Wonderful! - Wonderful! 151: Michaels Soul Connections

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Griffin's favorite big camera! Rachel's favorite suggestive workout! Griffin's favorite ill-advised customer support! Rachel's favorite odd-rhyming poem!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Aug...ustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Support Breonna Taylor's family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/9v4q2-justice-for-breonna-taylorDemand police accountability and reform: https://action.justiceforbreonna.org/sign/BreonnaWasEssential/Support Black Lives Matter Louisville: https://linktr.ee/BLMLouisvilleFor more ways to support Black Lives Matter and find anti-racism resources: https://linktr.ee/blacklivesmatterRegister to vote: https://vote.gov/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 🎵 Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Folks, we're not gonna BS ya. We're up against it. Yeah. We're up against it. We only got 40 minutes to save the world. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:00:27 Sometimes, at least for me, the topics don't come. Yeah. I sit in front of my computer and I think, what's wonderful? And I told Griffin the other day, I literally wrote down as a potential topic the color green. Yeah. Which I probably shouldn't be saying out loud because I may still do that.
Starting point is 00:00:44 I was more talking about the timetable that we have to record this particular episode i feel some responsibility for the yes because it did take me some time yeah come up with ideas but you know life finds a way we got 40 fucking minutes baby it's gonna be like an episode of 24 just like us trying to bang this thing out we're like two jack bowers but we don't hurt people yeah Yeah, maybe less torture in this one. But we help people. So whatever the opposite of torture is, I guess presence.
Starting point is 00:01:11 I don't know what the opposite, love? I don't know, but whatever. This is wonderful. It's a show where we talk about things that we are into, things that we like. I'm gonna keep it tight today, but do you have any of those small wonders? I bet I can guess what you're gonna say.
Starting point is 00:01:22 Oh, I mean, are you thinking I'm gonna talk about Pen15? Pen15 is a good show. Rachel just got me watching it. It's fun. It is. We've talked about it's dredging up middle school memories for me that I, not a joke, have suppressed.
Starting point is 00:01:35 Like, I don't remember anything from middle school because my experience there was straight up traumatic. And this show is like, hey, remember? The second season is now available and i was going to watch it but i really wanted griffin to watch the first season with me because i watched it solo and i thought he would enjoy this yeah so here we are yeah it's so good it's very very good premium recommendation i'm gonna say claire de loon by debussy is that right debussy debussy it's just a good track one of those has to be right that's the one that they play on during the fountain scene at the end of
Starting point is 00:02:10 oceans 11 the bum bum bum bum bum uh i just really like it it's been stuck in my head i've been trying to like do it by ear in ableton which is a fun sometimes i like to do that it's like a fun exercise i could very easily find the sheet music and like learn to play it that way but i don't know i'm i'm broken it's a very it's a very classy thing to have stuck in your head instead of like a commercial yeah the 1990s yeah well i'm sure that i could get one of those in there if i really tried um i go first this week great uh my first thing that i'm gonna do is hubble the telescope telescope up in the sky the big space telescope just takes pictures of things that are like wicked far away like really far away uh i didn't know anything about hubble aside from that we saw i guess a model of it at
Starting point is 00:02:56 the uh or i saw a model of it at the uh air and space the smithsonian air and space museum uh and they have some really incredible pictures there and there's no shortage of amazing pictures that this thing has taken it's been up in space since 1990 uh and it's just been taking great pictures ever since then except for the first three years where it was up there because somebody made a whoopsie doodle uh on the hubble that was uh apparently a huge debacle, a fiasco, one might call it, that I will get into. And over the last 30 years, it's helped astronomers solve like these pretty big existential like questions. But more than that, it's served as sort of a PR like godsend for NASA and really all global space agencies because you know you see a picture of the
Starting point is 00:03:45 whatever there's one iconic picture of a galaxy that's like this orange cloud with these three fingers like sticking up out of it and it's called like the pillars of creation I think is what it's called takes some incredible pictures and gets people super stoked about space you've seen some dope Hubble pics yeah I mean maybe but not daily i don't have like a daily calendar or like a daily alert i feel like i haven't been in touch with hubble in a while well you should tap back into your love with hubble because there's a there's a lot to to look at there so it's got a big ass mirror in it like an eight foot wide mirror uh it can observe observe ultraviolet visible and near infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Starting point is 00:04:25 And it has captured images from as far as, this might be a fun game. How far away do you think is the farthest that Hubble has taken a picture of? Oh. I know, I know. I hate estimating distance. I know, I'm putting you on the spot.
Starting point is 00:04:40 I definitely would have whiffed this. Are we talking about miles? No. What's our metric here? More than miles. 10 to 15 light years away okay i have no concept of what a light year is griffin it's how far fast it's how light takes a year to travel that distance it's big it's very very big it's so far away that it can see into the past right okay because of uh relativistic time dilation like it can see it can see way way way in the past okay isn't that cool it's a fucking time machine my brain and i can't withstand this uh it's because it's not on earth because
Starting point is 00:05:20 it's not a terrestrial we have amazing terrestrial telescopes but they all are affected by like background you know radiation light leak and all that stuff. Hubble doesn't have to worry about that. So you can just take these crystal clear pictures super, super far away. It was actually funded in the 70s. And it was supposed to launch in 1983. But it ran into a bunch of budget problems. And then of course, in 1986, there was the Challenger disaster, which basically put everything that NASA was doing, you know, at a standstill, especially the shuttle program, because they would have to launch it with a shuttle.
Starting point is 00:05:50 And ultimately, that is what happened in 1990. It was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery. And once it was up there, NASA realized that the big mirror that is responsible for like its optics wasn't installed correctly. And so the pictures that they were able to take were like not great. Oh my gosh, what a mess. What a big, big mess. So the first of five Hubble servicing missions
Starting point is 00:06:12 went up in 1993, fixed the issue. And it's been nothing but big, beautiful pics ever since. Other servicing missions added sort of like different features or, you know, just repaired various things. The last servicing mission was in 2009 like different features or you know just repaired various things the last servicing mission was in 2009 that was an important one because uh i didn't know this hubble's orbit is pretty fucking precarious uh and that's by design because you know it's got to be able to beam i guess get stuff back to i don't know why it's in such a low precarious orbit but it is uh and because of orbital decay is is likely to come down sometime in the 2030s and uh before this servicing mission
Starting point is 00:06:52 that come down was gonna be potentially catastrophic like if it landed on land it could be uh because of the way it's built it was not going to break up a lot and so it was going to be a big disaster so 2009 they added a module to it to help them you know rendezvous with the space shuttle and bring it down safely good a good update i would say um so yeah we've learned about the age and the expansion of the universe and the prevalence of black holes uh and there's another powerful satellite that was actually supposed to launch this year that is like the successor to Hubble called the James Webb Telescope, which features a 21 foot mirror array that is going to be able to take some like really, truly staggeringly far away pictures way, way even further than Hubble. And now it due to different delays and because of COVID and because of, you know, NASA funding and stuff, it's now scheduled to launch next October. So something to look forward to if you're a fan of space pics.
Starting point is 00:07:49 It's just like an amazing achievement. You can file to use Hubble, like you can apply to use Hubble. There's certain cycles that Hubble is available to use, and most of them are spoken for, like most of the available hours are spoken for, but there is time set aside for amateur astrologists to... For like a children's birthday party well not for a children's birthday but it's extremely competitive but it's like available for you to use and it's like it's expensive right but it's pure good i think like we're using hubble to see things out in the universe and answer these incredible scientific questions and you can use it hypothetically, like if you want to.
Starting point is 00:08:29 I think that's fucking rad. And it's sort of in my mind, like the aesthetic ideal of what a government program could potentially like establish for you. I know the European Space Agency and somebody else helped contribute to Hubble. So it wasn't purely NASA,
Starting point is 00:08:43 but it's just good. Hubble's just good. Hubble's just good. It's just straight up good. Yeah, you're not gonna find out years from now that Hubble's been doing bad stuff. Hubble's not gonna, I don't think we're gonna get milkshake ducked by Hubble. That would be wild.
Starting point is 00:08:55 Anyway, what's your first thing? My first thing is kind of silly. Oh boy. It's the shake weight. The shake. I have to imagine that you don't actually care about the sort of physical benefits of the Shake Weight as much as you enjoy. It looks like a jerk off. I enjoy the kind of the fine line it walks in its existence and promotion.
Starting point is 00:09:21 It is just one of those kind of delightful, at least seem to be happy accident that just created so much joy. Do we, I feel like we, did we have a shake weight or some derivative? Somebody we did. I think our friend Grace had one. I've used a shake weight before. It's, y'all, it's hard.
Starting point is 00:09:42 Yeah. You look at the shake weight and you see that and you're like, oh, fun, a jerk-off weight. It's fucking, it's really quite difficult to use the Shake Weight. Uh-huh. No, that's true. Like, there was research done and there are actual benefits to it. It's not a complete, you know, hoax.
Starting point is 00:09:56 Yeah. It, there, I mean, it is a weight. It's a weight that is even harder to lift than a regular old weight. For those that are not familiar, when it was originally marketed, it was marketed towards women. It is a two and a half pound dumbbell shaped device with spring loaded weights on each end.
Starting point is 00:10:14 So the idea is that you would grip it and shake it as if you were priming a bottle of soda. Oh, is that what the action is? I love the Wikipedia description said, Shake Weight has gained popular attention and parody because it involves using the appearance of a pumping a phallic object. Yeah, that's a very Wikipedia,
Starting point is 00:10:40 very clinical way of, I want dirty Wikipedia that's like, yeah, man, looks like it's jerking it. Right, boys? So the idea was, so they promoted it as something that they called dynamic inertia, which would ignite the muscles in your arms. So instead of just lifting a regular dumbbell, you would be, you know, moving the weight up and down, which would work additional muscles instead of just the ones you would get from a regular dumbbell. Yeah, basically, as you are lifting it up, the weights are pushing down. And as you are pushing
Starting point is 00:11:15 it down, the weights are pushing up because of the springs and doing and you do it very repetitively, very quickly, like a jerk off might do do. And it gets very, very difficult super fast. Yeah, the suggestion was that in just six minutes, you could burn as many calories as you would in 42 minutes with a standard dumbbell. That doesn't seem right or fair. Yeah, so there was research done. There was a professor at San Diego State University
Starting point is 00:11:43 that said that it is a good workout and that it does require, quote, 300% more muscle activity than a dumbbell, which is a claim that they made. But that six minutes isn't going to change somebody's life as much as a more focused, lengthier workout would. But it does force your muscle to contract more in the time frame. And so there is value to it. Did you know they made a shake weight for men? No. I mean, I assumed that the shake weight itself was fairly gender neutral. Well, here's the thing.
Starting point is 00:12:19 So the shake weight for women was two and a half pounds. The shake weight for men was five pounds. No thanks. weight for women was two and a half pounds the shake weight for men was five pounds no thanks and the suggestion is that it's i mean it's six minutes is almost impossible like like people just can't do it for that long uh because it is it's a heavy weight to be shaken back and forth and that's a six minutes it's a pretty long time to be doing one motion over and over again. The assumption that people who identify as men have literally mathematically twice the power is such a wild,
Starting point is 00:12:56 like it goes beyond sexism into the realm of like sci-fi. It's like, wow. I've never read Ender's Game, but like I assume this is the shit Orson Scott Card is up to. I just assume. So I found an interview with a creator. Okay. That is delightful.
Starting point is 00:13:15 So this was something that was popular in 2010. The creator is Johan Verheem. And I found the interview from Inc.com with him, and they try and kind of get at the suggestive nature of the product. Oh, they hint at it? And whether or not it was intentional, basically. Can't wait to hear this quote.
Starting point is 00:13:36 Because this is an ad that was, you can find it on YouTube. It was parodied by Saturday Night Live as well as a number of talk shows because the ad is somewhat suggestive for a number of reasons, not just the product. So the interview asked him kind of about the success and he said, well, you know, we had evidence that it worked, but it also looked provocative. It's not just that sex sells, but one of the other things that was very important to direct
Starting point is 00:14:03 selling is that a product looked different enough for someone to stop and watch it. And the interviewer said, you know, kind of pushed on that a little bit more and said, you know, what do you mean looks different? And he said, well, I think there are sexy bodies selling a lot of things. And there are a lot of 30-minute infomercials that use sex and good-looking bodies to get people's attention. The outright honesty of this person is like really taking my breath away. So we probably got more attention than most because our product was funny. And back when we were making the show, there were a couple jokes going around the set about what it looks like if you do it a certain way but that wasn't our master plan and we had to spend a lot
Starting point is 00:14:48 of money on pr so people knew that it actually worked didn't think plan was going to be the thing that came after master in that one is there stories of people who ended up in the hospital because they used the shake weight and then they went to uh pleasure a penis and just yanked their yank the wiener just like clean off i did not see that okay uh they they talk about marketing the shake weight for men and whether or not that was a trickier video to make um and he said well in the men's there's no room for sexual innuendo there because it's such an intense workout. That's fucking, that sucks, dude. That's rough. And so they said, well, does that mean that in the women's infomercial there was room for innuendo?
Starting point is 00:15:34 And he said, the lighter device for women is for toning, where the one for men is a really tough workout. We never intended for the women's device to have innuendo. We had a bunch of people here from industry and a lot of women on the set and they didn't make many comments but it depends how you shake it as well if you do it based on the three exercise that we have laid out it's not that suggestive some of the women would say though if you shake it this way it looks like dot dot dot well period a jerk off say it say it you saying that the dude weight has to be twice as strong because men can't joke around so because they have to get their muscles so big is way worse than saying it looks like a jerk off when you i did i did watch the the men's
Starting point is 00:16:21 infomercial and it is remarkably less suggestive uh the placement of the weight and the uh the the faces are not as suggestive perhaps what a tangled fucking web this person has woven uh-huh the the parody that saturday night live did stars bill hater and the suggestion is that the problem with the infomercial is you never know when it's going to be on and so it's going to be on. And so it's difficult to set your schedule by it. But they are marketing it as a DVD that you can purchase by itself. It is just the Shake Weight infomercial.
Starting point is 00:17:02 And it's just a bunch of testimonials from like Bill Hader and Will Forte and Keenan. It's kind of suggesting like their favorite parts right um i i guess i uh this was a simpler time it was that i have fondness for i i think we both have an appreciation for an infomercial yes like we both very very much enjoy watching people try to do things and this one this one actually like there are benefits associated so you know there are a lot of infomercials out there that i felt uncomfortable kind of supporting but this one it's like you know it's a weight yeah it builds muscle because it's a weight that you move right and it looks uh wow folks can't overstate it enough looks a lot like that dirty thing. Hey, can I steal you away?
Starting point is 00:17:46 Yes. It looks like the Shake Weight is one of our sponsors. Oh, how great. No, we got some Jumbotrons, though. Here's one for future Noah, and it's from past Noah, who says, I know the past few months have been rough, but you are killing it started your first teaching job you move to a new state you're crushing this new adult life remember to take a deep breath and watch an episode or five of GBBO that's Great British Bake Off if you're feeling down and hey forget about calories and buy yourself a peanut
Starting point is 00:18:18 butter blizzard you've earned it you don't even have to earn it to get the peanut butter blizzard you can just go get one of those. Yeah. Hey, past Noah, this is really nice that you did this for future Noah. Some really good advice in here. And I think past Noah and future Noah would be friends. It's been so long since I've had a blizzard. It's been forever since I've been to a derrick queen. I remember the last time I had one. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:42 Last one I had, I used to get the Nerds Blizzard, which is such a mistake. It would hurt your teeth. They would get like little rocks. On Stop Podcasting Yourself, they were talking about the seasonal flavors of blizzards. Apparently, there's a pumpkin pie one. Okay. Yeah. I fucked that up.
Starting point is 00:18:57 Yeah. What's the other Jumbotron here? Can you read it? This is for Emily. It is from Alice. Hi, Schmoesby it's punchy while you were the best mate of honor ever i'm excited to be the best matron of honor for you so glad you fell in love with my husband's best friend and now you'll never be able to get rid of me let's have a girl's night i'll bring
Starting point is 00:19:19 the wine speaking of a tangled web there's a lot of there's a lot of relationships going on and well i guess it's not that complicated turns out when people are friends uh sometimes they fall in love yeah cool cool how that works hey you like movies what about coming up with movie ideas over the course of an hour because that's what we do every week on story break a writer's room podcast where three hollywood professionals have an hour to come up with a pitch for a movie or TV show based off of totally zany prompts. Like that time we reimagined Star Wars based on our phone's autocomplete. Luke Skywalker is a family man and it's Star Wars, but it's a good idea.
Starting point is 00:19:56 How about that time we broke the story of a bunch of Disney Channel original movies based solely on the title and the poster? Okay, Sarah Hyland is a 50-foot woman. Let's just go with it, guys. Or the time we finally cracked the title and the poster. Okay, Sarah Hyland is a 50-foot woman. Let's just go with it, guys. Or the time we finally cracked the Adobe Photoshop feature film. Stamp tool is your Woody, and then the autofill is the new Buzz Lightyear. Join us as we have a good time at matching
Starting point is 00:20:13 all the movies Hollywood is too cowardly to make. Story Break comes out every Thursday on Maximum Fun. I don't know why I'm using this voice now. I'm so excited to do my second thing. Can I please do it? Yes. My second thing is the I please do it? Yes. My second thing is the Michael's online shopper chat. Do you know about this? You know, a lot of websites have that
Starting point is 00:20:33 feature. It is never one I have taken advantage of. Oh, you seem to misunderstand my dearest. A lot of websites have a feature where if you're having an issue, you can reach out to customer service through the chat pop-up that exists. Is that not what this is? Michaels took it a different direction. And that direction was pointed out by a Twitter user named Lou Bega Vivo, which is very powerful, in a now viral tweet. Instead of just chatting with a customer service representative, which I think you can still do on the Michaels website, the Michaels website, Michaels is an arts and crafts store, if you've never been to it. They're like Hobby Lobby, but not like deeply fucking bigoted. Yes.
Starting point is 00:21:24 Hobby Lobby, but not like deeply fucking bigoted. Yes. Their website has a little window that you can click in to ask or you can ask questions about products or your local Michaels or whatever. And then you, the customer, can also answer other people's questions. It is a, yes, it is a Q&A a a crowd-sourced q a basically shopper chat that you you can just go to michaels.com you don't have to sign up for anything you can just start firing away questions and responses and michaels like introduced this to sort of reduce the load of like basic customer service questions from their their CS
Starting point is 00:22:06 team right and I to I guess save a few bucks and I love what happened because I love when companies like exhibit hubris in that way and then they pay for that hubris when things go terribly terribly awry. So the idea is that somebody could get in there and be like, hey, my son has to make a solar system. Yes. What kind of stuff should I buy? And somebody else could be like, oh, we did that.
Starting point is 00:22:35 Here's what I'd recommend. Right. Okay. You could do that. Or you could do what Lou Bega Vivo and then a bunch of other people did, which is take this idea and take it some places. This tweet from Lou Bega Vivo went up on August 27th,
Starting point is 00:22:51 and it just had some screen caps of conversations that he had had with other Michaels shoppers. And they have turned this website into just a sort of unusable hellscape for anyone looking for actual arts and crafts advice. These are the purest laughs I think I've had since all of this quarantine started. And so, I'm very grateful to this concept. I would love to read some of the actual interchanges that have happened between shoppers on the Michaels website. Some of which were from Lubega Vivo, some of which I just found elsewhere on the internet.
Starting point is 00:23:32 So these are conversations between two shoppers on the Michaels.com website. Hi, everyone. I want yarn. Don't we all, brother? Okay. How are my fellow Michael heads doing tonight? Pretty good. Me too.
Starting point is 00:23:52 I wish. Oh, divorce. Hi, Michaels. Can I get a free t-shirt? Are you a veteran? No. Then yes. So, is this...
Starting point is 00:24:12 I am looking for my wife, Brenda. She was last seen in Paint Isle. I cannot find her. She belongs to the store now. Is this stuff everybody can see? Like when you log in, do you have to seek this out yes you can click i want to answer questions and then there's like a little inbox okay okay uh would anyone like to meet at michael's and fist fight me my reach wouldn't be long enough to maintain social
Starting point is 00:24:35 distancing guidelines per the cdc so i'm afraid an in-person fist fight would be too unsafe for now bro i'm on stilts it's all good I think you're supposed to be six feet apart, not six feet up, but that's sick as hell, bro. Looking for a coffin. They may have decoration coffins for Halloween, but if you're looking for a full-size coffin, you may be out of luck here, buddy. I'll make it fit. I don't live near a Michael's and it makes me sad. Sad face emoticon. this i don't live near a michael's and it makes me sad sad face emoticon what do i do somebody just responded michael it's it is this i really this is the kind of humor that i very much enjoy this is like a good amazon review except it's interactive it's interactive michaels what were you thinking there are going to be so many people who log on to Michaels.com actually thinking that
Starting point is 00:25:26 they are talking to a customer service representative. Yes. And then they get this. Yes. And it's very, very, very good to me. Yes. So it's still active? Still active.
Starting point is 00:25:38 Did it yesterday. Had some fun. Talked to some people. I wonder who advised that. Who was like, you know what? People are generally good. Let's just open it up to some people. I wonder who advised that. Who was like, you know what? People are generally good. Let's just open it up to the people. These people are good.
Starting point is 00:25:50 They're just having fun communicating. Listen, we're all isolated. I mean, so far. We're all lonely. This is a dangerous endeavor they are on, though. It is a dangerous endeavor, but it's also something that I wish every single shopping outlet in the world would incorporate yeah that would be incredible it would be my full-time job just like hopping around going to you know the uh sur la table website and just just having some just reaching out making soul connections that's what it's all
Starting point is 00:26:21 about don't buy a colander just put holes in this pot it's all you have to do get a drill you can use that for other things too anyway that was a short one but holy shit i love it there's a lot of these to look up just find michael's customer shopping chat and there's a cornucopia of goofs waiting for you what's your second thing uh my second thing is a trip to the poetry corner oh boy here we go here we go everybody buckle up to where you're going on a drive room to get your pencils and your pens and your stanzas and your pencils and your stanzas and your rhyming poetry is here poetry is here poetry is here thank you honey hey you helped it was a real round that we had going there i like
Starting point is 00:27:07 that uh the poet i am talking about uh is k ryan nope don't know that one you can be forgiven for this because she's kind of an outsider kind of a rebel kind of somebody who doesn't traffic in the typical poetry circles oh she uses numbers explain well a number poem is like a words poem but you just use sort of evocative numbers instead of a poem but not that not the one evocative number that you if you use 69 in a number poem it's like come on what year is it? But you could do like a three plus three and a 10 minus one and just like get people there, you know? Three plus three is six. Well, that's six and nine.
Starting point is 00:27:55 I love that you didn't just use a math equation that added up to 69. No, no, no, no, no. Not like 70 minus one. I really like to make you think. Yeah, you sure did. Anyway, sorry. Kay Ryan has published seven volumes of poems.
Starting point is 00:28:07 She is currently living in California. She's 75. From 2008 to 2010, she was a poet laureate. She also has been a MacArthur fellow and has won a Pulitzer Prize. Jesus. So she's got the accolades. The triple crown. But she is not somebody with an MFA or a PhD.
Starting point is 00:28:27 She also is not particularly active in the poetry community. She said that she does not typically read poetry because, quote, like eucalyptus trees, they poison the soil beneath them so nothing else can grow there. Wow. Hey, you weren't fucking kidding. She finds herself more influenced by things that aren't poetry uh which i can kind of understand you hear that from songwriters sometimes too like when they're making an album they don't listen to other music because they don't want it to like interfere with their own process right uh and she just has kind of always always seen herself as
Starting point is 00:29:02 somebody that doesn't go to conferences doesn't kind of fit into the traditional poet mold. Because for those of you that have been interested in creative writing, there there is kind of a circuit now of like you go and you get an MFA, and you go teach creative writing at a university. There's a way like a process kind of to follow if you want to make a living as a poet. And that just has not been her process. And it has worked for her. She gets compared a lot to Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore, and that she is kind of quirky and focused on meter in her poetry.
Starting point is 00:29:37 And you'll see that a lot. She focuses a lot on kind of surprising rhymes. So she recently in 2020 released a combination of essays about poetry called Synthesizing Gravity. And she gathers like 30 years of writing about ascetics and poetics and the pursuit of art. And it sounds really cool. I haven't read it yet, but I'm kind of excited to look at it because her writing is really, I don't know, there's a lot of energy to it. So I wanted to read one of her poems. It's called Atlas, and you'll kind of hear the musicality of it. Atlas.
Starting point is 00:30:19 Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is so little others can do. They can't lend a hand with Brazil and not stand on Peru. Jesus. That is fun. And I had trouble kind of following it. Yeah, you want me to read it again? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:41 It's a very short poem. But to even read it and to follow it is tricky because you get so fixated. I hung up on the last thing. On the rhythm. Yeah. Yeah. Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is so little others can do.
Starting point is 00:31:03 They can't lend a hand with Brazil and not stand on Peru. Okay, that's really cool. Yeah, it really was like I was trying to follow the different rhymes that were happening in the middle of the lines. And then I would like space out and miss the next line like completely. Yeah, people kind talk about um kind of economical use of rhythm and line and so her poems are very short often but there's so much work being done by language and rhythm and it's it's just it's fun i would really encourage people to check out k ryan very accessible um and just like a lot of kind of almost like some fun hip-hop rhythms in the 75-year-old woman's poems.
Starting point is 00:31:47 Hell yeah. Do you want me to tell you what our friends at home are talking about? Yes, please. Amanda says, I think that the kalimba, a.k.a. the thumb piano, is wonderful. I just bought one, and the sound is soothing. I'm having so much fun learning how to play it. I don't think I've ever owned a kalimba.
Starting point is 00:32:03 It's the one that our friend has one. it has like the metal uh bars that like come down and you just kind of flick them like your thumbs yeah it's you you do with your thumb it's a great sound uh i've used a like you know synthesized fake digital version of it i think in some taz songs uh in in logic and ableton and stuff like that. It's cool. It's a cool sound. Really liked this one from Crystal who says, Pulled pork. The end.
Starting point is 00:32:32 End of submission. Wow. Yeah. All right. I'm into it. So good. I'm into it. Good. God, I love pulled pork.
Starting point is 00:32:38 It's really good. For a while, it was like my favorite. Before I moved to Texas and, you know, brisket was a thing that was very good all of a sudden uh pulled pork was like my absolute jammy jam it's a messy messy tasty sandwich messy tasty sloppy boy not sloppy joe's that's too messy different yeah pulled pork yes go for it that's it thanks to bowen and augustus for the use for our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description and thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network i would
Starting point is 00:33:09 encourage everybody to go to maximum fun and see all the great shows on there uh there's a lot of time sensitive content that is really enlightening uh and there's also just a lot of little funny escapist pieces that i would encourage y'all to check out. It's good times on there. Yeah, wherever your heart is leading you. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, register to vote, please. Yes. If you go to vote.org, that would be radical.
Starting point is 00:33:33 Yesterday, I think, was voter registration day. Yeah, and the deadlines are coming up for a lot of states. I know Texas is October 5th, I believe. Yes. So please do that. Also, I'm dropping this in after we recorded because after we recorded, the Kentucky grand jury ruled on the case
Starting point is 00:33:53 of the murder of Breonna Taylor by the police officers that raided her apartment while she was asleep. And we are furious about the outcome as you probably are and should be, uh, as well. Uh, we're going to have links in the episode description of where you can, uh, donate money and support for, uh, Breonna Taylor's family and, uh, Black Lives Matter Louisville and the Louisville Bail Fund. It didn't feel right to put out this episode without addressing it because it is the most important thing happening right now.
Starting point is 00:34:32 And we would encourage you to raise your voice to demand justice for Breonna Taylor and to demand police reform both locally and nationwide wherever you can. And yeah, I think that's it did we get in under the oh just barely barely just we're like fucking zipping under the door the big stone doors it's lowering down then we see like oh no i left my hat on the other side and fucking whip out my hand i'm like like, I got my hat! And I put it on. But it's a fedora, and you're like, really? Really? That was what you
Starting point is 00:35:12 saved? Bye. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.

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