Wonderful! - Wonderful! Ep. 9: Alligator Jealousy

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Griffin's favorite zen-like video game series! Rachel's favorite therapeutic pastime! Griffin's favorite method of live musical performance! Rachel's favorite place to buy vegetables! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by Bo En and Augustus: https://open.spotify.com/track/5hs2nY40aeqM0mpP8SBOon MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Oh, boy. We can be loud. This is our loud episode. We're recording this one while Henry is at daycare. And so get ready for just a lot of loud, just language, adult themes.

Sound effects. Sound effects. Oh, no. A big bazooka. Quack, quack, quack, quack. Sorry, do that one again. How'd a duck get in here? Did you hear that?

How'd a duck get in here? And why's it got ten guns? Somebody stop this duck. This is wonderful. It's a podcast where we talk about all the good things that are going on for us and for you. It's a podcast where we talk about all the good things that are going on for us and for you. And it feels weird that actually this isn't our Halloween episode because Halloween's tomorrow when we're recording this. But whatever.

Let's just roll with it. I got all the spooks and scares out of my system. And now I'm feeling – if I see something spooky now, I'll be upset. I'll be pissed off about it. I'll be legitimately PO'd. Because it's November now. It's November now, technically. Spooky is over. Spooky is over.

Spooky is over. Wholesome is in. Also, we've got a candle and tea going in here. There's a whole aromatic sort of element to this recording. I'm very excited about it. And I think it's my turn to start, isn't it? I think so. Ah, boy.

We need like a chore wheel in here just for this. I will start, though, because my first thing is the video game series animal crossing what's up you knew it was coming you know it was coming you knew it was going to be here eventually and i decided that this is the episode for it animal crossing is probably one of my favorite video game series this is of all time uh i've spent a disgusting amount of time playing it as r Rachel can attest. She has witnessed me at least go into one of these sort of binge cycles. When the new game came out,

I literally asked Griffin how long I could expect him to be an escape into this world. Yeah. And I was sort of evasive, if you'll recall, giving an answer, because it's not a good one. So Animal Crossing, if you've never played it or if you've never heard of answer because it's not a good one um so animal crossing if you've never played it if you've never heard of it is a community sim game where you are a human being

living in a town populated by anthropomorphic animals it's a game by um nintendo the original game actually came out for the nintendo 64 in japan uh but it it only came to other regions including america the following year on gamecube where it was sort of fixed up and made to look a little bit prettier. And it's kind of similar to if you've played like The Sims or any of the Harvest Moon series. It's kind of in a similar vein where there's like a day cycle. The game moves in real time. And every time you turn it on, there's sort of new things going on. But sort of unlike The Sims specifically, there's a much less of a focus on like objectives. It's not like you

have to go and make your Animal Crossing character go use the bathroom. The fact that I just said that out loud, I envisioned it and it's profane. Oh, I have an idea. Go. How about I talk about what I know of the game? And then you kind of elaborate based on that. I know there's the noise you hate very much because you think it's the cat every time. Yes. So this is a game where you are a little creature and you have a bunch of. Just a human being. You have a bunch of friends to interact with in this town. And you can customize your little house and your clothes.

And you can go fishing and planting things. Gardening. Sometimes they call it gardening. There's little shops you can go in and out of. Yes. You have little convos with the townsfolk. Yeah, and help them out with their stuff. Griffin,

last time this game came out, and he was playing it incessantly, I got legitimately jealous of an alligator who seemed to be flirting with him in the game. Every time I looked over, there was this female alligator that seemed to be real thirsty for Griffin. And I just, he'd been playing it so long that I used her as a symbol of all that was upsetting to me. Right. And this was a long time ago. And I should stress that sort of my priorities are different these days.

But yeah, I mean, you know, she needed an apple. And so I'd help give her an apple. And maybe the relationship turned into something else, something more meaningful after that. But that's basically the whole game, right? Like, I just summarized the whole game. The game is essentially you helping out your neighbors and growing closer to them. There are these like sort of progression customization hooks. Like you mentioned, there's a bunch of different clothes and accessories you can buy for your

character. Didn't you make a whole like Mario themed room or something? Yeah. So that because it's a Nintendo game, like a big element of the game is designing your house. It's like an interior decoration simp. So much so that they actually made a spinoff game called Happy Home Designer. That is just the interior decoration part where you go into somebody's house and like i want a house with

like a cool goth vibe and then it's up to you to like sort of put that together which was fun but not the core sort of experience that i like so much um and so yeah a big part of the game is paying to expand your house paying off your house loan to this uh raccoon named tom nook and expanding your house and decorating it. And then you receive sort of a score based on how well you've decorated it. There are, there was, I don't know if this was in all the games, but in Animal Crossing, there was an emphasis on feng shui.

If you are following those principles, then there are like certain rewards that you can gain. And yeah, you catch fish and you catch bugs. There's a rewards that you can gain um and uh yeah you catch fish and you catch bugs there's a museum that you can donate stuff to so there's sort of a completionist element to it where you're trying to fill out the museum question please do that's why we do this um i've seen you put a lot of time into this like personalization and home design aspect of a variety of games right um i don't actually see you doing that much in your real life. And I'm curious why that appeals to you in the game,

but when it comes to, let's say, making a space or yourself look a certain way, that's less interesting. It's easier in the game. It's easier. I don't know. I personally don't give as much of a shit about, I mean, I like to look nice. I like nice clothes.

I know. I'm not saying that. I'm just, I'm saying that part of a, like, a big appeal to you in a video game is if you can customize a character or space. Sure. But, um. That's just like, that's just, and this is like the conversation about Animal Crossing or any type of game like this.

I played a lot of Stardew Valley, which is a pretty recent game that came out, I believe, last year. It just came out on Switch again this year, and so I started playing it again. But it is sort of a farming game in the style of Harvest Moon, but with an emphasis on you can decorate your house and customize this big farm that you've got.

I think that... I think Animal Crossing is sort of divisive as a as a game because if you want to boil it down the way that rachel just explained it like it just does sound like a bunch of chores and sometimes you'll buy new pants um but if you start thinking about the game that way then you and you should apply that same sort of um metric when talking about any video game and when you do that it all sort of starts to seem pretty meaningless, right? Like all video games, whether you're like shooting Nazis, or buying furniture for your house is all about putting your real ass time and then performing in game

things to achieve virtual goals that have no. Yeah, well, but that's the thing is the the goals the achievements right so and i think your brother justin has talked about this a little bit about kind of the value of a game that gives you some wins right you know some very clear um objectives as you said and so since these games don't have a like do these five things and then you win. Well, that's just it, though. Like, that's specifically what I'm talking about is if you look at video games from a, like, if there's no explicit objective that you're accomplishing, whether that objective is, like, a literal objective, a waypoint on the map that you have to go do a thing, or whether it's a story being told to you. If a game doesn't have that, then it kind of feels like a bit of a waste of time. My argument is that,

like, regardless of what you're doing, if you're playing a video game, you are creating objectives that you alone fulfill. And so while there isn't like, oh, I have to go use the bathroom before my bladder meter explodes, there is like, I want my kitchen to look a little bit nicer, or I want to complete this one furniture set, or I want to work on my relationship with this just beautiful alligator. um i i that that is the way that i treat games and that that specific objective of um personal ownership and customization of certain things is my favorite objective in video games i wonder now has that always been the case or is that more recent i think it's always been the case i've and it's especially true in games where uh multiplayer is a facet where you can sort of show off your work to other people yeah this first sort of clicked with me when me and my brothers and all of our friends were playing EverQuest, which was this like, old school MMORPG, like one of the first online RPGs. And I just loved the idea of just I had

this character who could get stronger and have better stuff and become wealthier and just have this better status that I could go then and show off to my friends. And I kind of like, or at the very least, not status, but customization. This one's mine because of the things that I did. Let me show you what I've done with my thing. And that is like Animal Crossing to a T. That's all it is. Come to my town. Let me show you my house because I've done some really, really cool design stuff with it.

It's just so interesting to me that you'll kind of, you'll peacock, to use an expression. There are peacocks, literal peacocks in the game. I learned in Parks and Rec. You know, you'll do the kind of flashy pop of color in the virtual space. Sure. But I never see you go to a party and say, I'm going to wear this really fancy, nice jacket. And everyone's going to say, hey, look at that jacket. He must have picked a lot of apples.

But I would do that if I knew where the right apples were. I know it's sort of a contradiction, but it's like, you know this to be true. Like, you have seen how much time I spend in, like, character customization. Yeah, it's just interesting to me. I just like the idea of I am on this personal journey that is mine and mine alone. And it's going to be different from everybody else's because of the decisions that I make,

but I do want to see what they did and I want them to see what I did to make it my own. And that's like, I think animal crossing does that really well in this very. Zen like package, because again, there is no, you don't lose animal crossing. There's not a failure state in

the game at all. And because it sort of rotates on a day-to-day schedule, and there are weekly events or holidays, like, hey, it's Christmas. Go in and there's special Christmas stuff going on. I just love that idea of a game that you can pick up for a few minutes and see how your thing's doing and the whole time you are sort of crafting this very individual lightweight narrative around yourself that is different from everybody else's um so that's animal crossing new leaf is my favorite game in the series it's the one we talked about most it's the uh out on 3ds if you haven't played it and you have a 3ds it's like my one of my top three favorite games of all time uh and there's a new one the one that you referenced earlier, that's on mobile called Pocket Camp that's coming out in November.

It's pretty good. Oh, so that one's not out yet. It's not out yet. I got a sneaky, sneaky version of it. It's not like the full Animal Crossing experience. It kind of reminds me of that Niko Atsume game that you got into where you collect the cats and they just kind of sit there. To be fair, I was never really super into that. You said that to me? You played

that game a fucking lot. For like a month. Yeah, but it was a very intense cat-sitting month. I wanted the cat that had the little hat and the feather and he'd climb to the top of your tower. And you got him and you said I beat the game. That was your personal objective and you accomplished it. See, Niko Atsume

is like a great example of this. There's no winning Niko Atsume. It's just like what you want. And that's why I don't stick with it. See, I do. I stick with it. But if I was playing Niko Atsume and we could show each other each other's cats, I bet you would have stuck with it a lot more. Maybe. Maybe.

That's Animal Crossing. It's very good and very cute. What's your first thing, babe? Ooh, oh my god.achel's got a laptop since we are recording on a different schedule i am using my laptop it's her it's her monday laptop i didn't print this week okay uh so this actually we have a printer you could have printed if you wanted i should have yeah now i have to hold luckily this is a very light computer half a pound uh so this actually came usually i i call my my topics from childhood experiences but these are actually things we've talked about recently oh good that inspired me uh to bring him to the show the first is

journaling hey Hey, okay. Griffin and I were talking about this last week, and I mentioned to him, which at the time didn't seem very significant to me, but thinking back now, I started journaling in middle school and more or less did it all the way through college, some in graduate school, and then some just this past year. Yeah. And it is tremendous for me. And it's not something I've ever really talked about before. the power, let's say, of journaling, and found out there's a guy here in town who's a professor of psychology at the UT Austin campus, who wrote a book called Opening Up by Writing It Down,

how expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain. This can help people sleep better, feel and think better, have richer social lives, all of which can build immune function and improve health. So there's all these different studies showing the impact of it. There was a study in 2014 involving women in residential treatment programs that found that those who engaged in four 20-minute writing sessions. Four 20. Four 20-minute writing sessions. 420.

You have your journal while you're just blazed up and out of your just gore, dude. Probably, if you look at my college ones. Hi, Linda. That was a joke. It was a parody. Four 20-minute writing sessions on consecutive days. They had greater reductions in their post-traumatic symptoms, depression, and anxiety after two weeks than participants who wrote about neutral topics. There's other studies that show that it helps people distance themselves from distressing life experiences, which in turn makes them less

emotionally reactive to it. So there's all these different studies showing kind of the power of writing through kind of your emotions. And I just wanted to bring that up. The most recent time I did it, this past year and a half or so before Henry was born, we were having a lot of trouble conceiving. And I was having a lot of trouble kind of processing all the highs and lows of that. So I started journaling and put together this like 20 page Word document just of all my feelings that were difficult to talk about with people that weren't living that experience. Sure. about with people that weren't living that experience.

Sure. And weren't feelings I had that I necessarily wanted to share publicly. And it was really helpful for me to go through that. Yeah. Why we were talking about this is because I just started seeing a therapist for the first time in my life ever in the past couple of weeks. And he recommended doing some journ journaling uh as sort of a therapeutic measure which i had literally and this is just because i'm dumb like i'd never considered journaling as a therapeutic activity i'd literally only thought about it as a chronicle

of one's own personal life and and history um and not a way, the reason that he wanted me to do it is because he asked, like, how often do you sort of introspectively think about your life and how you're feeling on any given day? I was like, oh, never. And so his recommendation is that journaling could be a way for me to like categorize and understand the shape of my own thoughts, which is like, yeah, sure. Like, absolutely. It makes sense. That's, that's the way that I categorize and make sense of anything is by writing it down. And typically in, you know, a Google doc spreadsheet or something like that, obviously this is sort of a different format, but I've never really considered the benefits of just like being deliberate and writing down just how I'm, how I am feeling. And then at the benefits of just like uh being deliberate and writing down just how i'm how i am feeling

and then at the end of that like it's not it's not just that you have like a record of what you did today it's a record of how you feel right now um which i've only done it i've only been doing it for like a few days but it's like oh okay i get it so dr james pennebaker from ut suggest and and there's something on the website unfortunately unfortunately, I didn't write it down, but that you do it for just 20-minute sessions, I think four times a week is what he recommends, to just kind of examine what you're experiencing. as someone who has done this for a very long time, it's made me much better at articulating how I feel about something and figure out kind of all the different pieces behind it. And so I find that when I have conversations with people, it's easier for me to really pinpoint what it is, you know, that's going on with me, which is really valuable. Yeah, for sure.

I think it makes it's interesting because it's a very independent, potentially lonely exercise that ends up paying off for you in your interactions with other people. Yeah, I think and I think that's I think that's why I never really did it until now is because it was I think it has to do with sort of the performative nature of everything that I do, that the idea of doing something that only I will see for the rest of time feels weird. It feels unnatural. But not only that, it is actually hard to break myself out of. We talked about this, like, some of my anxiety before I started journaling of my past attempts, like in college, when I i was just like super sad all the

time um ended up being these like really floral yeah um kind of like just shitty pieces of prose that weren't necessarily reflective of how i felt it was just i would start going and i'd be like what do journals sound what do what do, sad journals sound like? And I would write it and get to the end of it and be like, wow, this is fucking schlock. And this is not actually how I feel. It's just like, I wanted to write something romanticized. And it's a really, really tough instinct for me to fight back against. But I think it is worth doing because it's one of those things where I don't take that much time to think about my own brain because I am chronically hyper busy. And doing this thing is a way of dealing with that.

But it also is something that is like you have to really force yourself to do when you are super busy. But I cannot stress like even the few times I've done it, it's been very it's been it's been revealing of some stuff that's like, oh, so that's how I feel about X, Y, or Z. Yeah. Yeah. It's something I've always kind of done. And I didn't really think about kind of the benefits that I was gaining from it until recently. And I would really recommend it. You know what I would recommend, though?

What? Something that's always very therapeutic for me. Get that money. I should really start thinking about these. You're looking around the office as if it's going to be like, lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp, monitor, monitor, guitar candle, hot tea. That's it. That's it.

Done. Done. Do you want to tell me about the Jumbotron that we have right now? Sure. Also, Jumbotrons are available today. This might have gone up after that happens, but it's 11 a.m. Pacific time today, Wednesday, November 1st. If you want to get a message on the first half of 2018 for this show, go to MaximumFun.org slash Jumbotron. This message is for Chloe. It is from Xander. What up, baby?

Oh, boy. We're probably married as hell now. And I'm so, so excited to continue our life adventure together. I'm the luckiest boy in the world to get to spend my life with you. And thanks for, quote, in the world to get to spend my life with you. And thanks for, quote, stealing me away three years ago. Also, congratulations from us, Rachel and Griffin McElroy. You're a funny lady. Thanks for existing.

And I love you, too. Congratulations. You don't have to make us say it. We will. I promise you, we would have just said it. You didn't have to ventriloquist Rachel over there. Well, what if I had said congratulations from us and not Rachel and Griffin McElroy? That's very specific.

I always talk about myself in the third person. You do. It's really annoying. People really don't like it when I do that. Griffin wants some Cheez-Its. Hand those Cheez-Its over. Griffin's hungry for cheese. Do you want to read the next one? I I do this next message is for Tim Sutton

and it's from Julia Brown who says happy birthday goon I'm so sorry Tim I would never say the G word about you like that that is so rough this message is probably going to be pretty late that's my bad you can let us have that one it's probably also late because of us so I

hope that you had the best day. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully express how much I love you. Never forget that you are loved and appreciated by everyone in your life. We're all so lucky to have you, hon. Thank you for everything. Love, Julia. I am just a puddle right now. I'm a puddle.

Just a puddle of love and a puddle of mud. You remember that band? Only the name of it. Yeah, me too. I don't have any puddle of mud references or know anything that I can pull here. So maybe let's just stop. I'm Hal Loveland. I'm Danielle Radford. I am Michael Eagle. And we are the hosts of Tights and Fights, Maximum Fun's newest podcast dedicated to all things wrestling. We'll be talking about Sasha Banks,

the Women's Revolution, Sasha Banks, the brand split, and Sasha Banks' wigs. And we'll also be talking about wrestler fashion. Some wrestlers wear too many clothes. Some wrestlers don't wear enough clothes at all. And I'll be doing impressions of all your favorite wrestlers. New episodes Thursdays on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah.

Dig it. Do you want to hear my second thing? Yes. My second thing is live looping music. Oh, yeah, dude. I am very, very excited to talk about live looping music oh yeah dude i'm very very excited to talk about live looping music uh put simply it is a method of sort of live composition or performance uh where you play this a section of a song and then you loop it and uh usually using some piece of hardware like a foot pedal if you're just solo playing so that it plays again,

and then you play on top of it and add another layer on and so on and so forth, adding harmony or melody as you go. Or you start from nothing, but then after a few cycles have this full song that typically only one person created. And it's accomplished with any number of devices on the more electronic end, things like synthesizers and sequencers allow you to do this on the more lo-fi end, like tape decks. But there's lots of ways to sort of accomplish this effect. One of the more popular modern uses is just a delay pedal. Um, so looping, like not live looping, but the act of like looping themes and motifs has a history throughout like time spanning like multiple, uh, genres, but live looping is actually a fairly modern concept because it didn't really become possible until after, uh, multi-track recording became possible in like the fifties.

Um, in 1963, there was a musician named terry riley who made a demo called the gift which was a tape loop piece wait what year 1963 wow uh and it featured chet baker playing trumpet uh on it uh and it was the first piece ever based on a tape delay feedback system uh terry used these two uh revox tape recorders uh to create this effect and he called this system the time lag accumulator yo doc brown your shit rules that's fucking great the wikipedia article says unsurprisingly the name did not catch on amongst other performing musicians. Hey, Wikipedia, whoever wrote that, fuck off. Time lag accumulator is the dopest shit ever. It's the best thing I've ever heard.

I wish I could just like revise this and just be like, my favorite thing this week is that this dude who did the first like live looping recording named his thing the time lag accumulator. And so there's, it's obviously, and there have been some manufacturers who specialized and made hardware that is specifically designed for this thing. Then in the 90s, synth software started to develop ways of dealing with it now, and now it's a pretty common practice. So again, it breaks down into the more software side of things. There are bands that use music environments like Ableton and, you know, a launchpad, which I actually have and don't know

how to use to live create music on the go. There's a band called Battles that I really like that does this really well. But what I want to mostly focus on is like more electroacoustic stuff. Just watching a musician stand on stage with an instrument and a pedal, starting with nothing and then putting an entire song together. So I have a couple things that I wanted to talk about. The first is something I showed you like the other night, which was this band called The Academic, who did this really ingenious way of looping for a music video for their song Bear Claws. And the way that they did it is they stood up on a stage and they had a projector unit behind them. And the projector unit was showing a Facebook stream of the live stream that they were doing. But because of the nature of live streaming and lag, that feed was always 30 seconds behind. And they used that 30 second loop to live loop a

performance. So they would stand on stage, play a drum fill for 30 seconds, and then they would quickly clear the stage and run on and start laying down the main melody of the song on two guitars. Meanwhile, the projector behind them was showing the drum fill that they had just played on the 30-second loop, and then they would clear the stage again after 30 seconds. Now behind them, they had the drum fill and the guitars, and they brought keys on for stuff, and then they would do another. It was like such a mindfuck.

Yeah, I felt like the people must have felt like when they first walked into a movie theater, of just like, wait, if I'm here, and they're on the screen, and what was the name of that album. I can't believe I forgot the name of that album. I adore that album. But he is also a solo performer who does a lot of live loops. And I wanted to play just a little bit of a song. This is not live.

Obviously, this is not a live performance. This is the studio track. But you can hear some of how he builds this song. It's called Everlasting Sigh. And just the way that he does a lot of vocal harmonies with himself. And this is a section from that song, Moses Sumney's Everlasting Sigh. so the the person i really want to talk about who is in my mind like sort of the modern master of this is Andrew Bird, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time. I actually struggled with just like, do I want to do a section on Andrew Bird? Because I, pound for pound, I probably listen to his music more than anybody else's music in my life.

anybody else's music in my life. And if you want a good primer for like what he does, he actually did a TED talk called Andrew Bird's One Man Orchestra of the Imagination. It's 20 minutes long and he just like plays a bunch of songs. That's perfect. His act is just him. And he gets up on stage and he has a couple of violins, a couple of guitars and a live looping pedal.

He also has this weird gramophone that somebody built for him that's like a dual. It has two of the horn amplifiers on it that he has a pedal for that he will activate, and then all of the sound will just start coming through that gramophone while it spins around, which kind of throws the music all around the room. It's very, very trippy.

But yeah, Andrew Bird just plucks and plays typically just a violin, and then he will add on some guitar to create these super rich melodies from nothing. The song starts and there's nothing, and then like 30 seconds in, it's this beautiful piece that has been born in front of you. And he will typically add, he's a champion whistler. in front of you uh and he will typically add uh he's a champion whistler he if you saw the muppet movie uh at the end of the talent show when uh uh the the muppet does the whistling number that was andrew bird oh wow yeah he's he's a it's funny he's talked about in interviews like he is this suzuki trained um a violinist who's like you know the violin's an incredibly demanding instrument to learn and

he has spent tens of thousands of hours mastering it but the only thing that people want to talk to him about is how good he is at whistling he's a very fucking good whistler uh and so a lot whistling and vocaling vocaling that's what people call it um and so yeah he has entire albums that are live performances and almost every track is just a live looping performance. He had a series of albums that were the first ones of his that I discovered called Fingerlings, and I want to play a track off Fingerlings 3, a song called Dark Matter, that's actually showed up on various albums, both as Dark Matter, but he also repurposes his melodies for other songs throughout the rest of his career,

which is sort of a strange thing. But this is the live looping performance of Dark Matter. I'm just gonna play the first 30 seconds so you can hear how quickly it goes from like nothing to like, oh shit, this song is amazing. Thank you. so yeah the the way that it just like starts with this very simple melody and then harmony on top of harmony on top of harmony is added to it building this song before it really begins and then throughout the song he will drop that loop out and start a new section of the song and then add that original loop onto the stuff that he just played on guitar or whatever, for example. Just the amount of timing and manual dexterity and foot dexterity required to make this sound as good as it sounds. Because if you miss a beat, then the rest of the song is going to be thrown off forever. Yeah, to do that live.

To do that live and be perfect about it, every single measure is really remarkable. Not to mention the actual composition. Actually writing a song that can be performed like this is a feat as well. So yeah, that is Andrew Bird. He also has a series of albums that he's working on now called Echo Locations, where he just goes to a place that is acoustically interesting and then plays a bunch of live looping music there.

He has one called Canyons, where he just gets in a fucking canyon and plays some music. And he just put one out called River, where he went to a river, played some music, and you get the river sounds in the background. It's like really good music to work to, but I've seen Andrew Bird perform live in concert four or five times. And it's staggering. Like, watching this, watching this like beautiful song go from not existing to being like this, this very, very powerful, powerful tune that you know, just got baked up right in front of you is, is really, really something that you almost never get to experience, which is you are there as the artist is creating the music.

Yeah. Which is something you don't usually get to experience when you see a performer and it kind of taps into that excitement of just like, I am here when this is happening. And nobody else is going to, no one's going to hear this version of this. Yeah. It's,

it's really cool. So yeah, that's live looping music andrew bird i cannot recommend his work highly enough i i think he's a genius how about your second thing uh this one i was actually worried you were gonna bring up uh i guess worried's the wrong word but we keep waiting for that that uncanny moment i thought it was gonna going to happen last week for the Halloween episode. Farmer's markets. Oh, farmer's market. Griffin digs on this super hard, which is exciting to me because I also love them.

But I also feel like it's kind of like, I don't know, zhuzhy a little bit. I don't know exactly what you mean. When you go, you feel like you're in this performance piece almost. A little bit. But I think if you divorce the actual thing from that stigma, I guess, it's really just a bunch of folks making some stuff and trying to sell it. And that's cool. That's great.

Yeah. So researching the history, I think, was valuable because, yeah, right now it feels like, especially now that we have a baby, it feels like a baby parade where everybody's got their dog and their baby and they're all wearing their best sweater. And you just feel like, oh my gosh, I'm in a Starbucks commercial. But the farmer's market dates back to 1730. I mean, this used to just be called the store right yeah uh i read a website that was very uh insistent that it began in lancaster pennsylvania which you know i guess it's possible pennsylvania is one of those early states but how do you track this is just the idea of a bunch of people come and be like i got carrots i made who

wants care that's like how like society has functioned since the Dark Ages or the prehistoric times. Yeah, what made something the first farmer's market? I got a dinosaur bone. I have dinosaur meat. I know. Please don't tweet at me. Yeah, please don't. Please, God, it was a joke.

Please. I know. I know. Delete it. I get it. I know. Today, there are over 8,000 markets operating throughout the United States. Here's a cool fact.

USDA offers a National farmer's market directory. So you can go to the website, enter your zip code, and it will tell you all the nearby farmer's markets. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So in the first decades of the 1800s, most cities with at least 30,000 people sponsored municipal markets. For every, and this is from the Farmers Market Coalition, which is a national organization, for every $100 spent at a farmers market, $99 stays in state and $62 stays in the local economy, which is cool.

Yeah, that's good. I mean, all of those reasons like totally track. If I'm being honest, they are not the reasons why I go to the farmer's market. I go to the farmer's market because there's this place that sells this juice that's fucking so good. I'm not a big juice person, but damn, this juice is good. Yeah, we get juice. We get bread. There's something really nice.

Tamales. There's a tamale stand. About handing cash to a person that you know made the thing that you're about to consume. But more importantly, I get the juice. I get the juice. Support local business. All that's good. And I mean that.

Great. I want that juice, though. And if this is where I get that juice, awesome. It's good on two levels. Support local business and good juice. You'll see. So the thing that might be kind of deterring about a farmer's market, a lot of times you'll see vendors that you can just get in the grocery store.

And so you're thinking like, this isn't exciting. But there are also vendors there that this is the only place they sell. And so you're getting a unique opportunity to get something that's really keeping them alive week to week and you can't find anywhere else. Shout out to SoCo ginger beer. I love ginger beer so much. And it's actually kind of tough to find good ginger beer out there that doesn't cost like $16 for four tiny cans. They actually do sell that in stores though. Oh, do they? Oh, well, nevermind. But it's cool to get it from a tap and a live person. Yeah. It's nice to like, also there's, if you like sample-inis,

if you like little samples. Yes. Oh my God, it's sample heaven. Yeah, everybody samples out there and you'll see some, at least in Austin, you'll see some live music. Sometimes there's petting zoos.

One week we went, there was people doing yoga. Yep. Just right next to it. I like this for a lot of reasons. You are still not doing dairy because Henry has a cow's milk protein allergy. And so it's actually like kind of cool because there's a lot of options there for stuff that folks have. Yeah, there was a chocolate guy who was just like, I make this chocolate and I can tell you that these bars don't have dairy.

And it was just, you never get that interaction anymore. Yeah. But also like the quality of the stuff is good. Like we get our, we'll do a little meal prep while we're there. And the protein that we get there is like really, really freaking good. To get like chicken or pork.

This is going to sound like really weird. And like, I'm again, like trying to sound like kind of zhuzhy, but like you got some ground beef there that you made chili with. That was the best ground beef I ever ate. It was melt-in-your-mouth ground beef, which I did not know could be a thing. Well, and people hand you a business card and say, hey, you want something?

Let me know, and I'll bring it for you next week. Yeah, I dig that. It's also- Yeah, Griffin and I have been city living for a while now, so this may not be as novel to those of you that live in more rural areas, but it's really nice for us to have that kind of connection in an urban area. Yeah, you also get to talk to people about the things that they're passionate about. And while it's easy to put a crass face on that, like, oh, they're just trying to sell you a thing,

I like talking to a person about their chocolate business and why they're so passionate about their chocolate in a way where it doesn't feel like they're trying to sell me anything because i could just eat their chocolate samples and walk away and they know that they probably expect that yeah um but yeah it's it's it's it's really neat it is also i will say there's not a lot of stuff you can do outside of the house with like a baby who can't walk yet and And so Farmer's Market is really a very, our place is in like a really nice park. And so we get to walk around

and go and eat some tamales and drink that good juice. So many times, like when we're trying to think of activities, it's just going to like, you know, a Target or, you know, a grocery store and just walking up and down the aisles. And it's not a particularly enriching experience for anyone. Whereas this feels like, this feels really nice. I love the farmer's market.

Yes. There's a place that sells Thai food, but just like pre-portioned ingredients, kind of like boxed meal style. And you bring it home and you make the Thai food yourself. Farmer's market. Let's go today, babe. We can't. Why not? It's only on Sundays.

What the fuck, Farmer's Market? It's let us have real conversations about meal planning, too, which is something Griffin and I always talked about abstractly. Like, oh, we should really plan what we're going to eat for the week. But when you're at a Farmer's Market, you kind of have to do that. Kind of have to. Which is nice. Because they're not going to be open on Mondays, apparently.

Farmer's Market. How about some submissions from our listeners? Yes. Okay, this first one. Just steal yourself. Okay? Okay. It's from Eric, who said, I wanted to tell you something that I find to be wonderful. The fact that a Quantum Leap feature film is currently entering development.

No. So, where this comes from. They have said that for years. Okay, but there was very recently a panel featuring Donald Bellisario. Okay. Where he said that he has written a feature script for Quantum Leap. That doesn't mean it's going to happen, though. Just saying. What is going to happen?

How do they continue that experience? Because I don't think dude ever left home. You know, I saw on Twitter, Scott Bakula tweeted. Trying to get that heat going. That he was going to a con. This was that, I think. I wonder if that's what this was. I think that's what this is.

That would be incredible. You know, I have thought about bringing an episode of Quantum Leap to this show of quantum leap to this show so many times but how do you pick just one i mean the jfk episodes were pretty buck wild okay anyway here's another one from caroline who says going to the renaissance fair with friends has become one of my favorite fall traditions there is so much talent showcased whether it's the actors and actresses that make up the cast of characters the musicians and comedians that put on amazing shows or the artists who showcase and sell their creations. Not to mention there isn't anything quite like sitting on a hill under the changing leaves and setting sun,

drinking cider and watching a joust. It's nerdy, but it's wonderful. I've never been to a Ren Faire. I cannot believe you've never been to one. I haven't either, but it seems like for sure the McElroys would have gotten up on one. Oh, the McElroys have. I'm almost certain. Just not you?

I have not. And I don't have any hangElroys have. I'm almost certain. Just not you? I have not. And it's not any, I don't have any hang-ups about it. I just haven't gone. Austin has, like, a huge one. Uh-huh. And I was just, well, let's go. I always thought the appeal was the costume and the turkey leg. Yeah, but I think it's also, like, there's a lot of performance going on.

Yeah. And there's a lot of artists and stuff. That would be fun when Henry's a little older, too. Yeah, or when I'm now. And maybe Henry doesn't go on that one because you know jousting is dangerous little sticks they run into the armor and they explode and there's wood splinters everywhere just like in the knight's tale here's one last one from maddie who says i live in a tiny town in northern ontario canada one perk to living up north is waking up early on a school day to a

temperature of negative 45 degrees celsius and knowing that school is going to be canceled for the day. It's a well-needed break in winter when you can simply snuggle back into your warm bed and sleep in. I thought this was too early to be talking about snow days, but northern Ontario, Canada. Talk about power of positive thinking. Most people would say this is terrible. And this person said, you know what know what well i will get to snuggle in if it's negative 45 degrees celsius in your city it's probably terrible for a lot of people but the idea of like oh it's snowy and the snow day well let's save snow day because i could definitely do a whole episode about a snow day yeah i would be curious actually what yours were

like uh so fucking dope dude the best fucking shit you lived right close to a park right next to a park so my i had options because i could go sledding i was trapped i could i could go sledding or i could just chill inside and drink hot cocoa and finish chrono trigger so uh that is it for the episode thank you all so much for listening thank you to bowen and augustus for the use of our theme song money won't pay uh link to that is in the episode description. What else, babe? I wanted to thank Max Funn for hosting us. You can find a lot of other great shows on the network, shows like One Bad Mother and Stop Podcasting Yourself

and Jordan Jesse Go and any number of McElroy shows, which you can also find on McElroyShows.com. Yeah, and if you live in Chicago or Milwaukee and want to come see us in November, go to McElroyShows.com slash tours because we got some tickets available for you. I think that's it. Yep. All right. Well, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

What? Did you have something? No, I just keep forgetting we don't have a sign off. Yeah, I know. But it feels more natural that way. If we do a sign off, it's like we're, you know. Yeah. You know, we're, you know, like. Big're you know yeah you know we're uh you know like

big time radio show folks yeah or you know tosh.o or something or you know at the end of every tosh.o he pulls on his ear and he winks oh yeah and he flies away on his umbrella you know have you seen it yeah no i definitely funny. I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm on it. Maximumfun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. Hey there folks, I'm writer and performer Dave Holmes

and I host International Waters where we pair a team of comedians in LA against a team of comedians in London in a pop culture trivia battle royale. Comedians like Josie Long. I worry that it makes me seem like I'm 80 years old, but I hurt my knee and it is just on the mend. And I can't tell you how delightful that feels.

If I want to walk down some stairs, I'd just go for it now. Michaela Watkins. We have a country where, like, our leaders actually deny global warming. So we are going to have more beachfront property than any other nation. I mean, it's going to shrink our country in half, but it's okay. But that's just more beach. And many more. Join us every other week on International Waters with me, Dave Holmes. Find it on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.