Episode 19: Washington D.C. - “Justicia Omnibus”

Speaker 1 Greetings, dear listener of ePluribus Motto.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. Your ears, heart, mind, and nose do not deceive you.
This episode is devoted to ePluribus Motto's very first non-state or commonwealth, Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I will tell you that your liver is deceiving you. Oh, no, oh no.

Speaker 1 Because only your liver remembers that this, you were thinking that it was going to be different this week.

Speaker 1 This is the opposite of our plug in the credits last week when we advertised that Nevada was next on our list.

Speaker 2 But here's the thing. I haven't spent that much time in our nation's capital, but I have spent time in the other state in question.
The other,

Speaker 2 well, Nevada.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 I'm trying something different.

Speaker 1 I'm trying something new. I was really excited to talk about our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., and Janet really wanted to talk about

Speaker 1 Nevada.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we did a little switcheroo.

Speaker 1 That's all. Rest assured, Nevada fans and residents, we are not giving up on you.
Our episode on that state will be the finale of season two of ePluribus Motto.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's right.
And in the meantime, please welcome to your table. Please welcome to your dining table of thoughts, Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 That is its nickname, your dining table of thoughts.

Speaker 1 More information on that and other things in Washington, D.C. right now as ePlurbis Motto begins.

Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome one and all to the Elvira Bass Room in the basement of the Blue Hill Public Library here in the state of Maine.

Speaker 1 The macerating toilet in the restroom next door has stopped macerating, so now it is time to record a podcast. My name is John Hodgman.

Speaker 2 And over here near the macerating leafblowers of Los Angeles in the hills of Hollywood, I'm Janet Varney.

Speaker 2 Welcome to Geek Florvas Motto, the show that celebrates all the official and unofficial mottos, flags, mammals, and more of the still, for now, however implausibly, United States.

Speaker 1 And not just states, of course, as you know, we have now covered not one, not two, not three, but all four existing commonwealths.

Speaker 1 in these United States and Commonwealths of the United States, Virginia, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, they're all done, leaving us now with our one and our only district, Columbia.

Speaker 1 That's right, we're in the swamp, our nation's current capital, unless and until it is moved to Palm Beach, which seems inevitable. That's right, we're talking about Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 Now, Janet, when I think of Washington, D.C., I think about cherry blossoms on the National Mall, the Air and Space Museum, Catholic priests possessed by Satan throwing themselves down steep sets of stairs in historic Georgetown.

Speaker 1 I think of eating a half-smoke from Ben's Chili Bowl backstage right before performing at the historic Lincoln Theater in D.C. Questionable performance decision.

Speaker 1 What I really think about most of the time, Janet,

Speaker 1 is that time back in 2005

Speaker 1 when Fugazi's own Ian Mackay dropped by my book reading, not to see me, but to see David Reese. David's more punk rock than I am.

Speaker 1 And he just wanted to wish us well before disappearing into the Washington, D.C. night.
It was a real delight. Janet, have you spent much time in Washington, D.C.?

Speaker 1 And if you have, what do you remember about it?

Speaker 2 Hold on for a second because I just got lost in a reverie of trying to think of who you are more punk rock than.

Speaker 1 Not many. Having trouble coming up with any one.
Not many.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're definitely more punk rock than Paul Saboran. I love you, Paul Saboran, but I don't.
I think maybe John Hodgman is a little more punk rock, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 1 I might be more punk rock than Paul Saboran. And by the way, that's not a position I'm taking.
Just saying hypothetically, I understand it. Yeah.
But I'm not more straight-edged than Paul.

Speaker 1 Ian Mackay, of course, being the reluctant founder of the straight-edge movement in punk rock. That's right.
That's right. That's right.
Well, we'll talk about that more later.

Speaker 2 We will. And Paul, I'll be keeping my eyes out for all of the puppet accounts that you come up with on social media to attack me for that.
I love you, buddy. And I, again, could be wrong.

Speaker 2 I was thinking on the fly. What I think of when I think of Washington, D.C., I have not been there many times.
I think I have maybe been there three times.

Speaker 2 I went there at least once, maybe twice, to perform improvised comedy with friends like Rachel Dratch and John Michael Higgins and Cole Stratton at

Speaker 1 the comedy festival there.

Speaker 2 Big brags, big name drops.

Speaker 1 What I remember,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 lucky to call them colleagues and performing friends.

Speaker 2 My memory of at least one of the shows was that we were put into a sort of

Speaker 2 downstairs basement bar, tiny stage, possibly punk rock venue.

Speaker 2 And it was a very, it was a shotgun sort of shape.

Speaker 2 So people were

Speaker 2 very far away and they only had handheld microphones for us. Right.
Which, if you've done improv,

Speaker 2 usually you want no mics, or you definitely want not handheld mics. So, everything we did became

Speaker 1 to the folks. Why?

Speaker 2 Well, because you're doing dumb scene work in which you're maybe getting physical and kind of running around or standing and sitting in ways that when you have a microphone in front of you, suddenly all of the material you're doing feels like it has to involve why would I be holding a microphone as this person holding my store.

Speaker 1 It takes you out of the scene.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, so, but it was so loud that we had to use them.
So suddenly

Speaker 2 improv comedy just became like all of us standing in a row at the lip of the stage holding microphones, just kind of improvising without moving at all.

Speaker 2 I can't say it was our best show, but it like all good punk rockers, you make the best with what you got

Speaker 2 and you go rogue. I think that was the same trip where I did not, Rachel and I did not get there in time because we we took the train together from D.C.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 you were in D.C.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry, from New York City.

Speaker 2 Thank you for that. And so we missed out on the Segway tour of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 that some of our friends went on.

Speaker 2 So I think of that missed opportunity when I think of that. Also, my partner, Brandon, is a journalist and was doing a story on the Museum of the Bible.

Speaker 2 And so we did a trip two years ago after I did a convention in Altoona, which I think actually came up when we had our discussion about Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 We drove from Altoona to, with a short stop at Falling Water, the Frank Lloyd Wright

Speaker 2 house, drove to DC and went to the Museum of the Bible. I felt so weird, we both did, going when there were all these amazing museums in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 trundled into the Museum Museum of the Bible and

Speaker 2 looked at many, many old, pretty Bibles, went to the downstairs exhibit that was temporary, you know, the sort of like, hey, we switch up stuff down here, whereas everything else kind of stays the same.

Speaker 2 It was

Speaker 2 an exhibit on

Speaker 2 Christianity and science and

Speaker 2 how they work together. And we went through the whole exhibit, which involved like,

Speaker 2 you know, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and like quotes from Carl Sagan.

Speaker 2 And by the way, I mean, no shade on some of my dear Christian friends who truly are living the word and are kind and wonderful people.

Speaker 2 This, when I walked out of the exhibit, we turned to each other and said,

Speaker 2 what was that about? Like, what did that establish for us? And it didn't establish anything. Like, there was no sense of walking out and being like, I guess the creation theory is real.

Speaker 2 Or, like, I guess the world's great scientists believe that dinosaurs didn't exist. Like, we just sort of left feeling like, huh, what did we just go walk through?

Speaker 1 This museum of the Bible, was it a religion? Like, did it have a religious point of view or a historical point of view?

Speaker 2 I will say that it was a religious point of view in the guise of being a historical point of view.

Speaker 1 And it was in D.C.?

Speaker 2 And it's in D.C. And if I may,

Speaker 2 if I may establish, if I may establish for you who founded this museum, you need to only know two words, and those two words rhyme, and those two words are Hobby Lobby.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, gotcha.

Speaker 2 Also known for stealing shriny shrouds and important artifacts that they have absolutely no right to have that the black market supplies for them as they steal from Middle Eastern countries.

Speaker 1 Museum of the Bible.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was established in 2010.

Speaker 2 It's very old. It's a very old ancient museum.

Speaker 1 Excuse me. Established.

Speaker 1 I got

Speaker 1 some bad information there. This makes more sense.
It's a non-profit organization was established in 2010. It opened November 17, 2017.
That makes sense. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It makes sense that that would be around the time

Speaker 1 that what had once been

Speaker 1 a garden of sculptures in the classical Greek mode, an ode

Speaker 1 to America's best dreams of itself, its separation of church and state, and its frankly erotic obsession with Grecian statuary

Speaker 1 should start to be transformed into a semi-theocracy.

Speaker 2 It was, it was a, yeah, it was a trip. It was a trip.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's that's unfortunately, that's the most recent trip I took was a couple years ago.

Speaker 2 I was there, and we we did not have a ton of time there because we had to be up in New York for something else.

Speaker 2 And as I said, I loved being there. I always loved being there.

Speaker 1 And I felt real weird about the fact that I went to one institution.

Speaker 2 And that was where I went. Again, no shade on my Christian friends.

Speaker 1 It says here that the museum claims it is non-sectarian. And, quote, it is not political and it will not proselytize.

Speaker 1 And you know what I say to that? I cannot agree. I don't believe you.
Cannot agree. I don't believe you, Museum of the Bible.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't believe you. So you missed that segue tour?

Speaker 2 I missed the segue tour.

Speaker 1 Well, speaking of segues, let's move into our next segment.

Speaker 2 I wish I could make a good cricket sound with just my voice.

Speaker 1 Janet, do you happen to know

Speaker 1 the motto of the District of Columbia?

Speaker 2 I think it's Latin.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 is it something about justice or am I totally wrong?

Speaker 1 No, you're not totally wrong. You're totally on track.
The first word is

Speaker 1 it? Justitia.

Speaker 1 Okay. And the second word is omnibus,

Speaker 1 meaning justice for all. A very quaint concept of equality under the law that we used to, at least pretend to believe in, but let's be honest, it was never exactly true.

Speaker 1 Just as the Piscataway and Nacochtank people who once thrived in the delta between the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, where D.C. now swampily sits.
Janet, you remember those lords of Baltimore?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Calverts.
Yeah. Well, it was Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, the rare sequel that is as bad as the first, who in 1663 gave away land that was not his to give.

Speaker 1 850 acres of prime Potomac waterfront to some guy named Thomas Dent. Thomas Dent turned around and gave to the Native American residents smallpox and a bunch of other diseases they had no immunity to.

Speaker 1 And thus began the European settlement of the region that we now know as the District of Columbia, district meaning district. Columbia being the

Speaker 1 anthropomorphic figure of Lady America. Okay.
Before the Statue of Liberty, the Americas were depicted as a young woman named Columbia.

Speaker 2 Who always wanted to have her own movie studio.

Speaker 1 She always wanted to have her own movie studio and be acquired by Sony

Speaker 1 and hang on to those rights for Spider-Man

Speaker 1 villains for dear life.

Speaker 2 That's what I think of when I think of Columbia. I think of

Speaker 2 that girl. That girl who does kind of look like the Statue of Liberty-ish.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 the vision of Liberty, Statue of Liberty, really eclipsed Lady Liberty, really eclipsed Columbia as an image, as an iconic image of

Speaker 1 American-ness,

Speaker 1 for better or for worse, uh, sometime in the 20th century. But until in the 19th century, Columbia was all there was, it was just

Speaker 1 another lady with a different torch.

Speaker 2 I can't believe how quickly we can just toss them away as ladies with torches. Ladies be having torches.
You know how ladies are.

Speaker 1 You know how ladies are. There's always a new one.

Speaker 1 Even among current residents of the District of Columbia. Oh, and Columbia obviously is named for,

Speaker 1 well, you know who.

Speaker 1 The genocider. Columbus.
Columbus. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 Even among current residents of the District of Columbia, justice is not exactly for all.

Speaker 1 The motto might be just to see an omnibus, but do you know what's on the license plates, the slogan that's on the license plates of D.C. cars?

Speaker 2 Is it, I can't help but notice I've been paying taxes?

Speaker 1 Very close. It's a little bit more direct than that.
Okay.

Speaker 1 End taxation without representation.

Speaker 1 Because by constitutional order and by design,

Speaker 1 the District of Columbia is not a state.

Speaker 1 And that that means the 700,000 or so residents of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 And by the way, in case you're curious,

Speaker 1 the city of Washington is coterminous with the District of Columbia. That is to say, they're the same thing.
Didn't always used to be that way.

Speaker 1 Eventually, they expanded the city and they reduced the district. Now it's all the same thing.
But the residents of this district, almost three-quarter million of them,

Speaker 1 have no meaningful representation in Congress. They have 200,000 more people in D.C.

Speaker 1 than live in all of Wyoming. Wyoming gets two U.S.
Senators. D.C.
gets zero. D.C.
residents have only been able to vote for president since when would you guess?

Speaker 1 If you had to guess, if you don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 And it's the 23rd Amendment, by the way, in case that helps.

Speaker 2 Well, I was going to say, I mean,

Speaker 2 I feel like a a long time passed before they could, and I don't even know. If you told me it was like 1960, I would be like, well, all right.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to tell you it was 1960.

Speaker 1 Because it was 1961. Nuh-uh.
Yeah. You did a good job.
Oh, my goodness. Okay.

Speaker 2 I wonder if maybe somewhere in the back recesses of my brain.

Speaker 2 I wonder if downstairs in the Elvira bass of my brain, where it's nice and chilly and there's a macerating toilet. Somehow I knew that it was 1961 and I rounded down.

Speaker 1 Elvira Bass was a patron of this library. I call her Elvira, Mistress of the Bass.
I think that's wonderful.

Speaker 2 You may recall that when you first appeared down there,

Speaker 2 I thought that Elvira Bass was like a fish named Elvira that was like a beloved pet of, and I mean no disrespect to dear Elvira.

Speaker 1 Yes, no, that was when I first appeared. Now I live in this library.
Now I'm the ghost who lives in this basement. Wonderful.

Speaker 2 Lucky them.

Speaker 2 1961. I mean, that is just a long time

Speaker 2 to have even less to do with the way the country runs. I don't know.
It's fascinating.

Speaker 1 D.C. does have a single representative in the House of SAME.

Speaker 1 That is D.C. at-large rep Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served since 1991, can sit on committees, can, I think, participate in debates, cannot vote for anything.

Speaker 1 A non-voting member of Congress.

Speaker 1 So wild. Which is the same.
This, I can say, that is the same for Guam and Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories.
They also have representatives who can't vote. But unlike those non-states

Speaker 1 that pay no federal taxes, Washington, D.C. does.

Speaker 1 And it pays a lot of them. The last data I have

Speaker 1 is that in 2012, D.C. residents and businesses paid the U.S.
Treasury almost $21 billion in taxes. Billion.

Speaker 1 There are 19 states that paid less than D.C. did that year.
Wow. And it's not even a state.

Speaker 1 So you hear that, real Americans?

Speaker 1 The coasts carry the country. I say it before.
I'll say it again.

Speaker 1 Coasts carry.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you this. I mean, I don't want to get too in the weeds on this because I know we have more to discuss.
And

Speaker 1 perhaps be okay. All right.

Speaker 2 Well, it's just you and me, listener.

Speaker 2 I will pontificate and I will not have clear answers to anything. And I will refuse to do that.

Speaker 1 I have to go haunt the larger conference room upstairs now.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. So many responsibilities.
I'm concerned they don't even let you vote on anything in terms of library policy because you're a representative of the Elvira Bass room.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm not alive. I'm a ghost.
I'm a ghost. Yeah.
Ghosts can't vote.

Speaker 1 Imagine if they could, though.

Speaker 1 That'd be interesting.

Speaker 2 It'd be very interesting.

Speaker 2 I shudder. To be honest with you, I shudder to think.

Speaker 1 I shudder to think

Speaker 1 if ghosts could vote.

Speaker 2 My question is sort of, well, okay, here's what I'll say. Again, as a non-East Coast resident, never have.

Speaker 1 Never will. Never said, never.

Speaker 2 I guess my sense of D.C. is that many people live outside of DC who work in DC.
They live in Virginia, maybe they live in Maryland. But yet I've also spent time in D.C.

Speaker 2 I've also seen some very, very expensive like row houses and kind of beautiful neighborhoods.

Speaker 2 I guess where my curiosity is living is sort of this idea of like

Speaker 2 who of those 700,000 residents, how many of them work

Speaker 2 in that city? And then

Speaker 2 how much

Speaker 1 I'm definitely saying. Like you're suspicious, right? A bunch of them are probably not real.

Speaker 2 These are sock puppet people. No.

Speaker 2 I guess I'm just thinking about, without having a clear question, sort of the economics of what it means to be a person who cannot afford a fancy row house in Washington, D.C., and can also not afford to go buy a house in Virginia or something, and to be a lower-income person who is paying federal taxes, who is living in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 may or may not have strong opinions about what it means to be, you know, living in a cheap apartment, like working a blue-collar job and feeling maybe not fully a part of the United States.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's just very interesting. Disenfranchised? Yeah, very interesting to me.
I would think you would feel bad. Yeah.
And, you know, when our friend Wikipedia reports that D.C.

Speaker 1 has a population of 700,000, I'm presuming that that means residents. That is, they say they live in the district.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because the people people who commute

Speaker 1 largely are working in the industry of politics, and they tend to be more affluent than the everyday residents of Washington, D.C., which is a city that has real people in it that live real lives

Speaker 1 that either do or do not have anything to do with politics. Yeah.
And it's struggled for a long time, in part because they have no representation in Congress. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And in fact, our listener, Christopher S., wrote us a letter pointing out that as of February this year, District of Columbians now can choose a different license plate, one that is a quote to quote Christopher S.

Speaker 1 less passive and more aggressive option. It simply says, we demand statehood.
Brand new for 2025.

Speaker 1 All right. And indeed, a bill passed the House in 2021

Speaker 1 that would admit D.C. as a state.
It was going to be called the state of Washington, Douglas Commonwealth. That's why you still get Washington.

Speaker 1 But instead of District of Columbia, you get Douglas Commonwealth,

Speaker 1 which would make it, I guess, a hybrid state Commonwealth. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And obviously honoring Frederick Douglass,

Speaker 1 whose D.C. home, Cedar Hill, is now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, listen, I'm intrigued.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, believe me, lots of people were.

Speaker 1 A bunch of representatives in the House of Representatives were enough to pass the bill, but the Senate refused to take it up because

Speaker 1 D.C. is a large liberal city.

Speaker 1 It is full of both the coastal elites and the working poor.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 making it a state would give us two new senators representing those people.

Speaker 1 And there is one political party that I think more than the other loves the idea that land is more important than people, that land should have more of a vote than humans. And so that didn't pass.

Speaker 1 It's not fair. It's not fair.
It's not fair.

Speaker 2 I will quickly say, I know

Speaker 2 it becomes harder and harder to be apolitical in every day that we're alive on this earth, but I will say.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm as apolitical as the medium of the world. For what it's worth.

Speaker 2 For what it's worth, I'm just going to quickly say gently and with love.

Speaker 2 Everybody's got a lot of work to do.

Speaker 2 And I'm looking at blue. I'm looking at blue.
I'm looking at blue as well. Everybody's got a lot to do.
We got a lot to do, everybody.

Speaker 2 There is no perfect party happening in the United States. Never has been, but certainly right now feels like, holy shit,

Speaker 1 we got a lot of work to do.

Speaker 1 On all fronts.

Speaker 1 Both parties

Speaker 1 have a vested interest in controlling their electorate.

Speaker 1 You know, it is obvious that Democrats would like D.C. to be a state because there are probably more people who will vote Democratically there than not.

Speaker 1 And Republicans don't want it for that reason. But that said, nobody's perfect.
And in any case, this isn't fair. It's not fair.

Speaker 2 Right. I agree.
Well, but yeah, I mean, I would imagine, I mean, thinking about some of the events that have occurred in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 2 even over the last decade, like, obviously, the mayor becomes like an incredibly important figure because that's kind of what you got.

Speaker 1 Mayor Muriel Bowers, D.C. native.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The figure of mayor is

Speaker 2 is an incredibly vital, important and there have been movements to

Speaker 1 incorporate the electorate of the district into Maryland, but Maryland has rejected that idea.

Speaker 1 In other words, you would vote,

Speaker 1 you would be represented in Congress by Maryland if you lived in D.C., and you would vote for those representatives.

Speaker 1 And you probably would get a couple extra houses in, a couple extra seats in the House because of the population of D.C. But Maryland doesn't want that, or it has in the past rejected it.

Speaker 1 Not everyone, but some.

Speaker 1 In any case, it's a quandary. I mean, you know, it's not fair.
And there's a lot that's not fair about DC. And to be fair,

Speaker 1 no one's ever liked it.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Well,

Speaker 1 to be fair, people have been unfair to DC

Speaker 1 from before it even existed. Hmm.
Like, you know,

Speaker 1 the trend to hate on DC from a political point of view, right? Drain the swamp, these clowns in Congress, blah, blah, blah. Like DC has been hated on since before it ever existed.

Speaker 1 It was born of compromise and paranoia and contempt from the beginning, from before the beginning. Take you back to 1783, Janet.

Speaker 1 No one wants to go back to 1783, but we're going.

Speaker 2 Those are just some of the ghosts I don't want to have the vote.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the U.S.
Capitol pinged around New York and Philadelphia, all these northern spots.

Speaker 1 And in 1783, the capital was in Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 And in that year, there was something called the Pennsylvania Mutiny, when a bunch of former Revolutionary War soldiers on the Continental Army side, the U.S. side, stormed

Speaker 1 the Congress, demanding payment because they hadn't been paid yet for their service.

Speaker 1 And Congress is like, oh,

Speaker 1 we got to stop these guys from getting us.

Speaker 1 And they turned to Pennsylvania Governor John Dickinson and said, send in some troops to protect us. And he was like, I'm not going to.
These guys got a point.

Speaker 1 And when Congress realized they couldn't rely

Speaker 1 on

Speaker 1 independent state governors to protect them, They needed a place to hide.

Speaker 1 They needed a place under direct federal control so that no local governors could sell out their safety.

Speaker 2 I did not know this. Or if I did, I've long since forgotten.
But this is juicy.

Speaker 1 This is juicy. Later, it was determined that only a defeated president was allowed to threaten Congress in that way.
But at the time,

Speaker 1 they thought if we had direct federal control,

Speaker 1 we won't have to worry about this.

Speaker 1 And so they wanted to find a place to hide. And ideally, this place would be situated in a swampy, tropical place where no one wanted to go.

Speaker 1 And so the District of Columbia was haggled up over dinner between Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and it says here, Lynn-Manuel Miranda. Interesting.
In 1790.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Lynn-Manuel Miranda wanted the South to agree to Alexander Hamilton's federal debt scheme in exchange for reducing the Virginians' commute time by putting the U.S.

Speaker 1 Capitol right next door and in Virginia and Maryland,

Speaker 1 a random 100-square-mile diamond was established with the Potomac River running right up the crotch of it.

Speaker 1 A crotchet diamond, you say? Oh, God.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe you didn't say that.

Speaker 1 Thank God that word made it onto the podcast.

Speaker 1 A crotchet diamond? When I think of D.C., that's not the D.C. I think of.

Speaker 2 I'm going to tell myself you're just mispronouncing crochet.

Speaker 1 Well, we're going to get to the shape of DC in a moment when Ipler Urbis Motto returns. Janet, will you take us to the break?

Speaker 2 I will, but let me just answer this notary.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's me.

Speaker 2 I've been served with a slander suit from Lynn Manuel Miranda, and we haven't even, this hasn't aired yet, so I'm not sure how he knew.

Speaker 2 Oh, Lynn, but I got I gotta call my lawyer.

Speaker 1 Lynn is gonna do that over the break.

Speaker 1 Fun host all the time. Oh man, he's good.
He's so good. I met Alexander Hamilton.
That was my joke.

Speaker 2 I think we, I think we all knew that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was in the room when it happened. But just in case, I did not get served the slander suit from friend of Max Fun, Lynn Manuel Miranda.

Speaker 2 We love you, Lynn. We are going to take a short break when we come back.
I cannot wait to talk about the shape of this crocheted diamond.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to E-Plurbus Motto. My name is John Hodgman.

Speaker 2 And I'm Janet Varney.

Speaker 1 And when we were last speaking to you, we were talking about the shape of Washington, D.C. Now, Janet, I have presented you with a map of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I called it a crotchet diamond. But it's not a diamond, is it?

Speaker 2 No, it's not.

Speaker 1 How did you describe it? For folks who have never looked at a map before.

Speaker 2 I mean, it looks like, I mean, if you put a square on one of its points,

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 aphids came and

Speaker 1 ate a full third of it from the left point moving forward hungrily,

Speaker 2 I would say that's what it reminds me of.

Speaker 1 Like a brain-eating amoeba.

Speaker 2 Like a brain-eating, like if brains were perfectly square.

Speaker 1 Imagine if you had a saltine.

Speaker 1 Imagine if you had a saltine and it was being nibbled at by one corner,

Speaker 1 thus forming the Potomac River. Then you would have Washington, D.C.
It's weird, right?

Speaker 1 Because there are these three very straight and very arbitrary lines cutting the district out of Maryland on the eastern shore of the Potomac.

Speaker 1 And then the west, southwestern border of Washington, D.C. is formed, is formed by the irregular natural course of the Potomac River.

Speaker 1 And there's a reason for that. And the reason is that it used to be a true square or diamond.

Speaker 1 Like those lines

Speaker 1 reached out over the river into Virginia and completed the square at one point. Okay.

Speaker 1 Or diamond. I mean, that would make sense.
It's a diamond on it. It's a square on its side.
The pointy side is up and down. Yeah.
And side to side. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the definition of a diamond.

Speaker 1 Because that western bank of the Potomac in Virginia, that chunk that completed the square, was taken back by Virginia in 1847.

Speaker 1 Because guess what?

Speaker 1 People don't like their land being taken away from them. Just ask the Nacotch Tank people, the ones who didn't die of smallpox.

Speaker 1 All the prosperous farmers in Virginia wanted that land back.

Speaker 1 But the country still needed a capital, so they kept the Maryland side. I don't know why those Virginians were able to get their land back and the Marylanders were not.

Speaker 1 But that's why it looks the way it does.

Speaker 1 It used to be

Speaker 1 a true 100-square-mile square. Now it is this weird thing.

Speaker 1 Let's go a little closer. I'm going to show you a little bit, get a little closer to the city.
Okay. All right, Janet.
This is the original street plan for Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 1 created in 1791 by French-American architect

Speaker 1 Pierre Charles L'Enfant,

Speaker 1 also known as Lil Baby Pierre.

Speaker 1 What do you see when you look at this?

Speaker 2 I see a lot of what reminds me of Parisian

Speaker 2 structure to the city, which is to say lots of little circle plazas

Speaker 2 from which

Speaker 2 spokes of streets circulate out.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Not in like a very messy spider web, not black widow messy, but a little messy. And then a grid underneath.

Speaker 2 Like there's a grid underneath, but then there are all these spokes that kind of make the whole thing more confusing.

Speaker 2 Like the grid suddenly becomes a confusing problem, even though it's a grid when you put it against all these other things.

Speaker 1 I don't know how much absinthe little baby Pierre was drinking at the time that he came up with this idea.

Speaker 1 But this street system seems designed to induce madness. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because first of all, there's a grid, right?

Speaker 1 There's a pretty typical city grid with lettered streets and numbered streets. And that makes sense, but there's no J because the I and the J look too much alike.

Speaker 1 But that grid is positioned right up against two diagonal river systems. So already it's messed up.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then he overlaid it with a bunch of weird diagonal avenues named for states and people that then, when they connect, they make those traffic circles,

Speaker 1 which are designed to just cause fury.

Speaker 1 It's pretty complicated. And if you've ever tried to find your way around DC, it's hard.

Speaker 2 Well, now that I know that it was created so that people could hide,

Speaker 2 maybe they wanted it to be like Venice, Italy, where it's like, you can't, you will get lost. We make sure you get lost.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what's going on.

Speaker 2 You're not going to be able to that person who you feel owes you money for hard work. I'm sure you did do.

Speaker 1 Now, when you look at all these intersecting diagonal lines, I'm putting something else in the chat. Do you see something like this? Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Do I see a pentagram?

Speaker 1 Not just a pentagram, an inverted pentagram.

Speaker 2 A satanic pentagram?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I guess I do now.
That terminates at the south lawn of the White House.

Speaker 2 Is this this from the Da Vinci Code?

Speaker 1 I believe it's mentioned in the Da Vinci Code, but it's a pretty prominent, and I guess I don't know when it was started. Certainly in the 20th century, pretty early on, a conspiracy theory emerged.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, little baby Pierre,

Speaker 1 had an idea to encode the streets of D.C.

Speaker 1 with Satanist and or Freemasonic imagery. And for a lot of conspiracy theorists, Satanists and Freemasonry go hand in hand.

Speaker 1 I'll read to you briefly from a website called Rational Wiki that collects conspiracy theories.

Speaker 1 They quote, Ed Decker, an anti-Masonic Christian. The satanic pentagram under which the White House sits is an open door through which Satan has access to our president, end quote.

Speaker 1 People have been talking about this for a long time, and there are other symbols that people find in this,

Speaker 1 in this street grid, that suggest,

Speaker 1 you know, the pyramid of the Illuminati. Okay.
Or the compass and square of the Freemasons.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's all kinds of stuff. Now,

Speaker 1 in defense of the conspiracy theory, and I'm going to defend it for a minute, the Freemasons were around at this time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 George Washington is claimed as a Freemason. There's a very famous painting of George.
And if you don't know who the Freemasons are, They're a completely

Speaker 1 non-conspiratorial, old-timey fraternal order that in the United States was where rich white guys would get together and talk about issues of the day.

Speaker 1 But they borrowed a lot of weird symbology from

Speaker 1 Egypt and other ancient cultures that they reinterpreted into a kind of Gnostic philosophy of their own, which

Speaker 1 a lot of people, and because they were a secret organization, They inspired a lot of conspiracy theories that they were an anti-Christian,

Speaker 1 one world order, secret society dedicated on conquering every, I don't know what, you know, right. Being well, being in charge, secretly being in charge.

Speaker 2 But you're right. In defense of the conspiracy, yes, all of the things that you've just described,

Speaker 2 while to me they feel, and I say this as a person who, number one, loves escape rooms, number two, enjoys a thriller. I wouldn't necessarily put the Da Vinci Code amongst those, but I did read it.

Speaker 1 I just

Speaker 2 don't remember it. It's a thriller.

Speaker 2 And I enjoy, you know, symbolic. I mean, I like all that.
It still, to me, feels like,

Speaker 2 you know, like, I always wanted to, I always wanted to have a secret clubhouse in a tree when I was 12, and I never got the chance to do that. And a lot of my friends didn't.
So quick, let's adopt.

Speaker 2 ancient Egyptian symbols and create a clubhouse for boys now. Yeah.
And we'll, and we'll have like secret knocks and passwords and stuff. It feels like, you know, but

Speaker 2 because you're a grown-up man, then people are like, well, this isn't normal.

Speaker 1 You must be satanic. Yeah, but and if you were on the outside of that secret door, that lodge to which you did not have entrance, because Freemasons tended to be wealthier white guys.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And if you were on the outside of it, and they were up to,

Speaker 1 they considered themselves free thinkers and philosophers.

Speaker 1 And if you were a religious person, you might think they were anti-Christian. So that's where a lot of that conspiracy theorizing goes on.
And you can read all about it. It's fascinating stuff.

Speaker 1 They have secret handshakes and everything else. And

Speaker 1 to the defense for a moment of the conspiracy theorists,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 the Washington monument, that obelisk, that is a Masonic symbol. No doubt about it.
Like that is, it was the money for that was raised by Freemasons to encode

Speaker 1 the nation's capital with Masonic imagery in honor of their Freemasonic brother, George Washington.

Speaker 2 Which we also see on the dollar bill, right? Isn't that another place where right?

Speaker 1 Well, the pyramid with the eye floating above it

Speaker 1 is borrowed from this, probably you're right, Freemason-specific, but it might just be sort of general sort of Eastern semi-occult

Speaker 1 falderall that the founding framing fathers and doodads were a little too into that stuff.

Speaker 1 Right. The The satanic elements of it, you know, you'll notice that if you really look at the map, it doesn't really connect into an inverted pentagram.

Speaker 1 You have to see what you're looking for in order for that to work.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you have to stretch it out and you have to ignore other streets

Speaker 2 that are part of this kind of design.

Speaker 2 And while we're at it, I'll just point out: again, have not spent a ton of time, did not know that the memorial fountain at the bottom of this proposed satanic upside-down pentagram is the butt millet

Speaker 2 memorial fountain.

Speaker 2 I don't think I like millet and I like butts.

Speaker 1 I don't want to eat butt millet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can lie. I don't want to eat your butt millet.

Speaker 1 I like butt millets, I cannot lie. Yeah.
That said, even though there is probably no satanic encoding in the streets, I did not know that D.C. became quite hellish for a long time.

Speaker 1 Between the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, it was not tended to. It was not completed.
It was full of, well, let me just read to you from our friend the Wikipedia.

Speaker 1 After Thomas Jefferson, the lack of basic infrastructure led to unsanitary conditions, with the Washington City Canal becoming an open sewer.

Speaker 1 Summer heat and oppressive humidity compounded these issues. President Lincoln's third son died from typhoid fever, likely due to contaminated water.

Speaker 1 Crime and gang violence proliferated, creating the rise of unstable neighborhoods with names like

Speaker 1 Hell's Bottom,

Speaker 1 Murder Bay,

Speaker 1 and Swamp Poodle.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 1 please.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 1 They should have closed with Murder Bay, honestly.

Speaker 1 Swamp Poodle is not as scary as they think it is.

Speaker 2 Swamp Poodle is the best thing I've heard today.

Speaker 1 Swamp Poodle is now the.

Speaker 1 Why is it called a swamp poodle? I understand the other ones. I don't understand.

Speaker 1 It's all one word, so maybe it's swamp poodle.

Speaker 1 Swamp poodle.

Speaker 1 The neighborhood now knows that.

Speaker 2 It was designed by a French person, but they associated poodles with the French, and then it was swampy, so it was like a sweaty poodle.

Speaker 1 I got nothing. I mean, Hell's Bottom and Murder Bay at least makes sense.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Swamp poodle.

Speaker 2 That's like what someone calls a raccoon, but it's not a raccoon because they say trash panda. But like a swap poodle is like a muskrat or something.

Speaker 1 A swap pool would be like a muskrat. Yeah.
We're in a window. We did it, everybody.
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 There you go. Yeah, muskrat is good, though.
I like that.

Speaker 1 It goes on to say that the mall, the national mall, was a wasteland where animals grazed casually around an unfinished Washington monument, which is true because that monument took forever to get done.

Speaker 1 Like it was decades before they found that.

Speaker 2 I like what I'm hearing. I like that.
So far, I'm digging the idea of a bunch of wild animals hanging out near an unfinished monument. That's pretty great.

Speaker 1 It was considered a national embarrassment. The whole city.

Speaker 1 Charles Dickens.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Charles Dickens.

Speaker 2 Because it is so fancy. I'm so sorry.
I was just saying, because when you go there, if you're a person like me from Tucson, Arizona, not a particularly fancy city, in fact, quite the opposite,

Speaker 2 and the fancy stuff you see is much more of Spanish architecture or of Adobe, etc.

Speaker 2 You go to DC, and my first thought was like, oh, they definitely wanted this to look like Europe. Like, Like this is an example of like, hey, this place we don't want to be associated with anymore.

Speaker 2 Let's make it look as much like one of those places, like London or Paris or something, as possible. So the idea of that being

Speaker 2 kind of being produced, but also kind of going into disrepair and not being finished and being real swampy and full of crime feels just about right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they, I mean, to a degree, they wanted it to look like Europe, they wanted it to look nice, but what they really wanted to look like was ancient Greece. There you go.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 there were certain folks like John Adams who wanted it to look like garbage. Like

Speaker 1 there were two modes of thinking about what Washington, D.C. should look like.
This sort of Paniwani, faco

Speaker 1 ancient Greece full of all this neoclassical architecture that would create a false connection between

Speaker 1 the so-called democracy of the United States with these white guys' imagination of the foundations of democracy in Athens.

Speaker 1 And then there were people like John Quincy Adams who truly wanted it to be a wasteland because they were small government weirdos who were like, no, we shouldn't, nothing here should be celebrated.

Speaker 1 Like from the beginning, there was like, we shouldn't have any, nothing should be, D.C. is terrible.
Just even the fact that it exists is terrible. We just have to be here.

Speaker 2 What conflicting extremes. That's fascinating.

Speaker 1 None of these two sides of thinking, because they all had country homes, right? None of these two two sides of thinking were like, well, people actually live here.

Speaker 1 We need to make sure that they don't die of typhoid. Right.
It's not just a philosophical debate. It's like, how do we make this city livable?

Speaker 1 And it wasn't until after the

Speaker 1 Civil War that the city was effectively modernized and the canals were decanaled. The swamp somewhat drained, literally.
And the shape of the city, as we know, comes into shape.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't until after the Civil War that

Speaker 1 people started paying attention to the city and like, well, I guess we have to live here.

Speaker 1 So they modernized it.

Speaker 1 They drained the canals. It was like a proto-draining of the swamp.
And the city, as we know it, sort of took its satanic shape forever.

Speaker 1 Janet, we're going to go to a break here.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about the symbols of Washington, D.C. There aren't a lot of them.
Okay. Flags.
Are any of them pentagrams?

Speaker 2 Are any of them pentagrams?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 goats with horns, large horns, and demon faces.

Speaker 1 Yeah, anything like that I can look forward to.

Speaker 1 The official district mammal is a goat with a third eye in the middle of its head. A baphomet.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of them because it's not a state, but we're going to get to them in a minute, including the flag. But before we do, I'm going to ask you a question.

Speaker 1 Then I want you to think about it during the break. Okay.

Speaker 1 Think very carefully about this.

Speaker 1 What is a mullet?

Speaker 1 What is a mullet?

Speaker 1 Listeners, you can think about it too. We'll be right back with more E.
pleuribus motto.

Speaker 2 E.pluribus mullet.

Speaker 1 And we're back on E. pleuribus mullet.
My name's John Hodgman.

Speaker 2 I'm Janet Mullet. Varney, my middle name is Maureen.
That's going to have to suffice.

Speaker 1 It's kind of close to Maureen. Is your middle name Maureen? It is.
That's a wonderful middle name.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 After my aunt. Do you know my middle name is Kellogg?

Speaker 2 Oh, don't get me started on that, Kellogg.

Speaker 1 I don't have any known familial connections to the cornflake maker or the weird sanitarium. Sanitarium.
Sanitarium dude.

Speaker 1 John Harvey Kellogg started

Speaker 1 the sanitarium where he shook a a lot of people trying to make them lose weight.

Speaker 1 And he developed cornflakes as a dietary pablum for as a health food. And it was his brother across the road that marketed it into breakfast cereal

Speaker 1 for everyone. But I'm not connected to either of those dudes, as far as I know.
Gotcha.

Speaker 2 You asked me a question before the break.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. What was that question?

Speaker 2 The question was: what is a mullet?

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 was told to think very carefully on it. I certainly did no research whatsoever.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 I only have one answer for you, but I did not think very long about it, and

Speaker 2 further attempts to think more resulted in the same outcome.

Speaker 2 I think of a mullet as being a hairstyle of which the front part is short and the long part is in the back. Business in the front.
Party in the back, but mullet.

Speaker 1 That is absolutely a definition of mullet. Okay.
As is, I believe there's a a kind of fish called a mullet. That's probably true.
That sounds like a fish. But that's not the answer I was looking for.

Speaker 1 Here, let me use it in a sentence for you. Great.
It's not even a sentence.

Speaker 1 It's a clause. Okay.

Speaker 1 Argent, two bars, ghouls,

Speaker 1 in chief, three mullets of the second.

Speaker 2 Is this an escape room?

Speaker 1 Sounds like a riddle, doesn't it? Yeah. It's actually the description of the Washington, D.C.
flag.

Speaker 1 In

Speaker 1 not vexillological terms, but coat of arms terms. In the vocabulary of the blazon.

Speaker 1 When you describe a coat of arms, much like when you describe a seal before there is printing,

Speaker 1 the description of a coat of arms uses very specific terminology, a lot of which is archaic French.

Speaker 1 Okay. Because it was

Speaker 1 coats of arms became very important

Speaker 1 in medieval Europe and in England and in France when England still spoke a lot of French because of the Norman conquest.

Speaker 1 And emblazoning is, or blazon,

Speaker 1 is a formal description of a coat of arms, flag, or similar emblem when you couldn't print something, right? Okay.

Speaker 2 I did not know that.

Speaker 1 So you would have to describe describe it.

Speaker 2 It's never, that cannot come up before on e plurbus motto. And aka plurbus mullet.

Speaker 1 Yeah. For example,

Speaker 1 the state flag of Maryland is devolved from the coat of arms of

Speaker 1 the Calvert family, the Lords Baltimore.

Speaker 1 It comes up. So when you're describing a shield or a coat of arms or a shield that bears a coat of arms, you use certain terms.

Speaker 1 So like a blue shield with a yellow stripe over it would be described in Blazin vocabulary as azure,

Speaker 1 a bend or

Speaker 1 meaning the field behind it is blue. The bend is the stripe, and ore is the color yellow.
And in this terminology, argent

Speaker 1 means white background.

Speaker 2 Not silver.

Speaker 1 Well, it can be silvery white. Okay.
Two bars, ghouls, two bars meaning two stripes. Ghouls is red.
In chief,

Speaker 1 three mullets of the second.

Speaker 1 And in this case, mullets means stars.

Speaker 1 Wow. Making the flag of DC, and you can look at it now.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's so simple.

Speaker 1 It's a white field with two red stripes and three red stars above it.

Speaker 2 And yet, the way you described it, something about that, those linguistics make me

Speaker 2 weirdly uneasy. Like, hearing you describe it makes me feel suspicious, unnerved, and mistrustful.
Like,

Speaker 2 what are you doing? What are you trying to say? Like, there's something about it that's so off-putting to me.

Speaker 1 And I don't know why. It's not specific because, first of all, it is, the language is both archaic and specific.

Speaker 1 Because it's basically, they are trying to figure out a language that allows you to replicate a visual image if you don't, if you have no way to replicate the visual image, right?

Speaker 1 Except through language. And as I say, it's very archaic.
So I just dropped one. We'll get to the flag of DC in a moment, but like,

Speaker 1 did you see this

Speaker 1 shield? These are the arms.

Speaker 1 These are the arms of Bensdorf, a village and former municipality in the Berde district in Germany.

Speaker 2 Are you sure it wasn't in Lehavet or Lord of the Rings?

Speaker 1 It looks like it, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 So does the term. So does the name.
How would you describe it? I would describe it as:

Speaker 2 now I'm going to use plain English.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I don't support this weird magical language you've tried to teach me.

Speaker 2 I would describe it as a shield shape, that is to say, straight on the top, curving down into sort of an oval at the bottom, like if it was a pill capsule that you only had half of. Yeah, half a pill.

Speaker 2 Inside that pill, you would see on one side a very pleasant green, not unlike Kermit green, background. On the other side, a white background, or argentum or whatever that was.

Speaker 1 I said I was going to do that, so never mind.

Speaker 2 Then on the so, and then imagine a tree. You see some roots.
You see some kind of, I guess, sort of heart-shaped or spade-shaped leaves on their branches, the branches of this tree.

Speaker 2 And where there is green, the tree is white, and where there is a white background, the tree is green.

Speaker 1 Well, that sounded great, but you're wrong, because what it is is

Speaker 1 party per pale argent and vert, a tree eradicated, counterchanged.

Speaker 1 Doesn't that just draw?

Speaker 2 That kind of makes sense.

Speaker 2 It makes more sense now that I've was given the primer of an even more confusing

Speaker 1 set of turf. I've had to look at it.

Speaker 2 Ver is green in French, so that makes sense.

Speaker 2 Saying that one side is replaced by the other color kind of makes sense.

Speaker 1 This one that I just dropped in there is the coat of arms of the Churchill family. And it's very complicated, as you can see.

Speaker 1 And if listeners want to look it up, you can.

Speaker 1 It is the arms of Churchill.

Speaker 1 And like a lot of coats of arms, it combines coats of arms of various branches of a family. That's why it's so complicated.
I'm not going to ask you to describe it because,

Speaker 1 frankly, you'd get it wrong. Because the correct description is as follows:

Speaker 1 Quarterly, first, and fourth sable, sable, a lion rampant, on a canton argent, across ghouls, second and third quarterly, argent and ghouls in the second and third quarters, a fret ore overall on a bend sable, three escallops of the first, and,

Speaker 1 as an augmentation in chief, an inescutcheon, argent across ghouls, and thereon, and in a scutcheon, azure, three fleur-de-lis, ore.

Speaker 1 Totally understandable, right?

Speaker 2 They're like a fever dream. There were snippets and snatches that I was able to go, okay, they're talking about those scallops.
Cool, cool, cool.

Speaker 2 Also, not a fan of cryptic crosswords. This is starting to remind me of those.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 the flag of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 has these three stars or mullets above two red bars on a white background. And it is based on the coat of arms,

Speaker 1 as you might guess,

Speaker 1 that was George Washington's family. Okay.
Lawrence Washington, George Washington's third great-grandfather of Soulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire, England. What does third-great-grandfather mean?

Speaker 1 Great-great-great?

Speaker 1 Great?

Speaker 2 Third-great-grandfather. So it's great-grandfather, and then you add three more?

Speaker 1 That's my guess. I do not know.
Okay. Anyway, this is the flag of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 And while D.C. has been held historically in contempt by the folks in Congress who live and work there part-time, the people of D.C.
have really adopted this flag.

Speaker 1 Lots of people get this tattooed on their bodies. Okay.
What do you think about this flag?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's so long. It's so rectangular.

Speaker 2 I mean, our flags are rectangular. I know them to be rectangular.
Something about this seems skinnier and longer than kind of what we often see in our traditional flag shape. Am I making that up?

Speaker 1 Is it an optical illusion? It sort of seems.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's just an optical illusion because there's so much going on horizontally

Speaker 2 and not, I mean, there's so much going on from like left to right and not from top to bottom or something.

Speaker 1 It could just be a weird picture, but yes, I mean, it definitely does.

Speaker 2 What did the three stars stand for?

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 well, let's see. The coat of arms of the Washington family.

Speaker 1 You catch me short.

Speaker 2 Is it... And this is just a guess.

Speaker 2 Mama Bear, Daddy Bear, and Baby Bear?

Speaker 1 I'm scanning the entry for the coat of arms for the Washington family.

Speaker 1 I don't see any

Speaker 1 symbolic reason for it.

Speaker 2 Well, I can't get on board for something when I don't know what those three stars stand for. But I don't mind it.
I don't mind it. There's something.
I mean, I feel like I've seen flags.

Speaker 2 There's something about it that feels vaguely maybe South American. I don't know.
There's something.

Speaker 2 I think it's reminding me of other flags I've seen from other countries,

Speaker 2 but I can't, I could not tell you what they are.

Speaker 2 But I get why, I mean,

Speaker 2 I get why people would

Speaker 1 have, I don't have a problem with it. You know what it reminds me of.
What does it remind you of? I'm going to drop a flag in there. Argent Field, two bars, Azuel, four mullets, goulds.

Speaker 1 White background, two

Speaker 1 blue bars and four red stars. You recognize that one?

Speaker 1 What is it? Chicago.

Speaker 2 That's beautiful. Unfortunately, now you've given me one that I like more than the other.

Speaker 2 And so now I'm decided that I'm going to get the flag of Chicago tattooed onto my arm, even though I've never lived there.

Speaker 1 Hey, you know what? I'd have to

Speaker 1 do that from there. The flag of Chicago is beautiful.
And the flag of D.C., you're like,

Speaker 1 well, I love that blue. Stinky.
I love the blue.

Speaker 2 And I also love that the shape of the red stars in the Chicago flag reminds me more of a maple leaf.

Speaker 2 It's six-pointed instead of five-pointed.

Speaker 2 And as long as we're looking at simple symbols, I'm realizing that there are things that I enjoy more than just red and white and five-pointed stars rather than six-pointed stars.

Speaker 2 So you happen to give me something to compare it with that I prefer, but again, I ain't making a bunch of complaints about that Washington, D.C. flag, not at all.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, Janet,

Speaker 1 the flag of D.C.

Speaker 1 in a review of 150 American city flags by our friends at the North American Vexillological Association, NAVA,

Speaker 1 score of 9.17,

Speaker 1 that's best.

Speaker 1 Best flag. Wow.
Best city flag.

Speaker 2 They would know.

Speaker 1 I'm saying the experts know.

Speaker 2 Sometimes when I'm lying awake thinking about the fact that someday maybe this podcast will end because we'll get to all of of the states and territories. Even

Speaker 2 to get into Canada, it reassures me so deeply to know that there are that many city flags out there and all kinds of just specific cities that we can dig into.

Speaker 2 You're never getting rid of me, John Hodgman. You're never

Speaker 2 getting rid of me.

Speaker 1 Janet, Maureen, Varney, I never want to be rid of you. Great.
And by the way, next time you're in D.C.,

Speaker 1 there is, strangely, a Chicago-themed bar. Well, there you go.
Called Coney and Ivy.

Speaker 2 Did you just give me two things that aren't associated with the city of Chicago?

Speaker 1 I don't know why it's called Coney and Ivy, but it is very much a Chicago bar. If it's still there, cool.
That's where I and then DC residents Brian Farrow and Jay Jones, plus

Speaker 1 Ken Plume and one of his many Kermit puppets,

Speaker 1 sang

Speaker 1 queen songs until 4 a.m.

Speaker 1 After my Ben's Chili Bowl show.

Speaker 2 That's like out of people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was January of 2020. We didn't know what was coming.

Speaker 1 It was something all right. That was a great night.
There's video of it. We'll post it.
Nice. What was it we sang?

Speaker 1 Oh, you mean Rhapsody, I guess. Is this the real life? There we go.

Speaker 1 It was a very exciting, very wonderful time. Brian Farrow's an incredible musician.
Jay Jones is an incredible singer and musician. Look him up.

Speaker 1 And it's a bar that you won't get kicked out of in DC because you love Chicago so much. Nice.
There's a bird.

Speaker 1 The bird, I keep wanting to say state bird, and then I stop myself, and then I just stop talking for a while.

Speaker 1 The district bird?

Speaker 2 The district bird.

Speaker 1 The wood thrush. I don't know what a wood thrush looks like.
Well, let me describe it to you.

Speaker 2 Uh-oh. Don't use that terminology I'll never get on board for with ghouls.

Speaker 2 Ghouls. How many ghouls does it have?

Speaker 1 There's a very specific description, and it comes comes not from the Secretary of State's website where we normally get these official state symbols, but the Secretary of the District, the Sod,

Speaker 1 Kimberly A. Bassett.

Speaker 1 I don't think Secretary Bassett wrote this, but the wood thrush is a medium-sized thrush with the posture of an American robin, but a slightly smaller body.

Speaker 1 It was approved on January 31st, 1967, as the District of Columbia official bird.

Speaker 1 It has a cinnamon-brown color on its crown and a nape that fades to olive brown on the back. The underparts are white with large dark spots on the breasts, sides, and flanks.
No mullets. Woodthrush.

Speaker 2 Looking at a picture, that's a great description. It's not overselling anything.
It's on the nose.

Speaker 2 I love that many of the photos that you will see if you pull up, maybe not many, but a lot of the photos when I do an image search are the wood thrush with its beak wide open, clearly in song.

Speaker 2 I love this bird. I've already decided.
It's extremely cute.

Speaker 1 As I'm going through the wood thrush entry in Wikipedia, I see a reference to a citation to the review of American birds in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

Speaker 1 I just love the idea that someone's actually reviewing the birds.

Speaker 1 9.17.

Speaker 1 Four stars. Yeah, four-star bird.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's a good enough bird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm into it.

Speaker 1 If you were to guess, when you think of trees in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 1 you can only think of one iconic tree that must be

Speaker 1 the official tree of the district, the Todd.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to remember. I feel like I want to say like elm or maple, but I don't remember.
I don't remember.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to lead you. I'm trying to lead you.

Speaker 2 I don't remember a ton of trees except in places like

Speaker 2 that.

Speaker 1 Well, you've only been to D.C. a few times, and maybe you haven't been there in the springtime.
Okay. I was trying to leave.
No, cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms.

Speaker 1 My bad. On the path of the national park.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's right.
That's right. I have not been there when they have been a bloom.

Speaker 1 You would think that that would be the official tree, but no. Scarlet Oak.
Scarlet Oak. And this was approved in 1960.
The cherry trees were given to DC as a gift from the city of Tokyo in 1912.

Speaker 1 So they had been around for a while. Yeah.
But I don't know why the scarlet oak, also known as the black oak or red oak, pick a color. Pretty tree.
Pick a color.

Speaker 1 Or in the language of heraldry, the ghoul's oak.

Speaker 2 Less pretty now.

Speaker 2 Less pretty now.

Speaker 2 It's a pretty tree.

Speaker 1 It's just known for its brilliant autumn color. Yeah.
And it's found all over the place.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's very pretty.

Speaker 2 I like the word scarlet. I feel like the word scarlet has come to mean things like, you know, fevers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 And I'd like to, I would like Scarlett to be back. Scarlett Johansson.

Speaker 1 Nothing wrong with her. All right, the Scarlet Oak.

Speaker 2 What else you got for me?

Speaker 1 Two more things. Okay.
While the cherry tree is not honored as the official tree, the official fruit is the cherry. Whew.
Okay.

Speaker 1 As of 2006,

Speaker 1 Law 16-171, the official fruit of the District of Columbia Act of 2006.

Speaker 1 The cherry trees in Washington, D.C., as I mentioned, were a gift from Japan in 1912, following a long effort by a socialite in the region named Eliza Ruhama Skidmore,

Speaker 1 who got it in her mind

Speaker 1 that D.C. should have a bunch of cherry trees in it.

Speaker 1 And in fact, through her advocacy,

Speaker 1 arranged for 2,000 cherry trees to arrive

Speaker 1 from Japan to DC in 1910.

Speaker 1 And these initial 2,000 trees were promptly and purposefully destroyed. They were burned immediately because they were full of invasive bugs and worms.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah,

Speaker 1 we're going to give smallpox to the natives here.

Speaker 2 I was absolutely going to make that connection. Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm not going to be doing it for me. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 I'm glad. Yeah.
Yeah, but

Speaker 1 we cannot have our trees infested with nematodes from Japan. Trees we must protect.

Speaker 1 Sure. So they burned those 2,000 cherry trees, and I'm sure Ms.
Skidmore cried and cried. But then

Speaker 1 Prince Tokugawa Isiato of Japan stepped in to arrange a replacement shipment of trees.

Speaker 1 Tokugawa was the heir to the last shogunate of Japan, and he was a big, a good friend of then big President Taft Taft

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 was really obsessed with the American experiment and would come to D.C. and observe Congress in session.
He was interested in democratic reforms.

Speaker 1 He took a surprising lesson from America, even after the Civil War, that racism is bad. It was like,

Speaker 1 he thought that that's what America was about and went back and instituted anti-racist

Speaker 1 policies in Japan, which was really interesting. Interesting dude.

Speaker 1 And as a gift

Speaker 1 to this country that he was so fascinated by, he arranged for a new shipment of now 3,020 cherry trees. And they arrived in 1912, nematodeless and wormless, I suppose, because they weren't burned.

Speaker 1 But in fact, They blossom every year. There's a big annual cherry blossom festival.
And good thing, too, because we now know

Speaker 1 from documentary films of this year that a cherry blossom is the only way that you can stop a red Hulk.

Speaker 2 I have two questions for you, and neither one of them, sadly, are

Speaker 2 Scarlet Hulk-related. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 1 I mean, Hulk ghouls.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Rampant on a field of cherry blossoms.

Speaker 2 Rampant. I mean, that's just great.
Yeah. I did enjoy that part of the rampant lion.

Speaker 1 That means up on its high lengths.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I knew that made sense to me.
That made sense to me.

Speaker 2 Number one, isn't it? Aren't you so interested?

Speaker 2 I wish I could see a snapshot of sort of, and I'm sure maybe that exists, but the idea of these thousands of cherry trees like crossing the ocean on a ship, the amount of time it took for them to get over and just being on a ship with thousands of trees, presumably they were not just I mean, I don't know how mature they were, how small, how, you know, know, what they looked like when they arrived, but just imagining kind of a big, a big freighter or whatever full of, I mean, there's a lot I don't know about that story, so I'm making a lot of it up.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 a ship of trees, a ship of trees.

Speaker 1 They did travel by boat to Seattle and then by train across the country.

Speaker 2 And then a bunch of trees on a train. Okay.

Speaker 1 And, you know, not only was it an international gift, but obviously, I mean, a testament to an increasing connection through transportation of global commerce. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 My second question is: do those

Speaker 2 particular cherry trees, do they fruit? I understand they blossom, but do they fruit? Because that's messy, and I'm just curious.

Speaker 1 Do not know.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 do not care.

Speaker 1 I'm not surprised to hear that.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 it's something that comes up a lot in California because people use olive trees for their yards, their landscaping a lot.

Speaker 2 And it's sort of whenever someone walks past an olive tree that was perhaps accidentally purchased and is female and there are just squished olives all over the ground. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sometimes California people look at each other and sort of chuckle and shake their heads and go,

Speaker 2 I bet they thought they were getting a male.

Speaker 2 So they went up to clean up this mess and then they elbow each other in the ribs and then they go on a hike in Griffith Park.

Speaker 2 So I just was curious because it seems like if the cherries were being harvested, that's not really what they're necessarily for. It seems that they would be more ornamental.

Speaker 1 If you live or work in D.C. and you know whether you can eat the cherries from the cherry trees, drop us a line or send us some cherries.

Speaker 2 And if they don't fruit, you might be cheating that you have your district fruit being the cherry, but you have so little, I'll give you the cherry.

Speaker 2 Even if none of the cherry trees in DC actually fruit, I'm going to go ahead and let you keep that that cherry as your district fruit.

Speaker 1 The ocean liner that brought the trees from Japan to Seattle was the Awamaru.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. Built by Mitsubishi at Nagasaki on June 20th, 1898.
Launched July 27th, 1899.

Speaker 1 February 14th, Valentine's Day. There it is.
Departed Yokohama in 1912 carrying 3,020 cherry trees of 12 varieties.

Speaker 1 These fragile tree slips were bound for Seattle, where they were trans-shipped across the country via insulated freight cars on a train. There we go.
There you go. That's what I pictured.
I feel good.

Speaker 1 I pictured. I would love.
I feel good. Yeah.
Now, this isn't a state, so we don't have a state soil,

Speaker 1 but we do have a district rock, the Potomac Blue Stone.

Speaker 1 Quarried from the Sykesville Formation of Metamorphic Rock in the Piedmont region of Maryland and Virginia.

Speaker 1 It is a building stone that was used in the foundation of the White House, the foundation of the Capitol, in the Washington Monument,

Speaker 1 plus the old stone house in Georgetown.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it was used to build those priest-killing stairs in the Exorcist.

Speaker 1 The Potomac Bluestone was added as the official rock of Washington, D.C. in 2015

Speaker 1 in Law 20-220.

Speaker 1 And this law was called

Speaker 1 DC Rocks, so we need one act of 2014.

Speaker 2 I'm on board.

Speaker 1 And you know what? I'm on board. Janet Maureen Varney, despite the long history of contempt for DC,

Speaker 1 as Ian Mackay of Fugazi and Minor Threat well knows, DC does rock. It's a great city.
It's a place full of real people who frankly deserve better than they get.

Speaker 1 Janet, you know we have some listeners and they're all wonderful. They're and sometimes they send us messages.
Yay. Perhaps via email, emailplorobusmato at maximumfun.org.

Speaker 1 Perhaps via a voice memo, speakpipe.com slash eploribusmato.

Speaker 1 Perhaps via both.

Speaker 1 We got both a letter and a voicemail from James. Hi, James.
And I'm going to read it to you, and then we're going to play the voicemail. Wonderful.
James from D.C.,

Speaker 1 who lives there, Janet, says, here's a little note from Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 On January 20th, 2025.

Speaker 1 Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 I had some business take me inside the inaugural according yesterday as it was being set up, and I felt like we were bracing once again for four years of occupation.

Speaker 1 Of course, the federal city belongs to the whole country, and D.C. wouldn't exist in the form it does without the government anchoring it here.

Speaker 1 But there's so much more to the place than monuments and motorcades. A real place with real people that outsiders ignore or write off.
I'm talking about you, Janet Maureen Varney.

Speaker 2 I can't believe he wrote your name. I can't imagine he wrote that.

Speaker 1 By the way, this is a great letter. I could take it a quick break.
I could go on and on about that city, so I tried to stick to one facet of D.C.

Speaker 1 in my voice memo. while keeping it more or less lighthearted.
Hope you enjoy. As some slight repayment beyond my maximum membership, of course, thank you very much, James.
Thank you, James.

Speaker 1 For the hundreds of hours I've spent enjoying Judge John Hodgman, the JV Club, and now E. Pluribus Moto,

Speaker 1 James in Washington, D.C. And I'm going to play the voice memo now.

Speaker 3 Hi, John and Janet.

Speaker 3 This is James. I'm coming to you from the city I grew up in and spent most of my life in or near Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 I understand you're going to be getting to my district at some point.

Speaker 3 I'm recording this on the morning of January 20th, 2025, and so I thought I'd share with you two movies I know of, the only two, set in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 that don't have to do with national politics or international intrigue.

Speaker 3 The first one is a 1983 ensemble comedy directed by Joel Schumacher.

Speaker 3 D.C. Cab,

Speaker 3 also an an occasional New York Times crossword puzzle answer,

Speaker 3 starring Adam Baldwin, Irene Cara, Gary Busey, and Mr. T.

Speaker 3 The other one's a little more personal. I remember seeing when it came out.

Speaker 3 It's a sort of Gen X slacker comedy called Eat Me, Exclamation Point, and starring two then DC area actors who have since gone on to bigger things, Willie Zwaider and Ray Sehorn, who I think has worked with Janet a couple times at least,

Speaker 3 might be interested in knowing if there's any way to see this movie again.

Speaker 3 It's been a little while, and I wonder if I'd cringe watching it now, but I remember enjoying it very much when it came out in 2000.

Speaker 3 Our motto here in the District of Columbia is Justizia Omnibus, justice for all.

Speaker 3 And this is, of course,

Speaker 3 more of an aspirational motto than a declarative one.

Speaker 3 I am resolving to devote myself to that aspiration

Speaker 3 more than ever. And I give it

Speaker 3 in that spirit 10 out of 10 Frederick Douglasses.

Speaker 3 All the best to both of you and all the listeners.

Speaker 1 Bye now.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much, James.

Speaker 2 James, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 The movie Eat Me, you know Rhea Seahorn?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I don't know Ray well, but we got to do a play together and I've been play reading together. And obviously, I'm a huge fan of hers and we have a lot of friends in common.

Speaker 2 Yes, we have each other's email. I feel confident that she would say she knows me.
Would she say we're friends? Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 But she's wonderful.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would have to watch the trailer. I see that there is a trailer to Eat Me for Eat Eat Me on YouTube.

Speaker 1 An eclectic group of bachelors share a house in DC and find that life past Generation X Ears doesn't get any easier. And it's available for rent on Amazon or wherever, or what is some of the others.

Speaker 1 You know, iTunes or whatever they call iTunes now.

Speaker 1 And you can find it on Tubi.

Speaker 2 And DC Cab.

Speaker 1 DC Cab, also, you neglected to mention Max Gale from Barney Miller was in that movie as well.

Speaker 2 Great polls, great references, great email and great voice voice memo, James. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 And speaking of real people who lived in DC and come from DC and contributed to our culture, I got a couple of other ones for you here.

Speaker 1 Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero, also known as Chita Rivera. Ah, Cheetah.
Grew up in D.C. Her dad was a clarinetist in the U.S.
Navy band, and her mom was a clerk at the Pentagon.

Speaker 1 Jeffrey Wright, the actor, went to St. Albans School.
I mentioned Brian Farrow and Jay Jones. Look him up.
Marvin Gaye went to Cardozo High School, where he sang in the doo-wop group The DC Tones.

Speaker 1 Shout out to Marvin. Dave Batista grew up in DC.
I mentioned Ian Mackay,

Speaker 1 whose dad was a Washington Post reporter and was in, I just learned today, his dad was in the, as a journalist, was in the motorcade in Dallas when JFK was assassinated. Wow.

Speaker 1 Ian Mackay is, of course, the founder of Punk Pioneer band Minor Threat, post-punk band Fugazi.

Speaker 1 The Minor Threat pioneered the straight edge movement. No alcohol, no drugs, no cigarettes, no sex.

Speaker 1 No shows over $5.

Speaker 1 Truly inspiring dude. D.C.
guy. Duke Ellington grew up in D.C.

Speaker 1 His parents moved to D.C. from North Carolina.
His mom was the daughter of two formerly enslaved people. They went to D.C.

Speaker 1 to evade Jim Crow and to raise their child and children in a black positive household. But, you know, as good as he was at the piano, Duke Ellington's first love was baseball.

Speaker 1 And he would recall how they would be playing baseball in the neighborhood and President Teddy Roosevelt would ride a horse over to watch them. Wow.

Speaker 1 And his first job, Duke's first job was selling peanuts at the Washington Senators game.

Speaker 1 I love it. It was more than one game.

Speaker 1 The Washington Senators, of course, were the subject of the damn Yankees musical. You got to have heart.
They don't exist anymore. It's the Nationals now.

Speaker 2 No, it's the only reason why you're bringing them up.

Speaker 1 Duke Ellington's first piano teacher, you're not going to guess her name.

Speaker 1 It's one of the greatest names for a piano teacher of all time. Oh, wow.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Do you want me to guess?

Speaker 1 Marietta Clink Scales.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No. That's what it says.
Uh-uh. Actor and my co-star in the TV show Married from about 10 years ago, Regina Hall.
Yes. She's a graduate of Immaculata Prep.

Speaker 2 I love her so much.

Speaker 1 She's amazing. Immaculata Prep is a Catholic school that no longer exists in DC, but it popped up in my search as a place.

Speaker 1 I've got a monster for DC. Yay!

Speaker 1 DC does not have an official district cryptid.

Speaker 2 Yet.

Speaker 1 Indeed, our friend Monica Gallagher at Lipstick Kiss Press, who we've never met but consider a friend, does not have a DC cryptid poster.

Speaker 1 But from browsing the internet, I offer these

Speaker 1 small handful, or dare I say, pawful of legends. One.
It's pretty good for a district. I'm into this.
Apparently, the U.S. Capitol is haunted by a demon cat.

Speaker 2 Please, please tell me that that's true. I want it so much.

Speaker 1 Alternately described as a regular-sized black cat or tabby cat

Speaker 1 that roams the halls and basements of the Capitol after hours.

Speaker 1 And when provoked, if you are seen by a night watch person, for example,

Speaker 1 if they train their flashlight on them, the cat grows to the size of a tiger and attacks and then disappears.

Speaker 1 These are sightings date back to the 19th century, and corroborating evidence include, supposedly, I mean,

Speaker 1 this does exist. I don't know what it corroborates exactly, but there are indeed shallow cat paw prints.
in the poured concrete floor just outside the old Supreme Court chamber.

Speaker 1 They had to replace some of the stone flooring with poured concrete in the early part of the 20th century, and

Speaker 1 maybe a demon cat walked across it. But you can see the

Speaker 1 other places on the floor you can see scratched into the floor the initials DC

Speaker 1 for District of Columbia or Demon Cat, you decide.

Speaker 1 That's great. In 1932, the Washington Post reported on

Speaker 1 things living in the basement of the recently completed Department of Commerce.

Speaker 2 Hmm, a lot of basement activity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they said they wrote in 1932, there are,

Speaker 1 and this, I mean, look, ripped from the headlines today, there are three things causing

Speaker 1 a great amount of worry among government employees in Washington, pay cut, furlough, and dismissal. Sounds like doge, but this is 1932.

Speaker 1 But only those working in the new Department of Commerce building have actually come face to face with these problems because these are not mere concepts, they are also the

Speaker 1 names of three alligators that live in the basement of the Department of Commerce.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 What? I've never seen any reporting.

Speaker 1 They go on to report that the gators were a gift from the Bureau of Fisheries in Chicago.

Speaker 1 But who knows?

Speaker 1 In 1916, two alligators were found in Rock Creek Park. No one knows in D.C.
No one knows how they got there. They killed one and they took another to the zoo.

Speaker 1 And if you weren't done with gators yet, not only John Quincy Adams, but also Herbert Hoover kept pet alligators in the White House. No.

Speaker 1 Great.

Speaker 1 Mine as well. More recently and finally,

Speaker 1 we have the Metro Monster.

Speaker 1 First described about 10 years ago on an internet bulletin board.

Speaker 1 A massive, spindly, pale, fleshy creature that slinks along the walls of the red line tunnel.

Speaker 1 Good description.

Speaker 1 Good description. And I'll just read to you a little bit here.

Speaker 1 User Strelock wrote this on the internet

Speaker 1 on one of the bad bulletin boards that I won't name. Okay.
October 5th, 2015, a Monday.

Speaker 1 Talked about seeing this thing in the tunnels day after day when he was a teenager.

Speaker 1 And then one night, I was riding the red line back from Rockville to Metro Center. I was the only person in the car.
Yes. I caught the last train before the system closed.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I was looking at the front of the train, like usual, when I saw something weird. It looked like a white branch.

Speaker 1 It was thin, almost spindly. It was pressed up against the wall.
I thought it must have been a length of wire or pipe, but then it moved.

Speaker 1 And then a few days later, it happened again.

Speaker 1 I started to be vigilant for the weird leg anytime I was on my way home from work. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Ironically, I felt safer in the station than I did on the train due to the simple fact I'd never seen anything weird in the stations.

Speaker 1 But then I got to Metro Center, got off the train, and waited for my next train, and I started hearing it.

Speaker 1 Soft pitter-patter.

Speaker 1 I became on edge again. It was there.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just a leg, the thing in its entirety. And it wasn't in the tunnel anymore.
It was on the platform with me. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It was like a person, but warped to the point where all traces of humanity were gone. Okay.
It was thin, horribly thin.

Speaker 1 I could see how its pallid gray flesh wrapped around its bones, not even covering the holes in some of its leg and arm bones, hunched over like an elderly person. Maybe it was an elderly person.

Speaker 1 Hold on.

Speaker 2 Let him finish.

Speaker 1 Head was completely hairless.

Speaker 1 It was hung down so I couldn't make out its face. I opened my mouth to scream, but I just whimpered like a baby.
I shouldn't have done that. It started to move toward me

Speaker 1 with a horrible gait.

Speaker 1 That's all I'm going to read. It's too scary.

Speaker 2 That's too scary.

Speaker 1 He says it was 15 feet tall, at least. Oh, my.
Its torso was thinner than its femur. Its arms came down to its shins and let them drag along.
And then there was its face.

Speaker 1 If you want to read the description of the face,

Speaker 1 look up Metro Monster.

Speaker 1 Or we'll put the screenshot up somewhere.

Speaker 1 Great. That is a monster worthy of DC.
All right, Janet, we got to go. Let's rank the motto: Justicia Omnibus

Speaker 1 one out of ten

Speaker 1 cherry blossoms, Metro Monster? Sure, sure.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 Uh, justice for all.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 our listener pointed out it's pretty aspirational. It's not no, I like an aspirational

Speaker 2 and I do like an aspirational motto. I absolutely do

Speaker 2 I will give it justice for all. I mean, what what's to yeah, justice 100%.

Speaker 2 Aspirationally speaking, I give it nine.

Speaker 2 What do I have against justice for everyone?

Speaker 1 Good point.

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 I'm going to give it a one.

Speaker 1 You can't spell aspirational without ass.

Speaker 1 And this motto is ass. Hold on.

Speaker 1 Reason you can.

Speaker 2 You might need to borrow an extra S from somewhere.

Speaker 1 You think I don't have some extra S's lying around?

Speaker 2 Good point.

Speaker 1 Why do you think I have this snake here?

Speaker 2 I was afraid to ask. Now I know.

Speaker 1 Were Were you afraid to ask or afraid to ask?

Speaker 2 I was afraid to ask. I was afraid to look like an asp.

Speaker 1 I'm given this thing. I don't like this motto at all.
I know, I know. Because you know what? If it were given to any other state or territory, it would be aspirational.

Speaker 1 It would not be entirely true, but it reflects an idea that we want to be true.

Speaker 1 But for it to be the motto of DC,

Speaker 1 where hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised from representation simply because they're living in a city that happens to be a federal district.

Speaker 1 That's not justice for all my friends. That sucks.

Speaker 2 You're not going to give it any points for irony?

Speaker 1 No. No extra cherry blossoms.
No.

Speaker 2 Ironic cherry blossoms. No.

Speaker 1 I know. I know you're right.
I know you're right. One rotten cherry on top for hypocrisy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And

Speaker 1 a plea.

Speaker 1 Let's go ahead and enfranchise. Figure it out.
Figure out how to enfranchise these U.S. citizens.
Ideally, make it a state. Wyoming should not have two senators if Washington, D.C.
doesn't have none.

Speaker 1 That's what I have to say.

Speaker 2 Got it.

Speaker 1 What do we miss? Probably everything. So many things.

Speaker 1 Yes. I'm sure you'll let us know,

Speaker 1 District of Columbians or other friends of D.C.,

Speaker 1 email pluribusmotto at maximumfund.org is our mailbox. Is that what that's called? Email address.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Speakpipe.com/slash slash e pluribus motto is our speak box.

Speaker 1 We only have one state left in this season. Yeah.
It's true. You're going to talk to me next about the state of

Speaker 2 Novado.

Speaker 1 Oh no.

Speaker 1 Get your cards and letters and speakpipes coming.

Speaker 2 Nevada.

Speaker 1 To correct Janet Varney on the pronunciation of Nevada, Nevadans.

Speaker 2 I didn't mean it. Nivida.
Nivida.

Speaker 1 Nvidia, I think.

Speaker 2 Nvidia.

Speaker 2 Looking forward to rounding out our season two with the state of Nevada.

Speaker 1 That does it for this episode of E Blurbus Motto. The show was hosted by me, John Hodgman, and your wonderful Janet Maureen Varney.
The show is produced and edited by Julian Burrell.

Speaker 1 Our senior producer at Maximum Fun is Laura Swisher. Our theme music was composed by Zach Burba.
Our show art was created by Paul G. Hammond, as discussed.
Next time, we're going to Nevada.

Speaker 1 I'll say it again: Nevada.

Speaker 1 If you have something you want us to know, email us at emailpluribusmotto at maximumfund.org or speak to us at speakbike.com/slash eploribus motto.

Speaker 1 You can also find us on TikTok and Instagram to tell us more about the states and commonwealths and what district that we've covered so far. Until then, remember our motto: it is this.

Speaker 1 You say I need a job, I've got my own business. You want to know what I do? None of your fucking business.
That is the first stanza of the song Repeater by Fugazi, 1990.

Speaker 1 Straight Edge forever, although I'm going to have a martini. Goodbye.

Speaker 2 Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.