Ep. 163: caves and car thefts

[00:00:04] Speaker A: All right, so before our last episode a couple weeks ago, I told you that I, like much of the Internet, had gotten sucked into YouTuber Hbomberguy's four hour video about plagiarism on YouTube. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Right? Now, you and every other fucker, right? Everybody was talking about this for, like, everybody ping and then disappeared again. [00:00:32] Speaker A: Because it's like, what it. [00:00:34] Speaker B: Yes, but please do go on. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know that video foasted, that's certainly not a word. Focused mostly on one particularly egregious culprit, a dude by the name of James Summerton, who I assume has at this point changed his name and gone to live amongst the animals in a secluded forest somewhere. Because barring a hard turn to the right, which is always possible, bro is never getting a platform back. He was destroyed by that video. [00:01:10] Speaker B: For me, for the benefit of me. [00:01:12] Speaker A: Sure. [00:01:13] Speaker B: That you may as well just be stringing random words here. As far as I'm concerned, this is some stream of consciousness just guff, right? What is an Hbomber guy? Just sum it up for me, please. [00:01:25] Speaker A: Hbomberguy is a youtuber who produces video essays about various topics. I'm sure you've seen him before. Like, if you saw his face, you'd be like, oh, that guy. Famously. You'll have seen him as, like, a gif coming through a wall where he's, like, yelling at, you know, about selling real estate to Aquaman. That gif is used for a lot of things. [00:01:49] Speaker B: I'm looking at his face right now, and were this man to knock at my door right now, I would have no concept of who he was, but I'm a trauma guy. All right, great. [00:01:58] Speaker A: Well, he's british, for one. Doesn't sound like that. Yeah, british youtuber. [00:02:05] Speaker B: I'm h bomber guy. [00:02:08] Speaker A: That's it. Totally nailed it. So he does these video essays and things like that, and he put out this video, like I said, 4 hours long, about an hour and a half of which is just basically going through the plagiarism problem on YouTube and showing how many videos are made that are just straight copied from other stuff, other people's work, like books, whatever. [00:02:31] Speaker B: Things like that was rife on Twitter. As Twitter. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Remember that old thing? [00:02:38] Speaker B: Just the most. The weirdest fucking thing. It was after an episode of Question Time right here on the UK, where just a tossed off tweet without thinking about it on one of the panelists. And then, like, a few minutes later, I saw somebody in my timeline just literally having copied and pasted the exact same fucking tweet. Why? [00:03:00] Speaker A: Yeah, people are weird about that stuff. People don't want to do their own work. And that's why specifically, the fellow James Summerton, who then the rest of the video is mostly dedicated to, is batshit because this guy would literally lift entire books and things like that and just read them, maybe change like a word or two here and there. But it's like enough that you could google the phrases in it and that's the book. And he would highlight these whole sections. Like, here's a whole page that he stole from this and a lot of it. Like, he's a gay youtuber and he was stealing from queer youtubers and people who are marginalized and have trouble getting their voices out and stuff like that. He was just taking their work and packaging it and he was getting like $170,000 a year in Patreon, an insane amount of money, which he then nuked immediately, which is wild. Imagine, like, you were so caught out that you deleted your $170,000 income just like that. You'd no other choice. [00:04:07] Speaker B: I would hope that leaves the thief kind of actionable. Yeah. Surely a crime has been committed there. [00:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, probably. I don't know how YouTube and law works and stuff like that. I don't know how many people are going to pursue it when now his career is over. [00:04:25] Speaker B: I would ask Laura, but she's not that kind of solicitor. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Yes, as she often reminds you, not the kind that's useful for most things on Joag, that's for sure. [00:04:37] Speaker B: Not the kind that's useful. Know a very narrow set of circumstances applies. [00:04:43] Speaker A: Exactly. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today. I'm not actually going to talk about plagiarism or James Summerton or any of that kind of stuff. I only brought that up because in. [00:04:54] Speaker B: That video, I was settling in for a discussion about plagiarism. [00:04:58] Speaker A: Oh, you know what? I find it very endearing that you trusted and leaned into me doing something on plagiarism as if somehow I was going to make that interesting for you. [00:05:10] Speaker B: I thought, she's cooking. Let's just give her space. [00:05:14] Speaker A: I appreciate that. I really do feel respected. [00:05:18] Speaker B: Three years of weekly podcasting has given you carp launch. I can listen to you read the phone book, mate. You know this. [00:05:25] Speaker A: Well. Rest assured, it's not about plagiarism. There is a four hour video that anyone can watch on YouTube if they are interested in that particular subject. And I don't think I could add anything further to that conversation. But in there, there was one video that was mentioned in Hbomber's rant that intrigued me and not the video itself because it was plagiarized. And actually, the part of the video that wasn't plagiarized, James Summerton, just got completely wrong. But the subject was what intrigued me, and the subject was a man named Floyd Collins. More specifically, it was about the gruesome death of Floyd Collins. [00:06:07] Speaker B: Now we're talking. [00:06:08] Speaker A: Now we're cooking. Now, one of your most memorable and triggering cold opens on this show was about the nutty putty cave. [00:06:19] Speaker B: Oh, man. [00:06:22] Speaker A: Do you want to summarize. [00:06:24] Speaker B: Everyone loves the story of. [00:06:27] Speaker A: Do you want to just summarize it? Like, not. No big deal. But for those and for anyone who wants to hear the full thing that Mark told in disturbing detail, it's episode 92. But just a quick recap, Mark. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Yes, I believe this is in Utah. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Yes, I believe so. Yeah. [00:06:43] Speaker B: Look, humans being what they are, there is a group of humans. Every country has them whose their hobby, their passion, the way that they get their fulfillment is to crawl down underground through fucking ridiculously narrow, claustrophobia inducing just caves underground. Right? And the guy that we're talking about, John Jones, I want to say John Smith, something like that. Just the most just. [00:07:13] Speaker A: I remember it being a pretty generic name. [00:07:14] Speaker B: Yeah. This guy was a caver. Just a fucking absolute nutter for a cave. This guy loved a cave. And the worst decision this guy ever made was to take on nutty putty cave. So cold because the walls are in that cave apparently were slowly, slowly moving. Everything was fluid down there, which is fucking nightmarish in itself. Anyway, our boy fucked up, got the directions wrong. And instead of going out through the cave like he thought he was doing, he actually managed to jam himself headfirst upside down in the tightest, most claustrophobic, nightmare inducing fucking space. And he was stuck there. And they tried to rescue him. And they fucking tried and tried and they pulled and pushed, but he couldn't be moved. And now he's dead and he's still there because they closed the cave. He's still there. As I speak to you, as you listen to this, friends, out there in Utah, there's an upside down skeleton. [00:08:12] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. [00:08:14] Speaker B: It. [00:08:15] Speaker A: So, yeah, caves. Scary as fuck. I personally try to avoid them as much as possible. [00:08:21] Speaker B: I can't remember the last time I was in a cave. [00:08:23] Speaker A: I think the last time I was in a cave was in New Zealand, like five years ago. Or, you know, I was promised glow worms. So I was like, fine. But it is pretty hard to get me into a cave. But this is deeply not the case for a lot of people. Caves are huge business. There are cave attractions all over the world, ranging from the casual ones like I did, just a little rowboat ride to see some glow worms to stuff that requires years of training and expensive equipment to experience, all because people are super fascinated by what's going on in these strange, dark ecosystems beneath us. And it's not. Go ahead. [00:09:05] Speaker B: Were I to live to 100, I will never understand that. [00:09:09] Speaker A: No, absolutely not. [00:09:10] Speaker B: There's nothing down there that of any good to you? [00:09:14] Speaker A: No. Make a small camera and drop it down there if that's what. [00:09:18] Speaker B: There you go. We want to small cameras, don't they? [00:09:20] Speaker A: Small cameras. [00:09:21] Speaker B: One down my throat. [00:09:22] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:09:23] Speaker B: If a camera can get down my throat, it can get down a cave, right? [00:09:26] Speaker A: They can go down your throat, they can go up your ass. They can go into a cave and find out what's down there. [00:09:32] Speaker B: They even have cameras with, like, little kind of directional control on them. No reason for you to be in that cave, mate. [00:09:38] Speaker A: Don't need to be. [00:09:39] Speaker B: Get home your mother. [00:09:41] Speaker A: Yeah. This isn't a new phenomenon, though. Believe it or not, in the early 20th century, people fucking loved a cave. In fact, it was such big business, there was a period in Kentucky history known as the Cave wars. It was like literally all these unscrupulous dudes trying to sell their cave as tourist destinations and undercut each other and all of this bananas stuff, which is just bizarro to think about. This was such a problem. They have a name for that period of time. [00:10:12] Speaker B: Capitalism, right? [00:10:13] Speaker A: Capitalism. If people do want to enjoy the natural beauty of a cave, they have to be exploited to do so. If I'm going to go somewhere, I'm going to die. I don't want to have to deal with smarmy dudes on the way down. So Floyd Collins was basically born into that cave war life his family lived. [00:10:36] Speaker B: He didn't choose the cave. [00:10:37] Speaker A: He didn't choose it. His family lived 4 miles from a hugely popular tourist destination called Mammoth Cave, and people from all over the world came to visit from the tender age of six. Little Floyd was venturing into caves in the area, solo, retrieving all kinds of native american relics that he would bring back up to the surface and give to his father to sell to tourists. This was everything from, like, arrowheads and clothing and moccasins, like, all kinds of stuff would be found down in those caves. So he made this his full time job by the age of ten, dropping out of school to continue searching for treasures in the cave system. And at age 14, a geologist hired him to help him navigate the cave system that he knew better than pretty much anyone in the whole region. And as part of this arrangement, the geologist spent the next two years teaching Floyd about geology as the teenager guided him through the caves. [00:11:32] Speaker B: Nice. [00:11:33] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. [00:11:36] Speaker B: End the story here, and I think everybody will know. [00:11:38] Speaker A: Everything's great. This is awesome. It's just a story about learning. But thus, Floyd Collins ended up an amateur cave expert. An amateur only in training. He was known throughout Kentucky as pretty much the foremost expert on caving. He was locally famous, if you will, and he was absolutely fearless when it came to squeezing himself into tight spaces and wandering around dark and dangerous places. And I do mean dangerous. On occasion, he would legit come across just straight up human remains of people who'd gone before him. There's a picture of him just, like, super casually looking over and handling a whole ass skeleton underground. Just chill. Normal day in the life of a caver. When he was 21, he discovered an absolutely gorgeous cave on his father's farmland, which he named Crystal Cave. And the descriptions of it were, like, beautiful, like this white floweryness inside of it. [00:12:36] Speaker B: If you're the first in a cave, you get to name the cave is that. [00:12:39] Speaker A: Well, it was on his land. [00:12:41] Speaker B: Okay, fine. [00:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's how that works. I don't think you'd, like, go to your neighbor's farm and find a cave and be like, this is Crystal Cave. But it was his cave for all intents and purposes. So, yeah, this gorgeous cave that he found, and he hoped that this would bring tourists directly to him and begin marketing the cave as a hot new destination. This basically was what people were constantly trying to do. If you find a new cave, hopefully you can get some of that hot mammoth mountain or mammoth caves tourism to come to you. [00:13:13] Speaker B: Who doesn't want to be the first to splunk in a new cave, right? [00:13:16] Speaker A: Exactly. And just like, there was one cave that was discussed in one of the articles that I read that it was, like, apparently just this cave being kind of on the way cut into, like, a percentage of the tourism to the mammoth cave. So it's like, literally, if you had a good spot with a good cave in it, you could absolutely just make the big bucks as a result. I don't know what this motion. Lobster hands. Anyways, it didn't work for him. Crystal cave, though beautiful, was only accessible by a super not fun wagon trail that no one wanted to drive, and he tried to take it upon himself and bought a taxi to cart. Folks to the but. And you'll relate to this, Marco. Poor Floyd was a ridiculously bad driver. [00:14:12] Speaker B: Whoa. I'll have you know that it is currently the longest stretch between incidents on the road that I've ever enjoyed. Right, yeah, I'm getting better, mate. I haven't had an incident for over a year. [00:14:27] Speaker A: I'm proud of you. Yeah, it has been a minute since I've gotten that text message. [00:14:33] Speaker B: You enjoyed driving with me. Do you remember that time that I cut off, like, an articulated lorry? Then the guy tried to fucking swing into my lane. Give me the finger, give me the horn. [00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we've had a lot of driving adventures in old Brum, that's for sure. Or that might have been Bristol. Actually. That was when we were, like, driving in circles, trying to figure out that. [00:14:53] Speaker B: Was a motorway incident. Yeah. [00:14:55] Speaker A: But, yeah. So Floyd suffered the same affliction and so bad, according to mental floss, that he actually did manage to crash his car into the broad side of a barn. Now, dear Floyd had a theory that all the caves in the area were actually connected to each, so. And he turned out to be right about this, by the way. They didn't know this at the time, but it has been borne out now that, yes, in fact, all of the caves are connected to each other, so. [00:15:27] Speaker B: That'S kind of cool. [00:15:29] Speaker A: Obviously he's never going to live to know this, but if there was a cave on their land, there was probably going to be more caves. Four years after his discovery of Crystal Cave, he found sand cave in 1925. And this was not a situation where it was like, oh, sweet, here's a nice readymade cave all set up for tourists. Let me just put a sign on it and we're good to go. The entrance to this cave was about the size of a manhole. It was like a downward entrance, not like a nice little tunnel. [00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Portalis type of march, pristine march. [00:16:06] Speaker A: Oh, okay. I didn't know that word. Once inside, he had to crawl through spaces so tight in pitch darkness that he would have to shove one arm out in front of him and just sort of slither through on his belly. Eventually this tight space emptied out into a larger one that dropped about 60ft, and then he would kind of just repel down into that space. So basically he was going there every day, trying to dig this cave out to make it accessible to people who weren't comfortable flattening themselves out to wriggle through the unknowable abyss while on vacation. It was the end of January, and he'd been at it for several weeks. On this particular day, he'd reached the open space of the cave, but his lantern was starting to die. [00:16:54] Speaker B: Sand cave? Yeah. [00:16:55] Speaker A: This is sand cave, yes. His lantern was starting to die. So he was like, well, fuck, I better go back up. Then as he made his way back through the tiny crawl space, he knocked his lantern over, and the whole place was plunged into darkness, which would basically kill me instantly from fright straight away. [00:17:15] Speaker B: I hate this story. [00:17:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, it just gets worse and worse. This cave and many cave systems, not just this one in particular, but it's so dark that eyes are useless, and thus fish that live in these caves simply do not evolve them. [00:17:35] Speaker B: It's true dark, isn't it, where there is exactly total fucking absence of any sensory input visually. [00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is a horrifying thought, but Floyd wasn't actually super bothered by it. This had happened to him before in other caves, and he'd even been trapped in caves and needed rescue before. It was not at all his first rodeo in this happening. He just. [00:17:59] Speaker B: Would you go blind? If you were stuck down there, would you go blind eventually? [00:18:03] Speaker A: I don't think you'd go blind. I think that probably, though, once you came out, you'd be insanely sensitive to light, because there are some things that. It's like they're so accustomed to dark that they have really good vision. I don't know if our eyes adapt like that, though. But, yeah. So he continued trying to work his way back out. But of course, he couldn't see what he was doing, so he tried to push off from what he assumed was the cave wall. But it turned out to be a loose 27 pound rock, and the rock fell and wedged his ankle into the tunnel. [00:18:48] Speaker B: That's all for Floyd. [00:18:50] Speaker A: Yes. Stuck in what his brother likened to a chimney that only fit the size of his body and what the National Park Service referred to as a stone straitjacket, Floyd began a horrible ordeal that would last more than two weeks, 18 days, in fact. Now, Mark, I'm going to read you this description from mental floss of what happened initially, because it makes my skin crawl, my heart speed up, and my lungs ache. It is just such a horrific description. So the explorer tried to breathe. He was effectively blind. His head sat directly below the ten foot pit, and the cave hugged the rest of his body like a straitjacket. His left arm was pinned under his torso, his right by the rock ceiling above. He could not reach behind or ahead, nor could he roll over. Whenever he struggled, rocks tumbled into the abyss behind him or piled onto his feet. Under him. Razor like shards dug into his skin. With his body wrapped in this stony cocoon, Collins clawed at the cave walls. Blood seeped from his fingernails. He began to sweat and then shiver until exhaustion swept him to sleep. He began a tormenting routine. Sleep, wake, scream. Sleep, wake, scream. Minutes melted into hours. His voice disappeared, his arms tingled, numb, and pain radiated up his ankle. [00:20:24] Speaker B: I'm, I'm obviously, you know, fucking, it's not a visual medium, but as you were, as you were describing that literary. My head back, eyes closed, trying to fucking visualize this, and it's horrid. [00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it is, truly. And there are so many details, I'll mention this again, but in our blog, of course, I link to my sources for this, and if you read the details in many of these articles, they are just so grim and gory and scary. It is truly one of the most horrifying ways to go, especially over a long period of time. [00:20:59] Speaker B: I guess these guys who do fucking crazy shit like free know that knob ed who walked between the World Trade center on a tightrope, that guy. If you're doing stuff like this, like Floyd, like our boy in Utah, you've got to be comfortable with the idea of death. You've got to be comfortable with the idea that at any fucking point, the very worst thing you could possibly ever conceive of happening could happen. [00:21:27] Speaker A: Right? Which, like, even with stuff like, yeah, for one, that guy, hard pass, not going to be me. I am not going to die doing what I love. Thanks. I love podcasting, but yeah, when it comes to those things like free soloing or the walking across the wires, both of these things which I have watched on the big screen and terrified me. When I went and saw the Joseph Gordon Levitt one, I went and saw it in the IMAx at the Hollywood theater with the hands, and there's like a scene where two of them are like sitting on a beam in the unfinished world Trade center. And so it's just like straight down underneath them, and then someone comes and nearly catches them, and they have to throw like a blanket over them and they look down, and I seriously nearly fell out of my chair and threw up. It was the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life, and I'm not even afraid of heights. [00:22:29] Speaker B: So when rumbled, then that's what this guy would do. He would fucking hide under a blanket, sat on a beam. [00:22:34] Speaker A: They had no choice. They could have not done that, they. [00:22:40] Speaker B: Very much had a choice. Yes, we all have a choice to do that or not. [00:22:43] Speaker A: Right? Exactly. In that particular situation, he didn't have a choice. It was that or get arrested before do the thing. But that's to say, in those situations, if you fall off of that thing, you maybe have 30 seconds of screaming, crying, throwing up, and then splat. As opposed to caves, you may be stuck for a really long time when things go wrong. That's one of the things that makes caves especially scary to me, is that it's like you're not going to instantly die in a cave most of the time. Like if you dropped into that 60 foot cavern. Sure, maybe. But if you get stuck. [00:23:26] Speaker B: Yeah, you make a great point. I mean, think about the oceans gate fool. [00:23:31] Speaker A: Right, exactly. [00:23:32] Speaker B: Horrible way to go, but a quick way to go. [00:23:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that could have gone one of two ways. Could have been a really quick, like up. Didn't even know it happened. Or that could have been a horrifying however many days that they were down there stuck in that thing. I think, yeah. If I'm going to go doing something, I would rather it be quick than be just slowly dying for weeks at a time. [00:23:57] Speaker B: I don't think I'm ever going to get involved in a hobby with such high stakes. [00:24:02] Speaker A: No, I don't know. I don't even like flying, so that's about as high stakes as I let my hobbies get. Is flying to see you for a con or something. [00:24:17] Speaker B: I don't know if it's folly of youth or what, but I used to just chuck myself off stuff as a kid. Just jump off it. Hey, look at this way. Jump off something. [00:24:26] Speaker A: I would definitely do that when I was young and I paid the price for it. Gave myself two black eyes once jumping off of a thing. But I don't think ever something that was high enough, I would die. Certainly not. I don't necessarily think I was terrified of injuring myself so much, but if I thought I would die, I wouldn't do it. [00:24:47] Speaker B: No. Which is healthy, I think. [00:24:51] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Like a little bit of danger, but not so much you die. [00:24:55] Speaker B: Yes. The illusion of danger. [00:24:57] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. So anyway, this guy is tearing himself to bits and screaming himself hoarse trying to get someone to find him. And obviously being in a cave on his own farmland, shit could have gone real bad right out the gate, because there was really no way for anyone to know he was down there. He hadn't said anything about it. [00:25:20] Speaker B: Of course not. [00:25:21] Speaker A: However, he had hung up his jacket on a stone outside of the cave opening. And when he didn't come home all night or in the morning, neighbors went out looking and found the jacket. So they figured he must be down the hole. He'd been down there for almost 30 hours when a 17 year old volunteer managed to get close enough in the cave to call Floyd's name. But as you can imagine, while small enough to fit, he was scared absolutely shitless by the tight little chimney tunnel and couldn't muster up the courage to go any further. And this happened over and over and over. Guys kept trying to go down after him, but they were too terrified to squeeze in, which is obviously smart. They should have been terrified. That's how Floyd got stuck. But people started to gather and argue over what they could do to try to get him out. And this is a theme throughout this whole story. People would show up to help and then just fight with each other instead of actually doing anything. Like, I get that it's a stressful situation and they were trying not to kill or maim the guy, but, like men, they needed some women there to just be like, we're just going to fucking do this. But anyway, Floyd's brother Homer came home to find all these guys at the cave and immediately got right in there. I don't know if he'd grown up just as accustomed to caving as Floyd or was just compelled by brotherly love, but he did not hesitate. When the opening got too small. He just took off his clothes and kept going until he made it to Floyd. [00:27:02] Speaker B: That's the kind of guy you want on your crew, isn't it? [00:27:05] Speaker A: Yeah, just like he's in. He's going to try to save the day. [00:27:09] Speaker B: Like Runskeeper Willie just ripping his grease himself up. [00:27:14] Speaker A: Grease me up, woman. Anyway, the problem was that there really was no good way to approach pulling him out, neither. [00:27:23] Speaker B: Head first, man. [00:27:24] Speaker A: I know, right? We all know what you're talking about. [00:27:29] Speaker B: Cultural fucking impact. Huge cultural footprint. [00:27:34] Speaker A: It's true. Twice a week. Think I just got to rewatch the first 13 seasons or whatever of that show. Just dedicate myself to it. But anyways, also, I can't remember if I mentioned this on here, but no, I had posted it on blue sky. But it used to be that every day at six and 630 the Simpsons was on on broadcast tv. And I very much missed that. That it was just like while cooking dinner every day. You'd just have the Simpsons on. So nice. [00:28:11] Speaker B: Every Sunday evening on Skype, new episodes of the Simpsons. [00:28:14] Speaker A: Oh, yes, of course. I mean, we still have that, like every Sunday there's new episodes on Fox, but it was the reruns every single day, six and 630 reruns of the Simpsons. And it was amazing. So anyways, Floyd, I mean, Homer, his brother takes his clothes off, gets to Floyd, but there was no good way to approach pulling him out, neither head first nor feet first. And there was no way to get to Floyd's hands or legs because of the way that I described that he was stuck in there. He was basically on top of his hands. So the Homer called up for some food to be brought down, and he fed his brother before trying to remove the rocks himself, to no avail. When he emerged, his fingers were stripped to ribbons from trying to pull out all of that rock, which is know, I think if you're a person with a, like, it's. So if I imagine my little sister stuck in a situation like, like, I would absolutely be in the same position, just tearing myself to shreds to try to get her out of. So, like, I just really feel for poor Homer trying to get his brother out of this situation. And meanwhile, more and more dudes were assembling to try to figure things out. Both the National Park Service and mental floss have super detailed down to the day and hour recounts of what went on. So I'm not going to delve into every last part of it because this podcast would be like 4 hours long if I did that. But here's the gist. There were all sorts of suggestions on how to get Floyd out, all of which were complicated by a, the potential for the cave to collapse on him, and b, the potential for him to be horribly injured or killed in the attempt. And of course, the sort of third complication of that is all of these men fighting over whose idea was the best and all of this kind of. [00:30:08] Speaker B: Stuff, and who gets the rights to the fucking cave afterwards. [00:30:11] Speaker A: I'm sure that crossed people's minds. So a newsman came who went by the name of Skeet Smiller, so called because he was thin and wiry like a mosquito, and he weighed just 112 pounds. [00:30:27] Speaker B: Hang on. That's how we got the name skeets. [00:30:29] Speaker A: Because he was thin and wiry like a mosquito, so they called him skeets. [00:30:33] Speaker B: Tell you what, when I think mosquitoes, I immediately think thin. These are the thin ones? Yeah, the thin insect. [00:30:39] Speaker A: I mean, they got little leggies. Thin little leggies. [00:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:44] Speaker A: Maybe that's how we talked. I don't know. [00:30:46] Speaker B: Fucking hate mosquitoes, man. Just made me think about my last holiday. [00:30:53] Speaker A: I was thinking about that because for whatever reason, while we were in Puerto Rico last week, Keo kept getting bit by mosquitoes. And normally I'm the one who gets eaten by them, but I got, like, two bites the entire time we were there. And I was just thinking about you and your massive apparent mosquito allergy. [00:31:12] Speaker B: It's something that I'll never, ever forget, right? And my abiding memory of it, the thing that sticks with me is I remember, like, in the middle of the night, actually stopping and trying to kind of explore and kind of categorize the pain because it was a brand new sensation. Never felt anything fucking like it in my life. It was fucking horrible. It was an itch to the point where it was fucking burning. Like a burning itch. It was vile. I wanted to cut my fucking legs off. It was minging. [00:31:44] Speaker A: Fun times. Skeets would not be as cute a nickname to you. [00:31:49] Speaker B: No. I hate the guy. [00:31:52] Speaker A: Well, you're going to like him, because Skeets is good people. When he arrived, he approached Homer, telling him he had heard he was the brother of the guy stuck in the cave. And exasperated, Homer told him that he could go talk to him if he wanted. Like, basically, get out of my face, if you're so interested. Go fucking into the cave, talk to him. And Skeets fucking did it. The tiny little man slid down the cave and made it all the way to Homer. Seeing how dire the situation was, he became less interested in the story and more interested in getting Floyd the fuck out of there. Like, just super good. Oh, I'm here to do a little interview with you. Holy shit. We got to get you out of this cave. They struck up something of a tragic friendship with Floyd, coming to call Skeets fella as the rescue effort went on, his little term of endearment. And Skeets did interview Floyd as he spent days and days working to try to rescue him. And the story caught fire immediately. [00:32:57] Speaker B: I don't think. I'm not clear on where we are currently in historically, Kentucky. [00:33:01] Speaker A: Oh, historically, sorry. This is 1925. [00:33:05] Speaker B: Okay. Thank you very much. Good. [00:33:06] Speaker A: 1925, Kentucky. So Skeets, who had before this been writing police blotters for a small town paper, was now writing for the whole country. [00:33:18] Speaker B: Wow. [00:33:19] Speaker A: And I cannot begin to fully express to you how huge this story was. Floyd became one of the most famous people in the whole of the United States. Plays and congressional proceedings would be paused to give updates on his. Wow. Yeah. Like, people would gather to watch news tickers out on the streets to make sure that they could find out what was going on. You'd find people in the windows of the local news places, just waiting for updates. The president was invested in what was going on. The state of Kentucky. [00:33:54] Speaker B: Who would have been the president of the 1920s? [00:33:55] Speaker A: Who was 1925? I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, you look that up. [00:34:02] Speaker B: Jimmy Carter. [00:34:05] Speaker A: The man's old, but he's not that old. [00:34:09] Speaker B: The president in 1925 was Calvin Coolidge. [00:34:11] Speaker A: Calvin Coolidge. There you go. That's one of those presidents that I tend to forget about. [00:34:18] Speaker B: Did you get that right? Listeners, I'm certain, would have had a punt at that if you did. If you got that right, give yourself 20 jog points. [00:34:26] Speaker A: Ooh, I like that. [00:34:28] Speaker B: It could be redeemed for prizes. [00:34:29] Speaker A: Let us know. This is, like, on my list of things that I want to do, is I want to read a book about each of the presidents in order so that then when these things come up, it'll be like, yeah, I know who that president was. At that time. I never learned, like, people learned, like, fun little songs in school to teach who was the president. I never learned any of those. So this is one of my resolutions of sorts. [00:34:55] Speaker B: I don't think you're ever going to do that. Thereby ensuring it. [00:35:01] Speaker A: Right. So it's like, okay, well, check in with me at the end of 2024 when I have read a book about all 45 presidents, or 46 presidents. [00:35:14] Speaker B: Get that in the blog. [00:35:18] Speaker A: Anyways, that negging aside, the state of Kentucky offered unlimited funds to the effort to get him out of the cave. Blank check, whatever you need to do. And surprise, surprise, the site became a tourist attraction. [00:35:37] Speaker B: Of course it did. [00:35:38] Speaker A: People were selling trinkets and snacks and drinks to folks standing around watching. And February 8, 1925, became known as Carnival Sunday as 10,000 people showed up at the cave to watch the rescue effort. [00:35:54] Speaker B: Wow. [00:35:55] Speaker A: 10,000 would have been really nice if all those people just came to Crystal Cave and he didn't have to go through all of this. Yeah, had to be a guy nearly dead inside to get them there. [00:36:05] Speaker B: Listen, people stuck in a cave still to this day, attract fucking huge global news interest. [00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah. The thai kids, the chilean minor. [00:36:16] Speaker B: I think there was something in India recently. [00:36:18] Speaker A: Well, there you go. Yeah, we fixate on people in caves because it's just, like, the scariest thing you can imagine, and it's, like, so touch and people. [00:36:28] Speaker B: Someone almost always can. There's no one who likes the idea of dying in a cave. [00:36:36] Speaker A: No. [00:36:37] Speaker B: You know what I mean? It's the great kind of universal. It's the one thing we've all got in common. [00:36:41] Speaker A: That in common. Yeah. So this rescue effort simply wasn't working. They'd started trying to pull him out with a rope, warning him that his foot might come right the fuck off in the process, which initially, when they said, we might yank your whole ass foot off, and he was like, yeah, great, fine, whatever. And then when it came time, they were tying the rope around him and everything, he was like, I don't know if I want that. But they just gave him, like, really strong drugs and were like, they're there. And tied the rope around. [00:37:14] Speaker B: They would have been good in 1925. [00:37:16] Speaker A: Yeah, right. I can only imagine what they guy was seeing. Muppets and whatnot. He was having a great time. Not enough, though. When they started pulling him, it caused his back to arch in an unnatural l shape, and he was in so much pain that he actually managed the strength to wrench the rope right out of the hands of his rescuers with his body. It's not like he could pull. He was in so much pain, he managed to yank back hard enough that the rope just dropped from their hands. [00:37:49] Speaker B: Wow. [00:37:50] Speaker A: That didn't work. The guy tried to convince them to keep going with that. Like, we'll just do it a little differently, or whatever. But the other thing about all these guys who are standing around fighting about this stuff is, like, they were drinking good. Chunk of them were just shit faced while all of this was happening, too. So they're just, like, belligerently fighting each other about how they go. Yes, straight up. They were drinking moonshine. That was, like, amongst it, said that they had water crackers and moonshine were the only foods available to them at the site of this. These guys are just getting wasted and cracking crackers. Exactly. So much of this is, like, you kind of wonder if just a few circumstances were different, if they would have been able to get this guy out of here, and it would have been, like, a totally different story. But when the guy wanted to tie the rope around him and try again, all the drunks were like, no, not this time. They did not let him do. Oh, by the way, I just wanted to point out this little side note. While this was happening, Homer was having people bring Floyd food, right? [00:39:07] Speaker B: Sure. [00:39:08] Speaker A: But every single one of them was chickening out and lying about it. They were just shoving the food and blankets and stuff into the walls and coming back, literally being like, he's in great spirits. Love the food. Nom, nom, nom. Not telling anyone. Like, I didn't make it. He has not eaten. [00:39:31] Speaker B: I believe that would be to his benefit, because if you're eating food, you're getting bigger. He needs to be not eating food. [00:39:40] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. But I think it's a fine line between that and starvation. He's for weeks not getting any. Know, that's. He should be at least having something while he's down there. And Homer had no idea that nobody was actually giving him anything. It was like, later on, I think, after everything was found, that it might have even been skeets who went down there and was like, what is with all the food and blankets tucked into the cave? And realized that no one had been feeding him this whole time. [00:40:14] Speaker B: Jerks. [00:40:17] Speaker A: So, anyway, skeets then tried using various jacks to try to get him out, two of which ended up being too big and one of which was too small. And so he tried sort of using wooden blocks to make up for the size of the jack to kind of press against the wall. The whole process was causing him excruciating pain to his whole body, especially his abdomen and back and his hands. And he was struggling with this, but he vowed to keep trying until his body completely gave out, which was essentially what happened. He had managed, at times, to get the rock to lift, like, just a little bit while Floyd cheered him on, saying, you can do it, fella. I believe in you, fella. But eventually, skeets collapsed, and he couldn't do it anymore. He was never able to get the rocks more than just know, a little bit off of his ankle. As the work continued and people came and went from the cave, the structural integrity was compromised, and eventually the opening collapsed. So they would have to go in from another angle. And this was obviously risky because it could easily collapse further. So they only used manual tools in order to prevent further destabilization from heavy machinery. You don't want to just take a jackhammer to this already delicate cave, or whatever the equivalent of a jackhammer was. In 1925, I don't know. Maybe they had them. They had a lot of machinery, and for days, they drilled bit by bit down into the cave. I think from what I recall, I could be wrong, but I think they estimated it would take, like, 54 hours to get down there, just using picks and shovels to get in there. And finally, they were able to reach Floyd and found him dead. [00:42:14] Speaker B: Fuck's sake. [00:42:15] Speaker A: Yep, he had been dead probably for about three days at that point, succumbing to the elements, because it was February and it was freezing at the time, so just open it up and whomp. The guy just had to come like, the guy literally came to the top and just shook his head and said, dead when he got there. Okay, 10,000 people, like, everybody go home. And people had been capitalizing off the ordeal the whole time. Journalists who couldn't get a scoop would just straight make up stories about what was going on. There were rumors circulating that Floyd wasn't down there and it was a hoax to drum up publicity. [00:42:58] Speaker B: Others said, get that today? [00:43:00] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:43:02] Speaker B: Million percent. Get that today. [00:43:03] Speaker A: 100%. Yeah. I mean, that is like I told you the story of balloon boy a couple of months ago. That is what happened with that. There was no kid in the balloon. It was a lie. And with all these unscrupulous cave guys, absolutely, they would have made up something like that. So it's not like that much of a stretch to think that there were rumors circulating that he was murdered by a rival cave owner and left down. [00:43:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:29] Speaker A: Just shoved dead body down there once the whole thing was over and they sealed up the entrance to the cave. Many of the rescuers then toured the country with circuses, telling the daring tales of bravery and heroism in trying to save Floyd Wilson. Homer, too, joined the sideshows, but he did it not for the fame and fortune, but just to raise money to try to exhume Floyd's body and lay it to rest, because they had made absolutely nothing off of all of this, as everybody else was profiting from the situation. And eventually, Floyd's father sold the farmland a little too early because soon the US government would buy up all of that land to create a national park, and he would have gotten considerably more money for it. But he sold the farmland and had to make a deal with the person who bought it, that Floyd's body would be exhumed and then put on display in a glass case for tourists to come and see it. [00:44:31] Speaker B: I hate this story. [00:44:33] Speaker A: It's awful. Yeah, eventually. I mean, that happened. And eventually his body was stolen by grave Robbers who, for whatever reason, then tried to throw it in a river. I guess it wasn't the body they wanted. I don't know what he was buried. [00:44:48] Speaker B: With, but poor Floyd. [00:44:49] Speaker A: Poor Floyd. However, it got stuck in a tree and he was recovered, and they were finally able to lay poor Floyd, the famous corpse, to rest. [00:45:01] Speaker B: Where is he now? [00:45:03] Speaker A: He's buried somewhere in Kentucky. I don't know. Hopefully. I hope that he has, like, a nice mausoleum or something. [00:45:12] Speaker B: I hope that where they've buried him is now the Floyd something something memorial cemetery or something. [00:45:19] Speaker A: I hope he's got the Floyd Collins Memorial Cemetery yeah, I think that he earned that after all of that. [00:45:29] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:45:31] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:45:33] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, miselsen. [00:45:36] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said Miselsen in such a horny way before. [00:45:40] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal. [00:45:43] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:45:47] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm going to leg it. [00:45:53] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark. [00:45:55] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. Didn't enjoy that one bit. Didn't like any of it. [00:46:04] Speaker A: Not a single good detail in that whole thing. Except that dear Skeets was a mention. [00:46:11] Speaker B: Yes. And I hope his lineage remembers him. [00:46:17] Speaker A: You know what's crazy, too, about Skeets? I didn't mention in there. Welcome to Jack of all Graves, everybody. What's crazy about skeets, too is that he was offered, like, oh, he won a Pulitzer for the story. [00:46:30] Speaker B: Cool. [00:46:30] Speaker A: Which is incredible. Biggest story of the year and all that stuff. So again, this guy who was just, like, writing down, like, oh, so and so stole something from the a P in the newspaper, suddenly has a Pulitzer for this case that he went down to work on. But then he was offered a job with the AP or something like that, with some major press organization that would have paid him a ton of money. And he just went, nah. And just went back to the paper he came from. [00:47:02] Speaker B: So there is a hero in this town. [00:47:04] Speaker A: Yes, there is a hero. And it is our little mosquito man. Do you remember the mosquito ringtone? [00:47:14] Speaker B: Yes, I do. [00:47:15] Speaker A: This is one of the weirder getting older things. My husband is like twelve years older than me. Right? Is he older than I am? Yes, he's 51. 51. [00:47:30] Speaker B: Fuck, man. He does not look it. [00:47:32] Speaker A: I know, right? He keeps it tight. It works out. [00:47:36] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:47:37] Speaker A: Listen, I did not realize how much older he was than me when I developed a crush on him when I was in college. And then it was a big surprise. But regardless, not the point. He used to teach a sound design class and in it, he used the mosquito ringtone for something, and it was in a PowerPoint. Right. But at this point, I was like 24 and he was like 36 or whatever, and he would be going through his slides before going to class, and all of a sudden I'd be like. And he had no idea that he had that slide on and was playing the mosquito ringtone. And so it was driving me crazy. And he couldn't hear it. I recently went and I listened to it for myself and I was like, oh God, I can't hear the mosquito ringtone. [00:48:26] Speaker B: Oh, I'm going to try. [00:48:27] Speaker A: I'm an old. [00:48:28] Speaker B: The first thing I'm going to do is try. [00:48:30] Speaker A: You won't be able to hear it and it's going to be upsetting. Weird moment to be like, oh, I remember when it was like, oh, I was the young newlywed who couldn't hear the mosquito ringtone. And now, yeah, I'm an old. [00:48:46] Speaker B: Well, you're not, are you? [00:48:48] Speaker A: Depends on who you ask. Yeah, if you ask a 24 year old, I'm probably pretty old. [00:48:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great having kids. They are not fucking shy about telling you how old and decrepit you are, right? [00:49:02] Speaker A: I love that. Have you seen that meme? It's like one of my favorite things. It makes me laugh every time I see it. It's a tumblr conversation and someone says, do you guys remember when you would go over to your friend's house just to experience the Internet together or just to look at computers? I don't even says, the Internet. You would just go to your friend's house to look at the computer and then you'd go home. And then the response is someone saying, how old are you guys? And the person responds, just regular amount. That's how I feel. I remember going over to my friend Devin's house and spending hours just doing the little voice, automated voice on the old imax with the big colorful thing. It was like, oh, make it say stuff. [00:49:50] Speaker B: Polar mints, jolly ranchers. [00:49:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you can make it say stuff in a different voice. Just like do that all afternoon. [00:49:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, look, I've said it before. I think that's an amazing thing. I think being the last generation to have actually experienced different formats of things. [00:50:08] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. It was like deeply not a given at all. There was a whole conversation that came up about this on blue sky because someone had said something about how Gen Z and Alpha and stuff like that, they are truly digital natives and all that stuff, but they're not good at computers, they're not good with technology. And this is a thing that has always fascinated me. I think I've told this before on here, but when I was teaching, sometimes I would give assign a PDF to the class, right. And sometimes they were scanned the wrong way. Right. And what do you do when it's scanned the wrong way? [00:50:49] Speaker B: What? When a PDF is backwards, like when. [00:50:52] Speaker A: It'S just like sideways right. If a PDF is sideways, rotate it. [00:50:55] Speaker B: That's no problem. [00:50:56] Speaker A: Just rotate it. Right? What do you think my students. [00:51:00] Speaker B: Oh, don't tell me they turned the monitor around. [00:51:02] Speaker A: They turned their computers. They would flip their entire laptops on their sides. [00:51:09] Speaker B: Alan and I have shared plenty of examples of this, and one that I just can't get over is fuck. I even hate saying this because I sound like an old cunt, but the concept of holding shift down and then pressing a letter for a capital letter is gone. It's caps lock. Letter caps lock. [00:51:28] Speaker A: Now, do they really? [00:51:30] Speaker B: Yes. You hit three keys for a capital letter, caps lock your letter, and then caps lock again. [00:51:36] Speaker A: I've also heard that they have no sense of copy paste. They have no idea how to do that. [00:51:42] Speaker B: White clicks all the way. [00:51:44] Speaker A: Right? Come on, seriously. But here's the thing about why I say this in a way that's not an old person, like, oh, those youths thing. I always liken this to the fact that none of us can change our oil. Whereas, like, boomers wouldn't know, right? Because they had, like, shop in class. And where were you going to take it if you didn't know how to change your oil? Where it's like, by the time we learn to drive, there's a jiffy lube on every corner or whatever. What do you got? What's your quick fit? What's it quick fit? Quick fit? There's a quick fit. Or. [00:52:22] Speaker B: Now I don't know if quickfit is still around. [00:52:26] Speaker A: Oh, no. Another way to feel old. My point is it's not necessarily kids aren't dumber or anything like that. It's simply not having to build skills because it's built in for you. Right? Like, you never have to troubleshoot a thing. Whereas when we had to, if I wanted to play Jill of the jungle, I had to go into dos and be like, c run, all that kind of stuff and start over. So, yeah, it's a fascinating concept. To me. This has nothing to do with anything. [00:52:59] Speaker B: Hi, welcome to Jack of all Graves. Hello. [00:53:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Jack of all Graves. Hello. This is a vibe check episode. We decided. [00:53:09] Speaker B: Look, we told you that December, it's kind of like when you just turn up for school in the last day of the year and you're just bringing games and watching movies and doing fuck all. This is kind of the vibe of jo Ag, and it's going to be the vibe until January. So, yeah, realistically, get comfy. You know what I mean? We want you to come along with us and to let your mind wander. Don't focus too much on what we're saying. Right. Just enjoy that we're here. Just enjoy this time that we have together. [00:53:37] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:53:38] Speaker B: Because this is all that matters for the next however long we're talking. [00:53:43] Speaker A: I like to imagine that it's December 17, maybe December 18. If you're listening to this in the morning after it comes out, I like to imagine that people are maybe sitting, wrapping some presents while listening to this, going and picking up whatever their Christmas meal is from the grocery store. [00:54:02] Speaker B: Perhaps you've just come in from caroling, maybe. [00:54:05] Speaker A: And you're right. [00:54:06] Speaker B: Shaking the snow off your ear muffs and your nose is all red. [00:54:11] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:54:12] Speaker B: What better. Now I'll settle down with jo ag and a nice cup of warm nog. [00:54:19] Speaker A: It's so beautiful. [00:54:21] Speaker B: What could be better than that? [00:54:22] Speaker A: So if that's not what you're doing right now, honestly, will you go get yourself a cup of nog or a hot chocolate nog, for fuck's sake, and find some presents to wrap? Even if you're Jewish or Muslim or something like that. Just put some paper around something. Just humor us, will you humor us. Just to get in the zone of where our heads are right now. [00:54:45] Speaker B: I am ready for it, mind. I'm in the spirit. I'm very much in the spirit. Yes, I am. I'm enjoying it. [00:54:52] Speaker A: I love to hear that. [00:54:53] Speaker B: Because earlier on, when I went to little Tesco, not to be confused with big Tesco, they're the same shop, just different sizes. And as I was in the car, I saw a tractor. Right? A fucking. A farm tractor. And it had a gigantic ass fucking inflatable snowman in the kind of the lifty bit, the cup scoopy bit. And I was like. And that site, that very site specifically, that was. It tipped me over the edge. And now I'm Christmassy as right now. [00:55:22] Speaker A: I love that. I've been watching a lot of Christmas movies. It's Hallmark movie season. I've been watching all my hallmarks. Enjoying that. It's been a little. We'll get into it, but it's been a little bit of a crazy couple of weeks around here. So it's like the vibe is not completely on. We haven't decorated. We haven't put the tree up like anything like that. So what's nice? My next door neighbors, who have not decorated in years, put some lights up. So that's kind of nice. [00:55:55] Speaker B: I wonder why this year. [00:55:57] Speaker A: Well, they had their first child four years ago, and then another one two years ago. And I think this is finally when they've settled in a little bit, I went out and Matt was like standing there and I was like, hey, what are you doing? He's like, I'm trying to put lights up. Like, half the string isn't working. And I don't know, do I test every single. What do I do with this? So I come outside like an hour later, like 2 hours later, and the house is done. He's put all the lights up and I come out and I go, oh, you fixed it. And he goes, I did not. I just got back from Home Depot and bought an entirely new string of lights instead. Very nice. [00:56:38] Speaker B: Listen, this is how Christmassy the scene is here with me right now as I speak to you, as we fucking chat on tv. In front of me is this year's Royal Variety performance. That's how fucking Christmas. [00:56:49] Speaker A: That sounds festive. [00:56:52] Speaker B: Right? Obviously you don't know what it is, do you? Right, the Royal Variety performance, british entertainment tradition. And around about this time, they film it like in the middle of summer. So it's all weird. But they show it at Christmas every single year in a theater in London, Royal Albert hall. This year, so have I. It's great. Beautiful. [00:57:14] Speaker A: I feel like it's more interesting that I've been there than you, to be honest. [00:57:17] Speaker B: What did you see there? [00:57:19] Speaker A: Des cab. [00:57:21] Speaker B: Ooh, very nice. I saw ghost in. It was amazing. One of the best gigs of my life. But the royal Variety performance is just basically a menu, like a tasting menu of light entertainment. [00:57:32] Speaker A: Okay? [00:57:33] Speaker B: So you'll get your fucking talent. Contest winner will traditionally go on there and do a turn. Ventriloquists, illusionists, comedians, singers. You'll have a fucking school choir, no doubt you'll have. And this is all for the pleasure of the monarch who is in the fucking box politely clapping at the banality before them, right? And every single year, the royal variety performance will. You can fucking set your watch by. It will play host to at least two or three of my most hated types of entertainment. Right, let me think. Impressionists, right? [00:58:17] Speaker A: Okay. [00:58:17] Speaker B: No respect for your trade. None at all. What the fuck? Who's going to really want to see that? You pretending to be someone else, putting on a stupid voice. I know you're not that person. If you can sound a bit like. [00:58:31] Speaker A: Them, if that's going to work. Yeah. [00:58:33] Speaker B: I've always hated impressionists. I've always fucking hated them. That's no way to make your fortune, mate. Sounding a bit like someone else. No way to live your life. Second thing I hate is magicians. And magic. [00:58:45] Speaker A: Hate it. Okay? [00:58:46] Speaker B: Fucking hate it. Have we ever spoken on this? [00:58:49] Speaker A: I don't know if we have. I mean, it feels kind of on brand, but I enjoy a magic. I mean, it depends on the vibe of the magician, right? [00:58:59] Speaker B: Yes. [00:58:59] Speaker A: Because a lot of magicians have the same sleazy ass vibe that I. [00:59:03] Speaker B: We've totally spoke about this. We've spoken this. [00:59:05] Speaker A: Not all this at all, but sure. [00:59:07] Speaker B: Maybe the fuck is his name. David Blaine in the box. [00:59:11] Speaker A: Oh, well, yeah, we talked about making David Blaine happy. That was a different conversation altogether. It had nothing to do with magicians. [00:59:21] Speaker B: In the same way as I hate impressionists. I know you're not that person, so fuck off. I hate magicians. I know it isn't magic. It's a fucking trick. [00:59:29] Speaker A: I don't care. How silly reason to dislike magicians. [00:59:32] Speaker B: No, it isn't. [00:59:33] Speaker A: They're doing something that's like. They're tricking your eye. That's a cool thing to be able to do. [00:59:39] Speaker B: You've spent your whole life learning to do all that, right? And I know it isn't magic, so why. [00:59:48] Speaker A: It's not like Santa Claus. They're not trying to actually convince you it's magic. Didn't you watch arrested development? Illusions, Michael, it's not magic tricks. Tricks are what a whore does for money. [01:00:03] Speaker B: Exactly. But I think the answer to every single question raised by magic is it's a trick. And that all I care about. It might be a really well executed trick. It might be super fucking. The dexterity and the presence of mind and the kind of. What's the word? I'm talking about? Distraction and the misdirection. All right, all that's great, but it's just a trick. I don't care. [01:00:26] Speaker A: This kind of makes me a little sad, Mark. Where is your. [01:00:34] Speaker B: No. Whimsy for me is something that's organic and natural. You can't force whimsy. You can't practice whimsy. It's ersats whimsy. Otherwise, true whimsy is just enjoying the randomness and the ebb and flow of life. That's great, but, oh, I wonder where he got that dog from on the stage. It probably came out of that fucking box he sat on, didn't it? It's just a trick. I don't care. [01:00:57] Speaker A: Well, let me see, what else? [01:01:00] Speaker B: Hate magicians. Hate impressionists. Let me think. There is another one that I really hate as well, but I can't think of them right now. [01:01:06] Speaker A: Hypnotists. Jugglers. [01:01:09] Speaker B: No, jugglers. Complete respect. [01:01:11] Speaker A: I don't know. I'm just naming things that you might see in a variety show. Ventriloquist, did we say? [01:01:16] Speaker B: That's the one. That's the one. I hate ventriloquists. And magicians and impressionists. There you go. These are the things. [01:01:27] Speaker A: Like, I think the only famous ventriloquist in modern times is like the very annoying guy, Jeff Dunham, who's like just right wing nonsense. That's like very lowest common denominator thing. But I think, again, kind of like the magician thing. I like the concept of something that you practice and that's kind of creepy. Like, ventriloquism is like a very creepy thing to do. [01:01:53] Speaker B: But at the end of the day, I know that the dummy ain't talking. I know. [01:01:59] Speaker A: Well, unless it's like that movie magic with Anthony Hopkins, in which case that line is very blurry. But yeah, I don't think I enjoy watching ventriloquists. I wouldn't say I hate them, but. [01:02:13] Speaker B: If I think on it, maybe I don't hate them, but I would never. [01:02:16] Speaker A: Ever give one intentionally buy a ticket. Sure. [01:02:19] Speaker B: But you're quite right in what you say about it. It's the vibe of the magician that if I'm going to enjoy a magician, it's going to be because the guy is ridiculous. [01:02:26] Speaker A: Yeah. I love Justin Wilman, who does the show magic for humans on Netflix. And he's actually coming to the Wellmont at Montclair. I might actually go and see him, but he's just like a goofy guy. He kind of reminds me of Ben, who does, like, very silly things. Like, he has a whole segment called magic for susans where he just finds a Susan on the street and does a magic trick for, you know, like. [01:02:47] Speaker B: Chris angel mind freak. Yes. I'm all about that. Fucking amazing. [01:02:51] Speaker A: Just, yeah, David Blaine. Like, there's like people who. It's like, it's hard not to enjoy Chris. What the fuck? [01:02:57] Speaker B: They're c r iss so dumb. [01:03:02] Speaker A: I saw someone wearing a Chris angel shirt on a train in the year of our 23. [01:03:08] Speaker B: Give me my. Please. [01:03:10] Speaker A: In 2023. I was like, goddamn. [01:03:15] Speaker B: Okay, I tell you this now, right, and strike me down. If it doesn't come to pass when I come out there next September, I will come out there wearing a Chris angel mind freak t shirt. [01:03:32] Speaker A: Okay. We're put it in your notes. It's gotta be for like a month before to be like, buy Chris angel mind freak shirt. [01:03:41] Speaker B: You will have read a book on every single president. [01:03:44] Speaker A: Yes. And you will have your Chris angel mind freak shirt. [01:03:47] Speaker B: Because that's his full name. Chris angel hyphen mind freak. He's kind of hyphenated. He was Chris angel. He married something mind freak and they didn't want to. [01:03:54] Speaker A: Chris angel mind freak. Oh, my God. That is my head cannon. And I love it. [01:04:01] Speaker B: His wife insisted. Husband. [01:04:05] Speaker A: We'll talk like new year things and stuff like that. But just on that note of these resolutions. I love New Year's resolutions. So you give me a thing like this and I'm on board. I feel like it's along with my very. I have my thing about like zeros and fives. Only being able to start something on like a zero and a five in the time. It's like, I love a hard start. I am very on board for like, here is a distinct zero for me to start on to whack it straight up to ten. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of New Year's resolutions. A lot of people just think they're ridiculous or whatever and I'm like, no, I love it. I love starting well, why don't we. [01:04:46] Speaker B: Track our resolutions this year, you and I? Why don't we keep one another on plan this year? [01:04:52] Speaker A: I'm very on board. [01:04:54] Speaker B: Good. [01:04:56] Speaker A: Very on board. I will say a thing that we forgot to do and it's perhaps a little late to do. I did try to remember this, is that we were going to write an inmate a Christmas card. We'll have to find another. Maybe a Valentine's Day card. [01:05:09] Speaker B: Maybe that's too romantic. [01:05:11] Speaker A: We'll find another holiday to write a president's day card. I don't know. We will find a different one because, well, yeah, shit got crazy. [01:05:23] Speaker B: Do we want to do one in the US and one in the UK or should we? Sure. [01:05:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel great about that. [01:05:29] Speaker B: I've got some thoughts. [01:05:31] Speaker A: Oh, God. [01:05:35] Speaker B: We talk about movies. [01:05:37] Speaker A: No, first. [01:05:38] Speaker B: Why would we do that? [01:05:40] Speaker A: Why would we talk about movies? I have a story to tell. I have a yarn to unravel for you. Mark, I told you. I texted you when it happened and then was like, I will talk to you when we are in person, so to speak. But of course, because things were so crazy. We did not record last week. You can tell things were insane last week because neither of us even posted anything to be like. We were just like. [01:06:09] Speaker B: This is my question because I thought you had. Because obviously I thought Cory would have done that, Corey would have done that. And I was going to text you. Did we tell anyone? No, but I didn't because I knew you were having a mad time. [01:06:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it was wild. And I think I feel like everyone knew and understood that or were having their own crazy times. So it was Kyo's birthday, and every year he is in Philadelphia on his birthday, because Pax unplugged is in Philadelphia, and it is always the same week. [01:06:46] Speaker B: Okay. [01:06:46] Speaker A: So I tend to. For the past three years, I've gone down every year and just come and hung out, and we walk around. I fucking love Philadelphia. It is like such a slept on city, but it's super walkable and beautiful. The buildings there are just incredible. There's museums everywhere. We went to the public library this year and walked around, and there's like, old, ancient tomes written on stone from Mesopotamia and all kinds of stuff in there, and it's just free to walk around. I played a theraman. There's just so much to do in Philadelphia. [01:07:26] Speaker B: I threw my theramin out a week ago. [01:07:30] Speaker A: What? [01:07:31] Speaker B: I hadn't touched it in ages. [01:07:34] Speaker A: Oh. [01:07:38] Speaker B: Just wait. [01:07:39] Speaker A: Got it. [01:07:40] Speaker B: Wait. [01:07:43] Speaker A: Is that, like, an already established joke, or did you just come up with that off the top of your head? [01:07:47] Speaker B: Well, I heared it out of nowhere, like a few weeks ago, and I didn't even know that I'd kept it there until you mentioned theramin. [01:07:53] Speaker A: Oh, I got something good for such a time as this. Incredible. So we had an incredible time. Just like, eating all the food, drinking all the drinks, walking, going to museums. We went to eastern State penitentiary, which I went to last year by myself and went, like, at night and had s'mores on the ground, stuff like that. But I'd never seen it during the daytime, and Keo had never been there before. So we went to the penitentiary and walked around. It was really, really cool. [01:08:18] Speaker B: It's like a working prison. [01:08:20] Speaker A: No, it's been closed for 50, 70 years, something like that. It's a really interesting place, actually, because they built it. It's the first true penitentiary in the world. And the idea behind it was supposed to be very progressive. It was like, about reform, right? So basically their idea was, like, you keep people in solitude and silence and penitence, and they will eventually reform. But this was actually just what we would recognize now as cruel and unusual punishment. It's keeping people in solitary confinement, absolute order. Right? Like, people in solitary all the time, like, getting very little time when they experience other people and things like that. But they were trying to do something good with this place. Like, before, we would just jail people, maybe kill them, like, do whatever and expect nothing of them. We're going to reform people and get them back into the world, and there's not going to be recidivism. All this stuff now, all these years later, it became basically a ruin. They've done some upkeep and stuff like that, so it's not dangerous to walk around, but it's largely like a museum that talks about the problems of the prison industrial complex. And so they have all these exhibits and stuff like that, talking about modern problems with imprisonment, specifically in America, and how much our carceral system is just insane and unhinged and racist and huge and for profit and all of these kinds of things. So it's fascinating to see something that was built as a progressive prison, but failed miserably at that, now sort of tackle the problem of prisons as a thing altogether. [01:10:06] Speaker B: So what message does that penitentiary want you to take away? [01:10:13] Speaker A: I think ultimately it is trying to say that we imprison too many people and that we need to come up with other strategies for dealing with societal ills than simply throwing people in jailers as a result. Because it's removing people from families, it's destroying communities. Like I said, it's like the horribly racist system. People of color are targeted far more, but even white people. There's an incredible amount of people in jail, more than any other place in the world by a long shot. And it's basically just being like, this is bad. We shouldn't do this, because it's a. [01:10:55] Speaker B: Topic I've always meant to kind of queue us up to talking about, because I know you're an abolitionist and I don't know what the alternative is. I just have no idea. [01:11:06] Speaker A: This is a 2024 episode. We'll do early 2024. We will get into our prison abolition episode and it'll be fun. I can give you some reading as well, but, yeah, be a good time. But anyway, wonderful. We did that. It was great. We had a really good trip and then we were supposed to go see the band. You introduced me to Durry, who I absolutely love, and I was, like, super stoked to go see them. So we go drive over. I drove down this time so we could just drive back up that night. Afterwards, I spent, like, two days there. And we're just going to drive home because it's only about 90 minutes away. And we go, and there's a brewery next door. We go and we have a brew, then we walk up to the door and there's two different venues in the place. One side, aqua, is playing, and the other side, durie, is playing. So we walk up and we're like, aqua? Yes. As in Barbie girl Aqua. Aqua. Yep, exactly. So we walk up and we're like. [01:12:10] Speaker B: Lady from Aqua is fucking stunningly hot. [01:12:13] Speaker A: She is. Yeah, very. Remember, I have a vague recollection. We walk up and we're like, so which line is for Durie? And the lady's like, oh, so you should have gotten an what? Okay, so we go back over to the brewery, and we're like, well, we could go home, I guess. Or how much are Aqua tickets? And so Kia finds $10 Aqua tickets online, and we go and we see Aqua instead. And it was a blast. We had a great time. Kyo bought a t shirt. He bought his brother a t shirt because apparently his brother was into aqua in the 90s. Well, such a fun concert. Super great. Making lemonade, right? Yeah, exactly. Or so we thought. And then we got more lemons. So we go and we walk out of here, and we walk up the street, and we're like, where our car at? And it was kind of like a weird intersection where there were like, various spires off of it. And so we're like, maybe we walked up the wrong one, which didn't really make sense because it was a pretty straight shot where we parked. But we were know, whatever. Kio's drunk. Like, I don't know. [01:13:33] Speaker B: Maybe we've got parking disremeverance syndrome. Like me, haven't you? You'll park and just forget where you parked? [01:13:40] Speaker A: I mean, depends sometimes. Normally I have pretty good recall for it, but if it's like a huge parking lot or something, I might forget or somewhere I go all the time. [01:13:49] Speaker B: If my car were stolen, I would simply walk around the car parking circle, clicking my little fucking button. [01:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I usually have a pretty good sense of where it is. Unless, like, the Disneyland parking lot or something. Like. Like, so we check the other spires just in case. We're like, no, it had to have been this one. There's, like, a space where our car used to be. We're like, okay, did our car get stolen? And so we call the police, which is always a sucky thing. And Philadelphia police are, like, some of the worst in the nation. They're just known for being giant assholes. Guy comes after, like 40 minutes, and me calling three times, like, is anyone going to come or what? Finally, this guy rolls up and I explain what happened because Kia's drunk. And I'm like, he should not be talking to cops right now. No. So I'm talking to this cop, giving him all the information and stuff. And this guy is like, oh, yeah, it's a Hyundai. He's like, yeah, it's a TikTok challenge. I'm sorry, it's what? It's a TikTok challenge. Hyundai's and Kia's. There's a TikTok challenge because you can take the casing off of the steering wheel and start them using a usb a. And so kids go on TikTok, and they learn that you can hijack Hyundai's and Kias, and they just take them and they joyride them, and they crash them somewhere, and that's it. I was like, do they recover them? He's like, oh, yeah, they're not selling them. They're kids. They're just watching TikTok. They don't have anything they're going to do with it. They're just going to smash the car and leave. So we'll get it back. I was like, okay, cool. Unfortunately, Keo's laptop and all his work stuff was in that. My favorite baboon to the moon bag and my beloved Stephanie shoe t shirt, both of which were limited edition and you cannot get. Were in. Like, this sucks. So we are like, to the cop, like, can you drive us to the train station or whatever? And he's like, no, it's a little out of my way. And so he just drops us off in the middle of the city, like a mile from the train station in the cold. It's like 30 degrees out and is like, I think there's a station over there that'll get you there. So we walk down in the station. It's not running at this point with how long it took. It's like 01:00 in the morning. Okay, so both of our phones are dying because our chargers were in there and all that kind of stuff. So we finally are on our last leg. Call an Uber to get to the train station. We get there, and a cop is like, so the train station is closing, but if you have a ticket, you can stay. And so the next train is at, like, 04:30 a.m. So we buy tickets for that train, and then another cop comes up, and he's like, can I see your tickets? Give him the tickets. He's like, oh, these don't count. Only Amtrak. And I'm like, but that's not what we were told. We were just told if we have a ticket for the train, we can take. It's just Amtrak. And I'm like, buddy, our car got stolen. I'm like, this is. Can you have a little compassion for. We're not trying to squat here. We've got tickets for the train. And he tells me, you're digging your own grave, ma'am. Excuse me. And so I was like, are you threatening me? What does that mean? You can't arrest me? Are you telling me you're going to shoot me if I keep asking you for compassion? What's going on here? And he's just like, you're digging your grave. And starts to walk away. And I was like, what is happening here? So we leave the train station. We're stuck. Manage to get a taxi and just have him take us back to the hotel that we had. It's like 130. Take him back to the hotel that we stayed at the night before because we're like, it's a cheapish hotel and we know there's going to be vacancy or whatever. So we go and we get a room for the night. Phone's completely dead. Keel walks to the 24 hours. CVS goes and gets a charger, and he charges up his phone overnight. And in the morning we take a train back up. We get a phone call. That's like, the next day. That's like, oh, we recovered your car. It was like under an underpass. Everything's gone. Windows are all smashed. All that kind of stuff. Could have been worse. The side of it is smashed. All of you know, they got it. And they're like, it's in a tow yard down here. And you have to come here to sign that. It's like your car or whatever. So Q has to go all the way back to Philadelphia just to go to the police station and say, yeah, that's our car, and leave again. Because obviously we can't take the car. It's busted steering columns, right? It's not totaled. But then insurance finally comes like a week later and looks it over and they're like, oh, yeah, it's trashed. So we thankfully had comprehensive coverage on it, which we normally don't get. And now it's in a garage somewhere like a half hour from here getting fixed. We have no idea when we're going to get it back or anything. We've got no updates at all on this. And we've just been without a car for the past two weeks. Yeah, during that time also, we went to Puerto Rico for a couple days, during which I thought that I had allergies. But now that Keo is here and suddenly got sick, I might have had a cold that I gave to him, but I wasn't sick when I was outside. It was like, only when I was in the dusty Airbnb, so I assumed it was allergies. I don't know. For those wondering still, I was always in a mask and outside, so I wasn't giving anyone my cold. Except Kyo, who was staying in the apartment with me and is now downstairs dying of man cold. So, yeah, it has been chaos at this point. And I think that's part of why it's like we haven't decorated or any of those kinds of things. It's just kind of like we're just kind of tired. [01:20:50] Speaker B: Decompress. Just decompress process. [01:20:54] Speaker A: Right? We don't have a car. We are tired. We're sick. We're know all this stuff. [01:21:04] Speaker B: When the fucking crazy weather had kind of had its way with you, did Puerto Rico, did you manage to get any downtime? Did you manage to get any fun stuff? [01:21:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Like, the day that we got there, and surprisingly clear, we got some good weather, but we did get, like a storm or whatever and got absolutely drenched. And then the next day, we went on a walking tour, and pretty much that whole day stayed beautiful. And then it rained again the next day. [01:21:27] Speaker B: Why were you there? [01:21:28] Speaker A: We were just chilling. So Keo has, like, he flies for work, obviously, and to upgrade his status for next year so that he gets first class and all that kind of stuff and whatnot. He needed to take one more flight, and I was like, let's go to Puerto Rico. And you could use miles. So it was like, free. Just fly three and a half hours first class to Puerto Rico, and we got, like, a cheap little place there. And we're like, yeah, we'll just go for a couple of days, and then he'll get his one k status for next year. So that was why we went. [01:22:05] Speaker B: Well, look, I am deeply, deeply, deeply sorry that you got fucked with. I mean, the cop telling you that it was a TikTok thing, that seems fucking pointless that he would say that, right? [01:22:19] Speaker A: And he was so casual about it the whole thing the entire time. He just acted like we were like a pain in his ass. He didn't want to be dealing with this. And it's like, yeah, we don't want to deal with you either. The last thing anyone wants is to have to deal with an asshole cop all night. And he just like, yeah, it's like a TikTok challenge. What do you care? They'll get it back. It'll be smashed, but it's fine, okay? We don't live here. Our stuff was in there. He just was acting like we were being weird for being upset that this had happened. And I was being very upbeat because obviously I'm a black woman talking to a cop. So I'm like, cracking jokes and things like that and trying to be chill. But he was like, so cavalier about the whole thing. And I was like, my car is gone. I am in a town. I don't know, I could not point on a map to where I am in Philadelphia right now. It was just so ridiculous. And then, yeah, that other cop just, like, escalating things. And there was, like, another cop in there who, like, a homeless guy asked us for food. So we bought him a sandwich while we were in the train station. And then this other cop comes up and he's like, did that man ask you for anything? And I was like, what? I'm going to rat this guy out. I was like, the guy who was with us. And he was like, oh, I didn't think he was with you. I was like, yeah, that's our homie. And he was like, okay, bro, if I chose to buy that guy a sandwich, it's none of your fucking business. It was just absurd. [01:23:49] Speaker B: From an outsider's point of view, this seems fucking not having. I haven't had any dealings with the UK police in a long time, right? Thankfully, yeah. But I would find it hard to believe that they would be that fucking belligerent, right? [01:24:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Just so aggressive the whole time. Like, escalating to threats when someone asks for compassion over a situation that the. [01:24:23] Speaker B: Fuck am I talking about? I can easily believe that a UK copper would be equally as fucking. [01:24:27] Speaker A: Obviously, we know this from Mike Molsher coming on our show and talking about the UK. Cops like this know, not an unusual thing for cops pretty much anywhere. But, yeah, Philadelphia cops are known for being especially aggressive and terrible. The worst possible place to end up in a bad situation like that. But hey, listen, we are in a position where something like that happened, but we are safe. We went on vacation the next week. There's so much privilege wrapped up in this story and everything anyway that it's like, yeah, super sucks and I hate it and it's violating and I miss my stuff. [01:25:15] Speaker B: But you missed the Jo? AG another, right? [01:25:17] Speaker A: Exactly. At the end of the day, it is what it is. [01:25:20] Speaker B: Stuff is temporary. Jo? [01:25:22] Speaker A: AG is. That's right. Jo? AG is forever. Okay, now we can talk about movies. [01:25:31] Speaker B: Now do you want to talk about movies? Okay, do you want to start? [01:25:37] Speaker A: Well, we watched a couple of movies together. [01:25:39] Speaker B: We did as we do each week. What did we watch together? Well, I'll just talk about diehard two super quick. [01:25:48] Speaker A: Okay. [01:25:50] Speaker B: Right. For me. Shoot me down, break my knees. I prefer diehard two. [01:25:57] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:25:58] Speaker B: It's excellent. It is an excellent, excellent, excellent movie. Now it's made all the more excellent having watched it with Laura. Right? And Laura is currently fucking absolutely just obsessed with a show over here which airs on discovery, I think it is on National Geographic or whatever it's called now called air crash investigations. And she inhales this whenever she is at a loose end. If Laura isn't with you, she's watching air crash investigations. Right? [01:26:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:26:30] Speaker B: And she fancies herself now as some kind of forensic fucking aviation authority. [01:26:35] Speaker A: Amazing. [01:26:36] Speaker B: All the way through. She's like, no, they wouldn't have done that. When John McClain is on the Runway waving the fucking. His torches in the air to try and get the plane to pull up, she's like, no, they need to put the wing flaps down now because that would have reduced the drag. [01:26:56] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Please watch more airplane action movies with your wife and talk about it, like, fast. [01:27:05] Speaker B: She sees herself now as solicitor and amateur aircraft investigator. But Owen loved it. Owen the entire time was jaw dropped. Super, super loved. [01:27:18] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I was young enough when that came out that I didn't have the. To think this is a bad movie. I think you have to be an adult when you see it to be like, oh, this movie sucks. So, yeah, I don't have that. [01:27:32] Speaker B: But it doesn't, though, from any angle. [01:27:35] Speaker A: A lot of people hate it, though. It's that, like, what the OD numbers of goods even are bad or whatever. [01:27:40] Speaker B: People hate Dion, too? [01:27:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But, yeah, no, I always liked it rocks. [01:27:52] Speaker B: Now. I also watch Gremlins, again with Owen. Right? I seem to watch a lot of movies with Owen and watch Gremlins and fuck me, it's so rewarding to come back to films, to revisit films as an adult and see things that previously were not seen. Gremlins is absolutely fucking brilliant for that. It's got so much eye candy, particularly the scenes of Gremlin mayhem in the last third. Just let your eye wander around the screen. So much shit going on. I love it. I fucking love it. Talk about belligerent. That's what the Gremlins, man. What a bunch of pricks. [01:28:36] Speaker A: And see with this one, this is one where Gremlins two is my preference of the Gremlins movies. I love Gremlins two gremlins is great, but Gremlins two is the one that I like, I come back to over and over. [01:28:47] Speaker B: I think it might even have been at this time last year that I spoke about gremlins. Because one of the things about these two films that fascinates me so, right. Is the biology of the Moguai, right? And the biology of the gremlin, what leaps out at me, right. Is that across Gremlins one and two, Gizmo is the only benign mogui we ever see. Every other moguai is a prick, and every other mogui, aside from Gizmo, actively wants to be a gremlin, right? They seek it out. The gizmo's kids in the first one chew the fucking alarm clock. The wankers in the second one, they go straight for the food after midnight. Why? Is Gizmo like Mogwai prime? Or is Gizmo the anomaly? Is this atavistic fucking purpose? The point of gremlins and gizmo is just. They all want him. [01:29:43] Speaker A: Ill evolved version. Yes. Is he the fucking. [01:29:46] Speaker B: The one? Is he the fucking anomaly? I love that. [01:29:51] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. [01:29:53] Speaker B: The lot of a mogwai is to seek out its poople phase, right? And ultimately to become a little Bastard. But Gizmo doesn't want that. Why? I don't know. I don't know. Think on. [01:30:04] Speaker A: I love that. [01:30:05] Speaker B: It's fascinating to me. Asexual kind of reproduction. It's brilliant. Love it. [01:30:12] Speaker A: Now, together, we both watched for the first time the classic the people under the stairs. [01:30:19] Speaker B: Just super quick. The novelization of gremlins two. Right. [01:30:22] Speaker A: Are you about to talk about the breaking of the. What? [01:30:26] Speaker B: Oh, no, the paint. The novelization of Gremlins two suggests that when Gizmo gets wet in gremlins two, the water has run down one of Billy's artworks and mixed with watercolor paint. And the novelization of Gremlins two suggests that that might be what's fucked up all of the little mogui that come out of Gizmo in the first one, but that just doesn't hold true because the water was unadulterated in gremlins one, and yet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, people under the stairs. Okay, well, just lost faith. I became completely bored. [01:30:52] Speaker A: And if I'm bored myself, then maybe there's a Gremlins biology snack in there somewhere for one of these. [01:31:01] Speaker B: I'd like to wrap it up with a xenomorph biology snack as well. The life cycle of the fucking alien xenomorph is fascinating. I added, literally, a five minute spell in my teens of going to, like, a role playing club. And on the one day that I went, they were playing the Gremlins tabletop, sorry, the aliens tabletop game. And that gives you some fucking cool law on xenomorph fucking biology and reproductive fucking science. And it's amazing. It's to do with the stuff that they coat the fucking walls with, that biomechanical kind of shit that they exude. So good. Anyway. People on the stairs. [01:31:39] Speaker A: People under the stairs. Neither of us had ever seen this before, for some reason. [01:31:45] Speaker B: No. Red Eye was his last film. I'm not sure I believe Red Eye was Wes Craven's last film. But people understand, like, late era wes Craven, isn't it? [01:31:57] Speaker A: It's 1991. It's before your screams and everything. I don't know if I would call that. [01:32:05] Speaker B: Roll it back. [01:32:06] Speaker A: I respond that comment, and I recently read a book about black horror and black people in horror and all of that kind of stuff that the people under the stairs came up in. And as sort of like misguided as it might be, sort of Wes Craven's attempt at sort of addressing this racial and social inequality and having this know, everybody's so worried about the inner city and the blacks and all this kind of stuff, but you peek into a white family's home and it's the most horrific stuff that you can imagine going on behind closed doors. Even knowing that sort of premise for it, I was not ready for the kind of movie this was at. [01:32:54] Speaker B: Know that theme. David lynch is preoccupied with that theme, but he goes about it in kind of, I don't know, maybe a subtler way. [01:33:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So the premise of the people under the stairs, if I remember correctly, is basically that you've got this kid who, a black kid in the inner city who his family is about to be evicted from their home. And we know the landlord is some sort of bad guy, but who collects valuable coins. And so this kid is drafted by his mom's terrible abusive boyfriend to help him to rob the landlord to get these coins. But when they go and do this, they end up stumbling into the very disturbing relationship of the landlords, this man and woman, their daughter, who they keep trapped there, and it turns out a whole bunch of other people who are locked away in their basement. But I think I expected something more serious. And this movie is so goofy. [01:34:08] Speaker B: It is not a serious film. [01:34:10] Speaker A: It is not a serious film. It is like slapsticky. What's the fellow who plays the landlord, the male in that? The same guy from Silver Bullet? [01:34:22] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's Ed and Nadine from Twin Peaks, isn't it? [01:34:25] Speaker A: Right, yes, exactly. And every single reaction he has in that is the most cartoonish thing you've ever seen in your life. A good chunk of the movie. He's running around like a gimp. Yeah. It's over the top. It's got a lot of comedy. It's a weird ass movie. [01:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Now you've put it like that. I mean, I can't think of any comedy at all anywhere elsewhere in Wes Craven's movies. [01:34:56] Speaker A: Not like that. Not like slapstick comedy. There's quippy lines in a movie. Yeah. It's the Three Stooges as a horror movie. Yeah. It's a very bizarre wes craven picture. I didn't even rate it because I was like, I don't even know where I find this on the range because it was just so far outside of what I was expecting from the movie. [01:35:24] Speaker B: Pretty sure I give it a 3.5. Based solely on. Yeah, based mostly on the fact that. Whoa. What the fuck? [01:35:29] Speaker A: I did not know what is happening. Yeah, exactly. It's certainly not boring, that's for sure. [01:35:34] Speaker B: No kind of solo. I took the time to watch birth rebirth. Right. [01:35:43] Speaker A: Oh, right. Because I rejected that one outright. [01:35:45] Speaker B: Exactly. You were right to do so for the reasons that you suspected you might be right. This is some gynecological horror, right? Yes. Deals with pregnancy and uteruses and fucking necromancy, bringing kids back from the dead. Lots of really fun medical gore in this one. Right? If you like your anatomically correct fucking meat, this is one for you. Performances are great. There's loads of good meat. But if you're squeamish about bodily, fucking, bodily nastiness, this may be not one for you. I don't give a fuck. I enjoy it. So again, three stars. [01:36:32] Speaker A: All right, fair enough. I watched the other day, the new Netflix flick that I'd seen, people were talking about leave the world behind, right? [01:36:43] Speaker B: Gagging to watch it, really into watch. [01:36:45] Speaker A: I think you're going to like it. But I thought this seemed like a crowd pleaser when I watched it. And then I looked at the letter box and it's apparently more divisive than I gave it credit for. I loved it. I had a blast. This movie. It's an extremely claustrophobic, extremely tense and stressful movie. I don't think there's a moment in it where you get a chance to breathe. It's about basically Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts play a couple who have two kids. They're a sort of wealthy power couple type thing, but in a sort of upper middle class, bordering on rich way. So, like, the father is a professor, and she's like something that's like a communications whatever kind of person, something businessy. And they decide to get away from the city and go to this big fancy home that they rent an Airbnb just outside the city and have a little getaway. There's a pool, there's a forest. They're just going to not be in the city for a minute. And as they're there, the owner of the home shows up telling them that there was a blackout in the city. And is it all right if we come in here and stay the night, know, just see how things are in the morning? The tension sort of begins there between this black homeowner here and Julia Roberts, this rich white woman who does not believe this black man could possibly own this house. But then things start to hit the fan and it's like, what is actually going on out there? And is it the end of the world that's happening? And what does that mean for us in this house? It sounds excellent. Yes. I loved it. It's kind of absurdist in various ways. There's just, like a lot of good little quick quips and referential humor here and there without leaning super heavily on it. Super tense and stressful. I really liked it and recommend it. It is apparently not everyone's cup of tea. I thought it was great. [01:38:50] Speaker B: Excellent. No, you've done nothing there to dissuade me from going in on that one. So I thought I fancied a nice, light hearted watch, something casual, something to just throw on. So I went for Lars Montre's, the house that Jack built. Fucking hell, though. [01:39:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, right? [01:39:15] Speaker B: Amen. Oh, hey, boys. Right? It is such a thrill to be blindsided by a movie. It is an absolute thrill. Right? It's one of the fucking things I get up in the morning for is watching a movie with no ideas, no preconceptions, and being fucking flawed, which is what the house of Jack Bill did for me. I just want to say, I cannot think of Laz Montreal without wanting to watch that clip again. The one that I sent you. [01:39:43] Speaker A: Oh, man, it's so uncomfortable. The famous clip of Lars Montrear saying, how does he put it? [01:39:54] Speaker B: He starts off by saying some shit about how the Nazis were stylish, right? [01:39:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:40:00] Speaker B: And then goes in just after, just like a pause that seems to last years while everybody else on the con table with him is just hiding their head in their hands. [01:40:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Kirsten Dunst is, like, about to die. [01:40:14] Speaker B: Then perhaps I am a Nazi. He knows exactly what he's doing in that clip. It's the best example I've ever seen of somebody. Of somebody who's clearly fucking super bright and super intelligent, digging a fucking huge, horrid hole for themselves, seeing that they've done that and then intentionally just diving the fuck into it. [01:40:39] Speaker A: Brilliant. He's an auteur. Edge lord, basically. [01:40:51] Speaker B: Anyway. House of Jack, build, superb water. Great amount of creative gore in that film. [01:41:00] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. [01:41:02] Speaker B: Fantastic. Fantastic exploration of a serial killer. I mean, you've got to think, if I were a hack, I would reach for comparisons to things like Henry Porter of a serial killer, american psycho. Certainly there was another one that it really brought to mind as well. [01:41:18] Speaker A: It's interesting because for people who have a longer memory than Mark, you might remember that know, talked at length about this like a year or so ago when I watched it. And that it was explicitly because I had watched Henry for the first time a week before that and loathed it to my deepest, deepest core. And then sort of compared this as to why this is doing some of the same things but doing it just so much better. It's on another plane. [01:41:50] Speaker B: I can see it on my shelf. It's one of those that I think I'm going to revisit. Most of the victims as victims are women. Yes. But nothing in the film seemed as. It's the painfully sexualized as Henry. [01:42:04] Speaker A: Well, yeah, exactly. And I feel like one of the things that I had said about this movie, which is for those that have not seen it or don't remember us talking about it, is an exploration of a serial killer. And watching his sort of justifications and the way that he moves through the of. I'd compared this to Henry. I'd compared this to. What's that? Home invasion one that I also don't like strangers. No. [01:42:35] Speaker B: Funny games. [01:42:36] Speaker A: Funny games, yes. And that I really hate movies where the filmmaker makes something very sick and twisted and sexual and woman hating and exploitative and all this kind of stuff. But then they point at the viewer, like, now, don't you feel implicated? And I'm like, fuck you. You made the movie. And the difference with the house that Jack built is that he's implicating himself. This whole movie is like the exact reverse of that. It's not about saying at the viewer. And you're watching this, aren't you the sicko? It's like, no, I'm not. I make movies like this. And here's an exploration of how shitty a mind does this kind of thing to people and exploits women like this and stuff like that and that. I feel like, yeah, it's not doing the edge Lord thing with this movie. It's more of like an actual reflection on his own. [01:43:36] Speaker B: Completely and it ends and you just want to go. You're right mate. If you are. [01:43:44] Speaker A: I think the top letterbox comment on that is something like, can someone just get Lars Montreal or some therapy and be done with it? [01:43:53] Speaker B: Yes, I get it. [01:43:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I can absolutely see why this would be draining for people and be a little too like, yeah, he is commenting too much on himself. [01:44:03] Speaker B: I had to watch it in two sittings because it is hard work. [01:44:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like 3 hours long too. [01:44:13] Speaker B: It's a task you got to commit. [01:44:14] Speaker A: To, but it's gripping. [01:44:16] Speaker B: It's great. [01:44:17] Speaker A: I was invested. I never watch anything in parts. I'm never coming back to it if I do something like that. So I watched it in one something. [01:44:24] Speaker B: I'm doing more and more of a Blake actually port just. [01:44:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it does seem. [01:44:27] Speaker B: I'm going to pause it there. Meal come back. Yeah. Lots and lots of fun. [01:44:33] Speaker A: Yes. And together we also the other day watched Black Christmas, which I was excited about. I watched it for the first time last year and was like, holy fuck. I see why this is such a classic and everyone loves it so much. And so I was like, mark, when was the last time you watched the OG black Christmas? And you were like, never seen it. Never seen it. So I was like, fuck yeah, we're watching this. It did not go the way I expected it to. [01:44:58] Speaker B: It didn't. I think I maybe watched it wrong. I don't know. Or did I? I don't know. I mean, what you love in it and what you saw in it. I didn't and don't. I think it's one of those that I'll take another run at because I love. [01:45:16] Speaker A: Right. And she's great in it, I think. Yeah, this was one of those ones where I could kind of tell from the moment we started that you were not in the headspace for it also. Maybe the expectation was going to be off. [01:45:31] Speaker B: I think I was expecting something a little bit more of a vibe twin to something like sleepaway camp. [01:45:36] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly. And I think when I saw it, that's what I expected too, was like, I was really expecting more of one of. It's black Christmas. What we know of like horror slashers is much more light hearted and this does have light hearted moments in it. For those that have not seen black Christmas. It is about a group of women, college women, who live in a sorority house, and they're getting obscene phone calls over and over that get excellent. [01:46:05] Speaker B: Obscene? [01:46:06] Speaker A: Yeah, like just horrendous obscene phone calls that get more and more vicious and explicit and violent, and then they start being killed off as a result. And I think the movie is like, it was interesting the other day, Tara posted about it, and she called it misogynistic, which I was like, what? Or she called it woman hating. And she was saying it in a positive way, though. She was like, I love a woman hating 1970s movie, or whatever, which, like most slashers of the 70s are. They are absolutely woman hating movies. And this is not that. It's very much like the opposite of this. It's like you have a storyline about a girl who is getting an abortion or wants to get an abortion, who has this terrible boyfriend, older boyfriend, who's clearly taking advantage of her. And you have all these sort of various progressive messages throughout this. And I think very real sort of representations of what women are like and how terrifying men are to women. So it's kind of like the proto men where it is. Yes, all men sort of film. And what I think is so great about that is that despite how terrified women are and how terrifying men are in this movie, that the women are very normal and joyful even in the midst of terrible things happening. They'll be having laughing fits over stuff. And at one point, Margot kidders at the police station, and she's giving the phone number and she says there's a new call letter. That's fellatio, that she tricks the cop. Even in these very dismal situations, you get the fact that. But women live, they are going to go on with their lives because what else can they do in the midst of the fact that every man around them is trying to assault them and abuse them and use them and all of these kinds of things? So, yeah, I think it's so clever in that way and so real to women's experiences. While also the phone calls are really horrifying. I think most women have at some point received these kinds of phone calls from people, someone trying to freak them out and everything. And it's really terrifying. And it's got that just like men, there's like an ambiguity to it. You don't know who this guy is because it could be any of these people. Any man could be this murderer. That's what makes it so scary to watch. [01:48:44] Speaker B: Yeah. All of which was lost on me. [01:48:46] Speaker A: Pretty much paying attention yeah. This may have been an attention issue. I think in the right mindset, you would like it a lot more than you did. [01:48:58] Speaker B: I was busy watching kids on TikTok. Nick, in your car. [01:49:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Seeing if maybe it shows up on there. It would be very funny if somewhere there is a video of. I'm sure there is idiot kids stealing our. [01:49:15] Speaker B: Wankers. [01:49:16] Speaker A: Wankers. The other thing that I just wanted to talk about that I watched was a documentary called the Mission, which I was actually really excited about, and then unfortunately, disappointed in. The mission is on National Geographic. So here in America, it's Disney plus. I don't know if you guys get any nat geo stuff over there at all. [01:49:41] Speaker B: We do. Yeah. Fuckload, actually. There's loads of it. [01:49:44] Speaker A: Well, then it's probably on Disney plus for you as well. And the mission is about, you may remember, like, I think it was 2018, young asian american kid decided that he was going to go contact this famously hostile. I do remember that isolated tribe. [01:50:05] Speaker B: The island you should never go to. [01:50:07] Speaker A: Yeah. The island. It is understood. You do not go to. These people do not want you there. And as you can imagine, they immediately killed him. And so this movie is sort of exploring that. And just like with most movies, documentaries about evangelicals, it fails to examine evangelicalism. And that is like, it really sort of treats this as this kid being an adventurer first and foremost. And that's sort of reflected in the people they interview in it, too. Like, looking at him more as a kid who, like, if he hadn't been a Christian, he would just be exploring. [01:50:49] Speaker B: The guy was warned, surely. [01:50:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. He wrote, like, a note of, like, if I die, please don't hurt them or anything like that. What was he open to, budy? To make them christians? He was a missionary. [01:51:02] Speaker B: Oh, fucking hell. [01:51:03] Speaker A: Yeah. He went here and he was like, I am going to be the one to bring the gospel to these people. And it goes a little bit into, like I told Keo as we were watching it, I was like, certainly he's going to have been inspired by Jim Elliott, who is like a hero that I learned about in my missions, classes at vanguard and stuff like that, who was killed as a missionary in Ecuador, I think, in the 1950s. And then his wife went back after he was killed and continued the missions and christianized these tribes down there. And then they flaunted them on television. They showed them cutting all their nasty native hair and putting them in conservative dresses and stuff like that. And like, look what we've done. We've turned them into white people, and they are heroes to christians. And what I wanted this documentary to do was to explore that. This is not one kid. This is evangelicalism. When I was growing up, DC talk, the biggest christian rock band, had a book out called Jesus Freak that was just about people who were martyred and songs about people who were martyred. And when you went to church, it was like, ultimately, that was like, people who died on missions were rock stars. [01:52:30] Speaker B: Right to heaven, mate. [01:52:31] Speaker A: Yeah, right. There was nothing to that cloud. Yeah. And it affected how christians went about their day to day lives, too. Like, when you went to school, you were on your mission field. Your school is your mission field. You go in there and you need to evangelize to your classmates. And if they persecute you for that, that's more little notches on your belt. Yeah. That is proof that you're doing God's work and Satan is trying to push back on you, but you're doing the right thing. The more persecuted you are, and the best kind of persecution is to die. And on top of this stuff, I think about, there were friends that I had when I was in college who have been missionaries in Tanzania for the past 15 years or so, and they're antivaxxers, and they're going there, and they are bringing that to people in areas that have rampant hiv, malaria, like, all kinds of stuff. And they're being like, oh, vaccines are of the devil, and things like that. And this was pointed out in the movie that it's like you're bringing superstition to people who are not superstitious. You're bringing all of your folk demons and stuff to people who aren't like this, and you're training them to be that. And they want your approval. They want the stuff that you give them. And so they end up going into all this kind of stuff, and it's super dangerous. And I wanted more of, like, this isn't just this small, quirky group. This is what evangelicalism is. This isn't a travel documentary. [01:54:04] Speaker B: Did he go there alone? [01:54:05] Speaker A: Yeah, he went alone. Yeah. Nobody would go. But there was a group that trained him, and they should have gone into that more. He went to a. That actually trained people to do this. And they give you like five minutes of watching them pretend to have spears and stuff like that and whatever. But this is what drives me crazy about, and the reviews of this are hilarious because multiple of them are like, this is the first time that I have seen a q and a with the filmmakers and rated a movie lower as a result, because these guys went in. And they were like, oh, we don't want to have an agenda. We just want to have an open mind about it. The facts just present what happened. And so it romanticizes this kid as like, an adventurer who was maybe a little misguided instead of part of a very dangerous, organized mainstream religion. The mission encourages this. Yeah, the mission. So I'm still waiting for someone to make a documentary that accurately talks about the dangers of evangelicalism and stops making it seem like, oh, here's a little sect that's bad here and a sect that's bad here. Instead of like, no, the whole thing's rotten. You got to talk about that fundamental, or you can't understand this kid. You don't know any more about this kid after watching this than you did before because it doesn't talk about how he got that way. [01:55:33] Speaker B: Makes me wonder about funding and about where the fuck, who made this piece? Who created this? [01:55:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, they're definitely not Christians for sure. It's not coming from that angle. And I think that's why it's so wishy washy, because I think that's the thing. I think former evangelicals would make a different movie. But secular people don't want to judge. So they come in and they're like, well, it's not my job to judge christian beliefs. I don't want to do that. I'm just going to talk about what happened here where it's like, no, you should. You can't take that detached, ethnographical look at this. So, yeah, I think it's clear that they are not Christians by how carefully they treated this subject. [01:56:30] Speaker B: Yeah, because that guy would not have made those decisions in a vacuum. You know what I mean? There's a support network behind that fucking awful decision. [01:56:39] Speaker A: And what's really fascinating is that his parents are not like that. They took him to church and stuff as a kid. They're Christians, but they're not Evangelicals. And they tried to talk him out of his evangelicalism. Basically, they wanted him to become like a doctor. His dad is so upset about what happened, and I think that's another fact. We're talking about a family losing their kid to evangelicalism. And that's not really approached in this. [01:57:08] Speaker B: Either and in a pretty fucking remarkable way. [01:57:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Like really losing their kid to evangelicalism in a violent way. [01:57:22] Speaker B: I'm going to have some of that. I'm going to actually watch that. It sounds right up my. [01:57:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Let me know what you think. It's interesting because I think maybe from like, if you don't have that perspective, it's maybe more effective than someone who's like, oh, they're just missing a huge part of this. But I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on what you take from it. And if you're like, no, it's clear or whatever compared to my take, yes. [01:57:50] Speaker B: I shall report back. Let me think some bits coming up on jog over the next couple of weeks. We've got to do a jo? Ag review of the year. I think when we look back over 2023 from a kind of a media point of view, I think this is going to be a banner year. I think there has been a lot of good shit this year. [01:58:09] Speaker A: Interesting because on dead and lovely a few weeks ago, they had kind of brought up that they were like, compared to last year, this wasn't really a huge year for horror. There weren't really a lot of big bangers or zeitgeist movies like there were last year, even the ones that I didn't like. But you had X and Pearl and Barbarian and all these big horror flicks that we didn't really get any of those this year. So it'll be interesting to look back and see if. [01:58:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm basing that look 2023. You had fall of the House of. [01:58:43] Speaker A: Usher, which I was about to say, which immediately makes it elevates it way the hell up there. So for sure there's that. But yeah, we will definitely. We're going to look back on the year. So you have that to look forward to. [01:58:57] Speaker B: I've got a list of bullet points here, just out of context. Jo? Ag notes bodily breakdown. Fuck does that mean? Okay, don't know. We're going to talk about it soon. Simply poisons. We'll talk about that. This will be interesting when I work out what we're going to be talking about. Deformed babies. [01:59:15] Speaker A: Oh, that's right. We did not even approach the deformed babies today. [01:59:20] Speaker B: So that's going to come forward, circle background, talk about deformed babies. I know that might seem like a. [01:59:25] Speaker A: Kind of a. Yeah, that sounds like we're being throwaway. [01:59:28] Speaker B: Jog topic. No, what you've got there is just a taster of the topic. We're going to talk about more to come. Let me see. Bodily breakdown. Don't know what that is. [01:59:37] Speaker A: I don't know. [01:59:37] Speaker B: Corey's car. We did that one good. [01:59:39] Speaker A: We did. [01:59:40] Speaker B: I want to talk about. Oh, man. Right. So obviously everybody knows I'm a gamer. Love the games. The games. I am in the first half of playing Alan Wake two right now and I'm still picking up bits of my skull from the wall around me. Right. That's how much this has blown my mind. It is fucking great. And it's made me dying to have the discussion about video games as an art form. [02:00:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's. That'll be a fun one. That's upcoming for sure. It was hilarious, by the way. This morning Mark sends me a text message says, are you busy? It's not. Not particularly. Get on PlayStation five right now and share my screen. You got to see this. The moment that party started, Mark was yelling in the thickest welsh accent I have ever heard you do sober. Just singing and yelling and telling me to look at this. It was incredible. It was great. It was amazing stuff. I've never seen anything like that in a video game before. But we'll do a let's play of some of that as well so people will be able to see that'll be coming this week and this week or next. Also, you're going to get a nice Christmas reading from Mark on the ko fi. So if you're a member of what. [02:01:07] Speaker B: Has now become a deeply valued and beloved Christmas tradition. [02:01:12] Speaker A: Yes. [02:01:12] Speaker B: It wouldn't be Christmas, would it? Without Mark. [02:01:14] Speaker A: Exactly. [02:01:15] Speaker B: Drinking fucking dead man fingers rum and reading something into a microphone. [02:01:20] Speaker A: So I'm going to be doing so very excited about that. You'll get a little what am I doing? [02:01:23] Speaker B: What am I reading? Do we know? [02:01:24] Speaker A: Not yet. All will be revealed and it'll be great. And if you are in our great bunch of lads tier, you will also be getting Christmas cards in the mail soon. So keep an eye out for that. Yes, anything else that they should do? Dearest Marco. [02:01:43] Speaker B: Well, just to that in a minute. But I will say as the year waxes and wanes and draws to a close, it's just lovely to be able to spend this time together, isn't it, Corrigan? [02:01:55] Speaker A: It really know after over three years it is no less fresh and exciting every time we do it. And I love this podcast. [02:02:06] Speaker B: Yes, as do I. And I hope you can find friends, some semblance, something in there to agree with. [02:02:12] Speaker A: Indeed. Oh and hey, the 2024 book club calendar is up. By the way. Why don't you make a resolution to be a part of the book club this coming year? It is a fantastic time. We have so many good books on the list that I'm stoked to read. So jackofallgraves.com book club, if you want to be a part of it completely free. Has nothing to do with our kofi or anything like that. The only fee is your company. [02:02:36] Speaker B: Yes, and it's. Now cut that out. I was going to say some shit. 2 hours, 255. [02:02:45] Speaker A: Just cut the end. [02:02:48] Speaker B: So there is a lot of wholesome fucking hearty joag coming your way. It's the shit you love to listen to. Wouldn't be a fucking week without a joag, as you know. And that's not going to change here. [02:03:02] Speaker A: Here. So until next week, when we come to you, right before Christmas, why don't you go ahead and stay spooky? [02:03:12] Speaker B: Festively spooky. [02:03:13] Speaker A: Ooh, festively spooky. Ho ho.