The Host's Fictional Bios

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Hello and welcome.

Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli, and I'll be the reason for the season tonight.

This episode was scheduled for Christmas.

Scheduled.

But we'll need some minor characters.

Winter is a CQ.

It's not like there's only one season.

Yeah.

Exactly.

This is the white Christmas of Christmas episodes.

It's a podcast.

Every one of our episodes is the white Christmas.

White Christmas of Christmas episodes.

That's fair.

But we'll need some minor characters to make my story seem all the more astounding.

First up, three men who got really bitchy when I suggested that their sections of the show just be I don't know white guy stuff.

Peep, Noah, and Todd.

I thought that was a good name for the podcast.

Come on.

And I was just sad that it wasn't a euphemism for cocaine.

I thought we were going to party.

Yeah, it's an unnecessary contraction, Eli.

I do know white guy stuff.

Right.

You do.

Yeah.

You do.

It's all I do.

Pretty much.

It's true.

And also joining us tonight, the hero with a tale to be told, Cecil, something Italian.

Cecil, are you ready to be cannonized as you so rightly deserve?

I feel like I'm going to get cannonized by this group.

They're either going to be shooting me out of or with a cannon.

Okay, but it was either that or Eli had to try to spell hagiographical, and I don't think any of us wanted that Cecil.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, that's fair.

You want a winter soldier?

That's how you get a winter soldier.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Patrons,

usually a squadron of guys.

The reason for the season

patrons usually a squadron of guys jesus

patrons usually a winter soldier jesus

patrons usually

i was just thinking this episode wasn't going to be long enough keith it's going to be like three hours for me to edit okay come on man if i tell me a break if i don't laugh and stop every time he can't do the pit

it's good yes ending damn it

patrons usually thank you i was gonna gonna say it had to happen for that.

Thank you.

That's the commitment.

Yeah.

And also this next one has to happen too.

Patrons, usually a squadron of guys jerking off in such an egregious manner have to find a Turkish bathhouse or a David Barton gym.

Thanks to your dollars, we can record it for the whole world to enjoy.

And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

Ourselves, I guess.

More particularly, how little we actually know one another.

And Noah, you decided that we were going to talk about each other for this very special Christmas episode.

Why?

Well, because sometimes ideas seem better when you're high.

Yeah.

I get it.

I get it.

So, Noah, why don't you start us off by telling us the tale of Heath and Wright?

Okay, so obviously we've talked a lot on this show about Heath being tall, but what we may never have mentioned is that that has been a lifelong infliction.

He was, in fact, born at his present height of six feet four inches or 193 centimeters.

Curled up real good.

He was like a, yeah, right.

It's both an affliction and an infliction by my parents, genetically.

So, but he was he was still obviously baby levels of skinny at first, and then he just filled out over time.

So, in a process, less like being birthed and more like being extruded, he came into the world on August 27th of 1981.

Yeah, when he was born, the doctor actually yelled, it's a spaghetti.

Yeah, right, exactly.

That was the most remarkable part.

Now, Heath's immense size was obviously an incredible burden for his parents.

Normal baby furniture wouldn't accommodate their writhing noodle of a child, so they had to get creative.

On walks, for example, they used two walkers with a board stretched between them.

To put him to bed, they had to cut the ends off of four cribs and kind of duct tape them together.

And to carry him around, his mom had to wear a pair of papoosas, one on the front and one on the back, that just, you know, it was for limb overflow.

His childhood pet was a kangaroo with a backpack that you could take him for rides in that.

Exactly, yes.

My story's a lot like Tom Bunyan.

Hey, honey, you think maybe we should just use a bed-sized bed for our enormous baby?

No.

Don't I?

All right, then hand me the baby safe duct tape.

Not using it's ducked.

I was a pedantic shade, baby.

I would correct things like that.

It is ducked.

I'm going to need you to do the voice.

No, it's ducked.

There's a duct.

The duct tape that is the universal tape is duck tape.

Hell yeah.

Let's get into this.

Oh, but it's for duck tape.

It is not for ducks.

Ducked tape.

If you look

to let you use it on ducks.

Ducks.

Ducked tape is a shiny silver tape that would be not useful for anything else.

With Scott Tom, no matter what else happens in this episode, he then right will be Googling.

He's Googling right now only to find out in moments that he is wrong.

And I promise.

He's going to the dark web.

He's going to the deep web.

He's finding the first article on Wikipedia.

So the original duct tape is

going to be like an hour and 15 minutes already.

With a T at the end of it.

Duct tape to use for ducts is not the same thing as the universal tape that you are referring to.

That isn't duct serious.

I'm 100% serious.

Duct tape is a shiny, shiny, shitty tape.

It's not particularly useful for anything other than ducts.

And it's not used on ducts.

If you look at your HVAC system, you will not see what you think of as duct tape on your HVAC system.

You'll see a shitty, shiny silver tape.

Yeah.

What?

I'm 100% right.

I've looked this up before because I corrected people.

You sound so confident.

Yeah.

I corrected people and found out I was wrong.

Yeah.

Because I did the same thing you just did, and then I got told off.

And I looked it up because I was like, no way that's true.

this this correction pays it forward it's kind of amazing yeah yeah there you go

i yeah so i was like a double shitty baby i tried to do a pedantic correction that wasn't even worse i was like somebody i was like emailing a podcast to my parents it's not booping if it's not from kentucky all right so now i have to somehow steer this back to the prepared material i'm tall go ahead yeah yeah heath's tall Heath's extreme tallness also came with a few health issues.

For example, in order for baby formula to reach all the way down his giraffe-like neck, it had to be squirted with great force.

Caliente, right?

Holy shit.

It was Caliente.

Now, unfortunately, aerospace engineer and former NASA employee Lonnie George Johnson would not invent the Super Soaker until 1989.

So his dad...

That's a fun fact.

So his dad had to fashion a makeshift bellows system to get Heath through those first few tenuous months of life.

His extended digestive tract also required a far higher intake of fiber fiber than was true for most kids, a problem his father rectified with a steady diet of surprise toothpicks secreted away in his food.

The video of Heath's mom jumping on those milk bellows from the diving board never should have been cut from America's funniest home videos.

Bob Sagitt was a coward.

Yeah, coward.

She hit him with a wiffle ball bat right in the cross.

She just got him.

Yeah, she did.

Now, as Heath got older, it became clear.

He

was like, cut it.

Now, as Heath got older, it became clear that that he was only going to grow outward instead of upward, which came as a great relief to his parents.

Keep in mind that they were mentally preparing to raise a 24-foot-tall teenager.

But he remained six foot four as he aged, making his height progressively less awkward every year.

Now, in his adolescence, he did make a habit of wearing trench coats everywhere in hopes that people would assume he was just, you know, several kids trying to get into an R-rated movie.

But by the time he reached about 14 years of age, it ceased to be an issue.

Ceased to to be an issue.

Yeah.

Teens and trench coats in the 90s, definitely not an issue.

Okay, no,

it was fine.

I meant the height.

Jesus Christ.

I got to take cover behind a desk from that joke.

Jesus Christ.

No,

Tom, I meant his height.

His fashion choices would remain an issue far into the 2000s.

Man.

Okay, true story.

My friend wore a trench coat to school the top of Columbine and got

side tackled by security.

Yeah.

Cry and blackface at the time.

Now, as a teenager, Heath excelled at a number of sports, none of which were basketball, which we can all admit is weird.

But Heath's dad was the type who believed his son should have a sport for every season because the alternative was spending time with him.

So he spent his winters playing hockey.

His springs playing baseball.

His summer's playing soccer, and his autumn's playing Deardorkoth, an ancient game of unknown origin that involves forcing larger and larger objects through smaller and smaller rings.

I'm sorry, Heath didn't play football, and there are just no other autumn sports there.

So Heath was also an excellent student.

He made it all the way through high school without ever answering a question on a test incorrectly, or rather, in a way he was willing to concede was incorrect.

Sometimes the teacher disagreed, but they were fucking wrong.

It was Duck Tape.

Technically, his answer should have counted.

But the teachers didn't disagree often.

And so he went from high school to Williams College, where he would go on to graduate magna cum laude.

Wow.

Because this is a fictional biography.

Time out, time out, time out.

I didn't realize we were allowed to lie about each other.

Heath, I'm about to Venmo you a lot of money.

I need you to look at your phone.

Is it for my birthday dinner that I bought six years ago when your car just turned?

Thanks.

Thanks for that.

Well, that one's going to be the peak of my goddamn biography.

Thank you for spoiling it.

And as is true for so many

of course.

As is true for so many of us, it was during his days in college that the most pivotal moment of his life occurred.

I get it.

Lots of people experiment in college.

Not as many build dorm room fuck robots, though.

That's a little bit.

No, it was even more important than that, actually.

So this event that I'm talking about, it happened, as Heath can tell you from memory, I'm sure, at 10.48 p.m.

on November 28th, on 2009.

That was a Saturday.

Saturday, yeah.

And it lasted for only 45 seconds, but it would echo in Heath's heart and his mind for all the seconds afterwards and still rings there today.

And the moment I'm talking about, of course, is the 2009 Folger's Incest Commercial.

Woo!

In which an actor playing a teenage sister, I fucks the actor playing her 20-something brother for the most awkward three-quarters of a minute in the history of American advertising.

Fun fact, that commercial is so heath directional because they weren't sure if they wanted the two characters to be husband and wife or brother and sister when they shot it uh but they ended up cutting the two shoots together which i think we can all agree was an interesting choice i don't think that's true and they were both adults i'm pretty sure with ai accelerating at the rate it is 2025 will be the year that heath finally sees the climax of that commercial oh there's there are several reenactments cecil that you can find now so now after lots of my climaxes are called the singularity.

That's fair.

Yeah.

Now, after graduation, Heath would go on to use his degree in economic sciences to secure a job as a bartender at TGL Fridays.

Because

he could see how fucked the economy was before the rest of us, and he's like, I might as well get a bartender money.

He would then leave that job to take up a very promising career in the throwing around sacks of sand industry,

which he would eventually give up for the somehow even less promising field of podcasting.

A career move, no doubt, that seemed like a a better idea at the beginning of this biography than it does at the end.

All right.

So Cecil, tell us about Tom.

Wow.

Going after Noah with something like this is pretty difficult, but I'll give it a shot.

Okay.

Tom's mom and dad met the day Saigon fell to the Viet Cong.

It was April 30th, 1975.

It had nothing to do with Vietnam or the Vietnam War.

It just happened on that day.

Their courtship was a whirlwind affair, spurred on by a substantial lack of conversation.

When his mother asked his father to marry, his dad, like always, didn't speak.

So she just took it as a yes.

Tom's mom, Carol, had a monkey called Stacho.

He served as the ring bearer in the wedding.

They eloped to the Everglades, where they were married by a Protestant python who offered Tom's mom an apple.

And she, in turn, asked the python if it was martini flavored.

Okay.

To be fair, at this point, everything that ends up in Tom's mom's mouth is martini flavored by default.

Her something blue at the wedding was just three speared olives stuffed with blue cheese.

Yeah, it technically counts.

All right, this is a fair.

I had to make up fictional stuff from mine, Susan.

This is.

See,

I know Tom a little better.

Okay.

Their marriage lasted three years.

During that time, Tom's parents had two children and three conversations.

The conversations were never about anything too deep.

Two Two were about the weather.

The other was about where they should go to dinner.

Tom was conceived during that one, everybody.

They called it a Denny's grand slam.

Tom was born in 1978, and the doctors had some trouble removing him from the birth canal.

His shoulders stuck, and they had to exert some sort of amount of pressure on him to get him out of there.

And in the process, his neck was shoved deep into his body, and his shoulders formed this sort of protective foreskin around it.

And his

neck, his neck stays deeply buried in his chest cavity today.

Today, yeah, absolutely.

But otherwise, the Gravitron at the carnival was a fun time, right?

To be fair, based on what we know about Tom, if he had tried to let himself out, he'd have just ripped his mom in half and saved the world a ton of trouble.

Like Hulk Hogan taking off his shirt.

Exactly.

Tom and his brother, Ralph Wiggum, went to a school in a two-room schoolhouse schoolhouse in the swamps of central Florida.

One of the rooms was for the students, obviously, and the other was for the alligators that they rode to and from the schoolhouse.

Tom's alligator had to walk uphill both ways to school, and then he'd ride it home, and then he'd have to jump across several alligator heads like pitfall to get to his front door.

Inside, he would see his mom doing shots of plastic bottle doers with the monkey.

Now, that's actually

Scotcho's tiny little liver bulged as he took swig after swig of that swill.

The monkey died a year later, but it died because it bit Tom and he tried to flush it down the toilet.

And his mom caught him mid-plunger.

So she tried CPR for 30 minutes on Stacho's

tiny, fragile, and broken body.

Jesus Christ taste of toilet water, a welcome reprieve from the doers.

And he died right there in the bathroom on the floorboards.

And they can say you still hear his heartbeat if you listen really close all right see so for the last time that's just my throbbing head that's just yeah no we talked about this which is crazy because it's resonant because it's stuck in your chest cavity so it's just this sort of thrumming that comes up tom

tom was sent

i thought it was gonna shut up and go back to googling duct tail

tom was sent no i already checked

tom was sent to live with his dad near midway airport a small neighborhood surrounds that airport and they all signed a petition to kick Tom's dad out of the Homeowners Association.

They complained that Tom was so loud, he disturbed the serene sounds of the landing 747s.

So his father moved them to Frankfurt, not like an interesting one, like in Germany, the one south of I-80 in Illinois that's next to the entire village of white supremacists.

Exactly.

Indiana?

Yeah, the other side.

It's kind of sandwiched between white supremacists.

Ohio?

That was the original description of the oreo

tom spent many years tearing down road signs breaking mailboxes duct taping i'm sorry duct taping raccoons to dead people to people's steering wheels and killing any animal that came near his house The most amazing accomplishment is this.

He had to do all this before his curfew of 4.15 p.m.

Well, early morning is when the raccoons are the most trusting season.

Trusting

and filled with our garbage.

I'm comforted to know now that the raccoon was already dead when Tom duct taped it there though.

Right.

It's true.

It's not my fault they die with their arms out comically.

I mean they're just begging for a steering wheel taping.

Like our Lord in the garden.

I just want to point out that Cecil and Noah are secretly changing their duct to duck.

I didn't change anything.

I'm willing to be wrong, Heath.

I'm okay with it.

I'm

not willing for the notes to be wrong.

Oh, yeah.

We wouldn't want a spelling error in our notes.

Well, in four fifths.

Right, right, exactly.

I wouldn't want one in red or pink.

All right.

So, Tom.

Find blue, everybody, just so you know what that was.

Tom eventually found weightlifting.

We get it.

You have depression.

Whatever.

Nobody cares.

Tom eventually found weightlifting, which is kind of amazing because his eyes barely pop up outside of his upper body.

He's like a CrossFit tour.

It's an interesting shape.

He was also recruited to wrestle in his high school, which is surprising since he lacks any sort of pressure control, balance, athleticism, or tactile size.

I have some of the

tactic was to grab onto his opponent as hard as he could.

And then, when his balance failed, which it inevitably would, he would fall with them and hope that they hit the ground before he did.

Cecil, what did he call it?

He called it the 9-11.

As you can imagine, a wrestling career built on hope is only available to CM Punk.

Fun fact,

that is a person Tom wrestled in college.

And I'm not kidding on this last night.

Tom and I went to a college with a bunch of guys, and they had a wrestling league in some kids' backyard on Friday nights, and they had a ring, and they would jump off the ropes and they'd break tables and shit.

Oh, Jesus.

And then they had a free-for-all at the end of the night, like a big fucking battle royale.

And the last person standing got a pot of money that they collected to enter.

And when Tom entered, like the original backyard

reiteration, yeah.

When Tom entered.

I wasn't in it, but I played.

But Tom got in at the end to try to win the money, but they all ganged up on him because they were smart.

And then he did wrestle with CM Punk before that guy got his face obliterated in the UFC.

So

that's the best.

Cecil, I literally have a podcast whose main purpose is for Tom to tell crazy stories from his life.

And we hadn't gotten to that yet.

That's how we tell crazy stories.

This is all I would talk about.

You think that, but then you learn about the Car Wash Fight Club and you're like, well, I guess we got to spend some time on the Car Wash Fight Club Club.

I'd just be coming in hot to every room.

Wrestled CM Punk.

Okay, whatever you guys are talking about.

Moving on.

That's Phil Brooks at the time.

My great-grandma, fucked Millie Earhart, and my friend wrestled CM Punk.

It's all coming together.

Another true story I'd like to share.

One time I was at Tom's house with my now wife and then girlfriend.

Sarah came out of the kitchen and she saw Tom's brother, Ralph Wiggum, a much, much, much smaller and frail version of Tom.

This is due to years of him losing food share battles at the dinner table.

My wife asks who he is, but not in a normal way, guys.

In the way you would talk to a family pet.

And who are you, little boy?

She says.

And he says, I'm Tom's brother.

And then, no shit, in the most condescending and obvious child pandering tone, she asks,

and how old are you?

And she leans over to get to his eye level to say it.

She kind of sorority squats over, how old are you?

And he says, I'm three years older than Tom.

And then Sarah waited out in the car for me for the rest of the time.

In fairness to Sarah, my brother was about 28 and still had not finished puberty.

You got to see a picture of this guy before you judge Sarah on this.

Tom went to college in Naperville, Illinois at a college wedged between a Starbucks and a Mongolian barbecue.

He studied English lit and minored in secondary education.

He got a soul-crushing job after college and decided not to become a teacher because, well, he hates kids.

Later, he would go on to have two kids and then find two more children and then start a podcast that exclusively talks about it.

Throughout the hard years of soul-crushing labor and long hours, he kept his spirits up by reading about people lost in the Arctic or dying at sea.

All right.

Well, while we reflect on just how many of the crazy parts of that story are true,

apropos of nothing.

People dying of exposure as a kink is pretty awesome.

Like, I

get more interesting.

From freezing, I get more my own way, you know, right?

From watching them.

Whatever.

Amazing.

All right, everyone, pipe down.

As I mentioned in your invitation, we're roasting ourselves this week.

So we thought it would only be fair to you, the subject of our 400-plus episodes,

to have a turn as well.

So everybody, come on up to the mic and do your thing.

Who's first?

Oh, wow.

All the way back from episode six, it is Andrew Jackson, everybody.

Howdy, y'all.

Okay, here we go.

Since Tom did my essay, I thought I'd talk about him.

Tom

is an Irish.

He's an Irishman, full-blood, red,

red hair, and everything.

Really?

Fine, wow, wow.

That's okay.

Okay, thank you, President Jackson.

All right.

Next up, Chung Ling Su.

Hello.

No.

No, no, no, thank you.

Also, for anybody who's mad about it, a reminder that Chung Ling Su was a white guy pretending to be Asian, so you can't get mad, please.

Okay,

Frank Ducks.

You want to come up here, Ducks?

It's actually ducked.

Pretty sure that's not how it works with the tape.

But anyway, Cecil's karate doesn't hold a candle to my mind.

And I'm not sure about that duct tape.

It does.

It does.

The whole episode is that you are a liar.

So I'm wrong about the duct tape, too.

Okay.

I want to go.

Sure.

Action Park.

What do you have?

Heath threw up and pooped himself at the same time in me.

I was there.

Right.

Right.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

No.

I don't want to go.

I'll go.

Oh, Henry Ford.

All right.

Henry, come on up.

What are you doing?

Escalator is broken.

No, no, Henry.

Those are stairs.

You just walk.

No, those are your hands.

There you go.

Is this the microphone?

No.

No, this is.

Why would it look at my hands?

Which hand?

It's both hands.

I'm holding it with both.

You know what?

I'll come to you.

I'll come to you.

Here.

You got it?

Got it.

Okay, now talk.

Tom is an Irish.

I got him okay

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And we're back.

When we left off, two tales were told and three were left to go.

Tom, you're do some revenge.

Why don't you tell us a little about Noah illusions?

Certainly.

The Phoenix, the mythical bird whose death and rebirth is only possible because of its famed ability to immolate and from that immolation to be reborn, a creature made flesh from ash, may in fact be the closest known relative of Noah Lusions.

Though little is known of his parents, it can be surmised with some degree of reasonable certainty that little Noah was perhaps not made flesh from ash, but rather from flesh was born the remarkable animated ash that walks among us now.

Confirm, he is ash, and when he refers to his boomstick, that is just his bong, people.

If you guys have been saying Ash hole this whole time, I apologize for the Christmas presents this year.

Now, regardless of whether or not his origins were biological or mythical, what remains astonishing about his birth was that from the moment he left his mother's birth canal, before he even had words or was able to properly coordinate his limbs, baby Noah still managed to perform a rough pantomime criticizing the medical technique of the attending obstetrician.

And while reports in the day are admittedly sketchy, the infant Noah was both technically correct and brutally acerbic in his clumsy critique.

Yeah, if I could just hop in to correct you, wasn't what the pediatrician was expecting when he smacked Noah's ass, but it's what he got.

Take what he got.

The cold, harsh environment of the real world contrasted so starkly with the warm embrace of the gentle womb, a fact which Noah has never forgotten.

His desire to retreat back into the fold of his mother's folds, perhaps igniting his long-standing love of hot pockets.

Jesus Christ.

I know these were always going to be kind of roasty, but you only like hot pockets because they remind you of your mom's bachel takes.

I say so.

It's the gray sleeve, right?

Yeah,

I think it's the gray sleeve.

It's white on the outside.

Guys, it is crazy that you can make hot pockets exponentially more gross by adding a motive, right?

What?

fuck?

It's true.

It's true.

Things for baby Noah chugged along as you might expect for the first few years until one day, when watching the black and white moving picture box his parents had just installed in their ramshackle home,

Noah first saw Bobo, the smoking chimp.

Perhaps recalling his origins, perhaps recognizing the freedom the chimp embodied in his fearless, nonchalance to social rules and mores, Noah saw in that chimp his own future, and he began his smoking habit at the tender age of three years old.

Hey, Mo,

Hassa Fire's in the ashtray again.

Well, that's how he likes it.

You've come a long way, baby.

That's a good slogan, actually.

He won't go much farther, but you've come a long way.

Keep the cough in.

In school, Noah was a frightful student.

Noah was actually Tom's mom's chimp at first and then became Noah's working chimp.

Did a lot of extra work.

Stacho.

Everyone's related.

In school, Noah was a frightful student.

Not a bad student, but literally a frightening student.

While it was not unusual for precocious children to raise their hands frequently in class, Noah sat within the confines of his one-room schoolhouse, disinterested in the ramblings of the teachers.

He would later describe as, quote, no better educated or better able to educate than a dressed up turnip.

When he was called to the front of the class to answer some rudimentary question or puzzle, instead, Noah would take to the front of the class, snatch the chalk from his teacher's trembling hands and begin correcting the errors of grammar logic and judgment in the problems themselves it wasn't long before groans of dismay would instinctively rise from the bellies of school marms everywhere when they heard the prepubescent squeak of young noah beginning an unasked for soliloquy with let me begin by rejecting the premise

By the age of eight, Noah declared himself both emancipated and graduated and struck out on his own.

Yeah, when he walked across the stage at graduation, the principal handed him her quote.

I actually redlined it and gave it back.

It said, see me at the bottom.

So I legit, I called my 10th grade English teacher out for using the wrong form of principal on a classroom sign.

And you know what, Ms.

McQuarry?

I stand by it.

You were fucking wrong.

She hung it up with duct tape.

As most of the men and women of his generation did when needing to cross the vast expanses of a country as yet not entirely tamed, young Noah took to riding the rails.

Actually, hopping a train in motion being far too difficult for Noah's young body, he instead took up the practice of finding some beleaguered rail bureaucrat and just harangued him until the confused fellow eventually gave up and conceded the point that, yes, the U.S.

rail system does benefit from heavy federal subsidies and the people therefore do have a right to benefit from those rail systems.

And wasn't Noah then entitled not only to ride on the train, but also perhaps from some of the man's packed lunch?

He stole the guy's copy of Atlas shrugged, too.

That was while riding the rails across our great nation, then boasting not nearly so many states as in its present incarnation, that he came across the performers of the Big Apple Circus.

Here, Noah again felt himself at home in a way that he couldn't within the constraints of modern society.

Among what he felt were his people, Noah began to learn the ancient arts of juggling and balancing random stuff on other stuff.

A skill which, serving no practical purpose, delighted Noah, not instead of their practicality, but precisely because they were so completely divorced from all utility.

Okay, am I the only one who's going to do a fictional one?

Jesus.

Also, if sandbag disruptor isn't practical, I don't know what it is, Tom.

It doesn't even make sense what you said.

It's just gibberish.

It wasn't even English.

Read an economics.

And so it was that Noah began to grow up, riding the rails with a troop of the big top and seeing and criticizing the world.

From town to town, there was no elected official or state policy that was immune to his biting critique.

Having been gifted a soapbox from one of his friends within the circus, Noah began his early career in forming diatribes from his very first platform.

a wooden crate stamped ivory, the symbol of whiteness, berating a nation now becoming a long-standing tradition, even to the present day.

Oh, Tom, here's another rock.

I think I see a part of that glass house that's still standing.

It was on one of his many sojourns across our great nation that Noah, taking a break from performing for, as he called them, the goddamn rubes, the goddamn rubes, met the love of his life.

Somewhere in the backwaters of Georgia, he heard the voice of an angel calling out from somewhere deep within the woods, followed quickly by a thud and a muffled squeak.

Intrigued and perhaps slightly aroused, Noah followed the sounds deep.

I do like a good muffled squeak, let me tell you.

I'm not here to judge.

Just, you know, just

get it.

Just a biographer.

Noah followed the sounds deep into primordial Georgian wilderness when he spotted her.

There upon a riverbank, Clad in child's overalls and a straw hat made for a doll, stood Lucinda, singing and gleefully swinging what would later be described as her varmint hammer.

It was in that moment that Noah realized that his heart never fully belonged to himself, and that his journey of thousands of miles had been made so that he might one day happen upon the diminutive woman who so clearly had captured it.

At the moment he realized this, however, tragedy struck.

Without warning, a bullfrog, of no particular note or size, suddenly leapt from the water and in one gulp swallowed whole tiny Lucinda before disappearing into the murky depths of the shallow water.

At once, determined not to lose his love mere moments upon finding her, Noah dove into the water and seized the frog, pulling loose from its belly Lucinda and setting her upon a small stick to catch her breath.

Are you all right?

exclaimed a shocked and love-struck Noah allusions, to which Lucinda only laughed.

Of course I am silly.

It happens all the time.

She was nonetheless taken by the gesture, and thus began their whirlwind courtship.

Wow, Wow, Tom's not even gonna mention that I was the bullfrog.

I fucking hate being you guy.

This is bullshit.

Noah and Lucinda together began their lives with the circus, with Noah introducing Lucinda to the world of juggling and Lucinda introducing Noah to the world of narcotics.

Yes, you see, Lucinda was known across Georgia at the time as the Hillbilly South's own Pablo Escobar, her tiny stature allowing her to escape law enforcement by scurrying into crevices where men or dogs simply could not follow.

Noah then found his second true love, weed, which upon trying for the first time caused him to loudly declare, this almost makes you stupid fuckers tolerable.

That was in the year of our Lord 1963, and Noah has not one hour of his waking life been sober since.

Yeah, one time we took a plane to Japan, but yeah, he actually had a bunch of THC stored up in his mitochondria, I think.

So like,

yeah,

powerhouse of the cell.

Also, gummies.

Also, I had gummies.

Now, the heyday of the traveling circus had begun to wind down, and Noah and Lucinda had no desire to sell out to Ringling Brothers, or as Noah called it, Big Cirque.

And so the pair.

So the pair needed to stop traveling and settle down into more stable and less itinerant lives.

It happened that, juggling aimlessly about New York City, Noah found himself standing in front of a large toy store in Midtown Manhattan with a sign in the window that very coincidentally read, help wanted, toy demonstrators must be preternaturally agile and coordinated, no people skills necessary.

Not one to believe in fate, Noah did believe in opportunity, and he heard the knock loudly enough.

It was in that store that Noah met one Eli Bosnik, a 9-11 truther and conspiracy theorist, and the only Jewish person who believed that the Jews probably did it.

regardless of what it happened to be.

Noah began his usual process of belittling and berailing, and to his surprise, discovered that not only was it effective in converting Eli, but he was also able to perform his miracle of intellectual conversion while keeping six hacky sacks going at once.

He also met Heath, who helped him get something down from a high shelf.

Alas.

We stocked the sandbags up on shelves at the stores.

They did, it's true.

Alas, but all good things must, it seems, come to an end.

And one cold and blustery Christmas season, Noah found out that he had been fired from his toy store job he took it hard impossibly hard retreating into himself and living deep in the Pennsylvanian woods in an unheeded single wide trailer Noah began plotting his revenge just as he was putting the finishing touches on a quote a serves you fucking right device which I won't describe in further detail for legal reasons, he realized there might be a way to channel his rage and misanthropy and turn it into money.

In short, he had discovered podcasting.

Yeah, the people at Noah's Old Company had already built a pretty big bomb, so it seemed redundant at that point, too.

Listeners of this show know the rest of the story.

How he first reached out to Heath to help him get a microphone from that top shelf at Best Buy before realizing that Heath was actually both clever and tall.

And how he asked Eli to guest on the show on a lark and realized that actually self-effacing New York Jews might know a little something about comedy.

And how eventually he and Lucinda found some measure of success, moving finally from the backwoods of Pennsylvania and into the backwoods of Georgia.

A step, if not up, then at least not down.

He also likes video games.

A lot.

Well done indeed.

Well, podcast listener, as you know by now, The important part of the podcast is about to begin.

The part about me.

I assume this timestamp is carved onto some gold plate somewhere, and you're listening back through the annals of history, both for the story of and exhibition with my genius.

So, Heath, tell us about me.

Elias Q.

Bosnik.

Wow, Eli Bosnik, we're going to talk about Eli.

What can you say about Eli Bosnik?

It hasn't already been etched on the inside of the bathroom stall at the Greyhound station.

Not much.

Not much, but I'll give it a shot.

Eli was born in 1987 wearing geriatric Velcro sneakers, oversized and one mesh shorts, and a loud t-shirt with an obnoxious meme on it.

Huh.

Since then, Eli's grown out a beard a little, otherwise usually spared.

Same year as the garbage pail kids movie.

Things have never made so much sense to me.

Yeah, young Eli just didn't realize that junkie Jeff was not intended to be aspirational.

Okay, but here's the thing.

It's not that Eli wasn't a beautiful baby.

It's that he wasn't trying to be a beautiful baby and look good.

He was being ironic as a baby.

That's why

the visual stuff.

So Eli grew up in Binghamton, New York.

And against all odds, he is not.

a member of the Klan right now.

He has done firearms training at their literal facilities, but that was it.

That was it.

And Eli not being part of a hate group is thanks in large part to his amazing parents.

His father, David, was a high school and college football star who went on to become an extremely beloved teacher.

I heard David had four interceptions in one game at Poké.

Yes, yes, in the Rose Bowl somehow.

He led his high school team to the fucking Rose Bowl.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Super, super cool, dad.

Like the coolest.

And Eli's mom, Liz, is an extremely talented and celebrated writer.

Eli would never tell you this because he doesn't like to brag about his mom, but Liz actually won a Lee Bennett Hopkins Award for poetry.

Get the fuck out of here.

That is prestigious, man.

It sure is.

And she's an excellent professor as well, who's taught at some great institutions like Colgate, Hamilton, and Sarah Lawrence.

And her whole life seems super cool.

Like on top of being a great poet and novelist herself, she was married to John Gardner, one of my personal favorite authors.

Grendel was amazing.

Love Grendel.

So good.

So good.

And fun fact about Eli, this is his mom, one of the ghosts from Nickel Mountain was actually based on Liz.

No way.

Wow.

So cool, man.

Okay, said like men who have not read the book.

Okay, my mom is as close as John Gardner got.

to writing Lolita and with a similar age difference.

So let's just move forward.

Okay, please don't interrupt.

Did you guys know?

Did you guys know that JD Salinger tried to flirt with Liz and she totally shot him down?

I did not know that.

Nice.

He is a bad author.

He is a bad author.

Yes, he is.

Did you guys know that Liz Rosenberg anagrams to Zen or Gerbils?

Oh my God.

Wow.

His parents are so interesting.

Okay, so let's talk about Eli's childhood.

He had amazing parents.

And And just a reminder, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Award is like a super duper serious honor.

And of course, it's named after Lee Bennett Hopkins, the educator, poet, author, and anthologist who was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1938.

You don't say,

fun fact, Scranton.

is the setting for the American version of The Office starring Steve Carell.

And Steve is amazing.

Yeah.

As a comedian, an improviser, you tap dance.

He can tell Steverell.

I I loved him on the daily show back in the day.

Amazing.

Right.

And remember in Bruce Almighty, when he was doing the speaking in tongues,

his comedic gibberish was going to be compared to Jim Carrey, but still crushed.

He's so good.

Hey, what about crazy stupid love?

Very underrated.

Love that.

Yeah.

Agreed.

He is great.

If since our episode was building to a prank on me, I'm going to mention you all by name in the notes.

Steve Carell.

Wow.

Just so much talent, Steve Carell.

Wow.

Wow.

But yeah, okay, getting back to Eli.

Another important thing about Eli, he has an amazing cousin.

She was the chief of obstetrics at the Cleveland Clinic for years.

And during that time, she revolutionized the field using advanced robotics to assist in delivery.

Wow.

She sounds really smart.

So smart.

And she saved so many lives.

A good person.

Just a truly great person.

For society.

Yes.

Yeah, Yeah, the whole world.

Eli's family member.

But we're getting off track again.

I want to talk about Eli for real.

In particular, his amazing great-grandparents who survived the Holocaust.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

As a Jewish family living in Poland, it must have been absolutely terrifying.

Somehow they lived through that horrific time and eventually made it to America where they continued the family.

During the darkest, darkest moments, all they had was their faith.

And then generations later, we got Eli.

But okay, we're running out of time.

Something, something Tevya in high school, I don't know, IBS, NYU, penicillin, penicillin, penicillin.

Selling light up condoms at a toy store.

Should have used those condoms to avoid the penicillin now that I think about it.

More IBS,

more IBS again.

And of course, abandon the Jewish faith of those incredible Holocaust surviving ancestors and become an atheist podcaster.

I mean,

you're not wrong.

I just wish it was long.

No, okay, sorry, sorry.

One other important thing about Eli.

Eli's parents would go on to adopt another kid, but this is very important.

There's no official record of them saying, we're hoping to get, quote, a good one this time.

That is gesture.

All right, Heath.

Short but sweet.

Like, my revenge will be noted.

Sorry, sorry.

He also has a blog.

Or no, he had a blog, but like he had a blog.

It's hard to get a blog.

People, multiples.

Anyways, that leaves us to the reason why we're all here.

Nay, perhaps the reason this crazy dance called a universe began.

The best friendship of Cecil Something Italian and Eli Bosnik.

But before there can be an eclipse, there must be two celestial bodies.

You heard the brief story of my son.

Now prepare for the moon.

The yang to my yin, or as you call it off in the way distant future, the Cecil to my Eli Bosnik.

Cecil Something Italian was born in Chicago or something.

I don't know, but I do know he was born poor.

As a child, he would often sit by drain pipes while things in his neighborhood exposed.

That's true.

But from such a spark.

Sad, G.I.

Joe.

Yes.

But from such a spark, greatness was made.

Greatness in the form of Cecil Something Italian.

It says a lot about my childhood when someone can ask if I remember the refinery exploding and I have to ask which time.

It was fine the first time.

Refined the second time.

For it was on the rough streets of Chicago or maybe somewhere else that Cecil learned the blade.

The switchblade of first, of course.

The Tommy Knocker, the butterfly knife, the rapier, and eventually, the rapiest.

Jesus Christ, Eli Bottom.

So in our notes, there's space here for a joke.

Thank you, Tom.

Thank you for jumping on that.

Certainly space there for a joke.

Soon, none could match Cecil's blade.

The sound of his shoes made of food stamps on the copper-stone streets of Chicago or maybe somewhere else made his fellow Dickensian orphans flee in terror.

Yes, his own sword teacher, Mandy Batankin, who once famously said, I think it would be a good idea for me to do a one-man show about Anne Frank starring me in a puppet of Anne Frank.

But despite his skill, Cecil struck him down, shedding the only tear he would ever cry in the process.

I used that Anne Frank puppet as an offhand parry device for many years.

Good, wholesome times.

Cecil was so good, guys.

He could sword fight a guy with one hand while making the puppet sword fight that guy's dog with the other.

It was pretty extreme shit.

That's true.

There's video.

due to his terrible horrible disgusting poverty cecil or as he was known at the time l tigray ate only rocks and pebbles until the age of 16 when rifling through a dumpster he met a rat with a dream to cook after a series of wacky happenstances catalogued in the documentary ratatouille cecil went to cooking school where he met tom curry who was studying English.

Studying English.

Yeah, you just boil the food.

English is a real easy department in culinary school.

You just boil everything.

Done.

There were so many of us English majors coming out of the culinary at the time.

When at last Cecil had won the heart of the food critic, he knew he was ready to dive headfirst into the world and give the gift of himself to the masses.

So he did the thing he did best.

He stabbed that rat in the heart at midnight on Honeybeeans,

breathed in that rat's last breath out at exactly midnight, and gained all his cooking knowledge.

Some say he still has that rat's affection for cheese to this day.

Right.

And then he mentored those turtle ninjas.

It's a cool story, but tell us about Cecil and Batman.

I shall, Heath.

I shall.

You see, every Lone Ranger needs his Tonto.

Every Batman needs his Robin.

And also some examples where the two aren't fucking.

After having explained to him multiple times that he couldn't study English at Cecil's cooking school, Tom and Cecil started reading.

Yeah.

Tom and Cecil started reading philosophy or something, and they were friends.

A friendship that would turn out to be a second only to my own, maybe third.

In Shakespeare's 12th night, the clown Fiesti says, fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings.

The husbands, the bigger.

I don't know what that means, but I think it's a tip joke.

And I didn't know how to transition to Sarah, so now I have.

Good job, me.

Because yes,

I am Cecil's best friend.

Yes, his soul is entwined with mine, as no two souls have ever been or ever will be again.

But there is another,

his wife, who we met in a park.

She was drawing a sweet crow wearing an eyes-wide shut mask, dipping its feathers in blood.

Probably,

that reminds me of all the people I killed.

And they knew that they would be second place in each other's hearts forever.

Okay, at what point does this fictional biography cross over into sexually harassing your co-worker, guys?

This is important to know

okay but also a sweet crow wearing an eyes wide shut mask dipping its feathers into blood is an amazing

you can have that one sarah for their honeymoon they stepped through the stargate and brought back some of those time-traveling god cats which they keep in their home Scientists guess there are between 11 and 3 god cats in Cecil's home at any given time, but there is no way to know for sure.

The brave, the foolish, the full of vim and vigor seek those cats and trade belly rubs for a glimpse into the future.

But the future holds only death, and what the cat sees cannot be unseen.

My favorite part is when I'm sleeping past their breakfast and they stand on my chest screaming my future beats when I wake up.

Yeah, it's my favorite part.

Wait, how do they apply the electrodes, though?

Blockcasters are a rare lot.

Precious jewels that function differently than you,

as Cecil would call you, normies.

I would never say that because I am very relatable and just like you.

But Cecil says it all the time, just so you know.

Anyways, we cannot speak words, we podcasters, the way a normal person can, answering questions, ordering from restaurants, we fill with words like come in a teenager's pulse.

Okay, come in.

And we must release.

Lest we explode.

Like a teenager's ball.

So Cecil started a podcast with his second best friend, Tom, called Everyone's a Critic.

It's a movie review show, much like God Awful Movies,

available wherever you get your podcast, but it wasn't nearly as good.

It was not nearly as good, no?

Tom said Goodfellas was only okay.

Okay, that is still one of my most raving endorses.

All so long.

It's overlooked.

It's true.

What we learned from Everyone's a Critic, which I have heard every episode of, is that Tom doesn't care for film, the movie's actor.

Not really,

not a fan.

From there, Tom and Cecil decided to enter the world of secular activism.

Podcast atheism looked so different back then than it does today.

There was hinkerpunk, kerchow, hickory hour, the Bible Belt something, the unholy whatever, and then also Tom and Cecil.

Seth Andrews was still Christian, and Hemet Mehta was still a math teacher.

So being the only atheist podcast that spoke fluid English was a great benefit to Tom and Cecil.

And soon they soared to the top of the chart.

Yeah, we definitely nudged that one guy out who wouldn't edit out the part where of the recording where he let his cat out.

It was a real tough room to fucking get into.

One guy.

Fuck you.

Yeah, no,

the two guys.

The one guy who spoke German and did it, and the other guy.

Eli actually had a show back then.

I think it was called Mouth Noises Before Every Sentence, but it was in a different category.

Exactly.

Spoken like a man who edits me.

But

then, as you've heard so many times today, a miracle happened.

Heath and Noah started a podcast so that I could eventually be on it.

And with that promise on their lips, they were raised from the obscurity of the Honky Tonk Bible Squonk, where they shared the spotlight of cognitive dissonance.

And then an episode of Be Reasonable, so hilarious that it would lead to the very program to which you listen.

But none of that matters.

None of these people

matter.

Because then I arrived.

God, by which I mean that guy guy from Alibaba, reached down and smote Toys R Us, leaving my tremendous genius without an outlet.

Ethan Noah came to me on bended knee and whispered, Okay, lend us your genius.

And I said,

sure.

Yeah, okay, so we were actually bending down to put a dollar in Eli's hat at Washington Strip Park.

He's doing stupid, I don't know, tricks or some bullshit with cards or something.

So it was like, nobody, nothing, Eli, yes, I will lend you my genius.

And we were like, what?

Yeah.

we didn't ask you to lend us your genius you were desperate we asked you to sell it to us outright and you did it's true i did

it was crazy and that got him could have been the end of things my friend except for a snarky email about halloween costumes which would set the world afire and bring cecil and i together at last

and that began and ended The very first time anyone believed Eli Bob.

See up at Gale, a lady who totally turned out to be a bigot wrote an email to her students saying to look the other way if they saw racist Halloween costumes.

And then her husband ran across the campus with his hands over his ears to escape the consequences.

In fact, he was so ashamed of his actions that he secretly invented a time machine to destroy all the evidence of what he had done.

If not for the incredibly reliable news source, Yikik, his actions would have been hidden forever.

But luckily, I, investigative reporter Eli Bosnik, appeared on Atheistically Speaking Incognitive Dissonance to put the truth on the map.

Yeah, Eli had called no fact-checking like he was J.D.

Vance in a debate.

I did.

I did.

That was fun.

I think it was the first time we ever had to put out an apology episode immediately following it.

To say Tom and Cecil.

You don't have to make shit up to find racist people in America, man.

There's so many real ones.

To say Tom and Cecil were impressed is an understatement.

They said of the episode, wow, that was the greatest episode we've ever done.

And we'd like to apologize to those of you who were upset about the things Eli said that turned out to be not true.

Blowing praise like that.

Yeah, yeah, I actually think we offered refunds to our listeners, and this was before Patreon.

Trying to give him time, but yeah, you had to give it an hour of your life.

It was rough.

Yeah,

I'm gonna die at 53 just from that episode.

Just, oh, yeah, that's why

a spark.

A spark was lit.

Oh, God, I can't keep doing this.

No.

That's, and the podcast to the music just fades in.

A spark was lit.

A flame was phlemid.

And a friendship had begun.

When a charity needed money to burn witches in Africa, I used my insult powers to make sure they had the dough.

But they did.

When Keith needed several Michelin star dinners a month to keep him going,

we joined forces

and raised money to make those dinners possible.

And also, maybe did some stuff for some poor people, hopefully.

Yeah, I sure hope so.

Just going to jump in right here to give Cecil a clean.

Thank you.

It was after the second of those charity fundraisers as sweat ran down our manly backs and into our eyes.

Where do you think your eyes are, man?

We said to each other, we should start a podcast together about stuff and things and indeed it was and always would be

amen

all right noah you brought this monstrosity upon us if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence what would it be this was a terrible mistake and i've ruined 2025 already sorry fair enough all right noah are you ready for the quiz i i guess so why not cecil

What is your favorite thing about me?

It's an essay question.

I thought I'm just going to jump in right here for you, Cecil.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

Clean cut.

Okay, Noah, which of the following is the most tragic element of today's discussion?

A, Tom competing for his mother's love with an alcoholic monkey.

I lost.

B, my complete lack of any distinctive quality ever.

That's fun.

C, one of Cecil's recurring childhood nightmares of an oil refinery explosion was actually a real oil refinery explosion happening next to him again.

or D,

Eli's understanding of his relationship with Cecil.

God, that's a tough one because they're all pretty fucking tragic.

I'm going to go with secret answer E, the fact that I didn't even make it into this fucking question.

That was correct.

Okay, okay.

I do have one about Eli, everybody.

So let me just do this.

We all know Eli's penchant for lying about pretty much everything.

So with that in mind, what is his favorite TV show as a kid?

A

misleading Rainbow.

B,

Spurious George.

C, George, My Little Phony, or D,

Schmuck Tales.

Oh,

it's got to be D Schmuck Tails.

It's got to be 100%.

Oh,

all right.

Well, Cecil talked about me last, so he wins.

All right, well, let's get it.

I bet it was a concept.

Get a Noah essay again.

Yeah, I should do some kind of penance for bringing this shit upon the world.

I got it.

I got it.

All right.

Well, for everyone that isn't me and also me, I'm me.

Thanking you for hanging out with me tonight.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, we'll do a show like normal again.

Between now and then, you can hear me on Dear Old Dad, Scathing Atheists, God Awful Movies, DD Minus, The Skepticrat, and even a couple episodes of Cognitive Dissonance.

Those aren't up anymore.

Those other guys.

And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

And hey, Cecil,

Merry Christmas.

This episode comes out at the beginning of January, man.

Fuck you guys, okay?

Your mom is such a good writer.

Such a great writer.

It's like you don't even care about exploration.

I do.

I just find what happened along the way funny.

Oh, so Frostbite is funny to you?

I mean, yeah, very funny.

Tom, we're starting to roast back up.

Are all of the explorers done yelling at you?

Yeah, I think they're done.

I didn't make any difference.

So mean.

I ate my own toes.

You don't see how that's funny?

No.

Beautiful anonymous changes each week.

It defies genres and expectations.

For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son.

But just the week before that, we just talked the whole time about Star Trek.

We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery.

It's unpredictable, it's real, it's honest, it's raw.

Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts.