Kutbooms.
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 fastion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto cutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to 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 as we take a step back and provide you with podcast gold.
Unless we don't, you'll be the one that decides that.
But it is Friday here, the twenty sixth day of September, the final weekend of the Major League Baseball regular season, and the postseason will get going next week Playoff Baseball, which means we are allowed, as the sounding board of the late night to get deep into the weeds of Major League Baseball.
Now, I've said in the past that Baseball.
Should play their playoff games on days not named Monday, Thursday, and Sunday that and I actually brought this up years ago to people in baseball. I don't want to get sidetracked to begin here. But I talked to a few people I know that work at Major League Baseball, and they're like, listen, you guys, why even bother competing with
the NFL at this point. They have a choke hold on Thursdays, on Mondays and on Sundays, but you can dominate every other day, Friday and Wednesday and Tuesday, and you know all these in the day they were baseball, you know, the people that serve as a mouthpiece to Major League Baseball.
They're like, well, we're we don't believe in that.
The people are very tough, like, we don't We're not worried about the amount of NFL dominance that over shadows Major League Baseball. We're gonna do what we're gonna do. So anyway, they didn't listen to me. Of course they don't. Why would they anyway, So they'll play and then we'll ignore them on Sundays, we'll ignore them on Mondays and Thursdays. Likely we'll talk a little bit about them, and then the rest of the time will be heavy Major League Baseball.
Which'll be nice.
See if there's any kind of sizzle here. I am not optimistic about the twenty five Dodgers. This is a great underachieving team that will likely fizzle out rather quickly in the playoffs. But I did see today's National Lumberjack Day, which is exciting unless it's not. And that term lumberjack isn't all that old. I guess it's old relatively speaking, but it's not like in the Bronze Age they were
talking about lumberjacks. In fact, the word lumberjack was first mentioned in eighteen thirty one, so.
That's a long time ago.
Eighteen thirty one, it was, but I thought it'd be an older word. It was first mentioned, you know where it was first mentioned, the term lumberjack. No, how about oh card, I'm sure our buddy Nico knew that, unless he didn't anyway. Yeah, in Canada, they first existed about a century ago or so. The original form up until the time of World War II was about the end of the modern lumberjack. Lumberjacks worked in Scandinavia and they were roaming around Canada and also parts of the US obviously,
but some of them were immigrants to North America. Now, in nineteen o six, it is estimated that that is the magical year that there was a boom in the growth of lumberjacks. In fact, in nineteen o six there were five hundred thousand lumberjacks in the United States.
There you go.
Oh, I learned all of this because it's a Lumberjack Day today, and so you have to have fun facts about lumberjacks. In nineteen sixty the World Championship for lumberjacking was held. The Lumberjack World Championship held in Hayward, Wisconsin. And I recall in the early days of ESPN, before it went all woke and all that, when it was just trying to make its mark in the world and they didn't have a lot of programming to put on.
If you've flipped on the original ESPN, there would be heavy man or strongman competitions, and I remember seeing lumberjack competitions, and I'm pretty sure it was in Hayward, Wisconsin, where they'd have the cutting of the tree and in the pieces and the carrying the thing, the whole deal.
Now I did the name.
This is to me a mistake, but the Lumberjack Day name is also called National Pancake Day, which doesn't make sense to me. And then I dug a little deeper and I say, well, that makes sense. What we call Lumberjack Day pancake day. Pancake's not a lumberjack at Lumberjack's not a pancake anyway. So the theory is that the lumberjack has been so stereotyped by Hollywood that you have to have if you're a lumberjack, you have to have a big, burly beard, you have to wear a flannel shirt,
like I wear some flannel. My wife likes flannel stuff. She'll buy me flannel shirts. I'll wear those around and long sleeve flannel shirt like well, Benny the lumberjack, I don't do the suspenders. I don't really do the boots. That's part of the look as well. It's all part of the cosplay.
I mean.
One of the other things, though, is the appetite of the lumberjack. And the legend is that a real lumberjack, a hearty lumberjack, loves flapjacks or pancakes. And so thus they say that Lumberjack Day is also called National Pancake Day, which to me, again for most doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense. And then today is also National Chimmy chung To Day, and I feel like We've done this before in years past, but it's National Chimmy
chung To Day today, the twenty sixth of September. A chance to celebrate one of the great culinary accidents in history. And there are so many things that we eat on a regular basis that we're not supposed to happen. The French dip sandwich, right, that was a mistake that wasn't supposed to happen.
Right.
The chimmy choga is on that big board, not a list terry in England, not a list terry in England, but a big board. And it was created in Mexico, unless it wasn't. The Chimmy Chunga is not from Mexico. Was created in nineteen forty six, the year my dear old mom was born Rest in peace, the same year as the concept of mechicken restaurants in America became popular. Before nineteen forty six, it's hard to find a Mexican restaurant. But anyway, the chimmy Chunga, which I was blown away.
You know what that means.
Oh, I don't know what that means. Let me explain.
So I started digging around a little bits. National Chimmy chung to day. I like chimmy chung's. I don't eat them very often. I like them. They're delicious if properly put together the ingredients of one stuff. So I was like, all right, what's going on with this chimmy chunka? So hey, the term chimmy chunga. And I'm likely getting this completely wrong and I might be hornswoggled, so correct me if
you speak better Spanish than I do. But as I understand it, the term chimmy chunga means thing of a jig in Spanish.
How great is that?
So my goal now is to work into my lexicon the term chimmy chunga, but not as a food dish. No, no, no, no, because I do like to use the word think of a jag and what you mightna call it. Those are fun words. I like those words. They're relatable words. So my plan is to add chimmy chunga, and then people will say, I don't why do you use the word chimmy chunka. That's a that's a fried burrito. I don't understand what you're talking about. Anyway, get to the point, please.
So over the years, a number of restaurants have claimed to be the father, the forefather of the chimmy chunga. However, the legend is if you go to Tucson, Arizona. The origin story that we're gonna go with here, this is in the late nineteen forties, early nineteen fifties, and there was a woman named Monica Flynn, the owner of El Charro Cafe in beautiful Tucson, Arizona, where Mike and Tucson and his family lived there. So, according to the legend, the modern day chimmy chunga the thing of a jig
was the result of an accident. The woman named Monica was flipping a burrito and she accidentally flipped the burrito into the deep fryor who goofed? I've got to know, and she exclaimed, using the Spanish swear word chimmy chunga.
Uh oh, maybe it doesn't mean thing of a jig?
And that came out of what came out of the fryar was this crisp, perfectly cooked savory burrito That became a legend. And now there are chimmy chunga's all over the place and one of my go to foods when I go to a Mexican restaurant.
I love Mexican food, of course.
The rule is if you do not work in, if you don't bake in the price of chips and salsa, you're not going to get my business.
You're just not.
Oh that's not right, ben No, that's the way I operate. I have a strict rule. And if you've been with me a long time, you know my rules.
Here.
If you go to a Mexican restaurant and they don't provide you complimentary oh, it's not complimentary because there is no free lunch.
You could pay for everything. It's built into the cost of the food.
But if they don't provide you the chips and the salsa when you sit down and a cup of water, I'm out. And then in an Italian restaurant, I expect a cup of water. I also expect a nice plate of fresh bread, nice thing of bread.
There.
If I don't get that, and you're not getting my business. And I don't think that's too much to ask. I'm not asking to get it for free. I'm saying, build it into the cost of the food, and I'm in.
I'm in.
It makes you feel like you're getting a little something and you're not getting a little something. But it makes you feel like you're getting a little something, so why not So turn the page on that. Now we get to the meat of the podcast, now, the meat and potatoes of the fifth hour with me and Danny g who should join me at some point here over the weekend. So it started like every other week, two am Eastern in the.
Air everywhere, the airwaves filled with endless hot takes, an assembly line of hot takes, one after.
Another after another after another, as we draw conclusions on the day's sporting news.
And not only was the airwaves filled with hot takes, it had expired caffeine supplements. This week was a little rocky at the beginning. I got the call from New Zealand, Hey, we want you got to talk about the NFL. They actually wanted me to come on last week I was unavailable. Now, I love the people of New Zealand. One of my cool radio buddies that I've never actually met in person, Darcy Walden, who's a big New Zealand media personality, and I was on his show for ten fifteen years every week.
Then this thing called the pandemic happened in twenty twenty and the network he worked for went out of business. So now my friend Darcy hosts a news talk show. And when you host a news talk show, you can't have the fat sports guy from the US on all that often. So I'll go on every once in a while and I'll do a check up on American sports. If something crazy happens, if something unthinkable happens in American sport,
Darcy will put me on, but it's very rare. So there's another sports channel, sports network that started up, and they somehow got my number and they said, hey, we want you to have we want to have you on talks some NFL football.
I said, sure, no problem, I love New Zealand. I'll do it. And then I prepared for that.
The only problem is because of the time difference, I was going on the morning show, which I was supposed to go on the morning show, which is Tuesday morning because their NFL Sunday is actually NFL Monday, but it's
two day day then. Anyway, long story short, because of the time difference between the West coast of the US and the time zone in New Zealand that I was going on, they needed me to go on at a time that I am sleeping I'm not doing Diddley Squat at that time, but they wanted me to go on. I said, that's the time. It's a morning show. I said, against my better judgment, sure, why not. So I woke
up in I don't sleep a lot. I only sleep like four or five hours day at the most, and so this was like a two hour night.
I slept like two hours.
And I got up because I'm a loser, and I did the thing and then I curled up and wanted to die afterwards. But I didn't go back to sleep because I don't nap and I'm worried about oversleeping and I'm I've got a type a personality, and I was like, I'll just pound pound through the day and all that. So it made for some some rocky times. But the week started like you know, normal on Sunday and Monday, and then that Monday morning I.
Needed to go on. So that'screwed things up.
And then the thing about the overnight shift, it's like, as Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer would say, the Island of Misfit toys and sports radio, you never know who's listening, you never know who's going to show up, and we've got crackheads and CEOs. We've got professors and potheads, doctors and drug dealers not the legal kind, robbers and robber barons.
We've got them all.
And so it's kind of cool when you go to these Mallard meet and greets, as I've pointed out, because you have people crossing worlds. It's very similar to going to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs or live in La here So Santa Anita, and you've got really wealthy people, really successful people, and people that have mastered the fentanyl lean on the other side, and.
They just everyone mixes together. And I actually like it a lot.
I think it's kind of cool that we all have found on this common ground here on the show. So this week the door opened and in walked Moving Man Matt. If you listen to the Overnight Show every night, never miss an episode, and you might have heard that. If not, you can go back and hear the podcast. So Matt a road warrior, a road a lifer, a man who was racked up.
I did the math on this. I did malar math.
He has racked up more highway miles than an Amtrak conductor.
Moving Man Matt.
Trotting besides him, of course, as they made their way into the studio, escorted by Yours Truly, his trusty sidekick, a French bulldog named Louis. Now I first met Louis a couple years back. Louie was just a pup. Now Louie's all grown up, and Louie either remembered me or really wanted to give me the royal welcome, because as soon as Louie laid eyes on me, he had to investigate my feet.
Now, I do not have good looking fear.
My toes are all messed up from treadmill life and shoes that don't fit the right way, and I've had toenails fall off many times. It's a mess. It's a hot mess. You do not want to look at my toes, do you do not? But Louie, Louis, I love these toes. So he had his sniffer out, you know, sniffing around there, and I'm pretty sure that he was more interested in
where I had been prior his investigative skills. Louis the French bulldog, because I had been doing show prep with my beloved Moxie, who laid down on top of me and was cuddling.
As really sleeping and farting.
And so I'm pretty sure that louis the French bulldog spelled the English bulldog.
And then that's that back to the story.
So movie man Matt not just some random schmuck, you know, not in this and it is all of people listen to show. He's not undercover. He's certainly somebody's a headliner, you know the name. He's been around a long time, he's got staying power. We know he's a Giants fan. He's not perfect, he likes the Giants, he's loyal to them. So we've got that. So he's of the age as all our friends in Boston. I learned this years ago.
If you're over the age of like forty five or so, you're either a Dolphin fan, a Giant fan, or a Jets fan.
If you grow up in Boston, you're not a Patriots fan because they didn't win anything. They were losers.
They were loser.
And then if you're under a certain age, you love the Patriots because they were great. They were a dynasty. Anyway, so we know a little bit about him. We know a little bit about him. He's not just your normal listener he's a member of the Mallard bullsh He's a
decorated veteran. In fact, he has eaten the full Mallar food Tour, the Chicken Fingers, the Landing in Cans City, the Chickens, Dvandwich there in Denver at the Sportsbook Bar and Grill in the Greater Denver area, and he's even been to the Bird.
The bird is the word. The bird is the word. The bird is the word.
They're in Kansas where they had the Malard Fowler and probably some MA branded side dishes I didn't even know about. Somewhere exists, and we're still waiting for that pizza spot, the Mallard Pizza. I had a listener reach out to me from this podcast. By the way, I was very excited about that, and it didn't work out. He works at a mom and pop pizza place and he ran it by his pops, and it's too expensive to put
it on the menu. Of course, the rule is for us to give the full proper tribute to restaurants, you must have the Mallard food dish on the menu. I think that's very very small thing to ask. Anyway, this guy, I felt bad for him because he was all excited. He unfortunately made the mistake that so many people do. They made the offer before getting appool for the offer, and then it.
Didn't work out.
So anyway, with the this is not a commercial to get a Mallard pizza. I'm just saying we almost had that. At one point. We had it in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
That ended.
There's also a I forget the name and movie man Matt's going to be upset with me. But there was a place in Colorado they named Cocktail after.
The show, and I forget the name of it.
It's like it's not in Denver, it's out in sticks, out there in Colorado. Nonetheless, Mark is what you call a completist. He's like the guy that owns every Springsteen bootleg or every Seinfeld box set, or to relate to the show, Ferg Dog's Pokemon collection, ALPS nineteen eighties TV sitcom trading card collection, just everything.
And then there's the truck. O MG. The truck a beast, a monstrosity of beauty, metal, horsepower, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling across America's highways and byways, carrying with it this giant Ben Mather show Billboard hellllelujah, hellelujah. Now it is not a neon. The billboard is not a neon.
So you think marketing is some kind of slick Manhattan based company that dabbles in social media.
We'll get you some bots. We're gonna we're gonna have a good time here. We'll get you some bots. We'll have we'll have some fun with it. No, no, no. Triplastering the name of a radio show.
On this beautiful eighteen wheeler that drives from Boston to Boise, from San fran to San Diego. Every car in the lane behind this truck, every gas station stop, every roadside diner, truck stop. There it is Ben Mahlor Show, unofficial mover of the Ben Mahler Show. And that kids is guerrilla marketing at its finest. I want to thank moving Man
Mark he had this on there. He got rid of the truck for a while, and then he's brought it back and it's gonna get even bigger and better, he told me as we went outside on Sepulvita Boulevard there right across from the gas station, and a chicken restaurant and a closed bar that used to be there went out of business, and so he say, oh, yay, we're gonna put on the back too, We're gonna make it bigger. And this is just the beginning of it. And I
was like, oh, that's great, that is awesome. That's branding you cannot buy. And here's the kicker. The kicker. That truck that the moving man Matt Empire has with Louis his sidekick is more advertising for the Ben Maler Show than we've gotten from the actual network that airs the show.
And I'm not ripping anybody. I love where I work. It's been great. However, Fox Sports Radio will put out glossy spreads in the.
Radio trade papers. Yeah, I know, it's shocking there. It's still radio trade papers. So they'll put this out and they'll put it online. It's online, it's in the trade papers.
Now. I don't read the trade papers very often. I just stay in my lane.
But inevitably will happen is I'll have a radio friend from Atlanta, or someone from Detroit, or somebody I work with who's now in Tampa but would rather be in Dallas, but he's in Tampa hoping to get to anyway. These people will send me a message.
Did you see did you see they didn't include your show? Is everything? Okay? You're fired? What a disrespect? And I'm like, yes it is, but I'm used to it by now. I'm numb to the whole thing.
So they'll send out, the company will send out and the trades and they'll have you know, Fox Sports Radio the lineup on there, and more often for the not we're not listed. We are told that the space is reserved for the daytime shows. So we are reminded often that while tremendously popular, our niche, our niche here overnight, the Overnight show is still the forgotten stepchild of the company, and we scratch and claw for every inch of promotion.
It's the underground audio railroad, if you will. And meanwhile, here's Moving Man. Matt doesn't work for the company, doesn't work for me. I'm not paying him, and he's just a super nice guy and a good friend of the show, and he is doing more for the brand, one mile marker at a time, than the corporate machine has been able to do all this time. And so I just can't thank him enough. And we could make this a game.
I was thinking, we get an app, actually thought about this after Moving Man Matt paid us a visit.
I thought, this be a great thing. If we have a.
Listener who's really good technically, they can kind of play around with this stuff. How great was this? We we can make it a game where in the world is moving?
Man? Matt.
Now, he might not like this because this is going to track where he's at, but everyone's being tracked anyway. And we can have fans of the show go out to truck stops. You know, he's driving through Sheboygan and hey, have you live in near Sheboygan? Moving Matt maskin and he's got a gig out there. You want to see the mobile mal or billboard boom. And then we can put the photos of random people who are fans of
the show. Many of them never call the show, never writes to the show, and we can have a collection of photos from where in the world.
Is moving men Matt.
And then I'm going to put down the ayahuasca that I got from Aaron Rodgers and that is that. So anyway, listen it just think of a rolling scavenger hunt, a fandom hauling freight and at the same time hauling I would say my ego, you know, up and down? Was it I ninety five, maybe I thirty five traveling? Could he be going east to west or west to east down I ten stopping in El Paso for some chimmy chungas and then going over to batal Rouge for some good Southern food, and now for about an hour, a
little less than that. I think it was probably a little less Matt moving man. Matt and Louis sat in studio. They showed up on time, They showed up clean, they had showered, they didn't arrive twelve hours early. They did not pester my co workers. They were polite, They didn't wear suntanned lotion. They have never eaten Lucky Charms. The only leperkhn they like is Lucky the Leprechaun from the Celtics. I believe that's his name, Lucky the Leperqunt, or maybe
that's the Lucky Charms Leperchunt. Either way, they like the Celtics Leprechaun. And so we talked if you heard the show, if not, go back and hear the podcast from this week, and we talked about life on the road, about his lovely family which he has to leave behind in Massachusetts and he's on the road. He only goes home a day or two here and there, and he's on the road all the way to like Thanksgiving, and he's grinding. He's trucking across the country, moving man, Matt. It's not
an easy life. And you know, somehow too big and too small at the same time. The United States, it's massive, but yet it's too small. And the guy works hard. He sacrifices for the family. It gets a lot of money doing that. But he's got to keep moving. He got to keep moving. And we are reminded, at least I was reminded sitting there with Matt that the show, the show.
Is just a it's bigger.
And as I get reminded of this stuff quite bit, we were reminded that it's bigger than just the little studio that we're in and the microphone that I'm lucky enough to have the keys to. Right now, it's rolling down some random interstate right now, it's up and down I five, honking its horn, stopping for gas, heading off again and all that.
And so there you go. It's the story of the overnight shift.
You never know who's out out there, who's engaged, who's a fan. We have the Motley Crew not the band. We have the Motley Crew, and if they were to change the slogan Lady Liberty and Lady Liberty slogan, give me you're tired, give me your poor, your huddle masses yearning.
To breathe free. Hot Sports takes all night long, baby, because you never know when they are going to come knocking. You just don't know, all right, and.
Maybe they'll show up with a big giant truck and a dog and a story to tell.
And it's cool.
I always like, you know, I've been told not to do too much of this to have listeners in and we did have to cut back a little bit after some guy who likes to do cosplay as a Leprechaun showed up. We had Tree and here we had our buddy from Oklahoma Stop buy. We've had Manuel and Guardina that is paid a visit Robbie the Mariner fan in recent years, and so it's.
It's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool that you guys can come by and hang out kind of see where we work, where we operate, and it's pretty pretty neat, pretty neat stuff, all right.
We'll get out on that.
We will have new podcasts, fresh audio content in the audio Lab.
We'll have that for you tomorrow.
And Danny maybe he'll join me tomorrow.
Who knows. Danny should be with me at some point.
Have the mail bag on Sunday if you want to send a letter into the mail bag, Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com. That's Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com. We'll have that to look forward to on Sunday. We got the the big show tomorrow. And don't forget Benny versus the Penny. Don't bear the lead mama hand. All right, well, let's bad job by me. Here we are at the end. But it's not frightening, it's not scary.
It's Benny versus de Penny. Want all my picks on the big games, the TV games, the big TV games and all that and nothing will go Haywire off to a middling start. Do for a big weekend. Benny versus the Penny man versus coin. You can get all of that on YouTube. It's YouTube dot com. Slash at that at sign at Ben Benny versus Penny again, YouTube dot com slash at Benny Vspenny And for all that picks Me and the great Tom Looney Looney Tunes, l Loon.
Dog and get all that.
Anyway, have a wonderful rest of your Friday. Friday, and we will chat with you at some point over the weekend.
A stap pasta, I don't care, I'm leaving. Goodbye later. Skater got a murder. I gotta go.