Bad News, Heirs

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

This week, bad news airs.

Dan brings the case against his wife Emily.

When their kids are already in a bad mood, Dan believes it's a good time to deliver a piece of news they might not want to hear.

Emily disagrees with Dan's method.

She'd like him to stop doing it when she's with him.

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.

This is what I was worried about, and this is why I thought I'd have a bit of a chat with you and explain absolutely frankly and openly the method whereby you and everybody in this world came to be.

Jesse Thorne, in order for you to be brought about, it was necessary for your mother and I to do something.

In particular, it was necessary for your mother to sit on a chair, to sit on a chair which I had recently vacated, and which was still warm from my body.

And then something very mysterious, rather wonderful and beautiful happened, and sure enough, Jesse Thorne, four years later, you were born.

Bailiff Jesse Thorne, please swear to litigants in.

Dan and Emily, please rise.

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.

I do.

Do you swear to abide by Judge John Hodgman's ruling, despite the fact that he himself is bad news?

Yes.

Yeah.

Judge Hodgman, you may proceed.

Emily and Dan, you may be seated for an immediate summary judgment on one hearer's favors.

Can either of you name the piece of culture that I referenced as I entered this courtroom?

How about you, Dan?

You want to take a guess?

I'm trying to think of some old-fashioned novel like

a Washington Irving novel.

Washington Irving.

Maybe The Legend of Spooky Hollow.

Emily's guess is Bartleby the Scrivener.

Oh.

Is that your guess, Emily?

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville?

No.

She would prefer not to guess Bartleby the Scrivener.

No.

It actually reminds me of that.

Hang on.

I just want to note, I can see all of you through teleconference, and I'm really glad that that joke hit our editor, Valerie Moffat, so well.

Thank you, Val.

Okay, sorry.

Back to you, Emily.

No, that's fine.

Well, it actually reminded me of a sermon by our old rabbi Shalman.

So that's what came to mind for me

a number of years ago, but that's probably so obscure that nobody would even know that, except for like the 100 people who were there to hear it.

Yeah, I don't think that I was quoting your rabbi.

You might have been.

Jennifer does a lot of research, but.

All right.

I have no idea.

Insofar as that it sounded like a sermon, I'm going to give you both a hint before we proceed to the case.

See if you can recognize this as a one-word hint.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

Mowage.

Oh, the princess bride.

Okay, that is from the princess bride, yes.

All right.

But that is not, all of your guesses have been wrong so far.

It is certainly not the legend of Sleepy Hollow, although we are here in the midst of scary season.

Nor is it Bartleby the Scrivener, nor is it your old rabbi.

But do you know who played

the marriage officiant in The Princess Bride, Emily?

Yes.

Who was it?

You have it right there.

It was the little Sean

Wallet.

Sean.

Sean Wallet.

It was not.

No.

Absolutely not.

No.

Not little Sean Wallet.

It's not Little Sean.

That's the inconceivable guy.

This is Dan's area of expertise.

Well, there was the older couple, which was Billy Crystal, and the woman from the taxi.

I don't know.

You guys are really going down all the wrong roads.

You're listing all of the people.

It wasn't Andre the Giant.

It wasn't Andre the Giant.

It wasn't Wallace Sean.

It wasn't Carol Cain.

Was it Mandy Patinkin?

It wasn't the Patink.

No.

The very famous, and it was just a small part, very very famous British comedian Peter Cook.

Yeah, I never would have gotten that.

That monologue of a father giving his teenage son a lesson on the facts of life is from a sketch called The Facts of Life, or more commonly known as a bit of a chat, from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's TV show from the 60s and 70s called Not Only But Also, most of which was erased by the BBC after it aired because why keep anything?

They're kind of pulling a HBO discovery ahead of their time.

And it's one of my favorite sketches.

I urge you all to go check it out.

Just Google a bit of a chat, Peter Cook Dudley Moore on YouTube.

If you Google a bit of a chat, you might also stumble across our friend Ken Plume's very fine interview podcast, a bit of a chat, where I have offered a bit of a chat with him over many, many number of times for an annual holiday bit of a chat every year for many years, and lots of other fun people show up on that as well.

But all guesses were wrong, are wrong, and forever shall be wrong.

So help you God or whatever.

So we are now going to hear this case.

Who comes to seek justice before me, and what is the nature of that justice you seek?

Who is it?

I do.

It's me.

It's Dan.

Dan, it's me.

Dan, state the nature of your complaint, please.

I have a parenting technique that I've been developing over, well, since as long as we've been parents, which is about 16 years.

And Emily doesn't like it,

doesn't think it's any good.

And

should I describe the technique?

No, keep it secret.

Let's make it a game.

Let's have the listeners guess.

What could the technique be?

Boy, I would not like to see those letters.

So you better tell me what it is.

The goal of the technique is to reduce the number of bad moods experienced by our children and also

decrease the intensity of each bad mood.

And the way that I do it is by combining bad news or unpleasant topics together so that we can have,

let's say, it's two pieces of bad news or two unpleasant topics.

If we discuss them together, it'll put the child in a bad mood, but it'll only be one bad mood as opposed to discussing pleasant on topic number one and then having that bad mood resolve and like returning to emotional equilibrium and then springing the second unpleasant topic later on down the line, inducing a second bad mood.

Dan, you act as though I've never heard of the maximum bad mood asymptote, a hypothesis regarding mood effects resulting from the transmission of bad news from parent to child.

It was evidence sent in by you, Dan.

This hypothesis and this XY graph, with the X axis being bad news, the Y axis being mood.

Correct.

You sent a graph in?

Dan sent in a graph.

And just to double check, Dan, you wanted to win the case?

Let me read out the text that goes along with the graph.

As the amount of bad news received by the child from the parent x-axis increases, the intensity of the child's bad mood y-axis increases, described by the function below.

Function of x equals 2 to the power of minus x minus 1,

x, so long as x is greater than 0, such that it approaches the horizontal maximum bad mood asymptote.

Mood equals negative 1, figure 2.

I think you've got this one in the bag, Dan.

But from practice, so this is a hypothesis.

Yes.

Are the children hypothetical?

The children are real.

Okay.

We have two.

They are 16 years old and 12 years old.

Okay.

And those are some bad mood years.

Oh, yeah.

Those are some bad mood years.

So practically speaking, what you're talking about is like, hey, vacation is canceled.

And it's like,

oh, and by the way,

I'm trying to think of a second piece of bad news.

Empty the dishwasher.

Now it's your turn to empty the dishwasher.

Vacation is canceled, and also it's your turn to empty the dishwasher.

There you go.

That's not bad news.

That's just a fact.

They got to know that.

Bailiff Jesse Thorne, what's some bad news that you have to give to your child?

Their fish died.

Their fish died.

I stepped on their gerbil.

I stepped on their gerbil.

That's a pretty deep cut.

I feel like I need to say that's something my dad did once.

Yeah.

A phrase he said to me.

Okay, I understand this in theory.

In theory, your theory is that as long as you're going to go through a bad mood event, you might as well pack as much bad news into it as possible rather than have two spikes on the bad mood graph.

Yes, and also the intensity of the bad mood, I think, is reduced

relative to

what it would have been had the two pieces of bad news been delivered separately.

So, for example, I had about a month ago, I had like one of those really bad days.

I twisted my ankle.

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

I only have good days.

You can't read John's t-shirt?

Live, laugh, love.

I only have good days.

What do you think those flip-flops symbolize?

Really pulls the room together.

All right, Dan.

You hurt your ankle.

I had a day where I twisted my ankle.

Right.

I had a leaky tire on my car,

and it was raining out.

And then something really frustrating happened at work.

But by the time the frustrating thing happened at work, I had already reached my maximum bad mood asymptote.

And so it was kind of like one of those when it rains at Porris days.

I was immune to more bad stuff happening because

the spell had already been broken of

having had a good day.

The Eureka moment was

when the older child was around four years old.

He used to

hate it.

when he was like having a snack and his cereal bar broke before he started eating it.

It broke in half.

He would start wailing and just be really irrationally because he was four, whatever.

So

that happened once, and I was kind of consoling him and explaining to him that, you know, it's going to break in your mouth anyway.

It's all going to the same place.

It's, you know, it's, it's, don't worry, it's going to be okay.

It'll taste the same.

And then it was around that time that I realized, oh, this is a good time to talk about death.

Every candy bar breaks and every mom and dad dies.

It was more like every candy bar breaks and tonight you have to take a bath.

Because he also hated taking baths at that phase.

And so that was my Eureka moment because I noticed that the cereal bar broke.

He was upset.

I consoled him.

He wasn't back to equilibrium point, but he was still kind of in his feelings.

And then when I sprung on him that he had to take a bath, of course he was more upset than he would have otherwise been had I not told him that he had to take a bath, but he wasn't twice as upset or as upset as he would have been about the bath if that was the only unpleasant topic we had to talk about from his perspective.

And I didn't have to put him in a second bad mood later on.

So let the record show you've also sent in more evidence, including a photo of a broken cereal bar.

Yes.

Exhibit A, cereal bar,

and also exhibit B, bath time.

And this is a bathtub, but there is a non-your child isn't this dog is it

no that's that's our dog uh Roxy and she's closer in size to what our child was when he was four years old than he currently is because he's like six feet tall this is all this is a dramatic reenactment yes I say did you stick the dog in the bathtub and take a picture yes Emily have you not have you not seen the evidence I feel like that yeah I feel like this court is skewed towards Dan because I have not even seen the evidence Isn't that supposed to be part of court where you get to see the evidence?

Yes, it is.

And we'll rectify that as soon as possible.

And for listeners, you can also see the evidence at the Judge John Hodgman page at maximumfund.org, as well as our Instagram, which is at judgejohnhodgman, where you can see the staged.

I presume that this is not the actual broken cereal bar.

You have not kept this as a weird totem of

your theory.

No, I have not.

All right.

Dan is our first litigant to be heavily influenced by Errol Morris.

A recreation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A narrative recreation of the effect.

There's also a picture of another dog named Rocket.

What's the story here, Dan?

Well, I thought it would be unfair for me to submit a picture of Roxy without also submitting a picture of Rocket.

So I just made Rocket figure three of the hypothesis.

I understand.

Did you stick him in the bathtub, too?

No.

No.

Emily, you clearly have a lot to respond to here.

I'm sorry that Dan did not make the evidence available to you and that we did not as well.

We're getting that to you right away so you can evaluate it.

But it is, it is very much as I described.

And now that it has been described, what is your opinion on the maximum bad mood asymptote hypothesis and Dan's theory of giving the bad news and then the bad news?

It doesn't make any sense to me, right?

Because the bad news, it's going to be much worse.

The kid's going to be much more upset, right?

So there is like,

that hypothesis doesn't make a lot of sense where you say

some

XY thing isn't gonna, I'm from the humanities, I don't know charts and graphs, but you know, it is gonna decrease or increase because

the kid's gonna get really upset and then be even more upset.

So it seems to me that you either just, you know, you separate out the things and then if you're a smart parent, you've given yourself an out later to even avoid the bad news later because you could just skip it.

I mean, this isn't like your dog died or your grandma died.

I mean, mean, obviously you're going to have to tell that.

But, you know, if you don't want to deal with the secondary temper tantrum about a bath, then just don't give the kid a bath.

And then, you know, you've had a perfectly lovely evening.

So you're saying if the cereal bar has already pushed child A to the brink.

Yeah.

Why push that child further and just skip the bath altogether?

Yeah, if I don't have the wherewithal that day to handle a second meltdown, then I've left myself that lovely option of just opting out of the second meltdown and I've had a much nicer day overall.

Plus, my child is much happier.

Emily, you don't always keep a quiver full of grievances

and disappointments

so that you can drop them serially.

No, my parenting goal has been like.

even,

healed, uneventful childhood.

And so far, I think we've almost attained that.

So, you know.

Emily, I think you raise another another point as well, because for all of the accuracy and precision of this graph, there's no mention of any way you're measuring the mood of this child, Dan.

Precisely.

Like, Dan, when you break bad news to one of your children, do you pop some electrodes on them and hook them up to a machine that measures their respiration, like a lie detector or something?

Like, how do you measure the bad mood?

How do you trace the asymptote of bad mood?

John, it can't make things worse.

By the time you've told them they have have to take a bath, you might as well tell them that you're popping some electrodes onto them.

They've hit the asymptote.

Bad news, child.

Here comes the machine again.

That's a great question, and I've given it some thought.

And currently, I'm measuring the intensity of the bad mood just through parental instinct.

Wow, you're just eyeballing it.

That's not very scientific, Dan.

Right.

It's why it's a hypothesis and why it needs more development, but it doesn't mean the concept, you don't throw the concept away just because

this is Judge John Hodgman, not Shark Tank.

I'm not here to give you money to develop your bad mood machine.

Emily, you're a humanities professor.

Dan, you're a mathematician or what's your background there, Dan?

My background, I am a

what am I, Emily?

I'm a grad school dropout.

I'm a, I'm a, I'm a.

I'm a failed physicist.

I have a turned union organizer.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

So he does have, you know, he does love a chart.

And I have some pretty funny stories about Dan's scientific efforts to solve problems.

Well, Emily, whatever you do, don't tell any of them.

Let's move on.

Keep them secret.

No, I'd love to hear.

I'd love to hear a funny story.

Do you want to hear my favorite funny story?

It's not about parenting, but it is pretty hysterical.

It was pretty children.

So Dan wanted to bring his guitar to his parents' house, which required flying from Chicago to Connecticut where his parents live.

But Dan wasn't sure the guitar would fit in the overhead compartment of said airplane.

Now, if it was me, I would just bring the guitar and make them figure out where I'm going to put the guitar and they would just get there.

Oh, Emily.

Dan decided.

I admire you, but I mean, this is scary season.

And I feel like a ghost just walked through me.

You're telling me you would just wander onto an airplane

with a full-size guitar and trust the flight attendants to just deal with it?

Yeah.

Dan is not a let's see what happens thing.

So Dan constructed, looked up the measurements of a Southwest Airline overhead compartment,

then got cardboard and reconstructed said compartment in our dining room, and then tried to put the guitar and case in the compartment.

And of course, it was too big.

So he could not bring the guitar with him, you know, knew this because the guitar.

Now, you know, like too big, like you could probably have just jammed it in a little bit.

But anyway, he didn't bring it.

He ended up renting a guitar in Connecticut.

It all turned out fine.

It turned out it was to rehearse a song for our wedding.

So it was all very romantic and which I didn't know at the time.

But just I sat there in the living room thinking, am I seriously marrying this man who's now constructing a cardboard southwest compartment in our dining room?

And I mean, obviously I married him.

So.

I mean, I'm glad he had a little project.

The truth is you could have asked asked anyone on earth.

Anyone on earth who had ever been on an airplane could tell you that a full-size guitar cannot fit into an overhead.

Actually, I have to be correct.

It was a banjo.

It wasn't a guitar.

It was a banjo.

Oh, okay.

Well, yeah, there's a question mark there.

I appreciate it.

It was a banjo.

I am.

I was wrong, which is why I thought it could fit because it's not as wide and thick, right?

It's like narrower.

Yeah, I could see that being a little bit of a gray area.

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

We'll be back in just a moment on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

You're listening to Judge John Hodgman.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

Of course, the Judge John Hodgman podcast, always brought to you by you, the members of maximumfun.org.

Thanks to everybody who's gone to maximumfun.org slash join.

And you can join them by going to maximumfun.org slash join.

The Judge John Hodgman podcast is also brought to you this week by Made In.

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Let them know Jesse and John sent you.

It says here, Emily, that you are originally from the state of Maine.

I am.

So I completely support your position on Connecticut being not really a state in New England.

It barely fits into the overhead compartment of New England.

Exactly.

Let's put it that way.

It's an awkward fit.

It is.

But it's in there.

Especially southern Connecticut.

But, you know, whatever.

And where in Maine are you from?

I'm from a small town called Poland, Maine, where Poland Spring Water comes from.

along Route 26.

I know that town very well.

I mean, it's a big town now.

Last time I drove through it, it had a grocery store and a light and everything.

But when I grew up there, we just had country stores and a flashing light and a post office.

Emily, I'm not going to mention your last name on the podcast, but I am aware of it.

Are you related to any allergists in the Boston area?

Yes, this is my uncle.

Really?

That was my allergist.

Uncle Frank.

That's right.

Uncle Frank.

Don't say the last name.

Dr.

Frank T.

was my allergist for many, many years.

He was the first to diagnose my nasal polyps, my benign nasal polyps.

Oh, I had benign nasal polyps too.

Maybe, you know what?

That's a weird thing that we both know this guy.

We both had nasal polyps.

Maybe he was doing the, he had an experiment going of his own.

I don't know.

He did not remove my nasal polyps.

That's one.

Yeah, that is my uncle.

Usually I get asked about somebody else in my family, but

yeah, that's my favorite.

Oh, is there another person with that last name that is more likely to be in the middle?

Well, there's many, yes.

But my other uncle is a,

is in the same field as I am, but he's in Massachusetts.

So it's like I often go to conferences and they're like, are you related to Joe?

And I'm like, yes.

Right.

And you're a professor.

I am, yeah.

Of humanities.

Sure.

I'm a historian.

Oh, very good.

Well, due to family connections, Dan, I'm afraid that I have to rule in Emily's favor.

Sorry.

Welcome to Nepotism Court.

This is how it happens.

Wait a minute.

How do you know you haven't crossed paths with somebody in my family?

Well, what town in Connecticut are you from?

Orange.

Yeah, no, thank you.

All right, so

nothing against Orange, Connecticut.

That's fine.

So, Emily, how often does this actually come up?

That Dan springs a couple of bad news bears onto your kids at once?

I mean, I would say that it's probably an issue, you know,

that was more common when they were a little younger, but it is still an issue where like, you know, something will come up and then we'll have to like, you know, do we just kind of dump it all at once?

Or, you know, do we spread it out over the weekend?

And my approach is always to spread it out as much as possible, right?

So why do you think?

Because it just seems, it just seems a little,

maybe a little heavy-handed or

Well, one, it's two things.

One, it's selfish.

Like, you know, especially when they were younger, I didn't want to listen to the temper tantrum.

We also have to think about in the variable thing that Dan mapped out, you know, the parents' ability to withstand the temper tantrum.

Mine is much lower, I think, than Dan's.

So, since I have a much lower threshold for handling loud children, crying, that kind of thing, my goal is always to make it as short as possible and as infrequently as possible, right?

Not to say that I'm a pushover.

I'm a very firm parent.

I'm not like, my kids are not walking all over me.

Whereas I think Dan's ability to withstand the

emotional, the loudness and the upset is not because he's an insensitive guy.

He just can handle noise better than I can.

You're saying your kids are loud.

They're really loud.

Nobody told me before I had children how loud they were.

You know, I grew up in a very quiet house and they're very loud and they take up a lot of space.

physically and

noise wise, like a lot of, there's a lot of noise pollution involved in my life.

So I try to minimize the noise pollution to the extent that I can.

So that's why I would drag it out.

And then I, as I said earlier, I give myself that out of, well, maybe today I won't give that second or third dose of bad news.

I'll just put it off for a day.

And that way I've had a more peaceful day.

Dan, Emily grew up in a quiet home of conflict avoidance.

A quiet home populated by historians and allergists, you know, everyone just sort of reading and looking through otoscopes.

Was there more active,

loud conflict in your upbringing that might have thickened your skin a little bit to what she terms a temper tantrum?

I think so.

I think so.

I think my brother and I were engaged in pretty constant psychological warfare against each other.

And some of it got pretty loud.

And my parents are not quite people either.

Right.

So you add that to the mix.

And I think, yeah, you end up with a pretty loud household.

Can I say, though, that I just want to get back to my method a little bit and just say that I believe, and I think I have good cause to believe, that my method does reduce the overall noise pollution of the house.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that.

I mean,

if you have two pieces of bad news to give

and you give them both at once,

You might argue that the intensity of the noise and the emotional response and the and the wailing or the anger or the screaming or the gnashing of teeth might be a little bit higher, but it can only last a certain length of time.

And you're getting a two-for-one.

But this is the thing that I don't understand.

I have two questions.

First of all,

are you, as Jesse Thorne suggested, packing up a quiver of bad news to deliver and just wait for a cereal bar to break so you can throw a few on there?

Or how does it, practically speaking, how does it work?

It works by,

again, mostly by parental instinct.

I mean,

there are...

But are you storing up bad news?

Or do you have something really bad you want to say?

Like, unfortunately, we have to take the family pet to a farm, let's say.

And there's something big you have to say, and then you just sort of secretly break a cereal bar just to prime the pump.

Well, first of all, bringing the family pet to the farm is

not the type of bad news that I'm talking about.

That's too sad.

Because Rocket and Roxy are going to be cared for immortally

and prance around in the fields of Valhalla.

They're going to be so happy there.

When I'm talking about bad news, I'm talking about everyday annoyances, hard sort of bad news, not the death of a loved one, even a pet.

No, I understand.

So you're saying that there's always bad news to deliver.

There's always small bad news to deliver.

I mean, I was just reading that the Supreme Court's about to go back into session.

We're looking at existential bad news over the next year.

Are you trying to get me to go and fly into a tantrum to test your hypothesis?

I'm trying to host a podcast here.

I got to hold it together.

Dan is keeping a notebook of everyday indignities, like some kind of union organizing Larry David.

Dan, I have another question for you.

So Emily points out that your children aren't children anymore.

They're preteens and a teen.

Yes.

Does this even still happen?

And if so, what would be a more recent example?

The situation that motivated me to submit this case to the court was one where

we had

the younger child wanted to go see a musical performance, a show for his birthday.

We bought the tickets and then realized that it was a 21-plus show.

Right.

Classic.

Yeah, yeah.

And

he's 12.

By the way, we've been talking about getting him a fake ID because he wants to go to a lot of performances that are

that he's too young for.

But anyway, we got tickets to the show, realized he was too young.

And then also

Hebrew school was about to start again for the fall.

And there was something about Hebrew school that was also on our list that we needed to communicate to him at some point.

So I said.

It was there in your bad news quiver.

And so Emily said, well, why don't you go get him?

And we'll talk about the show and what we're going to do to celebrate his birthday instead of do that.

We can think it through.

And I said, okay, why don't we also tell him about the Hebrew school thing?

And Emily said, what are you crazy?

And I said, well, this is the dispute.

This is,

we could have done them together.

I relented and said, I'll just make my case in court.

But

I think that we had an opportunity there to

combine, you know, the Hebrew school thing into

not being able to go to the show.

And instead, we had to endure another bad mood with, I think, an overall total greater intensity between the two bad moods

because of it.

But we'll never know because you never had a chance to get your machine out.

I will say Kid Number Two handled the bad news of the show disappointment pretty well.

So if you'd stacked on the Hebrew school on top of it,

you would have like ended up with a worse scenario, right?

So it's kind of like goes against your theory, right?

So he handled it with quite a bit of grace.

And so then if we had said, oh,

by the way, Hebrew school starts next week and you have to go all year long and on Wednesday too, by the way.

So it's like triple bad news.

Then he would have been like super upset.

Does he know about the Hebrew school thing yet?

Or is he just finding out on this point?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Is the bad news about Hebrew school just that it's a type of school that you go to after you're done going to school?

Yeah.

Yeah.

More or less.

More or less.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Dan, I think Emily raises a point.

Wouldn't it make more sense to just sort of like play it by ear?

If kid two takes the bad news about the event pretty well there's no reason to then add add injury to non-insult i think that just because the child is not wailing or like like visibly yeah but at this point how old how old is the child in this example yeah okay 12.

so so right yes i'll grant that the intensity of the bad mood in that moment was was pretty low it was a low intensity it was a letdown it was a letdown um and so yes i think in the midst of a letdown, saying, oh, and I'll, you know, let's just, here's an opportunity to talk about challenging things.

We've had this time together to talk about a couple of challenging things.

We can't celebrate your birthday in the way that we had planned to.

You got to go to Hebrew school.

starting next week, whatever it was.

Like, here's an opportunity to kind of talk about these things.

And, you know,

and life is hard, and there's so little we can control about our children's experiences.

I feel like I can maybe help reduce the bad moods just a little bit.

Then as a father,

I'm trying.

I think that's what I just don't understand though.

How is that reducing the bad news by giving them more bad news all at once?

That is not reducing the bad news.

That's like making the bad news even worse.

No, the bad news is whatever the bad news is.

That's the independent variable, as it would be called.

It's the mood that I'm talking about.

Well,

I don't agree.

I mean, I think, why would you want your kids just?

I mean, if there's enough bad, as you pointed out, in the world, why do we want our kids to have to like,

you know, be miserable?

Emily, are you avoiding telling your kids about bad news entirely?

No,

no,

I'm not.

Dan, you know, I'm more of a half,

you know, a cup half full person.

Dan's a little more of a cup, half-empty person.

And so I like to try to look at things in a more upbeat manner.

Put the two of you together, you've got one completely empty cup.

Exactly.

Or full.

I don't look at it that way.

Emily, you used the word tantrum.

Yeah.

And you mentioned your kids were loud.

Like, what would be an emotional response to something as bad as having to take a bath or a broken cereal bar?

back in the day when they were littles.

I mean, back in the day, it was like, you know, crying and stomping around and slamming doors.

We lived in this really tiny little condo, so you couldn't, like, avoid anything, you know, so there's really no avoiding the tantrums.

Not like you could go to a different room.

Now I have noise-canceling earbuds, so it really helps with keeping the noise down.

But also, they're older.

Is this the kind of behavior that continues?

Well, no.

Their tantrums have matured.

Now they just kind of go on these rants.

Now it's more of a slam the door silent treatment from the older, or the younger is more like these stomping back and forth ranting about the injustices of right whatever and he can go on for quite some time more of like a bill maher situation yeah so he he's quite eloquent in his uh

soliloquy of injustice so and is that easier for you to deal with or is it still no it's still i just want to stop it i'll go buy an ice cream cone let's just everything will be better right let's go outside and get some fresh air pet the dog.

But stopping the tantrum doesn't solve the problem.

But we're not talking about problem solving here.

We're talking about, as Dan pointed out, the reaction to the bad news.

We're not talking about solving the problem.

I'm not talking about the problem of having to go to Hebrew school.

I'm talking about the problem of being upset.

You may be.

teaching your children that it's wrong to be upset about upsetting things and they should just

ignore or overcome their upset through sheer force of will rather than learning to take care of themselves.

That sounds good to me, Jesse Thorne.

So ordered.

Get over it, kids and everybody in the world.

I'm going in the other room with my noise-canceling headphones.

I would just like to say, you know, my mother gave me one very good piece of advice.

Well, she's giving me two good pieces of advice.

And one was timing is everything.

And I just kind of feel like this is an example of timing being everything.

So it's not about trying to avoid your feelings.

They should absolutely have their feelings.

And I will give Dan credit.

He is, he is the much better parent at let's talk about our feelings that that I will give him kudos for than I am.

So maybe you're right, Justin.

Maybe I am just trying to like

smooth over the feelings there.

But also timing is everything.

And so why would you like just stack it all up?

Doesn't make any sense to me.

Emily, I got to tell you, I'm an only child.

Oh, well, well, there you go.

Who had two single parents.

I have two half siblings, but they're much younger.

And I identify with you.

As soon as my children are upset, my instinct is immediately, wow, you're upset.

Let's go in separate rooms for a while.

Well, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that, Jesse Thorne.

Yes, it's de-escalation.

That's what the therapist would say.

You need to de-escalate by separating.

I mean, they're older now.

I mean, you know, I would say that an argument could be made, and I might make the argument that you want your child to know that you are there for them in their feelings, but at the same time, giving them space to work out their feelings and on their own without trying to tamp them down is okay, in my opinion.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

I think we practice that or try to anyway.

I mean, we're human.

I mean, sometimes, you know, it's just too fast.

It's a balance because you want, you know, when kids are going through an emotional event, you want them to know that you are there for them, but it is ultimately a kind of an emotional weather pattern that just has to pass through.

And

the kids have to have their time to go through those feelings.

So trying to stop the weather from happening is inappropriate.

But on the other hand, giving them space, however they define that, is also like, well, this is your weather event.

I'm here to observe it with you.

Let me know if you need me, but I'm definitely going to be cutting up some carrots in the other room or something like that.

And then on the, you know, as the parent being responsible for

talking to your kids about things that you know they're going to find disappointing, I mean, you are, either you just, as soon as it pops into your head, you say it, or, you know, you do try to pick and choose when and how you do it.

And that's a challenge.

And I, I think I found a pretty good

method to

make it work.

Dan, you ever get a boo-boo?

Yes.

You have a small cut or abrasion or something, a boo-boo?

Yes.

Will you put put a band-aid on it?

Yes.

When it comes time to take off the band-aid, what do you do?

Yeah, rip it off.

No,

you give yourself another extra cut.

Because you know you're going to cut that other finger eventually.

No, just to be clear, I'm not causing the bad news.

I'm delivering the bad news.

I think that you're carrying cereal bars around and breaking them to open a discussion whenever you need to broach a difficult subject.

Absolutely.

Dan, it says here that your ideal ruling is for Emily to try out your theory and have a real discussion with you about it, and also for Emily to recognize that your method is legitimate.

Do you feel you've not been able to have a real discussion with Emily about your theory?

Does she try to shut you down and tell you to go get some fresh air?

I mean,

I don't think that she recognizes it as a legitimate attempt to be a good parent.

And I think that if she tried it, then we would be able to have a discussion where she could kind of maybe more likely see what I'm talking about.

Answer the question.

Do you feel you can't have a, that Emily shuts down discussion about this very idea?

You're the one who said this is your ideal ruling to have a real discussion with you about

your asymptote graph.

Do you feel you can't have that real discussion?

That's why I...

I don't, because she's never tried it.

I think if she tries it, then she can discuss it from a, from, based on some experience, a trial, a trial period.

So you're the only one who's putting this into action, or are you not allowed to put it into action?

I put it into action when I'm not

stopped.

I mean, I would never, you know, just like the most recent example that I gave about the tickets to the show and the Hebrew school, I didn't do it then because I don't, I wouldn't do it over Emily's objection, like in the moment and just defy

her.

But I so.

So when Emily vetoed the concert/slash hebrew school double whammy how did you feel

i felt like

um

my

like my method never gets a fair hearing okay overruled emily just kidding

also

i think you know it is a hypothesis not a theory and i think to be a theory would require some peer review and my peer is abandoning me i don't have a peer in on this uh with me so that we could maybe get it to become a more substantial method.

She's in the other room cutting carrots with her noise canceling headphones on.

That's right.

That's right.

I do it when Emily's not around.

And I don't think that's a secret.

I don't think that that would come as a shock to Emily.

Are your kids wise to your technique?

Have they figured this out?

Have they figured out your ways?

Well,

no, they never figured it out until I told them because they listened to this podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

But no, they hadn't figured it out

up until then.

But I thought, you know, as I was going to, as I was preparing my case, I thought their perspective might be helpful.

So

I revealed it.

Oh, so you did?

And what was their feedback?

It was,

I know this is an audio show, but it was like.

A shrug.

A shrug and an eye roll.

But whatever, dad.

Yeah.

All they heard from you was Charlie Brown teacher talk.

Wa-womp, womah, womp, wom, womom, bom, wom, bomom, bwah.

Exactly.

Womah womah, womah, wom podcast.

Buam bwah, bwah, bwah.

Which made me feel like I could do whatever I want.

What does it matter?

Yeah, you're getting there.

You're getting there.

That's exactly where you're going as a parent with the teenagers or soon to be teenagers.

Eventually, you get to do whatever you want.

Nothing matters.

Emily, it says here that your ideal ruling is for me to say that you are right and for Dan to limit his technique to 50%.

Why not 0%, Emily?

Well, I think it wasn't so much, if I'm correct, it was, yes, I'm right.

That's definitely a ruling I want.

And perhaps to just do it when I'm out of town.

You know, so when I'm out of time.

It seems like we've already established that that's.

Right.

So I mean, I guess my ruling was like, you know, status quo.

There can be no status quo.

I'm either going to rule that he can do it all the time or zero of the time.

But the ruling has to be that I'm right.

Okay.

That's the ruling I want.

If I can't rule that you are right,

you're going to feel that you left with some injustice here, right?

100%.

Yeah.

Does it happen often?

I mean, this is where I'm a little...

Well, I'll answer that question with a question.

How many times do you think the children shirk their household responsibilities and I have to deliver them the bad news that they haven't completed XYZ

chore?

I mean, it's almost daily.

It's

not weekly.

I'll say weekly.

So the bad news that you're giving is not is not actually like...

You're trying to combine, you're trying to combine your nags as along with your bad news yes right yeah you're trying to take advantage as long as there's a bad mood going you're going to go ahead and nag you're going to double down and remind them that it's time to take the garbage out and walk the dogs and put the dog in the bathtub for the photograph whatever their chores are in the house they're already in their feelings i'll just i'll slip it in they'll you know it'll it'll certainly uh exacerbate the the the bad mood but not as as much, and I won't have to tell them later and start it all over again.

The dagger's in, why not give it a twist?

Emily, to what extent are you concerned about your kids'

feelings of upset?

And to what extent are you concerned about the upset that this conflict causes you?

Oh,

yeah, I think I'm more concerned about the upset it causes me.

I think they know their dad.

You know, they know he's a half a glass, half empty kind of guy they know he doesn't like wet feet they know he doesn't like you know to go outside in the rain he doesn't like the bad news stuff so that he's just you know so they take it with a grain of salt and they're older now maybe i worried more when they were little so now it's more about my own uh well-being so it is a bit selfish on my part i guess at this point that i i want the uh the ser you know i'm shooting for a more serene household as they've as they've grown up I'll put the question to you as well, then, Dan.

How much are you concerned about the bad mood that these news and chores and daily life cause your kids, especially when you have to deliver the news and that mood asymptote

hitting that bad level?

How much are you concerned for them?

And how much do you just want to get through the bad stuff and their bad reaction as quickly as possible yourself?

Yeah, I think that has to be part of it.

I mean, I mean, it's it's emo it's challenging emotionally challenging for the parent to raise an unpleasant topic with with your child.

And

why not get it all done at once?

Yeah, I think so.

I think that's part of it.

I think it doesn't take away from the fact that

I feel like I have real evidence on

how it

is, you know, it's like harm reduction for the children.

I mean, not grave harm, but you know, somewhat.

And

yeah, maybe for me too.

Well, I'm glad you feel you have real evidence.

Maybe someday you'll present it.

In the meantime, I think I have heard everything that I need to in order to make my decision.

I've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence, but anyway,

not data, Dan.

Not data, Dan.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to rule in your favor.

I'm going to go into my chambers.

I'm going to think it over.

I'll be back in a moment with my verdict.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Dan, how are you feeling about your chances?

Well,

I'm pretty used to having Emily best me in most things, but

I'm feeling pretty good about this one.

Usually it happens when I'm too cocky, which I feel like maybe I'm being too cocky right now.

But I also feel

like when she said that the only acceptable, that, you know, when she went way out on a limb, 100%, nothing less, that

that's why I'm here.

And

hopefully the court will see what I'm dealing with.

How are you feeling, Emily?

I'm feeling pretty confident.

You know, I think,

you know, Dan brought the case.

I think my, you know,

I think it's, it's,

it's just not the best strategy.

It's, it's, I like the, I like the quiver of bad news.

I kind of think it more about like, it's like kind of whack-a-mole parenting where you just kind of like whack your kids with bad news after bad news, you know, kind of hit them along the way.

So why would you want to do that?

Right.

So I, I think,

I I think I have a good shot at defending myself.

We'll see what Judge Hodgman has to say about all this when he returns with his verdict.

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 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,

Judge Hodgman.

We have a quick break here from the case.

What have you got going here for Scary Season?

Well, Jesse, as you know, it's scary season.

I'm going to suggest some delightful, haunting recommendations to the listeners.

Great news, John.

Everybody loved that voice, and now you can be done doing it.

Okay.

Everybody, of course, go check out Hulu on Dick.

Go check out Hulu on Dick Town.

And then while you're there, check out Dick Town on Hulu.

We don't have a scary Halloween episode per se, but we do have a big dress-up episode where people wear a lot of costumes.

And that features our good friend Gene Gray, as well as Mike Mitchell from The Doughboys.

And of course, Fortune Femmster is also in that incredible episode, along with all your Dick Town favorites.

That's a really great one.

It's the case of the Marauding Mascot.

A good place to start if you haven't started.

But also, I want to recommend our friend Ben Acker wrote a book of scary stories for middle schoolers called Stories to Keep You Alive Despite Vampires.

which is absolutely wonderful and funny and charming in every way.

And you want to get it for your middle grade reader right now.

Put it in their Halloween bag.

Check out also the book, All the Living and the Dead by Haley Campbell.

Haley Campbell's a journalist in London.

I met her through Neil Gaiman years ago.

She's a really smart, funny writer.

And this is an incredible book where she spent a year just visiting people who are basically in the death industry, people whose careers keep them close to death.

So, morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners.

I mean, it's grim stuff, but it's a fascinating and weirdly compelling book.

And speaking of Neil Gaiman, he is the avatar of Scary Season.

What a better time than October to read The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and various incredible illustrators or watch The Sandman.

The dream came true.

It's now on Netflix, a gigantic, big, lush mini-series event that I've been really enjoying, and I'm sure the whole world is watching it.

But if you haven't, go check it out.

That's on Netflix.

Oh, and also check out Edgar Oliver, whose voice I imitate.

Go to YouTube and search Edgar Oliver and find his monologue from the moth called Apron Strings of Savannah.

Jesse, what do you have going on?

Well, speaking of spooky stuff, one of the world's least spooky people, Patton Oswalt, is on Jordan JesseGo this week.

But he does love Halloween.

He's one of the great Halloween lovers.

Him and Dana Gould are constantly at the race for the number one spot of Halloween lovers.

It was such a delight, such a joy.

I know I plugged it a few weeks ago and then Patton had to reschedule, but it is on tape now.

So it will be out this week.

And it is so fun.

Patton's the greatest.

He has a great new comic out and a great new special out.

So

yeah, watch Patton's special and listen to him on Jordan Jesse Go.

One of the good guys of show business and one of the great talents.

And any scary stuff at putthisonshop.com?

Everything at the Put This On Shop is scary, scary, awesome.

Scarily beautiful and well curated.

PutThisOnShop.com is where you can find all of the special things for a special gift for a special person in your life, including if that special person is you.

Let's get back to the case.

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

Parenting is not necessarily a fun adventure for introverts.

And particularly for only children.

And

Emily, I don't know that you're an only child, but I get the impression that you appreciate a nice, quiet household where

you have time to tend to your own garden, as Voltaire would say, your own mental needs and wants.

And I'll say this: I don't know if you're 100% right, but you're not 100% wrong, that particularly when kids are little, when they have huge emotional responses, the kind that we call tantrums, that involve crying and screaming, it is very, very

hard

for a parent who is not a sociopath to endure those sounds

because it is my opinion based on nothing.

I'm kind of a scientist like you, Dan.

It is my opinion based on no data

that

the sound of a child, your child crying, the sound of any child crying is hard, but especially hard if you are a parent, and especially if it's your child, because it sets off all kinds of evolutionary alarms and fires all kinds of, I presume, chemicals within your brain and body that scream emergency, even when there is no emergency.

There is a broken cereal bar, you know, or it's time to take a bath.

I don't know what's evolutionarily going on in a child's development that it learns

to respond to a bath as though it is a forest fire.

I'm not putting it beyond children that they are simply learning to be manipulative manipulative jerks, that they realize that when they deploy emergency response to non-emergency things,

that it makes their parents go a little bit bananas.

And maybe that sound of the crying and the tantrum will be so much that Emily will be like, you know what?

Don't take a bath.

And then they don't take a bath.

It was very, very hard for

my wife, who's all human being in her own right and a terrific parent.

And

me,

a follower in parenthood of her parenting style, to realize that

the temper tantrum is, for lack of a better term, that a young child has is like horrible weather.

It's something that you just endure.

And you have to endure it.

You have to let it wash over you.

And you have to thicken your skin and

desensitize or noise cancel your ears to it emotionally and try to and calm all of those evolutionary firings of neurons and hormonal glands and stuff because it will it will pass it is just the expression of hard big deep emotion in ways that kids don't know how to how to express them and i'll say this i don't think you're 100 right emily in the sense that you know going back to when a broken cereal bar could cause a real tragedy in in your child's life that it would not be wrong to go ahead and take advantage of that bad weather system and throw in the news that bath time is also imminent.

You know, sometimes I can understand Dan's words, even if his graph is

looks like nothing to me, as they would say in West World.

I understand Dan's theory, and I think in practice, it probably could be very effective for a young child where the cereal bar is broken and you know there's something else coming down the pike, which is bath time.

And you might as well get the bath time news out of the way and then just take the full force of the gale for a while and then it'll be over.

Because it does.

It resolves itself, ideally.

I think that the theory is good for children of a certain age.

But Dan, your children are no longer of a certain age.

And you know this because they don't respond

with the same kind of tantrums.

They respond with different kinds of emotional responses because they're older.

They're preteen, early teenage years.

Their reactions are going to

be vocal and extend to rants that you have to listen to.

But it's not the same kind of thing.

And their moods have, and their emotional lives have matured to a point not only where they're more complicated and more likely to be turned inward as much as...

expressed outwardly to you, but also a point where you have to, I'm sorry, you have to take your children's emotions seriously.

Your children's emotions when they are a pre-human four or five, six-year-old, I mean, obviously they have deep emotional lives.

I'm not saying that they're pre-human.

I apologize for even suggesting that, but you know what I'm saying.

By the time they're 12 and 16, you have to take their emotional lives seriously.

Your children's emotional responses to bad news or however you want to put it, all these things are not data points for your graph anymore.

I can kind of see how they were when they were little, but I think you already know that your kids are

responding to stuff in deeper and more complicated ways.

And in both cases, and this is why you're not 100% right, Emily, though you're not 100% wrong, it is inappropriate to try to artificially end the tempest of a tantrum by saying, hey, let's turn on the TV.

Or, hey, let me get you five more cereal bars.

Or, hey,

there never has to be another bath again.

Like, that tantrum has to happen and you have to be there for it.

You have to soak it up or let it pass over you, but you have to be there for it.

In the same way, you have to be there for your kids' emotions when they're going, hearing bad news now, and let them know that you are there, even if it's really ultimately their job to work through those feelings.

You have to let them know that you're there, that you're not abandoning them to their feelings.

You don't carry around a quiver full of bad news, I hope and trust.

I mean, none of us do.

I mean, first of all, it's all bad news.

It's all bad news.

You can't give us all the bad news all at once because please, like, this world needs to dole out the bad news a little bit, a little bit slower so we can just keep up with it.

But also, when there's bad news that has to be conveyed, you know that you have to do it.

There's no reason to save that bad news unless they're already going through something and there's no reason to give them this worse news along the way.

So, Emily, I'm sorry that I cannot rule you either 100% right or 100%

wrong.

You're a little of both, as we always are in

this world.

I will say, Dan, your system was good,

but it is good no longer.

You have to approach these things with nuance, not graphs, sorry to say.

And parenting of teenagers is a lot more challenging this way than parenting young kids.

And you got to put the graph away.

Enjoy your babies.

They will soon very quickly stop talking to you altogether.

And you're not going to miss it.

You're not going to miss those monologues, but you'll be sad in the silence.

So, you know,

enjoy it now.

And also make sure that they understand that you're listening to them.

This is the sound of a gabble.

Judge John Hodgman rules, that is all.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Dan, how do you feel?

Yeah, well,

I feel all kinds of ways about this decision.

I think it's a wise decision.

I'm going to

abide by the decision, but I'm still trying to work out how to,

you know, there's time, when I'm spending time with the kids, there's times when there's no bad news.

There's nothing unpleasant.

It's all pleasantness and it's all joy and love and everything.

And then other times when hopefully it's as much love as possible, but then there's like unpleasant things.

And,

you know, in the concert ticket Hebrew School example, like, I'm trying to think about, like, okay, so we talk about the, which is what we ended up doing, but we had to schedule another time to talk about Hebrew school.

And, you know, every time we say we want to talk to the kids about something,

he says, what am I in trouble?

So

I don't quite know how that's going to work still, but I'm going to work on it.

How are you feeling, Emily?

I'm feeling pretty confident.

I feel like,

you know, It wasn't an absolute triumph, but I think,

you know, I, of course, listen to my children.

I think I have a good, healthy balance of blocking them out and listening.

I've also really bastard looking like I'm listening, but not actually listening.

So that's pretty good.

The older kid already doesn't really talk to us anyway.

So,

you know, but I think I'll help Dan out and we'll figure this out together as we always do.

how to move on to this next phase of parenting before we're empty nesters, which, you know, isn't really that far around the corner, scarily enough.

You know, it happens overnight.

Well, Emily and Dan, thanks for joining us on Judge John Hodgman.

Thank you for having us.

It was a real pleasure.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Another Judge John Hodgman case is in the books.

In a moment, we'll have Swift Justice.

Our thanks first to Twitter user at Jack underscore Matthews for naming this week's episode Bad News Airs.

If you want to name a future episode, follow us on Twitter.

John is at Hodgman.

I am at Jesse Thorne.

While you're there, you can also hashtag your JudgeJohn Hodgman tweets, hashtag JJ Ho to converse about what happened in this episode.

You can also chat on the Maximum Fun subreddit at maximumfun.reddit.com.

If you want to see a picture of a dog in a bathtub

and a weird graph,

we will post them on our Instagram account at instagram.com slash judgejohnhodgman, as well as on the episode page for this episode at maximumfun.org.

Our producer is Jennifer Marmer and our editor is Valerie Moffat.

Now Swift Justice, where we answer small disputes with quick judgment, Twitter user at Mango Squash asks, My wife uses her Apple Watch Find My Phone feature the moment she wants her phone and it isn't in her hand.

I want her to look for her phone for a minute before pinging because the noise drives me nuts.

Who's right?

Who's wrong?

I'll tell you what, at Mango Squash, why don't you find her phone?

Why don't you look for her phone for a minute if you think it's so easy to find?

That'll just say next time she's like, I'm going to find my phone.

Say, let me look around for it.

If you can't find it, guess what?

Bring, bring, bring.

Meanwhile, Jesse, before we close out, just a little bit of housekeeping.

I heard I had quite a few letters from people regarding our dispute on the docket about whether it is appropriate to sing happy birthday after blowing out the candles.

A husband and wife were in a dispute over this.

The husband said that it was traditional in his family to bring out the cake with the candles in total silence, and the happy birthday person would blow out the candles, and then everyone would sing.

And he claimed that it was a Philadelphia Jewish thing.

We had a huge number of listeners write in, too many to name by name, but thank you all for writing in.

But Keith wrote in from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania saying, I am from a Jewish family from the Philadelphia area, and we always blow the candles out first and then sing happy birthday.

This is confirmation.

It just makes sense that way.

The room goes dark and quiet.

The cake is brought in with the shining candles.

The birthday person closes their eyes.

The anticipation grows.

They make their wish, and then everyone bursts out into song and celebration.

But, Keith says, I should note that no one I've ever known does it this way.

My family's originally from Brooklyn.

My wife is not Jewish, but from the same Philly suburb as me, hates this.

And so we have divided our two daughters' birthdays in half.

I get my way for one.

She gets her way for the other.

Our girls, no one has bothered to ask what they prefer.

Perfect parenting.

There was a lot of mix.

There were a lot of families that said they had never done this.

There was a lot who'd had.

There were a lot of people from Detroit who said this happened, that they would wait.

And instead of a cake, it's a square pizza.

That's right.

And, you know, a couple of people theorize that it is more celebratory this way.

and I guess that that's true.

You are less likely to sing happy birthday as a kind of funereal dirge if you wait until the candles are blown out.

If you're bringing that birthday cake out, it automatically feels like you're walking a casket down an aisle.

Do it both ways is what I say.

A little bit more housekeeping.

I did ask people if they knew of other pieces of culture that were inspired by Hamlet other than the Lion King.

A couple of listeners, Wendy and Benja, both wrote in to say that apparently the first season of Sons of Anarchy is very Hamlety.

But I was very remiss not to remember myself until a listener reminded me that, of course, the great movie Strange Brew, starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug McKenzie, is entirely based on Hamlet.

I'm double remiss not to have even noted the name of this listener.

I think that they contacted me over Twitter.

So if you're hearing this now, will you write me at maximumfund.org slash jjho, right in the submission form.

Tell me me your name so I can acknowledge you.

We're still looking for your songs about or mentioning airships.

They can be dirigibles, Zeppelins, blimps, and even balloons for our big battle of the dirigible songs.

John, how many Luft balloons can be involved?

Is there an upper limit or?

I mean, the absolute upper limit is 100, but really we'd prefer 99.

Yeah,

we only have room for two characters.

It's like...

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, no, I wish we could go to triple digits, but we can number top limit is 99.

Send in your balloon songs and your blimp songs, your zeppelin songs, even if they just mention them.

Just no airplanes, right?

No airfoil travel.

And of course, we are putting together another juvenile justice docket.

So kids, if you want to take your parents to court, send me a letter.

Parents, if you want to take your kids to court, let's do it.

And Jesse, are we eager to hear all cases?

Absolutely.

Any case you've got, hit us with it, maximumfund.org slash JJHO.

Big or small, we judge them all, or at least we judge whether they're worth judging.

So don't self-censor.

Send it in.

Send it in to us.

We'll figure it out.

Yeah.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Maximumfun.org slash JJ Ho.

If you've always wanted to be on the show, this is your shot.

If you're not sure if you're good enough to be on the show, don't worry about it.

Send it to us.

We'll figure it out.

You're good enough just the way you are.

Oh, by the way,

a lot of listeners wrote in to say the Lion King was a shameless ripoff of Kimba the White Lion, a Japanese anime.

This is something that's been going around on the internet for a while, and I'm going to get more letters,

I don't think you're correct.

Wow.

Yeah.

Just dropping that at the end, huh?

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

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