Grudge Match

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.
We're in chambers this week, clearing the docket. And with me is the judge who judges them all, Judge John Hodgman.
Hi, John.

Jesse Thorne, it's good to be here this week. Very special docket, long, long promised, or at least last couple of months promised.
Grudge match.

Some weeks ago, we put out a call for your old grudges, grade school rivalries, summer camp nemeses. I'm looking at you, Camp Robin Hood.
Crummy cousins stealing your stuff when you were little kids.

And wow, did you come back with some amazing letters and some serious beefs? Not many of these cases, Jesse, are debatable.

There are a lot of sides to these stories, but there are definitely wrongs to be righted, and we're going to lay down some harsh sentences. John, you know what my top summer camp nemesis was? No.

Canoes. I just don't, they're too tippy.
Too tippy. Why am I in a lake anyway? Right.
I'm a land animal. Right.
And lakes are junk. Lakes are garbage.

They're full of gross seaweeds and big-mouth bass. If only they were seaweeds, they're lake weeds.
Oh, yeah. The worst weeds.

And as I've pointed out,

Sometimes giant freshwater clams are down there in the muck.

And yeah, you're up there on the canoe and it's tipping all over the place. I'm a city kid.
Tippy canoe and Jesse 2. That was that famous political motto from the past.

Archery is one thing. Archery might come in handy when I'm walking past Valencia Gardens housing projects by my house.
Holy moly.

I wish it were true that you were walking around your neighborhood in San Francisco

like Hawkeye with a with a quiver of with a quiver of arrows over your and a bow strung over your shoulder. What's that you say? Pocket check? How about this? Arrow check is what I would say.

Yeah, exactly.

I'll tell you about Camp Robinhood later in the episode because we got a lot of old beef to settle here. Okay, here's a case from Crystal in Seattle.

I'm 34 years old, and I'm still mad about an injustice from the first grade.

I had a gold hair clip that was so big, you had to have thick, long hair just to use it. Like my hair, which was extremely thick and down to my waist.

One day, my classmate Brittany stole the clip from my desk. I saw her with it and told our teacher.
The teacher asked Brittany if she took my clip and Brittany said, no.

She said she'd had that clip for a long time.

That line really brought back so many memories of kids lying.

Kids like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, I've had that for a long time. That's been mine forever.
Just about stuff. Yeah.
Brittany had short, fine hair. Oh.

There was no way the clip would even work in her hair. But our teacher believed Brittany and told me I shouldn't accuse people of stealing.
I was furious.

I stayed after school, snuck into the classroom, and took it back.

I still can't believe that teacher looked at that clip clip and believed that little thief.

I don't know. There's no work for me here.
You took care of it, Crystal. You took care of it.

You snuck.

I never would have done that, Jesse Thorne. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and guess who possesses it now? You do.
You win again. Yeah, but it's like

if I had to give back something that was stolen to me, I was never going to sneak into the classroom after school. I didn't have what it took.
Rule follower.

Yeah, I was a a rule follower, that's for sure. You ever have something stolen from you in school? That's a great question.

I think the main thing that would get stolen from you would be a turbo football.

That was a type of foam football that was

neon colored, half neon colored, and spirally shaped. Right.
And it was relatively expensive because it was made by the Nerf company. Right.

Like that was like the $14 playground football rather than the $9 $9

or $6

foam playground football. It was expensive because it was better.
Whoever had one, highly prestigious.

So if you had one and you didn't write your name on it in permanent marker, it became someone else's because they found it somewhere, wrote their name on it in permanent marker, and it was theirs.

Permanent marker is the proof. But even so.
I love Crystal's detective work. No, that's not what it is, though.
Crystal here is like one of those

private detectives. Yes.
Not the kind

that is in a hard-boiled noir story of the 1940s, the contemporary kind that like a corporation or a billionaire hires to ruin someone's life.

The kind that is just exclusively, yeah, like a belligerent, life-ruining. Well, no, but on the one hand, she's got a little Sherlock Holmes consulting detective.
Right.

You know, because the quality of Britney's hair made it clear that she would never own that clip.

But then when it became clear that the system was not going to respond, because this is what always bothered me about Encyclopedia Brown and Inspired Dick Town, was that Encyclopedia Brown was always being paid a quarter to go get back a stolen thing that Bugs Meanie had taken.

They were all in middle school and they were all in Idaville, which I think was supposed to be in Florida.

If you don't know what Encyclopedia Brown is, a series of books about a teenager, pre-teen detective named Encyclopedia Brown.

And kids would come up to him in his backyard, or I should say, in his garage office slash office. He was an early, early work from Homer, and put a quarter down on the gas can and hire him.

Like, Bugs Meanie stole my bow and arrow set or whatever. And then Encyclopedia would go around and talk to Bugs Meanie, who was both a big meanie and a and a pest.

He's a leader of the tigers, a bad kids club. And Bugs Meanie would was like, nah, I don't have that bow and arrow.

I've never used a bow and arrow in my life.

And then Encyclopedia Brown was like,

I didn't say it was a bow and arrow. I just said it was a bow or something, you know, something like that.
Right.

And then Bugs Mean, then the conclusion would always be, then caught in the lie, Bugs Meanie would confess his guilt and gave it back to him.

When it should have been, Caught in the lie, Bugs Meanie punched him in the nose and walked away. Yeah, 100%.

It's like, caught in the lie, Bugs Meanie doubled down on the lie, and the teacher believed him because the teacher didn't have time to deal with this hair clip dilemma.

I'm trying to imagine myself walking down 15th Street. I don't have my bow with me.
Right. Somebody comes up to me and says, pocket check expletive.

And then I say, well, I would empty my pockets for you, but ah-a-ah!

And that going well. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

But these pants don't have any pockets. I've sewed them clothes, something like that.
Yeah. Yeah.

Is that right, white boy?

Crystal tried using smarts, but when it came down to it, you had to put Sherlock Holmes out the door and become Leve Schreiber in that show, Ray Donovan. Isn't that about a fixer?

Yeah, I think that is about a fixer. She snuck in and fixed it.

Loretta writes in from Somerville, Massachusetts. 30 years ago, our science teacher wore a shirt that allowed a slight glimpse of a tattoo.

I thought nothing of it, but at recess, some other kids tiptoed over to me like cartoon spies.

In a whisper, they asked if I had seen that Mr. Science Teacher had a tattoo.
I said,

I guess.

They huffed away, annoyed that I didn't think it was a big deal. After recess, the principal asked to see me in his office.
He asked what the kids had said to me.

When I told him, he just said, hmm, and ordered me to write an essay about the incident.

I still have no idea

what he thought we were up to, or why I was the only one who had to sit in his little ugly office. until I wrote a, quote, acceptable, unquote, essay.
I demand justice. I have no issue with Mr.

Science Teacher. He was cool.
But all other parties involved owe me an explanation and an apology essay. Totally, Mr.
Science Teacher was cool. Had a tattoo 30 years ago going in to teach science.

Who was your coolest teacher in school? Mr. Crawford.
Yeah, right? You knew it immediately. Mr.
Crawford was super chill. Right.
He was a bear

who was a women's studies major and dressed like a rockabilly. Yeah.
He always wore a black leather double rider motorcycle jacket and blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and creepers. Yeah.

But he was very gentle and just wanted to talk to us about the cultural implications of

the book and film Carrie and

the girl group, The Sherelles. Wow.
Will You Love Me Tomorrow?

My wife. had a crush on me because Mr.
Crawford let me swear in class.

And I would say, most of all, basically the only teacher I ever had who never told me I was a disappointment to them. Let's hear it from Mr.
Crawford. Any tattoos? Did you bet he had?

I bet he had some tattoos.

I never saw them. Right.
But, you know, I bet that he had like on his bicep above his t-shirt, he probably had like a tattoo of like a Tom of Finland picture. Okay.
Okay. He was a great guy.

We had some pretty cool teachers. I mean, so, but they were never my direct teachers.
Like there was Joe McClellan, who was the permanent French substitute in our high school. And he was a big guy.

He had a, like, he was a little bald on top.

He had long frizzy hair, and he covered up his bald spot with a black beret, and he wore a... a black leather jacket and rode a motorcycle to school and was the biggest nerd of all time.

And, you know, in his spare time, he would motorcycle out to Medford, Massachusetts to play world music on WMFO, which was the Tufts University radio station. And I'm like, how'd you get that job?

He says, well, they hold spots open for members of the community. And he helped me get a slot when I was a junior in high school.
Oh, that's so cool.

Playing Billy Bragg songs every day, all day, every day. Well, it was only two hours a week, but you know.
And then he gave me a ride on his motorcycle. It was fun.
And then Ted Pine

was

an after-school teacher.

I went to this after-school program with Tim McGonagall and some other kids. And Ted Pine was one of the instructor.
I mean, they were more like camp counselors. Do you know what I mean?

And only later did I put it together that he was in a

really cool Boston band called the Sex Execs.

Cool.

Whose song was My Ex.

It was a really catchy tune. And he brought his bandmate in, Sean Slade, to play songs.

Like he, in his area of the after school program, he had like all these Devo posters up, and he and Sean Slade played a set.

Sean Slade later went on to produce Radiohead, produced the song Creep by Radiohead and stuff. This is Boston music.
This is when the Boston Manning Music scene was so cool.

And then the Sexy Zex went into WBCN's Battle of the Bands

and they went all the way, but they lost at the last minute. Guess who? Ben Affleck? No.

Ben and Casey Affleck.

The original founders of the Dropkick Murphys. No.

Till Tuesday

starring Amy Mann was their big break.

Big break. Those are the cool teachers.
To get back to Loretta, some teachers are not cool. And this principal is not cool.
Well, there's a lot going on here. It's a mystery, right?

Why did the principal feel the need to speak to Loretta?

What drew his attention to Loretta? And why? Did he ask Loretta to describe what had happened? And when what she described was this nothing burger of a conversation, why write an essay about it?

What was the interest that the principal had in Mr. Science teacher's tattoo? They're all mysteries here.
What we need is a detective because Loretta, you do deserve justice.

And I am very curious because it seems like there's a lot more story here. And luckily, I happen to know one of the best podcast detectives around, Starley Kine.
Oh, wow.

And I asked Starley Kine, would you look into this with me? Starley Kine hosted the great podcast Mystery Show, and she and I are going to, we're going to look into this enigma.

One of the greatest podcasts of all time, I think. One of the greatest podcasts of all time.
All three of them, or however many she made. Right.

And maybe they're available somewhere. I don't even know anymore.
But she's been out of the mystery game for a while other than writing on the mystery show Search Party. Legendary Show.

Legendary Show. And Starley and I are, we're already in contact with Loretta and we're already digging in.

One thing I've already put together is that Loretta is writing from Somerville, Massachusetts.

This actually happened when she was going to IS-PS217 on Roosevelt Island, a part of Manhattan that I have never, ever been to in the 29 years of my living in this city.

It's a little slip of an island in the middle of the East River, accessible by tram, Jesse. There's a tram that goes there and I've never been.

So I'm going to be gumshoeing it on the ground in Roosevelt Island, trying to learn a little bit more about what happened here so that maybe, maybe you can get the explanation and Loretta, I agree, the essay of apology that you are deserved.

But in the meantime, yeah, you're absolutely right. This is wrong.
You're a cool kid, Loretta. You still are.

We're going to take a quick break to hear from this week's partners when we come back. Grudges against some truly.
crummy cousins.

You're listening to Judge John Hodgman. I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.
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Thanks to everybody who's gone to maximumfun.org slash join. And you can join them by going to maximumfun.org slash join.

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Yeah, I i think that's a good call mabel's mabel's in there looking all little little and cute you know how much you love sending photos to your friends and family of things that you see people that you know things that you do i mean you love it it's a gift that you give every day probably

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Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast. We're clearing the docket of old grudges.
Here's something from Tobias in Durham, New Hampshire.

When I was young, my cousin once kicked me down a flight of carpeted stairs.

I was lying on the upstairs landing, eavesdropping on my siblings below me. To this day, my cousin claims that she mistook me for a laundry basket,

and that's why she kicked me.

Please order her to apologize and admit that she did in fact recognize me.

Indeed, she said hi right before she kicked me.

Oh, wow.

You know, first of all, I'm glad you're okay, Tobias. Yeah, I think this whole thing, let's just start by stipulating that it's never okay to kick someone down the stairs.

Don't kick your cousin, don't kick anyone down the stairs, and don't pull out a hank of your cousin's hair without asking, and then burn it with your weird lighter right in front of him, saying, I want to see if it burned.

Whoa, that's my cousin, Jason.

Holy mackerel. Yeah.
Is your cousin Jason like a character in the Saw movies?

Jason's like a truly, truly like a villain from a Stephen King book. Crummy, crummy cousin.
I doubt very much that he listens to this podcast. But, you know,

what I love about this one is, again, it's like, no one says hi to a laundry basket. All the lies are embedded in this one, right?

No one says hi to a laundry basket. No one kicks a laundry basket down the stairs for no reason.

It was obvious that Tobias's cousin kicked Tobias down the stairs.

And what's interesting about it is like, you know, the way some of these, like, we haven't heard Tobias's cousin's point of view from her own mouth. Yeah, how she felt about laundry baskets.

Yeah, exactly. But we do receive a lot of grudge letters about people being picked on and sometimes like shoved on a playground, that kind of thing, spat on,

that kind of stuff from grade school, right?

And there's so much going on in these stories because a lot of times the bully in this situation, now it's 30 years later, doesn't remember doing that stuff.

So, like, I believe that probably Tobias's cousin has told herself a story that she thought it was a laundry basket,

probably immediately after she did it in order to get out of trouble at home, and then locked that into her brain.

Because when you do something that is just so unequivocally mean

and you succumb to the imp of the perverse and do something that is unthinkable and wrong and embarrassing and humiliating to yourself in its cruelty, you want to erase it as quickly as possible.

And I know from

a lot of experience

that

bullies and picker honors and that sort of thing, when they grow up, they don't realize how bad they were.

to some of the kids that they were mean to.

And even if, even if it was a, I mean, there's, you know, you kick someone down the stairs, they can get really hurt.

Even if it's a non-physical thing like a tease or a nickname or whatever else, they'll convince themselves because everyone, no one is the villain of their own story.

They'll convince themselves that they were friends. And I've heard stories about this all the time.
And later on, they'll come to

get together or reunion or whatever, and they'll say, hey, how are you doing? The other person's like, why are you talking to me?

You were a jerk to me in high school or whatever. And they're like, like, I had no idea.
I thought we were having fun.

Weird, right?

We had one letter from really kind of touching from someone named Cameron saying, I was visiting my parents in my hometown and ran into a friend from grade school. We chatted briefly about old times.

And she finally said, you know, Cameron, I have never forgiven you. Taken aback, I asked, forgiven me for what? And she explained that it happened in third grade.

I was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. She came up to me and she said she had a crush on me.
And my response was to spit on her from on high.

I I had no memory of this, and I was mortified, and I apologized profusely, and we said goodbye on good terms, but I'm still amazed and saddened that she had carried that with her all her life.

And yeah, you should be. You should be saddened.
I mean, I know you're in third grade. Our judgment is not well formed.

But all of this is to say that if you become aware that you did wrong by someone, it is appropriate to offer to apologize.

And I hope, by the way, Tobias, that your cousin apologizes to you and owns up to what she did. She kicked you down the stairs.
They were carpeted.

I don't know how long ago this was, but maybe it was that plush, you know, wall-to-wall carpeted stairs type of thing. Maybe it cushioned the blow a little bit.

I hope you get that apology if that's what you want.

But if you are someone who was picked on and your picker honor comes to you years later at a reunion and says that they want to apologize, you have zero obligation to accept that apology. Zero.

Zero obligation to.

One of the bravest things I ever heard about was that one of our high school reunions, you know, my wife was a whole human being in our own right and I went to high school together. And

so we went to a, it was her high school reunion, actually.

And she saw this happen and reported it to me that there were two women, now adults.

And one of them went up to the other. And one of them was kind of from the cool clique and one of them was from the the less cool clique.

Traditionally, now we're all adults and you know, struggling and failures, you know, that's how it goes. But the cool, the originally cool

woman,

the originally cool teen goes over to the less cool teen and says, Look, I've really been haunted by how me and my friends treated you.

And I really just wanted to say, I'm sorry.

And

the less cool kid looked her in the eye and said, You should be sorry.

You made my life really, really, really hard, and I don't forgive you. Goodbye.
And I think that's perfectly fair. I think that's perfectly brave.
All of which is to say, I wanted to just say

the letter that you wrote, Destiny, about Mark proposing to you in kindergarten and then you getting dressed up for the Paniwani marriage the next day and him refusing you in a cruel way.

You don't have to accept his friend request now, 30 years later, or whatever.

You don't have to. And I admire you for saying that you wouldn't be his friend.
And I don't admire him for not apologizing at that point. And you have nothing to think about again.

That person is just a thought and he's gone. So there you go.
Anyway, Tobias's cousin apologized to Tobias.

Did you watch the television show 30 Rock?

30 Rock,

the comedy show? Television comedy program. Yeah, I love it.
One of the funniest shows of all time.

Not a sensitive or insightful show, generally speaking. Sometimes an actively insensitive show,

but also just more about 10,000 perfect jokes than it is about any kind of social insight.

But there is an episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon, the perpetually put-upon nerd character, goes to her high school reunion and has the realization that she had been a bully in high school. Right.

And I think that the central insight of that there

is not that bullies don't realize that they're bullies.

It is that in those situations before we developed full social awareness, most to all of us did things to other people that we may not have even realized were consequentially cruel. Absolutely.

And I think it is easy to

think of

going to your high school reunion, meeting a person who bullied you, and not accepting that person's apology being a heroic act.

And that in turn, that heroic act or that experience validates your own memories of high school as ethically pure on your part and

purely, you know, a matter of your own victimization, right?

And my experience is that

most of us look back on our childhoods and especially adolescences

as times when we were victimized and don't grapple with the times that we victimized others. And I think that it is important, especially for those of us who were

more the pocket checked than the pocket checker,

to take responsibility

for having inflicted pain on others in our childhood, as well as grapple as adults with what it meant to have had pain inflicted upon us as children.

Well, you know, it's what they say, you know, the axe forgets, but the tree remembers. Yeah.
And you're right that we're always a little bit of an axe and probably we don't remember.

And that's what I mean to be mindful.

of those times when you hurt people without meaning to. I realized I was a bully when at the Daily Show I wrote about it.
I used to tease Elliot Kalen.

I thought it was a really fun form of meta-bullying where one nerd bullied another nerd about comic books. But it took me a while to appreciate

that I wasn't just another nerd. I happened to be on camera talent.
He happened to be a writer, and there was a power differential,

and there was no way that he could defend himself.

And,

you know, and I realized this

at the moment that

the shoe that I was throwing at him hit its apex in midair. And I'm like, oh,

I can't throw a shoe at Elliot. I love him.
What is going on? And I had to apologize.

And I hope that he accepts it,

but he's not obligated to. Anyway.

Here's a case from Penny in Silver Spring, Maryland. When I was seven, my dad's stepbrother and my dad's stepbrother's family visited us in rural Indiana.

I was lying on the pink carpet pretending my mom's calculator was my computer. My older cousin scoffed.
That's not a computer, he said.

When I grow up, I'll get you a real computer, end quote. Later, my cousin went into computer science.
He is now quite wealthy. Although we lost touch, I think he still owes me a computer.

Thanks for listening to my 30-year-old grudge. Well, first of all, I read this letter right after the previous one.
Two crummy cousins in a row.

I mean, literally when they came in, when I got to the detail about the pink carpet, just because of the carryover, carpeted stairs, pink carpet, I was dying for this to turn out to be.

I was lying on the pink carpet when my cousin Tobias fell on me as he fell down the stairs.

I wanted these to be part of the same expanded universe. But

I appreciate the detail. Rural Indiana, pink carpet, specificity is the soul of narrative.
You really painted me a good word picture there, Penny, such that I really felt that scoff

when that older cousin scoffed at you. That's not a computer.
I'll buy you a real computer. Jesse, did anyone ever make a promise to get you something that

they never owned up on? Never paid off? You owed anything?

My father, for Christmas one year,

got me my dream gift. And this was not common when I was a kid.

I really

joined the middle class in my mid to late teens.

So

when I was this age, it was, you know, secondhand toys kind of situation. But one Christmas, my father got me the thing I wanted most, which was

a scooter.

I wanted a scooter so bad. Yeah.
You wanted to scoot around. You know, you're your favorite Muppet scooter.
And yes, your favorite Muppet scooter.

And he got me the,

he got me the kind with sort of like

inflatable BMXE tires. This is pre-razer scooter

and like a cool kind of

textured kickboard like the top of a skateboard and, you know handle brakes and all that kind of stuff

and i was so thrilled and my dad started putting it together then got confused stopped and never finished oh

for whatever i just don't know i think at some point he was going to ask rich lubman for help i don't i don't know what was

what Lube DeRube had to offer. Family nickname for Rich Lubman.

i'm gonna get you i'm gonna get you a scooter jesse i'm gonna get you a good scooter thank you john you know why because i know you love scooters how can i not love scooters when scooter is your favorite muppet you know who your favorite former chief of staff to the vice president of the united states is got to be scooter libby scooter libby of course

he's a jerk man how come i didn't get a waspy nickname like this i went to yale too why don't they call me scooter hodgman well i guess i didn't belong to the right secret society i could call you like the chipper or something.

Speaking of chipper computer chips, let's get back to Penny and her crummy cousin. Penny, do me a favor.
Send me the LinkedIn link for your crummy cousin at his big old company or whatever.

I'm going to reactivate my LinkedIn account for the first time in a decade because I'm going to write him a letter saying that he owes you a computer. I'm going to make it happen.

And it's going to be a good computer too, not an Acer computer,

favorite of the New York Times crossword.

a different computer of your choice. This is going to be a Gateway 2000, the best of the best.
Maybe Acers are great. I don't know.

It's just every time I see them in the New York Times crossword, I'm like, what are you doing? Famous computer. I'm a Mac.
All right, we're going to get you a computer penny.

We're going to make it right. I'm going to write a letter.
I'll let you know when I find out.

John, from now on, I'm calling you Birdie because you're so good at golf.

What do you think?

Scamp.

Scamp.

Now these are just dog. This is just dog names.
Dog names.

Yeah, it's just this.

What are the parts of a boat that seems important, right?

Hull,

front,

coxix, port, porty, boson,

coxswain,

prow, prow, prow, prowl, hodgman, a wugah horn, foghorn. That's what you can call me.
Foghorn. Hyalai.
I'm going to call you high a lie. High lie.
There we go. High lie.
I love it. Okay, that's good.

There used to be High Lai in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I'd see it on the train as I was taking the train to school.
All right. That's good.
I like it. Hi, Lai.
You got it.

Let's take a quick break when we come back. Banana pranks and, of course, straw scolding.

Hello. Hello, I'm calling on behalf of the Beef and Dairy Network podcast.
No, no, I'm sorry. No sales calls.
Goodbye.

It's a multi-award-winning podcast featuring guests such as Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, Josie Long. I don't know what a Josie Long is.

And anyway, I'm about to take my mother into town to see Phantom of the Opera at last. You are wasting my time, and even worse, my mother's time.
She only has so much time left. She's 98 years old.

She's only expected to live for another 20 or 30 years. Mother, get your shoes on.
Yes, the orthopaedic ones. I don't want to have to carry you home again, do I?

Right, well, if you were looking for a podcast, Mother, you're not wearing that, are you? It's very revealing, Mother. This is musical theatre, not a Parisian bordello.
Simply go to maximum fun.org.

I'm reaching for my Samson Galaxy 4 as we speak. Mother! Mother, not that that hat!

Judge Hodgman, we're taking a break from Clearing the Docket. I have been enjoying Up Here.
I watched Up Here you sing

like the top of the first episode. Gee, it's nice to really know someone.
You want to hear the rest of the song? Go to Hulu Up Here.

Eight episodes there, a lot of fun. It's a real toe-tapper.
It's a real heartwarmer. And

the whole cast album has been released wherever you get your streaming music and presumably your physical music. It's called Up Here.
All the songs were composed by Bobby Lopez and Christian Anderson.

Lopez, two geniuses who are friends of this show and put me in their show. Up here is available on Hulu.

I also want to tell you quickly about a podcast I discovered because at Sketchfest, I met very, very funny and nice performer, Greg Hess, who's part of the Improvise Shakespeare Company.

And he's got a podcast with Holly Laurent, who's a brilliant improvisational comedian called Mega, M-E-G-A.

And

it's dispatches from a fictional mega church somewhere in mega church land. And they play two extremely funny characters, and they interview a different member of the church each week.

It's obviously all live character-based improv comedy, and it was really, really, really funny.

funny not live in front of an audience but live in the moment improvised funny and incredible so check that out and finally i just want to very quickly say get your pets thanks to you the supporting members of Maximum Fun who stepped up and supported us during the Max Fun drive.

We hit our goal. I'm coming back with Get Your Pets, and we're going to get right into it starting the 17th of April.
That's Monday at 3 p.m.

10 whole days, two whole work weeks, 3 p.m. every day.
You can find me wherever you get your streams. I'll be posting about it on my socials.
my YouTube channel, the JJ Ho Facebook page, Twitter,

YouTube. I said that one already, but you know what I'm talking about.
Get your pets and get on over to wherever you get your streams on Monday, 3 p.m.

And we're going to interview some wonderful cats and dogs and other pets. And hey, while you're on Instagram, follow me on Instagram.
I've been, you know how I go to the flea market every weekend?

I do know, and I envy you. I wish I could be there with you.
Well, John, I'm shopping for the Put This On shop. Yeah.
But lately,

much of the stuff has been selling before it even hits the store. It's been selling when I post pictures of it on Instagram.
So follow me. You might might find something you love.
Put.this.on.

Put.this.on

is an account that I follow, and it's great. If you're on Instagram, follow me at John Hodgman.
Follow Judge John Hodgman at JudgeJohn Hodgman. Follow Jesse at put.this.on.

And follow all of MaxFun at MaxFunHQ. Let's get back to the docket.

Welcome back to the Judge Sean Hodgman podcast. We're handling old grudges this week, and here's a case from Sarah Sarah in Boston.
Well, hang on, hang on. Hang on one second.

Sarah, just hang on one sec.

Speaking of rich kids with fancy nicknames, Robin Hood Camp. This is a story about someone who was not believed.
Just like Crystal wasn't believed by our teacher when Brittany stole that hair clip.

Our son came back from his main day camp one day, and he said it was a big day. He was probably 10.
It's a big day at the camp.

Someone almost got hit by a jet ski. And I said, hit by a jet ski? You have jet jet skis at that camp? He said, no.
There's a jet ski from Robinhood Camp. I'm like, what's that?

He said, that's the rich snob camp across the lake. Like, what are you talking about? Rich snob camp across the lake.

That's a cliche. Who's telling you about the rich snob camp? The council is talking about it all the time.
I'm like, I don't know, son. I think that that's just a story they're telling you.

That's such a cliche of camp life. that across the lake, there's a mythical rich snob school.
No one got hit by a jet ski today.

Come on, that's just, that's just a game of telephone that went the wrong way. He said, no, it's real.
I said, oh,

I guess I believe you then. And I'm glad I said that because

the next time I was in town, a tour bus pulls up, a golden tour bus

with the words Robin Hood Camp on it.

And it was like the shiniest,

fanciest, like rock band tour bus that I've ever seen in my life. And the door opens,

and out start walking the Robin Hood campers in matching maroon track suits. Snubs, mackerel, rich snobs, scamp, and scooter, and boat shoe, and all of them just marching out there.
Sperry,

Sperry, and top side, Sperry, Lacoste,

Eyes Odd.

It was all true. Neck sweater.
All true. Tag Hoyer.
Tag Hawyer.

Tag Hoyer.

Wilson, Tag Hawyer. Valerie Moffat chiming in for the win.
That was great.

Anyway, I apologize to my son for disbelieving him for a moment there. And Robinhood Camp is real.
And if you went there, I dare you to write me and tell me how it's really not that fancy.

I saw your bus. I'll see if Tag Horror is available, Mr.
Movado.

Okay, from Sarah in Boston.

This is a grudge. Love that opening.
A few years ago, I took my one-year-old to our local public library.

The baby was getting fussy in his stroller, so I handed him the straw from my iced coffee to play with as we walked around.

An older woman looked down at my baby and said, to my baby, you know, Straws are bad for the environment. Wow.
I knew this comment was aimed at me, but I didn't know what to say.

After a moment, the woman, still looking at my son, said, Did you hear me, baby?

I was speechless. I wish I had told her off.
Then I saw her walk behind the circulation desk, and I realized she was a librarian. For shame.
Talk about cliches.

How dare you do the noble work of being a librarian, madam, but then dishonor your colleagues by living up to the stock cliche of the librarian as a scold and a villain when what librarians are are heroes.

How dare you? This one alarmed me a little bit, Jesse, because given the timing of a couple of years ago, Boston librarian,

there was a non-zero chance that this was my mother-in-law.

But then I thought about it, I was like, no, impossible, because my mother-in-law would never publicly shame someone for using a straw.

Never mind using their baby as a shame proxy to get at them in the most passive-aggressive way. And by the way, you know what? Don't talk to that baby.
That baby is not ruining this earth.

We have ruined this earth. And by the way, yeah, plastic straws are no good.

And I might argue might even do a little damage to your one-year-old's upper palate if he's or she or they are chewing on it. But that baby is not ruining the earth with that straw.
The earth

has been ruined by decades and decades of policy inaction and industrial malfeasance. That baby didn't ruin the earth with that straw.

He ruined the earth when he decided to live too far from his workplace because he wanted to live in single-family housing.

Yeah, that baby ruined the earth with baby sprawl. No, look, we all do our own part.
That's fine. We all have accountability.

We all have some work to do to try to turn this, what is it again, prow, prow of this giant, giant ship away from this iceberg.

We're going to be taking it on the prow of some berg for sure for a long time. It's going to be very, very disruptive.

And it's not a baby's fault for chewing on a straw, nor is it your neighbor's fault for not recycling properly. There are massive, massive governmental and industrial bad actors at play here.

So if you're a librarian and you want to direct your ire somewhere for climate change and other ecological disaster, go take your shishin finger and go shush someone else. That really teed me off.

It takes a lot to get to get Hilai to lose his cool here, Sarah, but this really did it. When you tee off Birdie.

When you tee off Birdie, ooh, swing bada, bada. Yeah, you catch the driver.

You're going to find yourself in the water feature. That's what's going to happen.
You'll find yourself in the sand pit. No puts about it.

I'll tell you what,

this librarian, she's a putz. You know what I mean?

Wow. Guys, I'm going to have to limit these puns to four.

Thank you, Valerie. Wow.

Wow. Valerie knows comedy's rule of force.
No, what do you...

She was referring to what you say before you hit a golf ball. Oh, okay.
Thank you. Yeah, Yeah, that's good.
That was a good one. That's what they call,

that's two in a row. Two in a row right there.
Two strikes in a row. What's that, a turkey? That's three strikes in a row.
I'm talking about bowling strikes. Never mind.

Anyway, I hope that, I hope, Sarah, that my telling off this librarian has provided you with some catharsis.

And I hope that if you're this live, because you know, a librarian, a librarian in Boston could very well be one of our listeners.

I'm pretty confident that my cousin Jason doesn't listen to this podcast because it's not pro-Trump enough. But

it could be that the Boston librarian is listening.

And, ma'am, if you are listening, may I say, thank you for the work that you do. Don't talk to other people's babies.

Don't scold other people's babies ever, ever. Never side scold.
Sideways scolding is not appropriate. Not appropriate.
Okay. Hope we settled that grudge for you.

This one comes from Mark in Gaston, Oregon. I have a grudge.
I don't like bananas. I never have.

When I was six, I had an allergic reaction to a weird weed in our yard that caused my eyes to swell shut. I love that detail.
Weird weed. I know.
Alliterative and everything.

Everyone's writing good letters today. Probably Jonathan Leatham writing to us.
It was very scary, but the next morning my parents were there to help me get up and get dressed.

My dad led me to the kitchen and poured me a bowl of cereal. He failed to mention he had covered the bowl of cereal with sliced bananas.
I was expecting the satisfying crunch of a Cheerio. All I got?

A mouthful of disgusting mush. I remember, vividly, spitting it out and hearing my dad chuckle.
To this day, my dad says he was trying to expand my palate. He also says he didn't know I hated bananas.

Two contradictory statements. This is all bull feces.

He pranked me.

To be clear, I love my father. I have a wonderful relationship with him.
I'd love for him to admit this was a lapse in an otherwise stellar career in the field of dadding.

But he's 82, and I'm 42, so it feels dumb to take him to task at this point. Putting aside your bias toward weird dads, was this as bad as I think it was? Look, Mark in Oregon, I don't want to yell at

your 82-year-old dad any more than you do, but I'm going to. Don't prank your kids.

Don't do it.

I told a story on this podcast not long ago about how when she was younger, my wife, whole human being, was taking a walk at night with her cousins in Maine, and the parents jumped out of the cemetery to scare them.

And it was the worst, the the worst,

the worst fright they'd ever had. I think that there was a time when it was considered kind of funny and par for the course to prank your kids.
And I'd like that time to be over.

I'd like that time for when late night talk shows are showing videos of parents telling their kids that they, the parents, have eaten all the Halloween candy.

to record the horror on their children's faces. I'd like that time to be over.
That stuff sticks. This is the whole thing about grudges, right? When you get hurt, and this is an evolutionary issue.

It's like when you touch something hot and it burns, you remember it. When you're a tree and you get axed, you remember it.
The axe doesn't remember. The tree does.

Pain, emotional or otherwise, sticks with us. It sticks in our craw.
Arguably, that's what the craw is for, for holding that grudge. So, Mark's dad, let me tell you something.
Stop playing games.

Stop playing pranks. Stop teasing your your son.
This letter was a lot longer in its original incarnation, Jesse. There's a lot going on here.

They still go, they go out to dinner, and the dad will still recommend bananas to his son. Anything with bananas on the menu and say, You want to try this? It's not funny.

Do you ever see that internet video? The dad was videoing a little kid, and the little kid's little brother had like cut his finger.

And the little kid was screaming to his dad, Byud, Byud, trying to say, Blood, blood.

And the dad couldn't stop laughing. He thought it was really funny the way the kid was saying blood and how upset he was.
And finally the kid said, biud, it's not funny. It's not funny.

It's not funny. Distress is not funny.
Confusing people by being a weird dad and asking,

I'll have the kung pao chicken in an Italian restaurant. It's not funny.
Pain isn't funny.

I know there's a long history in slapstick comedy of people falling down some carpeted stairs, but you know what else is not funny? Honestly, when you come down to it, three stooges. It's not funny.

I just remember that as a kid, watching that on channel 38. Just all the bonks and the binks and the bonks.
It's not fun. It's not funny.
It's not funny to me. And it stays.

So if you hurt someone, say I'm sorry. If they're ready to hear that apology, grand.

If they're not, you've done what you can. Be mindful as you go forward.
Biud, it's not funny. It's not funny.
It's Biud.

All right. That grudge is settled.
You can play this for your dad. And by the way, Mark's dad, I love you.
I'm sure you're a great dad. 82 years old doesn't get you off.

Justice may be delayed, but it will not be denied.

The docket's clear. That's it for another episode of Judge John Hodgman.
Judge John Hodgman was created by Jesse Thorne and John Hodgman. Our producer is Valerie Moffat.

We're on Instagram at judgejohnhodgman. Follow us there for evidence and photos from the show.
You can also find those photos on this episode's page at maximumfund.org.

If you want to chat about the show, maximumfund.reddit.com is a great place to do it. I have John here a quick correction

that was submitted by my conscience. I said that it was never okay to kick someone down the stairs.

And then I remembered that my stepmother, who grew up Catholic in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the Troubles,

once had a police officer,

let's charitably say, bother her,

and she kicked him in the jewels and then kicked him down the stairs.

That guy earned it. So I'm making an exception for evil agents of the state.
Yes. Evil agents of the state, you may be kicked down the stairs.
Watch your back and watch your jewels.

I agree with that, Jesse. So ordered.

Jesse, we've got a great docket of naming disputes coming together. I asked for some naming disputes a couple of weeks ago.
We could use a few more.

So just to remind you, what we're looking for are things that need to be named, that aren't named yet. A cat, a dog, a bearded dragon, a child, definitely.

A boat, a novel, or what if you're founding a new country? Yes, if you're going to name something.

Come to me with two alternatives, something you like and something someone else prefers. And I, in discussion with Bailiff Jesse Thorne, will determine the best name.
It shall be binding.

I will name your child. So keep those coming at maximumfund.org/slash JJHO, as well as what, Jesse? All the other cases they might have? Big ones, little ones.
Gin them up and email them over.

That's what I say: maximumfund.org/slash JJHO. Submit them there.

The honest truth is: if you right now sit down at your webmail, log into your webmail,

then in that to field, put your email address. Then in that BCC field, you put in the top 25 or 30 people you can think of who you know.
Yeah.

And then you put in the subject line, what's your problem? question mark.

And then in the body, say, I want to be on Judge John Hodgman. What problem do you have with me? Right.
Wow.

This is some atonement business going on here. You might find out about a couple of times when you were the axe and didn't know it.
And a tree might write back to you and say,

hey, you shouldn't have let your dog chew up my sunglasses. You should have paid me back for that.
And then, bingo, bango, bongo, you've got a case for Judge John Hodgman.

Go to maximumfund.org/slash jjho. That's maximumfund.org slash jjho Ho to submit your disputes and communicate with me directly.
No dispute is too small, and none is too large either.

And some are too medium, but it's fine. I'll write back to you.
We'll talk to you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

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