Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 172: The 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Starting point is 00:00:00 Alright, we good? Yes. I'm good, I'm good. Alright, let's do it. Yeah, yeah. Local's going, oh fuck me, dude, have you been recording this whole time? Yeah. We need to sync up, we need to sync up.

Starting point is 00:00:10 Oh, we do need to sync up. I'm sorry all those racial slurs were recorded. Someone once accused us of bleeping me because I said slurs, and I'm just like, no, it's usually death threats. It's usually death threats. It's usually death threats. In that situation, because we usually, what we're bleeping is like, you say something like, I think the CEO of UnitedHealthcare should be, and then a long beef, and what

Starting point is 00:00:34 you're saying in that situation is, a series of racial slurs, I guess? Right, yeah. I don't track that either. Grammatically, at least. Let alone politically. JUSTIN. Because, again, I mean, we'll talk about Mamma Mia. ALICE. We'll talk about it.

Starting point is 00:00:50 We will talk about it. JUSTIN. Mamma Mia 3. LIAM. Mamma Mia. JUSTIN. Mamma Mia 3, where the protagonist, Pierce Brosnan, of course, I've never seen Mamma Mia, I have no fuckin' idea, I just always have it.

Starting point is 00:01:00 ALICE. Yeah. I've seen Mamma Mia once, but I wasn't paying much attention. ALICE. I've seen Mamma Mia 2. JUSTIN. I think paying much attention. I've seen Mamma Mia too. I think I've seen it. I think you should do that for Kill James Bond, that sounds like hell. I'm unholstering my NKVD Commissar pistol to say, we do a sync point now. Okay.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Alright, three two one mark. Three, two, one, mark. Oh, I was way early, fuck my ass. ALICE It's fine, it's in the ballpark. It's in the ballpark. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, exactly. LIAM Well, when Devon comes to my house, and they're armed with two letter bombs, I'll get it.

Starting point is 00:01:35 Sorry, Dev. ALICE Here's my spare lesser bomb, in case the first lesser bomb doesn't work. JUSTIN Surely you would send the letter bomb in the mail as opposed to- ALICE Not the way Devon doesn't work. Surely you would send the letter bomb in the mail as opposed to... That's gone now, that's being primacized, you know. Not to my damage doing it. You can't even send letter bombs anymore because there's no postal service, you know.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Because of anti-woke. Another traditional craft gone in the face of capitalism. What would Uncle Teddy Kaczynski think of this? I'm not endorsing his methods. I sent my letter bomb by certified mail. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides.

Starting point is 00:02:20 I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson My pronouns are he him and death to Barney, which we'll get to We had and and and with us is our I don't know. I don't know what to call you man None of us know why I'm friend fine fine situationship I don't know what to call your man. NONE OF US KNOW WHAT I AM. FRIEND. FRIEND. FRIEND.

Starting point is 00:02:46 SITUATIONSHIP. Bringing our friend to Christmas, like your aunt and her roommate for the past 25 years. Yeah, yeah, where'd you do the cousin walk? This is the official podcast of the Cousin Walk, I think. I believe that. Yeah. Yeah, it's Cousin Gareth.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Cousin Gareth is here, and his pronouns, my pronouns, are he him. I do think that, my aunt, who I don't believe listens to the show and who I wish a very timely sh-. Um. Bleep that, please. My mom will get mad at me. Uh. Uh. She is openly gay. She's the worst woman in the world, my aunt is. And I applaud her for living her truth, but her truth is fucking miserable, dude. ALICE Suddenly fascinated about your beef with this

Starting point is 00:03:42 woman. If you didn't know anything about you, that would really sound like it was a specifically homophobic thing? No, no, no, it's just that she's mean to my mother. Oh, I see. And I love my mother very much, and anyone who crosses my mama is gonna get the blade. Yeah, I think that's right to say. That sounds about right.

Starting point is 00:04:05 So yes, go on. So what we see here was a cat in a hat. Ooh. Mm. But now he has been reduced to an ordinary cat. Without a hat. Reduced in status, shamed publicly. Shamed publicly, turned into an ordinary cat on some sort of weird Dr. Seuss motorcycle-type contraption.

Starting point is 00:04:27 ALICE critically, horizontal and not vertical. JUSTIN Yes. Yes. He has spun out, and lost his hat. And also, you will notice here, knocked over a street light. ALICE Oh yeah, there's some destruction. There's a wake of destruction going on here as well. ALICE Just lasering in on that and being like, this is a New York City streetlight, it's not supposed to look like this. RILEY This was originally entitled, That Time the

Starting point is 00:04:54 NYPD Killed Barney, but we're gonna actually expand it out to several incidents, most specifically at the 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but also the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in general. Hell yeah. I want to give many, many thanks to the people who maintain the impeccably detailed Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Wiki. Oh wow. It is a gold mine.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there, yeah. They apparently also do a podcast called Let's Pod Parade, where they do recaps of every year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Holy shit. I didn't know there was like a fandom for this stuff. Once I started reading the articles I was like, oh, you can really foam this. You can foam the balloons.

Starting point is 00:05:45 ALICE This is a foamable topic. JUSTIN This is a foamable topic, yeah. RILEY And my neurodiversity says yes to that. I'm now looking up whether you can find out technical details of these things, whether they find out what the thickness of the canvas is, and what technology they used to- ALICE Yeah, do you think that they're like sports boards where they're like, you're watching the Macy's Day Parade casually and they're

Starting point is 00:06:12 like, locked in? They're thinking about micron thicknesses of tarpaulin? JUSTIN Hasn't been good since the 1997 Pikachu. Take it back, take it back. These new balloons don't know how to play hard nosed parading. That was a real lunch pail Pikachu. 9 to 5. But first we have to do announcements, announcements, announcements, announcements, announcements, announcements. Um, okay, so, uh, the tour, it's still happening, the Northeast Corridor, um, the... Or the Six Days of Sodom tour on ice, sponsored by, uh, the hostage we have, Lin-Manuel- I can't

Starting point is 00:07:01 say that fucking either, can I? No, no, you can't say that we've taken Lin-Manuel Miranda hostage. Cause it's not true, crucially. It's not true, yeah. No, no, it's, again, I don't, you know. I can't fit him in my basement cause someone else put a nuclear weapon down there. It's not mine. Hold, hold this. Just like, oh, you're gonna have to share, sorry.

Starting point is 00:07:24 Roz shooting up the New Jersey droids to protect someone else's reactor. Oh, we didn't even put that in the news next time next time We'll talk about the drone. Yeah, it's on like a three-week delay. Anyway, shut there Yeah, I was about to say there's so much fucking news right now that you know, we can't cover everything I did see the Iranian mothership yesterday. It was big. It was white. It was round There was like a little bite taken out of it. It was big, it was white, it was round, there was like a little bite taken out of it, I was like, wow. ALICE It has been a... it's been a decade of weeks where decades have happened.

Starting point is 00:07:54 JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE So, our tour, next year, late April, early May. The April 29th show in New York, it's April 29th, right? I think so, yeah. That one still has seats available. The Washington DC tour is selling out quickly. The Fillmore even, in Philly, that one's also getting close to sold out, so buy those tickets. We are filling more quickly. Yeah. Like an over-energetic top. Yes, exactly. We are filling more quickly. Yeah. Like an over-energetic top. Yes, exactly.

Starting point is 00:08:25 We are, like, following the instructions written on the side of the building. Film more theatre. Yeah, film more seats. So go buy the tickets now. The link's in the description. As ever, when I say this, my presence physically is contingent on US Customs and Immigration Services, however, I am working on that and I hope to have a definitive answer soon.

Starting point is 00:08:49 I do want to say something that's very funny is that the Fillmore, when they have big touring acts, they close Richmond Street traffic to put the tour buses there. Well, we don't have many tour buses, or any tour buses really. We just have my wife's Toyota RAV4. We got this tour bus on discount from the Dave Matthews band. Oh, don't worry about what's happening in that toilet. We can get a private railroad car and put it down the trolley tracks there. I do want to see if they'll close the road for just my wife's car. I don't think they'll let me do that, but I think it would

Starting point is 00:09:26 be incredibly funny. ALICE It's like, have you seen that little, that photo of the tiny little dog that got onto the Pope's parade route one time on a trip and he thought it was for him? Yeah, that's gonna be like your wife's van. You know? RILEY The Rav4's internal persona will be like, skipping through like, like a cyclist way ahead of the peloton on the, when they cleared the road for the Tour de France. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:09:50 I love that. I also think you should get like a little aftermarket siren to put on the roof. Yeah, so when you're riding. That's probably legal. Yeah, yeah. As long as you pick a funky colour for it, you know, I don't know, go for like a beige or a tope. Ooh, flashing green lights or something.

Starting point is 00:10:06 I mean, what is more well there's your problem than a flashing yellow light on a RAV4? It implies vaguely engineering and urgency, which are two things that we are interested in. JUSTIN It's true, yeah. RILEY It's that, or an inflatable... we take the inflatable hat off the cat and pop that on the roof instead. It's like an ad hoc construction. JUSTIN We bring Milkshake to the show, yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:29 SEAN I don't think Milkshake would like meeting that many people. I'm afraid of how many people I'm gonna meet. JUSTIN No, Milkshake loves meeting people. That's his favorite thing. SEAN He loves chewing on their beards, he loves sitting on their heads. JUSTIN Oh yeah, absolutely. No, he loves sitting on their heads. Absolutely not, he's gonna scratch everyone. Just let the milkshake loose to terrorize the audience.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Let milkshake cook. Alright, what's our next announcement? A toy drive? Oh, yeah, that's me, right? Yes. So, I tweeted about it a couple of days ago. You hogs have outdone yourselves. I don't have an exact number. I did tweet the photo.

Starting point is 00:11:10 That is not all of the toys you filled. You blew by last year and last year was pretty impressive. So I am very grateful. By the time this goes out, our Christmas, which is our busiest season, will have concluded. Lutheran Settlement House can use your help all year long, though. We'll put a link to our Get Involved tab where if you are local to Philadelphia, you can volunteer. If you live in any other place that's not the perfect and wonderful city of Philadelphia, Mayor Sheryl Parker not included,

Starting point is 00:11:43 you can donate to us. We are always open to donations. We are always grateful for them. I have tweeted this number before, but the hogs have raised, I don't have the exact number in front of me, but since we started bullying them last year, something in the neighborhood of $28,000. That's pretty, be proud of yourselves folks. It's incredible. And that is money that is non-restricted. $5,000. Cool. That's pretty... Be proud of yourselves, folks. It's incredible. Yes.

Starting point is 00:12:06 And that is money that is non-restricted. Some of you have donated... I'm not going to call anyone out by name because I don't want to, for the sake of anonymity. I know at least one listener has donated $5,000. I know another has donated 10 to our shelter through becoming involved in this podcast. So well done, Hogs. Yeah, that's incredible. That's very good.

Starting point is 00:12:30 Yeah, just very grateful for you. Unironically, thank you, Hogs. Yes, thank you to the Hogs for doing lots of charity. Speaking of charity, another announcement here. A friend and multiple time guest of the podcast, Sean from the Antifada, suffered a series of small strokes during an emergency operation. He's going to be out of work for a while. I've at least texted with him. He seems like he's in good spirits.

Starting point is 00:13:02 You know, podcast brain comes for us all, apparently. And there is a, I believe it's called a Mealtrain setup for him and his wife. We will put the link to that in the description if you wanna donate either a meal or a gift card for DoorDash or Uber Eats, do the discourse somewhere else. But that is, you know, that is something that I think they would very much appreciate. Cause again, Sean's out of work for a while. So. And, oh, one very small announcement, which I've been told in the discord that I should be doing, and people have been shouting at me for not doing it, is upfront saying go buy my book if you want

Starting point is 00:13:47 to. It's a nice Christmas present. Well go buy the book. Go buy the book. How the Rails will Fix the Future. It's available in the US and Canada and the rest of the world. You can find it. We're on the third print run because it's been sold, it's been selling like hotcakes. So thank you to all of you who have bought it already. That's all. I'll keep it short. That's it. Thanks to all of you. I love you. I bought the book. I'm on page 20. It's very good. Oh, thanks for us. It's out there. I'll, I'll, I may have a chance to sign that in person at some

Starting point is 00:14:13 point in the next not so distant future. Who knows maybe. Let's hope so. I know we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll stop that. I will discuss that off camera. Yes. Well that's exciting. Anyway, yes. Announcements, announcements. Can you do me a solid, for the next announcements, can we put a deafening train horn blast in there? I don't know if we should do that. I think we should do that here, to wake them back up again.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Yeah. Oh, we do that, the big... SEAN You've slumped off and drooling in your chair, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, well you do the big K5 LA off the Assella, obviously. SEAN Oh, I have one joke to make before we continue. ALICE Oh, that's probably good, it's a comedy podcast. SEAN Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:58 It's a comedy podcast, we like that. SEAN I gotta wrap it. ALICE Yeah, that's it, yeah. SEAN A very serious podcast. SEAN Yeah, dude, and I'm being shelled, it's like work. So I was watching the Polar Express with my wife, because it is Christmas time. And she said, you know the annoying know-it-all kid who's like, you know what kind of train this is, this is a blah blah blah blah, it's a bald one, which it's not, it's a... whatever.

Starting point is 00:15:22 It's a Lima, it's not a bald one. He says it's a bald one, but it's a Lima. Kicking this kid out of foaming. Wait. Yes. My wife goes, my sweet wonderful wife, Rennie, goes, you know, I used to hate that kid, you know, when I was watching this movie as a child, and then I grew up and I married that kid, and now I'm married to that kid and that kid's best friend is also like that.

Starting point is 00:15:46 And I was like, yep, it's me and Roz, baby. Do the news. ALICE All right, it's time for the goddamn news. LIAM New mixer, it's a kind of a lucky dip here. F R U T L O O P E S ALICE That is a drop of a guy saying fruit loops from the film in order of disappearance, because of Kill James Bond. Thank you. At this time.

Starting point is 00:16:15 RILEY That's your job, Nova, is to have shit like that just all day. TROY Introduce chaos, yeah. ALICE Yeah, yeah. I like to think of myself as a kind of, like, confounding factor. TROY I also like to think of myself as a kind of, like, confounding factor. SEAN I also like to think of myself that way, and while Roz tries bravely to keep this narrative going, I just like derailing it. JUSTIN So, we have to talk, of course, about the man

Starting point is 00:16:36 of the hour. Luigi Mangione. ALICE I think that, uh... SEAN There's a non-zero chance this guy listens to all those problems and saw my tweet about kneeling the United Healthcare CEO over a ditch and then some guy got mad at me two years later because I thought it was funny that he got... ALICE How careful do you want me to be about what

Starting point is 00:16:56 I say about this? Because I've already said on Trash Future that I thought it was good that the guy he killed was killed, and that I don't think, like, this guy Luigi's Mansion did anything wrong, and that he should be freed immediately and awarded the keys to the city. Like, I think that's clear. JUSTIN I think Liam and I have discussed several times in the past, we both believe murder is basically morally neutral.

Starting point is 00:17:20 LIAM Yeah. Yeah. Cosigned, baby. ALICE Yeah. Cosigned, baby. ALICE Yeah. They're hitting him with terrorism charges, I guess. SEAN They are hitting him with terrorism charges, yeah. ALICE You can go into an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, kill nine people and try to instigate a race war. And yeah, I've seen the tweet about, well, actually, the feds got him, blah blah blah,

Starting point is 00:17:39 I don't give a shit, shut the fuck up. SEAN That guy got like Burger King after he was arrested, whereas this guy couldn't even get a McDonald's before he was arrested, without being betrayed by Pennsylvania, the Judas state, and like, arrested. You know, because somebody tipped off the cops that he was in a McDonald's. As the person in the leftist podcast sphere who has most recently been to Altoona, Pennsylvania, to my knowledge, if you were going to get turned in by a minimum wage worker, Altoona is the place it would happen. And McDonald's is the chain that it would be at.

Starting point is 00:18:26 Like, had this man gone across the street to his sheets, I believe they would still be looking for him today. He would be leaving more and more discarded jackets behind, and they would be tracing him across the country. JUSTIN More and more backpacks full of Monopoly money. ALICE I mean, listen, I know not everybody has to be on board with this kind of thing, right, if you're squeamish about that I'm not gonna hold it against you, right, if you wanna do the like, you know, hold hands and be like, why don't we just be friends, sure, right,

Starting point is 00:18:56 but for me personally, knowing a little bit, not even from personal experience, just from friends, from colleagues, from others, who like, knowing a little bit about the American health insurance industry, and about American capitalism generally, right? Seeing the CCTV footage, immaculate, seeing him evade the cops for like, a week with like, four pins in his fucking spine, also, very impressive. JUSTIN Never ditched the murder weapon. ALICE No, we were just walking around with a backpack, with the manifesto, in the backpack, with the murder weapon.

Starting point is 00:19:29 With the extremely cool murder weapon. JUSTIN I think he was trying to get caught at that point, he was like, what the fuck is going on, why haven't they caught me? SEAN I sort of, that's kind of my thought too. I will say as somebody who has dealt, who has dealt with UnitedHealthcare numerous times, yeah, I can't say I'm entirely sympathetic to Brian Thompson. He was a ghoul. And the other thing is my dad spent his legal career doing bankruptcy law, social security and disability law, and spent a lot of his time, especially in the pre-ACA days, arguing with judges over whether or not medical

Starting point is 00:20:15 debt was real. People go bankrupt over that. ALICE Yeah, routinely, and in a way that, like, nowhere else in the world. It's like... SEAN I think 64% of American bankruptcies are medical debt, but I could be wrong on that. It, the industry at this point, you know, now that people are living longer, now that you know, we have more effective treatments for cancer and heart disease and stuff like

Starting point is 00:20:37 that, but those treatments are very expensive, you know, we have better treatments for chronic disease, but those are also very expensive. More people are using more healthcare, and the health insurance industry is, like, I think at this point, inherently unsustainable, which is why the entire business model at this point is about denying care. ALICE We should look at some more industries that are unsustainable, and consider if there are ways to make executives not want to work in them anymore. ALICE Are you talking about, say, uh, the... ALICE Oh, you know, oil and gas.

Starting point is 00:21:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE Chiefly, but there's not a shortage, right? There's a lot of stuff to go around. There's a lot of verbs that begin with D, you know, it's fine. The thing is, right, and the thing that's been troubling me about this, the only thing that's been troubling me about this, is he wrote on the shell casings, like, deny,

Starting point is 00:21:32 defund, what the fuck was it? Defend, depose. Yeah, right. Which is, like, tactics that the insurance industry uses to avoid paying out claims. My question is, knowing that he had a magazine depth of like, y'know, seven rounds, did he write anything on the others? And they just were like, was he trying to make that point specifically? What would have happened if he had missed one and just hit him with the defend, y'know?

Starting point is 00:22:02 Yeah, actually, I would like to have known what was written on the other casings, yeah. You're just like really down into the dregs, you've got a dictionary open to DEE, and you're just like, what the fuck else did they do? You could do delay, that's another one. Destroy, I guess? That's pretty good. Destroy. Defenestrate.

Starting point is 00:22:23 Defenestrate! I feel like that doesn't hit unless you actively defenestrate the guy, right? I do like the idea of some bumbling New York City cop with his thumb up his ass being like, yo boss, this one says DEFENESTRAT. What's that mean? As Brian Thompson goes crashing through a window. Obviously it's a dude's name, you're looking for an Italian dude. As this was, Defenestrate.

Starting point is 00:22:48 Defenestrate, yes. Wow, this one says Fragile, that must be Italian. But yeah, so, no, I mean, the thing is, this guy's ideology, I was hoping for a while, while he was ahead of the cops, that he was gonna turn out to be the same kind of communist as I am. Right. And obviously that's never gonna happen. What's interesting about this guy is, in terms of radicalization, is that he seems like a completely normal, like, kind of, like, center-right bro type?

Starting point is 00:23:20 Who has- Yeah, he's like a business success guy, yeah. Based on his social media, he was like, you know. Little bit of like, Jordan Peterson maybe, but like, nothing even really extreme by today's standards, depressing as that is. Yeah, exactly. You know, the first thing I saw, oh, he made this post about trad architecture. And it's like, you know, after he does...

Starting point is 00:23:41 He put together the manifesto pretty good, because it's basically an elevator pitch. Maybe we need these business success guys to take on the mantle of radical politics, I suppose. You know? ALICE Yeah, I mean, I'll say this, they do a better job writing manifestos than your kinda like, Nazi type cranks, who always have like a kind of like, 80 page PDF with like, you know, sources to all their favorite columnists and shit, whereas this guy's just like, three

Starting point is 00:24:10 bullet points, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, it's like, well, three bullets. ALICE Yeah, that's what I was getting at. SEAN Yeah. Yeah. LIAM Guys like Steph fucking Curry out there, dude. ALICE Yeah. ALICE And, and, no collateral damage, as well. I mean, what else can you say? I feel like

Starting point is 00:24:29 this is... I mean, obviously the backlash to this is that CEOs are gonna invest even more in bodyguards and armored cars and shit like that, but there's nothing they weren't already doing. JUSTIN Yeah. Armored cars and tanks and guns. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN They might start in gun control. Yeah, I mean, possibly. I really think that the, like, the thing that-

Starting point is 00:24:52 He 3D printed this weapon, so that can't- that horse has left the barn. I think the thing that really struck me was the kind of... across the political spectrum from left to right there was a pretty broad lack of sympathy with the CEO. Because, like, almost everybody in the US has some experience with health insurance companies and it was always a negative one. Pure molten fucking evil. Because healthcare should be a right, it shouldn't be a commercial good and it shouldn't be something you have to insure.

Starting point is 00:25:27 Well, you know, we tried reforming it through the market, and we tried reforming it through the market, and we tried reforming it through the market, then there was this old Jewish guy who said maybe we should nationalize it, and he was beaten to a pulp, and then that happened a second time. And then we tried reforming it through the market, and then that happened a second time. And then we tried reforming it through the market, and that still didn't work. So here is a third route. ALICE Yeah, I mean, if you wanna take the kind of

Starting point is 00:25:53 lived position that what happened was bad, right, fine, but in that case you still have to concede that it's something that happened because every other safety valve was shut off. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah. This is the boiler explosion in process. ALICE I mean, one thing I will say is, because this is still, like, sub-unit, okay, I know you don't have laws like that in the US because

Starting point is 00:26:15 you don't care about trial processes, but like, we don't legally know that this is the guy, right? And I, for one, personally would like to say, I'm sure it's not. In fact, I'm pretty certain I saw this guy in the UK at the time of the killing, like thousands of miles away, and, you know, obviously no one personally, close friends, would never be involved in anything like this. And, you know, I just And you know, I think anything that we can do to just reinforce his innocence on a legal basis until the trial's concluded is to the good, you know? Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw- I don't even know if we've got a photo of this guy up here, you know, he's just some

Starting point is 00:26:58 guy- He's just a very handsome man. He's not even the same jacket, you know? Yeah. That's a point! Eyebrows completely different same jacket, you know? The eyebrows completely different. That's a good point! Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw him down at the Wawa on the day of, so yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think I saw him at 7-Eleven.

Starting point is 00:27:16 Just kind of taking the principle- This man goes to a lot of convenience stores. He's a fan. Just taking the logic of shoplifting a step further to say that if you see someone murder the CEO of a health insurance company, no you didn't. JUSTIN LAUGHS. ALICE This is gonna get us worse from the algorithm than the Aaron Bush guy. ALICE It's probably fine.

Starting point is 00:27:44 Listen, people have been waiting to hear about what we think about this, I think it's pretty obvious what we think about this, you know? I don't think anyone's gonna be surprised or scandalized, but like, I think we would be doing our listeners a disservice if we didn't lay cards on the table here about this being, like, good. Yeah, yeah, this is the reality of when,'know, this industry has been so out of control for so long and so directly damaging to people's lives. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:14 You have to make peaceful change impossible. And I've been quiet through this one, but the thing that I see is this is a bit of a canary in the coal mine. And we've talked about, you know, we've talked extensively in various places and lots of discussion about CEOs putting the barricades up even higher, but sorry guys, it won't work. But this is just a, this is a hint of what happens. Like given that liberal democracy is essentially failing as a process by which people are represented, this is kind of the, like the way to avoid this happening more is to make, is to actually start doing things as governments,

Starting point is 00:28:45 you know, making people's lives actually better rather than just, yeah, this is the inevitable outcome folks. So hi there all liberal politicians. If you want this to not happen, then maybe start doing some things that make individual people's lives better. Just a tip. Yes. Healthcare, housing, education, transportation. Transport. Yes. Ugh, if only. Yeah. In other news... Uh... There we go.

Starting point is 00:29:16 Speaking of bad things happening to bad people, um... It's Keir Starmer. Oh no, no it's not. It's anotherirste Dahmer, oh no, no it's not. It's another authoritarian leader... Why, you're gonna have to get your eyes checked, and guess who can check them for you? Yeah, no, it's another authoritarian leader, sort of widely despised by his population. Yeah, so it turns out that, like, invading Ukraine in a year plus three day special military operation really degrades your capacity to prop up your friends in the Middle East.

Starting point is 00:29:55 Which is something that Russia has just found out, Iran also is reeling from the strike on Hezbollah, and so consequently, this has led to the fall of Assad in Syria, which, good fucking riddance. ALICE Yeah, I'm glad I never- LIAM Yeah, wholeheartedly co-assigned. Fuck off. ALICE Glad I never volunteered an opinion on this before, because I probably would've gone with a stupid contrarian one.

Starting point is 00:30:19 ALICE Yeah, I mean, I did, back in the day, because I remember when a lot of the online left, and, y'know, fucking Charpo Trap House on down, was very much into the idea of, like, this is kind of like, okay, he's not great, but whatever you feel about him, y'know, it's like an anti-imperialist thing, and, y'know, what are you, a big fan of NATO? And it's like, no, if you look at the shit that this guy was doing, you know, it's like, the fact that he was doing it in a camp that is opposite to, like, you know, the US or the UK or whatever, doesn't mean it's a good or acceptable thing to be doing. When you're pulling people out of, like, torture prisons, you're like, well fuck this guy, you know? Like, I'm not gonna spend any time burnishing his

Starting point is 00:31:00 anti-imperialist credentials, because he doesn't fucking have any. ALICE And other people can be bad too. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there was a lot of, like, I remember a lot of jokes, I probably did a couple, about, like, you know, the white helmets or whatever the fuck else, because I was listening to Radio War Nerd, and convincing myself that Rania Karloik was like a worthwhile person to listen to on any of this shit. And I just, it's like, I think as, y'know, I'm deeply embarrassed by that now, and as time's gone on, I'm just kind of like, in this situation, where, as kind of skeptical as I am, I think for good reasons about the new guys who are in charge of HDS.

Starting point is 00:31:40 JUSTIN The new guys seem a little bit sketchy, yeah. SEAN Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN Yeah, especially since in the south the new guys are a little bit sketchy, yeah. Yeah. Especially since in the south the new guys are Israel, apparently. Yeah, Israel has like grabbed some more of Syria, Turkey is bombing the Kurds, it's like, it's a mess, but it's still all preferable to just Assadism forever, right, and that's something that's been sort of like an unresolved question for well over a decade at this point, because Assad's always kind of like, pitch to people was, I'm the guarantor of security and like, après moi, la déluge. And I hope that that's not the case,

Starting point is 00:32:18 you know, I hope that as chaotic as it is, as bad as it is, that I hope it doesn't get worse. But also, you know, that's the same doesn't get worse. But also, that's the same logic that every dictator's ever used, and it's not enough. There's a moment of change, a moment of potential escape trajectory, potential opportunity, potential hope. There are an awful lot of very happy people in Syria, in Damascus, there is a lot of very happy people people with this happening. And that stands for something, right? There's a moment that they can capture. I don't know. We wait and see. There was an immediate coziness with the West when it happened. But frankly, I

Starting point is 00:32:55 can kind of understand why. I can kind of understand that you're kind of like, well, you know, let's not burn all our bridges now. Let's, sorry. I don't know. I think this is one where, you know, what's a good idea for all of us here is to let Syria get on with it for a little bit and do our best not to fuck around with it. That feels from a geopolitics perspective, let's just keep, let's, yeah. Or actually what might be more helpful is to tell Turkey and Israel to do one. Yeah. I mean, it'd be nice to be able to, you know, tell Israel to do anything, but you know, well, quite, but y'know. Well quite.

Starting point is 00:33:25 Well again, it's more genocide. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it is sort of like, inadvertently, or like, y'know, another huge win for Israel, right, which has been continually rewarded for everything that it's done, including the genocide. Squeaky Wheel gets the grease. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:44 I look forward to them reaching the cliff edge, but it doesn't feel like it's coming anytime soon, and you know what, the way the world works, sometimes the bad guys never reach the cliff edge, and they're just fine. ALICE Yeah, I mean, even with Assad, right, he's like, out of Syria, but he's got asylum in Russia, so he's just gonna be like, chilling in Moscow. JUSTIN Right. No consequences. ALICE Even his kooky family members that he abandoned got out okay, so everyone seems to have got

Starting point is 00:34:10 out. Or was there some cousin or something that he doesn't like that escaped in a military helicopter? Oh god, probably, yeah. I think his brother's in Iraq right now, supposedly. It's a mess. He just walked out. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me a bit of the fall of Afghanistan, where all the ISAF-aligned

Starting point is 00:34:30 warlords were just fleeing the country, leaving convoys of trucks behind them, packed full of ill-gotten gains, y'know? I mean, listen, regardless of camp, regardless of political bloc, I'm never gonna be that sad to see people going through their former leaders, like, gold-plated study and tearing shit off the walls. Y'know? So yeah, we'll see. I would say...

Starting point is 00:34:56 We'll see what happens, yeah. Yeah, too early to say, I feel, y'know, as the line goes, condemned to hope. Right? Yeah, let's hope this is a nicer Al-Qaeda. Um. But, we saved the most important news for last. Of course. Alright, so it's the 2024 Hess truck. What do we think?

Starting point is 00:35:25 Go off, King. I like this. I like this. Yeah, it's much better than last year's, which if you remember was like a... The fascism mobile, yeah. It was the fascism mobile. It had like a heavily armored police car and a heavily armored truck to bring it around in.

Starting point is 00:35:40 This is, we have the fire truck. And we have the souped up Fire Chief car, and then- ALICE It's like a DeLorean Mustang, kind of, had a little baby there. I like that. That's very nice. SEAN This just screams, I didn't have to license this from Ford, shut up!

Starting point is 00:35:54 ALICE The truck in particular I like, is a kind of, it really, they've been reading, someone at HASS has been reading all those Yimby guy Twister threads that are like, American fire trucks are too big, we gotta have smaller ones like everyone else, because they've kind of compacted that bit. JUSTIN I think the car can fit in the back of the truck. SEAN I mean, that's usually how they do it, right? Yeah. ALICE Okay.

Starting point is 00:36:15 I mean... JUSTIN I don't know about the motorcycle, but apparently it has wheelie action. ALICE Wheelie action, so they can fully light it. This is sort of a full Italian job sort of arrangement going on here. SEAN So did you buy this Raz? No, no, I'm just reviewing the Hess truck. As we, for some reason we do every year. That's tradition, you know.

Starting point is 00:36:34 4599 plus tax suck my dick bro. Look the Hess truck is expanse, it's always been expensive. I know okay so the motorcycle does actually go in the truck on the side, you see that little- Does the rider come off as you just attach to the side of the thing? It's the door, yeah. Okay. Yes, it's the door.

Starting point is 00:36:53 I'm on the 60th anniversary page. Huh. Oh, yeah, I'm looking at it, this is apparently already sold out, otherwise I would have the various statistics about it. I think it's cool that it has 43 lights. It's a handsome red color, I will say that. Ooh, 43 lights. That's a lot of lights, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:12 How many lights? 43. 43 lights. That's just on the truck. I would've gone up to 60 for the 60th anniversary, but like, y'know. You add one light each year? Yeah. I mean, you start with like one beacon light and you just go from there, you know?

Starting point is 00:37:27 Well, I think the first HESS truck didn't have any lights at all. Well, no, it didn't. Starting from zero? The second one was a boat for some reason. Wow. It was the HESS Voyager, yeah. A boat? The truck of the seas?

Starting point is 00:37:41 Yeah. This is nothing. This is absolutely nothing. What I don't understand is why they stopped making, like, they just started making fire trucks? Well, when my parents used to buy me the Hess truck every year, it was like a tow truck, and then it was like, uh... I can't remember the rest, yeah, it was an ambulance.

Starting point is 00:38:01 It's like, this is the most... Mostly white and green as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying, dude. It's kind of like, this is the most respected genre of truck in America, because everybody that loves sci-fi is apart from those Yenby guys who are like, I wanna put them in a smaller truck and lay off half of them. So like, yeah, this is like, patriotic truck, y'know? They did do a dump truck in 2017.

Starting point is 00:38:26 ALICE Ooh. ALICE I feel like a dump truck is moderately patriotic, but like a fire truck is more patriotic than a dump truck. RILEY I do like the original like, like, Steven Spielberg jewel era like truck, that is quite nice. I am- ALICE Oh, like a tractor trailer? Yeah, okay. RILEY Yeah, yeah, truck, that is quite nice. I am... ALICE Oh, like a tractor trailer? Yeah, okay. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:47 Look at that! ALICE Oh yeah, the big Mack truck, yeah. LIAM Oh no, that's how Maximum Overdrive started! ALICE I mean, I do have a problem with this, in that, with delivery it is kind of normalizing a creeping fire privatization. This looks like the private fire brigade of H.A.S. Because of the branding, y'know, there's no municipal link there, you know? JUSTIN One of those private fire brigades that big chemical plants have, yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:11 ALICE Exactly, exactly. These guys are all wearing like six layers of hazmat suit in there. JUSTIN Yeah, these guys are about to go fight the nastiest fire you can imagine. ALICE Yeah, that's how they got the DeLorean Mustang for the chief, you know? Municipal fire departments, shit, I mean, they can the DeLorean Mustang for the chief, y'know. Municipal fire departments, shit, I mean, they can barely even pay people, most of them are volunteers, so, y'know. I will walk directly into the hydrogen fluoride cloud.

Starting point is 00:39:36 I'll do that. Doing sick burnouts in my DeLorean Mustang in a cloud of HF. I just melt my skeleton and falls out of the door of the car. When the smoke clears I'm just a thin soup in the bottom of the fucking mats. I should've said it to recirculate. No no! You think that's bad? The bike guy's having a worse time. Oh my god.

Starting point is 00:40:09 He's got an air tank on his back. That's true, that is true. But no visible hoses in it, just a regular bike helmet, so I don't think he's gonna have a bad time. I don't think he's doing alright. I'm just tracing down through years, so year of our birth, Nova, there appears to be like... 1990 motherfucking one. 1990 motherfucking one.

Starting point is 00:40:30 There appears to be a Lotus Elan as the accompanying vehicle with the S-truck. Ooh, so it is. Which is, that's... By the way, for anyone who doesn't know, Liam, without any words, Liam just very politely dropped in the link to all of the historic S- and all of us obviously opened it and have been tracing up and down while it's recording a podcast. There's just a little peek behind the curtain everyone there. Yeah, inside baseball which is just, Ross you didn't open the link did you?

Starting point is 00:40:55 No I did open the link. Oh good. Just now. Okay. Oh yeah, it's just on screen for everyone. I'm looking at all the Hess trucks. I thought it was a Hess Monster truck? JUSTIN We're never gonna get through this.

Starting point is 00:41:08 ALICE Oh man, it was a... I thought it was a Hess Space Shuttle truck. JUSTIN I know, I know, I think I had... No, wait, I had... The one I can remember having is 95... No, I had 99, I had the Space Shuttle truck. I had 95, and I didn't have 97 or 98, and I had 2001, I remember the helicopter. I like the Hess Chinook.

Starting point is 00:41:29 I like 1993, the Crown Vic type cop car. There was a Hess Winnebago in 1980. The 93 one, it's like a cop car but it still says Hess Gasoline on the side, and it's like, that kind of speaks to the like, you know the Bush era liberalism thing of being like, it's all about oil man, when you get pulled over for drunk driving? That fully hits that, it's like, yeah of course. I'm trying to figure out what Hess truck I had, it might have been the helicopter one in 95, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:42:02 Time is shit talking. I didn't have an F35. Time is shit talking the boat. But you know what? As someone who spent a lot of my time as a kid playing with LEGO and using the 2x4 blocks I had to create boats that famously aren't square, I actually am a big fan of the 1966 Tanker, I think that's actually very nice. Your modern LEGO boat uses a one piece molded plastic hull.

Starting point is 00:42:26 That is bullshit. That's absolute bullshit. How do you know how to make a nice hull when you kind of grid it? I've made some beautiful boats in my time. They like floated in the bathtub though. Yeah that's true, my wife did not float. And then you lost a bunch of pieces down the drain at the end of the day. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:42 You could still buy a Lego model of the endurance, right? Huh. I Still you could buy a Lego model of the endurance, right? Huh. I know that you could buy a Lego model of a Concorde. Funny story. I was in a stage, I was in the airport at Luton and I was going, you know what, when I get back on the flight back from Luton, I might buy the, I might buy this Concorde. And unfortunately in that, I was in Serbia seeing family. Unfortunately, that trip is when I was told I was suspended with pay,

Starting point is 00:43:06 and I decided that buying a Concord maybe wasn't a good use of my limited funds at that point. So I got two pieces of news. Look at this Concord! First piece of news is really good. We own this now. I am struggling through building 9-11. I know that that that sentence doesn't make sense, but I have a Lego 9-11. Not what the Twin Towers collapsing the car. I see. Right.

Starting point is 00:43:33 I was genuinely just bought. I bought the Lego 9-11. I think I pictured you just kind of like comes with the exclusive Mohammed, a minifigure. Just turning around to put another piece on my south tower diorama, it just like... RILEY It comes with a George W. Bush one too, and he sold him a little book upside down. ALICE It's like, opening the booklets and I'm like,

Starting point is 00:44:02 why are there a bunch of C4s in here? What are they? RILEY Okay, hogs. Get on my go ideas, make it happen. It's like opening the booklets and I'm like, why are there a bunch of C4s in here? What am I doing? Okay, hogs, get on LEGO Ideas, make it happen. I want that. How to get banned from LEGO Ideas in one easy step. These and other great Christmas gift ideas here are on Well There's Your Problem podcast. Ah, beautiful. Right, let's crack on. Let's Your Problem podcast. ALICE Ah, beautiful. Right, let's crack on.

Starting point is 00:44:27 JUSTIN Let's do the show, that was the goddamn news. ALICE 48 minutes in, baby! ALICE Oh, Christ, is it really? We'll cut most of it. JUSTIN Yep, I hope we won't. ALICE No we won't. ALICE I will say that we'll cut most of it, and that way people aren't allowed to get mad at me for it being long.

Starting point is 00:44:43 JUSTIN Oh, there you go. Alright, we have to ask a question, what is a parade? that will cut most of it and that way people aren't allowed to get mad at me for it being long. Oh there you go. Alright, we have to ask a question, what is a parade? Marching up and down the square. Yes. You're in high school, and you play the cymbals, and- It's in high school, and you've been invited to, like, guess in an okay go video. New York, Pennsylvania, Halloween parade, and then you, uh, you wanna kick yourself

Starting point is 00:45:03 the entire three and a half miles. It's fun, parades are fun. You make a whole bunch of nice uniforms and then you want to show them off. Mm-hmm. You can, other uses of parades, you can celebrate gay rights, for instance. Hells yeah. You could do like a carnival, you know, if you're in a kind of a place that does those. Like Mardi Gras?

Starting point is 00:45:25 JUSTIN You can celebrate the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism? ALICE Yep. As I do at every Mardi Gras. You could go, like... I'm on the, like, what's the fucking bullshit, like, NASBA, the American Communist Party? I'm on the American Communist Party Mardi Gras crew. JUSTIN The floats. the American Communist Party, and on the American Communist Party Mardi Gras crew. We've gotta float with the big polygonal Lincoln heads.

Starting point is 00:45:51 That would be so fucking grim. We're not throwing beads at anybody because that's bourgeois degeneracy. Exactly. You can parade four trains in the same direction, southwards on the East Coast Mainline, that one really rare time that I think I've shown in a picture on the Grey Heck episode, years ago. ALICE You can parade TGVs, as SNCF did. RILEY You can have TGVs, yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:18 ALICE Yes. RILEY You have a military parade, you bring a bunch of tanks out and destroy the pavement. ALICE Yeah, all the warheads on trucks the pavement. You can have an aircraft parade. You can do that. I actually walked out into one of those ones. I was in central London. I don't remember what it was.

Starting point is 00:46:32 I don't know, Queen's birthday or something? One of the Queen's birthdays that she used to have. Cause she had like three throughout the year and I never got which one was the real one. Yeah. And I was walking down central London, and got, like, a flypast got, like, overflown by a bunch of typhoons in F-35s, and I was just like, oh shit. So yeah, you can do that. You can do any number of things. You can have a marshal for a parade, which is when you give someone a sash, and they lead to the thing.

Starting point is 00:47:00 METE So what is the essence? You make a bunch of shit all go in the same direction. And that shit can be anything. It's there so you can show off your stuff and your guys. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just a fun activity. You have a victory parade, you can have a mummers parade, you can have all kinds of parades.

Starting point is 00:47:19 Mmhm. The word itself first attested, 1650s as a show of bravado. Oooh. Definitely got a show of bravado. Oh. Definitely got a lot of that. But in terms of what we now know as the Thanksgiving Day Parade, it started as a Christmas parade, at none other than Gimble's department store. We had our first dickheads. Yeah, Gimble Brothers department store in Philadelphia.

Starting point is 00:47:40 This is not the first department store, the first department store was Le Mans Marché, in Paris, in like, fucking... Yeah, but this was the first one with the parade. Okay, sure. Fine, Aristide Boussicaud did not have a parade. He did invent shopping though. Yeah, they did invent shopping. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:57 There's a very nice streetcar there that we're obviously not going to talk about at all, but I do however want to talk about, and I know we're about to, but it's on the screen and therefore appalling my eyes. What's this like carry on film motherfucker doing in the old timey car on two wheels? Cause top gear shit. I'll get to that in one second. Oh my God. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:17 Right. Everyone just hold, just get excited about that. Like edge of seat shit. What's going on? So in Philly we had at first the Gimbals Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1920. There were a bunch of marching bands, there were people doing stunts in the streets in little cars. There were horrible paper mache grotesques you can see down here.

Starting point is 00:48:33 They were horrible. Amazing performance right on Market Street. One of the funny things about this as far as I can tell from the photographs, they did not shut down the street for the parade. No barriers. Hey, I have another question. Wasn't this right in the middle of Spanish flu, too? 1920?

Starting point is 00:48:53 Probably, yeah. You can feel better about your, like, you know, polio by having your iron lung wheeled to do the no safety barriers, like, driving on two wheels bullshit, papier mache situation. ALICE Can you imagine being the guy just like, one, you're like in the Model T Ford behind that guy, just like a couple of car lengths, just in traffic. ALICE You're trying to get to work, you're just

Starting point is 00:49:17 like, for fuck's sake. JUSTIN Trying to dodge this guy and the streetcars. The finale of the parade involves Santa Claus climbing a fire department ladder truck directly to the eighth floor toy department of the department store. Okay, that's a pretty cool bet. I will. Yeah. And therein began the tradition of people climbing up poles in the street in Philadelphia. I think that started earlier.

Starting point is 00:49:43 Oh my god. Yeah, maybe it is. I don't know. I was trying to find a wiki for for the Thanksgiving Day parade, and I stumbled upon a future episode in addition to the future episode mentioned in the slide in which Cal and Stanford just killed each other. And 23 people died. Huh.

Starting point is 00:49:59 We're going to talk about that at some point. Yes. Continue. Now, this this department store is notable because it's the founder's son, Frederick A. Gimble, personally lobbied Congress to move Thanksgiving back a week to make more time for Christmas shopping. Yeah, I mean, the thing about Gimble is that he was really kind of a fixed point, a lot of other stuff kind of wobbled around him. Yes.

Starting point is 00:50:23 Um, you know, this, but the Thanksgiving Day Parade was one of the first attempts to do, wobbled around him. JUSTIN Yes. But Thanksgiving Day Parade was one of the first attempts to really, really encourage people to come buy toys at the department store. This is at 9th and Market, which is now the Disney Hole, which is a future episode. ALICE The what? I beg your pardon? JUSTIN The Disney Hole. ALICE The Disney Hole.

Starting point is 00:50:41 JUSTIN The Disney Hole. ALICE The Disney Hole. JUSTIN Don't explain! Don't explain! ALICE The Disney Hall. JUSTIN The Disney Hall. ALICE What? The Disney Hall. JUSTIN The Disney Hall. ALICE Don't explain, don't explain. ALICE I'm picturing like one half of the 9-11 memorial, but it's got like, instead of the fountain it's just got like a pair of Mickey Mouse's ears, just like, protruding. JUSTIN You're actually pretty close, but we'll get to that.

Starting point is 00:50:57 JUSTIN Aw, I was visualizing something scribbled on the inside of a cubicle. The Disney Hall, and then a pan-arrow to a hole. JUSTIN Yeah. The entire block of buildings here was demolished and later Disney came and were like, we're gonna do a new urban Disneyland experience, and then they dug out a foundation, and then they abandoned the site. And then someone filled it up with dirt, and put a parking lot on it. And the parking lot is just sinking now.

Starting point is 00:51:22 ALICE So, less the 9-11 memorial, more ground zero. Yes. Incredible. Heading towards ground minus one at this point, by the way. Why do they call it ground zero? It is clearly at a basement level, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So this is picked up by a few other department stores, most notably Macy's in New York City.

Starting point is 00:51:43 I've heard of them. Yeah, so in Macy's first, Marathon of Mirth, where floats based on nursery rhyme stories, the most elaborate of which featured Santa Claus riding his sleigh on a mountain of ice and snow. Filling the space between the floats were tumbling clowns, bareback riders, freaks, cowboys and girls, other merrymakers. Live animals from the Central Park Zoo were brought in to create an impromptu circus featuring lions, monkeys and camels. Walter F. Donner, a ringmaster turned assistant superintendent

Starting point is 00:52:20 of delivery at Macy's, organized a circus division of the parade that included 35 clowns refereeing a wrestling match between two grizzly bears in an open cage. ALICE You're just being... you are John Macy, or whoever the fuck, and you just handed a telegram that just says, grizzly bear has eaten cowgirl? JUSTIN LAUGHS. ALICE I was like, ah. Accept acceptable losses. ALICE LAUGHS.

Starting point is 00:52:46 When you said cowboys and girls I was like, cowboys? And girls? As in, they just had girls? Just like, girls and cowboys? No one's ever gotten a girl before. Yeah. Just like, check this shit out, women. Women.

Starting point is 00:52:58 Wow. I'm a little depressed by the inclusion of the freaks as well. Like... Yeah. You mean us? Thataks as well. Like... Yeah. You mean us? I guess so. Just the podcast float and the Macy's Day parade. Which is what, it's just all three of us, like astronauts in the back of a limo getting

Starting point is 00:53:14 a ticker tape parade but just waving. That was direct from Thanksgiving Day parade. I would hate to get a ticker tape parade, right, because you're never getting that shit out of your clothes or hair. Yes. Like, you know, I don't care if I've been to the moon, like, why would you want me to do that? Just dump a bunch of shit on me, like a bunch of shit paper, it's like, thanks, cheers,

Starting point is 00:53:37 thank you. Hooray. This started at 145th Street in Contenadno. Traditional New York celebration where we dump a bunch of office garbage on you. Shredded up inside the window. And in their culture it's a side of great art. It's like that was a pack of staples, dude. Just throwing staplers at you from the 60th floor.

Starting point is 00:53:59 Yet another way in which New York copies us. We did it first. Tossing a box of batteries out, whole reams of printer paper. Just? Just building a clock. Just like G. Lump's drawing in the side of the head with a triple A battery. Throw an office chair, throw a desk. You'll see a fax machine go down and you're like, well, I guess there's not going to be an Apollo 14.

Starting point is 00:54:27 Big reel to reel computer bank. Oh no. At like 3 million dollar 3 megabyte hard drive the size of a fucking storage closet. 20 pound mechanical adding machine. Whoosh. 20 pound mechanical adding machine. Whoops. One of the girls who does the spreadsheets, you just throw her out. Back to defanastration again. Yeah. Oh yeah, well yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:58 So this parade started at 145th Street in Convent Avenue in Harlem and it ended six miles later at the Macy's Herald Square store. There were float spans and borrowed zoo animals, concluding with, as always, Santa Claus. A quarter of a million people turned out to watch the parade because it was 1924 and no one had social media yet. S- Yeah, that's fuck all to do, that's it. A million thrills, a million laughs, a million thrills, uh, but...

Starting point is 00:55:25 Was 1924 still prohibition times? Because that would explain a few things. Yes. Also, everyone was sober, oh my god. No, everyone was drunk, but they had to lie about it. And drunk off of the most illicit, sawdust-filled grain alcohol. It was definitely a riot. Strong chance of blindness. Yeah, that's what it's a void to have, like, lemon peels and shit, and you're just like...

Starting point is 00:55:51 Yeah, it's bright! This was, this actually wound up replacing the previous festivities, which was the Ragamuffin Parade, where kids trick-or-treated dressed as beggars, that became very unpopular during the Depression, so people, you know, went to watch it. ALICE Still staging it during the Depression, and you're like, listen, listen, I know it's sensitive, right, but like, it's an old tradition, it's fine, and you just have a bunch of kids dressed like Charlie Chaplin. SEAN Another of your DEI, uh, walkthrough parade. Uh, you can't even...

Starting point is 00:56:26 These days you can't even dress as Charlie Chaplin's beloved tramp character, merely because people are starving. This route was later shortened to 110th and Amsterdam Avenue in the 30s for reasons we'll get into. After World War II when the parade was suspended for wartime material rationing, it was shortened to 77th and Central Park West, which is sort of- See the Mahuhu? What the fuck is a Mahuhu?

Starting point is 00:56:50 I was asking that, yeah. Yeah, I'm just reading through- You're gonna have to go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to see the Mahuhu, cause I don't know what it is. I know a wiki that might answer that question. Parade foamomas? No. Like, if you are a Parade Foma, like, first of all, thank you for your service, second of all, what the fuck is a Mahuhu?

Starting point is 00:57:12 Alright, we gotta know what the Mahuhu is. Answer in the comments, folks. I'm gonna look into this very strongly in my own time. So here's a guy. A Rhinoceros? Yeah. The Mahuhu's a guy. A rhinoceros? Yeah. The Mahuhu's a rhinoceros. I gotta tell ya, the guy, the balloon top right feels like it's targeting...

Starting point is 00:57:35 Oh god. Oh god. I just realized. Yeah, oh dear. It does, I know it's not all about me, but that just feels like, y'know, I dunno. Eugh. Pro-matic. Pro-matic. know it's not all about me, but that just feels like, y'know, I dunno. Ehhh. Prolmatic.

Starting point is 00:57:47 Prolmatic. Yeah. I like magazines' main things that that's representing at the time. Can I say one thing, which is that this is reflective of a time before Mickey Mouse dominance, when the most recognizable cartoon character to Americans was Felix the Cat. Someone no one has ever thought about since. I do like that this guy is basically, oh god, who is the doctor that the Mossad kidnapped?

Starting point is 00:58:16 Oh god, um, Eichmann. Eichmann. I didn't go to Adolf Eichmann when you said doctor is the problem. I got him confused with Mengele, so I merged. He was a doctor, I think, but like, chiefly known for other work. Right, right, of course. I'm seeing Born in Guatemala family moved back to Germany, and I'm just thinking, ah, he reversed Eichmann himself, which may explain the top-rate balloon. Tony Sard was born in Guatemala in 1880. His family moved back to Germany in 1887.

Starting point is 00:58:51 He went to a military academy commissioned in as a lieutenant. And because he possessed charisma and a sense of humor, makes a terrible lieutenant. Yeah. He was the center of attention at parties. He was a well- known practical joker, generally an all around good guy, he was extremely unpopular in the German officer corps. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at him right now and he doesn't have a bunch of fucking fencing scars. I'm sorry, I said that he was a reverse Eichmann, my bad. Wouldn't it be a better thing to be a reverse Eichmann?

Starting point is 00:59:22 Yeah, yeah. If he had to be an Eichmann in either direction, presumably reverse would be the less evil one. So he resigned his commission and moved to the UK in 1905, he married Bertha Eleanor McGowan of Cincinnati in 1909, he moved to Cincinnati in 1914, presumably in anticipation of the subway, but then the war broke out. So he finally wound up in New York City in 1915. Sarg had inherited a whole bunch of puppets from his grandparents, and thus developed

Starting point is 00:59:56 the fascination with puppetry. ALICE Just, anti-Semitic puppets. Just like, yeah. Just like, sorry we're dead, please take good care of our collection of racist puppets. This feels like I know that you get some some I hate to single out my mother here who can sometimes look like what a Nazi character of a Jewish person looks like and I love my mother. This is this balloon is pushing it.

Starting point is 01:00:23 He learned from the best in Britain. Sort of studied their means of puppetry. The best anti-Semitism in Britain. Yeah, well, you know. Someone's got to think. We rounded up the Jews and put them in a castle and burned the castle down, so we know what we're doing in this country. Yeah, this is the worst of the worst.

Starting point is 01:00:41 Learn it here. What a place. The Germans hadn't perfected anti-Semitism yet. No, that was still the domain of the French, learn it here. What a place. The Germans hadn't perfected anti-Semitism yet. That was still the domain of the French, I think. I think so, yeah. So it's like the presidency of the UN Security Council that rotates between countries, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:58 He was commissioned to make a star front display in 1917, and continued to have a working relationship with Macy's after that fact. And Macy's started to have a problem with their parade. The zoo animals got really tired in ornery on their six mile death march, and that meant they started scaring the kids. ALICE Yeah, they were eating cowgirls for sustenance, but like, you're marching them from Harlem to like, lower Manhattan, and y'know, the streets are terrible, they're constantly getting staplers thrown at them, you're calling them

Starting point is 01:01:31 shit like mahoohoo's, you can't work under these conditions. Yeah. You've got like, paperweights, papers, filing cabinets... Hitting a rhinoceros with a filing cabinet feels like an uneven fight against the filing cabinet. There's not many things you can say that for. My favorite thing about hippopotami is that they're herbivores and they kill you basically for fun. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:59 Just like, alright, that's enough of this human, I'm no longer sick of this guy. Shit. JUSTIN The thing about him being the most dangerous animal in the continent of Africa is apparently true, it's not a fake thing, it is a thing. Oh yeah, they'll charge you. Yeah, they'll just murder you for no reason. He slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch a face of God but it's just an eight year old getting gored to death by a hippo.

Starting point is 01:02:21 Dropping a filing cabinet vertically and it getting impaled on a rhinoceros horn? It's like... JUSTIN These things have been walking for like, hours. They're grouchy, they're angry, they're pissed off. At that point, if I'm already a murder herbivore, then I'm being a grouchy murder herbivore. I was trying to go there and then realized I just didn't have the chops. I didn't have the chops. Charged the fucking crowd, yeah. Oh, fucking rules, yes.

Starting point is 01:02:49 Oh first you get poked by the anti-Semitic Hitler balloon and then you get bored by a rhino. Oh, the anti-Semitic balloon replaced the animals. It's called harm reduction. ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE,

Starting point is 01:03:09 ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, ALICE, AL're gonna do really big puppets, and that gave us the character balloon. Here's one of the first ones, it's Felix the Cat. ALICE I like Felix the Cat. I'm a fan, and I feel like he's been unfairly marginalized by Disney, y'know? Like, who even owns Felix the Cat? Nobody, I think, is public domain.

Starting point is 01:03:44 JUSTIN Yeah, he was not a Disney property to start out with. I don't know if he was ever a Disney property. ALICE No. He was just like, a cat. JUSTIN We live in our mostly unproblematic fave. Shout out to Felix the Cat. JUSTIN So he put together some massive balloons. Some of these, the original ones were very small because they were filled with oxygen, but once they figured out, oh, you could fill together some massive balloons. Some of these, the original ones were very small, because they were filled with oxygen, but once they figured out, oh, you could fill it with helium, they got really really big.

Starting point is 01:04:11 ALICE Yeah. ALICE Fill these balloons with oxygen, and everyone smokes, that feels interesting. ALICE Weirdly, uh, Felix the Cat was sold to DreamWorks in 2014, but the early versions, like this one here, are public domain, so we can make this guy right here the official mascot cartoon character of Well There's Your Problem. Oh hell yeah. Nice. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:04:35 So, these were massive balloons, the original ones again, filled with oxygen, later they were filled with helium, some of them were 120 feet long, some of them were 25 feet high, so on and so forth. These were all built by the Goodyear Rubber Company. Of course they were. And they were... Shout out to Mia Mulder. Mmm. The gummi.

Starting point is 01:04:55 Stop it. I said stop it. This was an instant and great success. You know, 1929... 1928 Parade was the first one where they used helium balloons, we have some illustrations by the man himself. Gigantic helium balloon that just says the stock market's gonna go up forever. Just a stonks guy, but 1928?

Starting point is 01:05:19 The hubris parade. Yeah. You're in Wall Street, you see the massive stonks guy go past your window of death, and you're just like, feeling good about the American century. JUSTIN Wait, why are 50% of the animals that look sad that have got a star, a red star attached? What? ALICE Oh, good question.

Starting point is 01:05:42 That's probably the Macy's star. RILEY Oh, okay, okay. I was looking at the baby on the third of this kind of thing and I was thinking... ALICE It's like a little target marker, it's unsettling, yeah. RILEY Yeah, well, also they've got the stretchy dog from Toy Story in the one before, so that's some Pixar foreshadowing. ALICE No, that's Valdi, the mascot of the 1972 Munich Olympics. RILEY Oh golly, I mean there's a lot going on there,

Starting point is 01:06:08 there's a train, you know? I'm not liking the character, there's a lot of pointy nose characters that, rightly I believe Liam is looking at once again. ALICE And clearly they have the technology to do other shapes of nose, as you can see from... RILEY Nope, they will do every human they represent, other than Santa Claus, with the strange... Oh my god.

Starting point is 01:06:31 ALICE Anti-Semitic Santa Claus is like a weirdly specific... RILEY Here are some of the very early balloons in an airship hanger, cause they've made them out of the same stuff. ALICE They just be drawing, they just be illustrating everything like that, man. ALICE That's so funny. I'm stuck on Guy being anti-Semitic to Santa Claus, to be like, oh, he controls the supply of all the presents in the world. ALICE Why, why are all, why, everything looks, they've all got those eyes, everything's looking like that.

Starting point is 01:07:13 ALICE It's terrifying. Listen, if you were an animator, or artist, or whatever, in like the 1920s, and you drew an eye that didn't look like Pac-Man, they killed you. LIAM Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. It were immediately dead. It was the style at the time. The massive bags under the pig's eyes as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:33 You know, he's got a severe addiction. And all the animation at the time was when they didn't have elbows and knees, so they'd just flop around. I'm thinking of Olive from Popeye, and just like, how did she move, like, just kind of flopped about the place. Same deal. ALICE I've depicted you as the scandalized Macy balloon, and myself as the smug pig balloon. JUSTIN Oh my god.

Starting point is 01:07:55 LIAM Here's Sarg blowing up the elephant himself. JUSTIN That's not where you blow, mate. ALICE The quality of the rubber on these is so upsetting as well. That's not where you blow, mate. Here, down here is the, uh... The quality of the rubber on these is so upsetting as well. Like, I don't know if it's just that I haven't seen a modern one up close, but like, this is... Look at Mickey Mouse's dead soulless eyes. Oh my fucking god!

Starting point is 01:08:17 This is the first Mickey Mouse in the parade. Um. Wow. I, what the fuck is the thing on the top right? That's Godzilla. No, Sarg did this as a practical joke. Which is, he inflated it on the beach in Nantucket and told everyone there was a horrible sea monster on the beach.

Starting point is 01:08:37 Everyone was blind drunk on pure alcohol, so they believed him, presumably. Yeah. You're in fucking like, season three of Boardwalk Empire. You like leave your like speakeasy for the seeing daylight for the first time in three weeks and you see this thing floating down the beach. And then later it was in the parade. Just like we owned the rubes of Nantucket floating on a banner underneath it. RILEY Just like, Eldritch horror stuff.

Starting point is 01:09:13 Everyone immediately got like, absolutely... Oh, I suppose everyone was just seeing people getting smeared across the road every couple of hours, so maybe they were just kind of ineligible and stuff. But like, this is like, nightmare shit. ALICE Well, I mean, this is Prime Lovecraft times, so it's like, this is like, nightmare shit. This is stuff that... Well, I mean, this is prime Lovecraft times, so it's like, this isn't horror, horror is when someone is like, y'know, mixed race. Yes.

Starting point is 01:09:34 Yeah. Yeah. This makes Lovecraft look like the Reverend Audrey. And so, in the early days, at the end of the parade, when they reached the Herald Square store here, they would simply release the balloons. Oh, hell yeah. That's God's problem now. And he's gonna meet Mickey Mouse and a fucking sea monster.

Starting point is 01:10:00 Yeah. 1928, immediately after the Stonks guy goes up to heaven, they release the sea monster in a kind of tribute to American hubris, to find and kill gods. So yeah, when the parade reached the Herald Square store, the balloons were simply released with a $50 reward for anyone who subsequently found them and brought them back. This led to all sorts of problems, right? First, people would try and bring back random pieces of rubber and say, this is part of the balloon, give me a partial reward. Incredible.

Starting point is 01:10:41 Absolutely incredible work. The second problem was daredevils. What? JUSTIN Clarence Chamberlain caught a balloon with his plane in 1931 in a stunt. ALICE Oh my god, that's so sick. You would never talk about anything else. DARREN No! No you wouldn't!

Starting point is 01:10:56 ALICE Like, I flew up in a fucking biplane and like, clotheslined the sea monster. JUSTIN Yeah, I fucking took out Pikachu. ALL LAUGHING. ALICE F. 35 pilot painting little Pikachu. Like, I don't know if I'm an F22 pilot, because like, there's the Iacombe that killed Pikachu. JUSTIN Fucking smoked Garfield. ALICE There is no reason the Chinese spy balloon couldn't have been in Garfield form. Other than copyright, I guess. Yeah, the Chinese don't recognize that.

Starting point is 01:11:33 Maybe they do. You're working with no air force base, you look up, isn't it Garfield? Is that Garfield up there? By God, is that Garfield's music? In 19- Just like a Garfield trailed sensor array of cameras and shit. In 1932, the next year, a more novice daredevil attempted the same, to catch a balloon with her plane, stalled, plummeted out of the air, nearly crashed, managed to pull out of it

Starting point is 01:12:13 in the last second. And that was... ALICE And that was an hour for women's equality in the early days, you know? JUSTIN Well, you know, you needed, you know, we let women fly planes, but we don't let them vote. ALICE Make it make sense! SEAN Yeah, exactly. That ended the practice of releasing the balloons, they were simply deflated from then on. ALICE Just like, we ritually kill Felix the Cat at

Starting point is 01:12:35 the entrance to Macy's, his blood sacrifice, like, renews the Macy's toy department's success for another year. SEAN Yes! I am hoping that this black and white image is just misrepresenting the colors of the balloons, because otherwise an awful lot of them look a bit like gollywog caricatures. As far as racist balloons go, I will say, the United Kingdom, the only country I believe to have produced a gollywog hot air balloon, still exists.

Starting point is 01:13:06 And I, like, imagine seeing that come over the fucking horizon, and realizing the nature of the country you're in. JUSTIN These were mostly very very colorful. ALICE Oh, I bet they were! In ways that are unspeakably offensive. I mean, listen, I don't mind the Jew balloon, the Bajoon, but I think they should do it in my image. If we have any friends or listeners in charge of the balloons at Macy's, let us know what

Starting point is 01:13:39 an estimate is on getting myself into a balloon. We've got Pikachu, we've got the house from up, we've got Liam from Well There's Your Problem. JUSTIN No, it's at the Philadelphia Zoo, the 6ABC Jew Balloon. ALICE Which is my face projected onto it. Yeah, get at me Rick Williams. Back when I worked at the zoo, I asked the director engineering there, what happens if they lost control of the zoo balloon?

Starting point is 01:14:17 What if it got loose and he didn't have an answer? Oh, we're gonna test their metal here. Well, there's no zoo balloon anymore. They got rid of the zoo balloon No, it's still there. She's gone for the season, dude Six ABC was on like six six six six ABC was on it like three weeks ago Not three weeks ago, but like a couple months ago. They shot Adam Joseph there today I should I should clarify I Shoot the weatherman with a gun

Starting point is 01:14:43 He was just he they were shooting a segment and he was on it in the hot air balloon. JUSTIN Oh. So there's a balloon at the Philadelphia Zoo you can go up in, it's called the Zoo Balloon. And it was gone for a while, but apparently it's back. It's tethered to the ground, you go up like five, six hundred feet, and then come back down. I don't know what happens if they lose control of it.

Starting point is 01:15:03 ALICE It's the like, balloon boy problem, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. Well, I would just keep going up. ALICE Forever. So, I wanna- JUSTIN I wanna eat the sea monster. ALICE Yeah. ALICE I wanna derail this podcast even further. Because this is already probably the best episode we've ever done, frankly.

Starting point is 01:15:24 We're gonna have to pack it up after this but we have a listener who emails us occasionally Who is as far as as far as I know? Yeah fucking people She is from what she said in her emails a retired lawyer in her late 50s early 60s so she's like a peer of my parents and she she she us an email that was like, this is my feedback on the last Fort Pendleton and SS Mercer disaster. She was like, oh, it was like a little too masculine for my taste. And it was a good honest feedback. Wow.

Starting point is 01:15:57 Okay. Sorry. I'm trying. Okay. Hang on. Well, I think it's actually Tom's fault. But she, I responded to her email, because it was good, honest feedback, and she's like, I didn't understand all the Philadelphia references, and to you Mary Sue, I can only apologize,

Starting point is 01:16:16 and also I'm doubling down on the Philadelphia references. Okay. Yeah, next bonus episode after Catholicism is the cheesesteak. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Hell yeah. JUSTIN Anyway. So yeah. They stopped releasing the balloons is the point of this. ALICE And instead started sacrificing them to...

Starting point is 01:16:35 SEAN Ritualistically, yeah. Have you played the Tomb Raider reboot? It's just like that. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. Great games. JUSTIN So, for most of its history, the parade has gone from 77th and Central Park West, that's over here, by the way, um, uh, wait a second, no, that's wrong.

Starting point is 01:16:53 How do I do it? By the Historical Society, right? Because that's 79th. By natural history, so. 77th is like, up here. Yeah. North is that way. Yeah, north is that way. Yeah north is north. Yeah Yeah, yeah, so I come bud

Starting point is 01:17:09 77th and Central Park West over here by the Natural History Museum is where it starts It goes south down Central Park West it goes to Columbus Circle here Which is a nasty part of the parade because there's high winds It used to go down Broadway over to God's own worst place in the world, Herald Square, where Macy's is down here. ALICE Unspeakable evil. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, dude. JUSTIN Yeah, I would say the worst... ALICE Between Herald and Dimes, and Times, for that matter, I'm not hearing anything

Starting point is 01:17:40 good about squares in New York City. JUSTIN Yeah, no, you know, you go... ALICE You're gonna feel foolish when we play New York, a block off of Times Square. And Mayor Julianas has us secretly killed. But yeah, this is about two and a quarter miles, right? Today, since Broadway was pedestrianized, I believe they jog over two blocks, and they go down sixth, I think? They might go down seventh, I'm not sure.

Starting point is 01:18:06 But again, over here, Columbus Circle, very high winds, over here, Times Square, also problem with high winds. ALICE I don't like stuff being named after Columbus, you know, I think they should be named after another great Italian-American, it's, you know, Manjone square. Or Manjone circle. Yes. Go more back in! Luigi Manjone.

Starting point is 01:18:33 So because of these high winds, because of various things, these balloons, they have problems. Oh dear. Ooh. Almost hitting a perfect Trump cadence, just on those balloons, they have some problems. JUSTIN That's a problem. ALICE Okay, and we're gonna look into it. JUSTIN Yeah, we're gonna look into it.

Starting point is 01:18:50 SEAN I love this one. The terrible Turk, hit an electric sign on 72nd street and tore in half. The terrible Turk, lusts at his heart for a Chevrolet. JUSTIN Yes. 1931 down here, the terrible Turk, hit an electric sign at 72nd street, he tore in half. 19- ALICE Hold on, hold on a sec. The terrible Turk?

Starting point is 01:19:10 With the Fez? With the Fez, yeah. ALICE Yeah, turning one, man! ALICE And the Mastodon! What the fuck? I know, I know, I know. We do races really good in America. ALICE You know, maybe Eric Adams was just doing, like like New York City municipal reparations in his

Starting point is 01:19:25 own way, you know, like, granting him those contracts and stuff. JUSTIN Same year, 1931, the cat that's here... ALICE Just the cat? JUSTIN The cat. Hit a telephone pole, caught fire, and burned to the ground. ALICE That's a cat? No! That's not a cat!

Starting point is 01:19:42 ALICE It looks like. JUSTIN Can you imagine being an eight year old and watching this happen before your eyes? She was up in flames like the fucking Hindenburg. Oh, the felinity. 1932, the Tomcat here is released at Herald Square, and that woman tries to catch it with her airplane and almost crashes. Yep, yep, yep. Wait, so it wasn't even like a planned thing? And, uh, that woman tries to catch it with her airplane and almost crashes. Yep. Yep.

Starting point is 01:20:05 Yep. Yep. Yep. Wait, so it wasn't even, like, a planned thing? She was just, she was trying to, like, do, like, an emergency balloon rescue in midair with a plane? Uh, I think it was planned. Oh my god.

Starting point is 01:20:17 I mean, she knew when the parade was happening and there was a reward for doing it. Again. Try not to, uh... Taken out your light aircraft for a fifty dollar reward. Do not Zacharias Musawi the fucking Thanksgiving Day Parade. Like, leaning over to President McKinley and being like, they hit the fucking Flatiron Building. Neither of those things chronologically related at all.

Starting point is 01:20:42 Like, a hundred years off. JUSTIN 1933. Andy the Alligator was torn in half at 70th Street. ALICE Again, the sort of blood sacrifices that renew the kind of, like, parapsychological thing of the city of New York. Also, why does it look like he's being walked by Klansmen? ALICE He probably is. Right.

Starting point is 01:21:07 It wasn't political back then. ALICE It's 1933, like, yeah, he's probably being walked by the clan. ALICE Actually, I bet it's linguistically close, I bet those are clowns, cause pointy hat, white suits, I'm not thinking that's like a, what do you call that kind of clown, it's not a harlequin, the other kind. The Italians still have it. Yeah, Piero. The kind of, yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:31 That kind of clown. Yeah. I'm noticing, brief pause before we talk about, before bad things happen to mouse. I quite like that Chevrolet advert, and Liam, I think it's aiming at you. Sweet smooth sassy. Oh yeah. That's me. That's me.

Starting point is 01:21:48 With this, whatever the hell has happened to this... Oh god. I don't even know what that character is. That's quite profound, actually. It's like the dying goal. It's like, wow. 1956, Mighty Mouse deflates and collapses. Oh, that's the Mighty Mouse. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 01:22:06 Okay, with his one eye. Mike Wazowski eye. He slipped the- did not slip the surly bonser, they're actually quite the opposite. It's just like, this is a photo that conveys how can a loving god know such agony. Like, it's wild, you know? It looks like something out of the original film of Little Shop of Horrors, it's quite frightening. Smooth sassu- this is one of the greatest photos I've ever seen.

Starting point is 01:22:30 Like, no question. The 20th century represented in one image. This is the American condition, kind of. 1957. Popeye's hat fills with water during a downpour. The balloon tilts and spills it onto the crowd. Oh yeah. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH.

Starting point is 01:22:49 ALICE & LIAM I mean, water is famously heavy, so I'm just imagining a load of people just being crushed to the ground by tons of water falling on them. ALICE & LIAM You get hit with a riot cannon, but it's Popeye. JUSTIN It's Popeye. ALICE Why are you getting scattered like scum? JUSTIN Oh, yes. ALICE At least it wasn't olive oil. JUSTIN 1961.

Starting point is 01:23:13 The gorgeous gobbler. ALICE What? That's what they used to call me in college. JUSTIN The gorgeous gobbler's beak was punctured at the start of the route, and his whole head deflated. The only thing worth eating at Wawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw Headless. And headless. Come on! That's where the term comes from. That's two on the nose, that you literally eat like a headless turkey. Yeah, that's where the phrase comes from, famously, of course. 1971. Snoopy was wrapped around the cab of a helium truck due to the high winds.

Starting point is 01:23:58 Oof. Great Snoopy. Yeah. 1975. Snoopy was punctured by a lamp post at 73rd Street and was pulled from the lineup. Underdog ran into a lamp post near Times Square and was also removed from the lineup. ALICE It's got a higher race of attrition than the Vietnam War, Jesus Christ! It's like we're done in here. Smokey the Bear's right hand was punctured by a tree at Columbus Circle and swung a leaf.

Starting point is 01:24:34 Only you can... This is the best episode we've ever recorded. The inherent humor of giant balloons is really like tipping it over, yeah. 1982. Bullwinkle suffers a helium leak and slowly deflates along the length of Central Park West until being retired four blocks short of Herald Square. Almost made it. Nope.

Starting point is 01:25:04 Oh my god. Finally got Moose and Squirrel. ALICE 1986. Betty Boop deflates and due to high winds only yards from the finish line. JUSTIN I'm gonna go RBS or something. I can relate to this. ALICE Her husband's gonna be so upset. JUSTIN Yeah, but that's it. Deflating due to high winds, yeah, hard relate.

Starting point is 01:25:24 That's fair. ALICE 91. Kerm winds. Yeah. Hard relate. That's fair. 91. Kermit collides with a tree, suffers a deflated head. Oh my gosh. Did they catch him moving? Yeah, Kermit's pulling his head. Walking him off the field like a football player with a concussion. I really hope that someone's got like a boombox walking underneath. It's 1991. Someone needs a boombox just to play.

Starting point is 01:25:46 It's not easy being green, but at half speed. They take Kermit into the blue concussion tent for like half of the NFL. They got to take him out back like a horse, man. This is brutal. Oh, my God. 1993 Sonic the Hedgehog. OK. Oh, God. Oh, god. 1993 Sonic the Hedgehog. Okay. Oh god, oh cool. Why does he look so pregnant? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:10 Finally! My Sonic Tales and Prank fanfic is getting the attention it deserves! They literally did inflate him, making him huge and round. Like, I don't... huge and round. Handlers lose control of Sonic the Hedgehog at Columbus Circle, a notorious high wind spot. Sonic flew into a lamppost and caught it right in his eye, causing rapid deflation. When he pulled away he took the light fixture right off, which fell and hit a police officer and then a 10 year old girl, both of whom sustained injuries.

Starting point is 01:26:52 So we take and you give. Years later, how did you get your NYPD injured in the line of duty citation? Sonic the Hedgehog dropped a light fixture on me. ALICE And like, this is 1993, so the list of NYPD injuries is gonna be like, y'know, all the 70s and 80s ones are like, crashed own car dealing coke out of the precinct, right? And then the 90s ones are all like, comedy shit like this, and then it's like, four pages of 9-11. JUSTIN Yeah. The balloon then fell onto the crowd where one person was overcome by helium fumes, but

Starting point is 01:27:30 soon recovered. You can do that? One of the funniest ways to get overcome by fumes, I will say. Just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, No, I think I'm fine. Sonic was removed from the parade, repaired and returned in 1994 with no further incidents, but in an age of increasing balloon sizes. I see, there's never fucking consequences for these people. They just move them onto another parade.

Starting point is 01:28:03 This was the worst accident the parade had seen so far. In 1995, Dudley the Dragon... I hate his stupid fucking high tops. Oh no, Dudley. What good news? Dudley the Dragon was caught on another lamppost in Columbus Circle whose fixture shattered, and it showered the crowd with broken glass. Jesus.

Starting point is 01:28:26 Oof. Dudley was caught fast to the lamppost and was removed from the parade. Just inseparable. Just like, wrapped around the fucking thing. Just like, teams of people trying to get him off this lamppost. I'M NEVER GOING ALIVE! I'M NEVER GOING ALIVE! post. The pink panther collided with multiple objects tearing open his stomach and puncturing his eyes. Jesus. Completed at low altitude. Can I, can I, can I say, under enemy radar, can I say something about the, about the attachment point for two of

Starting point is 01:29:06 these tethers specifically, they're really, really along with the collar. Oh God. The nipples. Make it look like the pink panther is being pulled by nipple clamps. No, you're not wrong. Who's to say? Folsom gets weirder every year. The balloons were getting bigger and the stakes were getting higher. And y'know, these accidents actually will get worse, but first we have to talk about something important, which is what is Barney the Dinosaur?

Starting point is 01:29:35 Okay, so you know what Coco-melon is now? They're kind of like, it's the thing you put on iPads if you want to destroy a child's brain in such a way that they don't bother you. Or so I understand anyway, like a bunch of my friends are having kids. So. Is this the one where they're like gabadubidgirbidibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibib and it's the thing that puts toddlers into a kind of trance state. It's probably bad that that exists. Yeah. Yeah yeah. Well that, like, it's-

Starting point is 01:30:08 Yeah, sort of, uh, you do that, you do Elsa in Spider-Man, you do, um, what's it, there's a bunch of stuff with a bunch of needles for some reason that the kids love. Yeah, weird horrifying shit. But anyway, Barney the Dinosaur was like- The chickens turn into alligators. The chickens turn into alligators. What? In different colors. What? With different colors.

Starting point is 01:30:25 What? Isn't that... Barney was like the 90s version of that. Apparently it's pure brain rot, no educational value, dancing spruits, according to my wife. Yeah, that sounds about right. Alright, thanks, Ryn. Yeah, Barney the dinosaur, he's a Tyrannosaurus Rex. No he fucking isn't, bud!

Starting point is 01:30:42 He's also a war criminal, cause they used to use the Barney song in Guantanamo Bay, amongst other places. Wow. Yes. For, on a loop. So yeah, Barney is complicit with some of the darkest crimes of the US imperial state. But Barney was sort of a vaguely educational, wholesome children's programming thing, about a bunch of kids and the magic dinosaur.

Starting point is 01:31:09 You know. Ooh. Now you read that sentence out loud, it rings different. I wish I had... He's got kind of a waste on him in a way that's obsessing to me. Like it's a... Oh he's got a Kardashian body, yeah. I wasn't gonna say it, but yeah, it looks like that one paper magazine cover.

Starting point is 01:31:26 Yeah, that's what I'm- Oh, he's a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He's not a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Barney is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Canonically, or what are we talking about? Yes. I'm gonna- I- I- okay. You know what, just carry on, bud.

Starting point is 01:31:39 Yeah. You know, when I was about nine it was very cool to hate Barney and imagine him being killed in various violent ways. I remember those rhymes on the other play. Yeah, cause Barney was always very saccharine, and there was no depth to it, and so of course kids were like, yeah, it would be epic to see Barney get beheaded by a combine harvester. Yeah, but y'know, in real life Barney would kill you in various violent ways because he's a T-Rex.

Starting point is 01:32:06 But nothing personal. Simply the nature of the T-Rex. Nothin' personal, kid. Yeah, that's true. As you're simply devoured by Barney the Dinosaur, but not putting your toys away in a timely fashion. Yeah, kinda like the hippopotamus or the Mahuhu, you know? He's got a jawline, he's got a jaw that's almost as wide as David Kultar's, it's quite something there.

Starting point is 01:32:29 He's got very nice teeth. He must have spent a lot on that. Like David Kultar's, yeah. He went to Turkey, yeah. He's also got a... I think this is the set for the new version of the show. Nice wooden bobber caboose back here. That's lovely, yeah, very nice.

Starting point is 01:32:44 Just parked up there. A lot of That's lovely, yeah. Very nice. Just parked up there. A lot of it's painted safety yellow. Oh yeah. Anyway. Safety first. Mmhmm. So, November 27th, 1997. Oh god.

Starting point is 01:32:56 The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Why the fuck? I see some, I see Hey Arthur there. Big Tramp Hey Arthur. There's a hell of a Nickelodeon going on there, yeah. H Arthur there, big fan of Hey Arthur. LIAM How's the hell the Nickelodeon going on there, yeah. ALICE Hated Rugrats. Always hated Rugrats.

Starting point is 01:33:08 LIAM I liked Rugrats. Really? I loved Rugrats. ALICE Never liked the art style, never liked it. Hate this clown, hate these snowmen. LIAM Yeah, the cloud is giving me John Wayne Gacy vibes. ALICE Right, did we see the clown one? ALICE Did we see the clown one?

Starting point is 01:33:23 ALICE Our balloon lineup. New balloon, Arthur. Right? Returning for the tenth time, Big Bird. Returning for the twelfth time... Mixed feelings about Big Bird. I don't have mixed feelings about Big Bird, he's a national hero, Nova. Big Bird has a complicated legacy, alright.

Starting point is 01:33:41 He kept us out of war! Returning for the twelfth time, Garfield. Uh huh. Of course. For the second time, Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit. What the hell, we're the Brits again in there. For the tenth time, the Pink Panther. Chiefly notable in the form of balloon. Yeah. For the tenth time, the N Panther. Chieftain- Chiefly notable in the form of balloon.

Starting point is 01:34:05 Yeah. For the tenth time, the Nesquik Bunny. For the fourth time, Barney. Official balloon of diabetes. For the fifth time, Sonic the Hedgehog. Who was a previous, like, war casualty. Just like, with a patch over one eye, and- Yeah, that's it.

Starting point is 01:34:25 Dared Crenshaw, but... I wanna say Sonic the Hedgehog had a visible patch somewhere on him. A venomous one. Yeah. Already a demon, Kaz. Um. Debuting, the Rugrats. Boooo.

Starting point is 01:34:39 For the fourth time- I'm throwing filing cabinets down at them. Shit. The Cat in the Hat. Okay. For the eleventh time. Spider-Man. Yeah. This is like old school Spider-Man. The back when, like, before any of the alternate continuity shit where there was one Spider-Man

Starting point is 01:34:57 and he fucking sucked. Yes. Hey, wait a second, wait a minute, I loved Spider-Man as a kid, I had a plastic toy that was my beloved god knows where it is now, I think my parents stole it from me at some point. But I loved that, oh my god. The animated Spider-Man? From like the 80s? I just gotta single out Spider-Man as one of the rare few intellectual properties that

Starting point is 01:35:19 has actually gotten better in the 2020s. Not to say, you know, uncomplicated relationship with your mass media slop, but, yeah. ALICE Yeah, I'll give you that. But also, we won't have anyone take my 80s Spider-Man cartoons away. The Amazing Spider-Man when it's like, waaah, Spider-Man, Spider-Man, weah, weah. SEAN Spider-Man sort of thing. I was a big fan of that. JUSTIN That's it.

Starting point is 01:35:43 SEAN I'm a man spider oh yeah check out my dirt next yeah what the first time what the fuck is this um pay what the fuck is that um pay um pay is right here that's bum pay what he's a cow from Sweden oh he changes into various things from the alphabet. ALICE Ross, what the fuck are you talking about, mate? JUSTIN What? It's Bumpey.

Starting point is 01:36:10 America's favorite, Bumpey. ALICE I don't like that this rabbit has got full QAnon. Oh my god, they made RFK into a balloon! LIAM Well, because you can't vaccinate a balloon, cause you just puncture it. Oh yeah, you backscore one, that's it. For the third time, Eben Bear.

Starting point is 01:36:30 What's Eben Bear? It's Macy's Sky Pig. Oh my god. This guy's wearing a big fur cloak, he's in rift. And for the first time, Petula Pig. Right here. Oh, the fuckin' non-union Miss Piggy, I see how it is. Miss Piggy will not deem to be balloonified, and frankly I don't blame her.

Starting point is 01:36:52 Yeah, cause she's so armed to curb it the year before. She's like Jacques AGBOR, she's not gonna get out of bed for less than a million dollars, you know? So it's the morning, it's New York City, it's cold, and there are 40 mile an hour gusts and 20 mile per hour sustained winds. Oh dear. So meanwhile you're out there up early inflating Sonic. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:10 You're putting the nipple clamps on the pink panther, you're ready to go, you're like, this is a normal American cultural activity I'm about to engage in. Everybody shut up, it's not weird, dude. So nonetheless, the nation is watching, the show must go on, cause this is nationally broadcast parade. ALICE Who's watching this nationally? LIAM Everybody. JUSTIN My grandmother.

Starting point is 01:37:31 LIAM Also my mom, who loves the Thanksgiving Day Parade. ALICE So this isn't like, this is actually like beloved, this isn't like a thing like the Super Bowl where I watch it every year to see whether or not somebody banes the thing. You know, whether it gets 9-11. LIAM Right, no, this is a beloved cultural institution. I really support it. Yeah, I love the people who like to be... Is this to the US?

Starting point is 01:37:53 LIAM American cultural dominance, baby! RIght, don't get me the, don't maybe get the Pennsylvania dominance to drop out. Is this a bit to the US, is this the same as like, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire watching the Vienna Phil on New Year's Day morning? Is this kind of the same level of cultural sort of prescience? Yeah, good enough. Yeah, it sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:14 They all do it. I did Belgrade. They put the TV on. It's Eurovision, because Eurovision is a thing outside of just Eurovision. And everyone just claps along to, well not handle, everyone claps along to Mozart. It's nice. Not a thing we do in the UK, because we're all hung over on New Year's Day, so we're not going to put on clapping. RG Wow, New Year's Day you go out and watch the

Starting point is 01:38:36 Mummers Parade, but that's only in Philly. JUSTIN Yeah, and then you drink yourself sick. RG Yeah, you go get really drunk. JUSTIN You do the fireball in a trash can at 9.45 in the morning, yeah, but I know. Or if you're Scottish, you give yourself heart failure by running into the freezing cold for a fourth for no reason. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, and polar plunge.

Starting point is 01:38:53 You guys do that too? Hell yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, you know me. Thought any of us personally. An official for Macy's is like, nah, fuck it, we'll do it. Send the balloons up, right? Yes!

Starting point is 01:39:03 Let's go! It looked like the winds might be subsiding anyway, so. Fuck it, we'll do it. Send the balloons up, right? YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS You're making a white vest. ALICE Literally every call for this one, yeah. Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The first to go was... The first to go! ALICE The flying fish, right here. One of the smaller and older balloons. ALICE I like this fish.

Starting point is 01:39:41 ALICE He was immediately shredded by high winds overnight. Jesus Christ! You make me pack Bond with this fish, and then you kill him in the first scene like a red shirt? To establish the stakes? This is so good. Shredded by high winds! Shredded!

Starting point is 01:39:58 Just tacked in the veins amazing mistake. Just flowing down and landing on people. Totally decommissioned as a result. Like a nuclear reactor. We gave He's with the angel fish now. That's amazing grace just blares out over the children. That's just a bunch of balloon handlers with like solemnly bringing shreds of rubber down the parade route. One block into the route, Sonic the Hedgehog, making his triumphant return after reconstructive surgery, had his head ripped open by the wind, and was retired. How much can one hedgehog take? This is like a Tarantino. Like fucking Shadow thinks he's had it rough. Eat shit.

Starting point is 01:41:21 Getting your head torn open on a New York City lamppost in consecutive years. The Nesquik Bunny proved exceptionally difficult to control and wound up being significantly delayed, taking the place of Barney in the parade lineup. Barney was slotted in behind a Westward Ho float. What did you call that? It's Westward Ho, second-mentioned in a row in WCYP. Why does Westward Ho have a float in the Macy's Parade? Who's to say?

Starting point is 01:41:51 I don't know why. Yeah, why does anything have a float? Why don't we have a float is the more important question. So, the Nesquik Bunny struck a tree at 77th and Central Park West that ripped open his ear. Okay, got flesh wound at this point, but okay, okay. Surviving. Despite this, he continued the route until the deflated ear caught a stoplight at Times

Starting point is 01:42:16 Square. Uh oh. Handlers from the Pink Panther, which we'll talk about in a second, rushed to assist, but it was too late. The Nesquik Bunny was ripped limb from limb by the stoplight. Can you imagine just being like a six year old kid? You got up early and just watching your favorite time. Here's the flip from lip.

Starting point is 01:42:57 Torn bodily apart like a medieval execution, like a regicide, tanged, drawn and cornered. We scattered the deskwick body over Fort Greene. And you're gonna have to bring in the bounty for, like, partial pieces of rubber back, you know? ALICE The Pink Panther this year was a truly monstrous balloon, one of the largest the parade had ever seen, it was seven stories high, it was several other dimensions as well. In these winds. Oh my god. Oh my god.

Starting point is 01:43:37 I feel very strongly that if you look at the three photographers and one woman with a ponytail arrayed down the crosswalk here. This is us. This is spiritually us. I like this guy just climbing, bottom right, red shirt, climbing on what I believe to be is at the tail of the Pink Panther. Oh, and there might be one in Slender, the lower part, yeah. The eyes, the bulging eyes.

Starting point is 01:44:05 Oh god, the eyes. The dead lifeless eyes. Who's anti-Savage now? The most childish and pesky massade operation. In these winds, the Pink Panther could only be flown horizontally. At 52nd Street, the Pink Panther began to behave erratically, catching a gust of wind, and throwing many of its handlers to the ground.

Starting point is 01:44:38 ALICE Oh, getting like, intossed to rest! LIAM Getting like, body slammed onto asphalt by the Pink Panther. The Pink Panther caught a lamp post, but did not tear. Yes! At Times Square, though, things took a turn for the worse. You have to have a Patrick O'Brien, like, early 19th century Royal Navy rigging crew, level of rope handling and cohesion and fighting

Starting point is 01:45:08 against the elements and you're doing it all in a pink panther jumpsuit? JUSTIN LAUGHS. SEAN A much stronger gust of wind which is amplified by tall buildings, caused the balloon to rear up, taking its pilot with it. JUSTIN Jesus. SEAN This is a pilot? SEAN There's a pilot who like directing everyone else for the balloon. With just hand signals or what?

Starting point is 01:45:30 Um, I assume he's also holding on to something. Oh, Christ. Alright. Getting tossed into the- getting yanked into the air like a toddler on a bell-ringing rope. Suffered like a nasty fall afterwards. But no injuries. Oh. Yeah. Ah no injuries. Oh. Yeah. Ah, cool.

Starting point is 01:45:47 No problem. So the balloon was still undamaged and the handlers pressed onward. Just this limpig pile of this limpig pile is like, oh, I guess we crack on. There's so much street furniture, this is so obstructed. Like, if you think about all the stuff overhanging a street in Manhattan... Yeah, we'll get to that later. ALICE Oh god. LIAM Oh god.

Starting point is 01:46:09 Okay. ALICE That might be my least favorite phrase on this show. JUSTIN The balloon finally caught a traffic light and ripped open. ALICE Oh god. And trails passed to the wind. JUSTIN It mostly deflated, but still had enough helium in it to stay airborne, until a police officer stabbed its tail. This stabilized the balloon and brought it to the ground, then some thirty New York Police

Starting point is 01:46:36 Department officers took to the scene and stabbed the Pinkther to death. ALICE AND TROY LAUGH. ALICE Not even an officer involved shooting, an officer involved stabbing. Like, all of these- NIGEL Yeah, 40 of them climbing all over it, their instincts, their eyes like flick back and come back forwards again and they just all enter an extreme violence mode. ALICE It's like Italian moment, right, in that moment the epigenetics speak and they fall on him like Caesar.

Starting point is 01:47:07 LIAM Oh my god. JUSTIN E. E. E. too brutal. ALICE Oh my god. ALICE I think the funniest thing is, from an institution we know very well is extremely violent in set ways, but a complete mismatch of method to be stabbed to death by the NYPD is like... Testimonies from the scene indicate a mother and daughter were trapped under the balloon and some handlers were briefly overcome by helium gas." ALICE It's a good shoot, then.

Starting point is 01:47:47 It's self-defense, you know? Internal affairs rolling up and taking statements. Every single one of these cops gets their, like, Union rep. I was in fear for my life. JUSTIN Planting a gun on the Pink Panther inflatable. Listen, the Pink Panther has a long criminal history, right? I think we can be clear about that. Here was no- the Pink Panther, there was no angel.

Starting point is 01:48:11 I recovered this gun off of the suspect! Oh. This one's gonna kill me. This one is gonna kill me. Oh my god. The handlers went to assist the Nesquik money and managed to get it six blocks further to 36th Street, where it too was ripped open and was retired. This is a death march! Hold on! You wrote a baton! You wrote a baton! Now get ready for the thesis! Thanks for getting my paper ready! then was retired. This is a death march. This is like Rocky Balboa's fight doctor organizing this. Slaughter of this scale in downtown New York would not be known for how many more years? I could stab a guy on Fifth Avenue, stab a balloon on Fifth Avenue.

Starting point is 01:49:12 They'd still vote for me. Anyway, the most infamous scene from this particular Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade was the murder of Barney the dinosaur. Oh my God, he's being torn by Suttner! Oh, that really is good times. Oh my god. This was entirely, this was entirely cut on video, you can watch it on YouTube. There's like a family and their kid, and the kids just laughin' the whole time.

Starting point is 01:49:42 I mean, if you're a nine-year-old and you're like, yeah, I want to see Barney get decapitated, you're about to have the best day of your fucking life. On the other hand, where's the combine harvester I asked for? I just didn't play the one behind. An event that would go down in history as extremely funny. Barney became uncontrollable around 52nd Street. To the point where handlers were lying down on the pavement to keep him under control. We're having sort of a Jurassic Park moment here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:21 Barney managed to... Just go to that video and cut in some of the Godzilla roars please. ALICE Godzilla roars, just like some guy going clever girl. Like this shit going on, all left right and center, yeah. JUSTIN Well Barney managed to wreck himself into a streetlight, which tore a massive gash in his side and exploded his tail. ALICE I told my wife what we were doing for the

Starting point is 01:50:50 episode tonight, and she sang, in the cadence of the Barney theme song, off the dome, I love you, you love me, I was killed by NYPD. emboldened by their successful dispatch of the pink panther the new york police department immediately swarmed barnie and stabbed him repeatedly in the face stomach tail arms legs etc. this was a police riot like a riot is the language of the unheard and it's just Barney the dinosaur on a loop. Barney was soon a flat sheet of rubber on the pavement and was retired. Oh my god, look how they massacred my boy! And his dead soul is high.

Starting point is 01:51:45 Petula Pig! Listen, I will say one thing. I will say one thing for policing, irrespective of abolition or whatever, one thing its defenders do say is true, which is that just fucking any shit just lands on cops, it seems like, and that they're just left to be like, yeah, I have no balloon handling experience but what I do have is many knives, I guess. And that combination of being the, like, public service of last resort, and also having, like, a very specific set of training that does not account for Barney the Dinosaur being uncontrollable,

Starting point is 01:52:25 leads to maybe the funniest thing I've ever fucking heard. Oh Jesus. Absolutely incredible. Wait, there's more. Roz, there's more. Yes. So, Petula Pig did not start the parade. Ah, disappointing.

Starting point is 01:52:42 Even there did not start. That is the most not-that-IP-ass-looking balloon I've ever seen in my life. That's like... Getting a DNS for... You're not her. You will never be her. Yeah. Yeah. Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit struck a streetlight hard at 72nd Street but did not deflate.

Starting point is 01:53:03 Oh. Americans coming to your little English village and being like, hey can we adapt your beloved children's character two weeks later, you are watching your tiny little British TV seeing a gigantic balloon of him being slammed into a New York City streetlight. JUSTIN It's what she would've wanted. But the worst incident was with the cat in the hat. This wasn't the worst!

Starting point is 01:53:32 We've seen so much blood and gore at this point, like, just... Well, here he is, he's on the Seuss mobile. I mean, I've seen the Michael Myers movie, that's pretty- oh my god. But he is missing his hat, thus rendering him an ordinary cat, and he is sideways. So at 72nd Street, the cat in the hat started to get angry. Spiritually a milkshake, yeah. He's a broad, he's like a tall balloon, it's very susceptible to wind. Like... Tall, he's got very broad sides, yeah. He started bucking wildly from side to side, he hit a streetlight, in fact the same streetlight

Starting point is 01:54:14 that Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit struck. Then he hit it a second time. Knocking an arm from the streetlight onto the ground and into the crowd, injuring four people, including one Kathleen Corona, who was nearly fatally injured and went into a coma for a month, suffering permanent brain damage. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You're just almost murdered by a Dr. Seuss balloon.

Starting point is 01:54:49 Just a regular giant cat. Do you remember fucking Six Feet Under? That's the way they used to start episodes, to grab you for the rest of the hour where it's like Dexter being gay and sad. It's like, oh, a woman getting killed by the cat in the hat at the Macy's parade. JUSTIN Yeah. I mean, I don't think she suffered particularly debilitating brain damage, but a little brain damage is still too much brain damage.

Starting point is 01:55:14 LIAM Yeah, I don't want the damage to break. ALICE Yeah, no, that's not your friend. It obviously fucks with you in ways that you can't even account for, it's fun. JUSTIN Yes. The response to this was to deflate his hat, leaving him a mere cat on a strange machine. Whoa whoa whoa, hold on, we've nearly killed a woman here. And their response is, well we'll take the hat off as a compromise, but the parade is still going.

Starting point is 01:55:39 We'll take the cat off the cat in the hat. We're still gonna do the parade, the show must go on. You're not gonna call this off at any point. You're just like... NICHOLAS The show must go on, Nova! We can't! JUSTIN The handlers managed to get him as far as 36th Street, very close to Herald Square, where he became unwieldy.

Starting point is 01:55:56 Once again, he was deflated and permanently retired from the parade. ALICE Okay, but why? What social good was served from dragging this hatless cat? JUSTIN The balloon abolition? The cat, the cat sans hat? ALICE Yeah, and other like, forty blocks, when it's got blood on its hands, quite possibly literally. Why though?

Starting point is 01:56:20 And why does the crosshatching make it look like it's got fucked up chest and arm hair? Yes. Robin Williams ass looking cat. I hate those. Ultimately, of the fourteen balloons that year, only seven. Arthur. Big Bird. Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit.

Starting point is 01:56:41 The Rugrats. Garfield. Spider-Man, and America's favorite, Bumpey. Made it to the finish line. ALICE You hate to give Bumpey credit, but like, he is built different. He is just like... Those Swedes, they know how to make it up. LIAM Everyone's favorite cow.

Starting point is 01:57:05 I mean, you know what this is, it continues to be like, unlimited Arthur supremacy. Yes. Arthur is just, you know, there, work him unlike, he just walks to the finish line. He's just a nice guy. He's got his book, he's got his backpack, you know, he says hello to everyone. Real blue collar balloon. Yeah, exactly. Lunch pail, nine to five. Well seven to three, cause he's at school.

Starting point is 01:57:31 I find Big Bird here lightly terrifying, to be honest. Like the shadow under it, the encompassing embrace, the eyes. It does look a bit like, yeah, there's a dark energy going on there that troubles me. So there's some sense after this incident there needs to be some kind of reform at the parade after they lost half the balloons and put a woman in a coma. The good news is, they have the most capable man for the job, Rudy Giuliani. Freakin' Giuliani! Check out, check out, no gods no man.

Starting point is 01:58:06 So, yeah, Giuliani does what any good mayor does and convenes a task force to figure out what to do. They came up with a couple recommendations. Recommendation number one, put the New York City Emergency Response Center in the World Trade Center. Yes. Yep. They're gonna limit the size of the balloons, the city's gonna make the World Trade Center. Yes. Yep. They're gonna limit the size of the balloons, the city's gonna make the call to call off

Starting point is 01:58:28 the balloons if winds are high, they're going to require some kind of training for balloon handlers. Which apparently had not been a thing. Just like, that's so funny to look at the balloon handlers and be like, you go to school for that? And the answer being no, as well. It's like, doubly funny. JUSTIN They're gonna tether the balloons to vehicles as opposed to just people. ALICE Great, so now Sonic's picked up a pickup

Starting point is 01:58:52 truck and it's gonna be swinging around like out of Mari. JUSTIN And they're gonna actually prepare the parade route for balloons by moving like streetlights and things like that. ALICE They didn't do that?! LIAM They didn't do that?! LIAM No, why would they do that. They didn't do that? Some of these feel like things they shouldn't have done. Why would you do that? Kathleen Corona made a partial recovery and after suing Macy's, the city, the streetlight manufacturer, and everyone within two miles, eventually settled out of court.

Starting point is 01:59:19 Then in October 2006, Yankees pitcher Corey Lytle flew a Cirrus SR20 into her apartment. What?! Not intentionally. Yeah. But, yeah. I was gonna say, that's a... What?! Strange... series of events.

Starting point is 01:59:34 What?! I have to be honest, if this had happened to me, I would attribute that to the earlier brain damage. I would think I had to have done. ALICE Yeah, honestly, yeah. She was not in her apartment at the time. ALICE Yeah, okay, still, but like, if you get like, fucking Wesley Snipes'd in like Baseball 911, they did like... Why did he, what?

Starting point is 02:00:00 On purpose? JUSTIN Why did all this happen to this woman? ALICE And then we got the coronavirus as well, like, I think genuinely we should, this woman should seek some kind of spiritual investigation, that's the only thing I can think of. I was about to say, I'm gonna have to talk to a priest about this one. See if you can get some kind of financial settlement with God. Not running up that hill to make a deal with God.

Starting point is 02:00:26 God settling out of court with no finding of liability. ALICE Don't worry, we will get to the catholuses of Abbot Sash. ALICE God has to replace your apartment. JUSTIN Anyway, so this meant there were never any incidents at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade again, except for... Oh. 2003, the new turkey exploded due to thermal expansion.

Starting point is 02:00:52 2004, Charlie Brown's football deflated. Okay, that's the funniest possible arrangement. Charlie Brown deflates? Funny. Charlie Brown AND the football deflate? Funny. Charlie Brown is fine, but the football deflates? Hysterical.

Starting point is 02:01:13 A Lucy balloon floating away from the sink. ALICE & LIAM LAUGHING. ALICE 2005, the red and yellow M&Ms brighten up the holidays, uh, balloon. That's the name of it. They have a handling line catch a light post, sending the fixture into the crowd. JUSTIN Oh yeah, the scattered glass shards into the crowd situation again. Good stuff. ALICE Oh, cool, okay. Listen, I would be fine with that if it was the green M&ards into the crowd situation again. Oh cool, okay. Good stuff.

Starting point is 02:01:45 I mean, listen, I would be fine with that if it was the green Eminem showering me with glass, but like, whatever. Who's to say? Hey, I'm not here to kink shame. 2010. The wiggle worm. The what? The god damn worm.

Starting point is 02:01:56 The wiggle worm. Oh my god. Excuse me? First of all, don't talk about my penis like that. Second of all, my penis does not have these dead soulless eyes. Yeah, that's it. The wiggle worm was punctured by a one way sign. I guess there wasn't enough wiggle room.

Starting point is 02:02:19 Yeah. 2012, thanks, Liam. Pikachu's ears exploded due to thermal expansion. Can we actually attribute this to climate change? Because it only seems to be happening in the 2000s. Like 90s, nobody's exploding. They might be killing people, almost, but like, nobody's having their ears blown up. 2019.

Starting point is 02:02:47 Goku... What did he do to New York City? Goku knocks down three balloon handlers in a gust of wind, leaving one with an injured shoulder. Well now he's defeated them, that means they're friends. JUSTIN Yes. And one of the art balloons, the new art balloons they have, called Love Flies Up To The Sky... ALICE Oh, this sucks, I hate it. JUSTIN...wrecked into a portable restroom trailer, and brunk its face, then had a tentacle

Starting point is 02:03:20 ripped off by a subway map stand. ALICE Oh my god! The city is fighting back. I'm just imagining this weird tentacle thing smashing into a truck full of porta-potties and just sending porta-potties? Skating down! This is a beautiful tradition, I hope they keep doing it forever. Yes, it's just, uh, I love to see a giant balloon, uh, of my favorite cartoon character, be destroyed.

Starting point is 02:03:50 Accidentally. Potentially causing danger to life and limb. I get it now. I was skeptical on the Macy's Parade, but now I'm converted. I'm a believer. You will get me appearing like that guy in the GIF who has the like pop out chair and he just smacks it open and puts it on the ground and sits on it. That will be me at the next one of these. This is incredible. This is a bit like F1, so the regulations get tired, but the murder and slaughter gets more and more diverse. It's joyous. It's really

Starting point is 02:04:23 quite nice. I love this so much. ALICE This has been life changing. RILEY It literally has! I'm a different human, the Gareth before is gone, the Gareth anew rises. ALICE And now I have a new model for whenever I'm feeling particularly shitty, I can just be like, damn, I feel like Sonic the Hedgehog being slammed into a lightbulb. It's stabbed in the eye. Oh, there's a video of that one too, it's pretty gnarly.

Starting point is 02:04:55 He's like, what a wince. It's like, he got it right in the eye. I don't remember the French word for hedgehog off the top of my head, but it was sheer underlubricated hedgehog. Oh, and if anyone ever needs cheering up, the wiki art, the entire wiki for this will provide endless joy. Yeah, I'll put a link to it in the description. I was gonna say, literally have to do that, yeah. This is one of the most, like, fucked up things Americans routinely continue to do on a yearly

Starting point is 02:05:32 basis. Like, this is baked in drunk driving deaths, it's just... It's just human power. It's just, yeah, it's just... It's just, yeah, it's just... Exactly. We're gonna have to kill some cartoon characters each year. We're gonna have to kill some cartoon characters each year, which is a sacrifice, yes. ALICE Listen, I, y'know, obviously I support murder

Starting point is 02:05:52 in some cases, but I don't support taking away someone's ability to view the next year's Macy's Parade. JUSTIN Oh, exploded due to thermics. ALICE I need badly to see Pikachu's ears exploding, I think. I'm gonna seek that out. JUSTIN Oh, absolutely sensational. What did we learn from this?

Starting point is 02:06:15 ALICE Uh, the NYPD of the thin blue line, protecting order from balloon chaos. Were it not for them, every New Yorker would have been killed by Sonic the Hedgehog, the Pink Panther, and Barney the Dinosaur. JUSTIN You'd just see Pikachu looming outside your, like, 50th floor apartment, just staring out. ALICE Not even the parade day. JUSTIN Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:41 ALICE Batman returns, but you just replace all the characters of their own Bane's team with these balloons and they have to fight the cops at the end? I would pay good money for that. We learned that maybe it shouldn't be up to an employee of a department store whether or not to fly a bunch of huge balloons down a street in one of the most populated cities in the world. Yes. No, we didn't learn that.

Starting point is 02:07:05 I learned nothing from this. Except I, by heart, I hunger for more balloons. Yeah, I need to see more of this happening. We need the Will-Airs, your problem balloon. Give us a balloon! Oh my. Give us a balloon! It's just the big Doonally subway token, with the hard hat on it.

Starting point is 02:07:24 Yeah, we're gonna have to do that in the Boscov's Thanksgiving Day Parade, or now it's the 6ABC Dunkin' Donuts Thanksgiving Day Parade. That's the Philly one. I don't know if anything funny happened on that one. ALICE Looking forward to settling out of court when the subway token kills somebody. ALICE and LIAM laugh. ALICE Using some of Earth's finite reserve of helium on this as well is incredibly funny. There's like, so many MRI machines. I mean, luckily you can't afford them anyway because of insurance companies, but like,

Starting point is 02:07:59 if you could, that helium is being diverted to Charlie Brown's football, which feels like an apt metaphor. It's just then, deflated, before your eyes. Yes. Well, there's a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. Howdy loyal subjects of milkshakes, and any potential guests. Yeah, I only have one milkshake here. We love him.

Starting point is 02:08:29 Yes. I have a tale that shows how one can follow the correctly safety protocols and still wind up in a situation where they're doing something that's really fucking stupid. Near the turn of the century, I was a trade school student- Oh, I don't like that that's a phrase you can use now. JUSTIN LAUGHS. JUSTIN Desperately trying to get a job in the field that I was studying for.

Starting point is 02:08:52 Namely, machining. Despite the fact that I've been schooled for a couple years, I couldn't get a job in my field as I didn't have enough experience. You know how there's that whole catch-22 thing, you can't get a job because you don't have any experience, and you can't get any experience because no one will hire you Anyway, I eventually managed to find a job working in a small foundry as a grinder slash pouring crew For far less pay than I could get working at the local Walmart But I took it since if I stayed at the job for a year

Starting point is 02:09:23 I'd have enough on my resume that I could claim experience, and thus get hired at a machine shop that paid better than either Wally World or the foundry." ALICE Fair plot, okay, yeah. JUSTIN This particular foundry had a main furnace that could melt just under one thousand pounds of metal at a time. Roughly one hundred pounds of molten metal would be poured into the ladle, held by a two person crew."

Starting point is 02:09:48 ALICE I see the simplified Minecraft illustration here. very nice. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. It's the Tinker's Construct mod. That you cast the tools, it's kind of fun. Um, that two person crew would then take it over to the various molds that were in the pouring area, and after filling up a couple of the over to take it over to the various molds that were in the pouring area And after filling up a couple of the molds they'd go back to the furnace for more metal to pour into the other molds Yeah, the pickaxe pickaxe sword sword, uh hammer Ho, etc

Starting point is 02:10:18 Yes, the ladle was in the middle of what we call the shank That looked like two letter Ys joined at the base. The forked part was where each person holding the shank was located. Both of us wore the correct kind of safety gear, this being leather coats covered in silver mylar, leather gloves, and a welder's face shield. I went a step further and wore cloth draped around much of my head to help protect me from the heat. ALICE Looking very cyberpunk, I imagine. JUSTIN Yes.

Starting point is 02:10:49 One day, as I'm holding my end of the shank, as molten tool steel that was about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit was being poured into the ladle, I saw a drop of metal splash out from the ladle and head my way. My thought as I saw the drop head towards me was, oh, that'll probably hurt if it hits me. Yeah, I bet. I want to point out that as a member of the pouring crew, be it the person who was operating the furnace, someone holding the shank, the mould setter, the person putting the insulation

Starting point is 02:11:20 on the mould after it was filled in order to control the rate at which it cooled, or the QA person observing everything to ensure All proper procedures are followed you could expect to get the kind of burns Someone frying bacon in a skillet might get every time we did a pour They were annoying but not particularly large or painful This drop was large enough for me to know just by looking at it that if it hit me, it would be far, far worse. A few seconds later I suddenly became aware of a serious burning situation on my right ass cheek.

Starting point is 02:11:52 I mean, there's worse places for it, but like, still. Not that much, yeah. And when I say serious, I mean serious. If you've ever broken a tooth and had to wait a long period of time before you get pain meds stronger than aspirin, you have an idea of what I was feeling. I also couldn't just scream and run around, because if I made any sudden moves, there was a strong chance that the metal would splash out of the ladle, which could put myself, and a person at the other end of the shank at risk of life-threatening burns.

Starting point is 02:12:23 I understand- Not to be a capitalist here, but I now understand why some of the other jobs wanted you to have experience. Yeah. I had to stand absolutely rock still, while screaming to the top of my lungs for someone to take the goddamn shank out of my hands, as I was clearly being burned. One of the other guys on the pouring crew came over, grabbed my end of the shank out of my hands, and I immediately raced off to an area not far from the pouring area, where I was shielded from the heat and could begin stripping off my gear.

Starting point is 02:12:55 Once behind the shield, I began taking my stuff off as fast as I could, hoping that this would get rid of the molten metal that was burning me. I don't like the phrasing of that, because this suggests that that does not succeed. I don't like this, and I do not like what's coming. Mmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhm Oh, Jesus Christ, dude. They were doing you like a Macy's Day balloon. Yes. I had to do this a second time, to get it all out of me. I then promptly collapsed on a pile of stuff, I had no idea what it all was in front of

Starting point is 02:13:40 me, gasping. No, cause you were self-excavating one ass cheek with my hand! JUSTIN I was gasping like someone who'd just been saved from drowning. A moment or so later, the guy who'd taken the shank from me walked back to where I was and asked me if I was going to be able to finish pouring the rest of the heat, a heat being the amount of time it took to pour all the metal in the furnace. A smart person would have responded, no, but because of the toxic masculinity culture of the job, we're admitting that suffering from anything other than a sign of life-threatening

Starting point is 02:14:12 injury meant you were a wimp, I nodded. ALICE Man, you've got one ass cheek left! You're gonna need a prosthetic to sit on a toilet! Go to hospital! You're gonna need a prosthetic to sit on a toilet. Yeah you're gonna need... Go to hospital! They're gonna put you in the iron butt. The man in the iron butt. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:14:33 I nodded yes, I put my gear back on and I finished the heat, even though I was in severe pain. Just like a set of arse cheeks that look like the Phantom of the Opera. ALICE That Joel and Bede mask, yeah yeah yeah, I gotcha. ALICE After we finished the heat, I inspected my gear to try and figure out what had happened. My assumption was the droplet of metal had hit the outside of my coat and burned its

Starting point is 02:15:00 way through to my ass. I discovered that what actually had happened was that the droplet had managed to perfectly sail its way between the gap in my coat and my neck caused by the position I needed to be in when the metal was being poured into the ladle. And it was only when the droplet hit my belt that it stuck out due to how I had to be crouched over that the molten metal was directed into my ass. ALICE I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't want bad things to happen to my glass. And the idea of it being shredded and then I have to rip out... You have to do the damage

Starting point is 02:15:35 to yourself! It makes you rip off your own ass! I don't like this at all. My solution- There's some sort of an auto-gluteectomy or something. That would be it, yeah. My solution to ensure this never happened again was to wear a backwards baseball cap while we poured, so if any metal tried to follow the same path, it'd be stopped by the bill of my cap. I don't feel like- That's more faith than I've ever put in the bill of a baseball cap in my life. Also, it just ripped, it just ripped and shredded an ass, you know, widened this person's interglutial

Starting point is 02:16:13 sulcus by several inches, and yet they're relying on a baseball cap? I- Just a doctor with a clipboard sitting you down and being like, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you'll never wear a thong again. ALICE Sounds like butt plugs aren't for you. Actually, you might need one cause the sphincter doesn't work anymore. LIAM Jesus Christ. You ripped off your own ass. Blow that like a robo, yeah. That's gonna be a vivid, a vivid like, mm, no, not thrilled with knowing that.

Starting point is 02:16:50 This is a medical buttplug. This is not a sex thing. This is safety care, fuck off. PPE for my ass. My mylar buttplug. My asbestos buttplug. Should be fine, you're not breathing it, like what's the problem? Yeah, exactly. There's a lot more I could say about that job, like how I came to be in possession of

Starting point is 02:17:22 the kids. Is there? I came in possession of- What's worse than ripping off half of your own ass? I can't think of many things. Like how I came in possession of a good sized hunk of magnesium in case I needed to unalive a supervisor, but that probably wouldn't play on the show. Signed- I mean, you've said it now and it's on record, so, you know.

Starting point is 02:17:42 Yeah, plus- I will say, this is a pretty distinctive injury if anybody like has ever met you they're gonna know because they'll be like oh the guy with like the guy with half an ass yeah the man the man with the man with half an ass you've actually do we know this I just said the person we don't know gender yeah we don't know the man who knew too much now get ready for the man who pooed too much. Signed a guy who wouldn't be upset if a particular McDonald's in Pennsylvania burned down because a chunk of flaming magnesium hit it.

Starting point is 02:18:13 It's throwing a chunk of magnesium into the deep fryer and leaving. Isn't the Camp Hill McDonald's? Cause I have beef with them. Not just because they're McDonald's. It's the Altoona McDonald's. Oh, it does, that makes sense. I, whoever was in charge of not providing you with the safety equipment for that should have one half of their ass burned off for the kind of like blood money. Well, no, they have to donate their ass to you. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 02:18:41 Who do you think donated the ass cheek? You turn around and look and it's the safety officer who's lying on another bed at a 45 degree angle because they're missing one ass cheek. It's like a train going round a curve, yeah, okay, yeah, nice, yeah. I applied cant on my ass. Yeah, okay. Yeah, fine. Oh, you gotta put some pseudocram on that, man.

Starting point is 02:19:11 It's, uh, whoa. I... I... This might be my least favorite ever. Fistfuls of ass, mate. Ripping out your own... At least it's got like a nice little melted ass. Like a barbecue, you know?

Starting point is 02:19:24 It's probably overcooked, is the thing. Just ripping out your own net char on it. Like a barbecue, you know. Probably overcooked is the thing. Yeah. Also, I don't know how much this guy is into auto-cannibalism anyway. I don't think it's a great idea. That's just my own opinion, though. This is just... I mean, it's all fat, there's nothing to be done here.

Starting point is 02:19:42 This is upsetting. This is upsetting. This is gonna this is... this is... this is... this is... this is... this is... this is... This is gonna haunt me. This is gonna be in my dreams tonight, and not... not... not... I... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't...

Starting point is 02:19:53 can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can't... can That's actually a way faster, so yeah. NBCR suit made of marble and lead, yeah. Oh, the sound the marble suit makes when it moves is upsetting. Just like grinding rock noises while you're walking around. Captain Krepitus is here. You actually have to move like the fucking angels from Doctor Who, no one can be looking

Starting point is 02:20:23 at you. This isn't to speak up on people, it's just annoying. I love British TV, like, oh this is too cheap to animate, how do we do it, and we turn that into really affecting horror. Something this country is good at, something your country is good at, uh, balloon catastrophe. You're welcome. Absolutely. That was Safety 3rd. Shake hands with danger. Cause of you guys that were having balloon catastrophe in English, you know?

Starting point is 02:20:51 Otherwise, we'd be done with balloon catastrophe. That's goomy catastrophe. That's goomy catastrophe, fuck off. Best episode, worst Safety 3rd. What a night. Yeah. The duality of man. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Starting point is 02:21:10 Uh, subscribe to the Patreon. It's uh, we're funny. This is funny. Yeah, we'll have a bonus episode out this month on So Help Us God. Yeah, I mean, So Help Us God is relevant to the topic. Yeah. Otherwise, you know, we'll have an angry patron come and shoot us three times. Delay, delay, delay. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:21:36 Ah, listen to all the 150 podcasts that we're all respectively on. Yeah, listen to No God's No Masks, we're having a good time with it. We just put out an episode on Michael Applebaum, the former mayor of Montreal. What a beautiful city. So much fun, because I... So I work at a very brief cutaway, and yes we will wrap this up, it's like 30 seconds. So I work at Frackens, a company that... S&C Lavellant, there you go, Nova, you'll now understand the connection, bought out to greenwash their own name. And it didn't work to the point where they've now jettisoned their old name

Starting point is 02:22:09 and renamed themselves Atkins Rayalis. And it still hasn't worked. And the amount of corruption training they have to do internally is genuinely obstructive to them doing their day jobs. It's quite hilarious. So it's very funny. So yeah, listen to that episode because it's a lot of fun. I enjoyed listening to that episode quite substantially. It's very funny. So yeah, listen to that episode because it's a lot of fun. I enjoyed listening to that episode quite substantially. It's gone great. What a part. What an idea for a part. My plug is also that Tom Payne of this parish occasionally is coming on rail natto. We've recorded a very funny Americana episode about stupid flights that shouldn't exist, that should ought to be trains.

Starting point is 02:22:45 And we ended up going extremely long because we both got quite drunk. Yeah, I heard about that. It was fun. That'll be going out on literal Christmas day because the release schedule of Rail Natter is insane. So enjoy that. All right. And I was just on a podcast about The Simpsons called Mole Man in the Morning.

Starting point is 02:23:08 We talked about Marge versus the monorail and also the episode after that. It was very long, so you better listen to it. So my time was worthwhile. Exactly. And buy tickets to the remaining shows. See the start of the episode to understand which precise places you need to buy tickets if there's anybody left after the uh i don't know delirium psychoses we all entered uh when uh again barn of the dinosaur uh suffered trails were scattered across scattered off long island sound yeah what are you gonna do i think they actually repaired that balloon somehow. They scooped up its insides, popped them back in, and got stitching.

Starting point is 02:23:49 Yep. Lot of stitching. Just imagining them all with bandages and patches, like the year after, just like actual b- anyway, it's beautiful. We should do a big trip to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving parade and get everyone along. I would be really funny. But also everyone should bring a pitchfork to just protect themselves if they get if the balloons get too close.

Starting point is 02:24:12 Bring sharp objects. You'll never take me alive. Broken bow. All right, let's wrap this shit up. All right. Yeah, that was podcast. All right. Good night, everyone.

Starting point is 02:24:23 Bye, everyone.

Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 172: The 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

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