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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Cook. There's Charles W. Chucker's brand that makes this stuff.
You should know.
I wonder what that sounds like to people who listen to it at double speed.
You sound like your normal boys.
Right, yeah, you know that. That was my impression of somebody. I'm gonna guess go with Vincent Price. No, okay, Edgar Oliver. It was a great Edgar Oliver. Terrible Vincent Price. Edgar Oliver. He's a storyteller on the moth. Oh really yeah, and he sounds exactly like that. You got to check stuff out. He's awesome.
Is he a horror? Is he like?
No?
Any wrong with him?
Well? Yeah, I mean he talks like that. But other than he's he's an awesome dude. So that was my Oh, it's pretty good. You go back and listen now you'll be like, wow. So I was doing an Edgar Oliver chuck because in t minus like four days. Yeah, it's gonna be Halloween, one of our favorite days. And mind blowingly enough. If you're listening to this on Halloween it's today.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, that works. And last year we did something unusual, so this year we're doing it again, which makes it the usual. But it was popular. People liked it. We read a great short story last year.
Yeah, people actually called for it again and said, oh, you're gonna do it this year.
I think some people might not have liked it, but just skip it then.
Yeah. We were like, does that mean we don't have to study? Okay, let's do that exactly. Yeah, there's one in the can that's guaranteed gonna be at least okay. Yes, So this year, Charles W. Chuck Bryant selected the story and it is by someone you may or may not have heard of. He's a somewhat you know, well known Writer's name is Edgar Allan Poe and he died in Baltimore, I believe, in the eighteen forties. Sure, here's one of the great first great American writers of the nineteenth century.
Slash drug addicts, big time drug addict, and I think that comes through a lot in this. Yeah. But we've selected a short story. Chuck selected a short story. It's actually I gave.
You a selection. You made the final choice.
Yeah, but you let me to You're like, which one of these would you like? And then you basically put this one in my hand.
No, actually, I was leaning toward the crazy dwarf that kills the king.
What are we reading this one for? Because this one's creepy? Okay, all right, I agreed. Well, do you want to tell them the name of this one?
It's called Barnice and give you a slight setup just so you know what's going on. There's a woman called Baronice and a man, uh, and they are cousins and they're married, and things go a little weird in the story.
Weirder than cousins being married. Yeah.
I don't want to give anything away, but I just want you know it's it's old English. It's not Old English, but it's older than it's Old American.
Yeah. So before we lose any more listeners, let's get to it. You want to cue the spooky music.
Yeah, but we should also point out that at the end of this episode we have a very special guest.
So let's not say who. If you listen on Tuesday, you know.
But if you aren't into the reading, just go ahead and skip forward to the special guest, and you'll get some delight there.
Right, And if you do that, we apologize in advance. Yes either way, all right, So now let's cue the spooky music.
Okay, that's the tone.
Let's dim the lights, okay, and we now present to you Edgar Allan poe'se Bevernice.
My Josh is a little quote at the beginning in.
Latin and in English.
I'll read the English. My companion said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might somewhat alleviate my.
Worries reasonable advice.
And here we go.
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform, overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow its hues, or as various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended, overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow. How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness, from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow. But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, So in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.
Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which have their origin, and the ecstasies which might have been nice.
It sounded like improper English, but that's how we wrote it.
And it's not just today, it's to day with a hyphen in between.
My baptismal name is Eugaeus. That of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time honored than my gloomy, gray hereditary halls.
Our line has been called a race of visionaries, and in many striking particulars in the character of the family mansion, in the frescoes of the chief saloon, and the tapestries of the dormitories, and the chiseling of some buttress in the armory, but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings, and the fashion of the library chamber, and lastly in the very peculiar nature of.
The library's contents.
There is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the bloe.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes, of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother here, and I was born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before that. The soul has no previous existence. You deny it. Let us not argue the matter, convince myself.
I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms, of spiritual and meaning, eyes of sounds, musical yet sad, A remembrance which will not be excluded, a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady, and like a shadow too in the impossibility of my getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my reason shall
exist in that chamber. I was born thus, awaking from the long night of what seemed but was not nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairyland, into a palace of imagination, into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition. Singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye, that I loitered away my boyhood
and books, and dissipated my youth in reverie. But it is singular that as the years rolled away and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers, it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life. Wonderful how total an inversion
took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became in turn, not the material of my everyday existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
See he's getting a little caught up in his own obsession of thoughts.
Right, he's a bookworm. Okay, he's bookish.
So the real world as it doesn't even matter to him at this point.
That's what he thinks of the real world.
Onward, Bearnice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew I ill of health and buried in gloom. She agile, graceful and overflowing with energy. Hers the ramble on the hillside, mine the studies of the cloister. I living within my own heart, an addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation. She roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path or the silent flight
of the raven winged owers. Berenice, I call upon her name, Berenice from the gray ruins of memory, A thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound.
Ah.
Vividly is her image before me now as in the early days of her light heartedness and joy, Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty, Oh sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim, oh Naiad among its fountains. And then then all is mystery and terror, a tale which should not be told. Disease, a fatal disease, fell.
Like the simoon upon her frame.
And even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person Alas the destroyer came and went.
And the victim where was she?
I knew her not, or knew her no longer as Berenice.
Now she got sick.
When I first read him saying Berenice Nice, I thought of Kramer going, Pam, Pam, you remember that one?
Yeah, all right, Spernice didn't doing so hot all of a sudden.
No, it happened like that. Ye. Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one, which affected a revolution of so horrible a kind, and the moral and physical being of my cousin may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy, not unfrequently terminating in trance itself, trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner
of recovery was in most instances startlingly abrupt. In the meantime, my own disease, for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation. My own disease then grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form, hourly and momently gaining vigor, and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendency. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the
mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood, But I fear indeed that it is in no matter possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of metaie not to speak, technically busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
So now he's becoming obsessive about just things, anything transfixed on things.
But like he can't even get across how obsessed.
He becomes monomania all right, to muse for long, unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the topography of a book. To become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, and a quaint shadow falling a slant upon the tapestry or upon the door, To lose myself for an entire night, and watching the steady flame of a lamp or the embers of a fire, to dream away whole days of
the perfume of a flower. To repeat monotonously some common word until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind.
Everyone does that.
Yeah, it's called day awesome.
To lose all sense of motion or physical existence by means of absolute bodily quiescence, long and obstinately persevered in such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not indeed altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.
You did good. That was a tough one. Thanks.
He sounds like an opium head, you know he's like.
And by the way, I'm high as a kite right.
Now, I'm staring at a lamp for two days.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. This due earnest and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature, frivolous must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged him by persons of ardent imagination. It was not, even as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different.
In the one instance, the dreamer or enthusiast, being interested by an object, usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions, issuing therefrom until at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the in sedimentum or first
cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming through the medium of my distempered vision a refracted and unreal importance, few deductions, if any, were made, and those few perdinaciously
returning in upon the original object as a center. The meditations were never pleasurable, and at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing
feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind, more particularly exercised, were with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are with the daydreamer, the speculative anything thoughts, No, he's just going on to say it was really serious.
Yeah, they'd like to really describe things back then. Yeah, okay, my books at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder partook, it will be perceived largely in their imaginative and inconsequential nature of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself.
I will remember, among.
Others, the triestas of the noble Italian Colius Secundus curio, the amplitudine biat de regni de Saint Austin's great work The City of God and Trillium decarne Christi, in which the paradoxical sentence mortus sde phileas credibo esquia s sepotus resurreic exit certum esquia impossibilest occupied my undivided time for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation. So he's getting hung up on these phrases from the books.
Yeah, like I am the Latin.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephistian, which, steadily resisting the attacks of human violence and the fiercer fury of the waters and the kinds, trembled only the touch of the
flower called Asphodel. And although to a careless thinker it might appear a matter beyond doubt that the alteration produced by our unhappy malady and the moral condition of Berenice would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble and explaining. Yet such was not in any degree the case in the lucid intervals of my infirmity.
Her calamity indeed gave me pain, and taking deeply to the heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the wonder working means by which so strange revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred under similar circumstances to the ordinary
mass of mankind, true to its own character. My disorder reveled in less important, but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Baronice, and the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity during the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty. Most surely I had never loved her, and the strange anomaly of my existence. Feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always
were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning, among the trellish shadows of the forest at noonday, and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her not as a living and breathing Berenice, but as the baronice of a dream. Not as a being of the earth earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being, Not as a thing to admire but to analyze, Not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most
obtruse although desultory speculation. And now now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach, yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage. I'm getting oddly Madonna esque here with my English.
Yeah, does she speak strangely? Ah?
You know, she married guy Richie.
All of a sudden she started talking like a Madonna.
Yeah, that's right, not like she was from Queen's or.
Yeah, you're not supposed to do that. You got to remember who you are, you know, I agreed, and at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year, one of those unseasonably warm, calm and misty days, which are the nurse of the beautiful halcyon. I sat and sat as I thought, alone in the inner apartment of my library, but uplifting my eyes, I saw the baronice stood before me.
Was it my own excited imagination, or the misty influence of the atmosphere, or the uncertain twilight of the chamber, or the gray draperies which fell around her figure that caused in it so vacillating an indistinct an outline.
Or was it all the opium? And as he likes to have.
A lot of different ideas to choose from, sure, I could not tell. She spoke no word, I not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame, A sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me, assuming curiosity pervaded my soul, and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time, breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person alas its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in
any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face, the forehead was high and very pale and singularly placid, and the once jetty hair fell partially over it and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of vivivid yellow and jarring discordantly in
their fantastic character. With the raining melancholy of the countenance, the eyes were lifeless and lustreless and seemingly pupilss and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted, and, in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenics disclosed themselves slowly to my view, would to God that I never beheld them, or that having done so, I had died. Bear Nice is in bad shape here, so's the guy.
The shutting of the door disturbed me, and looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber, but from the disordered chamber of my brain had not alas departed, and would not be driven away the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth, not a speck on their surface, not a shade on their enamel, not an indenture in their edges, but what that period of her smile had sufficed a brand in upon my memory. I saw them now, even more unequivocally than I beheld them then.
The teeth.
The teeth, They were here and there and everywhere, invisibly impalpably before me, long, narrow and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, as ruggled in vain against his strange and irresistible influence in the multiplied objects of the external world, I had no thoughts but for the teeth.
For these I longed with a frenzied desire. All other matters and all.
Different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They, they alone, were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light, I turned them into every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their confirmation. I mused upon the alteration in
their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them an imagination, a sensitive and sentient power and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression.
Boy, he's a losing it.
Of Madselle Salaer has been well said couetou cepa in chien decentient, and of Beernice, I'm more serious believed quit.
Indien daisy ds.
And I believe that translated to something like the ideas the ideas. All of his ideas were of the teeth, something like that.
And he just had to say it in French, didn't he? Wellat this is this isn't that good? So I'm gonna make you I'm going to write in French.
If I went to a French speaker in the office and they're like, dude, this is really like hard to translate. So if anyone knows that, please send it.
Do you want to read it again? That part the line.
Sure quetu sepa ittien the sentiments getu said, Then itien daisy days, daisy days, all right, Ah, here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me easy days.
Ah.
Therefore it was that I coveted them so madly. I felt that there possess could alone ever restore me to peace in giving me back to reason.
So Chuck what's going on here? Like, there's teeth. Now he's got teeth, and he's focused on the teeth.
Well, now the teeth are in her mouth. She is disintegrating physically, except for her teeth, which remained perfect. Okay, So now he is hyper focused and obsessed with her teeth because they're so perfect.
I would be hyper focused. I'm running out of the room at this point too, okay. And the evening closed in upon me. Thus, and then the darkness came and tarried and went, and the day again dawned, and the
mists of a second night were now gathering around. And still I sat motionless in that solitary room, and still I sat, buried in meditation, And still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid, hideous distinctness, It floated amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber length. There broke in upon my dreams a cry of horror and dismay. And thereon too, after a pause succeeded the sound of troubled voices intermingled with
many low moanings of sorrow or pain. I arose from my seat, and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden volunteers, who told me that Baronice was no more. She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now at the closing end of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.
So Bernice is dead.
Yes, I found myself sitting in the library, and again, sitting there alone, it seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Baronice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened, I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror. Horror more horrible from being vague, and terror
more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim and hideous and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decipher them, but in vain, while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done? Indeed, what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, what was it? All right?
So he's awoken from a fever dream and he's like something. I've done something here while I slept That ain't good?
Yeah?
What was it?
On the table beside me burned a land mp and near it lay a little box that can't be good. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the family physician. But how it came there upon my table? And why did I shudder? And regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for. And my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a
book and to the sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Eben Zayat. My companion said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might somewhat alleviate my worries.
Why, then, as.
I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins. There came a light tap at the library door, and as pale as the tenet of the tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice mulus husky and very low. What said he some
broken sentences I had heard. He told of a wild cry, disturbing the silence of the night, of the gathering together of the household, of a search in the direction of the sound. And then his tones grew thrillingly distinct, as he whispered me of a violated grave, of a disfigured body, and shrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive.
He pointed to garments. They were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand. It was indented with the impressive human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes. It was a spade with a shriek. I bounded to the table and grasped the box that lay upon it, but I could not force it open, and in my tremor. It slipped from my
hands and fell heavily and burst into pieces. And from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty two small white and ivory looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
The end.
Wow, I just got a little chill, actually.
And I knew the ending.
He liked his teeth.
Did he dig her up or was she still alive?
I don't know. I was thrown off by the fact.
That those shrieking women.
Yeah, she's still palpitating as it, were still alive.
I think he hallucinated the whole thing and that she did not die and was buried. I think he went into her chamber and removed her teeth while she was alive.
Or maybe he while he was in his little opium dream, buried her alive, then decided, oh yeah the teeth, went back, got him out of her mouth while she's still alive, and took him back to the library. I think he needs to lay off the dope, is what it comes down to. Yeah, So happy Halloween. I hope everybody is appropriately nervous now, right.
Yeah, And if you have ideas on royalty free readings that we can do next year.
Yeah, well we'll bring this up again, like in August or something like that. Agreed, So stick around. We are not going anywhere just yet. We have a special you can almost call us a two parter. The second part is a special guest. Right, We're not going to do listener mail or anything. We're going to do this Happy Halloween everybody. So since this is a Halloween episode, and since, as you may remember from Tuesday, John Hodgman has been hanging around the office this week.
That's I'm sleeping in a cubicle earlier.
It's weird. We I got locked out of my here again. My so, Hodgman, how you doing? Was?
I don't get a I don't get like the chimes?
Well, well, I haven't finished the introduction yet. We're not doing listener mail this week because it's special, it was, this is a Halloween episode and because Hodgman's here, so instead we're going to do stuff with John Hodgman.
That's right.
And the reason, well, the reason John's here is because he decided to surprise us and he had a ticket to the show.
Yep, we decided to honor that ticket. Yeah.
Look, I feel bad. I feel a little bad about last week because I came in and interrupted Sarah's letter.
This week, whatever was, We took care of it.
Don't you know what I don't. I don't pay attention to time anymore. I'm a deranged millionaire.
Okay.
I like Sarah.
I like the letters she writes. I like all the letters. But I'm a listener too, you know. That's why I'm here. Yeah, and what am I going to have my say?
Do you know what I mean?
And no one ever comes in to do their listener mail in person like you.
You bought a ticket to do.
So. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I have access. It's time for me to have my say. Here's my listener mail. All right, nice work, guys.
Thank you, thank you. That's nice listener huh. Yeah, that was Chuck's.
Well that was Poe los my mind.
You say it was porific, I say Poe.
No, I like it.
Drownd post.
Fine, Well you got of Like you know, guys, I wrote this new book of complete World Knowledge called That is All that's coming out. And this is the third book of Complete World Knowledge. And in my previous books of Complete world knowledge. I talked about everything, right, I talked about how to tile kinds of knots. No, I never did for some reason, I think I did.
That was so close. I almost said, like, Yeah.
I talked about Hobo's. I talked about Mollman. I talked about the presidents of the United States. I talked about the mottos and nicknames of all fifty one American states. I talked about history. I talked about the future. But there was one topic that I never took on before, and that was sports. Yeah, because I am not a sports fan.
See, I found that surprising.
Really.
Yeah, well, you and I co hosted at trivia then it Max fun Con, and yeah, we did our own little fun trivia.
Well'm Elijah won. Right.
I did some sports questions that you were not privy to to humiliate me. You did some science fiction nerd movie questions that I because I'm not into that.
You did jock questions to humiliate me, and I did nerd questions to humiliate and it went great. It went great.
We're both humiliated, that's right.
And that is usually the sign of a good night.
Yes it is.
But here's the thing for this third book, because we are reaching the end of human civilization December twenty one, twenty.
Twelve, at eleven eleven am.
Exactly, and it's and it's time for me to engage in well, Like the dying person, I reach out to that which I've previously spurned in life, like religion and sports. So I decided to learn a lot about sports and to write about sports in this new book. And one of the things I learned, which I didn't know until now, you guys probably know this, that the Baltimore Ravens is named after the Edgar Allan Poe poem The Right. So you didn't know that. I didn't know that. I knew that,
and now that makes more sense. I didn't realize why they had Edgar Allen Poe as their mascot. Some dude dressed up as like nineteenth century and no, he's got one of those big heads on, like a big Edgar Allen Poe head.
I was like, why is that?
And then I finally got it. Ed Ground Poe apparently got runeously drunk in Baltimore, as he did in every East Coast city for a period of time. They all, for some reason claim him as their son. Well, in Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Providence, but only Baltimore had the nerve to name their team after a famous quasi literary kind of dumb dumb poem that the French really liked. And they have this mascot, which is crazy. Now I
understand why they have that mascot. This dude dressed up his egg ground Poe with a giant Edgar Allan Poe head on top of him that's filled with brandy.
Now it makes sense.
And John Cusack, to bring in full circle, is playing Poe in a movie I know, which is.
He's only the latest who wanted to play ed Ground Poe. Of course, Sylvester Stallone was developing an edge Ground Poe really biopic four years.
Four years. You didn't know that.
Foreigner was going to do the theme song. They wrote, I have the tiger for that movie. Oh sorry, foreign first, I apologize exactly survivor right, They wrote I have the tiger for the edg Ground Poe movie, but when it didn't get made, they used it for Rocky three instead got sports and more sports. Punching is a sport, right Pugilism? Oh no, I agree, that's the sweet science. That's the that's the that's the intricate logical art of her doing someone in the face exactly.
Wow, wow, hold on, you're leaving out a big element trying to not get hurt in your own face. Right, that's practically you're doing two things at once.
Yeah, that's that's that's ballet.
Do you know what I mean?
That's that's an intricate dance. That's like ultimate fighting. I'm guys down on the ground trying to knee each other in the neck. It's it's acrobatic.
I see you at a boxing match, though, Hodgman, I wasn't a boxing match. I've seen that, Yes, you were.
I was in a fake I was in a fake boxing match.
Was that choreograph of that state that it looked a lot like the directors like you to just go at each other and we'll see what happened.
This was in an episode of Boards to Death.
Right with you? You box, Jason Schwartz.
I did, yeah, and uh, And I realized then that it is an extremely physically taxing thing to do. I don't I do not mean to run down boxers in the least because first of all, they will kill me. Second of all, what they do they are. They're are extremely accomplished athletes. I have no problem with athletes, you understand, Sure, I think they're incredibly skilled people whom I wish only not to hurt me, do you know what I mean? But they are artists in there in their own way.
And I don't even dislike sports per se. Like, there's some sports that I occasionally will watch. I dig a curling match from time to time.
Okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, any.
Spot with a broom I like. It's it is the presupposition in our culture that everyone must like sports, and if you do not know what the sports teams are or what they.
Do on the field, something is wrong with you. Then you are abnormal.
In some way.
And I think that that's a little bit that presumes too much.
Well, John, that's the where we live in.
But it's changing now. Baltimore got the Ravens in what nineteen ninety six or seven or something like that. Okay, so they name their team after a poem, right, was like, no big deal, not a big deal, who cares?
Right?
This year we got some baseball what's the baseball player?
Who named is a bat?
Orchrist?
I did not that.
Yeah, it's that it's in the news, someone will write about it and send it in.
Okay, it was.
It was this April it was revealed the very popular bass ball player named his bat Orchrist, after one of the Elven forged swords in the Hobbit.
Huh that's pretty cool.
Yeah right?
And then guess what have you noticed this?
You know?
It's Nick Mangol, the center for the New York Jets.
Yeah.
Have you noticed, like he's not wearing a helmet anymore?
I have not noticed that.
It's surprising to me. He came out in one of the games earlier this year. He was wearing a leather top hat with like goggles on it.
Do you notice that? I did not know? What is that on the field on the field why, I.
Don't know, but it's weird. And then and then another time he came out and he was wearing a pith helmet with with a jeweler's lens on it. That and he came out in the he came out on the field on a on a on a penny farthered bicycle.
What is going on?
It was a steam powered Penny farthing bicycle?
Wow? Which was it of his own design and manufacture? Yeah.
And then he went on a sports program, a radio program much like this this radio right, Yeah, sure, it's kind of and uh and he was and he was saying, I'm really glad we won that game, and uh, I think and they said, well, what do you think? How do you how do you what to what do you attribute your win?
And he said, I just took.
The lesson of Admiral acpart to heart and realized that they were setting a trap.
Weird.
That is weird, very weird. What do you think is going on there?
I think this is it? Guys, I think this is happening.
Is this the beginning the beginning of the nerd jock convergence? See it all around us?
Wow?
I think Nick Mangled may be the one. Yeah, it's the person who's going to join these two worlds together. Yeah, he's doing steampunk cosplay, he's quoting Admiral Lackbar, He's riding a Penny Farthing motorcycle, not just a steam powered Penny Farthing motorcycle of his own design. And I recently, you know how my my Zeppelin Hubris isn't in ruins, the HC Hubris, the HC Hubris Audrin Zepplin's Hubris. Uh, but I just got an offer on it.
Did you know that?
That weird?
I mean it's still crashed, it's still I think parts of it is still burning in Central Park.
This happened since Tuesday.
Yeah, yeah, I maybe you hear this person heard the podcast. I don't know what it is, but if the offer came in, it's a good offer too, from man Gold Steampunk Industries.
It's gotta be the same one football Well yeah, see, I think it might be him. Are you selling it to him as is?
Well, I'm not putting that thing back together. It's on fire and burned my hands. Yes, I hope it works.
Where is it over? I don't know.
Most of the top half of Central Park.
I mean it was big, it was big, most of the top half. Yeah, I haven't been up there in a while.
Good.
It crashed and burned probably two years.
Ago and still oh yeah, it's still burning.
Yeah, well I should do something.
Well, John, let me ask you. I mean, that seems like one of the great divisions in life in the world that's been going on forever, is this division between jockson nerds. It seems like it's a good thing. If things come together, is it not?
I I don't know. I don't know.
I think it's I think, like all major c changes, it's unnerving, do you know what I mean?
I think those of us I'm scared of things too.
I think those of us on the nerd side have been defining ourselves by our marginalization for so long that it may be hard for us to accept a world where you know, that TV show Community did a whole Dungeons and Dragons episode. Superhero movies are the only movies that people make, now, do you know what I mean?
Like all of the.
Things, And now I think at least ten people in the United States know who Doctor.
Who is now, do you know what I mean?
Comic Con is big, big business. And I think that that all of these things that we used to hold as badges and use to comfort ourselves in our marginalization and culture are now being absorbed into, you know, the monoculture as a whole. And there's no greater expression of the monoculture than jock culture, which is the great leveling, cross cultural, unifying thing that men and a lot of women talk about unless they're a nerd like me. Right, So when that's gone, I think that will bother nerds
very well. But I don't think the jocks give at all.
No and and jocks tend to get their way as far as society goes, if they want something. If Mangole wants to make steam, hey.
I like your steam pup culture.
Give me that, nerd. That's right, they take mine.
It's mine now, Hey, you're you're your your your steam funk ironman armor that you made yourself.
That's mine.
Now drop it off at my locker.
Throw a Jets jersey on top of it.
Yeah, I'm gonna put the Jets jersey on top of it. It's going to be steampunk Ironman Jets. That's not what the mc. Mangol does not talk like that at all. He's a very sweet guy.
I met him. That's why I hope so.
In real life. In real life, Nick Mangold's Twitter avatar is an illustration of him as an ewok.
Really.
Yeah, So you may say that what I'm putting in my book is crazy, but look around you, everybody, it's coming true.
Well, John, thank you for coming by with your baffling prediction.
You don't have to think it's very easy. I just walked down the hallway from my safe room.
Are you going to stay here? Because the weekend's approaching.
I need someone to kick down the door of my safe room because I fell asleep in that cubicle because I went out and I accidentally armed the system. Okay, So if you have an intern or someone who can go in there, they will.
Be gassed, Jerry, Yeah, a foot of lead.
Okay, and she can.
Yeah, but there are booth but there are booby traps. There will be gassed, There will be darts, there will be snakes, there will be a giant rolling boulder.
Just good.
If we get that, then I can get back in and then I'll be back again.
Jerry deals with us on a day to day basis. She can handle any boulders or poisoned darts.
You're right, Yeah, here's to you, Jerry.
We'll send Jerry in. Yeah. And then.
So John's book is that is all and it is coming out November first, and you can pre order it right now using the internet, using the internet, and I hope that you will at a variety of Internet sites.
Oh you really, just plug the heck out of that, chuck.
Well, you know, I want the guy to sell a book or two.
I'm just happy to be here as an listener, as a deranged millionaire. I'm happy to come in here and take over your listener mail, and as a resident, as a resident of past up Works closet.
Well to those of you who made it all the way through this podcast and you're with us right now. I want to say on behalf of myself, Chuck and mister John Hodgman, Happy Halloween. Be safe, Please don't get hit by a car.
Dress your children in skeleton costumes and send them out into the street.
At the end, be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how stup Work staff as we explore them with promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
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