Misdenomer

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bill of Jesse Thorne.

This week, Misdenomer.

Haley brings the case against her partner, Jonathan.

Haley and Jonathan have a non-existent child named Belinda.

Belinda started as a joke, but she has since become a symbol for their future together.

Now, Haley and Jonathan are talking about having an actual child together.

Jonathan thinks the name Belinda would be perfect, but Haley disagrees.

Who's right?

Who's wrong?

Only one can decide.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman enters the courtroom and presents an obscure cultural reference.

I came home one day from a friend's house holding a book that seemed like it might help me change my life.

I hid it under my sweatshirt and went straight to my bedroom.

I felt a tingle of excitement as I slipped it out and looked at the cover.

The Satanic Bible by Anton LeVay.

I read bits and pieces, and although I understood very little of the author's rant against Christianity, I focused on terms like exorcism, evil, and black magic, thinking I could find out how to cast spells and take control of my life.

Bailiff Jesse Thorne, please swear the litigants in.

Haley and Jonathan, please rise and raise your right hands.

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

So help you, God or whatever.

Yes.

Yes.

Do you swear to abide by Judge John Hodgman's ruling, despite the fact that his two human children are named Hodgmino and Hodgmanilla?

I do.

Even more so.

Judge Hodgman, you may proceed.

Hail Satan.

Haley and Jonathan, you may be.

Oh, Haley, Satan, indeed.

Haley and Jonathan, you may be seated for an immediate summary judgment in one of your favors.

Can either of you name the piece of culture that I did not merely reference.

I quoted directly.

I changed not one word of this passage.

Where is this passage from?

Who wants to guess first?

I'll say, Haley, you guess first.

I genuinely have no idea.

So I'm going to go with some sort of teen beginner's guide to Wicca.

A teen beginner's guide to Wicca.

Okay.

That's just something we made up, or you did.

There are many that exist.

I don't know the titles of any other hand.

That's true.

You conjured it.

Okay, that's fine.

Good.

I put it into the book.

And I have cast my intention into the universe.

She'll come back at me sevenfold?

I don't remember.

Wiccans, let me know.

Meanwhile, Jonathan.

I was going with like a one of the young adult novels that was popular when I was a kid.

So I'm going to go with like an unpublished Judy Bloom

novel.

Unpublished Judy.

Yeah.

How old are you?

You know, they were popular when I was a kid.

That doesn't mean that that was when they...

They're always popular.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Just struggling for one.

I don't even know why it would have to be unpublished.

You think Judy Bloom's afraid of writing about the Church of Satan?

I don't recall,

but she's pretty inclusive.

Are you there, Satan?

It's me, Margaret.

That was the sequel.

All guesses are wrong.

Sure.

All guesses are wrong.

What I was quoting from was a memoir

entitled Lips Unsealed.

Lips Unsealed.

Do you have a guess who that one's by?

It's a memoir.

No?

Yes.

No,

not at all.

I feel so vacant.

No, nothing.

It has something to do with this case.

Is it written by someone named Belinda?

Oh, Jennifer Marmor's got an idea.

Do you want to guess, Jennifer Marmor?

I saw you light right up.

It's by Belinda Carlisle.

Belinda Carlisle.

No joke, lyrics to a song by the Go-Goes was my backup guess, but that didn't sound like a song.

No,

but Belinda Carlisle, of course, was the lead vocalist.

And co-founder of The Go-Go's, also known as The Go-Goes.

I don't know why I said it that way.

And author of the memoir, Lips Unsealed, but

Haley and Jonathan.

Why is it, look, no offense to Belinda Carlisle, very, very talented person.

But why is it somewhat inappropriate for her book to be named Lips Unsealed?

I'll tell you why.

Because the song that that is referencing, Our Lips Are Sealed, was written by Jane Weedlin.

Again, no offense to all the go-gos.

But you know what I'm talking about.

I love Jane Weedland.

I've always had a crush on Jane Weedland.

Hi, Jane.

I hope you're listening.

Jane Weedland Weedland wrote Our Lips Are Sealed.

Who did she co-write it with?

Terry Hall of the Specials.

Very sadly, just passed away.

They had a secret love affair when the Go-Gos were opening for the specials in England, and they wrote about it.

And they wrote the song Our Lips Are Sealed about their secret love affair.

And then the Go-Gos performed it, very famous song.

But then Terry Hall performed it, a completely different, very downbeat version of it with his post-specials group, Funboy 3.

And as fun as that three sounds, it's actually a very, very

mournful version of Our Lips Are Sealed.

Both versions are fantastic.

Both were co-written by Jane Wheeland.

And Jane, by the way, is a terrific name.

It was my backup name.

If I were not John, I would have been Jane.

So your entire case is founded on a false premise, which is that your future child should be named Belinda, which is wrong.

It should be Jane.

By the way, shout out to Kathy Valentine, another of my favorite.

All of the Gogos are my favorites.

Gogos are one of the greatest groups.

Agreed?

Can we all agree on that?

So stipulated.

Thank you very much.

Go listen to the Gogos.

If you haven't listened to the Gogos in a while, go listen to them.

They're incredible.

Meanwhile, we have some justice to dispense.

Who seeks justice before me in this fake courtroom today?

I do, Judge.

And you are Haley, correct?

That's correct.

And what is the nature of the justice that you seek?

Sure.

So Jonathan and I have this fictional child.

Her name is Belinda.

It started as a joke that was told to me on the New York subway about six and a half years ago, but has since since kind of grown into a shorthand for us to talk about parenting and children.

I recently learned that Jonathan would like to actually name our firstborn daughter Belinda, and I am opposed.

Is this a thing that happens on New York subways, like those kids who come on and they say they're raising money for their boys and girls club, and then they dance on the subway poles and go around with a hat and sell chocolate bars or whatever?

Yo, yo, yo, it's name time.

And then they just go around

and they suggest names to couples.

In the form of jokes.

That would be less weird than the real version.

But yeah, let's go with that.

What actually happened?

So saying it out loud, I realized sounds pretty horrible.

We were riding the subway

and there was a small child, a baby,

who was, yeah, I mean,

usually,

which are usually small children.

And she was just really cute.

The mother poured Cheerios onto the little part of her crib so that she could have a snack while they were on the subway.

And the baby was doing a terrible job of eating the Cheerios.

We were both watching, sort of

fascinated by the process.

She was particularly cute.

And I don't think it was so much a joke that I told as, you know, like an alternate history of the future of our family.

The idea that we would, and this is where it gets weird, abduct this child, move to Newfoundland, Canada, raise Newfoundlands with her, and she would be the princess of the Newfoundlands in Canada and have a happy childhood.

And it really grew from there, and it's taken on a whole different life of its own at this point.

The giant dog?

Newfoundlands?

Yeah, yeah.

Not Newfoundlanders, the people who live in Newfoundland.

No, yeah.

Newfoundland.

Yeah.

Right.

Judge Hodgman, is that the fantasy of all New Yorkers just to have multiple giant dogs?

Well, it's a dream come true for many New Yorkers who pack them into apartments because the larger the dog, the less the energy.

And they just flop around.

One thing, though, that is not...

What train line was this?

This would have been the four of the five.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can't bring a whole crib onto a four-train.

He mentor stroller.

I said.

You left out some details.

Okay.

They had set up a nursery on the five train.

It's really frowned upon on even the B or the D trains, and they're much larger.

But a four train, forget it.

That's the oldest line.

Can't bring a whole crib on there.

Nice plug for Cheerios as well.

Okay, so were you two dating at this time?

We were dating, and I was still living in Boston, and Jonathan was still living in New York.

So I was down for a visit, and we were going to the Brooklyn Bridge, which is where we saw this very, very cute baby.

And Jonathan was staring at her really hard because he's baby crazy.

This is not a different cute baby.

This is the same cute baby you saw on the train on the way to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yes.

And

he was staring at her so hard that I nudged him and I said, we have to stop staring at this baby.

People are going to think we're trying to kidnap her.

And then he looked at me deadpan and was like, no, we are going to kidnap her.

And that was the lore.

How long had you been dating at this point, Haley?

Two years.

Ish.

Two and a half.

So you were an established couple.

Yes, yeah.

And how long ago was this?

This was...

I don't know the date, but the first text message mention of Belinda is July of 2016, so, or 2015.

You're so established that you are now seriously considering perhaps having a child together.

Is that correct?

Yes.

That's the natural progression of romantic relationships, Judge Hodgman.

It goes from dating to kidnapping to having children.

It's your classic meet-cute.

Yeah.

And where did the name Belinda come from, Jonathan?

How did this specific name become part of your non-maritime province of Canada fantasy?

You know, I couldn't.

I think it was pretty much off the dome.

We frequently play the game of make up stories about people you see,

and there's just a lot of spontaneity in that.

So I don't think there was any particular idea.

Maybe I had Belinda Carlisle in the back of my head, as I often do.

But it's possible.

But I think it was just a name that I picked off the dome.

And it had alliteration with the last name that we'd chosen, which was Belinda Barnes.

Don't know why we chose that last name either, but they're all fictional.

It's not either of your last names.

No.

Jonathan made it up completely on the spot.

And I think he just said it because he thought the double B's together sounded funny.

Yeah, yeah.

Double B's.

Prequel.

Are you an improviser, Jonathan?

No, I am not an improviser.

We both work in theater, and Haley works at an improv theater, but no, neither one of us is actually improvisers.

Tell me about yourselves.

Right now, all I know about you is that you've been dating for some time.

You're thinking thinking about having a child.

And I can see via our teleconferencing program that you're sitting at the bottom of a pit, which is fantastic because

I've wanted the guest pit for a long time.

And we finally got one built, I guess.

Is that true?

Where are you in the world?

We live in Philadelphia.

Now you live together in Philadelphia.

Yes.

Okay.

And you work at an improv theater in Philadelphia.

What's the name of that theater?

And what do you do there, Haley?

It's called Philly Improv Theater, which is exactly what it sounds like.

And I'm the operations director.

So I keep the trains running.

okay and you also work in philadelphia theater jonathan yeah i work at a regional theater just outside of philadelphia and it says in here that you belong to a group called shakespeare on tap that is our personal project uh which is uh we go to bars around philadelphia uh and we have a group of actors who work really hard uh we do one read-through one rehearsal and then put up an off-book fully staged shakespeare play with just the one rehearsal in bars In bars, yeah.

Are you invited or is this just a

Shakespeare invasion?

No, we usually work out with the bars in advance rather than just inflict Elizabethan drama on people who are just looking for a night out.

And how many nine-volt batteries have you accidentally inhaled during these performances?

We've been fortunate.

People tend to enjoy it.

Yeah, it's pretty darn popular.

We do it for free or for pay what you can.

So the bar makes money because people buy food and beverage.

You know, nobody has to pay for a ticket, so we usually sell out.

And

it's more like a party where a play just happens to be happening.

And it's interactive.

We play games.

It's a fun time.

You ever do it at Bob and Barbara's on South Street?

No, although that would be the dream.

That's a super fun space.

Great Philly knowledge there.

It's absolutely my dream.

I dream about it every night.

So, Jonathan,

the name Belinda doesn't have a specific meaning.

It's not a favorite character.

It's not one of the many Australian athletes who are named Belinda that I saw on Wikipedia.

It's just

Belinda Barnes popped into your mind as a good name for a fictional child.

Yeah, at that point, it didn't have any significance.

I would argue at this point, it's taken on a great deal of significance.

How so?

How has it wormed its way into your life over the past years or so?

Yeah, so like we said, this started out as a joke.

We weren't serious about the child child abduction.

You weren't serious about kidnapping a child.

Oh, good to know.

Yeah, thank you.

No, that much was that was a joke.

And it started from there, but increasingly over the years, it became the go-to name we would use when talking about what the future looks like and how we want to be as parents.

And I think particularly during the lockdown, when there was nothing to do but,

you know, talk to each other about what the future might hold someday and

watch.

it was also Monopoly Deal.

Right.

You should have played that.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah,

we did a lot of those things, but you burned through them pretty quickly.

And, you know, when we were watching television shows about parenting, about parent-child relationships, frequently we would say, well, what would we do if Belinda were in this situation?

How would we deal with it if Belinda wanted to do this?

And so it became, you know, really It became very real at that point for me.

Did Belinda ever become real to people outside of your circle of two?

Did you talk about Belinda with friends, family, that sort of thing?

So as far as I know, the only people that really know are my two oldest friends.

We floated it past, I mentioned it to my mom when we were home for the summer for my sister's wedding.

And part of the reason why I'm opposed to this name was her reaction to me telling her that.

Jonathan also contends that his brother-in-law, Joe, has been told about it, but I do not recall this.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So, Jonathan, are you lying, or did you tell your brother-in-law, Joe?

No, we actually,

my family is at a point where they're really starting to have kids.

My eldest brother and his husband have a son that is now almost two.

And my stepsister is pregnant and is giving birth soon.

So it's something that's come up for us more.

But part of that is we've had many conversations about baby names over the course of the last two years that I think we were having.

Well, obviously we were having this conversation for a while,

but this was the first time we really started to have the conversation with other people.

And Joe and Adam, Adam is my brother, Joe is his husband,

remember our having this conversation and are very attached to their prospective niece.

They love the idea of their niece, Belinda Barnes.

Yeah.

So tell me about your mother's reaction to the name Belinda.

We were home over the summer because my sister got married and we were sitting in the car, and we mentioned Belinda.

I don't remember why.

And she said, huh, Belinda, that's an interesting name.

Where does that come from?

And I didn't want to lie.

I didn't want to say we got it out of a baby name book or something because that's not true.

So I told her the story and she didn't have a bad reaction.

She just sort of tilted her head to the side and said, huh, which if you know my mother speaks volumes.

And Haley, would you say that your reaction to the name Belinda is also, huh?

I feel very conflicted about it because I actually love the name and I really love everything that it represents.

And Jonathan would probably tell you that of the two of us, I talk about Belinda way more.

But

it's not,

it's not,

people name people things for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is not typically someone told me a joke on the subway once.

Normally, when you name a baby together, you have a conversation about it, and it's not just something that someone made up one day without consulting you.

So I feel conflicted because I adore the name,

but I think it's a weird way to name a baby.

My wife and I named our third child Lindberg Baby.

That's true.

I've seen the birth certificate.

Yeah.

Kidnapping plots are a common source of baby names.

That's right.

Patty Hurst Hodgman is

my middle child, Frank Sinatra Jr.

Let's take a quick recess and hear about this week's Judge John Hodgman sponsor.

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Let them know Jesse and John sent you.

Haley, you mentioned that you

love all that Belinda represents, and that's something I'm not clear on.

What does Belinda represent?

Sure.

So when we first started talking about Belinda, it was just casual stuff like, oh, I really loved Where the Wild Things Are when I was a kid.

I can't wait to read that to Belinda.

Or, you know,

you know, once we have Belinda, you're going to have to take us both to the park, even though you really don't like going to the park.

Like, we just used her as a placeholder to talk about things we wanted to do.

And

so, and but then as time went on, we started talking about more serious things like, you know, how are we going to talk to Belinda about gender?

What would we do if Belinda got in really big trouble?

Like big importance stuff.

And so she's just kind of really evolved over time into

everything we want to be as parents.

And so that makes her feel very symbolic and significant.

Aside from her residency in Canada and her raising of dogs and her different last name from yours,

is there more Belinda imaginary mythology than that?

Other adventures that she has had in your minds, Jonathan or Haley?

Or is she more just a placeholder for the future?

Yeah, so I think I will object to the term placeholder, which Haley used.

I think she is.

No, no, I used it, and it's overruled.

It was a great use of that word.

but you go ahead and say what you're going to say anyway yeah i think it started as that like we said as that mythology uh i think that joke ran for knowing us longer than it should have uh but eventually did move into something more real and more tangible for us um i i think after six months of talking about our imaginary child uh we started talking about her in very real terms and like had serious conversations about if we stayed in new york would we do private school like what would that look like?

And would that ever happen given that we work in theater and that's not feasible?

And so, you know,

Shakespeare in bars.

You're invited buskers.

There's a company that already does it in New York.

So

we really wouldn't even have a market for that.

You're the second best invited busking Shakespeare barfly company.

in the East.

We're not egotistical about it.

I think second best might be a little aspirational aspirational for us.

However,

but

the mythology kind of stuck to that one joke.

But again, we had very serious, lengthy conversations about like, again, like I went to a private school in New York, and Haley has very strong feelings about that based on the portrayal of Chilton Academy and the Gilmore Girls.

And so it was just conversations about that.

And now it really, like, I don't know that it's somewhere in between mythology and

real life, for me at least at this point.

How much of your future planning is based on the noted social realist text, The Gilmore Girls?

Jonathan is making fun of me because I am perhaps the foremost amateur scholar of the Gilmore Girls in North America.

Oh, I see.

I have seen it many, many, many times.

And while I do not think it is realistic or in any way indicative of how we should be as parents, they do, because she grows up over time, you get to like tackle different subjects like trouble at school or trouble with the law or, you know, mother-daughter fights, like stuff like that.

So it is, it is an easy gateway to like talk about these sorts of things.

Also, as Elliot, Jonathan's nephew, has been going from being a baby to being a toddler, these sorts of conversations just sort of naturally come up.

And it always falls back to us saying, well, if we had to deal with what Joe and Adam are dealing with with Elliot, with Belinda, what would we do?

So

these things come up.

So from a Gilmore girls perspective, let me just understand this.

You probably would prefer for your child to be named Yale University.

Yes, but not after the Gilmore Girls, after you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

I had to donate a lot of money to have Yale University named Yale University.

So, I appreciate that.

To be fair, John, you have an almost infinite supply of money from your padlock fortune.

Also, combination locks now, Jesse.

Thank you very much.

Fair enough.

But also, if I'm not a scholar of the Gilmore Girls, Haley, but am I remembering correctly that this is

about a woman raising a daughter without an interfering husband?

Is that part of the fantasy?

No, no, it's not.

I did not expect this to become a Gilmore Girls fanciful.

But no, no, no, no.

I do not fantasize about raising Belinda without Jonathan at all.

I would like to be part of the picture, too.

My mother-in-law, Judge Hodgman, is a...

marriage and family therapist and she can't even watch the Gilmore Girls because she gets so upset about the dysfunctional family.

Right, but that's part of why it's good for this conversation is because if every no, I'm just saying if everything in your childhood and your parenthood is going perfectly, then what is there to talk about?

But because they have all these problems,

it's just a good gateway for you to talk about how you solve problems.

And what are you going to do if Belinda gets in big trouble?

That was one of the hypotheticals you were talking about.

What kind of trouble were you talking about?

And how would you resolve Belinda's trubs?

What did we say?

We talked about this the other night.

What if Belinda kidnapped a child from the subway and then got in trouble with the law, for example?

Because that runs in the family, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Weird eccentric.

We come from a long line of weird eccentric parents and I think we'll try to pass that on someday.

I think, yeah, I mean, I think we have a policy that has been long considered of making sure that our child feels no matter what situation they find themselves in, whether it's they've stayed out past curfew or have abducted a subway baby, that they can call us without fear of repercussion to make sure that they know first and foremost.

Jonathan,

these are not subway babies.

These are babies that have families.

They happen to be riding the subway.

This is a very weird

worldview you have.

This is going to be one of those situations, John, where the local news is interviewing Haley and Jonathan after their child has abducted a subway baby, and they're going to say,

my child, my child abduct a subway baby?

Yes, I always figured something like that would happen because we come from a long line of eccentric parents.

They have parents too who love them and want to reassure them that they will always be loved.

They're not just subway babies waiting to be plucked by you and your and Belinda.

But okay, I understand what you're saying.

And what about gender?

What if Belinda decides that Belinda isn't Belinda?

Do you have a backup name?

Yeah, so that's another one of the reasons why I'm a little bit opposed to this name because

it is so overtly gendered.

And also, I'm slightly concerned that the child might not like the name because it has, I think, a little bit of a grandmotherly feel to it.

I think that we are both...

we're both on the same page about like leaving gender a very open question until Belinda's old enough to to know a little bit better about themselves.

But if you do name someone something that is overtly gendered and then there comes a time where that needs to be changed, that is something

that someone has to figure out and has to go through.

Whereas if you pick something that is not so overtly gendered, they might want to decide on a different name anyway, but

it's not so inherent in what they are called and what is on their ID card and how the legal system knows them that they would necessarily...

If you go

with a slightly less gendered name, the transition perhaps would not be as difficult.

Aaron Powell, well, and then also setting aside for a moment that question, I mean, wouldn't Belinda have a Belinda to live up to that a non-Belinda wouldn't?

I mean, you have this fantasy of a child

that you are then putting on to a real human being who is in your life.

Yes.

What do you think about that?

Obviously, you're agreeing with me, Haley, so please do so.

This is my biggest objection to naming her Belinda Barnes.

It is not that I do not love the name.

I do love the name.

And it is not that I'm against the symbolic nature of it that we have, the meaning that we have created around it.

It's that I think we have talked about Belinda for so long.

She is very much a representation of what our relationship was when we were in our 20s and all of our hopes and our dreams.

and you know things that we fantasized about that we couldn't afford back then i think that's a lot of meaning to put on a person who doesn't exist yet.

And I worry that

it would be selfish or perhaps putting too much expectation on real Belinda to name her after a fantasy that we had a really long time before she was ever born.

Jonathan, let's say that you have a daughter and she loves being a daughter and she loves the name Belinda and she loves the pronouns she and all is right in the world.

And let's say that she doesn't grow up to raise large dogs in Canada

or wear Amelia Earhart leather cap and goggles or have all the other steampunk adventures that you imagined for her.

Don't you feel you might feel a little let down or confused?

No, only because at this point

it's moved so much beyond the

Newfoundland riding toddler

surveying.

Oh, wait, she was going to ride around on the dogs?

Well, that was part of the charm of a really bad thing.

I think I've heard everything I need to in order to make my decision.

Belinda, it is fantastic.

Belinda Barnes and her Newfoundland steed.

What's the name of the Newfoundland steed?

We hadn't really gotten that far.

We'd envisioned so many that names were kind of irrelevant for the dog, just not for the person.

I know, Yale University, the dog.

Hambone.

Hambone, of course.

Hambone.

Belinda Barnes and her noble steed, Hambone of the North.

Sounds pretty good.

Anyway, you were saying something serious.

I apologize.

I don't know that I was.

No, I mean, I think I was basically saying that it's gone so far beyond that initial fantasy,

if we could even describe it as a fantasy.

I think now it's become how we think of our child someday.

And

regardless of whether or not we use the name,

the ideas that we've had don't go towards what we hope that this child will become.

And of course, like, I'm aware there's a 50-50 chance that Belinda is not born female and may not want to stay with that.

But I think

there's also

Lynn is a version of Belinda.

That's a gender-neutral name.

Oh, like Lynn-Manuel Belinda.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's no longer about values we ascribe to her.

It's just how we think about it.

And I imagine every couple

thinks about at some point what their life with a child will be like.

We just happen to have a name that we've glommed on to that has special significance.

And I would posit that even if we didn't go with this name in her heart of hearts and in her mind, Haley will still use that name in thinking about and talking about her child.

Oh, Haley, Jonathan just told you all about your hearts of hearts and your inner mind.

Did you know that?

It's a good thing he's around.

Yes, I think that Jonathan is just another in a long line of Judge John Hodgman litigants who say, well, I think if you really thought about it, you do agree with me.

Hey, Jesse Thornton, do you know what I decided is the best sort of male spectrum version of the name Belinda?

If Belinda is on sort of tilted toward the female spectrum, do you know what the best male spectrum version of that would be?

Backup name?

What's that?

Del Roy Lindo.

Named after the actor Delroy Lindo.

I just assumed you were going to say Belly, named after the Hype Williams film.

Oh, sure.

There you go.

We call her Belindo when we talk about her as a boy.

Very nice.

In your heart of hearts and in your in your mind of minds, Haley, do you think you will always think of this child as Belinda?

Yeah.

Well, so part of.

So Jonathan was right.

Good.

That's good.

That's pretty interesting.

But I think thinking of her, I think, so one of the arguments that I was going to make is that I don't have a problem with Belinda being a family name or a pet name or a nickname.

I just don't think it should be her legal name on her birth certificate.

And Jonathan, in his defense, is not wrong that to completely keep from thinking about her as Belinda and maybe occasionally accidentally calling her Belinda would be difficult for me.

Do you have another name that

you like for this?

I mean, this child is still hypothetical.

I think what I'm arguing for is pretty reasonable in that I just want to have a conversation about what this baby should be named, like all other normal adults do.

Jonathan's mother really likes the name Harper.

It's got a lot of important family history.

It's her maiden name.

It's Jonathan's middle name.

And I like that I think it goes either way gender-wise.

My big objection to that is that I think right now it's in like the top five most popular baby names.

And I really, I really, I grew up in, I grew up in a school with five other Haleys and I hated it.

And I doubt I have to explain that to the contingencies of Johns that are here.

But I really didn't like having a bunch of other people who had my name.

There's no one else named John.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Haley,

were you with a bunch of Haleys because there was a Haley's Comet thing going on?

I don't know if the timing matches.

I'm just curious.

I don't know.

Or is it just happened?

I don't know.

It was a very trendy name when I was born.

I'm 31 now.

And for whatever reason, when the 31-year-olds of my region were being born, it was just a very popular name because I lived in a really tiny town and went to a very small small school.

But there were five Haleys.

Yeah, it was Jessica's when I was that age.

And did you all have matching platinum blonde bowl cuts and weird eyes?

And you all wore the same clothes to school every day?

No, we were actually very different.

But because

most of the Haleys I wasn't really good friends with, but I was really good friends with one other Haley, and she was very short.

And I have always been quite tall.

And so we got ascribed the names Big Haley and Little Haley.

And I did not enjoy that.

Big Haley.

It's a wonderful thing to tell a teenage girl, right?

So you just want, but you want to postpone this whole conversation until it is Germaine, which is also a pretty good name, now that I think about it.

And

do you want me to order that Belinda is off the table if I were to find in your favor?

If you found in my favor,

I would like it argued that

it should not be considered as the legal given name.

And instead, some other name should be selected through a normal selection process.

Yeah, but so you're saying that the name could be something like John Hodgman, but the nickname is Belinda?

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, I think so.

Everyone in my family has a nickname.

There's nobody in my family who doesn't also have a family name.

And several of them are silly.

And several of them are names that don't sound silly.

Give me some of the silly nicknames.

I want to hear about them.

Sure.

So I'm Chichi Rodriguez, or Chichi Bonchuldegong.

My sister is Gooch or Gucci Rama.

My brother is Pickbill Rufus Dog.

And my other brother is Baone.

How come you're the only one named after a professional golfer?

You would have to ask my father.

I have no idea.

I wasn't old enough to remember when I was given this name.

Jonathan, if I were to take Belinda off the table today,

how would you feel?

I would be a little bit crushed, and I think it would be particularly confusing because Haley is often the one who instigates conversations about what life with Belinda will be like and how we'll deal with Belinda, and often prefaces it with what will we do about Belinda if, how will we deal with Belinda this?

And so it's,

I'm not good with sort of inconsistencies, and that would be introducing,

imagine i mean i would think that the conversations would still center around that name and i'm a simple man and it would be confusing to me so it would introduce a whole lot of chaos into my life personally

big haley let me ask you this question don't john i'm sorry your own size haley let me ask you this question

Is this true what Jonathan is saying, that he's a simple man who might get confused?

Is this true or is this what they call on the internet weaponized incompetence?

I'm sorry, I just can't remember any other name.

And you're the only one who's good at cooking.

Jonathan may be playing it up a little bit, but it is actually quite true that Jonathan is not good at

two conflicting realities.

It is a regular conversation that I have to have with him where he will say, oh, you don't like that thing.

And I say, yes, I do.

And he says, no, you don't.

And I said, since when?

And he said, you told me six years ago ago that you didn't like this thing.

And I have to say, it doesn't occur to you that people's minds can change over time.

He really, he's very black and white.

He's your heart of hearts and your mind of minds.

He's very black and white.

I don't think he would be, I don't think he would be harmed by me calling her Belinda, but knowing that he couldn't actually name her that.

But

I do think he's very black and white about things.

Aaron Powell,

specifically with reference to the family names things and this idea about inconsistency being my personal bugaboo.

I think there's something too to the idea that

if

we've established, I think, that there is a possibility that Belinda will be the name we use to refer to the child

even after they are born.

And

it's possible that it might slip out from time to time.

And Haley's right that her family has a tradition of nicknames, but not all of those, I think, are nicknames that were enjoyed, to my understanding of what's been reported.

And if this child gets gets stuck with a nickname that we hate that we that they hate that we inadvertently slip into from time to time i worry about the ramifications of that as well a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds you ever say that in a bar in in uh philadelphia no you know who said that not off the top of my head which is embarrassing i feel like delroy lindo the famous actor del roy lindo

was not shakespeare's ralph waldo emerson i was sort of expecting though honestly, when I said, if I take Belinda off the table, how do you feel?

Not like, I'm worried that I'll be confused in the future, but like, I'm worried, I feel like I'll be losing someone I know and care about.

I think that's true, too.

I mean, I think it's been,

you know, I think people have children for a lot of reasons.

People have real children for a lot of reasons.

I can only imagine not being a parent yet myself.

I think part of it is wanting to share something with your partner and the idea of taking taking on the adventure of raising someone together.

But I also think there's something about a child that is like, about having a child that is aspirational.

And particularly for us, this idea about our future that is centered around this name, it's been an aspirational thing to look forward to.

It's been sort of the person we want to bring into this world.

And to lose that would feel like losing something

that

is already, in some ways for us, I think very real.

And it would be a loss.

And Haley kind of nodded in some way there, I feel like.

I don't know if you can see at the bottom of the pit, but.

Haley, do you nod in some way in agreement there?

Yeah, I mean, like,

we're all having a little bit of fun making fun of the fact that like theater kids don't make any money, but it's true.

And when you consider, you know, when Belinda was born, Jonathan and I were young and madly in love and working artists in two different cities and horribly, horribly broke.

And we couldn't do things that people who are madly in love sometimes get to do, like get married and buy houses and have babies.

So we made up this imaginary one partially to talk about parenting decisions that are important, but also just to like feel a little better about something that we desperately wanted but couldn't have.

So

in that way, yeah,

she's very real to me.

She's very important to me.

I love her very much.

And if this court were to order that we never say the word Belinda again, kill the fictional child right now, I would be deeply sad too.

But I don't think...

Well, I would never order a fictional child killed, simply taken from you while you weren't looking while riding the subway with your daughter.

No, but

she is real.

She is real.

I love her very much.

She's very special to me.

Officer, I...

Left the subway nursery for just a second to get something from the subway kitchen.

Yeah, you went to the dining car for a a moment and you left Belinda in the crib on the four train.

You came back.

A young couple had stolen her.

That's all I would ever order.

A simple subway baby kidnapping.

Solomon of the subways.

What do you see happening to Belinda once you have an actual child?

Well, so if we don't end up naming her that, I mean, if we ended up naming her that, obviously that would be her name and then she would be Belinda for real instead of Belinda for pretend.

If we didn't end up, if the court orders us to not use that as the legal name, then yeah,

I think we would call her that in our hearts and maybe even sometimes out loud.

But it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be the name she had to learn to write in grade school.

It wouldn't be the name that she carries on her ID someday.

It would just be a little

private joke between Jonathan and I.

I think just to offer my own two cents on it,

again, we don't have children yet.

I know that that raising children is difficult.

I watched my parents do it.

It seemed like a real tough gig for them.

That might have had something to do with me.

But I think

part of what it is for me is that

the life we have now is not what we would have envisioned at this moment in our lives.

It's somehow even better.

The reality is even better.

And to think about what we planned and to see where we are now doesn't cheapen either one.

It only makes what we have now even greater.

And I'm so fortunate that we have that.

And I think this idea of the fictional child that we have, I don't think it would be disappointing to have a child come into the world and be in conflict with this fiction.

I think it would be

a way of actually improving on the fantasy that we already have because the reality is inherently so much more wonderful than just the fantasy.

And I think too, there is a way in which this fictional child is very much so already a part of our lives

and we've made a place for her in our family.

And

yeah,

I think it would represent when it actually happens, the completion of something we've been talking about for a while, but not something that negates the future we have conceived of.

Yeah, sometimes Jonathan says, like, first we dreamed her and then we made her, which is very, very, very sweet.

But, well, it's very sweet.

It's a very sweet thought.

I love it.

I love it when he says it.

But I don't think that that is necessarily a good enough reason to make this kind of decision for a person who doesn't exist yet and can't put their two cents in.

First, we dreamed her, then we made her.

Forsooth.

That is some Shakespeare in a bar type stuff.

I think I've heard everything I need to in order to make my decision.

I'm going to go forward into my private car of the F-train that only I'm allowed to enter with my plush wing back seats, leather wing back seats, and my legal tomes.

And I'll consider for a moment, and I'll be back in a moment with my verdict.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Jonathan, how are you feeling about your chances here?

Pretty, pretty, pretty bad.

I know that it's a ridiculous thing, and we joke about being eccentric.

But yeah, I feel like

it's going to be

Haley has a bunch of really good points, and of course it's a conversation we would want to have.

I just hope it's not taken off the table entirely, and it's something we can continue to talk about because it's been something that's brought us so much joy.

Haley, how are you feeling?

I feel okay.

I think I stated a pretty good case, but I don't know.

Jonathan's so poetic.

Given that you've already given up on the Newfoundland dogs and moving to Newfoundland, how many of these Belinda dreams do you think are realistically achievable for unnamed future child?

Well, I think something that Jonathan was trying to say, but maybe we didn't quite make it clear, we never say she will be like this.

We never say it's important to me that she goes to college.

It's important to me that she become an artist too, or specifically not, because we know what that life is like.

We only ever talk about it as regards to ourselves, what we can bring and who we should be.

I think that who Belinda or future named Unchild is is a completely open book, and we'll love her no matter what she decides to do.

Yeah, I can tell you, my one hope for my children was that they they not go into comedy.

And I'm pretty worried about my middle kid.

Oh, we're shaking in our boots, but we're not going to say anything to her about it.

I mean, if you're lucky, this unnamed child will go into some highly remunerative profession like improv.

Improv is the only artistic career less well-paid than Shakespeare and bars.

Well, we'll see what Judge Hodgman has to say about all this when we come back in just a second on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

you know we've been doing my brother my brother me for 15 years and maybe

maybe you stopped listening for a while maybe you never listened and you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years i know where this has ended up but no

no you would be wrong we're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing yeah you don't even really know how crypto works the only nfts i'm into are naughty funny things which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother, and Me.

We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.

And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.

So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show.

Let's learn everything.

So let's do a quick progress check.

Have we learned about quantum physics?

Yes, episode 59.

We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?

Yes, we have.

Same episode, actually.

Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?

Episode 64.

So how close are we to learning everything?

Bad news.

We still haven't learned everything yet.

Oh, we're ruined.

No, no, no.

It's good news as well.

There is still a lot to learn.

Woo!

I'm Dr.

Ella Hubber.

I'm regular Tom Lum.

I'm Caroline Roper.

And on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.

And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.

Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Maximum Fun.

Judge Hodgman, we're taking a break from the case and we are headed out on tour imminently.

I need folks to get their tickets.

Yes, some bad news for the people of Port Townsend Washington.

We are sold out.

If you slept on those tickets,

I don't know.

You might have to go to SeatGeek or something

to buy some resale tickets.

There's going to be scalpers outside this fort where we're performing.

But if you're in Port Townsend and you didn't get a ticket, you're not that far from Seattle, where we're performing the very next night on the 29th at Neptune Theater in Seattle.

Then you can take a little road trip down to Portland, Oregon, where we'll be performing at Revolution Hall, which is an incredible venue where we haven't ever been before.

Then a city we've never been before, Denver, Colorado, the mile-high city for the very first time.

Judge Hodgman, I just talked to my buddy David Borey, who is one of the world's funniest comics, one of the hosts of the very hilarious podcast, All Fantasy Everything, and lately the voice of Comedy Central.

And David is living in Denver, Colorado, where he's from, and he's agreed to come on our show.

That's incredible.

I can't wait to meet all the people in Colorado that we've never gotten to see before and hear their cases live on stage,

no less at the Gothic Theater in Denver, Colorado.

That's my kind of cozy goth.

John, did you know that Judge John Hodgman listener Corin Tucker of Slater Kinney is going to come on our show in Portland, Oregon.

I did know that, but I wanted you to reveal it, and so you have.

We'll have all sorts of fun surprises at all of our stops.

And here's a surprise maybe you didn't know about, if you didn't listen to the very beginning of this episode.

In San Francisco, at San Francisco Sketch Fest, not only are we performing live at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, which is a beautiful theater, which I hope you come to, but we're streaming the whole show all over the world.

That's right.

It's streaming.

You can go watch a stream.

Maybe you're in Port Townsend going, I didn't get tickets.

Well, why don't you watch the stream of the San Francisco show?

All you've got to do is go to San Francisco Sketchfest website, sfsketchfest.com.

On the Judge John Hodgman page, you'll see the link for the stream right there.

Yeah, project it on the wall of your nerd bar.

I know that most Judge John Hodgman listeners own nerd bars.

Some people think it's just Stuart from the Flophouse who owns a nerd bar, but most of our listeners own nerdbars.

Granted, some are librarians and graphic designers, but most own nerdbars.

So project it on the wall of your nerd bar.

This is going to be a great Saturday night.

Get yourself a bottle of whatever you like to drink.

Put your feet up on your coffee table, cuddle with your cat dog or other creature, and watch Judge John Hodgman live.

It's going to be a hoot and a half.

sfsketchfest.com.

Go to the Judge John Hodgman page and you'll see the streaming button right there and you can get your streaming tickets.

And then finally, we're rounding it out.

We're bringing old Jesse Thorne back home from his real home in San Francisco to his fake home in Los Angeles, to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where we are performing in Los Angeles inside a Masonic Lodge.

It's truly a dream come true for me.

I can't wait to go on tour and see everybody for the first time in several years.

It's going to be a terrific time, and we hope you can join us wherever you can join us.

To get tickets, go to bit.ly slash JJ Ho West.

That's J J H O W E S T, all capital letters, bit.ly slash J J Ho West, or just go to the events page at maximumfund.org.

They're all linked there.

And if you're listening to this show on release day at 4 p.m.

Pacific, 7 p.m.

Eastern, Judge Hodgman and I will be live streaming on the AITA subreddit, the legendary Am I the A-Hole?

subreddit.

We'll be deciding who is and isn't an a-hole.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's really exciting.

Mark, one of the founding moderators of the Am I the A-Hole subreddit, which I am a big fan of, heard us talking about it on the podcast, contacted us and said, do you want to do a live streaming event where we present you with cases from our subreddit, Am I the A-Hole?

And you can decide who is and who is not the a-hole.

And we said, yes.

So if you're listening today on the 18th of January, check us out right over there on Reddit, on the subreddit, Am I the A-Hole?

But it's not a hole.

It's, it's a, a, you know, you know what I mean, the word, you know what the full word is.

You got to type it in.

Sorry, kids.

Judge Hodgman, Mark has thrown down the gauntlet.

I want to do a live stream on my favorite subreddit, which is Dogs on Roofs.

So moderators of Dogs on Roofs, if you're at R slash Dogs on Roofs, Judge Hodgman and I stand ready to live stream with you.

Meanwhile, go over to R/Am I the asshole.

There, I said it.

And listen to us tonight, tonight, 7 p.m.

Eastern, 4 p.m.

Pacific, if you're listening on the 18th.

And if you're not,

I bet it's archived.

I bet you can listen to it after the fact.

Okay, whether it is on the road, on the streams, or on the boards, we are out there.

Can't wait to say hello to you.

Can't wait to see you again.

Bit.ly/slash JJ Ho West.

Let's get back to the case.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman re-enters the courtroom and presents his verdict.

Quote, one can never anticipate how audiences will respond.

One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it, end quote.

I am quoting, of course, the actor Del Roy Lindo.

First quote that I was able to find.

Googling frantically while Jesse was asking you about how you thought you were going to do.

And yet, of course, you know, fate sometimes offers these things because Del Roy Lindo is absolutely correct.

What little I know about acting,

and I've not even performed any Shakespearean bars, I know that what you offer in your performance can be very, very, very personal.

But the moment that it is outside of your body, it belongs to the audience, and you cannot take it back, nor can you control it, nor can you control how they feel about it.

Similarly, a work of writing.

I was educated in literary theory at Rory Gilmore University.

And

there I learned from Roland Barthes, and not on purpose, supposedly he wrote this down, but who knows, because

according to Roland Barthes, the author is dead.

And that the text that the author gives, no matter how invested they are emotionally and personally into the story that they are trying to tell, the story that is received by the reader is necessarily going to be different, personal, and outside of them we cannot write our stories onto the world the way we might want to we can only offer them

and then they are changed after that by those who receive them same is true of names naming a child of course is really the last and only act of pure

control that a parent has over a child.

You decide,

arguably before the child comes into the world screaming, you put it on a piece of paper, and then that child becomes a whole human being who denies any effort on your part to control their lives and personhood.

Often those names are rejected, of course, for all kinds of reasons.

Most, you know, one would argue a majority of people hold on to the names that they are given, but many don't for a whole whole host of different reasons, including issues of gender.

But of course, sometimes it's just an issue of wanting to be your own person, taking a middle name instead of a given name, or taking on a nickname such as Chichi Rodriguez,

instead of having to suffer under the unfair name of Big Haley.

Naming is control, of course, and I think that it's true that every child who has a name feels

probably a mixture of pride in that name and then wonder if perhaps they are not someone else.

And I anticipate, you know, the crux of this for me was

how would this child feel to be told the story of Belinda?

You were named after a baby that we almost kidnapped off the subway in New York City, who became the repository of our hopes and dreams, not for you, who became

a training version of you, essentially

a training dummy that we practiced our parental theories on until you were here.

I mean, quite honestly, I think that if and when you do have a child,

you will almost immediately forget all about Belinda.

For our first child, we had a kind of a token name, a myth name for this child because we didn't know who this child was.

We hadn't agreed on a name.

We were going back and forth

on a couple of options, and we were obviously not sure about gender.

And we discussed gender in a different way at the time that this child was born.

And the moment that the child was born, that token name disappeared.

We did name our child.

She did not name herself.

And she continues to be angry about it.

She doesn't really love her name, it turns out.

Hasn't changed it so far.

But that fantasy child that preceded her did not exist the moment that she arrived.

To some degree, I think my ruling will be immaterial because I think that Belinda is a wonderful fantasy child that you have together.

But

like as in all fairy stories,

the changeling will be replaced by the real child.

I don't think that's how it actually works in most fantasy stories.

I think in most fairy stories, the real child is replaced with a fairy.

So this is a reverse story.

That's part of the fairy's journey.

That's part of the fairy's journey.

Exactly so.

Look, it's a midwinter's afternoon podcast, and I don't know how all fairy stories work, but I'll say this.

I think that once your actual child arrives, Belinda will recede.

Everything that you think that you know about parenting, you will learn is

not wrong.

And probably your conversations will bear good fruit in terms of establishing what your values are as parents ahead of time and sharing them with each other and stress testing them with each other before you actually have a life to take care of, which is terrific.

But then all of that will be put to a new stress test, which is this other human being.

Honestly, I really

think you're both very adorable.

And I'm very grateful that you're in the guest pit in Philadelphia.

I can't wait to see you both when you interrupt my drinking at Bob and Barbara's someday with some monologue or dialogue from Shakespeare.

And I understand where you're coming from.

And I hope it won't be painful when I say Belinda is off the table.

I'm sorry.

Yeah,

I'm sorry, Jonathan, but I'm not sorry.

Also, that's a Shakespeare quote, by the way.

He invented that phrase, much like all that glistens is not gold and

there's the rub and so many other things that we didn't know that Shakespeare invented in a pickle.

He invented, sorry, not sorry, Shakespeare.

I know that it will be painful to let go of Belinda, and perhaps in your heart of hearts and minds of minds, you will think of Belinda.

But I think that it's not right for a new human being to have to live up to this fantasy that you conjured.

As wonderful as the idea of Belinda Barnes atop her mighty Newfoundland dog, Hambone,

in northern Canada, northeastern Canada, is.

The child needs to develop their own legend.

And it also happens to be the case that Belinda is a very female-gendered name.

And if you happen to have a child who is gender-assigned at birth male, and that person feels like a male all of his life,

there will not be a Belinda.

And I think that that will be a different kind of mourning that you will have to go through eventually.

But you will have to go through the mourning of Belinda.

No matter what, because the child you have will be whoever the child is, whoever the whole human being is.

And they deserve a fresh new name of their own.

That has to be agreed upon 100% by both of you.

This is one of those things, being in a spousal partnership or a spousal, I don't even know if you're married, but who cares?

Being in a parental partnership means, you know, lots of times,

you know,

you have to come to a consensus.

There is no majority rule.

And there is no consensus here around a Belinda, which is all the more reason why Belinda should not be the name.

I think most of all, emotionally, you need to prepare yourself

to let go of this child that you saw on the subway one time and let that child, that imaginary child, continue their journey in their crib with their Cheerios.

So you may begin your journey with this new human being who's going to surprise and delight you in so many ways and deserves a name.

of their own.

Therefore,

I have to say, Belinda is off the table, which is more than Big Haley even asked for.

I apologize, Haley even asked for.

Make a list of names, find one that speaks to you, and don't do it until you're expecting.

Belinda hangs in there until you are absolutely ready to go, prepped and

as best you can be, which is barely at all.

and actually expecting.

And then you can sit down and start brainstorming up some non-Belinda names.

But once that happens, you may say goodbye to Belinda.

Choo-choo, farewell, Fortrain.

You're going all the way.

Now I should have looked up the biggest city in Newfoundland.

Hang on one second.

Newfoundland.

Okay, provincial capital is Delroy-Lindville.

Wow, okay.

No, it's St.

John's, named after me.

See you in St.

John's, Belinda.

Until then, this is is the sound of a gavel.

Judge John Hodgman rules that is all.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Jonathan, how do you feel?

It was a very well-reasoned decision.

It was very patient and kind.

I haven't processed it all quite yet, but I understand the reasoning,

even if my heart breaks a little.

Haley, how are you feeling?

I feel good.

It is bittersweet, but I think it's the right decision.

I think it'll be fun.

Haley, Jonathan, thanks for joining us on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Thank you.

Another Judge John Hodgman case is in the books.

In just a second, we'll render a decision in Swift Justice.

But first, our thanks to Redditor Super SoftB-Day Party for naming this week's episode Miss Denomer.

Join the conversation over at the Maximum Fun subreddit.

That is maximumfund.reddit.com.

We'll be asking for title submissions there too, so keep an eye out for those.

Got a lot of response last time.

Evidence and photos from our show are posted on our Instagram account.

That's at instagram.com slash judgejohnhodgman.

Follow us there.

Judge John Hodgman was created by Jesse Thornt and John Hodgman.

Our producer is Jennifer Marmer.

Our editor is Valerie Moffat.

Now, Swift Justice, where we answer small disputes with quick judgment.

Pedro says, my wife swears that if you don't make eye contact with a deer, it won't try to cross the road in front of your car.

I disagree.

I would say that if you are making eye contact with a deer, it's too late.

Whatever's going to happen is going to happen.

I don't think you need to be worrying about making eye contact with the deer one way or the other.

If you are driving on a country road at dusk, just go slow and keep an eye on the side of the road.

Those deer are going to wander out into the middle of the road, whether they're looking at you or not, because they are not.

They're really lovely, but they're not smart.

Just be careful.

Don't worry about staring them down.

Hey, I'm glad to report we have multiple disputes lined up for our live shows, including our live show in Port Townsend, Washington, which is sold out.

And at least two of the disputes that we've received are grievances against the mayor himself, which is very exciting.

We're really going to get to the bottom of some deep Port Townsend issues here.

If you've submitted cases for our tour, thank you.

If you haven't yet submitted cases for our tour, it's not too late.

We hear multiple cases per show, and we always feature open court when you can just yell stuff out.

So, if you're coming to the show or you know someone who is, send in your Portland, Oregon disputes about food trucks or whatever, your Seattle disputes about salmon tossing techniques.

If you're in Denver and you've got a dispute about which one of you or your roommates is the mile highest, you can send in a dispute.

That's appropriate for Colorado, in a way.

If you have San Franciscan disputes about marinating burrito stumps or whether it's it really are it,

or you're in Los Angeles and you've got disputes about cemeteries or Masonic lodges, such as the Masonic Lodge in a Cemetery that we're performing in, hey, send them in, won't you?

MaximumFund.org slash JJHO is where you always send in all your disputes.

And if you've got disputes that you want us to consider for education live on stage on tour, which is coming right up, by the way.

Make sure you let us know what city you are submitting for, whether it be Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles,

Seattle, or even Port Townsend.

We look forward to them.

And all of your disputes, right, Jesse?

Absolutely.

Any dispute, any subject, no case too big or too small, maximumfund.org/slash JJHO.

We live and die by your submissions.

So maximumfund.org slash jjho.

Tell us your beeves.

We'll talk to you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Beeves.

MaximumFund.org.

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