Cut booms.
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 soul 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, Big Ben and Danny g Radio Happy Saturday. We are here every single freaking day on this twenty ninth day, the last Saturday's Joyous No No, No, I'm not again, Danny. As I said on yesterday's podcast, I like doing this because I when I go out and meet people at events, I can say listen, I'm a podcaster, I'm a content creator, and I have credibility. People love that. They're like, oh wow, that's impressive.
Oky.
Even on the radio show, Danny, I tell people I record my podcast live on the radio and then repackage it in the podcast format. But why not? And this today is It's Midsummer day today on this set. What is that? You ask? What is Midsummer Day. Well, this is the big dance in Midsummer Day in Finland because the last weekend of June today this year, June twenty ninth, is the official start of the warm summer weather. Now, as I said on a previous episode of this podcast,
last weekend, I was in Palm Springs in California. It was one hundred and sixteen degrees. So I can only imagine what we're in for over the next couple of months. But this just in Danny. It gets hot in the summer. Oh, okay, be prepared for those stories about global warming and uh, it's all you know, it's all. It's hotter than it's ever been. Of course, I snicker.
Midsummer how about your local newscast where they give you the tips on how to stay cool, drink lots of water, stay in the shade, stay hydrated. Okay, thank you for that.
Yeah, common common sense. I appreciate that we have on this pod. We have the magical view skin cancer. That's a DeBie Downer traveling zoo, the idiom of the week, And if we have time, we'll get to some pop culture, but we'll begin with this and as the iconic radio man from before my time would say, you know what the news is, and in the next couple of minutes you're going to hear the rest of the story. So
we'll flashback now. We told you on the previous podcast that on Friday Friday, Friday Friday, I ended up going to a funeral and then went out to a weekend getaway for my wife's birthday carnival the weekend of fun birthday month. But I did not stay in Palm Springs for very long. I made the long drive back to the LA area early on Saturday morning, and when I had to take care of Moxie and Luigi, my dogs,
I got the the frog and the bulldog. Moxie's the bull the English bulldog in Luigi's the frog, which they're an interesting group, interesting group of characters. So did that, took care of my dogs, put my back my my church clothes, went back on, and headed to another cemetery about well, actually I was at a church on Friday, now a cemetery on Saturday, and it was a chance to say goodbye to a friend. We talked about this
gentleman on a previous episode of this podcast. TJ. Simers, a longtime columnist at the LA Times, who I knew professionally for a while from going to games and interacting with TJ and press boxes, and I really got to know him a lot better over the last couple of months. He had terminal brain cancer, and so this was his goodbye and had a big celebration, celebrational life ceremony for the Curmudgeon. And I told TJ this, I love the way that he approached sports writing. And I've lived in
La my whole life. People have I often accused me, you've heard this Danny like I act like I'm from Boston or something like that. I'm not from Boston. I just like the way they approach their sports in Boston. And TJ kind of had that attitude where he was an attack dog and all that he helped people accountable. So I was a big fan of his work. And he passed away and it was very sad. I had a chance to see him just a few days before he left this mortal coil, and so I went to
the cemetery there to say goodbye. In Newport Beach and I went to simmer Times, I felt like it. Actually I'd been by there a lot. I liked going to the beach in Newport, So I didn't even realize it was there because it's hidden. It's off the side road you to go up a little hill, and I didn't even know it was there. So I went there and did my thing whatever, and we'll explain why why that's that's important, but or to the story, it's important. But
it was great. I got to see TJ's family, as his wife, Say, who had gotten to know a little bit too. She had been been there when he was in hospice the last couple of months. And his grandkids were there, who he talked a ton about. Loved telling stories about coaching basketball for his daughter and his grandkids and and all that, and the famous grocery bagger. TJ would often write about him in the in the column
in the La Times. And it was kind of cool, Danny, because I I didn't know who he was, and he came up to me and he introduced himself. And he actually was a listener to our show when you were on the show back in the day. He was a big listener to the microphone throttler to the overnight show. Used to work at night, and it was funny. He told me, like the whole stories, like he said he was a grocery bagger and TJ. He was like a
character in TJ's column. It was a guy who was married to one of his daughters, and he would call him the grocery bager. But he hadn't been a grocery bager for years. He actually had like he was working in law enforcement. But TJ just loved call him the grocery bager, and it was kind of funny, and he was a fan of the show. But he was like
going into a time portal. I got to see a lot of people I hadn't seen a long time, people from my twenties and thirties, when I was working every night and no girlfriend, no women in my life, no friends. My friends were press boxes and I was there every night just doing the grind. And among the people I got to meet or again and see again. One of the gentlemen that runs what I used to call Staples Center, I guess it's called something else now. And he's a
guy that I had a big brewhaha with. He got very upset with me because of things I said on the radio at about that arena when a guy got in there with a knife, ran through the red coats I had a big problem with the security over there for years, but but he was, you know, we got along.
Was fine.
It was we'd made up and all that. It was wonderful to see my guy, Tim Mead. Tim Mead was forever the pr guy for the Angels, the old California Angels, the Anaheim Angels, the La Angels for like thirty five
forty years. He was with the Angels. And we were telling stories about the nineties Angels when I was a radio reporter and the Angels had some historical collapses, and we were trading stories about Tony Phillips and how Tony famously wanted to fight me in the Angels clubhouse when they were apart in the mid nineties and allowed the Seattle Mariners to pass them by. Actually they technically tied, they had a one game playoff at the Kingdome, but
we were telling the stories about about him. Mike Bredlahan, the old Laker beat guy who's a Laker broadcaster. I saw him. I hadn't seen him in years. Dylan Hernandez was their columnist of the La Times, a bunch of newspaper people. Bill Dwyer, the old editor of the La Times. I hadn't seen him in years. Ken Gurnick, a longtime baseball writer retired baseball scribe, caught up with him. He
used to pop up with Roy Firestone. Remember that up close show with Roy fires Of course, if you're old, you know that show.
How dare you?
He was on there. But the one that I was I thought was the coolest. I saw a writer from the San Diego Union Tribune who I knew when I was nineteen and twenty years old and I'd go to Podre games when I was in San Diego working at the mighty sixth ninety Go after yourself, San Diego, and this guy is still working for the Union Tribune. And we were, you know, we were just shooting the shooting the you know what, and it was it was good to see him, and he seemed happy that I remembered him.
I don't think he remembered me, but that's fine, and.
It was great.
And you know, TJ is just the overall thing. TJ was a curmudgeon. He was the some of villain and all that. Now, speaking of villains, though, uh, the guy, the guy who is responsible most for my vitriol towards the Lakers was there. The person that and someday I might write a book, And if I write a book, I'll make sure to mention this in the book. I'm not going to say this person's name right now, but he was at the service. I did not approach him,
he did not approach me. But this is this is a guy that made my life a living hell when I was in my twenties and I was covering the Lakers at the Forum and he was a complete asshole, treated me like shit, and that really planted the seed. I never liked the Lakers, but I didn't hate the Lakers like I do today. That guy is responsible, and he was there and he didn't work for the Lakers anymore. He got Lebron got him fired, as I understand it,
not because not because Lebron. It might even mean Kobe that got Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it was it was Kobe that got rid of him. That that was a record. I've not done two funerals in one weekend, A macabre weekend. I wanted to finish up with this. I mentioned the cemetery. I had been by there several times. I had I felt like it was important. There's important people that were there. And as I was leaving the service, and I had to get back out to Palm Springs. More on that
later in the podcast. But as I was leaving, I realized, wait a minute, this is the forever home of Kobe Bryant. This is the cemetery where Kobe Bryan is buried. So I was like, well, I don't know that I'll be here ever again. So what do you think I did, Danny?
You threw your twenty four jersey from your trunk of your car on and walked over to his grave.
Kobe close. I drove up to the very top because I figured I'd heard Kobe had a private plot of land at the very top of the cemetery. So I drove to the very top.
An it's bad taste because of where they crashed, though it should have been down at the bottom.
Too soon, Danny, too soon, Hey, yikes. But anyway, I drove to the top. And as you go up, one thing I've noticed about cemetery is the peasants are buried at the lower part of the cemetery, and as you go up, the graves get progressively bigger and the stones are better, and you know that kind of So I get up there and I can kind of make out where Kobe's plot of land is. There's like a fence around it and all that, but they don't really want you up there. And I was the only one in
that part of the cemetery. But I looked at it and I was like, well, there's really not much more I can do. You know, I'm not when am I going to go over there. I'm not going to do that. But I did see it, So that's that's a big couple of months, Danny. I was at Michael Jordan's High School in Wilmington, North Carolina and Kobe Brand's grave in Newport Beach, California. But that was part of my weekend and I was out in the sun a little bit.
I don't think I got skin canceled, though, Danny hopefully not. I don't think I was out in the sun long enough. It was a sunny day, but it was like a cool it was a cool sea breeze. That view by the way where Kobe's buried. I looked. I turned and I looked out unbelievable. I mean it is you can see all of the Newport Beach coastline there.
Amazing And by the way, I'm allowed to joke. I actually have a Kobe Bryant tattoo on my Yes you do, I've seen it. Yeah, you do, number eight slash twenty four. What would he think about Brony being taken fifty fifth overall?
Oh, if you could get Kobe some in a room without he probably wuldn't even care about microphones. But if you got him privately, oh, god, dude would just destroy the Lakers.
You know though, your boy Justin and Cincinnati. He sent me a DM trying to bust my balls. He said, Lebron owns the Lakers franchise. Now with a question mark, I wonder if Kobe, if he was still with us, if this is how it would go, And I wrote back, Lol, they'd be drafting Kobe's daughter question mark.
Well, they probably would.
Yeah. Maybe Kobe would be like, hey, I want my daughter to be the first female NBA player.
Yeah, and Genie bus would be okay, all right?
What else?
What else does Lebron like? I want to see Lebron's wishless He's already got his podcast Buddies the as the coach, He's got his son on the team. Does he want Rich Paul to replace Skinny Jeans? Rob Polinkaz the GM.
And they're still gonna win more games than your Zippers. That didn't happen last year going to happen this season, Okay, saying that maybe it'll happen. Watch Connect's gonna shoot the lights out. Reddick's going to be a decent coach. He'll have a little bit of a learning curve, but he'll be all right, and he'll drop some more f bombs to entertain us.
Well, we live in the multiverse. That's your version of reality. My version of reality is that Lebron James will get hurt. Bronnie James will suck and won't play. They'll have to play them a little bit because TV is going to demand Bronnie and Lebron play. You've been calling for Lebron to be hurt for seasons and seasons, and Anthony Anthony Davis is going to bake cookies. He'll burn his thumb taking the cookies out of the oven, and then he will miss about forty games.
You are the biggest Lakers fan that I know. So last Sunday I mentioned on our way out that we were thinking about going to the movies. My girl had been bugging me to go to Inside Out too, and I gave it the double Siskel and Ebert two thumbs down. I don't want to see that. Instead, we got up early. I did the podcast with you, and we thought, let's go to Zuma, like a million other people in southern California thought, but let's try to go early before the canyon roads get all busy.
You should explain for those not in southern California where exactly that is, because people like in Ohio and Michigan probably don't know.
Yeah, Zuma beaches in Malaboo.
Malabu boo, as we like to say, mal boo boo.
So for us who live off the one O one Freeway, there's a few canyon roads that lead to the coastline.
And these are very dangerous roads and very congested roads.
On the lease. Yeah, some of them are keep one lane.
People have met their demise on those roads. Many times they fall off the cliff. It did game over.
Yeah, so it gets super congested, especially on weekends during the summer. Thought, okay, we'll get to the grocery store get the items for our igloo, which my chick stole from our aunt during that yard sale. By the way, so we have this igloo that started leaking once we put the ice in it. Cool nice stolen igloo. We had a thirty dollars pop up tent from Costco had been sitting in the garage because we found it on
sale months ago, waiting for the summer. Solid right, So we got to bust that out for the first time. Go inside the grocery store for bread and jelly to make sandwiches. Had the peanut butter at home already, chips, fig Newtons, Mini diet Pepsi cans and ice eighty nine dollars later. After the grocery store. Nice, true story, What a deal. We get on the Canyon Road and finally get to it's like a fifteen minute ride for us. With the traffic, it was about a half hour. Not
the end of the world. Get onto the sand eighty six degrees in Malibu last Sunday. You know what that's like, Ben, that's like one hundred degrees on the sand.
Ah. Oh, it's terrible, Yes, super hot, pained.
Tar on the feet. That's why I kept my flip flops on because I saw my girl get like a tar on her foot. But yeah, I'm not going down that road. Ben talked about that on the fifth hour.
That's right, I've had that problem. Yeah.
We get everything set up, and we get the pop up tent in place, get the folding chairs out, and we slap together the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and shove them to the kids. Shut the hell up, as my grandpa would say, quit your damned winding, Eat a sandwich, Feed the kids, our middle kids. She's thirteen. She does not listen to adults. She thinks she knows everything. She's at that age right now. She tries to explain things to us in all of her wise wisdom, wonderful. Yeah,
you're you know you are, daddy, You're a boomer. No, no, no, you old head.
No.
I was born in a year where we're considered Generation X. All right, we do not get along with Generation Z.
Now that's why we like being on X because it's our generation. Yeah, Ration X, get on the Twitter.
She's a know it all right now. Other than that, she's a good kid, but she's a no it all. Me and her mom both told her you have to put a lot of sunscreen on. She's at the age where she's just starting to talk with boys and all that comes with teenage years and if you're a girl, dad, you know what I'm talking about. So she's like her little thing during the summer. Right now, she wants her friend over so they could go to the pool and
lay out because they want to get tans. Oh my god, Becky, I keep telling her, you have good skin right now, and you're about to ruin that. You see those old ladies that come around our neighborhoods where they look like leatherface. That's gonna be you if you keep playing in the sun. And she finally asked a question, because normally she's not asked questions. She's telling us things like she really knows, like she has life experience. What do you mean how
come the sun does that to you? And I said, well, think about it. The sun is basically burning a layer of your skin off of your body. And this was the night before we were having this conversation. So now we're on the beach and I look at her and I said, hey, remember the sunscreen that same friend I mentioned. She brought that girl along. They're both spraying the sunscreen on, they take the boogie boards, they run into the water. They were in the water bend all afternoon a couple
of times she came back for food and SODA's. I told her, reapply that sunscreen. Do you think she did? No, she didn't listen to me. She didn't listen to her mom.
Turn into a lobster. Your sounds are going.
Let me tell you? How can I well? What's on podcasts? She looked like Anchemima. The next day, all I could see were the whites of her eyes and her teeth.
Racist.
I'm okay with my color and boy.
And now it's been almost a week, her skin started peeling really bad, and she came into the living room crying, and she's like, mom, I look like a cow because the spots that have peeled off. She's been trying to put vitamins, vitamin E on her skin and these different lotions, and she's been crying about it. And her mom's like, well, I try to tell you. Your stepdad tried to tell you. You didn't listen. Guess what. Her dad comes to pick her up and to take her one of the summer
days this past week. He sees her and he freaks out. He texted my wife, He said, why did you let her get burned like that? She is gonna get skin cancer. My better half said, you better talk to your noa all thirteen year old daughter because we had several conversations with her and she did not listen. So now this is a true test because once her skin heals, do you think she's gonna do this again?
This is the personification Danny of the fuck around and find out? Mean right, I mean, that's it, right around you find out. And I'm gonna give her the benefit of the doubt, your daughter that she's going to remember this the agony, and I'm I'm a stubborn guy myself. I remember my mom would would have these conversations with me when I was a kid about putting suntan lotion on.
And what I would do is I would halfway do it because I would just put it on my elbows and knees because when you get some burned your joints, it really that's where it really kills you. So as long as I was, like, you're your neck, yeah, the neck also, so I would just hit those areas because I figured, well, if I get burned, it's not that bad. As long as I don't, I don't have any of those areas burned, and so I would I would do that. But at this point in my life, I you know,
I'm an older I guess I'm middle aged. I don't know, maybe older than middle aged. But I don't go out. I try to avoid the sun unless my wife drags me to palm springs and all that. But did your daughter just have tons of alivera? Did you just take a bath in alivera?
She has been gathering alivera on her every night. She came out of the shower the other night crying, telling her mom, it hurt to shower. I was crying. We're dealing with CoA at the beach because he's trying to dig in the sand. He's trying to crawl all over the place. So we were preoccupied with a ten month old, so we didn't get to hover over her to make sure she was doing the right thing with sunscreen. What we think is she didn't even put any on her face.
Sun can lead to some pain, especially if you didn't wear any sunscreen. Well, as they say, Danny, a watched pot never boils. A watch teenager does not does not burn their face, but an unwatched teenager will absolutely boil their face away. Now, did you show CoA the old sandcrab thing. He's probably too young for that. But in a couple of years, right, you've showing those sand crabs.
That's my yeah, kid, right, I'll wait for that. But what he got to do for the first time was take shovels and the bucket and dig in the sand. He's never done that before. And I was pouring the water into the sand to make the mud pies with him in the different shapes that come in the bucket. He was so into it, and he was such a good boy. But about ten minutes in he took a huge, huge handful of the mud and put it right in
his mouth. Well so one kid burning their face off, the other kid eating dirt.
But it's the same concept, right, He'll learn maybe that's not the best thing to put in my mouth, as she avoid that in the future, you know, you know somewhere in the back of his head that seed will be planted.
You may have seen children eating mud.
So to turning the pitch, I wanted to just finish up on my funeral weekend, so I went from LA from a funeral out to Palm Springs and then drove back to the LA area to go to a different funeral in Orange County, and then I had to go back to Palm Springs because my wife was still out there. She had big events with their friends and stuff, so I was I was given a special treat. On my way back, the long drive out to Palm Springs, I'm
driving out there on the highway. I think I'm on the sixty and there's a trailer in front of me. It's like a two lane road and I see this trailer and it's like, okay, I'm behind it. There's a truck carrying this trailer, and I really think much of it. At first. I thought, well, maybe maybe there's a horse in there or something like that, and I was just kind of, you know, you zombie out a little bit when you're driving. You're getting this kind of coma state
where you're just driving down the road or whatever. So I'm driving. As I get closer to this truck with the thing in the back, I see this this head pop up and I noticed this. I'm like, what is that? I see these eyes looking back at me, and I'm I had this this epiphany, this this like abercadabra moment right in front of me. I'm in the middle of like a traveling a traveling zoo or circus or whatever.
I felt like I was transported to the Sahara Desert like a petting zoo, because, standing tall, loud and proud, with all the panache you could possibly want of a model, was none other than a camel. I yes, I was driving behind.
That is one of your most classic drops of all time. I want a camel.
Yep, yep and uh And all those years in the on the radio saying I want a camel where that was after Adrian Peterson, who.
We had on this podcast camel cake sent to us.
That was one of the coolest cakes we ever got. It was awesome. Uh, that in the Chuck the Condor cake. But anyway, so I'm driving, I'm like, wait a minute, there's a freaking camel and uh and it was just awesome. Here I am on this desolate road with tumble weeds and sand all around, and I am staring in the eyes of this majestic camel who is chewing away at whatever it's chewing at and could not care any less. They know who the hell are you? So I had an option. I could have sped up and gone around
the truck and the camel. But now I was like, I want to enjoy this. You know, I'll get to my destination. It's not driving that slow. So I just stayed there and I took a few photos of the camel, and the camel just look in the back of me and all that stuff and really care who I was. And it was kind of cool. It was one of those weird things out in the middle of nowhere, you know, I Camel's living his life, doing whatever's doing. I thought it was funny.
You are never going to see something like that again for the rest of your life, probably not.
Probably not. It was funny though. On the back of it, I took a photo me see yeah, I mean it was just there. It's hard to tell, but I could see it a lot better in person, and I love the back of it. You see what I sent you the photos. Damn, I hopefully get him. You see this is like something This like a joke that Doc Mike used to say out the air. Do you see what it says on the back of the truck.
There Camel won one thousand and two, one thousand in toe.
Yeah, it says Camel in tow is what it says on the back And Doc Mike. Once, like ten years ago, Doc Mike, he somehow learned that phrase. I guess he had never learned cammebltoe, and so he kept calling up and saying it. Remember like he thought it was like he was like eight years old, Doc Mike saying the phrase on the radio over and over again.
So I remember that.
That was my run in with the camel, Mike Cammell, my camel experience. All right, let's get to the idiom of the week. We'll get out on this the idiom of the week, and this week's idium of the week is dog days. I thought this was appropriate, this being the last weekend in June, we're sliding into July this week and the dog days of summer. Now, do you know when the dog days of summer are, Danny, I hear that a lot during the baseball season. Yeah, yep,
that's true. It does correspond with the baseball season. Well, the actual definition of dog days, the dog days of summer are between July third, which is what Wednesday of this week, So it's coming with July third to August eleventh, those are the dog days of summer. Now here's the interesting thing about this. Is it true that dog days of summer have nothing to do nothing to do with dogs.
The common belief is that it's called the dog days of summer because it's associated with the the dogs having issues with the heat, and that's why they call it the dog days because they start huffing and puffing and they need extra water and all that. But the term
dog days does not have any relation to our canine friends. Instead, it is inspired by the heavens and it refers to the almost forty days when Serious, not the satellite radio, when Sirius, known as the dog star, rises and sets with the sun, and Serious is the brightest star in the constellation. And in Latin the term is it means a greater dog, and that's in relation, not relation to actual dogs, just in relation to Serious, the dog a star. This goes back to ancient Greeks and then Romans who
realized the hottest days of summer occurred. They coincided when Sirious rose near the sun, and so the that particular star's name derives from the Greek word of scorching. So everything's related together and all that stuff, and so Romans thought that Sirius gave off heat. So how they thought back in the day, the Romans that Sirius gave off heat when it was next to the sun in conjunction with the sun. The Egyptians, but wait, we got the Greeks,
the Romans, and the Egyptians. These are all legends. So the Egyptians noticed the dog stars position of the sky and often heralded the Nile rivers annual floods. They thought that was related. But over the years, the actual timing of the Dog Days of Summer has shifted since then due to how the Earth's rotation makes the stars placements in the sky change over time, and we'll all be long dead. But in about ten thousand years the Dog
Days of Summer actually happen in winter. So and then people say it's climate change, but no, it's just the way the way the Earth rotates, and everything's related together and all that, and that is our idiom of the week dog days of Summer.
It was actually interesting.
Well, thank you for giving me a left handed compliment. I appreciate that. All right, Danny, we'll get out on that. Anything you want to promote here, It's Saturday, a day of rest other than this podcast for us, anything at all though, just.
This fine podcast right here. Make sure you send it to not one, but two, either friends or family members this weekend or enemies.
I don't care. As long as they listen for a couple of minutes. That's all we need. Just a couple of good minutes and we're in good shape. You don't want to make an enemy out of me, It doesn't matter who it is. Just give us a couple of minutes and we'll be your best friend. So that's it, all right, Have a wonderful rest your Saturday. We will catch you tomorrow.
Asta pasta basulacious