Family Feuds

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

We're in chambers this week to clear the docket.

And with me is the winter king of Brooklyn, New York City, Judge John Hodgman.

Jesse Thorne, if I have your consent, I'm going to lean over and give you a kiss on your cheek.

Well, thank you.

Is that okay?

Yeah, of course.

Here we go.

Do you know why I kissed you on your cheek?

Why is that?

Because it's our family feud episode.

Oh.

Most of our listeners are probably too young to remember the original host of Family Feud, or even that there existed a game show or what a daytime game show even is.

I think there's still a Family Feud.

I think, what's his name?

Steve Harvey hosted.

But originally it was Richard Dawson.

It's hilarious.

Steve Harvey is really.

I have mixed feelings about Steve Harvey in some areas, but

I will say he does a great job hosting the Family Feud.

I have actually seen him host The Family Feud a couple of times on television.

And I was like, how can that guy make not giving a feces about his job so funny?

Yeah.

So checked out.

He is enacting, I'm not paying attention, why am I here?

And it is gorgeous.

It's so beautiful.

It's exactly what the family feud deserves.

But of course, the original host, Richard Dawson, was famous.

for kissing all the ladies on the cheek without asking.

That's what he would do.

It was gross.

But this isn't gross.

This is fun.

This is the Judge John Ajman podcast.

I'm happy to kiss my friend Jesse Thorne virtually on the cheek with consent because I love him.

And it's nice to see you because it's 2023.

Happy New Year.

I didn't kiss anyone on New Year's, but here we are.

It's a new year.

We're back after the winter holidays, a time that many people spent in very, very heavy and intense contact with their families.

I hope it all went okay.

But a while back, we did ask for disputes involving families, not just partners,

not spouses, but cousins, in-laws, uncles, aunts, aunts.

And we have a bunch of them today.

We do not have any avuncular disputes.

We still need some avuncular disputes down the road, please.

But we did have one, I'm glad to say,

materteral dispute, materteral dispute.

Shout out again to listener Margaret McGee for letting us know that material is the adjectival form of aunt.

But that dispute was so one-sided that I could in good conscience just blast this poor niece who was so in the wrong.

But her aunt Barbara wrote me, and I just need to say to Barbara,

thank you for your detailed letter.

I agree with you, it was not cool for your niece to bring a table talk pecan pie to Thanksgiving.

It's not the best pie you can bring.

If you offer to bring dessert to Thanksgiving, there's no problem with a store-bought pie.

But if you are, but if you live in Manhattan and you have an and you have a job,

you can upgrade a little bit from a table talk talk pie.

They're award-winning pies, Jesse.

I'll tell you that.

I looked it up.

Table Talk Pies, they won some blue ribbons at the American Pie Competition, which is a competition that I presume Table Talk runs for itself.

It won in the category of Best Pie competing against a watermelon.

Exactly right.

And the Pecan Pie did win best pie in competing against a watermelon, but they only make it in the eight-inch variety.

And this was a Thanksgiving dinner for 10.

So in many ways, Barbara's niece, you blew it.

But Barbara, it was Thanksgiving, and she didn't know how to bake, as you acknowledged.

Your daughter, who normally bakes the pies, wasn't able to do it.

I have to imagine your niece did her best.

So I'm not going to put her on total blast here.

And you should let this grudge go.

Although we do have some great familial grudges coming up that have not been let go.

So why don't we get into them?

I'll say this.

Yeah.

If you don't know how to bake and you're in charge of bringing the pie for dessert, just bring a watermelon.

Everyone loves a watermelon.

Watermelon will feed 10.

Okay.

Here's a classic family feud.

Sibling-in-law feud.

Yes.

A case from Kyle in Melbourne, Australia.

When my brother-in-law Ian runs on the treadmill in his basement, he wears Crocs.

Wow.

The original style in brown.

I find this to be outrageous.

He claims it doesn't matter and it's not uncomfortable.

I request the judge order him to wear proper running shoes when running on his treadmill.

And Kyle wanted to clarify, this is not some weird Australian thing.

Ian lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

So we are forced to presume it's a weird Halifax, Nova Scotia thing.

I don't want to put this on Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the top cities of the maritime provinces.

And oh, by the way, I'm sorry that I called Newfoundland and Labrador a maritime province.

Apparently, that's technically not true.

Thank you, letter writer.

I love Halifax.

I cannot wait to get back there.

We have to perform there one of these days, Jesse Thorne.

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Put it on the docket.

Let's get out to the East Coast of Canada.

Say hi to Kate Beaton.

Lovely, brilliant cartoon genius, Kate Beaton.

She lives out there in Nova Scotia.

She's from Nova Scotia.

Shout out to her incredible book, Ducks.

It's very, it's pretty intense, but one of the best comic

books I have read in a long time.

Kate Beaton, one of the tops, come on Judge Sean Hodgman.

All right.

I'm not going to put Barbara's niece on blast, and I'm certainly not going to put Halifax, Nova Scotia on blast, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia, as I call it.

But I'm putting Ian on blast.

This is not just outrageous, it's depressing

running on a treadmill

in brown crocs in the basement.

There's no way to live your life, son.

To paraphrase Animal House.

Just eating expired pork cracklings from

the expired groceries store.

That's as depressing as Christian Bale playing the drums in the big short.

Just sad men in basement doing weird, solitary things.

It's also unfashionable, especially since there are really good running shoes that you can get that look cool.

The whole point of running shoes is to look cool.

I know that I've already already put out a shout out to my favorite brand, Hoka One One.

Those are the most comfortable shoes I've ever owned in my life.

And they've got some beautiful colorways going.

But also, I think it's deadly.

I think if you're running in Crocs, you're going to slip and fall and hurt yourself very badly eventually.

It's going to happen.

It's going to happen.

I mean, at least you're not running on a treadmill in a basement in Australia in Crocs because that would be confusing because treadmills go down the other way in Australia.

I think it's dangerous to Ian's feet, frankly.

He's going to end up with plantar fasciitis or something.

He needs to go to a running store and get real running shoes.

Yes.

I think they're dangerous to Ian's feet.

I think they're dangerous to Ian's forehead when one of them flies off and he slaps himself in the forehead on the console of that treadmill.

And I think they're dangerous to whoever's standing behind him.

I mean, that's hypothetically if he has someone in his life.

I really wonder if he does because he runs on a treadmill in the basement in brown crocs.

I hope you have someone in your life, Ian.

Not just, well, you have to, obviously, because, well, I don't know.

This could be, you have to be married in order to have a

brother.

Look, this could be his wife's brother.

This could be Kyle's wife's unmarried brother.

I think you have to be married to run on a treadmill in the basement.

Yeah, that's probably true.

That's probably true.

You have to be married and probably are a dad.

Look, you have people in your life who are counting on you not to hit yourself in the head, Ian, and also to look better and also to take care of your feet.

If you go into the YMCA in Park Slope, where I go sometimes,

I don't see the former mayor over there anymore.

He doesn't come around.

He learned his lesson.

But if you go over there, what you will see are signs saying, no crocs on the treadmills.

That's for sure.

That's real.

I'm not making that up.

You can't wear crocs on the treadmills at the YMCA.

If it's good enough for the village people, it's good enough for you.

I don't care.

Put on shoes.

Think about all the things you are allowed to do at the YMCA.

Yeah, you can have a good good meal.

You can do whatever you feel, except we're crux.

I only recommend one lonely dad exercise activity,

and that is what John Malkovich does in the 2008 Cohen Brothers film Burn After Reading,

which is you have to be on a boat watching a TV VCR,

doing step aerobics, and saying, I'm better than ever, you f ⁇ ers.

I'm coming.

Play the audio.

Valerie, play the audio from the scene.

I'm bigger.

I'm bigger.

Again.

Better.

I'm back.

And again.

Than ever.

You fkers.

I'm back.

Probably cinema's greatest moment, Baton Rosebud or whatever.

I never saw that film.

It's not their best work.

It's one of their lesser films, but

that is unparalleled.

You know, a lot of people talk about it holds the room together or, you know, this is not nom.

This is bowling.

There are rules or whatever it is.

But the real money thing that happened in a Cohen Brothers movie is John Malkovich doing step aerobics and saying, you f ⁇ ers, I'm coming.

I never saw that movie because I auditioned for it and I didn't get the part.

It was a dream come true.

I auditioned for Joel and Ethan Cohen.

I was in the room with them.

A very small role at the beginning of the movie, playing a federal agent.

Didn't get it.

Didn't see it.

It was a long time ago.

And I was on the set of the Apple ads telling Justin Long about this and how I had never saw the movie because I was just too hurt.

I mean,

no hard feelings, just like I couldn't see it.

It's sad.

Sad.

Who doesn't want to be in a Cohen Brothers movie?

Right.

And then Jeff, the boom operator, who was sitting up on his ladder, holding out the boom mic, said, you know, I worked on that movie.

I said, really?

He said, yeah, I know who got that part.

I said, really?

Who?

He said, Lonnie Anderson

from WKRP in Cincinnati.

And you probably are all too young to know who that is, but it's obviously I'm not a Lonnie Anderson type.

So I was really relieved.

Like, I was like, Well, if they wanted Lonnie Anderson, obviously they weren't going to go with me.

Now I don't feel so bad.

You're a brunette bombshell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm a Bailey Quarters.

So I said to Jeff, Is that true?

And he said, No,

you should feel bad.

Jeff was also the person who told me the very big important piece of wisdom that I have repeated on the podcast many times.

The only person who enjoys whistling is the person who is whistling, which

I can imagine is true.

If you're a boom operator, you've listened to a lot of people whistle and you don't want to do it.

You don't want to hear it anymore.

I'll say this for Lonnie Anderson.

I saw her at a screening of a documentary about Burt Reynolds, her late ex-husband.

Yeah.

The love of her life.

And she spoke in front of a crowd of 400 people sitting in a movie screening cemetery here in Los Angeles.

In fact, the very cemetery where you and I will be performing, although we will be performing in its beautiful Masonic Lodge.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Hollywood Forever.

And other than having watched a few reruns of WKRP as a child on UHF or whatever, I didn't have any strong feelings about Lonnie Anderson at all.

No.

But she was delightful, like legitimately a joy to watch talk about Burt Reynolds and their life together and their love.

And she just seemed like a radiant human being.

Yeah.

Anyway, I guess my point is I can see why she got the part.

Here's something from Ryan in Milford, Pennsylvania.

My brother Dustin and sister-in-law Emily have a last name that rhymes with Walton.

They're expecting their second child.

I want them to name the baby Dalton Alton Walton.

Emily is disgusted.

I think the fun rhyme will make my future nephew cooler.

It will

also help Emily and Dustin with parenting as the name will build character.

Please order Emily to consider my suggestion seriously.

I also think the judge could order a fair price on the naming rights of my nephew, perhaps a contribution to his college savings.

Like the crypto.com arena?

That's a great name for a child.

Arena?

Yeah, crypto.com arena.

That's nice.

It has a ring to it.

Crypto.com Arena Walton.

Ethereum Dogecoin Walton.

I wonder how our friend, our listener, well, I guess he had given up mining for Dogecoin.

The American couple that we saw in London back in 2016 or 2017.

He was mining for Ethereum and they're flat, heating up the place with his many servers.

I hope they're doing okay.

Hope they got out of the business.

There are probably a lot of kids named crypto, not only for the crypto boom, probably a lot of people of the anarcho-capitalist community who go down to anarcho-pulco every year, the big anarcho-capitalist convention.

There's a great documentary about it.

I don't remember what it is, but I just remember that one of the anarcho-capitalists has a son named Axiom.

That's got to be a great place

for unusual kid names.

I hope that no one has named their child crypto after Superman's dog, because you can name a dog after a human, like Carl Allen, but you shouldn't name a dog.

You shouldn't name a child after a dog, like Fido or Spot.

Should you name your child Dalton Alton Walton, though?

First of all, I'm going to say this about you, Ryan.

You're not acting in good faith here.

Your two arguments are, A, it will make Dalton Alton Walton cooler, but B,

it will build character, presumably because you know that Dalton Alton Walton will be teased.

Look, obviously cool kids have been teased throughout the history of high schools.

The cooler you are, sometimes the more you stand out and the more people want to take you down with some teasing or some bullying.

That's what makes you cool.

I get that.

But you're not sincerely offering a boy named Sue scenario here, where this is going to toughen up your nephew, Dalton Alton Walton.

or make them more cool.

You just want to make a funny joke at the expense of your nephew and your brother and your sister-in-law.

None of your business.

None of your business what they name.

Look, presumably, your last name also rhymes with Walton, Ryan.

Why don't you change your name to Dalton Alton Walton?

Then you could be really cool.

And I'll start to show you how cool you are by teasing you.

That's a banana's name, Dalton Alton Walton.

I tease you.

There you go.

Now do you feel cool, Ryan?

The only real way to make a kid both cooler and tougher would be to put neon face paint on their face every morning, morning like the ultimate warrior.

That would be pretty cool.

Make them cooler and tougher.

Cooler and tougher, C-A-T.

It would increase their folk and their distrucity.

Yeah, and look, if your name is crypto or whatever and you get teased, you're cool too.

No one should be teasing anybody.

And no one should be giving anybody names specifically to invite teasing.

Teasing, one thing that is not cool, teasing.

Stop it.

Stop teasing, everybody.

It's okay to tease anarcho-capitalists.

Yeah, that's all right.

But not their children.

It's not their fault that their parents are trying to undermine the government and world economy.

It's a good documentary.

It's on one of the things David Reese told me to watch it.

I watched it.

It was good.

Sad, too.

A bad thing happens.

We're going to take a quick break to hear from this week's partners.

We'll be back with more cases to clear from the docket on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Hello, I'm your Judge John Hodgman.

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Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're talking family feuds this week.

We have a case from Kim.

Last week, my husband.

Before we get to Kim, Jesse,

I just spent a lot of time plugging this documentary that I don't even remember the name of about anarcho-capitalism.

That when I think about it, when I reflect on it, it kind of made me feel bad.

So let me just plug something just to even out the karma.

Let me plug something that made me feel really good that our daughter made me watch that I enjoyed, and I'm sure you've seen it.

We may have even discussed it.

Dairy Girls.

That's a great show.

Oh,

Dairy Girls.

I only imagine that you watched it with interest because of your familial connection to Northern Ireland.

Yeah, my stepmother and her entire family are Northern Irish.

Spectacular show, I thought.

Do you agree or do you disagree?

I think anyone who is on the fence about Dairy Girls should just search for the screen cap of the list of things,

the chalkboard with the list of things Catholics like and the list of things Protestants like.

I just re-watched that episode last night.

It really, really made me happy and

is a very wonderfully constructed show, really wonderfully acted, really light, but also, you know, meaningful and funny.

Very pleasant for me because while a dairy accent is a bit different from a Belfast accent, which is where my stepmother is from, it does still remind me of my grandmother or my stepmother's mother, stepgrandmother calling and me answering the phone and just hearing on a sort of distant, crackly, even in the mid to late 90s.

Northern Ireland had distant, crackly long distance lines.

Sure.

And a sort of distant, crackly voice in, oh, hello there.

It's your grandmother.

It's Bernardette there.

Hello.

Hello there, Jesse.

It's nice to hear from you.

It's your grandmother.

It's Bernadette there.

Sure, it's nice to hear from you.

We got to put Belfast, Dairy, and Dublin on the list of places to go.

Oh, love it.

Okay, here's a case from Kim.

Last week, my husband and I visited my sister Jamie and her husband.

We had a lovely time.

However, during brunch, Jamie pulled out the sorriest-looking bottle of honey I've ever seen.

It's dark and crystallized and looks like it comes from the depths of hell.

Jamie estimated this honey is between five and nine

years old.

I demanded they replace it.

She and her husband both say, honey doesn't go bad.

I don't have words after that, so...

I hope you do.

Okay, and we received a photo of this honey.

This is a large bottle of honey from a popular warehouse store.

Yeah, a big plastic bottle of honey.

It is available for your viewing displeasure on the show page at maximumfund.org, as well as our Instagram at judgejohnhodgman on Instagram.

I will admit I have a similar bottle of honey in my cabinet.

Although, I will say, I think it's been a few iterations of the front sticker design.

Yeah,

this is the old school.

This is the old school sticker because it's a decade old.

And sure enough,

it's sort of settled into three layers, like a trifle or a Neapolitan ice cream.

At the top, well, I should say at the bottom, there's sort of like an amber-colored honey.

And at the top, there's this like deep brown plug that looks like an obstruction.

And in the middle,

it's just like this clear crystal layer of sort of mucusy colored crystals.

It looks gross to me.

What would you do if you had this honey in your house?

It also looks full, by the way.

Like, why haven't they been using this honey all this time?

Honey doesn't go bad, so it doesn't bother me.

Honey doesn't go bad.

It's true.

No, I'd eat that pharaoh honey.

You know how the pharaohs had honey and they're in the tombs of the mummies?

Oh, yeah?

I'd eat that honey in a second.

You'd eat that honey?

You'd spread it on bread?

Doesn't go bad?

Absolutely.

It doesn't go bad.

Honey doesn't go bad.

It does crystallize, but if you heat it slowly, you can un-crystallize it.

Yeah, it's true.

I did not know this.

This would have been a great, a great case to get the

expert witnesser

from a person that we hoped would be a friend of the court, Erica Thompson.

No.

I'm talking about the B lady from TikTok that we tried to get on, but

she chose not to go on this podcast.

Instead, she chose to go, her first podcast she chose to go on was B.

So she's not on my list anymore.

A lot of fun in the comments she had on her Instagram post about that.

You know what, Valerie, Valerie?

Bleep out that name.

We'll just say that she went on the podcast of a cast member of News Radio, and then our audience can decide whether it was Candy Alexander's podcast.

But I will shout out instead to some honey, a honey-making couple, Jillian and Kim, in Asheville, North Carolina, who had a very good article on their Asheville Bee Charmer website about how it's true.

Honey doesn't go bad.

It is naturally acidic, which inhibits the growth of bacteria.

And it is also antimicrobial because bees put an enzyme into honey when they're making it that eventually matures into hydrogen peroxide.

So it will not go bad.

The only way it will go bad is if it gets wet, if moisture gets in there, and then it can ferment and go sour.

But otherwise, if it's stored properly, it will last forever.

Please don't give young infants honey.

It's not recommended for young young infants because some raw honeys have a little bit, a little, a little hint of botulism in them.

You know what?

I'm going to amend that, John.

Yeah.

Don't give extremely young children honey because it might contain botulism unless you're concerned about forehead lines.

That's true.

You can rub it on their foreheads.

Yeah.

That's not a problem.

That's called baby Botox.

Everyone should avoid, apparently, according to healthline.com, everyone should avoid mad honey.

Mad honey is honey that's made from certain rhododendrons or azaleas, and the plants have toxins in them that get into the honey, and it makes you dizzy and nauseated.

I've been seeking that out.

I got the whole thing wrong.

Oh, that's how you want to spend a Saturday night.

Yeah.

Stay away from the mad honey.

But otherwise, five to nine-year-old honey, as crystallized as it might be, Jesse Thorne points out, it's still okay to eat.

That said,

just because something's okay to eat doesn't mean you should eat it.

Now, I am very, very averse to food waste, but even I will throw out like an end of feta cheese that's kind of gone crumbly and it was stored in an old plastic tub that used to have walnut pieces in it.

And it just looks so gross in the fridge and no one's going to ever eat it.

I'll throw that away.

And then inevitably, my wife, who's a whole human being in her own right, will say 30 minutes later, what happened to that piece of feta that I was saving?

But if something is just like, sometimes you look, I don't know, you got to clear out the fridge every now and then.

You got to restock from time to time.

I'm not saying throw away this whole bottle of honey, Jamie.

It's your honey.

You do what you want.

But I would say that maybe, maybe get some one bottle of new honey for your guests.

One bottle of attractive honey in a glass jar that doesn't look like toxic waste for

when your sister and brother-in-law come over.

Why not?

You have the space and it doesn't go bad.

Then you can have home honey and guest honey.

Here's a 28-year-old grudge between Emily and her parents.

In 1994, my parents challenged my Scrabble word.

Tweets.

I somehow lost because there was no dictionary in the house.

I'd like that decision revised.

Not only is Tweets a word now, it was also a word in 1994.

The word existed prior to the invention of Twitter, as it's the answer to the question, what does a bird do?

Well, I mean no disrespect to our friends Emily Brewster and et al.

at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but

I am currently now a subscriber to the Oxford English Dictionary.

I paid for that subscription because for the New York Times column net that I write based on this podcast, the Judge John Hodgman column and The Ethicist Every Week in the New York Times magazine, also online, if you're not boycotting the New York Times.

I had to look up the etymology of the word fart.

Not to brag.

Yeah.

We're in show business.

Specifically to determine whether or not, this was a dispute between a husband and his spouse,

whether or not fart is an onomatopoeia.

And the answer is,

of course, it is.

It derives from, well, basically, it derives from old Middle German or something

far.

And it's, and the OED determined that it was probably imitative, which means to say it is a word that describes a sound by imitating the sound.

And I got some letters from some listeners and readers of the column who said, you know, you don't have to subscribe or pay money.

If you're already a member of a public library, they probably will offer you

access to the OED, which is terrific.

I didn't realize that.

And you should become a member of your public library,

not only for that reason, but also because it's fun to go to the library.

So do that.

But in the meantime, I still have this subscription and I was able to look up the word tweet.

And first of all, obviously tweet is a word that far predates tweet in the contemporary sense of sending a tweet on Twitter.

Birds have tweeted for a long time.

Tweet, tweet, tweet.

That's why we have tweety bird.

And in fact, the first documented use of tweet

in the bird sense.

That's a category in every OED entry.

Human sense, bird sense.

Right.

The first documented use of the word tweet relating to birds going tweet in writing,

according to the OED, goes back to 1851, G.

Meredith, in their work Poems, or Poems, as my father-in-law would say, quote, the little bird tweets to its mate a tiny loving note.

Then the next one is 1891, and I don't understand this quote at all.

It's from S.

Maustin from Curatica, page 63.

Oh, tweet tweets, a diaconal pullet.

How splendid.

All right, I don't know what that means.

Point is, birds have been tweeting for a long time.

And second of all, more interestingly to me, the first use of the word tweet in the sense of sending a tweet goes back to 2006, 27 December.

This we have obviously clear.

Remember Twitter?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

John, I remember Odeo, the podcasting service that

right.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, Twitter used to be fun.

Back in 2006, 27 December, Twitter user CyberWanderlust

tweeted, got the new phone so you can tweet me again, you sick bastards.

First use of the word tweet as a transitive verb in the technological sense.

Cyber Wanderless still has an account, 38 followers, and they have it locked.

I think this person probably had a good time on Twitter and then realized it was just poisoning us all with light and misinformation.

In any case, that was only a couple of months after Twitter was started.

It was started in March 2006.

So there you go.

It all goes back.

The point is, though, in 1994, tweet was definitely a word.

So yes, obviously I revise that ruling.

I overturn it.

You should re-score that game, Emily, and her parents.

And shame on you.

Shame on you, not just for challenging tweet as a word, but not playing Scrabble correctly.

Because when you play Scrabble, you have to have a dictionary on hand.

You have to stipulate to a dictionary that you're going to use.

for that game.

It could be the OED.

It could be Merriam-Webster.

It could be the Scrabble official word list, whatever it is.

But

if you don't have a dictionary, you can't challenge.

It means you have to accept every word.

And that's no fun at all.

So, Emily, I say to you,

I hope that your parents are still alive and healthy.

And I hope that you have a good relationship with them,

mostly so that you can call them on the phone.

And when they pick up, you can say, I saw, I taught a wrong person.

I did.

I did see a wrong person.

Two of them.

They're my parents.

Ha ha ha ha.

That's a mashup of Tweety Bird and Woody Woodpecker.

John Hodgman, the man of a thousand voices.

Tweeting.

Ha ha ha ha.

Do you know what the real answer to the question, what does a bird do, is?

No.

A bird uses a single posterior opening for its digestive, urinary, and reproductive tracts, including expelling feces and laying eggs.

Talking about a cloaca.

It's the only bird topic worth mentioning.

I thought it was going to be that old joke.

Hey, Jesse,

what's a bird do?

What does a bird do?

About four pounds.

That's a riff on the joke.

What does a hen weigh?

What's a hen weigh?

About four pounds.

Let's take a quick break before we go further down this path.

I can't wait for the letters I'm going to get about what a hen actually weighs.

What do we have coming up after the break?

Well, we have a dispute about checks mix.

Yes.

We also have one about the words beard juice.

Beard juice.

We'll be 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 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 Fun.

It's the Judge John Hodgman podcast and we are headed out on the road on tour.

So if you live in the western United States, make your plans now.

We are going to several cities and townships.

in the western part of these states, starting on January 28th in Port Towns in Washington, then Sunday the 29th in Seattle, Tuesday the 31st of January at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, following up in Thursday, Denver, Colorado, 2-2

Groundhog's Day.

We're going to be doing one million shows over and over and over again, the exact same show.

And finally,

we will be able to resolve some unresolved issues in our lives and get to move through time again.

and move all the way to San Francisco on Saturday, the 4th of February.

Join us at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for our live performance and what I dare say triumphant return to the triumphant return of the San Francisco Sketch Fest.

It's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of big shows.

And then we're going to go to Los Angeles, by the way, also.

We're going to be performing right after that in a Masonic Lodge in a cemetery.

Yeah, Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever is such a cool place.

And again, as an Angelino, I can't let this go by without mentioning plenty of free parking.

Plenty of free parking.

Tickets are on sale now and they're going fast.

Port Townsend sold out immediately.

Oh, it's sold out already.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Port Townsend sold out like this.

I don't, I guess.

I don't know.

It's going to be

a heck of a show.

Bit.ly slash JJ Ho West.

That's B-I-T.ly slash JJ H-O-West for West Coast.

And also, please remember to send your disputes for these cities at maximumfund.org slash JJ Ho.

No cases too big or too small.

If you want to have a dispute considered for live adjudication at one of these shows, maximumfund.org slash JJ Ho, make sure that you put the name of the city that you are submitting the dispute for.

We're also going to be doing a Reddit talk on Judge Hodgman's favorite subreddit.

Everyone knows that my favorite subreddit is

R slash marbles.

i thought it was magnet fishing i've i'm off i'm off magnet fishing i'm on marbles battle wagons

and dogs on roofs those are all great i'm enjoying vintage menus oh yeah and vintage ads i just subscribe to vintage menus it's a great compliment to ask a food historian which is a genuinely uh fascinating subreddit and of course the max fun subreddit maximumfun.reddit.com or r slash maximum fun right But one of my favorites, to the point of distraction in the past, has always been, am I the a-hole?

We'll say, we'll call it that.

Yeah.

Am I the a-hole?

Where people write in saying, I did this, and does that make me a jerk or what?

And people comment and vote whether or not they are a jerk or not.

It is my favorite collection.

of short stories featuring wildly unreliable narrators since Yelp.

I love it.

And one of the founding moderators of AITA, as it's called, heard that we enjoyed the show and reached out to us and invited us to do a live talk.

It's sort of like a live podcast on the AITA stream.

So if you're a member of MITA Whole or want to be one, we're going to be doing this live talk on the 18th of January.

at 4 p.m.

Pacific and 7 p.m.

Eastern over on the AITA subreddit.

And they're going to give us some examples from their subreddit of people who are trying to figure out if they did the right or the wrong thing.

And Jesse and I are going to get to judge it.

And it's going to be a lot of fun.

So join us, if you will.

You can listen along, and it'll be a lot of fun.

Go over to the AITA subreddit, and we'll be talking a lot about the tour as well.

That's January 18th at 4 Pacific 7 Eastern at aita.reddit.com.

And also bit.ly slash jjho west.

Come on, go get your tickets.

They're going.

They're going away.

Let's get back to the docket.

Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're adjudicating family feuds and finding out the bird sense of words.

Here's a dispute from Maggie.

For decades, my family has made checks mix around the holidays.

Some family members feel it's acceptable to pincer grasp one's favorite bits of the mix out of the bowl and eat only those.

Others feel this is unfair.

It's intended to be a mix with a certain distribution of constituent bits.

One is honor bound to take a scoop and eat whatever one gets.

Please save us from this year's dispute and tell us once and for all who's right.

Well, let me settle this dispute first.

I like Chex Mix a lot.

I like it when people in my house make it from scratch based on any number of family recipes that have been passed down and improvised over the years.

And then I like it, the commercial version too, that I'll get at a gas station from time to time.

I will say this, though, in case you were wondering.

If you get the extra bold flavor Chex mix, it will taste very Worcestershire-y and good, but your breath will stink really badly.

And you don't want to be breathing that on people in a car.

Got it, everyone who rides in my car.

That stuff stinks.

I also will settle this.

There are three main streams of checks available.

Wheat, rice, and corn, best checks.

What's your guess, Jesse?

I mean, my guess is going to be corn checks, but I don't know.

Not for me, friend.

Rice checks.

Blandest of the checkses.

That is one of my true indulgent pleasures.

Bland, bland rice checks and ice cold milk.

Yum, yum, is what I say to you.

Here's the thing.

I'm just giving some checks talk because the answer is obvious.

We settled this in Atlanta, live show, 2019, when we ruled you cannot cherry-pick the trail mix.

You can't take the M ⁇ Ms out of the trail mix, nor can you take the cherries out.

You can't, literally can't cherry-pick the trail mix.

You got to eat it all.

It's a mix.

Just as you said, checks mix.

You can't just be taking the good stuff out.

And we know what you want to take out.

I've talked about it in my book, Vacation Land.

I'll talk about it now.

What you want are those little rye crisps.

They're not checks at all.

They're those little sort of thumbprint-sized,

pumper-nickel-y dark rye bread crisps that have been salted with all the sea and the ocean and baked in the center of the sun.

You eat one of those things, and all the moisture in your body leaves immediately, gets absorbed.

They're so delicious.

And yes, that's what everyone wants to eat.

Tell you what, they don't want to eat is those little pretzel knobs.

Blech.

And then you get the checkses, which are fine.

But here's the thing.

Gardetos, if you didn't know this,

makes a rival Chex-style mix

called Gardetos Old-Fashioned Italian Snack Mix.

They used to be called Snack Ends.

They don't have Chexes in them anymore.

They used to.

They used to, but then Chex bought the company and got rid of the Chexes.

But it is a very similar sort of mix, and some people like it.

But the main thing is, Gardetos puts out an oops all-Rye Crisps edition.

Wow.

Yeah, you can go to the gas station and get a Gardetos.

It's called Special Request because so many people said, I just want the Rye Crisps.

And just get those on their own.

Give those to your family at the holiday because you know that's what they're going for.

Here's something I didn't know about Chexmix.

You know who were the spokes characters for Chexmix in the early 1990s?

I don't.

Charlie Brown and the gang.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

They did a whole series of pretty charming animated cartoons for Chexmix with the tagline, the top snack for kids with suburban ennui.

It's true, though.

The thing about Charlie Brown is true.

I like Chex Mix.

You gotta eat it all.

You can't.

If you just want the one thing, you got a special request from Gardella's.

If you have another thing you want to request, write to Gardeta's.

Excuse me, Gardetos.

Maybe they'll help you out.

But in the meantime, if you're making Chex Mix at home, don't cherry-pick.

I recently learned through the medium of a social media poll

that there are many people, in fact, a majority of my followers on social media, who prefer Snoopy to Charlie Brown.

Whoa.

Which seemed utterly bananas to me.

And then I learned that one of them is our producer, Jennifer Marmor.

You told me that at the time.

What poll?

I didn't take this poll.

You didn't take the poll, but I brought up the poll to you and you said that you prefer Snoopy.

That's what you told me.

Jennifer, please approach the microphone.

That sounds like something I'd say.

Are you suggesting that you were trolling me?

No, I don't know.

I don't remember this conversation at all, but now that I think about it, I think I do prefer Snoopy.

He's a goof.

Likes to wear sunglasses.

He's not a goof.

He's a doof.

He is a doof, but he has a funny laugh.

He doesn't do anything.

Charlie Brown is the representation of what's important in life, which is to be sad.

Snoopy is the opposite.

Snoopy is happy and satisfied with his life,

unless he's waiting for suppertime.

Yeah.

Who does that represent?

He represents Charles M.

Schultz in his retirement.

All the later strips featuring Snoopy are just Snoopy thinking about and playing tennis and then trying to write a novel.

He was

like a middle-aged retiree.

Thinking go ice skating in his own rink.

And thinking about World War I, too, another middle-aged dad thing to do.

He was very happy.

I have enough on we.

I don't need a child to remind me of how sad I am most of the time.

Can't you just like Linus then?

I love Linus.

Yeah.

Love Linus.

Snoopy and the Peanuts Gang are parallel comic strips, but they're in different cinematic universes, basically.

You are getting a two-for-one with that comic strip.

You are getting the adventures of a goofy dog in his imagination who basically parasitically lives off Charlie Brown, Brown, but otherwise doesn't care for him.

And then you have Charlie Brown and his friends going through existential crises.

Separate comic strips within the same thing.

It's a perfectly valid thing to like Snoopy.

Most kids love Snoopy.

Most adults like Charlie Brown.

Good old Charlie Brown, how I hate him.

Sometimes Charlie Brown is really mean to Snoopy.

And it feels Snoopy is contemptuous of Charlie Brown.

It feels aggressive how mean Charlie Brown can be to Snoopy sometimes.

Although Snoopy is a jewelry, Snoopy does misbehave a lot.

Snoopy has no regard for anyone else in the Peanuts universe.

Snoopy might not even like Woodstock.

Snoopy loves Woodstock.

I'd like to see one time where Snoopy says, I love you to Woodstock.

There are times when they see each other and they both go,

they're so happy to see each other.

These are in the like the

cartoons, the animated specials for the most part.

Yeah, yeah.

But a lot of those have material that's like basically lifted from the comic strips.

Yeah, they're all many of them are written by Charles Schultz.

There is one where Snoopy is the ultimate jerk, where he's supposed to go to dog training at the Daisy Hill puppy farm.

My son was just watching this the other day.

And he goes to stop by Peppermint Patties on his way to the puppy farm and then just stays there and imagines he's a World War I soldier on leave in France.

Yeah, sure.

And just hangs out by her pool all day and snaps for service.

And she gets real mad.

It's the ultimate jerk move.

Hey, everybody.

Look, you all did such a great job sending in your Zeppelin and Dirigible songs.

And I have the bracket ready to go.

I just, this program, this is this computer program that is making me a little frustrated because I can't quite get it to do what I want it to do.

But we're going to get that poll going real soon.

I promise you.

Before March, certainly, because

that could be our March madness bracket.

I haven't forgotten about it.

It's just been a busy winter, but I hope that you will continue to

favor us with your fans and listener-submitted suggestions for things.

If you would like to submit a panel from the Peanuts cartoon strip of proof positive that Charlie Brown is too mean to Snoopy, I'd love to see those two.

Well, I guess it could be a whole strip, but ideally one panel.

You can go find them online, I'm sure, or take a picture of a, or, you know, they're all collected.

You can figure it out.

I would enjoy those.

You know, the director of the Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, California is a Max Fun listener.

No kidding.

And supporter.

Lovely man.

He's certainly welcome to enter the contest.

And I guess it's a contest now.

Yeah, he doesn't get any special advantage for being a curator.

There's no curator's bonus.

No, no, but I mean, he probably has access to archives.

It doesn't have to be published.

Whoever gives me the single panel of Charlie Brown being the meanest or Snoopy being the most loving towards Charlie Brown or Woodstock,

you're going to get a Judge John Osman t-shirt in your size or the size of your choice.

From MaxFunstore.com?

MaxFunstore.com is where you go to get all that merch.

Here's something from Nicholas in Somerville, Massachusetts.

When the weather's below freezing, my beard gets covered in a thick layer of frozen breath.

It can take up to 10 minutes to melt once I get back inside.

During the melting period,

I like to make a snack.

but my family insists the dripping moisture is unbearably gross they forbid me from doing anything in the kitchen until it is melted i explain it's just lung water

i didn't think it was going to get worse than beard juice now we got lung water

as a man who recently

recovered from pneumonia, John.

That's me.

You know, from lung water.

It's not fun.

They breathe the lung water anytime they share a room with me, but my family stands firm in their anti-beard juice policy.

Can you please tell them to let me have my food in peace?

Well,

look,

shout out to Somerville, Massachusetts, and

Tufts University on

WMFO FM 91.5 on their frequency modulation dial live from atop majestic Curtis Hall on the Medford-Somerville line, where I used to broadcast my radio show, Radio Consuelo, when I had a radio show

as a senior in high school at a college, because they didn't know any better than to give me a show.

I love Somerville.

I love Massachusetts.

I think a lot of this, though, is, I mean, unless things are very, very different just a couple hundred miles north of me right now, this whole issue is kind of moot because it's January as we record this and as we release this.

And it's 62 degrees in Brooklyn, New York.

I don't know if it's ever going to be freezing again, dude.

I don't know if it's ever going to be cold enough to freeze your beard again, even in, even in Somerville.

In Maine, I don't think it's been below freezing for a couple of days.

So

maybe you won't have to worry about this in the future.

But in the meantime, let's say we get a cold snap.

And your beard freezes up and you go inside.

I don't know, Jesse Thorne.

We both own beards.

Don't you feel that a person with a beard has a certain responsibility to minimize how much they're grossing out the people around them?

I think that's fair, yeah.

Because it's pretty gross.

It does sound gross.

And I think, I don't know.

I mean, we've discussed on this.

I'm a native coastal Californian, so I've never experienced weather.

But my understanding is that this is what mudrooms are for.

Yeah, that you sit down and wait for your beard to melt.

I think he should invest in,

you know, those kind of hand dryers in the bathroom where you dip your hands into it and then pull it out?

Yeah.

He should mount one of those at about five feet.

Dip the beard in, pull it out.

If he's got a ZZ top style or old school Jesse Thorne long beard, he could do that.

And you know what's great?

That way the beard juice collects in a reservoir for later sale.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

You could put that into an apothecary bottle and probably ship it to Brooklyn and sell it.

Sell it in a little storefront and a little pop-up shop shop in Dumbo.

But yeah, no, I think that you have an obligation.

Like,

beards are, I think, intrinsically a little bit gross.

They can be majestic and beautiful to look at.

And someone can find one attractive, even if they are not you.

But I will say that

I know that the people in my life who come close to my beard are making a sacrifice every time they come close to my beard.

It is a weird texture and it's kind of gross.

And I know as someone who kissed Zach Galifanakis Galifanakis

in the second season of Bored to Death, maybe the third, that it's a scratchy endeavor.

I had a mustache at the time.

And as Zach said, it felt like we were pushing two brooms together.

Give me a sec.

Anyway,

yeah, so given that the beard, I think, is sort of baseline, probably your family is already making a...

concession just letting you walk around with this thing on your face.

To have frozen breath dripping out of it, I don't care if you're you're making the most personal of snacks.

Even if it's not something, a snack that you're sharing, I don't care if you're making the most personal of snacks, the personal pan pizza.

Don't be dripping lung juice onto it.

Just dry it off.

Cut a towel, dry it off.

Jesse, do you know what I learned recently?

This may mean nothing to you.

You know, nostalgia is a toxic impulse, but I've been talking a lot about Lonnie Anderson and some other old, old school stuff.

Richard Dawson.

I'll just mention one more thing.

Maybe this will ping with you or maybe it won't.

But this is a big, important part of my middle school life.

Stouffer's Frenchbread Pizzas.

You ever have one of those?

No.

Val, Jennifer, Stouffer's Frenchbread Pizzas.

I'm sure I've had a Stouffer's Frenchbread pizza at some point or another.

I've had Frenchbread pizzas generally.

Sure, generally, but the Stouffer's, boy, oh boy.

I don't know.

What I learned, the good news for you is that they still make it.

Still comes in pepperoni and deluxe.

Oh, good.

There's still time.

Yeah, you still have a chance.

In screenwriting, they call this a ticking clock.

Yeah, and this is your inciting incident.

Everyone go out.

Well, I don't know.

I don't need to advertise Stouffer's.

Hold on, hold on, Val.

First, save a cat.

Yeah.

Then go get the pizza.

For all I know, Stouffer's pizzas are only good enough to wear on your feet when you're running on a treadmill in Nova Scotia at this point.

But I have a fond memory of it.

So if anyone wants to try one and let me know, maybe I'll do this.

They still make them.

But here's the other thing I discovered that they're still making.

This was one of my mom's favorite things.

I don't know if frozen food was not a big part of my growing up, but we had these Stouffer's French Red Pizzas, and we also had Stouffer's creamed chipped beef.

Which have you ever had creamed chipped beef, Jesse?

I've never even had chipped beef.

Oh, well, the cream chip beef is the same thing as chipped beef, except it's in a cream sauce.

Oh, okay.

What is chipped beef?

It's basically like it's air-dried beef.

This is how it's described on the Snuffers website.

Tender strips of dried beef topped with a seasoned creamy sauce.

And you traditionally serve it on toast.

And this was a thing that my mom would always say with perverse delight

was described in the armed forces as sh on a shingle, cream chipped beef on toast.

And she would, she would make not one, but two packages.

I have to imagine it had to have been 70,000 calories of cream sauce and beef and just eat it out of a bowl.

And I, and I love my mom and I love her memory.

And I've had cream chip beef and it's, it's kind of disgustingly good, but I didn't know they still make it and they do.

And I only found out because I was thinking about personal pizzas and stuff for Frenchman pizzas.

And I was found on the website.

They have this page for cream chip beef.

And at the bottom of the page, it says, why it's delicious.

And it offers two reasons for why it's delicious, why cream chip beef is delicious.

Why does this product defy God's will?

The first reason they offer for why it's delicious is it's freshly made and simply frozen.

Okay.

It's frozen.

That's why it's delicious.

Hold on.

It's simply frozen.

None of these Baroque freezing processes that our competitors use.

Right.

No, it's simply frozen,

just like grandma used to freeze.

And then the other reason that they give for why it's delicious,

for why creamed chip beef is delicious specifically, is cooking trays made with 30% recycled plastic.

Wow.

And let's just leave it there.

That's all I got.

That's why it's delicious.

The trays are somewhat recycled.

Get a little bit of that post-consumer flavor.

Anyway, there are things in life that are arguably grosser than beard juice.

Maybe creamed chip beef is one of them.

But whatever it is that's dripping out of your beard,

don't let it get in your snack, everybody.

Beards require a certain amount of self-discipline.

Maybe a hand towel at the door?

Yeah, get yourself a beard towel and just go,

dry it out.

Or go into the bathroom and, you know, you don't need a wall-mounted hand dryer.

You can just get a hair dryer and blow it on your beard.

That said, you should get.

You should.

Oh, yeah, you should.

Of course you should.

For later sale.

Well, it will increase the value of your home.

You're going to see that on Zillow Gone Wild for sure.

The beard drying room.

Our docket's clear.

That's it for another episode of Judge John Hodgman.

Our producer is Jennifer Marmer.

Our editor is Valerie Moffat.

Follow us on Twitter at Jesse Thorne and at Hodgman.

We're on Instagram at JudgeJohnHodgman.

Make sure to hashtag your JudgeJohn Hodgman tweets, hashtag JJ Ho, and check out the Maximum Fun subreddit at maximumfun.reddit.com to discuss this episode.

Do you know what that is, John, the Maximum Fun subreddit?

Well, it's a place to discuss maximum fun shows and things that come up on Maximum Fun shows.

It's a part of the internet that's still pretty fun.

It is fun.

It's fun over there.

It's nice.

Positive vibes there.

Pause vibes over at Maximum Fun.

MaximumFun.reddit.com.

MaximumFun.reddit.com.

Hey, we heard about some long-standing grudges today.

Let's hear some more.

Did someone cross you in kindergarten?

Are you still mad at that one kid who beat you in the audition for the high school production of Pirates of Penzance just because he already had a peg leg?

Did someone ever steal your joke or tell a story about your house without acknowledging you in their award-winning one-person show?

Did the mother of your friend who you were house sitting for kick you out of the apartment because she wanted to visit New York and you had to leave?

And she said, I know it's wrong, but I'm doing it anyway.

If you have an old grudge that you want settled or just want to complain about, let us know at maximumfund.org slash jjho.

As when we do our open court segment and our live shows, fortune favors the accuser in this particular category.

If you err an old grudge, the other person doesn't have to answer answer for it, and I'll almost certainly rule in your favor.

So make sure you let us know about your old grudges at maximumfund.org/slash JJ H O.

Plus, what else, Jesse?

Well, we're eager to hear about any dispute on any subject, whether or not your dispute is with a person who does solo performance.

Could be with a sketch comedy team, it could be with a double-hander.

It could be anything.

To be fair, most of my beefs are with Anna DeVere Smith.

Legendary rivalry.

Norman Marler-Gore Vidal stuff.

It was 11 p.m.

in Los Angeles in 1992.

This is solo performance humor.

Valerie gets it.

Valerie gets everything.

Jen's working on something else.

Anyway, no matter what your case is, submit it at maximumfund.org slash JJHO.

That's maximumfund.org slash JJ H.O.

And a reminder, it's not too late to get in your cases for our tour.

Port Townsend, Seattle, Portland, Oregon,

San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Denver, Colorado.

If you have a case that you'd like us to consider for live adjudication, make sure that we know about it at maximumfund.org/slash JJHO.

Excited about those mile-high disputes.

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

MaximumFun.org.

Comedy and culture.

Artist-owned.

Audience supported.