Wonderful! - Wonderful! 309: Zoopin' in My Cardboard Box

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Griffin's favorite seasonal sitting activity! Rachel's favorite onion-inspired pit! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya World Central Kitchen: https://wck.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. The weather outside may be frightful, but not here, not in this room. That's how it goes. Not in this room, in this room. The Lord will keep you warm and cozy.

Who's trying to sneak in the Lord anytime we talk about anything? That was the version I learned as a child. Weather outside is frightful, but the Lord will save your soul forever the snow is the devil and that's great because that's year-round you don't you don't even need yeah even we need winter time for that yeah it might be too hot outside that's frightful whether if you ask me i'm not trying to get um sweaty and sunburned there might be mosquitoes

the weather is almost always frightful if you think about it. There's always something natural out there waiting to get you. If you take one thing away from this podcast, the world is scary. You got the Lord?

Don't even have to sweat, mosquitoes, hot weather, rain. Do you have any small wonders? This is a show where we talk about things we like that's good

that we're into. Go ahead. I meant to Google before I said this, so you may break my heart right now. But the other day, Henry rhymed skeleton with relevance. Is that from a Dan Bull song? It is. It is. Our son, Henry, and to be honest, Rachel and I, I think also listen a lot to Dan Bull, who is a, I think he does general sort of video game raps.

A lot of Minecraft. But mostly Minecraft. Yeah. And there's a lot of genuine jammers. Anyway, Henry really likes rhyming, and I always get really excited when he does it, particularly if there are multiple syllables involved. Yeah. excited when he does it uh particularly if there are multiple syllables involved yeah uh because i like to think that he has the spirit of a poet and that just helps me build that fantasy that i have it's not a fantasy i think he's got the beautiful spirit of a gentle soul the beautiful soul of a

gentle artist poet man uh i'm going to say uh i should have thought of something shouldn't i have i had all the time in the world. You looking around the room right now? Bottle, plate, Doritos. I will say that Jake from Roll for Sandwich, to thank us for poisoning him a couple of times on our collab between us and Roll for Sandwich, sent us some nice sauces. And didn't crack into those because I figured, you know, I'm kind of out the hot sauce game.

But man, there's this green sauce, the brand of which I don't know off the top of my head that he sent me, that I can't stop putting on freaking everything. You know what I did yesterday? So, you know, we have that like spicy Parmesan one. Too spicy for me. I used that on my pizza crust. Oh, how was that? It was nice.

I bet. That was a little too spicy. That green sauce, though, hits it just right. We also used the Thai chili one the. Ooh, how was that? It was nice. I bet. That was a little too spicy. That green sauce, though, hits it just right. We also used the Thai chili one the other day, too. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for the sauce, Jake. I go first this week. It is snowy out there.

D.C. got hit pretty good. Definitely the most snow we've had since we have lived here, you know, almost a year and a half. Was it four inches? Did you figure out? It's like three to four inches deep. And we weren't really expecting it quite so bad. But it started yesterday, snowed all day yesterday, and most of the night woke up to a veritable winter wonderland out there.

It's interesting weather, you know, because you look at your little phone and it says 40% chance. And you think, oh, that doesn't seem like very much. And then you see it's for the entire day yeah you're like oh well that is a lot that is a lot yeah we got we got uh there's a lot out there it really is beautiful snow day today henry's first real like snow day since he's been in school which is exciting uh and it's got me thinking a lot about sledding uh yesterday we had a chance to take the boys out in the snow,

play with them for a little bit, which was really nice. We haven't had many chances to do that. Put in stark contrast, I think the first time we did it with Henry was when our house was destroyed by snow living in Austin. And this was, I would say, a much more footloose and fancy-free way of playing with snow in that we came inside and there was heat and water, which is always ideal. We have a little toy sled we bought at a toy store for like 10 bucks. I pulled them around with that and it just got me thinking about how much I like sledding. I think it's just great. And it was always sort of the highlight for me of snow days growing up in Huntington. Do you have any fond,

I don't know if as an only child, you didn't really carve up the slopes as much. I have zero sledding experience, I think. There wasn't, I mean, there weren't a lot of kids in my neighborhood. There wasn't really a good hill near me. That's true. On a snow day,

typically transportation is a little difficult right uh so i just i i yeah i don't think i've i don't know that i've ever sled like ever in your life once uh i can't think of it oh man we gotta get out there babe you gotta carve it up it's a lot of fun you go sofa you sit down you sit of all, amazing. I've gone skiing a couple times. Awful. You can't sit. You can't sit famously with skiing. You must stand.

Unless did I do it last year? Did you go sledding when we were in Huntington? We went down Justin's Hill. I know you did. I did a couple times. I don't think I did. I think it seemed like a bad idea. I think you watched.

It's safe. It's safe. It's fine. Literally no one's ever gotten hurt sledding. Zero percent of people. Which is great. So I grew up in Huntington, a short walk from Ritter Park, which is sort of like the big park in Huntington. And Ritter Park has this big hill that runs up behind it that goes up to the tennis courts. The dog park is up

there the amphitheater is is up there uh and so there's like a road that would clear out so you could get up it pretty easy uh take us like maybe 20 minutes to get all the way to the top and then you can go all the way down this huge just straight up grassy slope wow that is a good long ride it is i mean you get your money's worth uh but it would always be such a huge deal because everybody in town like knew that this was the hot place to go so people would go and like line up to uh to sled down the hill there would be people who would uh very i would say shrewdly, we're selling hot chocolate at the top. And then when you reach the bottom, you just climb up the steps of the amphitheater to get back up

so you don't have to trudge up a shitty snowy hill. It was like a snow park. It was a dream. St. Louis had something that was appropriately called Art Hill and that it was next to the art museum. It was a very large hill and people would come from all over the city

to go down. That's fine. Again, never. I don't think I've ever been to the art museum. It was a very large hill and people would come from all over the city to go down. Oh, that's fun. Again, never. I don't think I've ever been to the art museum in St. Louis. No, I don't think so. Anyway, it was a huge deal.

It was a lot of fun. I have a lot of very fond childhood memories of that. Seeing like kids from school who I wasn't particularly close with, but like when you see them at sledding, it's like, me too. Like too like i'm also we're both kids and

we're doing the same stuff so normally we don't have anything in common we have nothing to talk about we are both sledding in this moment uh like rachel mentioned not last christmas but christmas 2022 we went to huntington and there was a great great deal of snow that happened and we went sledding behind the house uh behind justin's house uh justin and sydney's house uh i guess charlie and cooper lived there also yeah and they have a couple cats they got a couple cats that's everyone this isn't the census i don't know why you come here for this uh we went down the hill it was henry's first time sledding and he just really lit up this was at a fun age where he started to get kind of like braver about like, you know, outdoor adventurous stuff. Yeah, peer pressure finally working on him.

Peer pressure finally cracked the egg. And he had an amazing time and I did too. And it was a lot of fun. And I thought you had gotten in on that also, but you didn't. Did Gus do it? Gus is so small. No, no. As I recall, there is a fence and pretty much-

I hit it a couple times. Yeah, in order to stop, you hit the fence. It works. And I thought, eh. But here's the thing that's great, is when you fall down, there's a lot of activities for my youth that do not fucking hold up.

If I never go on a slip and slide again for the rest of my life, I'm fine with that. Because when you're 10 years old and your ribs are not yet fully formed and there's some give to them it's fine you hit the you hit that's your that's nature shock absorber your rib cage as an adult no such luck something happens to you every summer though where you suggest we buy a slip and slide for the kids not for me jesus i did it when i was like in college there's actually uh uh pictures we were with oh god this i think we're with the smurls yeah i mean the picture is of you and travis and riley yes uh and travis and i were like too old then this was

when i was like 22 years old maybe just shattering my my sternum every time I threw myself down. Sledding though, you fall down, you land in soft powder. And it's cold, but it's like, it's pretty safe. And that's just amazing. So sledding, it has existed obviously forever. Basically people who have lived in snowy areas

realize like flat stuff, flat stuff go fast. I would not put it past a dinosaur with like a particularly broad foot sliding its foot across the snowy ground and being like, hey guys, check this shit out. It's like if Tim Allen were a dinosaur. Thank you. Ancient Egyptians also used sand sledges to move huge things across the desert for construction, which is very clever. Obviously, there's infinite variations on the sport of sledding, the most famous of which being the luge and the skeleton and the bobsled in the Winter Olympics, all of which I really enjoy watching. What's your favorite of those three? Not skeleton for me.

Skeleton's too scary uh i like luge you like luge i think i do too i think i like luge too bobsled is cool but it's like i feel like we've perfect we've solved for bobsled yeah like bobsled the difference between racers is always like point zero zero zero six seconds it's hard to tell like who's crushing it but on a luge it's like god dang there's also something i enjoy uh when people wear tight clothes and they vibrate on top of each other i guess wow not what i was expecting you to say in that sentence but you did it and we're all here for it um there's a version of sledding called backcountry sledding, which involves a little sled that you ride on your knees, almost like a little kayak. It's like sort of kayak shaped, uh, only much, much smaller.

It's more sort of maneuverable than a sled. So you can kind of tilt back and forth holding onto the sides to like really carve. So you can use it to go through like more densely sort of like wooded hills and like get through trees you can also do tricks on it i watched a compilation of people doing jumps and it seems really fun but like probably very exhausting and slightly more dangerous than normal old sledding and then of course some ski resorts allow for tubing which is just sledding on an inner tube yeah um and they do that on special tubing hills on one of those youth group church ski trips uh i went on at one point

i was so sore and my butt was like encrusted with ice like it was i had gotten so much snow down my pants that it formed a perfect butt uh when i went to the restroom and so i was like i'm not doing that anymore. And I did tubing instead of the time of my life. It's just like sledding, but a little bit faster. There's also something called ice blocking, which is apparently very regional.

The only places I could find it happening on any kind of organized level was in California. It's kind of like sledding in reverse where you sit on like an ice block and you slide down a grassy hill on a somewhat warm day. It has to be kind of warm because the ice has to melt in order for it to get slippery. And the ice blocks are like specially made where they'll like freeze ropes into the ice blocks so you can like hold on to it and slide down a hill. Did you see where they do this?

California. It's a big state. I mean, I wish I could get more. I assume Minnesota. This seemed like a real wholesome Minnesota activity. It does seem like a wholesome Minnesota activity. I don't like that. There's no snow in ice blocking.

And so it's like when you fall down, does the ice block crush you? Maybe. No one is quite sure. crush you maybe no one is quite sure um i just i i i really really enjoy how accessible sledding is i we we have this sled now that is very cheap and works very well very slippery i will say but when i was a kid i remember one time going to ritter park i didn't have a sled because it had broken it's like one of those cheap plastic discs and it just fucking snapped. But I took a cardboard box and it worked great also. That's all you need. Can you see me? A little stinker, a little Charlie Brown just zooping down in my cardboard box. I think most sort of snow play activities are great, but sledding I think takes

the cake. And I really would like to go sledding with you. I don't know how we make that happen. I mean, there's got to be a hill. I could just take you outside. This thing's got a—the sled we have has a rope on it. I could just tow you around the neighborhood for a little bit. I mean, we live close to a very large number of hills. There's got to be one.

There has to be one. That people go to. That adults—that adults go to. I'm has to be people go to that adults that adults good i'm gonna google where's the adults only scheme i mean what you do is you put a kid in there with you and then it's like not even about you that's true for so many things can i steal Most of the plants humans eat are technically grass. Most of the asphalt we drive on is almost a liquid. The formula of WD-40 is San Diego's greatest secret. Zippers were invented by a Swedish immigrant love story.

On the podcast Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, we explore this type of amazing stuff. Stuff about ordinary topics like cabbage and batteries and socks. Topics you'd never expect to be the title of the podcast. Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Find us by searching for the word secretly in your podcast app. And at Maximumfun.org. I'm Dan McCoy. I'm Stuart Wellington. I'm Elliot Kalin. And together we are The Flophouse, a long-running podcast on the Maximum Fun Network, where we watch a bad movie and then talk about it.

And because we're so long-running, maybe you haven't given us a chance. I get it. But you don't actually have to know anything about previous episodes to enjoy us, and I promise you that if you find our voices irritating, we grow endearing over time. Perhaps you listened to one of our old episodes and decided that we were dumb and immature. Well, we've been doing this a while now. We have become smarter and more mature, and generally nicer to Dan. But we are only human, so no promises.

Find The Flophouse on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts. Okay, my thing this week. Yes? Takes us from outside play. Okay. To inside play. I prefer this. And that is the ball Okay. To inside play. I prefer this.

And that is the ball pit. Oh, yes. All right. Yeah. Oof. This is a toughie. Because I think there's a big distinction between the private. And this is bougie.

This is bougie and privileged. We have our own ball pit. We might have a ball pit. It's not a fancy ball pit. And there isn't nearly enough balls in it. No, not nearly enough. Rachel recently bought, do you want to tell the story of you trying to restock?

Yeah, I mean. We have a kiddie pool. Yeah, it's basically the size of a kiddie pool. And we had collected a pretty large number of balls, but not enough to fill this thing. And so i was looking online and i thought i have no idea how many balls i need but i'm scared to get like 200 that seems like way too many and i was like you know what i'll just get 50 nothing did nothing

same level yeah i agree i'm saying after covid. I mean, we're still in COVID times, but after the bad COVID-19 times, I look at ball pits with a little bit of a stink eye now. I actually, I talk about that at the end of my segment, how I read a whole article that was like, will we ever get in ball pits again? I mean, I can say like empirically, yeah. Yeah, I'm here from the future to tell you yes. Yes, you do. like and i'm here yeah yeah i'm here from the future to tell you yes yes you do yeah um so i wasn't sure if i would find anything about this right because it's like tell me about slide like you know ball pit to me feels pretty uh rudimentary i don't know slide is a simple mechanical object ball pit feels like a distinctly human like like a product of human civilization.

That's true. That's true. Okay, so there is a man who is credited with the invention of what they called the ball crawl. That is Eric McMillan. The first ball pit or ball crawl he installed was in 1976 at SeaWorld Captain Kids World in San Diego. That's way later than I thought you were going to say.

Also, ball crawl sounds like a new single from the Yin Yang Twins. It's the Yin Yang Twins featuring LMFAO, ball crawl, summertime hot. About ballrooms, right? It's about, no, testicles, summertime hot. About ballrooms, right? It's about, no, testicles, I imagine. Oh, huh. Yeah, they get blue. They work blue, the yin-yang twins. A lot of people, so he kind of rose to fame in 1971.

He was appointed chief designer of Ontario Place, which was a project that included a park, a theme park, the world's first IMAX theater on the newly built artificial islands just off the Toronto waterfront. But what he identified one of the like quote mistakes was, was that there was not like a lot of kid activities. Yeah. was that there was not like a lot of kid activities. Yeah. So he created the Children's Village, which at the time had huge rope nets, soft pyramids,

hanging tunnels, and an enormous air mattress. That sounds dope. All that stuff sounds great. So he kind of became the like leader in soft play. And so that's the ball pit in 1976 uh which had guess how many balls i mean did you say the dimensions of the pit are you if you tell me the dimensions are you gonna do this precisely yeah it's like a math like a problem like a math problem i don't i don't know the dimensions of the pit we'll say okay it's probably what like 15 feet by feet, probably a foot and a half deep.

I'm going to say there was 8,000 balls inside of it. 40,000 balls. Fucking hell, man. That's so many balls. I'm sorry I didn't have the dimensions for you. I'm sure you would have gotten it. I can work backwards from 40,000 balls. Okay.

40,000 balls is next year's single for the Union Twins. The band has 20,000 members. So this is an article from Vox.com in 2019. And they are talking just kind of about the whole beginning of the ball pit. And they include a quote from this gentleman, Eric McMillan, about how he got the idea for the ball pit. Was this before or after he'd been stricken with ball madness after seeing and comprehending 40,000 balls?

You will never guess this. Okay. So he was working with a team trying to come up with ideas for San Diego, as I mentioned, the SeaWorld kids location. And he said, quote, there was a jar of onions. And we were sort of saying, wow, how about if you could crawl through those? Cool. And then ding, we decided to try it. I'm imagining pearl onions, first of all.

Yeah, I'm assuming. That would be a pretty big jar if we were talking about full-size Vidalias. He goes on to say, like, people just went crazy about it. Thank God for those onions. People just went crazy about it. Thank God for those onions. I mean, it is impressive. I think it takes a very special, unique mind to look at a jar of pearl onions and say, oh, you know that new SeaWorld exhibit we were talking about?

What if we did 40,000 balls? That's such a long leap, it seems to me. Yeah, I wonder if they did what I did and they bought like 100 balls. And we're like, nope. That's probably what happened. They were like, oh, sure, I know. We'll get 100 balls. And they put it on the ground.

They're like, shit. There's nothing. 200? I don't know. So what we're more familiar with is the 90s, which is when the ball pit became kind of the staple of any family-oriented restaurant. Your Chuck E. Cheese, your Billy Bob's.

Yes, exactly. This is also because for most of the 20th century, arcades were seen as kind of seedy and linked to gambling and racketeering. Yes. And so places like Chuck E. Cheese were a response to that. Like, here's a safe place. Right. Also, the whole idea of indoor play, like it's contained.

Like you don't necessarily have to worry as much about people rolling up and messing with your kids. Like they've got to go through a process to get in the building. Right. You know. They have to fight Charles Cheese. Charles Cheese does security at every location. Uh-huh. And how does he do that?

Pit fighting. He's a strong brawler type. Every person that enters has to fight Mr. Cheese? Adults. If you're an adult. If you're a grown-up you can't go to chucky cheese unless you have a report card if you have a report card with enough a's on it you can't get into chucky cheese and you get a personal pan pizza what if that's the tack they took instead of

saying you bring in your report do you remember this chucky cheese you bring your report card they give you give you tokens if you got good grades oh i don't remember that okay well it was the thing and i fucking cleaned up um but they should have made it so that you can't come in unless you have a good report unless you have a good report just a bunch of parents standing outside the window trying to watch their child from the sidewalk yeah uh the other thing i wanted to quickly mention is of course the mcdonald's play place oh yeah i didn't realize this. So in the 90s, McDonald's Playplaces had become so successful, they launched a standalone brand of indoor playgrounds called Leaps and Bounds.

I feel like I watched a defunct land about this or something. Yeah, this debuted in Naperville, Illinois in 1991. And they merged Leaps and Bounds in 1994 with Discovery Zone. Right. Which I remember. Right. I just thought that was interesting that like this fast food restaurant was like, you know what else we should do? Yeah.

Totally unrelated to food of any kind. Well, I mean, it brought in children and communities who didn't have access to a lot of playgrounds. So it is one of the more sort of, I don't know, I guess, brilliant maneuvers of the McDonald's Corporation. So 2020, as you mentioned, ball pits everywhere went dark. Nobody's playing in a ball pit during the height of the coronavirus situation. And this article in the Washington Post was all like, I can't imagine ever getting a ball pit again. But what they talked about was the color factory.

And what they do, they have a ball pit washing machine for the balls. And then they have sanitizing before and after people enter the pit so it's like a disinfectant fog similar to the kind that airlines use to sterilize airplane cabins so we've been to a few indoor play places that have advertised this as well like we fog blast the shit out of this yeah this happened when we were at the Dopamine Land exhibit. Yeah, that's right. They were trying to chase this little boy out of the pit because they were getting ready to fog him. Fog the balls.

Yeah. Another great standout track from the Yin Yang Twins. There's a lot of easy, low-hanging jokes. I wonder if our listeners have heard anyone make jokes about balls before oh maybe just balls in this context i think i mostly just like thinking about the the band yin yang twins

i don't even remember what their song was no i don't either i assume that you did uh while you look that up i will say um that the color factory is quite proud of their antibacterial sterilization option and uh the chief executive in this article said quote i would contend that in a pre-covid world and especially in a post-covid world that we have the cleanest ball pit on the planet i love that when you when you it, flaunt it. Shake it like a salt shaker. Oh. Featuring Lil Jon and the East Side Boys.

A lot of collapse. The Yang Twins have been involved. I love a ball pit. We brought two fucking club bangers this week, I think. For kids and adults. Here's the thing. Sometimes I jump in the ball pit, our private ball pit, to play with our kids. It's great.

It's fun. Yeah. And I will say there were a lot of things during the height of the pandemic that I thought I will never do again. I also probably would have been in the ball pit camp. Right. And I will say definitely when we take our children to locations with ball pits, all I think about is when they get out and I can wipe them down. Yes. But I'm glad they when they get out and I can wipe them down. Yes. But I'm glad they exist.

It is a safe location. Kids, man, kids love them. Kids love them. And it's indoors, which this time of year is really appealing. Yeah, absolutely. That's it for our show. Thank you so much to Bowen and Augustus for the theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have over there. I'm going to plug once more, new season of Adventure Zone just started. The Adventure Zone versus Dracula. I'm GMing. We're playing D&D 5th Edition and my family is vampire hunters hunting down Dracula.

I finished the first episode. It was so fun. Thank you, baby. The characters are great. The whole premise is great. Thank you. I'm excited. It was so fun. Thank you, baby. The character's great. The whole premise is great. Thank you. I'm excited about the adventures to come. Thank you, baby. I appreciate you. We got merch over at McElroyMerch.com

that you can go and check out, including the Three Wolf Brothers shirt. I don't know the name of it. It's us, but it's like the three wolves howling at the moon, but it's us, grown men. Can you be able to track those sales in real time? Yeah, a million. A million?

Yeah. So, no big deal. That's going to do it for us, though. We'll be back next week. Oh, can I share another cute thing that our kids did? Yeah. So, we got like the snow overalls, the snow overalls. Oh, they're good.

Gus put them on and then he's like, I look like mommy. Yeah. Which I was so charmed by because as listeners of the show know, I'm a big fan of overalls. I have at least four pairs and I wear them quite frequently on the weekends. And I was so happy to be associated with that brand. Yeah. Get at us. Get at us overalls company. Yeah. Any overalls company if you want. Get at us. Get at us, overalls company.

Yeah. Any overalls company if you want to get at us. Then I don't know how you would go about doing that. Ask Max Fun. I don't know.

Anyway, bye. Bye. Bye. Working on it, money won't pay. Working on it, money won't pay. Working on it, money won't pay. Working on it, money won't pay. Working on it, money won't pay. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network

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