Wonderful! - Wonderful! 248: Nicely Nicely Podcast

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Griffin’s favorite musical about bad boyfriends! Rachel’s favorite use of Google Translate!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Fair Elections Center: https://www.fairelectionscenter.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Beep, beep, beep. That's a horn sound. We are driving the bus. The bus has two driver's wheels on it.

Rachel and I are sharing. You all are on the bus. It's free. The bus is free. A lot of buses they do tokens, they do swipey cards, Apple Pay. Not on this bus is free. You hop on.

You can ride it as long as you want. But after usually about 35 to 40 minutes, it does come to a dead stop for a week. And don't let the pigeon drive the bus. Oh, my God. Can we talk about this? This is a wonderful show. We talk about things we like, things we're into. Can we talk about this pigeon, though?

This pigeon is very convincing. It's very. Listen, if I weren't a dad, a daddy, and this pigeon tried very convincing it's very listen if i weren't a dad yeah daddy yeah and this pigeon tried to put his game on me yeah do we sound like completely out of our gourds for people who don't know oh for sure i can't imagine that people mo willems people know mo willems if they don't have children but maybe i don't know maybe, maybe. If they don't have children, Mo Willems. He has a book about these pigeons. Willems. Mo Willems.

That's what I said. I just stumbled through it really fast because I was trying to sound like a cool guy. Mo Willems writes about this pigeon, and the pigeon either does want to do something he shouldn't do or doesn't want to do something he should do. Exactly. What a great summation. Thank you. Yeah, it's great.

One time he finds a hot dog and a little duck tries to get it from him. It's heartbreaking stuff. But that's not what we're here to talk about. Although I do appreciate Mo Willems' whole body of work. It's just a delight. Nuffle Bunny, fucking forget about it.

Nuffle Bunny fucking fucks me up every time I read it. But this is wonderful. Should we talk about things that are good? Why are we both driving the bus? How did that come to you? I couldn't which one of if it was going to be one of us right i don't want to well i'm just wondering how the bus even got brought into the equation i think i was thinking about our show as a journey now that's reality television talk you're doing right now i noticed last week there was some

talk among the the wonderheads out there oh i like that about the sort of delirious state that we but mostly i was approaching the episode with and i would like to publicly announce that our fortunes have not reversed. They have, if anything, gotten much worse. Sleep is an unobtainable, precious, golden dew that the taste of which I have forgotten. Which I have forgotten. I have entered into a sort of circadian cycle now that I didn't know was sustainable. Let me offer you a perspective that I have that helps tremendously. I can't wait.

I need anything. So middle of the night, I feel like everything is terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm terrified and panicked. And I feel like there is some huge problem that needs to be addressed. Yeah. And then I wake up, and I'm so relieved that the night is over. The sun will come out tomorrow. Then I'm like, oh, I don't have to deal with that.

It's daytime now. Yeah. I just have to deal with the extreme mental, physical, emotional exhaustion from the psychic wounds this two-foot-tall organism can do to me, a big, strong man. He's so little. He's so little. But the wounds, the psychic wounds he inflicts upon me

are out are they so far outscale him what is what is making it i think uniquely troublesome is that henry was also a poor sleeper but at this age he had started to become very consistent you know he was still waking up but it was about the same time for the same duration every night. Love that. So it was like. That became daddy's anime time. You wake up and I would be like, I have nothing to do for the next hour. I'm going to, I've already watched.

Well, it wouldn't even take an hour. I'm talking about at this age. At this age. Okay. At this age, it was like 10 minutes. And then he was like, oh, okay, maybe I should sleep. Yeah. God, that was

so fucking choice gus is he's a rowdy boy and i know in the future our boys are gonna listen to our show and gus is gonna feel really self-conscious and i just want to tell you buddy good like good no i it's it's i mean that's dad's parenting too shall pass. Do you have any small wonders? Oh, man. I appreciate that you always allow me to go first. Well, you know what it is? You're not fast enough. I know.

No, no, with asking me for the small one. Yeah, that's true. I feel like it is a courtesy that you afford me, and I like that. Yeah. Okay, I've got one okay just in that stalling that i just did uh when you are taking um a like a ride share or a taxi and the driver tells you that they have lived in the city you are in for a very long time and then start giving you like a little history and trivia so good i i unsurprisingly am not comfortable speaking with strangers in a situation where

i am trapped typically but when somebody just kind of wants to share their journey with you yeah uh and and give you some comfort and their ability to get you from one place to another. I love it. I'm on board. Mine is I got my bike. I ordered an electric cargo bike, the Turn S8i. I get the different models confused, but it's a nice bike. And I've successfully gotten our child to school on it a couple times now. And whenever I run past other parents who are also biking their kids to school, there's like a cool little...

Do you do a little nod? A little nod. Oh, that's great. A little nod. And also we biked past one of Henry's classmates who was walking. And he's like, hi, Henry M. And Henry said, my dad's bike's got a jet engine on it. And it doesn't.

And what was really funny is that we were going up a pretty steep hill and moving at about the speed of smell. So you very slowly passed him. Very, very slowly passed him while my son in the back almost mocking me. Look at this jet. I go first this week.

Okay. Please do. You know what I'm going to talk about. Yeah. Last night, Lynn was kind enough to take us and some buds to the Kennedy Center production of Guys and Dolls. And it was off of the chains that it was so far removed from the chains that the chains had become sort of an abstract memory i um listeners of the show will know that griffin has an extensive uh connection to uh musical theater i do not no at all no not through any real choice of my own i just didn't

grow up with a father that was in productions regularly no or ever uh yeah your dad he would grace occasionally he would tickle those boards uh every you know he was in the chorus right uh yeah so i had never seen guys and dolls before and what a fucking way to see right this cast y'all i can never see it again out of sight philip the sue uh steven pascal james iglehart kevin chamberlain the the og horton from seussical the musical really brought things very full circle for me at what point did you realize? As soon as he started singing. Oh, really? Yeah, for sure. Rachel Dratch was in it as Big Julie. Outrageous.

Like, so fucking funny. So fun. Best ever. If you've never seen the show, like Rachel, before last night, it is just this bonkers upbeat musical about gamblers who are also shitty boyfriends and every song in the musical goes so hard like there is not a there's not a throwaway number in the in the whole thing

it reminded me a little bit and this is again my limited um glossary that i'm working with but uh anything goes yeah for sure you know kind of a similar like was that a frank lesser i don't know why i am asking you yeah it is like a similar fun time energy where everybody on stage is having an incredible time and you are really enjoying watching them uh no that was uh guy bolton and peachy wodehouse uh so anyway uh Guys and Dolls has like a few intertwining plots all happening around this one floating craps game. But toward the end of the second act, you get the climax of the show. who you get to know in this musical, have been dragooned into going to a city mission prayer meeting because they lost a bet to Skye Masterson,

who's one of the two sort of big leads of the show. I guess one of the four big leads of the show. And the musical is taking place in like... 1940s New York. So the gamblers are all here and they're at the city mission and the missionaries are trying to get them to confess their sins and none of the gamblers like really know

what they're doing and this scene is kind of like you know it is it is not necessarily this like incredibly like plot heavy sort of moment. No, it feels a little bit like an improv sketch almost,

like a premise. They kind of plop in at the end of the show and it's very long. It's a very long scene. And a couple of the leads are not even in it. Like Sky Masterson dips in. He's like, here's the dudes, bye. And then he's not in the scene anymore.

I don't think Adelaide's in the scene at all. So like it is a weird, there's a concept in musical theater called the 11 o'clock number. And it is typically toward the end of the second act. And it is kind of where the one of the protagonists has a realization that helps them complete, like an epiphany that helps them complete their hero's journey, right? And there's so many examples of it throughout musical theater. In Guys and Dolls, that number is called Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat. And it is not performed by one of the leads. It is performed by a character named Nicely Nicely Johnson, who's played by Kevin Chamberlain, the OG Horton.

And he is not a lead character, really. He is not. He is a. He's in it a lot. He's in it a lot, but he is like a secondary comic relief sort of almost like Greek chorus character who is just very unassuming, goofy dude. who is just very unassuming, goofy dude. And they pressure him to stand up in front of the city mission prayer meeting and sing a song. And this song is like, again,

no lead character's like, oh no, I've made a terrible mistake. I love her and I must chase her. It's not that. I had this fucking wild dream about gambling on a boat to heaven. And everybody gets into it. And I feel like Frank Lesser, who wrote the musical, must have just written this song.

Like, well, okay. This doesn't tie up any threads. And there's no moment of gigantic fulfillment that happens here. Nothing is building to this. Nothing is building to this. Nicely Nicely Johnson doesn't have this arc that culminates in his like salvation he is this a very unassuming character who then stands up and fucking destroys yeah with the best number in the show it is the show stopping though and it is such an unusual choice for that i'm so glad that i got to see it because griffin had for a long time told me about the virtues of this song.

And I mean, it's a great song. I couldn't object to that, but I didn't feel the power of it until I saw it. Until you see a whole chorus of people getting into it. So I want to play a little bit from the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls which is the version I grew up with. We got Nathan Lane in the mix.

We got J.K. Simmons in the mix. He's one of the Greek chorus guys. Peter fucking Gallagher as Sky Masterson. So Walter Bobby plays Nicely Nicely Johnson

who sings here. So here's a little bit of Sit Down You're Rocking the Bo, if you've never heard it before. I dreamed last night I got on the boat to heaven And by some chance I had brought my dice along And there I stood and I hollered, someone fade me But the passengers, they knew right from wrong. For the people all said sit down, sit down, you're rocking the boat.

People all said sit down, sit down, you're rocking the boat. It's just perfect. It's chaotic and it's fun. And the ending of Guys and Dolls is like kind of weird and abrupt. The ending of Guys and Dolls is kind of weird and abrupt. Immediately after this, Adelaide and Sarah, the two sort of female leads for the show, get up and sing a song called Marry the Man Today, which is kind of like their moment of epiphany. Yeah.

And then you cut to a reprise of the Guys and Dolls number, only doing it for some doll uh and then the show's over yeah i always i have always felt that way about musicals honestly like they always end in a way that feels abrupt to me yes uh and i i don't know if that's like the the nature of the beast like you have to kind of shut it down at some point right it's always gonna feel abrupt uh or if if i just happen to have seen a lot of them then in that way right i just i i this song rules objectively divorced from the narrative or like its place in the rest of guys and dolls like it's a great song it is a very very fun song like in in every way but then in the show it's a great song. It is a very, very fun song, like in every way. But then in the show, it's so I can't stop thinking about it after seeing it last night, because like, Sky Masterson isn't even there. It is not a vital song. It is not. If you removed the song from the musical, then the narrative of the musical would still arguably work, right? Yeah, that's true. So despite the fact that it is just sort of this secondary comic relief character who stands up and has this moment of absolute brilliance, which I adore in any form of fiction whatsoever.

Instead, it's like a thematic 11 o'clock number where it's like, yeah, all these gamblers are shitheads. They are garbage people. And here they are singing about like how they are, they have had this moment of like holy redemption in a dream universe. Like- Right before it started,

and I didn't know it was coming at this point uh griffin looked over at me excitedly and i was like why it's oh it's about to happen it's about to pop off um it guys and dolls is such a it's such a like it's such a fun like musical it is breezy and light and the music is so good yeah and after they finish the song uh in most productions that i have uh seen uh they finish the song and it's just this big you're rocking the boat and then everybody like loses their mind like stand up standing ovation and then immediately after they just do the end of the song again immediately after it's not a reprise it's not it's like a weird like post script like coda thing and then people are like

yeah i'll clap again for that i i am i'm obsessed with this song uh i love it when unassuming characters do big things and like nicely nicely johnson is the blueprint for that also my dad destroyed this shit when huntington Outdoor Theater put it on. I can't even imagine. In the late 90s. It's almost like Frank Lesser sort of like saw through a time portal and like saw my dad and was like,

oh, wow, I gotta really give this dude something to chew on. I bet that's on tape somewhere. It's gotta be on tape somewhere. Yeah, I would love to see that. I would absolutely love to see that. Anyway, best song, best song in the show. Oh don't know if i go oh really i like i really love the song that the grandpa sings to his daughter oh yeah uh so like beautiful it is very very

been licorice tooth that's all i remember okay it doesn't go hard i need it to go hard it's a great song it's pretty true right i need it to go i guess yeah it's not it's not a banger you gotta hear peter gallagher bust out they call you lady look like i can't well i can't imagine you can't imagine you watch the't imagine. You watched the OC. You know. Yeah. Anyway, that's Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat. I will say, as a fun sidebar, Don Henley did a fucking god-awful sort of fun-free, loosely reggae-inspired cover of the song that moves at about eight beats per minute that I saw in a karaoke book once and I was like fuck yeah they got to sit down you're rocking the boat and I got up on the microphone and just heard like boom ting ting ting ting ting I was like there's bit of his give me off the stage I can't anyway can I steal you away? Yes. Thank you.

Got a couple tumble boys here and I would love to read the first one. It is for Laurel and it is from Beth who says, Hi, Angel. I just wanted to interrupt your piece to tell you that I love you. You make me happier than I ever knew possible. and I am so lucky that I get to be your person. Thank you for making me laugh and holding me when I cry, and most important, thank you for loving me. Oh, and happy birthday, or happy anniversary, maybe. Hopefully, I adore you. figure out which one is the birthday and which one's the anniversary unless you got married on a on a birthday or started dating on a birthday yeah i love these little these little sweet nothings that we get it makes me feel like i'm a guest at their wedding you know it makes me feel like i guess at the wedding i'm glad you're here or else i would feel like some sort of weirdo voyeur. You know what I mean?

Like the fact that you're here and we get to share this sort of, this remote proxy love together makes me feel a lot more comfortable about the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Do you want to read the other one? Yes.

This is for future Tay. It is from past Tay. Dear future Tay, I hope by now things are less buck wild. If not, embrace chaos. But seriously, I'm so proud of how far you've come with the voices of the McElroys in your ears along the way. Hope your 30th is as emo as you want in the eyeliner fallout boy kind of way. Keep chasing those small wonders and scritch the boys for me. Love, Five Ever, Past Tay.

Strong, powerful message. I really hope things have calmed down. I don't know about on a global scale, but maybe if you sort of like zoom in, things have gotten a bit more chill for Tay. But I also wonder if we will ever have a Jumbotron from the future to the past. Interesting.

I like that. I don't know what that would look like. Don't eat that donut in November 2022. That's in the future, hun. That's in the future. Oh. But also now I'm not eating any donuts next month because of your prophecy. November.

It's October. We're fine. Yeah, I know. I'm saying next month I can't have any donuts. Oh, yeah. Because of your dire want. Oh, damn it. Did your neighbor back into your car?

Bring that case to Judge Judy. Think the mailman might be the real father? Give that one to Judge Mathis. But, does your mom want you to flush her ashes down the toilet at Disney World when she passes away? Now that's my jurisdiction. Welcome to the court of Judge John Hodgman, where the people are real, the disputes are real, and the stakes are often unusual. If I got arrested for dumping your ashes in the Jungle Cruise, it would be an honor. I don't want to be part of somebody getting a super yacht. I don't know at what point you want to go into this, but we've had a worm bin before. Available free right now at MaximumFun.org. Judge John

Hodgman, the court of last resort when your wife won't stop pretending to be a cat and knocking the clean laundry over. Okay, Griffin. Yes? You want to know what I'm talking about this week? I can lead you a guess. So here's the thing. You see me holding this book of poetry and you think it's a poetry corner.

Oh, dang. Wait, what? It's more like a poetry hallway. A poetry hallway? Here we what? It's more like a poetry hallway. A poetry hallway? Here we go. I'm building a house, guys. We're walking out of the corner and down the hall. Because this week, I am talking about translation. Okay.

Yes. Okay. So this is like a pathway we are walking between corners. This is like a pathway we are walking between corners. I will read part of a poem from a poet, but this is not a segment about said poet. So don't even think about vibing with it at home like you do with Rachel's Poetry Corner. You save that for the next Rachel's Poetry Corner because we'll know if you vibe with it. I will also say I do not need a theme song for the poetry hallway. So don't don't stress about that okay

that's pretty high energy as you know i don't really bring that kind of hype typically to my segments um so i feel like now anything i do is going to be down from there sure i can do more of it if you want inspired by acdDC's Highway to Hell, if you want. I can do it if you want. I know you can. I have no doubt. Okay. So translation.

This is such a name-droppy episode. I know. We were talking to Lynn last night, and he was talking about Hamilton in Germany. And he was talking about how he had oversight over the translation and that they would send him – obviously, he's not fluent in German, but they would send him kind of side by side. Yeah. Here's what it is in German. Here's the translation. Here's the original text.

It rips so hard in German. I don't know if you saw any of the clips. No, I haven't listened to it. Oh, man. It slaps it's good uh but that made me think about translation i i made the mistake in graduate school of signing up for this like french poetry seminar uh and it was a real peer pressure situation i know how it is some of your friends start translating french poetry and then they're

like hey you want to try this you want to try this shit rachel i took french in high school and then uh before i said maybe seven years past and i only took like four years of french which the foreign language centers in your brain really like ferment and i never got past the like this is how you say this noun this is the day of the week this is how you count like i never got into real poems though right so we had to like identify a poet and read their work in the original french and then talk about it and it had to be kind of an understudied piece of work. I mean, I was over my head. It was very embarrassing. And that's when I really realized how impossible translation is. Yeah. Yeah, man.

Specifically poetry for a lot of reasons. I mean, you're dealing with what can often be like a very strict structure, like a sonnet or a haiku where there has to be a set number of syllables per line. There's also a lot of metaphor, you know, like multiple meanings and the expressions. And then there's a lot of interpretation and, you know, the length. And I mean, it's just, it's impossible. And so I kind of looked into it a little bit. possible. And so I kind of looked into it a little bit. And I'm, again, I don't have a lot of expertise in this area. But obviously, it was incredibly important. Because if you think about it, with most artists, they are inspired by the work of other artists. And particularly with translation, you wouldn't have the opportunity to be inspired by some like seminal works if you hadn't.

If you can't understand. Yeah, if you hadn't seen the translation. A lot of this started in the, you know, early translating Latin and that influence on Italian and French poetry. and French poetry. In the 19th and 20th century, this is where you start to see like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot was translating a lot of their poetry. Ezra Pound was translating a lot of Chinese and Japanese poetry. And then Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, these are all like famous poets. Like these are not translators first and foremost.

These are poets that were looking like across, you know, Europe. And you see a lot of like Spanish poems and poets and Rilke who I've talked about from Germany. All of it, like, tremendously influential. And so I wanted to just use Google Translate. Oh, no. And compare it to, like, the translation that was printed in a book. That's interesting. That's a fun game.

But I didn't want to do a whole poem because I wanted, you know, to kind of dig into one. So I picked Neruda. Yeah. Paolo Neruda, which is what Griffin saw me walk in with. And he's like, oh, are you talking about Paolo Neruda? And I was like, ha ha, no. Tricked you. Rachel does this thing sometimes where she runs really fast with both of her arms behind her back.

And she calls it a Neruda run. And I don't think she knows. I don't think I haven't had I I haven't had the courage to correct. I would like to say that that is a joke a small percentage of our listeners will get. Oh, no. Actually, I've engineered. No, no, baby. I've been engineering that joke for four years knowing that it would tactically strike basically every one of our listeners. Okay. Can I? Yes, please. Okay.

So I'm not going to read it in Spanish. I'm just because I can't speak Spanish. But I'm going to read the Google translation and the actual published translation. And just part of this poem that in English is called Girl Gardening. I'm not reading the whole poem. Do you have a preference or a suggestion as to whether I read Google Translate or the published poem first?

I would say the published poem first and then Google Translate. Okay, let me figure out where to start. Who translated Pablo Neruda for this? So this is Ben Bellet uh it's an addition actually it was interesting when i was reading about translation and i was like like troubleshooting and curious about kind of what the issues were this edition that i have actually just omits pieces of poems so there there is a poem that I was looking at. I was reading this article in The Guardian,

and somebody wrote about this translation and talked about how there is a particular poem that they were all reading in a group, like him and some other people. And there was a whole canto eliminated from the poem in this edition. It's the Heights of machu picchu it's like a 12 poem sequence hell yeah and they just like left out like almost half of it

um in this edition and so there's like a real like because they were sitting all together reading different editions and it was like oh i only have half that poem so clearly like this may not be the best edition to read from. But I think it's still... It's got to be better than Google Translate, though. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think this is the power of Neruda.

Like, Google Translate is still gorgeous. Yeah, okay. Okay. So Girl Gardening. And this is not the whole poem. And this is the... This is... I'm reading it from...

Yeah, I'm reading it from the published translation. And another... Just one more piece paul and ruder writes like the sexiest horniest horny horny horny on main non-stop 24 7 boner city yes i knew that your hands were a blossoming clove and the silvery lily, your notable way with a furrow and the flowery marl. But when I saw you delve deeper, dig under to uncouple the cobble and limber the roots, I knew in a moment, little husbandman, your heartbeats were earthen no less than your hands, that there you were shaping a thing that was always your own touching the drench of those doorways through which whirl the seeds okay so so that's just that's part of the poem getting sweaty over here google translate uh in in the spanish version the title is directly owed to

the gardener which because there's no masculine and feminine in English, at least in the traditional way, they had to call it girl gardening in the book just to be like, hey, this is the lady. This is about a lady. Okay. So here is the Google Translate version. Yes, I knew that your hands were the flowery wallflower, the silver lily. You had something to do with the soil, with the flowering of the earth. But when I saw you dig, dig, remove pebbles, and handle roots, I suddenly knew, my farmer, that not only your hands but your heart were from the land, that you were doing your own things, knocking on damp doors where seeds circulate. I almost like that one better.

I almost like that one much better. I really like that. Knocking on damp doors where seeds circulate. Whereas this one says, touching the drench of those doorways through which whirl the seeds. I mean, that's evocative and powerful as well. And maybe this speaks to the power of Google Translate. Like, maybe you can put anything in there. I mean, for the many reasons you outlined, you can't just plug a Ryman meter into a computer and then the computer.

Although, I don't know, man. Fucking AI art is like getting so bonkers out there and i mean i guess a lot of that is is is it pulling from different deep clouds of uh of art data that exists man i don't know i'm out of my depth in a couple of different fields talking about this right now but that was shocking to me yeah no i i really i i broke my own rule and vibed with that on a big in a big big way google translate um i was reading like a an npr story from 2018 uh where they spoke with a an award-winning literary translator uh aaron coleman who talks about translation and just gives some examples um and he translates a work by katherine hulsoff uh and he notes specifically like in the poem he's translating

in spanish tiempo means both time and weather and then coleman said we don't have that opportunity for metaphor in english so i did days instead of time in order to get a weather and also the passage of time like that's just like a little example of like but do you know what this reminds me of is uh art restoration right like obviously it's like a different thing but we we used to watch those uh Baumgartner art restoration videos in which he would sort of emphatically talk about uh the restore and obviously like art restoration and translation are two different fields entirely but uh he would talk about how like it is not his place to change the the original sort of vision of of the painting yeah uh and that is so fascinating to me because if you are translating a poem and you have to adjust metaphor or

rhyme or meter or change the words just so like it still sounds good like you cannot help but kind of get a hand on the ball in a way. That's really – and I'm not saying that it is without virtue because of that because obviously it's essential work. But then when a computer is doing that, are you all of a sudden dealing with a completely unbiased sort of voice, right? That's not like, ooh, I bet I, the translator, knows what's gonna, this is gonna sound way, way better. Yeah, I think it's interesting, right? Because everybody looks at or reads a piece of art

or listens to differently. That is part of your experience of it is you are bringing different interpretation but with translation you are kind of guiding the hand a little bit because you are making choices potentially against or in opposition to what the poets and and obviously like it is a question of the i'm the good translators i imagine do not uh take the ball and run with it as much. But yeah, this is really, this is really fascinating. It's to me, I imagine it's incredibly rewarding and like an enjoyable exercise to do.

But I would be so frozen, just terrified, you know, and constantly second guessing of like, you know, is this the right direction? Am I losing something? Like, did I make a choice that is going to totally change the experience for the reader and not help them kind of get what the original intent was? I don't know. It, it is something that I, I can't even imagine attempting, not just because I don't have the language proficiency, but because like you have to make decisions. Like the very nature of it is you saying like, this is what we're going with. And the second anybody came up to me and be like, you know, did you? I'd be like, I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't know. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you for the gift of this segment. I'll be thinking about this for a while today. The Poetry Hallway. The Poetry Hallway. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org.

Check out all the great shows that they have on MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have on MaximumFun.org. If you never listened to Mission to Zix, they just wrapped up the series back in, I think, last month in September. Very special show. Very funny and cool sci-fi sort of space opera that if you've never listened to, I encourage you to give it a shot today. Oh, yeah. And speaking of which, there's a new arc of- Of the Adventure Zone. Adventure Zone. Yes.

That is led by one Justin McElroy. Justin McElroy is DMing Adventure Zone this season. It's called Steeplechase. It takes place in a sort of Disney World inspired super corporate place. And we are thieves in it. And we do crime. And we play with blades in the dark. and it's so fucking fun yeah uh and i bet you're gonna love it i think you should go listen to it

there's a couple episodes up i think by the time you're listening to this but that's it we're done we're done with it yeah we're done with it we finished it we did it we didn't know if we were gonna do it but we did it now get out here. Now you get the hell out of here. I really don't even want to pretend. I know. What if we ended every episode with that? Yeah. What if our whole thing was like, we talk about things that are nice.

Things that are good. Things we're into. But get the hell out of my office. But we cry also while we do it because we know that like we're pushing them away. Yeah. But like in order to grow, they have to leave. They have to leave. I like this.

Get the hell out of here. Thank you. Hey! Hey!