Wonderful! - Wonderful! Ep. 58: Ya' Gotta Eat!

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Griffin's favorite puzzle game! Rachel's favorite bouncy jam! Griffin's favorite nautical synth love song! Rachel's favorite influential poet! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya "Smoke, Netflix, Chill" by Tank and the Bangas - https://open.spotify.com/album/3Hw1yKKePVdonlW1PcXySR "Yeoman" by Baths - https://open.spotify.com/album/4bRhWjJc6qCPbWxTF8NjWX MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Go. Begin. Begin listening. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome, you've done it.. Go. Begin. Begin listening. Welcome. Welcome.

Welcome. You've done it. Now begin. Enough waiting around. It's time for you to grab your life by the horns and just really make it your own thing. Go. Do it. What if we became like sort of more of an inspirational sort of self-help then?

Would you like that? That would be rough for me. Why is that? Oh, I don't know what advice i would offer people i guess well just tell them to do how you do it because you're living your best life you grab the life by the horns every day and um you're just you're you're living your best self and so how do you do it and tell them how to do it and then we get five hundred dollars okay yeah that's how it works so go ahead how do you do it the way that you do the things you do make me want to shoot you make good choices make good choices just be

thoughtful about your choices now expand on that uh so i think every day there are a series of choices in front of you oh and i would just don't know why my blue tie or my red tie i would just be thoughtful well my boss hates red you gotta wear that blue tiger gotta wear the blue time boss is scared of the color red so scared of it he's like a reverse bull but um hey thank you all for tuning in it's been a hell of a week huh a real fucking hell of a week i think for me personally speaking and um i was commenting on this to rachel all last night i was i've gotten sick again which is great this is just sort of my default state of being now but i kept getting alerts on my apple watch and i can actually scroll through my notification history and it's hysterical because it's like 14 of the alerts

that are like hey you haven't been moving but your heart rate's over 120 beats per minute. And it's like, yeah, there's a pretty freaking good reason for that one. My Apple Watch. But we're here and I'm glad to be talking to you about things we're enthusiastic about for our friends. Yes. At home. Do you have any small wonders? I do.

Go right ahead. How about all those ladies in the house? Ladies in the house? Ladies in the house, LGBTQ people in the house ladies in the house ladies in your house lgbtq people in the house it's all fucking awesome people that are not white in the house yeah which is refreshing real refreshing what is it the first time that 100 uh women have been in congress yeah it's like fucking buck wild and so good and so cool yeah mine is election related too mine is when uh beto o'rourke said fuck on live tv so choice you are my dog i love how the the like media outlets

were all prepared to like oh this is juicy and everybody's like that's awesome that's really good guys like thank you for sharing that clip with me you're not gonna get a rise out of me it's fucking so good he's so legit and good um yeah election week man it was stressful but it's over now and now we can move ever onward ad astra as they say yeah i mean i think a lot of us here in texas were a little bummed but i am choosing to look at the big picture 0.9 of us i think is what it boiled down to which is a a lot. Yeah. But yeah, a lot to be happy about. Yeah. So who goes first this week? I don't know.

Well. I never do. Me. Me first. Okay. Let me go first. Okay. My first thing is Tetris.

Is Tetris. The video game. Tetris. Tetris. The video game Tetris and all of its ilk. Because I was thinking about it. There's a new tetris game that comes out uh on friday that i'm very excited about i'll talk more about it in a little bit

but it had me thinking about sort of my life and how tetris weighed in on weighs on my soul yeah and uh i love it i love it it occupies a very singular space in my heart i'm not big for like puzzle games i feel like that's more your dominion like especially on the iphone i feel like you get your yeah yeah your your teeth sunk into a puzzle game you really go for it see you are big into puzzle games but like more complex i think than kind of tetris i mean typically is like is obrid the return of the obridin game the boat game i talked about last episode is that a puzzle game? Maybe, kind of. Remember that puzzle game where it was like,

it had like a seventh guest quality where you walked into a room and you had to turn a box around? What were those? I forget what those were called. They were neat. I think it was called The Room. Yeah, I guess that's fair.

Tetris, though, is like so stand apart in my mind because of how like zen-like it is to play it for me. It has not always been that way i used to not really enjoy tetris uh it was mostly travis's thing and travis was like the good one at tetris in our house and it was sort of stressful to like play in the same room as him uh i remember we used to go to vero beach florida and uh there was a a family we were close with at our church uh at the time who had like a little tiny little modest lake house down there. And they had like an old like CRT tiny TV with an NES hooked up to it.

And because we're indoor kids, we spend a lot of time just playing like Punch Out. But we also play a lot of Tetris. And I remember Travis just like sitting down and four hours later still be on the same game. But I feel like in recent years i've gotten into it and it's it's just really it's so satisfying right like that's what i love about the puzzle games is that when things like fit together or you have like a little row that disappears because you did something right it's just like it's like cleaning up you know how some people like to clean yeah not so much me but i like a puzzle game for similar reasons it is satisfying watching the

blocks disappear when you complete a line a little bit about the history of it uh it was invented by or created by uh alexey pajitnov who is a russian game designer uh and he first sort of like finished the first prototype of tetris in 1984 um he uh he was mostly like doing it to sort of test the capabilities of this computer hardware that he was messing around with and he's like oh okay i'll make a game that i can play on it just to sort of see how uh just sort of stretch its legs and what he made was tetris the first like design he really liked playing with uh like puzzle shapes when he was younger like um you know shit what are those things called where you have to tanograms holy crap you got that so

fast i'm playing with stuff like that and and uh you know just the stacking blocks and stuff like that and so uh he wanted to make this game with uh tetrominoes which is what the shapes in tetris originally it was going to be what's what's pentominoes i forget but like one step up but there were i think 12 configurations of what those could be and the computer i guess couldn't run it so tetrominoes there's only seven configurations of what it can be and so that's why they are that shape uh and also the game used to originally be just like fitting these shapes in together uh but the computer would like run out of memory and so that's why he got, he invented the like,

and now they'll come disappear when you make a whole line. And with those two things, he made Tetris. I love this idea of him just like making it and then playing it a few times and being like, this is a really good game. This is fucking good. Well,

I mean, he showed it to like all of his friends, right? All of the, the, the coworkers at the, the organization he was working with. And they were like uh bud this is fucking great uh it sort of spread like wildfire across the globe and back then like uh copyright on uh software was like a tough thing to to track

so there were all these different game publishers that licensed it for uh you know typically pc release in their individual countries. So there was like a version that was popular in Russia, and then there was a version that came stateside, and then there was a, you know, a version in the Ukraine that became sort of popular. And so it was kind of tough to like track the sort of legal ownership of Tetris at any given time. Where the game really took off was 1989 it came out packaged with every game boy if you bought a game boy you got tetris yeah there is a great uh

mack roy home video of the year that we got the game boy it must have been i think it was 1990 of just like justin just disappearing standing under a lamp because it was the original Game Boy, so it wasn't illuminated. And just like that was it. Bye, Justin. And that is sort of credited with like Tetris made the Game Boy. The Game Boy made Tetris. Like it was such a like symbiotic relationship between those two. It established Tetris as this like cultural phenomenon.

It had like been on PC and some people had like known about it but with tetris like everybody knew about it and that's true today like everybody knows what tetris is and i feel like i can say this pretty definitively because i've you know i worked in the games industry for over a decade like that's not true for a lot of things right like Like maybe like Mario, like people can recognize him. Yeah, but not everybody's had a lot of time playing Mario. Not everybody's had a lot of time playing Tetris, but like it's hard to forgive that because it's been out on every imaginable platform, whether it's on calculators or iPods or, you know, little keychain tiger games. Do you ever get Tetris on a graphing calculator? I think so.

Not a very good version of it, but you can get some version of it. It is like a culturally like important game for that very reason. Like it is for a lot of people like a touchstone for what games are. And while it's kind of a maybe a primitive touchstone, like it's still a great game and it still has likes because there are new versions coming out we most recently played on the switch puyo puyo tetris which uh blends puyo pop oh my god i was so into that we were both into that because you could play either one or you could play like a mix of them you were big into the puyo pop side i was big into the tetris side the

puyo were like little beans they're like it was Tetris shape, but they were beans. It was really, really good. So Tetris is great, not just because it's a fun game. There are a lot of like psychological effects attributed to Tetris, some of which are like actually very positive, some of which are just kind of weird. I pulled like a lot of stuff that I'm going to try and summarize on the fly pretty quickly. There was a study that showed that prolonged Tetris activity can lead to more efficient brain activity during play. So they measured like your brain and how it's, you know, firing the first time like you start playing

Tetris. And then it figures out like how it's firing after you've been playing for a while. And the efficiency of your brain, what is it? As Tetris players become more proficient, their brains show a reduced consumption of glucose, indicating more efficient brain activity for this task. Moderate play of half an hour a day for three months boosts general cognitive functions, such as critical thinking, reasoning, language, and processing. Really? That's fascinating.

And it has physiological effects. It increases cerebral cortex thickness. From Tetris. There are other psychological psychological benefits too there have been studies um uh the one with oxford university where they were showing people sort of like traumatic material and then making them play tetris and they found that like it was harder for people to form sort of like these sticky memories about the traumatic stuff that they had seen because of tetris sort of like rew memories about the traumatic stuff that they had seen because of tetris sort of like rewiring their brains not to focus on it um and so they like have a they

theorize that like this could be used to as a sort of intervention to reduce like some of the effects of ptsd which is so wild um there was a study at plymouth university that showed that tetris could have a quote quick and manageable fix for um people studying to stick to diets or quit smoking or drinking. There was a Canadian study shown that older adolescents with amblyopia, which is the scientific term for lazy eye, it is a way to sort of like train your eyes to work better and work faster um uh they said there's a quote it's it's much better than patching much more enjoyable it's faster and seems to work better uh they tested this in the in the united kingdom to some success imagine going to the doctor and having your doctor prescribe you some tetris you need to play an hour of tetris every day i could totally do that.

So the new game that comes out this Friday is called Tetris Effect, which is a reference to another sort of phenomenon that isn't explicitly just about Tetris, but it's kind of where it gets its name, obviously. It's a phenomenon where your mind pictures like Tetris blocks long after you stop playing Tetris, especially in your dreams

i get this so much i get this so much i've been playing uh diablo on switch lately and like last night of course i was feverish and like sleeping on the couch and on like eight different medicines but like in my mind i was just like playing diablo because i've been playing it a lot uh but like with tetris like it is it is uh it is the most sort of visceral i feel like because it's so simple your brain only has to remember these simple shapes uh and so the game is like kind of focuses on that and tries to it's made by a uh the designer is a guy named tetsuya mizuguchi who makes like rhythm games especially like trance-like rhythm games. He has one called Rez

and the whole design aesthetic for that was he was into the idea of synesthesia, the idea of like your senses detecting things other than what they should explicitly be able to detect. That was a very like long-winded way of explaining synesthesia and was very bad. But like he's very big into just these like trippy, just like trance-like games. And that's what what tetris is so like i'm fucking so stoked to see like what

he does with tetris but yeah i just love tetris it's so it's a special game that even like other puzzle games aren't really like um i'm always fascinated to watch people play tetris too because it like says a lot about uh them as a person yeah like griffin will develop these like 15 row strategies where he is just waiting for that long single piece and i will watch him build up along the walls and i will think this is a man who is determined it's also a man who's just waiting on one long block and if he doesn't get it he'll lose this we have to mention we've been watching this series of stand-up specials from james acaster oh my gosh who i only recognized from um uh i don't know a lot of like the stand-up people he was on worst idea of all time and was hysterical i re-listened to his episodes recently

because i love his stand-up so much. He has a special on Netflix. This is another small wonder called Repertoire. It is four stand-up specials in one thing. So like the amount of content this dude is making is like out of control. And there are some bits in each of them that like had us on the floor cackling so good. We had a bit about Tetris where he talked about how nobody like he wanted a fresh start in life like in Tetris because like the first time that you put a block down and it just goes wrong. You just hold the down button and just and I do that like I'll stack up Griffin plays. Yeah, I stack up the towers.

And if I don't get a long block for like the straight block for like, you know, 20 blocks, I'm just like, well, that's it. Bye. I never had seen somebody so recklessly just abandon video games until i met griffin yeah uh what's your first thing my first thing is tanking the bangas tanking the bangas you sent me a clip of the song that you're going to talk about and it's fucking so good i'm so excited to play it. This is a band that I had recommended to me a lot recently. And I think it's because in 2017, they won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest. I didn't know how I talked about how that's like a thing.

Oh, I love Tiny Desk. I didn't know that it was competitive. They have a contest where people send in their own little Tiny Desk videos and the winner got to be on it. That's so good. Uh, and that's how everybody got really familiar with them. Um, tank and the bangers have a vibrant blend of R and B funk,

hip hop, gospel, and spoken word poetry. uh, Tariana tank ball is the lead vocalist and she first gained attention as a slam poet. I can see that i mean i only listened to that one song that you sent me but it was slammy uh-huh it was slamming

do people ever say that at like the slam poetry things you went to where they'd be like slamming you did that like jim carrey in the mask a little bit slamming uh so the group formed in 2011 so they've been around for a while uh in new orleans uh and they um released their debut album think tank in 2013 followed by the 2014 live set the big bang theory live at kazugasa isn't that great um apparently their live shows are just like incredible. Oh, dog, I can believe that in a heartbeat. There's what?

There's like seven of them, right? And that song is so like larger than life. I didn't watch the Tiny Desk concert, but I bet it's amazing. Well, I think there are five official members of the band, at least according to what I found. But yeah, Tank has said that she, quote, kind of feels like they take church on the road. And so I wanted to share a little bit of a song. So they have a new album that's set to come out in 2019. And one of the songs I really liked, they just released a single Spaceships in September, which you can check out. But the song that I want to play is Smoke Netflix Chill.

That's so good. Which came out in April. Here it is. You know what I was thinking about? I was trying to like think about like, obviously there's a lot I like. Like I like that kind of like new orleans bounce sound yeah you know um that's kind of like soulful but like super danceable but then i realized tank kind of reminds me of like a funky nikki minaj okay i was gonna say like a funky like regina specter only in like the way that she like uses her voice and it's like changing line to line like what kind

of delivery it is i'm so i adore shit like that that is so good when you never really know what the next line of a song is going to sound like even though it's sung by the same vocalist yeah and that was this like all over i was instantly in love with this song as soon as i heard her voice i was like oh shit yes i'm so down i know uh i i again this is like and i think it's because I've had friends see the band live, but I've just had this recommended to me over and over again, and I finally just checked it out this week, and I was like, oh, this is really, really great.

It's so fucking good. It's unique and positive and exactly the kind of thing I like. Yeah, I just had a big goofy grin on my face as soon as I started listening to it. It was an amazing pick-me-up. Should we steal us away? Mm-hmm. Boo, boo, boo, boo. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo You can also do All that she wants is another baby

That's so good You can do that There's a lot of Ace of Base songs Well there's actually not a lot of Ace of Base songs There's only like three There's just the three Ace of Base songs you could kind of, well, there's actually not a lot of Ace of Base songs. There's only like three. There's just the three, I guess. Man, they really sort of defied expectations in that they were a three hit wonder, which is strange.

Usually three hits is enough to get you, get you over, as they say in wrestling. Do you want some personal messages, Griffin? Yup. This message is for Darcy. It is from Deidre. Happy birthday to my little is for Darcy. It is from Deidre. Happy birthday to my little sister Darcy. What I think is wonderful is the time we've gotten to spend together listening to podcasts and even traveling across state lines to see our faves live. I hope we get to listen to Wonderful on another tubing trip or on another long aimless drive, maybe even way out to the wind turbine farm.

Happy birthday. Do they grow wind turbines? This is stupid. I was about to say something really stupid. Yeah. I was going to say something like, sometimes I say stupid stuff and play like I'm a child, but that was a bridge too far, I feel like. Tubing trip sounds good right now, though, doesn't it? These long November months, getting in a tube, splish splashing around.

Oh, see, I'm already into winter. I'm psyched about winter now. Maybe it's because I didn't get to go on a tube and trip this year. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Sorry. This next message is for Phoebe. It is from Tuva and Sharni.

Hey, massive shout out to Phoebe for being the most wonderful friend anyone could ask for. We even made a poem for you without phoebe parappa the rapper is crapper i'm not gonna hear any of this bad bad mouthing parappa the rapper we forgive you for moving to melbourne and please know that we love you and hope that the cuteness of rachel and griffin continue to make every week better i'm not gonna be cute right now you just came with my with my dog friend, Parappa the Rapper.

He's so good. I was not at all familiar with him until I met you. Do you want me to do the whole song from level two? No. He has to get his driver's license, and there's a moose, I believe, a moose police officer who teaches him how to drive a car. Sounds a lot like Sam and Max to me. Well, except it's all through the beautiful lens of rapping.

So it's like, press and turn the signal to the right now turn to the right i do like that it's so good it does sound like fun i'm riley smurl i'm sydney mcavoy I'm Taylor Smurl. And together, we host a podcast called Still Buffering, where we answer questions like... Why should I not fall asleep first at a slumber party? How do I be fleek? Is it okay to break up with someone using emojis? And sometimes we talk about bugs. No, we don't.

Nope. Find out the answers to these important questions and many more on Still Buffering, a sister's guide to teens through the ages. I am a teenager. And I was two. Butts, butts, butts, butts, butts. No. Can I tell you about my second thing? Yes.

My second thing is a song. Can you guess where I found it? Spotify. Spotify Discover Weekly. Yeah, they got my number on this one. It is the song Yeoman by Baths. Baths, if you are not familiar, is the stage name of Will Weisenfeld, who is an electronic musician from L.A. of Will Weisenfeld, who is an electronic musician from LA.

I actually became sort of aware of his presence and his work through the late great platform of Vine where he had some real good jammers. Oh, that's funny. A few viral smash hits. Didn't you tell me Vine was coming back? It's gonna, and I've been thinking a lot about it because there's so many people like Will Weisen, that I found on Vine and knew from Vine and still do. Is there going to be some sort of reunion when Vine 2 launches?

Are all those people going to come back on? I don't know. But anyway, he performs as Baths. I knew some of his songs. I was familiar with baths uh he has a song called animals which was off of his first album that uh was kind of a smash hit that album came out in 2010 and i feel like i heard that song everywhere uh and it's a good track but i wanted to talk about uh this song yeoman which is uh y-e-o-A-N, like the, I don't know, boat job. What does a yeoman do?

I don't think I've ever known that. I've heard the word before. Oh, yeah. No, I know the word. I know exactly how it's spelled, but I could not tell you what it does. It's a type of sailing boat. It's also a man holding and cultivating a small landed estate, a freeholder, a servant in a royal or noble household ranking between a sergeant and a groom or a squire and a page. Okay. i guess i have no fucking idea what yeoman means but the song is called yeoman and it's it's super good it's off his latest album that came out uh just about a year exactly

ago uh called romoplasm uh and i love this album so much every song is like really musically fascinating which is like kind of his style um i try and fail so much to describe music like this as being just like really sort of um dense in terms of like the instruments being used in it like no measure is the same and there's you know weird samples and modulations happening in every millisecond of the song it is is very like, there is not a wasted second of like repeated music throughout the whole thing. And Yeoman is totally like that

as is like the rest of the album. But there's also on this album, just all these themes of like lighthearted fantasy that really warms my soul to hear. So to give you like an idea of what that is, here's a clip from yeoman it's like a love song about a an airship about an officer on an airship and the person singing

the song sort of uh dancing on the deck of this airship with the yeoman over the world that they both left behind i was so excited that there was like a story because i feel like a lot of the electronic music you're into there isn't like a story oh for sure yeah there's it's it's definitely uh i can actually think of a couple artists but they're like very obscure on like uh like soundcloud electronic artists that i like who who do a lot of sort of like vocal storytelling work over over their music but it's super not like common. And I just love, I love this song for that exact reason.

Like it's about an airship love story, uh, with this like incredible hook, uh, just that really fast poppy synth. Uh, and by poppy, I mean like it sounds like pops and not that it is pop music.

Uh, but also it's so full of like nautical terminology. It's so good. Here's some lyrics. Let me bore you here under the moon robed in the armillary room. An armillary is like a spherical star chart kind of thing. Oh. The fact that the word armillary is in the song.

Anyway, inert for all my years and then fell into you. These routes that you just so ornately improvise, they're always wild and I don't seem to mind. I just, man, I just love every second of this song. It is fantastic. And there are so many songs on this album just like that. So I will say that I also kind of wish i could play just like the whole song on this show or eight different clips because it goes to so many different places

there's like two or three bridges one of which is like this wild like uh full hook full of like horns and strings that come in over the sense that is so extra and it just rules. I will also say I sort of was brought into this album this week because it was on my Spotify discover list. And it was nice to have these nice, chill, upbeat tunes yesterday while my heart was racing for most of the day. It was nice to have this to fall back on. What's your second thing, though? My second thing actually came to me yesterday.

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my poetry crusade that I went on. You bit off so much more than you should. I don't know why you thought that that was sustainable. I invited people that voted on that day to send me a picture of them in their voting uh sticker uh and i was just their voice oh griffin uh and i would send a few lines of poetry and immediately you were i was inundated well then i felt like i couldn't say no to people that were like oh i voted absentee or i early voted and i was like, I don't really want to split hairs. And so then that kind of became like 24 hours of work for me. I didn't post a sticker image yesterday.

We early voted. I early voted. And whenever I get a voting sticker, I stick it on the inside of my underwear drawer. So I have like a nice little collection. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah. And so I didn't know that yeah and uh so i didn't feel like peeling it off because i was afraid i would lose its stickiness well now i want to see a picture of that underwear drawer yeah anyway uh and so the i was trying to think of poets that i felt like conveyed a real like kind of inspirational tone or poets that could be excerpted really easy. Yeah.

And one of the poets that I went with immediately, very first, was Maya Angelou. Oh, for sure. Which I imagine everybody has heard of. Yeah. And was maybe the first poet I ever really liked. I mean, as I became an adult, you know, like obviously I was a big Shel Silverstein fan. But as I got older, Maya Angelou was my go to like as early as high school. It's probably not good.

I also love the work that I and it's, you know, not a whole lot. But the work that she has that I'm familiar with is obviously fantastic. Yeah. But the thing that makes me the happiest is Tracy Morgan's impression of her that he would do. I will sometimes just re-watch that video the one of him doing the different hallmark cards that my angel his fucking slays me it's the same joke basically three times over which is such the like weekend update style of doing jokes even stefan whom i love but come on uh and shit it kills me i always think of uh crispity crunchy

well that was david allen grier i think was it i think that was david allen grier when he was guest hosting but i remember that too yeah it's not good it's not good that's my touch she's just got such a distinct voice it just makes you want to like try it out in your own mouth yeah uh so she has published seven autobiographies three books of essays several books of poetry and a list of plays movies and television shows spanning over 50 years she received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees geez can you imagine that's a lot of honorary degrees how many honorary degrees does it take to make up one real degree i don't know griffin that's a strange question the honorary degree is like a it's a degree that

an institution will award as like recognition for your talent yeah so if you get like 30 of those does it count as like you got your phd from johns hopkins or something i don't know but you should be able to trade them in like i'm not saying they're not good i'm just saying what's the economy of them uh so she uh part part of what makes her so unique and so translatable to so many different people is not only was she a poet she was also a singer she was a civil rights activist uh she has experience working as a fry cook a sex worker a nightclub dancer and performer a cast member of the opera porgy and bess porgy and bess yeah uh a coordinator a coordinator for the southern christian leadership conference and a journalist in egypt and ghana jesus she just kind of let christ led an incredible life

that's insane i had no fucking idea uh in 2011 she received the presidential medal of freedom from president obama that was the best rightfully so uh and i was posthumous right no she's still alive in 2015 2011 oh 2011. Oh, 2011. I thought you said 2015. No. No, there's actually pictures of her accepting it. Okay. So I'm pretty sure she was alive. Yes. And I think she gets dismissed a lot because, again, she's one of those poets that's really accessible, really recognizable.

For sure. When Bill Clinton was inaugurated, she read the poem there during his inauguration. And actually, I have the last few lines of it if you want to hear it. Because for me, it's really recognizable. I don't know if you'll remember. The poem was called On the Pulse of Morning. It was this very long, sweeping poem about the rock and the river and the animals and coming together across the earth.

And then at the very end, the last stanza was, Here on the pulse of this new day you may have the grace to look up and out and into your sister's eyes into your brother's face your country and say simply very simply with hope good morning isn't that perfect for an inauguration yeah it's really good it just gives me chills even reading it was it written specifically for the inauguration because it sounds like it was i have to assume so maybe i don't actually know the answer to that um but the poem i was sending around to uh people yesterday is uh still i rise uh and the reason i was sending it around is there's like it's it's a poem like all about persistence and courage in the face of adversity

and there are just these great little stanzas in it. And so I wanted to share a few of them. There's kind of a mix in there of triumph and also kind of just some really like good burns. Like she's kind of speaking to her adversaries a little bit in the poem. And so there's just these great lines. So let me just read one stanza. does my sassiness upset you why are you beset with gloom because i walk like i've got oil wells pumping in my living room what a great burn is that isn't that so nice that's so fucking good she uh she also wrote this poem that she's really famous for called phenomenal woman but it's just this like this

like confidence and just like brassiness and sexiness. Oh, so good. And then so here's how the poem ends. And this is, I think, universal. And this is that triumph that I was speaking of. Out of the huts of history's shame, I rise. Up from a past that's rooted in pain, I rise. I'm a black ocean leaping and wide welling and swelling i

bear in the tide she's the best she's the best she just you can see why she just became such a spokesman for poetry uh and for women and for african-american women like she she is to the point and accessible and fearless and inspirational in a big way. Yeah. And I just like, I'll walk away from her for a while, especially like when I started to be more academic in my approach to poetry. But when I was looking through her stuff yesterday, I was just like, oh no, this, this man, this really holds up.

There's a reason why everybody knows who she is and what her poems sound like. I feel like, like I'm not familiar with a lot of her work. The kind of imagery she includes in her poems is so distinctly Maya Angelou that I feel like if I just heard that read out loud on the street, I could be like, oh, that's Maya Angelou. Yeah, so I would encourage you to check out those poems, Still I Rise. You can easily find it on the internet and same with On the Pulse of Morning. Hey, do you want to know what our friends at home are all about is about yes cameron says i just wanted to drop in and say that something i find wonderful is fall scented candles the sense of pumpkin and cinnamon and baked holiday treats are perfect in candle forms help me calm down after a long day of work i even dabble in making my own scrap wax now, even if I'm not very good at it.

Is that some kind of new street drug? Scrap wax. I assume it's like when you take the scraps of candles and blend. It can't possibly be that, right? Like maybe, yeah, you take leftover candles and combine them together. But multiple scents would be strange, huh? I don't know, but I love a good fall leaf candle. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I feel like a lot of summer candles smell like laundry detergent, which is okay, but it can be a little overpowering. And spring, too, for that matter. Spring especially, yeah.

Yeah. Fall, though? Fall and a winter candle? Winter candle can also, I don't love a really stinky pine one. A little pine is okay. Griffin has a lot of strong opinions about smells. Well, I used to have a sensitive nose before it stopped working for two fucking months.

Here's one from Erica who says, I just had my second baby three weeks ago. Congratulations. And one thing I forgot about is that is completely wonderful is that full body stretch that infants do when they're waking up sometimes they put both tiny arms over their heads and pull their knees up to their bellies and just stretch and groan in that tiny way it's wonderful oh i'd forgotten about that too i've forgotten everything

about the first six months of henry's life but i do remember this good stretch the babies do it's yeah it's very good uh adrian says something i find wonderful is mise en place when i'm cooking the last thing i want to do is have to scramble to make a seasoning or chop a vegetable so before i start i make sure i have everything i need ready to go i only cook like this like very rarely if especially for like a super ambitious dish with like lots of little components that you know if you're you know searing something off in a frying pan and you only have like minute to do it. You don't have time to chop up that garlic and smash that arugula or whatever. It's a gross recipe I've just done.

Is that a street truck? Yeah, smash that arugula. So getting a bunch of little, what are they called? Colanders? No, not colanders. Oh, ramekins. Ramekins. Just fill them up with all your your your materials i feel

like a warlock doing some sort of potions yes yes yes so good um that's it though hey thank you all for listening thank you to bowen and augustus for the use of our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description uh what else Thank you to MaximumFun.org for hosting our podcast. If you like Wonderful, you might want to check out other shows like Bullseye and Can I Pet Your Dog? Flophouse. And Flophouse. Those good boys. Yeah, there's a lot of great shows on Maximum Fun.

We're very grateful to be on their network. If you want to hear other stuff we do,'s at mackleroyshows.com uh we have a mailing list also for the whole like mackleroy family of products that we just launched where we're doing like most of our announcements now these days so we don't have to do them all on the show every time uh you can find that at i believe bit.ly slash mackleroy mail i was thinking i might sign up for it you probably i feel like it's the only way i really know when you're going somewhere that's not entirely fair but anyway it's a good uh newsletter and it's got uh it's got fun stuff i was trying to i was talking to him uh amanda and been like hey can we put it like a crossword puzzle or a word search or junior jumble? And I'll even I'll even make it.

So, yeah, look forward to those great puzzles. And I think that's it, huh? That is it. Oh, for those of you who are getting mail items returned to you, we still do not have a P.O. box. I promise we're going to fix it. It is not personal. We did not reject your item. No, we do not have a place for you to send it.

we did not reject your item. We simply do not have a place for you to send it right now. Yeah, we moved far away from our last post office and it lapsed and we are failures, but we'll get it fixed. Okay. I think that's it. That's it. Time to shut her down.

How can we end our show this time? I could try out some of my new catchphrases. Yeah, Rachel's going to take us out with some of her great new catchphrases. That's peppermint. No. It's like something you would say, you know? That's peppermint. Are there more, or can we end on that?

Keep it in the frying pan. Okay. That's fun, because it's like out of the frying pan and into the fire, and you're just like, no, keep it in the... Yeah, I like that. Are you in in a cave or are you on a ladder that one's confusing too you know what i have to say about that one that's peppermint Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay.

Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Hey! We've all made mistakes in book club, right? You drink a little too much, you don't actually read the book, and if you're under the bubble in Fairhaven, your individual will gets subsumed by the collective. Hey, maybe I just let him go and whip us up some guac.

We do not require guac. We require only nutrients and expansion. You will become Book Club. You will eat, pray, and love with us. Join Book Club. Bubble, the sci-fi comedy from MaximumFun.org. Just open your podcast app and search for Bubble.