Prepare yourself for: Baconnaise, greedy bisexuals, super soldier vitamins, The Hunger Games, zombie butlers, and Ruby.
Read the full text, as well as the show notes, at http://flashpulp.com
The Skinner Co. Network
FC58 - Baconnaise
[music] Hello, and welcome to Flashcast 58, a Skinner Co presentation. Skinner Co, where the bottom line means something different, especially when in the fetish division, as does dropping the ball. This episode is also brought to you by a generous donation from Dave Duck Blue went. Prepare yourself for bacon-aise, greedy bisexuals, super soldier vitamins, the hunger games, zombie butlers, and groovy. [music] Hi, I'm Opopinax, and with our powers combined, Jessica May. Hello, JRD. Hello. And I are Captain Planet. Okay, so. But speaking of Skinner Co, Rich the Time Traveler sent in this little interlude that I wanted to throw up first. Why isn't when I heard the word school and the word exploded by immediately thought of the word Skinner? Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! I have to go home and make sure my poor boy is using his Skimmer! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! Well, Seymour, you are an odd fellow, but I must say, you steam a good hand. It's been a long time since I've watched that show. Yeah, unfortunately. I've heard people argue that it's still just as good, and that people just are haters. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, it just hasn't held my interest in a while. I wouldn't even know if it would. I don't think I've watched it since Mr. Nine and Mrs. Nine were around... Mrs. Nine. She got married to him three times. Yes, Jeez. We were very sad. She left you soon. So, did you guys hear about this German DJ? Did he rest? Yes. I did. Yes, I've heard of D-Rex. It's really gross. She must have a condition. Hold on, who wants to tell the story? I think Jamie should. Yeah, Jamie may go. Okay, so there's this DJ, right? And he meets this lady at a pub. They hit it up like they really enjoyed each other's company. She's very attractive, apparently, and she brings them home. They have sex three times, and then he would like to leave. Just like that? Yeah, well, no, they're having a good time, but then he's like, you know, I gotta go. Well, he's not exactly there to, you know... Okay, yeah, right, sure. Whatever. Anyways, so he discovers that all the doors are locked from the inside. She has the key. From the inside? Yeah, and he goes to the balcony, but she's up too high. So then he just decided to continue to have sex with her. To wear a robe. Did he ask her to unlock the doors? Yeah, yeah, it just wasn't gonna happen. I think he figured like he didn't want to escalate anything. Anyways, he had this specific approach, and that was just to have sex over until she fell asleep. At which point he went on the balcony and called the police on his phone. They were there in 10 minutes. And then she propositioned the officers. Yeah, to make the problem go away, she was like, "Well, I've got an idea." Yeah, so officers, I think she has a condition. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, she's gotta. Yeah. Who would do that? That lady. It didn't have a condition. Yeah, totally. Because it's not that she can't get it. It's that she can't get enough of it. Hey, you know what? She should call Sexaholics anonymous. Yeah, we lost that line. Yeah, I'm sure we can find it, right? Yeah. Do you guys have any advice for her? Stop locking up German DJs. Get a good lawyer. Get a good play toy. Yeah. Those are all good pieces of advice. Speaking of games, we'll be running the Hunger Games Book Club at the end of the show, finally. But speaking of the Hunger Games, I wanted to bring up this little item that I snagged out of El Scribe, Harris's feed. You may know her from Pendragon Variety or Fit to Right. Yes. So Fox News, as they want to do, was mentioning taking an interesting approach to the Hunger Games. So it's a bit of an opinion piece by this fellow Dr. Keith Ablow. Yeah, I thought it was like a straight up article and then I realized very quickly that it wasn't. And then you realized he's a douche. Yep. He's essentially saying that the Hunger Games is terrible and it's destroying our children. It's going to cause them to be bent. The author of the Hunger Games saw on TV or whatever. Or she got the idea from watching reality shows and things going on the TV. So she thought of this concept and he thought that it was, she shouldn't have, she should be looking at it in a light where she can take the opportunity to show people better. As opposed to make more of a statement or a lesson to be learned from it. Right. Which I'm sure there are lessons to the Hunger Games. I don't want to get into that discussion just at the moment because I want to save it for the book club. I mean there's a pretty obvious underlying point to the Hunger Games. Yeah. It just, it bothers me. So he had four points, right? He had four specific things. Or three specific things. Yeah. Females will be further distance from their traditional feminine characteristics. Uh oh. That is, you don't want to start wearing pants. And then two was young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence. Okay. So I'm wondering if this point is going to lead us to, uh, you know, in the way that, in the big boom of wrestling, sort of around the 2000s, there became a lot of backyard wrestling leagues. I'm wondering if we're going to end up with a lot of backyard Hunger Games. You know, maybe three or four kids from the neighborhood and they've all been training up for the specialty. But that's so silly. Like I think the best thing is to understand what anybody really truly is capable of. And then you make a choice for the better, which generally people do. Like I don't, I don't, I don't believe that by showing that or being honest about the human condition, somehow detrimental. Yeah. Okay. And what was this third point? A few psychological vulnerable teens. Who would have come to know good. Anything. Maybe inspired to replicate the film's violence. Jeez. And then, uh, hold on. Then he says, that's about it. But hey, I didn't much go for Harry Potter, wrenching kids into a realm of wizards and demons, spells and incantations when we've got real life lessons to teach them and see it be failing rather miserably at that. Let's all send this guy hate mail. Yeah. Yeah. You can send him hate mail at info@keithablo, A-B-L-O-W dot com. Anyways, that's a whole bunch of poo-poo-ka-ka. Yeah. And actually, you know what? Well, I was reading that article today. I came across another article that was linking off that one. And it's about, um, I think, I know J-R-D had said he'd heard about it. It's about the recent Belvedere Vodka ad that's had a lot of trouble over it. And I, yeah, it was only on Twitter for an hour. Yeah. Have you seen the picture? Uh-huh. It's pretty terrible. It's, um, it's a picture of a guy smiling as he grabs this terrified looking girl from behind. Yeah. Uh, she looks like she's crying, you know, and... Look, no, God, no. Yeah, this, this one around the Twitter. It says something about, um, something about going down easy. Yeah, 'cause at least your vodka should go down easy or something like that. Right. And it's basically a joke about rape. It's pretty horrible. And did you know that they're actually getting sued over that? Yeah. No, I can see that. The girl whose image that is, that was done for, like, that was a video for a company that she's with, but she's actually the girl who does the voice of Little Miss Sunshine on the show. You know the little, the little cartoon guys? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's Little Miss Sunshine. Imagine. And she's like, "Yeah, I mean this." Yeah, now I'm in this rape ad. This is horrible, you know? So she's suing me. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good. I hope she wins. Honestly, when I saw it, it just seemed like he was going in for a too aggressive of a flirt. And it's just like... But then you see your face. Yeah. And he's kind of looking like he's... He was an ascravit. Look like an ascravit to me. He's just, it was almost like a bear had like come over here, honey, but he was sitting down like, "Come sit on Santa's lap." I didn't exactly think. Yeah. You know? I guess what do you think? I was shocked the first time I saw it. Like immediately I was like, "Oh my god, this is horrible." But to be fair, I didn't just see it off, off Twitter. I saw it as, "Oh, there's this horrible ad out." So as soon as I see it, I'm looking for the horrible thing. No. But I mean, they actually... It's obviously inappropriate. Yeah. They've put out a big apology and they made a big donation to like Women's Crisis. Which is exactly what they should be doing and some people don't, I think, like honestly. Except for the weird misuse of intellectual property. I know. But like one person's brain fart can end up on Twitter and then your screw. You know? The leaner. Or that ad that's not quite a brain fart. The baby drinking from a booby-eaten in Oreo, what? It was meant for just some promotional event or something but then it got online and it was a milk ad with a baby at the breast and an Oreo cookie. I don't know. It's kind of gross. I don't know. I don't have a problem with it all but I'm just saying like that one up was taken down and, you know, it's like that onion gang they put up not long ago where it was a news report from 2040 or whatever and they were saying that there are no electable presidents because of Facebook. Yeah. That's right. Speaking of bothersome business, Jeff sent in a little something. He said it wasn't quite right for the spotter bother but he thought it would be of interest to the mob. It was a mentionable. Yeah, certainly. Apparently the big thing in good culture in the States right now, zombies. Really? Because you know what? That's the reason why I want my gun license for zombies. Yeah. Well, apparently there's a huge spike in people who are almost jokingly getting their gun licenses. Well, ain't he zombie measure? Okay. Listen. Can you, can you, can you explain this to me? Is it like people who are like for real Z's? Oh my God, zombies or people who are just like survivalists who are like, you know what? If the depression happened or whatever, I would just, I would know how to deal with stuff. Doomsday preppers. I'll be back to do your paper. Yeah, that's right. Doomsday preppers. You know, learning how to cook your own veggies and raising chickens. I would love to be a doomsday prepper. Yeah, but okay. But a lot of these. When you say zombie because it's fun because you want to put like a happy hat on your serious disaster. For real. I suppose. You don't want to just say that, you know, buddy down the street is going to snap because law has gone to poop. Yeah. You have to defend your family against him and his acts. You want to call him a zombie. Okay, but a lot of this article that Jeff points out is revolves around people buying posters and shooting targets involved in zombies. Zombie posters. Yeah, zombie posters. That's funny. Apparently, there are also sort of accessories to your targets that you can purchase, including blood packs. That's gross. That will explode or bleed one shot. That's gross. I don't like that. And you can also put a little extras, like a firecracker essentially in there to explode. Those people who are getting their, like people who are, who like guns who are playing with guns, but it's like zombie play. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, they're dressing their targets up. I dig it. Essentially. If I were shooting in a target, I don't think I'd want it to bleed. Really? Yeah. I would like some sort of gratification, you know, it's been shot other than a teeny tiny hole. I would like a little flatter. That's enough for me. I don't need blood to tell me that I've done a good job. Okay. Okay, zombies, maybe they would bleed or whatever. But what if it was like packs of sparkles of glitter? Well. Glitter? Glitter. Glitter explosions every time you hit something. Yeah. I don't like sparkles. Yeah. I just, I don't like sparkle splurge balls with the blood. You want to be able to shoot things, you just don't want them to die or no. Maybe you need to read the other games a few more times to divide yourself from your femininity. I would say that you have a problem with video games like... You don't know. I can just play things. I think if I wouldn't, I wouldn't add my own blood, you know? I wouldn't bring blood to the party. I'm okay with... I'm okay with... I'm okay with shedding it in the wild, but I don't need that. I dig it. That sounds like fun though. Good on you zombie hunters. But I tell you one day it will catch on sparkle splosion. You forgot to mention that we'll be, I'll be taste testing bacon a's at the end of the popular press segment. Bacon mayonnaise. Bacon mayonnaise. Simulated flavor. Yeah, the other thing. There is no bacon in it. No bacon whatsoever. I can't even tell that there's any sort of meat product in any way associated with things. Well, there's little chippy things, but to... I think there's simulated meat chunks. To discuss the origins of the bacon a's, Jaredie and I were in the grocery store and we were headed down to get creamy peanut butter because I got natural peanut butter and he just about flipped. His head exploded for a little... Yeah, it was a long story. Extra creamy happened and he was expecting the smooth and then the natural came and it was just... It was too much. Yeah, well. It was a long week. Anyways, so we're down this aisle and normally if we see something cool we whip better phones and whoever whips it out first pretty much calls it for the internet. You're like, "Ahh, you know, posting." So I went and I'm like, come here, come here, this is like, I said something like this is a gift to you. Come check this out. Like this is going to be beautiful. Like this is for you. Like so much will stem from this one photo and it has because now we've bought the bacon a's and it's become a part of the Flashcast. The response on Twitter was pretty amazing actually. Yeah, yeah. Well, the mob loves it's bacon. Ooh. So yeah, we've got a few more items to touch on, but then after that I will be sampling the bacon a's. A few extra surprises that even the ladies are unaware of at this point. Everything's under a giant pink bowl. I don't know if he plans on making us taste it as well, but we'll see. Hopefully. I have brought a little extra sampling business for you if you want, but at the same time I'm not expecting anything. Actually speaking of epic consumables, I snagged this article from a video solier on Twitter and it was a 1941 modern mechanics article. I love that it's modern from 1941. Simply titled Captain Marvel, now you have to understand this is sort of around the Captain America phase even though they weren't for some reason specifically citing him. Super shot troops for the army will soon be in action. Vitamins are the magic that produce them. Oh wow. Troops. Wow. Yeah, super shot troops. But if you look at the pictures, it's essentially. They're taking a speed. Yeah, vitamin speed. Anyway, they portray these fellows getting right up in their grill, getting right in the German bases with knives and such business. Everything's hand to hand for some reason. They've just sent a answer. Yeah. Outdone by vitamins. They're using the baskets. What's that game? Jai a lie. Yeah, it's like a scoop on their hand. Mm-hmm. That they like swing the ball from. Yeah. It's a my inner. Is it my inner? I believe so. But there's a last check. I can't remember. I don't recall. Some South American nation created this game. These super troops are using them to launch grenades essentially into airplanes. I think that's pretty hardcore. Yeah. And some of the quotes from this article are absolutely choice. For example, they're discussing the supposed research project that's been undertaken. And I'll just begin the quote halfway through because you'll pick it up quickly enough. The health service combined combed the hill country and got together a group of underfed and undernourished hillbillies. People and hillbillies as a quote for the purposes of this article. People who had lived most of their lives on salt pork and cornbread. They were as shiftless, lazy, lackadaisical, a bunch of folks as you could find. We cannot expect here to detail all of the many experimental plans which the health service applied, all of the disappointments they met, nor all of the technical details of their research. I know all the disappointments. Yeah. Can you tell me any details of the technical details of their research because it sounds like you've basically turned hillbillies into super troops somehow. Yeah. Or guinea pigs. Or both. We can, however, tell you this. After several years of experimenting with diet, the health service turned these characteristics of hill people into strong, healthy, ambitious, thriving, energy-filled citizens. All of them accredit to the community. Like nice. Some nourished hill people. We didn't have anything. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't be doing much either. Super soldiers, man. Ugh. Great. Oh. Yeah. It was fantastic. The whole article is fantastic. I'll post it up on the show notes. Thanks. Just, ugh. But the art's fantastic. Seeing them taking out, there's a quote. I won't go and do it, but there's a quote somewhere in the article that essentially says they're going to turn the German panzers into German pansies. Nice. Yeah. Well, all of it sounded like propaganda anyway, so it makes sense. Armin Strasberg was wondering if people are going to go to the Mocha Fest in New York. He's going to be there. And he'd like to meet up. Ooh. What the heck is that? What is the Mocha Fest? Does it have to do with coffee? No. Oh. Chocolate? It's like a... Chocolate coffee? The Mocha is the modern...no, sorry, museum of comic and cartoon art. That's it. Oh, awesome. And Mocha Fest is just sort of a...I don't think it's a huge con. It's just sort of a show, has a little more of an indie vibe, if you will. It sounded delicious from my tummy, but it's delicious from my brain. Well, up your eyes, yeah. Exactly so. And it sounds like a really fun little show to go to. I'd love to be able to make it. Take pictures, if you're allowed. And posters. There's any way we can help you on this. Just let us know. Oh, we have completed the PDF. That's right. Yep. A Pope has yet to post it. But it's been leaked to the mob. Yeah. And it should be up. And it's gorgeous. She did such a wonderful job. And most of it, like 99% of it, is black, white, and gray, so it'll be cheap and effective. And by the time this is up, it'll already be up. That's right. You can find it at flashpult.com. And we have one of those little codey things on it now. Little Scanny Doodhickey for your cell on the phone. A little Scanny Doodle, woo. Which of course, are entirely useless to shiftless hill people. Actually no, they're not. If you recall, I think you sent me a link a little while ago where they had those hobo codes, only they were in scans now. And I thought that was really great, frankly. I know this is a little bit off topic, but those things were awesome. And I loved the scans that they had available. They had downloadable templates for you to be able to stencil them on to things. I thought that was really great. Do you feel like sort of hobo's have been overtaken by hipsters? Yeah, a little bit. We watched a couple of films. Yeah. I was going to just say yesterday, I saw a couple of people on the street with a sign that said, "Hungary, angry, hobo's." That was pretty great. Yeah. We wanted to jump out of the car to give them money, but we had to go. It was green. Yeah. Happy hobo's. Since Jolly, Jolly hobo's. Yes. Anyway, berserk. Now watch berserk. Crazy. I have no idea what berserk is. My short term. It was, um, that Joan, I keep trying to say Joan Collins. Joan Crawford? Joan Crawford. Yes. Was that Joan Crawford? She was running a circus. A British circus for some reason. There is so much, I loved about it, and so much that left me wanting. It's interesting because both, I would argue that both of the films we're about to discuss have the exact same weakness. Um, I really liked berserk. I thought that it opened with a hilarious scene where there's a fellow on a tight rope. Uh, the whole premise of the film is that people at the circus are being murdered one by one, and it's a bit of a hoo done it, although the hoo done it part gets entirely checked out the window in the last quarter of the film. Joan Crawford is the one that runs the circus. Yes. Yeah. Uh, it's always been her child, even though she has a child who always wanted her affect child. Right. Yeah. And the, the interesting thing is, I really like the character that Joan portrays. She's very strong. She runs the circus by herself. But she's vulnerable, for sure. Well, she has her moments, she kind of uses a very much younger man for a while in the film. Yeah, and when he wants to be closer to her, she's like, no, I'm a, you know, I'm a lady on my own. Yeah. But they do, they do get a little closer. Yeah. But, yeah. But I liked the, I liked the portrayal and I found it surprising. I liked that it wasn't her that was like, Oh, Mary, me, you know, yes. Yes. Yeah. She was a strong female lead. She didn't need a man. Mm hmm. She had her business. But the, okay. So, but the idea is that all of these murders are happening and they're generally in the same format as the act involved, right? So the movie opens with a fellow on the tightrope and then the tightrope snaps, but that's not enough. Somehow the tightrope snaps and as the fellow's on his way down, it wraps around his neck. Yeah. That's when he's hung in front of the audience. And then he's hung in the middle of the circus and it just gets more ridiculous. Yeah. It will happen. And of course, Joan Crawford is getting blamed for the murders because they keep happening to people who it would be very convenient for her to have dead. It's nice little, I'd say it's a nice little mystery, but in the end, you had no way of knowing that it was that person who did it. Yes, because the thing is the daughter suddenly shows up in the last quarter of the film. Yeah. She's not really mentioned previously. Yeah. Oh, hello, mummy. I'm home from school where I was horrible. She's like, "Oh, well, I kind of would prefer you were there because you were an accident." Okay, maybe not that bad, but she kind of gave off that unwanted vibe. Yeah. And then, of course, the daughter ends up having, well, I mean, we're going to blow the ending, but she ends up being the murderer. For some reason. But there's no hinting at it previously. There's no... Her mum's attention. It's just weird. Yeah, it just feels ram rotted in there. I find it's interesting the amount of time that they spend showing the circus acts. You know, they have a lot of time where they show the lions and the elephants. And the producers obviously knew somebody who ran a circus. Yeah. But the guy who was killed on the tightrope the second time, he is just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then, finally, he lands on the blades, and he's just like, "Oh, God." But the thing with the daughter that didn't make sense to me is that when she's brought to her mother, she has a lady from the school that she was at. And I don't know how or why it wouldn't be mentioned that because everything else that she did at the school that she was being expelled from, they mentioned she's doing this, this and this. When they also mention that she's never there because she's off, like, killing your girl. Constantly, we're going back to where the circus system murdered people. Yeah, that's actually a good point. So there's that. Yeah, I don't know. And it's a traveling circus. Like, how far would she have to go in order to kill these people? Yeah. What-evs. What-evs. That's all I'm saying. I would like a mystery that I can look back for a second time and think, okay, I pick at these moments that I should have, you know, remembered, and, you know, you can put it all together. Do you remember that? You... There's the little person, right? And throughout the whole time, you're like, "Oh, man, I think he's the one that did it. I think he's the one." And there's that scene with him and Joan Crawford where he's like, "I really need to talk to you. I have something I need to talk to you about." She's like, "I don't have to after this right now." Oh, yeah. There's all the other things. And then there's like no follow-up to that. He's like, "Yeah." But the whole time he's like, "Oh, I need to take..." Yeah. But there was like four or five times where he needed to talk to her that he was waiting in the shadows. Yeah. And then nothing. Like, no, maybe you were explained. I don't like that. There has to be a reason. You have to think of whatever happened to baby Jane as the high water mark for the sort of Joan Crawford films. And they all kind of go downhill from there. Well, it's like she's so awesome and they just can't come up to her level. And then whatever happened to baby Jane came. Well, yeah. But it was really the first one. It actually chronologically came before these films. And she just kind of, unfortunately, sang her favorite. Yeah. It went down. Like, it was lower quality. It was for the money. What was the one with the axe-wielding? Oh, she was. What was the name of that one again? I was trying to think of it earlier and I can't where she's, it's her mother and her daughter. It's another mother-daughter thing. It's like the same movie only on a farm. What the hell? And without a circus. Yeah. Well, it's not a farm, not out of circus. Yeah. Yeah. Where she had just come out of like an institution. Well, no. I mean, that's not really fair. She's not a strong character in that film. She's just somebody with an axe and a bit of anxiety. Yeah, that's right. Remember? Yeah. In the black room. The black room suffered from this- What was that one about again? The black room. 1935. Boris Karloff plays both of the main roles. Twin Brothers, Anton and Gregor. And Gregor. Gregor is the evil one. Can I just say, Anton being the younger brother and Gregor being the large giant evil older brother named Gregor. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you automatically went to the Game of Thrones reference. Of course, it did. Me. But it's interesting because the evil brother, Gregor, is sort of a cat, but he's kind of a fun cat. Yeah. He's a womanizer. Yeah. He's obviously evil, but he's kind of jaunty. And then Anton is just such a nice guy. He's a cripple. Yeah. He has a condition where his hand is kind of curled in, which makes for a very easy visual clue every time you need to know which brother is which. And at the beginning of the movie, they go through this little discussion, "Well, are we going to kill the younger brother, Anton," or the younger of the twins, "Anton," because they were children. When they were children. Yeah. When they were first born. And they discovered that he was going to be crippled. They discuss the family legend, which is the very first family brothers, whatever. Yeah. Became rich somehow. They were twins. And the younger brother had killed the older brother in the black room and a room in the house. Yeah. And it was foretold that the house would end the same way it began. And there would be another set of twins and the younger would kill the older. So of course, when there's another set of twins born, they're like, "Oh, man, this is going to happen again. Why don't we just kill the younger?" Yeah. And the other dude, the colonel, he convinces the father not to kill them, they grow up. They seal up the black room. Yeah. To keep both the brothers alive, they seal up the black room. But everyone's aware of this family legend, it goes on forever. The one brother ends up leaving and then the evil brother takes over as the Baron or whatever, drives everybody into the ground. Yeah. I don't want to give the whole film away because I actually do think it's worth watching. Yeah. Oh, it is. Definitely. But there are some things about the film. There are some surprising plot twists including one in the middle where the good brother actually, you know he's going to die in the film. It's very clear from pretty early on that he's going to die. But they kill him surprisingly early in the movie. And the weird thing is that with his death, it kind of removes all of the characters who were in any way capable of bringing Gregor to justice. Yeah. Except the family dog. That's right. And somehow. Is it not a hound in the end who puts things right for Gregor? Yeah, yeah. The weird thing is that this dog becomes essentially the hero of the film in a weird way and it almost becomes his narrative for the second half of the movie. I wonder if George RR Martin saw this movie. Yeah. It's weird and if you're, I don't know, it's hard to explain because I find it difficult to put that much story emphasis on a non-human character, especially it gets a little bit over the top with how the dog is portrayed. Yeah. But at the same time, it's, the whole film is kind of a lot of goofy fun, like seeing Karloff and these two twin roles and how they handled it. It was very well done too. I didn't think it would be done as well as it was, but with the obvious, like, okay, you have two cameras shooting here, right, or two camera angles put together or in this shot, you can tell it's somebody with their back to camera, but it was, I thought there would be a lot of, oh, back to the camera, but it wasn't and it was really well shot. Yeah. Yeah. I thought they did a good job. The ending again, a little weak, a little bit. You know, there's one thing I couldn't get over throughout the entire movie is that like so many of the people that Gregor killed, their problem was they'd be like, Gregor, I know you're a bad person, I know what you've done. I'm going to tell everybody and then he'd kill them. Yeah. They really have got to just stop telling him that they know he's killing people. If you knew somebody was killing a bunch of people, would you go and be like, hey, I know you're killing a bunch of people. Yeah, I know about this. I'm going to tell him. I'm going to the authority. Yeah, seriously. Don't kill me. I don't know. Okay. Are we ready for? We're ready for some baconase. Are you ready for some baconase? Oh, wait. First, just a reminder that we're going to Fan Expo. That's right. Yeah. That's right. We have a mobster hotel. Mm-hmm. If you would like more information, it's very nice and swank. Comments have left the bloke on if you might be showing up. Yeah, actually giving deals for Fan Expo people, so yeah, so it is very nice, a little older, so the rooms are slightly smaller, but very, very fancy, very, very pulpy. It's on the railroad. We've stayed at the hotel previously, and it is a very pulpy little. Very, very nice. Yeah. And bother some Jeff. You'll be at the same hotel as well. That's great. I'm quite excited about that. We'll have an event or two outside of the con just in case you'll be in Toronto, but not attending. Yeah. We'll be happy to see you there. Yeah, let us know if you're around or if you want any details where we'll be. Speaking of mob business, the Hat Contest came to an end this week. That's right. Yes, it did. Nutty, our nutty one. Who didn't even know there was a prize? I know, which makes it all the more sweet. She got some steampunk goggles that I got from the Czech Republic. Yeah. Because they're all steampunk there. Yeah. I hear the whole Republic is run on steam. Yep, yep. That's what I hear. And Zeplins. So, yeah. Congratulations, Nutty. You deserve it. Your hair is awesome. So I'm copying you. I just want to give kudos to Shade, who had a hat wearing a hat. That was pretty good. Oh. Man, that one photoshoot. Yeah. They were so great. It was so good. I loved them all. Their shoot was hilarious. Mm-hmm. Your effort for us is just wonderful. Yes. We appreciate it. Yeah. When the Bacon A's idea originally came up, I posted it to the mob, and Rich's immediate suggestion was that it had, I eat it on bacon bits with some bacon salt. Yeah. That's pretty horrible. And I did actually take some time to consider how I was going to go over approaching the Bacon A's. Yeah, for sure. Because it is worth mentioning that the front of the bottle clearly indicates that it is entirely simulated flavor. Yeah. There's no bacon. I considered having some tomato and toast. Yep. But I knew that by the time we got around to this part of the show that it would be cold and probably a little more than gross. So I'm going with the fancy cracker. Okay. Okay. The tiny toasted fancy cracker. Oh, the potato and chive? Or rosemary? Rosemary, I suppose. Those both sound delicious. But I also have an alternate to keep the sort of, well, as you're aware. I want him to try it on bacon. As you're aware, with all Canadian content that is created here, the government mandates a certain amount of Canadian content to be directly in the show. So as an alternate. It's on poutine. Oh, that's so funny. Bacon A's own poutine. So I'm going to start with the cracker and then I'm going to go to the, yeah. To the poutine. To the poutine. Yeah. It's nice to get it with a cracker because you get the full natural flavors. How much are you going to have? Can I see? It's dipping. I should take a photo just like live. You should bring it over here and let me take a photo of it. I'm not going to shoot directly into the mic because I find that gross when I hear it on a podcast. Okay. Can you put it near the, my screen here so I can see it? I don't want to drip bacon A's on your keyboard. No, that'd be. Okay. I think bacon A's void to the warranty. That would be a big picture rather. Bacon A's. Thank you, sir. You can have it back. And now it's going to the children. Three, two, one. Bacon A's. You know, he put a lot of bacon A's on that cracker. He's looking okay. He's not barfing. He's looking okay. He's thinking about it. He's sort of staring off into nothing. The flavors and textures. You can see his mind is turning. He's trying to think the words. And now he has the words. And now he has the words. Ladies and gentlemen. Here we are. Wait, wait. The hush comes over the crowd. You're drinking something. I want you to take a little red bull. Yeah. It's a little greasy. Mm-hmm. It's very smoky. It's very smoky. It's very smoky. Oh, I can see how they can hide that with some liquid smoke. It's not terrible. I don't know that it's going to replace bacon. I don't think it combines bacon and mayonnaise into. A convenient spread. A convenient spread. Yeah. Would be good on like a burger. Yeah. Yeah. It might be nice on a little flavor. So, okay. But would you eat it on a burger, Jaredie? I'm not sure if I was more of a mayo on a burger fellow, but I'm not. Yeah, sure. I'm sure it's because the mayo. Okay. The pope's going for it. She's covering her mouth, but it doesn't hide the crunch. She's thinking about it. I'm not going to try. It tastes like bacon chips. They can chaps, but it's wet. It's moist. I'm not going to try it on the fried cheese and really combo. Can I continue to eat my cracker? Yeah. Go for it. These crunches are allowed. It's for our science. Gina on the mob. She knows I had trouble this weekend with what I was eating, and now she just sent me food porn, this woman who paints food and makes it super sexy. I mean, it's beautiful, but what are you doing today? Yeah. I could see with the gravy and the cheese and the bacon A's. Yeah. Yeah, really. I think that might be almost a winner. That's a winner. You know, I don't think this is ever going to be consumed again. Yeah. You're going to check out the bacon A's. I don't know. I think we should put it in the fridge, but I don't think anyone's going to touch it again. Next time we have burgers, I'm totally going to put some on it. Some bacon A's on it. Instead of mayo. Yeah. See, if you're a mayo person, this would be just a little extra. Because I'll do a little bake, catch up a little bit of mustard, a little bit of mayo. Some pickle if they have it. You want to try making a bacon on the burger, but you don't want to go through the hassle of making them. It's the smoky. I like the smoky. Yeah. It is very smoky. It's almost like more of a smoky mayo than it is a bacon mayo. Yeah. To conclude our journey into bacon A's. Yeah. I just wanted to read this bit of ad copy off the label. Okay. Bacon A's is the continuing story of two bacon fanatics, Justin and Dave, who won some money on America's Funniest Home Videos. No way. And decided to make everything taste like bacon. No way. That's great. Wait. Use it on sandwiches, burgers, dips, salads, sauces, chicken, fish, and even french fries. For recipes and more, please visit bacon A's dot com. That seems so much cooler to me because before I was thinking like somebody, some company that already has like a niche market, like a mayo company who's just doing something for kicks. But to have guys who are passionate about bacon, who want new products. You know what? You know what we're going to do with this money, man? Yeah. Like just the a-kin. Just regular Joe guys who had the opportunity because they had that money. Yeah. Like I almost want to try it a little more. You should. Joe Bacon. With that curiously questionable compliment concluded, let's move into spot of bother. Spot of bother. Being a member of the LGBT community is tough these days. We homos have to be constantly vigilant and prepared for lots of potential problems that are just a creaking closet door away. There's job discrimination, hate crimes, teen suicides as a result of bullying, gay bashing and diesel dykes, blowing cigarette smoke in our faces while we order appletinis at the local bar. Then there's always the seven foot drag queen in size 15 pumps who's bound and determined to get a dollar or two out of you if it takes three tubes of mac lipstick worth of cheek kissing to pry that money out of your Calvin Klein boxer brief on underwear night. It's a tough life. Oh, and let's not forget the bisexuals who in my opinion are just plain well greedy. As if all this isn't confusing and taxing enough, a prominent neuroscientist is now telling me about another whole previously unidentified group of people who don't seem to know what they are from one day to the next. Here's more from the Huffington Post. A graduate student of famed neuroscientist, Valinour S. Ramashandran, has found a group of men and women who report that their sexual identity can switch involuntarily to that of the opposite sex and back again. The transgender metamorphosis, these people assert, can occur several times a day and at inopportune moments. It is also accompanied by this incessant of phantom breasts or genitalia of the non-biological sex. The research grows out of Ramashandran's long-standing fascination with the study of body image and how it contributes to basic sense of this self. Work that is included investigation into the phantom limbs of amputees. The preliminary study by Laura Case, Ramashandran's student, raises the prospect of a new category of transgenderism, alternating gender incongruity or AGI. The neuropsychiatric term the researchers have tentatively proposed, describes the involuntary change of gender identity along with perceived phantom sex characteristics, a tendency toward ambidexterity and bipolar disorder, all signs that suggest a biological basis for AGI. A paper published in the April issue of the journal Medical Hypothesis found 32 respondents, 11 anatomically female, on an online by-gender forum that hosts about 600. Average age was 29. About a third of the respondents said that gender switching was predictable. A majority said they switched weekly and 14 said the transformation occurred once or more per day. Here are some quotes from the paper. I still have the same values and beliefs, but a change in gender is really a change in the filter through which I interact with the world and through which it interacts with me. Here's another. If I'm in mail mode and I see someone crying, I'll think along the lines of "man up." Well, if I'm in girl mode, I think along the lines of "oh sweetie." And one more. "I sometimes wake up thinking I have a penis," says one female respondent, "or that I have no breasts. I usually end up in tears and can't get out of bed because once I get up I'll know for sure it's not really true and it's just my mind playing tricks on me. So I just lie there and cry. It's strange though because I normally don't even want to have a penis." Medical Hypothesis is a controversial journal. It once published an article on the nature of naval lint and only adopted a peer review system in 2010. Yet, Ramashandran, Nobelist, Arvid Carlson and other science luminaries have served on its editorial board because of its stated goal of foraging for radical new ideas and speculations. Ramashandran published previously in the journal on phantom genitalia after sex change surgery. The "more research needed" refrain certainly applies to the AGI work, a concession the investigators themselves make. These results are suggestive but not conclusive, Ramashandran says, "We need to rule out the possibility that this is just a variant of dissociative identity disorder." Multiple personality disorder. Or the subjects are simply role playing. Without the smoking gun, physical evidence in the form of fluctuating hormone levels or brain imaging data, we don't know what we're dealing with. It's something we are currently working on. At the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in early April, case presented preliminary research that one nominal AGI subject to is anatomically male performed differently on cognitive tests depending on his gender state. When male he did better at a targeting task, throwing darts, and he had a superior score on a verbal fluency test after a switch to female state. It was inconclusive whether testosterone levels fluctuated with the change in sexual identity. Case is now preparing to move ahead with a larger study of four members in which she will conduct neuropsychological testing by telephone and examine hormone levels with saliva samples sent through the male. The researchers are not ready yet to do brain imaging studies on the group which is scattered throughout the country. Ultimately, the line of research would examine patterns of activity within each brain hemisphere that differ between sexes. If the researcher's hypothesis holds, it would furnish an increasingly nuanced definition of sexuality. The neurosceptic blog which wrote about the study wondered what would have happened to the little-known bi-genders before the advent of the term, the anonymous blogger wrote, would they have identified as transgender, maybe but maybe not? Would they have had any label at all? The scientists expect that AGI could eventually be classified as a neuropsychiatric condition which would point immediately to the deeper question of the extent to which each of us is a multiplicity of genders or even persons coexisting in harmony. If this research succeeds, AGI could ultimately help provide a biological rationale for the protein and nature of the self. I swear, all of this is enough to drive a gay guy back crap crazy. I think I'll just stay home this weekend, put on my favorite Tammy Y Nat wig, pop open up PBR and watch glee. Those kids are so cute. I'm Jeffrey Lynch and that's This Week's Spot of Bother. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah. So humans, this is obviously all a matter of body thetans. Yeah, yeah, it's all the aliens, all the toxins, right? So, when I think of it on those terms, in those terms of, you know, we're all humans, it seems like just such a slight variation with everyone of who they prefer. And I think the more that we're less discriminatory against people, the more we can just say like, "Hey, I feel like a man half the day," like just the freedom to say that. I had a personal journey during this recording. Tell me. During this listening, I automatically come from a place of skepticism. Okay. This is for everything. I kind of like to give everything a hard look, especially if I haven't heard of it previously. And at first, listen, I don't want to discriminate against anybody, but there was a little hint to me of an echo of the satanic cult/hip no regression situation you guys familiar with. No. We sort of went through this period in, I guess, the 80s where hypnotic regression became this big thing where people would be brought back in a journey of the mind. Was it like their own childhood or somebody else's life? Yeah, no, they're childhood. Okay. And they would suddenly remember that, "Oh, goodness, Uncle Jim, sexually abused me." We were part of a satanic cult and he sacrificed like seven other kids. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Extremely fortunate. And so, I kind of wondered, this guy has a theory he's trying to prove. He's using an online form as his data set. And maybe his questions are a little leading. Like, I would be interested to see how they differentiate between just depth of mood. Like, you know, sometimes you just feel- You're feeling more empathetic, which is, you know, kind of people assume would correlate with this sort of female gender to be more empathetic or to be more man-up, which I think really depends on the person because I think my mom is very much that way with herself, like, man-up woman, you know, don't say a word. Just do it. Go, go, go. And that has nothing to do with her gender. Yeah. I do. Or how she'll treat other people even. Exactly. And there's just so much we don't know about ourselves. We're on the cusp of science people. I would rather that we talk about everything and figure out which is hokey, as opposed to, like, years and years of people feeling like they couldn't say anything or else they be, like, physically assaulted or something, you know? It does seem odd to me, though, that out of- I believe they said it was a 600-member form, 30 people, 37 people came forward with- Yeah, that seems a pretty high ratio. And you'd think that maybe we would have noticed that high level. Maybe. I would understand that it's on a self-identifying form. So they're already, you know, cutting down the- Yeah, they're not asking, like, the general population. But at the same time, I don't find it terribly difficult on the internet to find a form of 30 of 600 people who would believe that they were in a past life originally responsible for raising- Or any other, yes. Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge. Stonehenge. It could be any number of things. But I did hear a little hint of Jeffrey being- What did he say about bisexuals wanting it all? They're just reading. Listen, as a half gay myself, I have to tell you, I do not feel the sort of struggle that a gay man might feel. But it's weird to not identify with straight people who assume that you're straight and not feeling a part of the lesbian- Yeah, or even the gay and lesbian community who will also view you as straight- As greedy. So yeah, I have that sort of like, well, am I- Well, I know, I know. And it's- Yeah, I can understand those people, or there's always people who are different and some people may be just bisexual for the attention or whatever. There are some of those out there who may be half gay, who are legit, baby. There are drag queens and there are drama queens, and every community is going to get a little bit of a presence. Exactly. Exactly. Interesting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Very interesting. I appreciate you bringing it up, broadening our horizons. Broadening the Phantom's genital horizon. Mm-hmm. Solid. Just work over at bothersomethings.com. Mm-hmm. Fantastic. Please go there. Please go there. The week of further bother. Next up on the docket is actually fish this week. He's ready and willing to entertain us all and educate us all. Fresh fish, a new batch of cinematic pulp with the all-ways listening, three-day fish. Hey, flashcast, three-day fish here, and sadly, because of my technical difficulties and what not, I missed out on reviewing Captain in the Woods, but perhaps G.R.D. was right. Perhaps I should not tell you about that movie for all she gives me this movie without any assumptions. Plus, the first 15 minutes of the movie pretty much tell you everything about it, so. The lucky one came out this weekend. Sadly, two of my brothers are schedule. I just couldn't find time to see it. Ugh. What a shame. So, I'm going to have to do another retro review, so I'm picking this month I see. This is a movie I keep thinking that I've already done a review for, but I'm pretty sure I have it, and if I have, I'm sorry. So forgive fish and his forgetfulness, or don't if it turns out I was not forgetful. So anyway, this week I'm going to do a review of Fido. What is Fido you might ask? Well, if you go on to your Netflix, I didn't type in Fido. You can find the story of a boy and his zombie, which he named Fido. It's a funny little flick. It's set in like a very 1950s type future, where zombies are used as servants basically, because we've developed these collars that inhibit their desire to eat flesh. It's a cute little movie, very much for the zombie fan. It follows Romero style rules, if you die, you become a zombie, not necessarily just getting it all caused by reading. They do such an interesting twist on what modern society would be like coexisting with zombies. And as much as I would love to say that this is just a straight up green light, I can't just because the acting, like nothing's wrong with the acting, or you have to like zombies to really accept this movie, I feel, like I don't think anyone can just watch this movie. You have to be like a zombie fan, be like, oh that movie was so cute, aw that is all for this week, always listening. JRD, where's my zombie boat? Yeah, come on, it's much better than the monkey butlers. Usually, you're such a good geek that we get everything on the cusp of units and science. Yeah. We're going to have robot bodies. Yeah, for real. I can definitely see how this is a genre specific film, like it's for fans of what it is. Yeah, zombies. If there's enough of us, come on. Yeah, but that's the thing. Yeah. Fans of zombies and butlers. I'm going to be so sad with the zombie bubble bursts because I don't mean to sound like some sort of zombie based hipster, but you know, I've been a fan of the zombie genre for a long time. It's been pretty important to me. I feel like there's a certain, like, resurgence of the geek pride, honestly. I think the zombie thing is always there. There's just a swell in it every once in a while. Like, we have Mr. Nein's friend saying, yeah, I'm a geek man. I like this. I like this. I like this. And I think it was something that was sort of under the radar before. Yeah. And I think when it's not zombies, it'll be something else, or it will always be zombie. Although, frankly, this whole zombie butler thing, I can't help but think of a downton abbey walking dead crossover. Yeah. It's pretty great. It's old. Yeah. I just, I see myself some time in the future in a Las Vegas hotel room discussing when the wave broke and rolled back from zombie freedom, anyway. When the zombie wave broke. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sounds fun. I'm definitely going to check it out with Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah. I love that he was too busy for the lucky one. Later on the mailback, he will be referring to it because he does have reports from eyewitnesses that were not himself. Surprisingly. Yeah. So you'll see. So let's throw into the New York Minute, but before that, let's see if we have a word from Hollywood Russell. Hollywood Russell and the case of the virtuous Vixen, part four. Last week, Hollywood Russell confronted a shapely specter from his past. This week, what does she want? What do you want? Hollywood asked. The woman slinked over to Hollywood in a way women can only do in movies and never in real life. What makes you think I want anything? She put her arms around Hollywood. He held her because the last time you were in my life, you stole my heart. Not to mention my right kidney. I'm still in dialysis three times a week. Hi, I'm Barry, and this is your New York Minute. Once again, I am commenting on the New York radio scene. Say what you want about talk radio, the real lunatic fringe is on sports radio. In New York City, we have the biggest sports talk radio station in North America, WFAN. I almost never listened to it. First of all, the station is dominated by the pompous and sports challenged Mike Francesa. I know a lot of you out there listen to him, he gets great ratings, I don't understand it. A bigger sack of trash, you'd be hard pressed to find outside of Congress. And secondly, WFAN is home with the Mets, and as a Mets fan, I can't stand the Mets. You really need to be a Mets fan to understand that, but it makes perfect sense. Sports is the great equalizer. A bricklayer can speak with equal authority to a billionaire on the subject, and because of that, you get an amazing cross-section of humanity calling sports talk shows. And with that, I'd like to introduce you to Jerome from Manhattan. "The dimension of sight, of sound, but of no mind, is a rubber room up ahead. You're entering the Jerome Zone." "For one rubber room to the other." "Oh wait just a second, it would help if I click a mic." "You're not like that picture who picked the first tape." "Who is it?" "I think that guy in the mouth, I'm turning off the tape." "No, he was fine." "When in case, we're going to make a move." "Now he doesn't." "Now make a lot of picture." "He is." "I can't wait to detect the guy from Cleveland in here." "Who asked if they're not making it?" "And if they don't, they are done. Finish." Jerome, wait a second, he never, it's like holding a press conference. He doesn't have, it's like the old days again. I think he's off the drugs. What is it? And the bottom line is, as long as his health is okay, and apparently Jerome is back. In mid-season form, there's no question about it. First of all, we don't want Jerome, if you're listening right now, to overreact. There's nothing wrong with damn guys. And by the way, Brian Cashman didn't make a move, so there, Ollendorf comes down, and here comes Kay Eagawa, and good times are ahead, but the New York Yankees, there's nothing wrong with their pigeons there. Okay. Jerome is an excitable sort. In that clip above, you heard him with Steve Summers, who, by the way, is a legend in New York sports talk circles, and I absolutely love the guy. If the Yankees win 10 in a row, and then lose one, he'll call up yelling and screaming for someone to be fired or traded. He is a total nut. To say he makes snap judgments is an understatement. If Joe DiMaggio were playing today, and his 56-game hitting streak ended tomorrow, Jerome would be on the phone right after game 57 demanded the Yankees trade him. This is from Wikipedia, and any poor grammar in there? Blame on them. A die-hard Yankees and Knicks fan, Jerome is famous for his on-air, taking no prisoners blistering rants and raves, as well as his own unique take on the English language. One of his favorite exclamatory phrases is "freaking frack." He refers to the bull pen as "the ball pen," and one shout out that the Yankees are done, D-O-E-N-Done. His relationship status is intriguing enough for Steve Summers to once give Jerome $60 to take a lady out on a date, only for Jerome to keep the money and not go out. Former host Sid Rosenberg once asked Jerome if he was upset that he was not taking his eagerly anticipated trip to Colorado, and Jerome replied "no" to Denver. He does not like jets, they make him seasick. Jerome, when he's still called WFAN regularly, was known for being the only caller to have an audio intro, much like those played at the top of each show. Occasionally when he calls in the Steve Summers program, a special introduction has played to the tune of the Twilight Zone. Jerome, whose last name is Middleman, has had health problems, and that was kept him from the WFAN airwaves on a regular basis from late 2004 until about mid 2008. He's recently started to call in more frequently. "The next world is a little clear about the next world, oh wait a minute, other people do. I'm going to tell you something, it's time for your listening, you'll better not stop and that's the best that you do with that, but the fans are going to write that to you and I want to tell it why, I don't care what it takes to catch the guy near you and it backs out, stay on it, pick trouble, okay, it's a bathroom man, but it's been a lot of life." "Where are you going?" "And first of all, you were all on the line before, when we first came on, right after we're filled with the hockey and all that, man." He calls the station five or six times a day, and he usually calls other stations in between. You will hear him on FAN, you will turn on the news and you will see him or hear him, depending on if you're on TV, because he calls the TV calling stations too. One days when he's in good health, you cannot get away from him. Jerome has also been banned from FAN for racist language. After his ban, I heard him on the air say of a Planck Yankees ball player, "I hate that, I hate that guy." He also has very little knowledge of sports outside of his very limited knowledge of current Yankee players. Frankly, he has very limited knowledge of most things. I'm Barry, this has been your New York Minute. That dude sounded so angry. Yeah. Well, he obviously has some sort of... It's so funny too, he has really no understanding of the game, but if somebody under performs for a certain amount of games, then he takes issue. You know what really got me is the ball pen, bull pen thing, because ball pen makes me think of like those ballrooms that the little babies play. D-O-E-N-Done, yeah, D-O-E-N, oh. I found it really interesting because somehow a talker radio has given a space for crazy people. Well, every little town, even the town I grew up in, had a crazy person. There was this old lady who would walk around, and she had some sort of decent home. She was living with her sister, but she would dress up in sort of a quilt of her own creation, a coat. Oh, wow. And just walk around pushing her stuff around. You know, a side note, there's actually, I've seen the beginnings of a hobo, or at least I believe, the lady in front of the Bank of Montreal, there's a lady who never sat in front of it, who now always sits in front of it, and she looks like really out of it. She smokes cigarettes, and talks to everybody, and smiles at every car. And I feel like I'm just going to see her, and she's only going to be worse off. She's building into some sort of hobo smell. Yeah. Anyways, Barry was mentioning. That's the thing about radio, is that, you know, your people are on the same sort of even level, like some guy who calls in who's your steel worker as is, you know, somebody who's got D-O. And it, I mean, you don't see that as much in an area as dense as New York, but it's interesting that one of the themes that are coming out of his radio bits, if you have enough persistence and you're crazy enough, you can get a rep. If you want it, you can be on radio. Yeah. Well, it doesn't matter about crazy, but it's the desire to want to be on there. Yeah. You just got a yell out enough, I guess. So thank you so much, Barry. Mm-hmm. So I love that you had little, little clips, examples of this guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was nicely done. Mm-hmm. I'm loving all of this radio history stuff. Thanks. So, I think we have a little something from Gibraltar, some more horrible histories. Yeah. Yes. You will hear his finished intro and his... Oh, I am quite certain. ...delectable bite of a story. Oh, yeah. Now we go into a bit of an end run, right, with these three segments. I hadn't realized that right in a row all of the new intros are in place. Mm-hmm. Enjoy them, everyone. Well... Well... Come from beyond to save us from our own past. Gibraltar has found only one solution to protect us. Here, now, is your horrible histories. Well, LAB cans, that's another room we can't ever go in. I'm sure they're fine, they're magical for me. Don't look at me like that. Come on, the histoscope needs maintenance. Now, salutations by fellow monsters, and I welcome you again to your horrible histories. Histoscope on! Private Henry Farrr of the British Expeditionary Force was executed for cowardice after he refused to go forward into the frontline trenches in the Western Front during World War I. After joining the BEF in 1914, Farrr was sent to the front in France, and following May, he collapsed, shaking, and was sent to the hospital for treatment. He was returned to the battlefield and participated in the Somme Offensive in mid-September, 1916. However, Farrr refused to go ahead into the trenches with the rest of his squadron after being dragged forward, struggling, keep broke free, and ramped back. He was subsequently court-martialed for cowardice, and given the death sentence, which was carried out on October the 16th. Soldiers in the firing squad ordered to carry out the execution were often tormented by the experience for the rest of their lives. John Lasseter, who died in 1999 at the age of 101, recalled to how he and a number of other soldiers were marched to the woods and told that they were part of a firing squad. Speaking to the BBC, television program Every Man, Lasseter said he was haunted by the moment as he looked down in the direction of rifles were pointed, and a mere boy there stood there with his back to the tree. There were tears in my eyes, and there were tears in his, he recalled. Farrr was one of 306 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth, who were executed for cowardice during the Great War. According to his descendants, who have long fought to clear his name, Farrr suffered from severe shell shock, a condition that was just being recognized at a time that had been damaged both physically and mentally by his experiences in combat, especially from the heavy bombardment that he and his comrades on the front were subjected to. The symptoms of shell shock, a term that was used in 1917 by a medical officer named Charles Meers, included debilitating anxiety, persistent nightmares, and physical afflictions ranging from diarrhea to loss of sight. By the end of World War I, the British Army was forced to deal with over 80,000 cases of this affliction, including among the soldiers who had never experienced a direct bombardment. Despite the ongoing treatment, one-fifth of the men affected ever resumed military duty. Farrr's wife, Gertrude, who lived in Kensington, London, was first told her husband had been killed in action, but was later when her pension was stopped, was informed that he had been shot for cowardice, and she was not entitled to it. In 1992, Gertrude and her family discovered some documents that were being released by the government, and that Andrew McKinley was involved with a campaign for justice for those in similar positions to Farrr. When they got a hold of the court-martial papers, they were horrified to discover that Farrr had been sent back to the front when in fact he needed urgent medical treatment. Despite a sustained campaign, Prime Minister John Mayer refused to pardon, and in 1993, Gertrude Farrr died. On August 15, 2006, Henry Farrr's family announced that Farrr had been granted a pardon. The announcement came as Des Brown, the defense secretary, said that he would seek a statutory group pardon. Des Brown told BBC Radio 4's Today program that after 90 years, the evidence did not exist inside each of these cases individually. It had been suggested that the move would avoid numerous court cases. Historians, however, have criticized such a move in the past as trying to apply a modern social standards retroactively. Sreen goes dark on me again, my fellow monsters and lab cat. Why is the dimensional proximity alarm going off? You said you fixed it. Don't give me that. Either you fixed it or you didn't. Live cat, get the burn of Tron. Till next time, mobsters, hopefully I'll have all this sorted out by then. Aw, I love lab cat. That's awesome. Yeah, consistency is important to that cat. I love it so much. Yeah. He's like, oh, didn't we just have something in the mob recently with that cat made of cats? Yep. That's kind of how I picked your lab cat, like a giant cat of cats. We are. Oh, okay. Just like Gibraltar is the rock of rocks. Cat is the cat of cats. I think it is horrific. I must say. Right. That if you were killed for cowardice that your family would not receive your pension or whatever they called it at the time, that's horrific in that that person was executed and he just stared at a tree while an executor had a or an executioner had to kill him who was volunteered by the army. Yeah, didn't volunteer but was volunteered and for that to haunt him for the rest of his days. I don't know that it was used in this situation but the sort of token bit of draw that they usually put into these things is one of the shells is a blank. Yeah. So each person can compare themselves that maybe they didn't do the actual shooting. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That smells a lot. Oh, man. That's heavy. It's very much the same when you would get the people throwing the switch for an electric chair. Maybe like three switches or something like that. Oh, yeah. And then one of them would be a dummy and you just... Well, two of them would be a dummy or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of them actually goes. You know what? If it makes you feel that disgusting, perhaps it shouldn't be done. Yeah, perhaps we should stop killing people. Yeah. Yeah. If you think it's a bad thing to do, let's not do it. What we've learned in the meantime about PTSD and just the psychology of warfare is fascinating. To be dragged kicking and screaming back to the front lines only to turn and run away and that's just horrible. Yeah. Yeah. And for his family to have not even been told initially what happened. Well, I think, you know, it's something that's quite humiliating that you don't really want to... I know that you can take away your pension anyway. Yeah. But you just, you don't want, you don't want the complaining and the bitching and the moaning. You know. That's rough. Well, listen. Oh, it's rough. No, you deserve it. I like a lot of transparency. I kind of think of a not to bring up political points with the Pat Tillman situation. Yeah. Where he became a hero, even though he was killed by Friendly Fire, just because it sounded better. Yeah. Well, that would definitely a horrible history you've altered, thank you very much. Yes. You did a marvelous job. No, I hear it's a bit of a rainy day of the Surgeon Power. Mm. I think it's time to move on to Doc Asriel, Angel of Dead. Good yourself for another entry in the Tale of Murder, Mystery, and Dark Motives. That is the ongoing saga of Doc Asriel, Angel of Death. In the last episode, Jimmy Keenan visited the third Heaven Club for the first time. After witnessing a particularly stirring rendition of Fever, the smuggler met the mysterious Calvin St. Delva third, and now, the latest chapter of Doc Asriel, Angel of Death. Billiards, Surgeon Parr cursed as he turned up the collar as worn overcoat against the dam in the chill. But neither the upturn collar nor his white brimmed hat did much to keep the cold drizzle from stinging his face. Parr hated weather like this. The department shrink would likely say that was due to the fact that his wife left him on a day like this, but Parr knew better. That dark cloud had little enough to do with weather. He pulled the brim of his hat further over his face. Drizzle like this was sneaky, malevolent. Parr was half convinced that the wets somehow made the blocks stretch, making the walk to the station house longer. He would take a good, honest rain over this bitter misting, any day. The sergeant had walked a beat long enough to know that weather like this made people mean. The same grocer, who would offer an apple on any other day, would just scowl from under his awning on a day like this. The same taxi driver that would stop to let you cross the street normally on days like this would speed up just so they could splash you with whatever had collected in the gutter. In weather like this, there were more domestic disturbances, more bar fights, more muggings. Sergeant Parr's grumpy musings were interrupted by a scream for help from somewhere up ahead. The alias, he cursed again and broke into a jog. There was another shriek. It was cut off suddenly, but it was enough for the older officer to identify the source. It was coming from the alley about half block away. The officer slowed his jog and pulled his gun as he reached the opening of the alley. He didn't know if anyone else had heard the cry, but he didn't have time to wait for backup. If it was just a mugging, the perps would get away before a beat cop showed up, and if it were something worse. Well, Parr didn't have time to think about that, either. He edged around the corner, his pistol held in both hands in front of him, about a dozen feet ahead, behind a pile of trash that served as a pitiful source of concealment, two thugs were manhandling a young woman. One had an arm around her throat and his opposite hand over her mouth. The other was menacing her with a knife and reaching for her purse with his free hand. Her grocery bag gets built out around the three sets of feet. Your boys will want to step away from her now. All three figures looked, noticing the officer and his gun for the first time. I don't think so old man. You're the one who's going to walk away or I'm going to cut her. The woman's eyes pleaded silently with the sergeant. Parr took a slow step forward. I don't think so, what I think is that you are going to drop that knife and let her go before you get hurt. The knife wielder slid behind his victim. You're not going to shoot us as long as we got her. Parr took another step forward, slowly hoist her in his gun. No, but you're still going to let her go. The old officer spread his arms gradually as he took another step. And twice that they laughed roughly because I'm not the one who's going to hurt you. The sergeant lunged forward suddenly to catch this old young woman as she slipped free from the grasp of her attackers. Took you long enough. Parr watched as the shadowy figure hauled the muggers up to the rooftop. As he did so, the sergeant updated his opinion of the weather. It made folks stupid and mean. Ooh, a shadowy entrance there at the end. That was great. Billiards. Yeah, I love that. I know. It's like Baladash. Yeah, I'd really like to start interjecting Billiards into my everyday conversation. I think you have to pay a few cents. Yeah, royalties. Yeah. Every time. Yeah, another fantastic entry. It's interesting to see the effect of weather in this sort of story. Sometimes the rain just drives all the sins of this city away. Sometimes it throws the main fellow into a dark mood. It was on a night like this that my wife left me. I love that. That's great. Many thanks, Doc Blue. Mm hmm. Great. Dave went. Great. You can find more of his postings over at thesecretlayer.com. He's got a fantastic gig there with a few other brilliant fellows. Okay, to round out the magazine section, I believe we have a salty tale. Mm. If you would love a good tale with a splash of a salty brine on your face, then prepare yourself for the adventurous expulsions of Captain Iglesias Picard. Aha. We'd been drinking since sunset by firelight. My guest was one Horatio the Hermit, who'd been so kind as a joiners in the capacity of Stowaway. It had been a while since any fool had hidden aboard our ship, still less one disguised as a rabbit-hutch. Poor Barry had been most disappointed as he knelt to stroke the bunnies ear, to find only the twisted beard of some stinkin' malcontent. I'd planned to toss him overboard, with a man's silver tongue at stage's execution. Her ratio babbled about a sacred cove with the ocean, where a man could commune with the watery gods and receive their blessing. He was as mad as a flyin' fish, but of course, that don't necessarily make him wrong. We were needful a diversion for having plundered mightily off the Spanish coast, we now neared the alcoholic dull germs aboard him. Our course was set, and for further amusement I ordered the hobo cleaned. When we reached the Hermit temple cove, we had a celebratory barrel-draining, just me, her ratio Barry and Mick, ruddy in the light and in various stages a passin' out. There came startling thunder from all around us, though it were dry and the stars were clear as day, well, they'd be as they are on a clear night. You know what I mean. To a strange. The sea was calm beneath us, and yet when we cast lanterns over the side, the water itself was bubbling fiercely. I dashed for the helm to steer us from these queer waters. There was a slight wind which I hoped to exploit. But as I hobbled over, the seas exploded about us in great fountains aluminous spray, each top by a mass of jellyfish. I stood at the wheel, flanked by me battered buddies, gobs a gargant gaping with slack jaw surprise. A deep thromblin' from below forced the rhythmically writhed in maritime beasties out of the water. Gah! The beauty of nature near unmanders, the pulse of the ocean penetrated, the inebriate veil we'd drawn over our senses, flinging water over the planks. Horatio bounded over to the rail with customary grace, trippin' and flinging himself into the sea. We found him treading water by the ship's side, lit with an eerie pink from below. Hop in, lads! The water's lovely! The man declared. Mick and Barry were already mounting the rail when Horatio chuckled, "There's a ticklin' at me ankles! Why, you little mischiefs!" A premonition struck me, and I laid a hand and hook upon the shoulders of me crewmates as they straddled the railin'. They twisted angrily in me grip, keen to enjoy the peculiar pink waters, but I held untight. Sure enough, me creeping concern was based on a side grasp of our likely misfortune. Why, 'tis the ocean's own kisses or love, as in the days of ancient Greece! Horatio's babble turned to the inevitable cries and screams, as the water foamed readily about him. Barry and Mick had returned all four of their feet to the deck. 'Tis likely too late for a rope,' Mick commented, as the hobo hermit vanished in a whirl of bubbles and flashin' teeth. The author of the vanishing sea-trap reared suddenly from the water, born up on another mast of brine, anerific writhe in mass of teeth and eyeballs, making me suspect the dancing seabees were merely escaping its dinnertime intentions. And in our drunken state we pirates our professionals that last, and was only a few brittin' toes that slowed us in rollin' a cannon across the deck. The beast was using its teeth to haul itself up the hull, its horrid eyes gogglin' at us with hunger, tatters of her ratio being snapped up by lower mouths as they tumbled towards the sea. 'Blast the demon back into the deep slads!' I bellowed, quite forgetting that Mick still wore his drinkin' mitts and could only bash at the fuse with a mug. Meantimes the beast was on deck. With me pistol I blasted away one facet of its fishy features which merely caused it to shriek and lash out toothily at Barry, who was dashing across the deck with a lantern and taper. The lantern bounced off the pissky beast and onto me waiting hook, but the taper was snapped up by the fiend as it latched onto Barry's leg. Mick set to wack in the brook with his stein fists while I whirled, desperate for some tender to sparkle like Mr. Boom as we'd named the cannon earlier. There was not a hand, and me lads were in trouble. Not a hand, but to foot. I smashed a lamp to the deck, and thrust me peg-leg into the oily flames. The rum reserve I kept within its hollow core, burst into light, and I put me in flame stumped to the cannon's boom whisker, the name had gone on for some while. Mr. Boom kept true to his name and atomised the ghastly sea beast, casting a fishy mist across me and me crewmates. Untethered Mr. Boom, thundered back across the formast, delivering a fatal blow to her upright fortitude. With a weary creak, the mass split and tumbled, smashing down onto the headless stub of the sea beast as it battered against the deck, searching for its snappy noggin. With spars embedded in it, the whole lot slipped and tipped off the grim bastard, threatening to tug the ship over with it. Only the quick thinking of me crew alerted, finally, to the threat by the cannon's discharge of hackin' it rope stopped us from following the beast into the depths. The pink temple of fizzin' water collapsed back into the sea, and apart from the sway the destruction across the grim bastard's deck, there was no sign of the wondrous events of the night. "Right," said no hands Mick. That sells it, still weighs go overboard immediately. Oh, thank you so much, Captain. I love that. That was great. It's interesting because, to my mind, Nick really treads in a dangerous sort of comedy, almost the necromancy of comedy, in that it risks, okay, not to in any way cast aspersions on Nick, but it risks being too silly, right? That's always the danger, as it's gonna go. But he never does. He always nails it. It's in the details, like the rabbit hutch, the stirboom, Mick no hands, like he nails it, and it's always fantastic. It's never enough, really. You're like, "Oh, oh, it's done." And this one had a nice little touch of horror there, a nice extra bit. So you can find all of Captain Pickard's adventures over at CaptainPickard.com, and many thanks to Nick. You can actually find Captain Pickard on Twitter as well. Whoever he be, you should go. Yeah, Facebook. And beyond. So guess what time it is? What time is it? Mail time. It's mailbag. Mailbag. How long have we been doing this show? Mailbag. All right, before we dip into the mailbag, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, you can send them to comments@flashpulp.com. You sure can. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you. Text to our MP3s, record them on your phone, send them along. Mm-hmm. So we got a quick email from Fish recently. Oh, nice. Yeah, and it's nice. Sometimes he'll give us little insights on movies that he doesn't, you know, that he's not... Oh, yes. This is the follow-up to the movie he copped out on earlier. Yeah. Yeah, the lucky one. Oh, yeah. So he says, "My chick flick expert's report that the lucky one is not as passionate as the commercial suggests, but that SAC efron's back is sexy." Much. Oh. That's so funny. It's okay. I guess he was the lucky one to have not seen it. Okay. They were really hyping up that movie. Were they? Yes. And they basically said like the whole premise, they're like, "This is how they meet. This is them falling in love. This is her realizing just how wonderful he is, the end." I don't know if that's how it goes, but... Wow. Yeah. Who's SAC efron again? He came out in the high school musical stuff, and then he had success in some other stuff. But he's considered a respectable up-and-comer. Oh, there you go. Good for his back then, I guess. Yes. Yeah. Yes, he's bringing the sexy back. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I hear there's much love to the Soda Stream from the mob. Yeah. Oh, yeah. In relation to Flashgast57, right? We were discussing... I can't believe how many mobsters have a soda stream. Mm-hmm. That's so crazy. There's a little note here that says Nick mentions that you can't soda-rise milk, but every time I read it, I swear I read Nick mentions that you can't sodomize milk. It's terrible. Yeah, he said he was actually... He was actually mentioning that he had one when he was about six, but they attempted to soda-rise milk, and that discontinued their soda stream. Yeah. I'm sure it was all over their mom's counter and kitchen, and they're just like, "No, no kids, you broke it. We can never use it again." Yeah, it's just done. Yeah. Actually, out of that same discussion, we discovered that Mountain Dew in Canada does now have caffeine. Yeah, as of like two months ago or something, that's so weird. Yeah. And that there was a brief period in which it was sold on the shelves, but it had to be labeled a health drink. Before we get to Time Traveler Rich's call, we did hear a little bit of feedback from Olivia. She, well, via Rich. She seemed quite pleased with her segment last week of Roo. The literary considerations? Mm-hmm. Yeah, she listened to it during dinner. That's great. Yeah, she was found later on like repeating her little intro, like trying to do it like Miss Nine just around the house. That's weird. I know. She's gotten a little bit of trouble because, yeah, she didn't realize that her music was on the internet. Oh. Oh, also, we also got Rich in a bit of trouble. We do realize that Mrs. Time Traveler has quite a bit to do with Olivia's fantastic upbringing as well. Yeah. Because we're always praising Rich. You both seem like fantastic, folks. Yeah. And you can play that one Rich. Thumbs up. Yeah. Okay, well let's see what else Rich had to say. ♪ The tirelessly seeks through the ages for fictions ♪ ♪ Besties reach the Time Traveler ♪ Hello, Flashbulb crew and fellow mobsters. Rich the Time Traveler here. I've got a mixed bag of comments from things mentioned in last week's Flashcast that I'm going to start off with. First off, Juggers. Who else was thinking of the Hunger Games when they were listening to that trailer? When you talk about solving your world diplomatic problems with sport, you have to also think about future sport, don't you? I thought Barry's mentioned at the Bob and Betty radio show, sounding like it could have been an Andy Kaufman-esque performance piece. It seems too surreal to be real. I wonder if you ever got some confirmation or further information on it. JRD's discussion of the holiday music tapes at Sellers reminded me of my gradual musical descent into madness a few years ago. We were spending a week at Disney in Florida during the holidays, and were staying on the property at the Polynesian. Disney likes to strongly theme things, so Christmas plus Polynesian equals non-stop Polynesian and Christmas songs. Only, there are just about enough of them to fill one good CD, which I think they put on repeat and left for the entire season. By the end of the week, a couple of bars of Meleka Leakey Maka could induce facial texts. JRD also reminded me that I watched Rubber myself a few weeks ago. It was quirky, and I think he was right that the premise stretched right up to the breaking point at the end, but it held okay for this sort of movie. I will say my favorite part was the audience, but that sort of ended too soon. Not to give too much away. Nutty mentioned soda stream, and there was some discussion of it on the mob. I wanted to drop a few comments on it. I was given one as a Hanukkah gift last year, and I love it. It was supposed to help me give up canned soda and make my own healthier version instead, but it hasn't quite worked out that way yet. I tried to stay away from caffeinated drinks after dinner, but I still crave the carbonated fizz, so I've been using their diet pink grapefruit, think fresca, and their diet lemon lime, think sprite, to make some drinks in the evening. I also use their My Water flavor essences to make sort of a flavored seltzer water. The other thing I really love about this is that you can lightly or heavily carbonate the beverages, so I tend to give mine a lot of extra fizz. If I can figure out a good way to transport the soda I make to work instead of bringing in the full bottle, and a way of making something similar to my drug of choice, which is diet cherry Dr. Pepper, then I'll really be in business. If Jessica May likes to play around with essential oils and such, she could probably come up with her own flavors pretty easily. Two more quick food things. Another beverage to try is meo energy. I scoffed it at first as their commercials were silly, but I gave it a try. Essentially it's a liquid crystal light type mix you take on the go, but the energy version has B vitamins and caffeine added, sort of like red bowl. It tastes pretty good, though I don't know if it's available or legal in Canada with all your beverage rags. And since food seems to be a regular topic, I want to give the "How much do we love" podcast a plug. I mentioned it before to JRD, Jessica, and a pope privately because of a Downton Abbey connection, but not in the mob since they aren't really a pulpy podcast. However, since it seems like lots of folks here like cool foods and snacks, check them out. I'm good friends with one of the hosts, Sarah Davis. She and her co-host Rob are from a musical theater background, and Rob still performs in Chicago. They talk about food, TV shows, clothes, and generally anything they love. The last episode was done while Sarah was in England in vacation, and she recorded the podcast with a local English podcasting group called Flat 29. They did a live taste testing of the English version of authentic American snacks. To close the circle on Herbert's Dune books, yes, he does sort of overpower the characters, but he does deal with it in a cycle. For instance, Dune and Dune Messiah are about the rise and fall of Paul and his sister Elia. While Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune follow Paul's son, Leader of the Second, they are a similar cycle. So he seems to nerf them effectively in time. What gets me though is when he winds on about philosophy or ancestral memories for a couple of chapters at a time. I have copies of the next two books Herbert wrote himself, Heretics of Dune and Chapter House Dune. I'm sure I'll get through them eventually. Not so certain I'll do the ones that his son co-wrote after his death. I did finish Kenamor Zombi, Ohio, definitely an easy read, and had a twist off the bat that wasn't too unexpected, but there was another twist later that caught me by surprise. While the general plot was interesting, there were a few places where the writing felt a bit forced. There were certainly a few times where I felt the character motivation and actions were forcing credulity just a little bit. Though I've seen worse. I say if you're just looking for a read, it's a three out of five brains book. But if you really like zombies, I want to see an interesting twist on the genre, it may be a four out of five brainer for you. You mentioned putting the handwritten Ruby diary in the stream. All I can say is yes please. Are they posted elsewhere already? I thought you had alluded to that, but I didn't see them on flashpulp.com. Anyway, I still think that it would be a nice addition. I haven't listened to the first of the new six part of Ruby, but I wanted to say how happy I am to see her back. In your timeline, you've been without her since October, though it was a little easier in mind. I think I finished her last episode in late November. Looking forward to a nice run of her story. That's all for now. Tell Cara Grises this is rich. He knows so much more about the dune books than I will ever know, but that book Zombie Ohio, was that it, Zombie Ohio? That sounds cool. That loves me as a zombie book. It's interesting that he brought Juggers around to the Hunger Games, which I don't want to get too much into you still now, because we're still going to do the Book Club at the end of the show. But it did remind me of the Dasati experiment, which is an odd book also by Frank Herbert. I don't know that it's one of the more mainstream books that people have read by him. It was a solid story, and there's a way, the sort of double thinking that Katniss does in the arena, where it's not just her immediate thinking, but she's also trying to second-guest image, and all of these things. There's a lot of that in the Dasati experiment, because it's this battle-hardened planet, where there are seven layers of personality deep, and they're all trying these ploys upon ploys. Yeah. Jeez. Anyway, it's an interesting book, and if you're looking for some Frank Herbert to read, it might be one of the better ones. Sounds cool. I do find the idea of being able to mix and match flavors to create something more, very tempting about the sort of stream. Yeah. Having a more hands-on approach. Yeah, that'll be cool. I say that'll be as though it was 40 years somehow, yeah. Right now where Orgerides is perfecting his iced tea. Mm-hmm. Well, I feel like getting pretty close. I'm now down to mixing the types of tea that I use. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Finding the perfect tea blend. Yeah. I started with a Louisiana, I believe it's called, but that's only available in the late, so I've moved on at the moment to Red Rocket, which is good, but... Mm-hmm. It's a bold tea flavor. Yeah. I enjoy it. I find it needs a little bit more sugar, but then with that content of sugar, you really need to make sure you've got a lot of lemon. Yeah. Oh, speaking of, you guys did listen to a little bit of how much do we love, right? You really enjoyed it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I picked up the episode where they spoke about Downton Abbey, completely agreed with them. I can't remember what point. I was like, "Suck village." But it was something minor. They are highly entertaining. I really did enjoy their banter. I find their snack idea very clever as well. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a neat idea of going overseas and then trying the things that are supposedly from home. Yeah, I know. That's the one thing I'm always tempted to do, not that I've been that many other places, but the Big Macs, trying the local Big Mac. Although there's also sort of, I understand that it's more for the novelty, you should really be trying the local fair. Oh, yeah. You're trying those local McDonald's. Yeah. It's pretty terrible. Well, hopefully you're there long enough or you can sample everything. I do wonder if there's ever a time when Rich, just to make it feel like Christmas, has to throw on a Polynesian track or two. That is so funny. That is so funny. I don't know if I could handle, like, I have trouble handling Christmas, like it's just, it's so expensive and it's always there and the songs are always playing and no one wants to be at work for those long hours, like, that plus Disney. Thanks. Well, we're at the awkward point where we can't really stay here due to family obligations, so there's a lot of travel involved, but we still have little children, so there's a lot of stress involved with travel. I believe that you may enjoy Christmas more in a decade or so. Yeah, well, I like the decorating. I like being at home as a family, but I don't like going where other people are because they're generally grumpier because they have to do more stuff. I'm a fan of the vacation time. Yeah. Yeah. Hala. Okay, before we move on to a call from Joe, I just want to say to it, well, say thanks to Rich, and I like the brain scale of reading things, let's keep that up. Hello, flashcast crew and fellow mobsters. What a stressful week. Evidently, in a bid to escape it all, I dreamed that Linda and I switched places. Unfortunately, it was just a stressful, only different, but the dream was so real. Weird, huh? So I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other about Eddie Murphy, but when I think of him, the first movie I think of is Trading Places, which I really enjoyed. Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis made a decent comedy trio. I took a peek at the lesbian pulp covers. The interesting thing to me is that the majority of them appear to represent lesbians in an unrealistic way that makes me think the target demographic for the stories was not women. It's always interesting to see that some things don't change through time. A while back, there was a discussion about identifying place of origin in the UK based on accent. This is always amazed me. We're talking about a landmass that is slightly smaller than the state of Colorado. Granted, vis-a-vis Colorado, the UK has a long, rich history, but I would be hard pressed to say there was anything related to an accent in different parts of the state I live in. Compared to the extremes found in the UK, and I can hear some differences they're probably not most. This blows me away. In fact, there is more difference between some UK accents than there are between me and the Flashcast crew who live half a continent apart. The world is a funny place sometimes, which is good because sometimes it's not. My author's spotlight this week is Corey Doctorow. I mentioned in the mob how much I loved Little Brother, which I feel serves as an excellent warning about the dangers of a government that gets too interested in the private lives of its citizens. Because Corey releases all of his work with a Creative Commons license, it's really easy to find and read all of his material. I recently read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and I'm currently in the middle of makers. Both are great sci-fi stories, with interesting takes on future economic systems. Little Brothers already been adapted to the stage, only in San Francisco at this point, but all of these books would make great movies. One more quick aside for Nettie, who in a recent Nettie Bites mentioned a great steampunk story on Escape Pod, but cannot remember the title. That was Doctorow's "Clockwork Fagin", which is Nettie noted is awesome. So he's versatile as well. As usual, Flashpulp is keeping me entertained, on my toes and in suspense. I love the reference to junkies, seeing into the world of Carwick in the last, cough and tail. Excellent visual. Well, I'm off, hope everyone is doing well. For some reason, I have the urge to go read a romance novel. Like I said, very strange week, take care. It should be mentioned that this should have been played last week, immediately after the April 1st release. But I fell down, everyone. Well, Jay made us a great job. Sometimes something slips through them, but unfortunately, even something as fantastic as Colorado Joe. Yes, I know, that's what's so rough about it. I absolutely agree about trading places being a good film. There is a lot in his early catalog that's really solid. It's just the laziness that kicks in later in life, I think. Once you get to a certain level of success, it's very hard to keep pushing yourself to really be... Hey, yeah. People stop giving you their honest opinion. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's an ongoing discussion we've had. I can definitely recommend Doctorow's work. You can find all of his stuff over at craphound.com. Craphound? Craphound? Maybe this is why Joe didn't mention it. Craphound.com, it's related to, I believe, his first bigger known work. Oh. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sure. He does make a good point. Although, I have definitely seen lesbian covers that are more lady-centric. He does make a good point, but a lot of them are obviously intended to bring in male... Yes. The male gaze. Yeah, I like that one about the lesbian sisters. Yeah. But I mean, again, I need to do... I haven't had it a lot of time for extra reading beyond my sort of research material. But I would be interested in reading more of Mary and Zimmer Bradley's work, the stuff she did under an alias, and to see because she was a lady who liked ladies, and I'd have to assume her work would be relatively honest. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'd like to see that. Speaking of having to hide things, I've also always found fascinating those people in British politics who have had to go to a speech therapist to have their accent sort of removed in case it's too lower-class. That's interesting, right? Mm-hmm. A step above the King's speech, really. Despite your busy schedule, it's very nice to hear from you. Mm-hmm. Thank you for taking the time out. Yeah, absolutely, Joe. Mm-hmm. We miss you when you're gone. Yes, we do. But it's nice when we see you. Don't make 'em feel bad. Okay. Well... Well, speaking of accents, we got a little write-in commentary from our favorite pirate, Nick, Captain Pickhart. But I will not read it in a pirate accent. He says, "A vain scraping of commentary, which is pitiful considering just how awe-inspiring flash pulp has been of late." Thank you. Thank you. I repeat my comment on the now long-ago black hole six-parter, well, fuck me. Yeah, I certainly appreciate it right at the time. The forest ship truly horripolated me. I love that. It horripolated him as he listened. One of the finest creations I've heard or read in a story. Oh, thank you very much, sir. I really need to comment as I listen, but it's difficult when cycling. I can imagine that. In summary, it's brilliant. I did note with interest that Doc Blue's vocal range is quite remarkable. Read on, sir. Read on. Also, the April Fool's conspiracy was mind-blowing confusion to listen to you early in the morning. Aw. That's awesome. All stories from segments were exceptional. Many thanks to Ingrid for the kind mention of the captain. He is almost always late and undoubtedly lost in the body or districts of Vienna. Nope, brain vaporizing now. I can't remember the other things I wanted to say. Oh, lockout was great. Terrible but great. Yes. That's what he says. Oh, yes. The cartoons are exceeding themselves weekly. Thank you very much. Recent loves are the iron giant and moon inks. Very nice. I really love the moon ink too because it had jamie in it. Oh, there's too much. Do less than I'll comment more but be less happy. So yeah. Thank you so much, captain. That was great. You're so entertaining. I love it when you write in. I love it when everybody writes in. Mm-hmm. Thanks. You can do so at comments@flashpulp.com. And now on to... Are you a dassy, old hulk? I got some hot problems. Oh, no. Oh, no. Not a hot problem. Not a hot problem. So I did some stuff this week. What'd you do? We finished the intros for the captain. That's right. Doc and for Gibraltar. So yeah, that was really nice to finally finish up. And I think they sound really good. Yeah. I think they came out really well. Mm-hmm. I think everybody's going to be pleased. Still not done that song but I'm hoping to at some point. Mm-hmm. Tick, tick, tick. And yeah, it is so terrible. I don't want to waste your time but hulk problems is just like the worst song in the entire world. It's a hot mess and I need to share it with you. What do you do? Look at me and tell me the truth. What do you do when people don't know what we go through? They see my blonde hair, blue eyes in class but they don't know I have a really big face. Don't get me wrong. I know that I'm hot but textbook perfection really takes a lot. Weird guys call me phone and girls call me names but like Milo said, I can't be changed. [music] Hot girls, we had problems too. We're just like you. Except we're hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. We're not perfect. Sometimes we, hot girls, we had problems too. We're just like you. Except we're hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. We're not perfect. Sometimes we, hot girls, we had problems too. We're just like you. Except we're hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. We're not perfect. Sometimes we, hot girls, we had problems too. We're just like you. Except we're hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. We're not perfect. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. We're not perfect. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. 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The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. The world needs to open their eyes and realize. Yeah, well, I'm hoping to put a section up on Flashpop.com itself. There's actually a major overhaul needed there, but that's a much larger discussion. Yeah. But yeah, if you have any fanart, we'd love to see it. Yep, me too. They're in the wild world. Or start making it now. Just grab a pencil. Yeah. Start. You can send it off to me at opokenex@skinner.fm. Backroom plots. I had a little bit of pain this last week. A little bit of medication. Difficult, yeah. But fish ably stepped up, provided a guest-assode. That was very nice of him. Thank you. Very nice. Now, I hate to always have to put the disclaimer out there, but I do have to remind folks that guest-assodes, as fantastic as they are, don't necessarily count as canon. Yes, I happen to have pointed out one very glaring detail that was important in fish's episode, which he doesn't necessarily know right now. Well, that's exactly the point, right? There's some things I've held back that there's no way mobsters could know we're not feasible. Yes. But I love seeing people's takes. I loved Cutter. He was great. Yeah. It was so crazy, because I remember at the beginning of this project, you knew this whole universe, so you had some pretty definite ideas about it. Now, we're like a third of the way in, and these things are starting to come together. And other people are getting it, but you can't give away too much. You can't have that in-depth conversation because you don't want those cards to fall too soon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we could sit down and do like a six hour recording, and I could just be like, "And then this happens, and then this happens." Six hours, please. Well, yeah. You wish it would be six hours only. Speaking of, speaking of the inevitable march of progress, we've returned to Ruby finally. That's right. I forgot to return the comment to Rich, but we do post up the written journals. We're a little bit behind now for the last couple of rubies, which is probably why he didn't see them there. We're going to get through this six-parter, and then I'll post them all up in a batch. And you know what? Maybe just for fun, I'll post them all into a single PDF and post them to the feed or something. We'll get that sorted out. But yeah, they're definitely on the flash pop site. So if you look up Ruby departed, you should be able to find most of them. Yeah. Well, honestly, the last few story arcs aren't there. Yeah. Well, it's a Pope's job to get them jotted down. Yeah. Come on, a Pope. Write me a letter and tell me how much you want them up there. Send your comments, too. She does an occasional margin art and stuff, which is definitely fun and worth checking out. I've discussed in the past how fun it would be to be able to do a printing, like, well, people probably aren't too familiar with this, but if you have a nine-year-old, you certainly are the diary of Olympicid books. It would be very fun to do a Ruby journal. That was just a reprinting of a Pope's writings and sketches. Yeah. Yeah. Put that on the list. You had the big to-do list. Well, we're slowly getting through it. Mm-hmm. Before we close out the show, I just wanted to touch on some of my music this week. I'm kind of coming out of the '80s Cassio Symphony funk that I've been in lately. And it is a funk. But at the same time, I've been somehow sticking with that same sort of moody theme with golden music, specifically the song Time to Kill. It's hard to explain, but I feel like this has a direct line between this and the sort of stuff in the main hundredth century. Despite, you know, thirty years. Yeah. Yeah. I was totally feeling that, especially in the beginning, really the intro. The highest color, and take the world and daughter's home. But it can call it lies. This is all time to feel. Just hiding heads to real life. This is all time to kill. All right. Well, we're going to do book club in a moment. But first, I'd like to give some big thanks to Jim. Thank you, Jim. Retro Jim. Chrono Not extraordinary. For hosting wiki.flashbulb.com and flashbulb.com. Holla. Enjoy the show, tell a friend. Really enjoy the show. We've got a donate button on the site. Huge thanks to all who do so. That's how Doc Blue got his name up front on the show. And if you want to toss us some change, we'd definitely be happy to put you in the sponsor seat. Mm-hmm. We'll think about you just a little bit more than we would have before. Yeah, it's the best seat in the house. Mm-hmm. But we do love you all. Mm-hmm. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, you can find us at flashbulb.com. Or email us text her mp3s to comments@flashbulb.com. Jessica Mays vocal talents and musical stylings can be found at maytunes.com. Indeed. The entire run of flashbulb can be found at flashbulb.com or via the search bar and iTunes. Flashcast is released under the Canadian Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 lessons. So, Hunger Games. Yes. The exciting conclusion. Mm-hmm. Okay, well, first let's just get the general opinions out of the way. Thumbs up, thumbs up. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I definitely enjoyed it. Yeah. Thought it had a nice ring of the sort of '70s dystopian fiction I really enjoyed. I don't think it's any surprise that Rich was connecting judder in Hunger Games, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I would have loved to see Root-Gahara play President Snow. That would be great. Yeah. I thought the ending, okay, I know there are two more books. We haven't really touched them yet. Well, yeah, the ending. It's kind of just like, eventually I'd have to let go. Well, see. Oh my God, give me more. Here's the thing. In the, what I think of as the original generation of these stories, sort of the '70s era where everything was just miserable, Peter would have died by the end of the story. Oh. That would have been the sacrifice she, yeah. That would have been the sacrifice she would have had to make to survive the tale, right? Yeah. But instead, Peter survives, but they have to go through sort of heartbreak or whatever. Oh, and it's just, it's so cliche to be like, what? Those weren't sincere feelings since when I can't trust you. Yeah. But I at least like that he's like, well, make your effing decision and then talk to me. But he's like, you know, strong enough to make that his final exit if necessary. Yeah. Well, and to also be able to continue on, be like, I know this is what we have to do for the capital to, you know, see us right now. Yeah. That despite his heartbreak, he was still putting on the ship. Yep. I definitely think that it partially falls under the restrictions you're going to get in sort of young adult fiction, as opposed to so many might get an actual adult novel. Where I felt the novel fell a little short for me was in the areas where it was definitely a little YA. For example, Ru's flatness. It was a little unfortunate. I liked Ru as a character. Yeah, I really liked her. But she was so helpful in every aspect of her character and so obviously intended to be loved so that she could be killed. Yes. That it was almost too much room. It was almost like, I would have almost preferred some sort of greater flaw in her. Mm-hmm. I also found the young adult thing sort of nerfed all of the killings so that it was very much like 80 action movie style. Yeah. Yeah. And that she didn't participate in hardly any except for, you know, like it was by accident. Everything was. Well, there was the few. There was the one that like had killed Ru. Yeah. But everything is easily ethical. Yes. There's no time when she ends up in a quandary where she is like being forced to kill. Mm-hmm. Because I don't know if you remember, but Peter's whole thing is, "Oh, the games aren't going to change me." Yeah. And I would have liked to have seen a little bit more resistance to that change. Like, it's like the games never at any point had any opportunity to change either of them. Whereas all the other contestants, you know. Changed into. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Amazingly. I also found actually... Well, quite literally. The things that I did like about it though, that they did avoid, or Susan Collins avoided, was the '80s movie love effect in which these two people are thrust into a situation, and then by the end there is a genuine love and they just kind of go off into the sunset. Mm-hmm. At least she didn't do that. Yeah. Yeah. She didn't like to say that Peter really was the one for her and... Because I think we've actually discussed that on the Flashcast before, how unlikely so many of those relationships are and how obviously falling apart they would be. And at the same time that actually reminded me of the Bachelor, in that sense that these people are put in a crucible and then come out and just don't really care for each other. Yeah. It's more realistic for her to think, "Okay, I was just going to apply to my life now that I'm going to survive it." It's my real life. Like, she's not just like... Yeah, plugging her ears and saying, "I'm going to make this work." Mm-hmm. At the same time I did feel like that ending went on a little long after the game was done. It was a little bit. Yeah. Or into the second book. Yeah. A little bit. I'm also not that I spend a lot of the time in this sort of territory, but the two-boy love plot is really getting old. Oh, the P-DAD plot thing. Yeah, yeah. Is it Edward, is it Jacob, is it Sam, or is it What's His Face, Vampire Bill, or is it What's His Face, the Vampire Viking guy? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's very easy to fall into the, which, and at the same time, I don't necessarily think that it would be acceptable for a male to be in that same situation. You rarely see the two ladies who are supposedly equally acceptable. Baby steps. Yeah. Yeah. To go back to what Rich was saying, actually, this also reminded me of Ender's Game, which I don't think either of you have read, but... I don't think so. But, Ender's Game has a lot of the same structure in a weird way, in that there is sort of a surrounding plot, but the majority of it involves this very tightly constricted set of rules that everyone operates within, and there's sort of a logic set to that. I don't really want to get into it because I really recommend reading Ender's Game, but essentially Ender's Game takes place in space, and it's another sort of game that is a larger fight, and there's strategies within it, and it's a lot of the main character thinking up clever ways to defeat his enemies. Now, I would also say, though, that this, my worry is that this series falls into some of the weaknesses I felt with Ender's Game, and actually do now that we're just kind of running a thread through everything, in that later books maybe aren't as solid because they don't have that simple structure to surround them. Mm-hmm. Like, I've purposely avoided information on what the sequels are like, but I rather suspect it's going to be a story of rebellion and downfall for the capital. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Anywhere else can it go? Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, I'd much prefer, well, my 70s dystopian fiction, where you go into a miserable situation and no one really comes out entirely unscathed, and then it's done, and it's not necessarily turning into an epic fantasy where everything's falling apart around you. I reminded of, what is it, silent running? Yeah. Where you know? The trees. Yeah. Things don't really work out, but you get some small consolation. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you know, I'm wondering, am I going to ring the next book? I really sort of felt uneasy the way it was all up in the air at the end. I want to know, like, what's going to happen, you know, Pita and Gail. Yeah, well, is Hamich going to be around, like, you know, he kind of just sort of walked off into the shadows there, you know, like, trying to get besties, you know? Yeah, Ryan Hill was mentioning on Twitter that this is actually a good example of what I call Star Wars plotting, which is essentially a self-contained first story that leads into a larger trilogy. Yeah. It's a risky strategy, right? But at the same time, when you're trying to continue a property that you don't know if it's going to work on the first time out, it can feel like there's some separation between the first part and the continuance, right? Like, that's the downfall of the Matrix and so many other attempts to continue a story that really should have maybe been left alone. Back to the future. Yeah. Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. There's been so much controversy over this movie, too, about-- I know I put out on my Instagram feed a little while ago, which also goes out on my Twitter, the McLean's magazine about how angry our kids are, and they had a really, like, intimidating photo of Katniss. How hungry are they? I mean, angry are they? Which is so silly, because Katniss really doesn't want to be violent at all. I mean, you can talk about how it's sort of anti-government, anti-war or whatever, but-- It's an entirely different society, you know? They're not suggesting that they go out and try to just stabilize the government. You remember the big uproar around Golden Compass because of its anti-religion views? I would hope that this wouldn't fall in the same category that it had enough negative talk around it where it wouldn't get the rest of its movies put out. I really think it always ends up just being about bank. Hey, there, Flashcast, this is Nukchas calling in about the Hunger Games. Well, first off, I got the book as a Christmas-- I'm doing a, quote, present last year from my brother-- basically, I had heard nothing but Hunger Games from a lot of my friends who I happen to think have good taste in books. I was at my brother's house for a D&D session, and it was-- happened to be the night before my family celebrates our form of Christmas, and I asked him, I said, "Do you have the Hunger Games?" He said, "Yeah, I got it on my Kindle." I said, "Oh, can I take a look at that? Do you think it's any good?" And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, no, it's good." And he kind of brushed the subject off, and I was like, "Okay, whatever." And then the next day, it turns out, because we do a gift exchange, he had me and he had bought me the entire set. He started reading the first book, loved it so much, and knew I would like it that he bought me the entire set, and I ripped through them like I haven't ripped through books in a long, long time. And unlike a lot of other YA series like Twilight, I don't feel embarrassed about reading them. And unlike Harry Potter, which I never felt embarrassed over reading Harry Potter, I never felt that this was a book for little kids, it's definitely a book for the teen crowd. It's not something that I would recommend to a 10-year-old, although I do have a 12-year-old niece who is interested in reading them, and I've discussed this with my brother, and I said, "If you read it, and then let her read it, and you two discuss it, it might work." Because she is pretty, she's a pretty mature 12-year-old. And she's a voracious reader, but other than that, I would hold off maybe a year or two. But basically, if your kids mature and able to discuss it with you, then it's fine. There's quite a few YA books out there that you really need to read with your children. I'm going to get the title wrong, but you know the book, it's like 13 Reasons Why, it's about the cassette tapes and the girl that committed suicide. It's an important read for teenagers, but it is something that they need to be able to discuss with other people. Anyway, getting back to the Hunger Games, I had no movie trailers, I had no inkling of what was going to happen, everyone I knew just said, "You gotta read the Hunger Games, I can't talk to you about it until you read it, come back to me then." So I had no preconceived notions whatsoever. When I started reading it and you know, little Prim Rose's name is called, I was shocked. And I know everyone else I talked to said that they saw it coming, but I was shocked. So I really did not expect that to happen. And I was so moved by the whole scene and the whole setup. And I like the way that the book is written, where it doesn't really explain everything, you know? Doesn't give you a history lesson on this world. I feel that the book is not completely but to a point written as if you already know what the world is like and what has happened in the past. I like that with books, I prefer it to them talking down to us and saying, "Oh, so this is the map of the world." And these are the different kinds of people that live in it. And this is what has happened for thousands and thousands of years. No, I like to learn it as it becomes relevant to the characters. So I really do enjoy it. There's something about the world that I can see it, I can feel it, I can taste it. As I'm reading those books, I have a very clear picture of what's going on. And yet, I'm not too worried about the movie spoiling any of my mental images. For instance, I already the actress that they chose for Katniss doesn't look anything like Katniss in my head. The boy doesn't look anything like Pita. Gail actually looks like Gail, but other than that, I mean, I'm not worried about them spoiling it because I think that the book is such a strong book that it stands on its own and the characters are firm in my head and the world is firm in my head. So I really don't have to worry about the movie ruining anything. Anyway, so from the moment Primrose's name is pulled, I was hooked, hook lying in sinker, pulled into the series, and I had to know more. And I don't know if this comes into play in the first part. I don't think so, but I have posted to it on the mob, "Oh, when we get to the lamb dish that Katniss loves, I want that recipe." Anyway, happy reading, so glad that I could partake in this book club, although I still have to read that Bimbo's book because I have been meaning to read it, I just always forget the title. Anyway, enjoy reading and go Hunger Games. I'm sorry, we waited so long to get to your comment, Naddy, but I feel like it's still really relevant because a lot of items that I wanted to discuss came out of it. Yeah, I found it interesting that she said it wasn't really, like, for 10-year-olds or anything like that. It was more a team than yet at all. Yeah, I have to. And yeah, I thought that was kind of funny because our nine-year-olds reading it, but there are points in it, especially with the one Katniss gives PETA a kiss or something and they'll be like, "Oh, I wonder what Mr. Nunn's gonna do when he gets to this part." Yeah, I think he'll be able to handle it. There are parts that are pretty intense, but the sort of '80s action movie rounding that we discussed earlier, where everything's a little bit nerfed and safe, I can keep them. I had parts where I was getting a little squeamish. Yeah, the hallucinatory stuff and the oozes. Yeah, the oozes from the, what is it, the tracker-jacker stings? Yeah, the tracker-jacker stings. Yeah, that was a little rough. Yeah. But yeah, you definitely have to know your kid to know if it's cool. Yeah, I totally think it's trying to take it. There are other things that will erk him, but... Do you guys feel like the prim/rue thing was handled well? There wasn't too much overlap in that we were supposed to obviously draw a connection between prim and rue. Yeah. The connection was drawn for us because Katniss even recognized herself how much rue reminded her of prim. Now, my question is... But I guess my point is, did it feel too contrived to you, or did it feel natural enough? I think it was natural of Katniss to want to watch out for rue like she did. Yeah, falling into that relationship. Yeah. I think it was just luck that there was a girl like rue that she could find similarity so easily between her and her sister. Yeah. This just might have been interesting to see Rue be more scrappy or something, I don't know. I mean, I enjoyed the character, but again, it felt just a little too sacrificial lamb. But again, getting back to prim, what Nettie was saying is she was totally floored by prim getting called as the reaping tribute. Did you expect that coming? Because I guess I wasn't surprised, I didn't really see it coming, but when it happened, I was like, "Oh, yeah, there you go. That'll happen." Yeah, I kind of saw it coming. She was obviously prim was kind of the only good thing in her world and she was going to get involved. So it had to be put in jeopardy. Yeah. Yeah. Again, another 80s movie trope where I'm not getting involved in this fight until it's my family. Yeah. I mean, if it were Katniss' name called, then it's like, "Oh, the capital." But then it's like, you know, even worse because it's like, "Oh, the capital's going to destroy the one thing I love." Yeah. And I don't want to make these comparisons sound like I didn't enjoy the book because I did quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah, I really did. The book versus movie discussion, also very interesting. I'm glad to have read the book before we've seen the movie. Yeah, most of the argument seems to be that it's glorifying children in combat, right? And at the same time, it's one of those situations where the book definitely leaves you with the impression that it's something to look down on. I'd like to see how they do it in the movie. Yeah. Like, this is one of those books where I do want to see the movie now. And I'm sure it can't be, you know, exactly the same, but I wonder how much they're going to vary from the story. It's interesting because I find that the book is laid out in such a way as to be very visually interesting, but at the same time, all of the depth and justification for the character actions come from Katniss, essentially doing her first person discussion. And without that narrative, I'm not sure how, you know, just the visuals alone hold up, really. Yeah, because she can't be really talking to herself throughout the movie. One thing I do have to say, I was willing, I was drawn in enough that I was willing to let go of the tents. But I must say that the number of times that say or says were used, that was a little annoying. Driving me mad. Yeah. It didn't bother me until you brought it up. And then it's all a good thing about it, so thanks for that. Yeah. Good job. Yeah. Anyway, I do wonder if it's sort of Game of Thrones situation where you feel a little more depth if you've read it. And even though it, you know, it should be why it should be easy to translate, but some of it may be lost. It depends if they go to the trilogy, right? Because if I'm correct in my assumption that the next two books are about the downfall of the Capitol, then obviously that makes the first movie a little more excusable if it's sort of a, you know, Luke Skywalker kind of, we've got to rise up from not just thinking of hunting in the woods and actually try to fight these others or whatever. Yeah. Rise up like John Connor and smash these metal motherfuckers. Anyway, thanks a lot, Nutty. Thanks for sending in the call. Thanks a lot, and thanks for everybody who followed along in our book club. We actually have the next book selected, but we're going to just take a week in "Basket of the Glory of Finally Having" gotten around to completing this. That's right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody. Keep reading. [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [GUNSHOT] (dramatic music)