduction of the five blade razor in 2006 what was it the quattro yeah right that was quattro now they i guess they do have razors with six blades now. Oh, right. So here's a quote from that. What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed.

Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, because mom is about to drop you one sweet fat nightcrawler.

Here she comes. Put another aloe strip on that fucker too. That's right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me. The second strip lathers. It's a whole new way to think about shaving. Don't question it.

I've never heard you say the word fucker in the way that you just said it it was like deeply spiritual deep south like oh boy i'm intoxicated um i this platform plays such a valuable role in all of our lives oh yeah and i think it is worth recognizing on our show about great things. You mentioned the book. So this was my main exposure to The Onion. Yes. In, I think, 2004.

The Ardum Century. The Ardum Century was released. We had this in the McElroy upstairs bathroom. Yes, that sounds right. And I read it many times during my many sojourns. Is this why all the macaroons spend so long in the bathroom? Were you just conditioning yourselves? Yeah, we had that.

We had a lot of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. There was a page in that book that I would just turn to, and it made me laugh every time. Okay. Our Dumb Century is like a collection of fictional onion pages from newspapers throughout time, like imagining a scenario where the onion has been the paper of record for a century. fictional onion like pages from newspapers throughout time. Like, uh, imagining a scenario where the onion has been the people of paper of record

for a century, July 21, 1969 headline. Holy shit. Man walks on fucking moon. Neil Armstrong's historic first words on moon. Holy living fuck the moon. Jesus fucking Christ. The distant, lonely, mysterious satellite that has fascinated mankind since the dawn of the words on moon holy living fuck the moon jesus fucking christ the distant lonely mysterious

satellite that has fascinated mankind since the dawn of time so distant is distant and lonely no more at 4 17 p.m est yesterday astronauts neil armstrong and edwin e aldrin jr touched down on the sea of tranquility in the lunar module eagle and radioed back to Earth. The historic report. Jesus fucking Christ, Houston. We're on the fucking moon. Holy living fuck. Are you fucking believing this? Over. Armstrong radioed back to NASA headquarters

nearly 250,000 miles away. I abso-fucking-lutely am standing on the surface of the fucking moon. Holy mother of fuck, the first man on the moon added. Roger, no fucking doubt about it mission controller peter lovell replied a fucking affirmative over yeah i just thought it was the funniest thing ever yeah it's still very good there's so much to mention um all the ones they do now of just like area man blank blank blank like they're so quick hit and it's the same joke structure every time and it slays me yeah yes the onion uh my second thing i'm gonna go

through it real fast because this has been we've been we've been really chewing the chewing the fat here chewing the chewing the cud i'm gonna talk about the oh wait, this is last week's notes. I can't talk about blown away again. I mean, you could. I want to talk about the fact that there is an app for virtually all of my human needs. This is maybe a bit more of an abstract idea. But like tech industry, whatever. I don't want to go off on the tech industry. End of the day, I think it's pretty sick that whenever there is a function that i need filled by technology or an

app odds are it exists and you know what the time i really realized this was when you got our lawn mode through an app we needed a lawn but we were going out of town we wanted to get our lawn mode got an app and it's just like this was years ago too this isn't even like a new thing this has been around for literally years this week nintendo's coming out with a new model of switch in september and i wanted to i want to get it nintendo products are like famously kind of hard to get the first like salvo that come out uh and so i was like i want to pre-order it how i find out when pre-orders go up well you can sign up for amazon or best buy whoever's like mailing list and they'll tell you when the item is available what if i'm not checking my email there's an app

called like the tracker that i downloaded and i just typed in like hey send me a notification whenever this thing pops up in any store and then it did today and i got it because an app existed wow the app exists and like i fretted about that i fretted about like am i gonna get this thing and then there was an app for it and obviously that's a really innocuous thing but like uh slack i think is a great app discord is great it's like i need to chat and i need to make communities and i need private chats and I need a place to upload files and get them distributed to people and X, Y, and Z.

There's apps. Those apps exist. I'm really, really forgetful. I'm an extremely forgetful person. It's true. I've got Google Cals now and I'm more diligent about putting stuff into Gcal and now my fucking phone is like, hey, hey hey you forgot

about that haircut go go go i wouldn't miss a haircut without it you know what i mean uh i mean there's just so many i can't make it through movies without having to go pee i have never looked this i thought that this was not real for the longest time oh run pee yeah this is just transitioned to a segment about Run P. Run P is an app. And I actually think they changed it recently where it's like a pay-to-play sort of situation where you have to buy credits to get this function for different movies. But you sit down in the theater and you pick which movie you're about to watch in the app.

And then it even has a dark activation mode and it'll say like once the you know lion roars and the mgm logo now you turn turn the app on and get it going and it syncs up with the movie and it tells you when there are like down periods in the movie where you can go pee and while you're peeing you can read a synopsis of what's going on while you're peeing how how quick do they get this updated and what is the process for updating it? I just, I have so many questions. I don't know. I don't know if they're getting early screeners.

But there's an app for that. If I want to know what the tempo is of the song I'm listening to, there's an app for that. Like, there's an app for all these things. And yes, we live in, like, a dystopian cyber future. And that part's not great. And there's a lot of apps for stuff that people will, like, never need. Like, a lot. But the benefit of people will never need, like a lot.

But the benefit of that horrible spaghetti at the wall is, you know, you need an app to help soothe your anxiety or sleep better. There's tons of apps for that. You can have Matthew McConaughey read you a book, whatever. What literally changed my life is just having Google Maps on my phone. I was the person that used to print out directions on a piece of paper. Yeah. And carry it with me to my destination. And I did that for far too long.

And what would happen sometimes is you would turn the wrong way and then you just had no idea how to get back. Now I'm lost. I drove to Chicago when I was like, before I had an iPhone and went to visit my buddy Evan and survived in Chicago basically like parked

my car way outside of like the city like in the very far last stop of the of the trains and then like just forgot that I had a car and then on my way back I got lost in Cincinnati for like two hours and I was like pulling into gas stations to call my dad like I don't know where I am I don't know where I am i ended up having to go the wrong way down a highway because i finally saw my exit and so i like i drove the wrong way down a highway a little bit to get home because i was so panicked this is the thing like and i'm not going to andy rooney out here i promise but like this is a real thing that i think about is this idea of these mostly fairly privileged desires or curiosities that I have can now be instantly catered to in any imaginable way. And that was wicked. When I was younger, when I was

in high school, we had a dial-up modem where if somebody called the house while i was playing everquest it kicked me off the internet and now it's like i can figure out my phone will tell me when to go fucking pee during the avengers movie like that is such a wild sea change and it has not been that long no since it wasn't a thing uh and there's like i think when you become a parent there's like lots of, you can make infinite observations about like, well, that's different, which is probably why like,

it's a thing that every parent generation has ever done. This is the origins of the, I walked, you know, uphill two ways to school. Like maybe this is my version of it, but it is, I don't begrudge it. It's just like,

because God knows I take advantage of it too. It's just wild to me how quickly that, that, that has changed. Yeah. It's just wild to me how quickly that has changed. Yeah, shit's different. I used to have to tear the little accordion pieces off the edge of paper when I would print something out because you used to have to print something out.

Yeah, one time I printed out like a 150 page game facts strategy guide for Pokemon Gold and Silver and I got caught because it was the school library. And they let me keep it. But I got in trouble and I wasn't allowed to work in the library anymore. You did this when you were working in the library? Yeah, it was the perfect

crime, huh? I was the inside man. You know why? Because I didn't have a reliable internet access at home that I could download the game facts for. Anyway. I have a theory that every story of employment before the age of, let's say, 20. No, let's say 23. Yeah.

Is primarily a story of theft. Oh, yeah, baby. Oh, my God. I can tell you shit that would make your hair turn gray. So now why is it okay for you to steal crushums from the TCBY, but it's not okay for Simone Munch to take one line out of somebody else's poem? That's just what I'm asking. You know what?

You're right. You're not. It would be like if I put the crunchums in the ice cream and I was like, I made both the crunchums and the ice cream. This is called Griffin's Ice Cream. I wanna talk about what our friends at home are excited about. crunchums in the ice cream and i was like i made both the crunchums and the ice cream this is called griffin's ice cream i want to talk about what our friends at home are excited about katie says you know what's wonderful when you're folding a paper in thirds to put it in an envelope and you eyeball it and you get it perfect on the first try oh i love that too kobe when i worked uh at

literary magazines and we used to have to send responses back through the mail i really perfected through folding a piece of paper uh alexandria says my wonderful thing is when you line up your car tires just right with the gap in between two speed bumps while driving and either miss the bump completely or only go over it with two of your tires like a little game but in real life i do this all the time i do too not because i'm a speedy boy necessarily but because like i don't trust the suspension in any car like it can't be good for your car right i can't imagine it is but it's also just kind of a fun challenge kind of a fun challenge yeah uh lindsey says a thing i find

wonderful is when someone opens a fresh pack of minty gum and the smell escapes the plastic casing for the first time. I was reminded of it during a long flight when the person next to me opened a fresh pack of minty gum and I could smell it from my seat. It was truly wonderful and very refreshing after a long stint in the airport. Got it. Out of all the smells that you get on an airplane, that has to be the best. Or possibly the only good one. I've never told you the story about when, think this is probably on tour so we were all probably the boys were all

traveling together and there was an older woman sitting in the seat in front of us who had a big thing of country crock nope see this is me i was there and it was the person sitting next to me you made me take the middle seat because that's what you always do. That's right, okay. And the woman literally got out a tub, a plastic tub she was reusing specifically to put tuna salad in it.

Like the play-in hadn't even left yet and I just looked over at you and I remember motioning like, can you believe this is happening? Of country crock. Of country crock. Of country crock. Like, you know i you know fuck it i'm from west virginia i know all about the using country crock as a tupperware situation yeah but not i would never

bring that shame onto an airplane with the stinky fish inside and also like how did she get that through security how did she get did she make it in the airport this was not that long ago yeah i mean it was at least within the past five years yeah i have ibs and a very small bladder you do not want me sitting you do not want to be on the on the hook every time i have to use the you do not want to be on the plane let's say even yeah it's not a bad point thank you to everybody uh listening today and you know what even if they're not listening thanks to bowen and augustus for the use of our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description and a big thanks to maximum fun they

got all kinds of great shows like Switchblade Sisters and Bullseye and stop podcasting yourself can I pet your dog? no and a lot more at Maximum Fun we have other stuff at McElroy.family uh

thus ends our broadcast hours now for some reason it's the national anthem goodnight and good luck to you money won't pay

money won't pay money won't pay money won't pay money won't pay money won't pay Bye. Hey! Hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. Hey James! Hey Nneke! What we doing girl? We are inviting the awesome listeners of Maximum Fun

to join us at Minority Corner. Ooh, fun. But you know how we go on Tangent City. We're the joint mayors. We're not going to do that, okay? Supes focused. Okay, so Minority Corner is where you can all come and get your pop culture take. Plus, social commentary, news, and TV movie reactions like Avengers Endgame.

No spoilers here. Ooh, snap. Sometimes we dig into the vaults and we review and recap those movies you missed. Look at you, Halle Berry's kidnapped. I love how she always gives 1,000%. Like Beyonce. Did you see Homecoming on Netflix?

She was burning it down like the Mother of Dragons. Have you seen the latest Game of Thrones? So good. Only thing missing? More black people. What'd you think about Mayor Pete? Wait a minute, James! We went on a tangent?

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