Kabbooms.
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants of the old republic, a sole fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Wow.
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now in.
The air everywhere.
The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben Mahler and Danny g Radio A glorious, wonderful Friday to you back at it here in the podcast studio on this twenty third day of January, the Friday before Championship Sunday, which is magically delicious. It is going to be great. Two games day, all the marbles.
You want to know who I like?
A tremendous weekend of Benny Versus the Penny A masterclass. Now some of you have reached out and said, what did you make two episodes of Penny Versus the Penny?
You only needed one episode? I don't know. I don't like that. Slow your role number one number two.
The reason we did that is because of the outgo rhythms.
I believe.
I've been studying up on trickeration with YouTube and all that, and so the more episodes you have and the more views that you get, the better that you're doing. And then it all is tied together, the dew hickeys, the thing of my jigs, all that stuff.
So that is why we are doing it.
It's each episode is not very long, and you watch the AFC, it should roll into the NFC or vice versa, so help us out on that.
Check it out.
It's Benny Versus the Penny. It's on the YouTube global audience on YouTube. We are not paying for followers like so many of you frauds on YouTube, which have exceptional download numbers out of this world.
We don't do this.
Everyone that's watching, we assume is a real human being, so we're trying to build that up.
So check out Benny Versus the Penny.
On this episode of the Fifth Hour podcast, we've got mister American Pie and into the Parrot's nest, which is quite the plot twist. But we begin with this so certain days on the calendar they feel fake until you think about them for more than I don't know, twelve seconds. So I bring this up as I'm looking for things that interest me for the podcast. I came across National Pie Day, not the math. Pie today is National Pie Day.
Delicious pie. It's one of those days. At first glance, it is something that you assume was invented by big Dessert in America, Big dessert, not big Pharma, big dessert to sell more whipped cream.
Why not?
Then you start looking around and you remember that pie is basically America's emotional support food, and suddenly it all makes perfect sense. It does so in honor of a National Pie Day today. Pie is woven in to my muscle memory, and I think all of our muscle memory. Right in America, we have a song literally called American Pie, American Pie, which somehow became this long history lesson you sing along with it. It's very gatchy at the campfire. It's a cultural test, all of that rolled.
In one and in America.
As wholesome as apple pie is, American is apple pie, right And even though apples are not native to North America, they're an invasive species, the apple. And that's peak Americana right there. We borrow something we in our head, we improve it, and we now own it. And pie is really old when I started going down this rabbit hole for National Pie Day. Like when I say really really old, I am talking about ancient Rome.
Old, like the ancient Romans.
We're eating pie, although they're pie, we're talking about goat, cheese, honey rye, and something called placenta, which sounds like you need to call an ambulance. There's some kind of medical condition with the placenta.
As I was amused by breathing about this.
Apparently it was like cheesecake, So the ancient Romans had their own cheesecake factory. And back then the crust was like tupperware. You weren't supposed to eat it. It was more like the container to keep the meat from turning into I guess charcoal or whatever. And they didn't instagram photos of this back in forty BC, so we just have to go by the historians putting all this together. Crust was the I guess, the shipping box you'd get
when you get your Amazon delivery of food. And then later on, many years later, England picked up the pie baton and the relay race of the pie. Big Pie the twelfth century promptly filled pies with mystery meat.
What's in the pie, not what's.
In the box, what's in the pie, mystery meat, which led to urban legends, bad vibrations, and likely heartburn. And then our friends the pure Tins crossed the Mighty Atlantic and they said, you.
Know what we're gonna bring with us Pie?
They brought pie, because of course, why would you not bring pie?
And then there's the twist. The first Thanksgiving.
I knew this years ago, but I was reminded of it the very first th Thanksgiving. They did not have sweet pie like I would think they would be sitting around eating yams and pumpkin pie and all that stuff. Well, pumpkin pie did not really hit until the eighteen hundreds. So if you're annoyed by pumpkin pie Thanksgiving, you can blame progress. You can blame progress. So we continue here
on National Pie Day. Modern American, right, Modern America. This is where pie became the thing and and sweet pies are the dominator. They run the show. The savory pie are hanging out like the weird cousin who moved far away, and you see them once in a while. And somehow, despite all of these artists in bakeries, at least where I am in La there's a lot of artists and bakeries and nine dollars slices and all that stuff. The MVP of pie still comes from the frozen aisle that Sarah Lee is the.
Queen of the pie game.
With Marie Calendars chasing after Sarah Lee, they're in a cat fight. And then you've got or I guess, a pie fight, and then you've got Missus Smith, the leader in the clubhouse of I'll just heat this up real quick, or I'll let it defrost.
If it's in the freezer.
So, in terms of the rankings, because America loves rankings almost as much as it loves pie, not a list, not a list to Terry in England, not a list. These are rankings, which is much different than a list. It's also not Big Men's Big board. It's also not Big Ben's Big board. So apple pie is the Swiss Army Knife of the pie community. You can have apple pie with literally any meal.
Of the day.
It works in any situation. There's something there. It's like a Swiss army knife. There's a tool for any job that you need, and the apple pie you want to have it with your eggs and bacon in the morning, you can do that. If that's what you eat, you can have it with you as your dessert. You can have it with lunch or dinner. You can throw some ice cream on top. It literally works in any way. You watch now number two on the rankings banana cream
pie perfection. That is the Michael Jordan Bolls of desserts from back in the day. Then you've got pecan pie, very controversial pecan pie. For many, pecan pie is a once in a while situation. Even for me, I don't see pecan pie. It's like a holiday specialist. If you're a baseball fan, you might remember they got rid of this baseball because of the rules the nerd Rob Manford put in.
But the lugi.
Remember the lugi in baseball, like Jesse Orosco if you know that he was a lugie lefty one out guy is called the lugi. So you bring the pecan pie in to get one meal out at a holiday in November and possibly again in December, and then that's it. And then the lugi just kind of sits there in the bullpen and waits to be called out. Now, occasionally the lugis called in for Fourth of July. Occasionally you get the Lugi for the Fourth of July, but very rarely.
The mud pie is just a whole bunch of chocolate moose and it's got the sweatpants with the elastic on it. Then you've got Lemon Mering, which is like a jazz album, Lemon Ring not for everybody, however, unforgettable if you're into it, hey, come on now. Then you got pumpkin, which is just I'm not a big pumpkin guy, very seasonal. You know, it's a Thanksgiving thing. Cherry pie is way too inconsistent. Cherry pie has a very high ceiling a low floor.
There's other fruit pies like strawberry pie, which is not high up blueberry pie. And there's also some fun facts that are absolutely absurd. One hundred and eighty six million pies are sold every year in America. Now, to put that in perspective, nearly half of Americans fine pie comforting, which I mean, say what you want about that. You can do a whole dissertation on that. One in five Americans have eaten an entire pie alone. Anyone who want to raise your hand, my hands raised, no judgment. I
give you respect. I've done it when I was at my fattest. I hit a whole pie by myself nine percent. Eat the crust first. I bet you that ferg dog eats the crust first. I bet you I do too. I like the crust, buttery crust, way to go. There's even a myth about pie. I learned on National Pie Day today that someone named Oliver Cromwell.
I've heard of that.
There's the Cromwell Cromwell Hotel in Vegas. But Oliver Cromwell banned pie in sixteen forty four for being too fun, which is just perfect, is it not.
You know, we need to be serious.
And then of course there were religious battles, but it was about pie, which just feels wonderful.
It's on brand. You know. If it's not true, you know fine. Whatever. Of course, someone tried to cancel pie. We live in the age.
Where they're still trying to cancel things. Not as much anymore, but you get the point. And so anyway, celebrate guil Free, have a big giant piece of pie, because pie is not just any dessert. You can get your cake and your cupcakes and your cookies and all that stuff.
Pie is nostalgia. You're honoring America with pies. Pie.
It's tradition, and you know it's one you get the flaky crust sometimes there.
It's one of the if not the most American dessert. Apple pie. It's the way to go.
All right now, turning the page on that, I did want to spend a couple of minutes going to a place I did not think I was going to go to. I did not think I was going to go to this place. So there are days in this wacky radio world when I'm very bad about writing back to people, and I apologize.
I say that, you know, it annoys me. I wish I was better. I'm not very busy.
I've limited time, so usually I'll open up my inbox and I'll just kind of scan it, and I'll occasionally I'll write back to somebody. So I opened up the mailbox, and you open things up, you expect a lot of junk mail, check complaints. I get, why did you do that monologue? Why didn't you say this? You should have said this, You didn't say this? People complaining about my hot take. There's people that have great conspiracy theories that reach out to me.
There's people that recommend topics for monologues.
I get all this on my inbox that's Benmathershow at gmail dot com. Every once in a while I'll get someone that sends me a long letter saying how much they hate the show. And then I'll get someone that sent an occasional love letter, which is written, of course, in entirely all caps the caplock is on, which is not psychotic at all. But they love me, so it's okay.
And then there are days when one message nudges you down a I guess you call it a parrot's nest, and you didn't even know it was there, like a trapdoor opened up beneath years of talk radio, a lot of noise, laughter, late night static, whatever you want to call the thing that we do. And so this one started innocently enough. It's like, hey, Ben, I really like your show. I haven't listened for a while. I started listening again because of And then this person explained why.
They started listening again.
They started working at night again, so they started listening in I guess you can't listen to the podcast anyway. The listener reached out asking whatever happened to so? And so you know the drill, right, So the old celebrity caller roll call I guess we'll call it the celebrity caller roll call. So I was like, well, you know, Chris and Houston moved to the day shift. That guy got divorced, so he stopped listening, so he changed his routine.
There's another guy that he had the health problem, so he kind of drifted away from the show.
I don't know what happened to him.
Life happens, and so the audience turns over on the Overnight Show like crops in a field denial, you can't get attached. I occasionally do get attached, which is my problem. So I'm going through this email and then a name surface that I had not heard in a good amount of time. David from Winter Park, Florida with his sidekick Roscoe the Parrot. Now, if you're an OG fan of the Overnight Show and we're around back in the day, you likely know who this is. You'll remember the name anyway,
even if you don't remember his phone calls. If you weren't, let me catch you up to speed on this, you missed a live wire. So I did what anyone with insomnia and occasional access to a very powerful microphone, the bully pulpit and a suspicious mind would do. I said, you know, I haven't heard from David a while, so I went looking.
I didn't go deep. I don't go deep on these things, mind you.
I had a minutes long malor investigation, more flashlight than searchlight type situation going on. So I went down social media, because you always go there first. To go to social media. I checked out some old emails, digital breadcrumbs, silence. Then I looked he hadn't posted on the X machine in I think almost a year. I think it was March of twenty twenty five. And so then I started typing some words in what I knew about my friend, David radio friend.
And then the.
Thing you never want to find but you can't ignore once you do took place. And as I was searching around, an obituary that lined up too cleanly to totally dismiss. In fact, it was so clean you had to accept it from the Orlando Sentinel and listed all the key facts, winter Park, Florida, the right age, the right information. Now, the words that stopped me were not flowery or poetic. They were very clinical that this man who was a part of our world, if this is accurate, you're died alone,
no listed family. Uh, and it said right underneath it is said, anyone with information about relatives was asked to contact the funeral home.
And that's like when that happened, I was.
Like, oh man, when I read that, I like, who took a deep breath, paused, and I started going through some memories.
You know, I was like, well, I mean, far as I know, this is accurate.
I mean, how what are the chances there are two people with the same name, at the same age, from the same city. Uh, you know, everything everything lined up like planets in a row. And at that time, I'm thinking, well, why do I keep doing this in terms of going down these rabbit holes, because you be careful, you really don't know what.
You're going to find.
And so just like this guy died alone, no listed family, and it's again it said anyone with information, you know, contact the funeral And so what we do is an odd circus. There's a lot going on, right. You hear people call in for years without ever seeing them. They become these these characters in your documentary, in your world. They become voices, some of them background noises, depending what you're doing, punchlines. There are people that are foils of mind.
That that a goofon that play along with the bit familiar ghosts who pop up at three in the morning and then vanish and are gone. And you assume, like I always like to think, well everyone's ever called the shows alive until I hear they're dead right. They're out there somewhere, They're just not part of the show for whatever reason, you know, blame it on the wife or whatever. They're still breathing, they're still eating, they're still living life
and enjoying life. They're still listening, they're still yelling at the radio until they're not right. So David was one of the great characters of the Mallard Militia, and so I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about what I remember.
From David in Winter Park, Florida.
Not because he was he was a great character, not because he was loud or outrageous, but because he was all in the kind of a fan who doesn't just listen. He participated, and he created content.
He was a content creator showed up. So this goes back number of years. I don't know exactly how many. It's just one giant ball of time.
So it goes back a number yusers before the pandemic, and when I was pulling double duty, I had a side hustle. I was doing Boston Radio Wei. I did it remotely from the home studio in la and I would fly back to Boston for certain events. And one of those trips included a meet and greet at a legendary bar which is just down the street from Finway pac a Pilgrim image site for baseball lifers, right and of course in this case radio diehards need to go there.
So people came from everywhere. It was great.
It was one of the great turnouts we've had, just phenomenal for a malor meet and greet. The show does very well in the Boston area, and so every corner of New England, all the Commonwealth, it was all involved there. We had a guy even that came down from Toronto. We had people from the South. Somebody drove up from North Carolina with their kids. I'm sure they love that. Blind Scott held court telling stories that nobody wanted to hear.
Blair from Maine showed up with his assistant. He was wide eyed, very uneasy, and convinced that the late DMX group that he's dead DMX, but the fans who were there at that concert, he was just down the street. We're lurking in the shadows around every corner. You had Wayne from Southey, who torpedoed years of sobriety, jumped off the wagon, who immortalized himself with the iconic drop. I did it for Mala. Yeah, now we don't hear that anymore.
Lorena's new kind. Shepelled the show for a while, but she doesn't know any of that stuff because she wasn't around for those days. And so unfortunately a lot of these drops just vanished. And that's it. It's over. And then there's David, David from Winter Park floor. So I remember doing a double take at this event, the Malor meet and greet, the last one we did in Boston, by the way, the lost official we didn't want. I did one on the streets of Boston after that, in
the North End, but this was before that. So I remember doing a double take. And when he told me how far he had driven. You see, David got in the car and drove thirteen hundred miles from Winter Park, Florida to Boston. He did it to spend a couple of hours at a bar with a bunch of strangers and.
Here I am. I'm out there shape.
Hands and kissing babies and all that, and we're all telling stories and trying to soak it all in. And he was there, he was involved in all of it. That's not casual fandom. That is devotion, bordering on madness. The good kind, the good kind, all right. And so David in my interactions, he loved to talk about sports gambling. He was a big gamba. He would drive out to Vegas. There was a casino and I think it was Biloxi, Mississippi.
He would drive over there because that was like the big one that this back before Florida had legalizing gambling. He loved the angles, the bad beats, the mythology of it all. And somewhere along the way, my man David in from Winter Park, Florida, invented Roscoe the Parrot, a character that lived on the airwaves so vividly as any flesh and blood collar. So when David walked into the cask and flagging, I asked him the obvious question. I said, David,
where's Roscoe? So where's Roscoe at now? Without missing a beat, he said, it's He's.
In my car. You want to meet him?
Yes?
Hell, yes, no. I assumed, rather foolishly that this was metaphorical.
Well, David disappeared, and I went back to forcing myself to socialize at the Malor meet and greet. We did there, doing the awkward introvert dance, the devil's dance of smiling and nodding and trying not to look like I wanted to crawl under the nearest barstool or there's just table now. A few minutes later, as I was busy schmoozing, David returned from he had parked down the street. He returned and I saw him. He didn't have anything in his hands.
I said, well, where's Roscoe. No Roscoe, I asked.
And that That's when he reached behind his back, very dramatically, with a big smile on his face, and he pulled out a stuffed parrot, but kind you would buy it like the San Diego Zoo gift shop, and he had tucked it into the back of his pants like contraband. And then without warning, he started talking in a parrot voice. I'm not making this up. Those that were there, No, those that were there, no commitment timing zero shame. That is Radio Gold, even though it wasn't on the radio.
That was Radio Goal. So David wanted me also to partner with him on the million dollar NFL contest in Vegas where they pick NFL winners and all that. So I had to decline that because of a TV deal I had at the time and I didn't want to step on any toes and all that. And so my picks I gave out on TV.
So they paid me for that, So I couldn't give them out even though it was a contest. It was just I didn't do it. So I could have checked with.
The lawyers and it may have been able to work out, but I chose not to do that.
And so.
The fact that he was willing to bankroll it was thousands of dollars to get in on this and he was willing to bankroll it told.
Me like he really is.
I mean, he wants it. And they drove all those miles. He wasn't like half stepping. He pushed all his chips to the center of the table. And now knowing how this story seems to have ended, based on what I have come across here on the interweb, those memories hit a little different. The jokes don't land quite the same,
the laughter echoes a little differently. There's something uniquely sad about dying quietly when you once had so much much energy and all that stuff, And even if that space was just a few minutes of airtime in the middle of the night. And he made some friends with some of you guys on social media. I know that he would interact with fans of the show and the Mallard Militia, Shane and des Moines, and I believe of alf and even Terry and some of these these guys interacted with
with David. And it's the old idiom come to life right here today, gone tomorrow, and the world barely breaks stride. But we in the overnight radio realm.
Right in the overnight radio room, we remember, and the Malard Militia remembers.
And so somewhere in the great after hours bar in the sky, I like I'd like to imagine that David is holding court with Roscoe the stuff parrot right nearby. He's talking trash and a parrot voice, and having a cold one with Jimmy Ray from Ye Bye Bye, or smoking some cigarettes some new Ports with Genie and Medford and masshole Mickey's arguing a point that makes no sense at all, but he's masshole Mickey.
And maybe Matt.
The Raider Warrior a's Tom Brady rose Fan, the great boy. I miss him too, Matt the Warrior Raider A's Tom Brady rose Fan. What a legend is nodding along loudly agreeing with himself, which he often did.
But that's the thing about.
These voices, right, they really they don't really disappear, you know, they just they stop calling. I know, And so again, sad sad story appears based on the investigation and no other way to get hold of this person and nothing else working, and the obituary and the timing and all that rest easy Roscoe and David and all that. A guy that drove thirteen hundred miles to not go on the radio just to hang out with a bunch of radio fans and my fat ass, that alone earns you a permanent seat at the.
Malard Militia Bar. So there is that anyway We'll get out on that.
Don't forget Benny Versus the Penny available for you on YouTube.
Two episodes. Two episodes.
Watch it today Friday, Sunday before kickoff, but Benny Vspenny on YouTube. If you want to watch monologues of the radio show, you can do that care of Ben Mahler Show on the YouTube. So two channels there and we'll hopefully have at some point here Ask Ben. This weekend there will be an Ask Ben, so follow the social media accounts will try to get you in on that answer. Some of your questions turn on the notifications on X I can tell who has the notifications on and.
Who doesn't have the notifications on it.
Some of you guys always respond round and it usually takes a little while. I've noticed recently there's like a warm up time to get the questions going on Ask but less so on Facebook. Less so on Facebook. It seems like on Facebook the Facebook page is Ben Malor's show Instagram Ben Maller on Fox. But on the Facebook page it does seem like that moves a little quicker.
It moves.
Are just people on there more engaged. I don't know what's going on.
I have no idea. Anyway, have a wonderful weekend.
We'll have new episodes on Saturday and Sunday and we will catch you then got a murder.
I gotta go