Here's the Story

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

We're in chambers this week clearing the docket.

And with me, as always, is a man in his home office wearing a promotional t-shirt that he got for free.

Yes.

Judge John Hodgman.

You're correct.

I'm wearing my

Wilco Solid Sound Festival 2017 tea.

Solid Sound Festival happens every other year.

It was not scheduled for this year.

It's their off year, and boy, I bet they're glad.

Jesse Thorne, you're wearing a delightful plaid cap.

Yeah.

Japanese Americana, John.

Oh, yeah, all right.

I like it.

What's that mean?

It's like a multi-panel madras by the Japanese brand Beams Plus.

All right, very cool.

Beams Plus.

Big Japanese Americana maker.

They make American-style clothing in Japan.

Also, your beard and mustache are coming in at different rates.

Like

you shave, you had this magnificent.

People who saw you at any of our live shows will know that for the past several years, you've been sporting

a beautiful Rasputini beard, full resputin.

Yeah.

And you shaved it off concurrent with

quarantine.

I shaved it all.

I shaved all headhair.

All headhair was removed by me.

Not fully

depilated.

Oh, no, not my eyebrows.

No.

And it looked bad.

No.

So my wife didn't love me anymore.

Right.

So I switched to number one half on my head and number four on my beard, but I had a long conversation with my wife, the only person besides you who sees me with no mask on and my children.

And producer Jennifer Marmor, who is watching us silently from above.

As we sleep.

Yes.

She had us put nani cams on.

That's weird.

That's where she sent me that nest cam.

Yeah, she said it's for producing, and I honestly don't know what that is.

Yeah.

And so I switched to number four on the beard and number one half on the head, but I had a conversation with my wife.

Should I grow the mustache back out or keep it trim?

And she she voted for grow it back out.

And it's, you know, sort of her mustache.

A brave woman.

Yeah, it makes smooching more complicated, but

she likes the look.

I thought maybe you just had incredibly strong mustache hair that was coming out much faster.

Well, I do do a mustache hair-based circus act.

But you shaved, you shaved all of the headhair minus your eyebrows off for a reason, a fancy, a whim,

easier self-care during quarantine?

What?

Anxiety.

Anxiety.

I just wanted to take an action.

Yeah, I understand.

Just wanted to do something that was within my control.

I wanted to control something.

Yeah, that's how I feel when I put on pants.

Yeah.

Well, let me tell you something.

I'm glad you didn't shave off those brows because people don't know.

You're a radio personality.

You got some of the best brows

in the game of life.

That's true.

I have powerful brows.

Some people do know that.

People who've seen, for example, history channels, Christmas Through the Decades.

Right?

They only shot you.

On which I appeared.

They only shot you from the eyelids up.

They're like,

we just need the brows.

We don't need anything else.

I recorded in between Mr.

Belding and one of the younger Brady's.

Oh, boy, Jesse.

Look, a lot of listeners probably are close enough to my age anyway that they know what the Brady bunch is.

Yeah.

But you know, I mean, if you listened to Tom Sharpling in the past two years, you know about Cameo, right?

Yeah, sure.

Right?

That's where celebrities charge you $35 to $300 to say happy birthday.

That's sort of the thing that Judge John Hodgman invented when I offered to thank people on Instagram for donating at the leadership squad level or above and mispronouncing their names.

Cameo saw that and said, we can get anyone to do that.

Yeah, specifically Eric Estrada.

Yeah.

And

Eric Estrada.

Sadly, Alan Ruck is not on cameo.

I'm very upset about that.

Lots of fun people are on it.

Pee Wee Herman, Paul Rubens, is on it.

And he does.

Really?

Yeah, and he gives great cameo.

Like, he really leans in.

He's a great, gracious guy.

He's a very nice man.

Yeah.

But I'll say, like,

you know,

our daughter just went off to college, where she is being safely held prisoner a in a cleansed dorm area.

So far, so good, fingers crossed.

But we spent the summer at her

frankly insistence watching the TV show Love Island UK,

which, like, it was a really good bonding experience for me and our daughter and our son.

Like, we all, and especially during this time of anxiety and worry and uncertainty, to learn from from Love Island Okay,

basically the watchwords of my life is what it is.

Is what it is, isn't it?

Is what it is.

But our daughter bought for our son's birthday a birthday greeting from Nas from Love Island UK most recent season, and he gave so much of himself.

Not, for example, Nasla.

Ilmatic, the greatest rap album I've ever recorded.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Just different Nas, different Nas.

Very sweet guy.

Kind of the jokester of the villa.

Love Island UKs will know what I'm talking about.

And then when our daughter went to college, I went a little cameo cuckoo.

And I just started because

I couldn't send her anything, couldn't send her any care packages yet.

So I just started sending her and my son cameos from various reality show stars.

And it's so endearing.

And then I sent one to Nas, and Nas,

not Ilmatic Nas.

I'm talking about Laval and Marquette Nas.

And I wrote to Nas, I said, you, you were so wonderful to answer our daughter's request to wish our son a happy birthday.

And now our daughter is off to college.

Would you say something to her?

And Nas is like,

I'm not going to do an accent because it's terrible.

But he's like, hello, Hajmina.

Welcome to college.

Good for you.

I feel I'm a Hajman friend of the family now.

I'm so excited.

I just want to write to him every week.

But there's a reason I brought this up, which is that

Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady, is on cameo.

Also, an incredibly generous, giving guy.

I had an interaction with him when I worked at a video store in college, which you can read about in my book Medallion Status.

So I feel like a close connection to him.

But if you check, I really advise people to check out some of the sample cameos that

he's got up there,

his anniversary and birthday wishes, because there's one that takes a hard right turn that you do not see coming, and he handles it so graciously.

So there you go.

We were talking about, this is all about the Brady Bunch, right?

This is our new podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here's the story is the name of it.

Let's do our actual podcast.

Okay, how about some justice for Sam?

I moved from Florida to Minnesota about three years ago and was surprised to see pizza sliced into squares rather than the traditional triangular cuts.

Triangle cuts have many advantages.

Each slice is is the same size and shape as the others.

Each slice can be held by the crust, so your hands don't get messy.

A pizza cut into squares winds up having pieces with no crust to hold and weird-shaped pieces that are very tiny around the edges.

Is this an issue of people like what they like?

Even so, I'd like you to issue a ruling that triangle cut pizza is better.

Just look at the emoji for pizza.

It's a triangle slice.

Well,

trial by emoji, perhaps?

Sam, even though, even if I were to rule people like what they like, Sam wants me to rule that he's correct, correct?

All right.

Well, Jesse, I have a question for you.

I think this might be a retro.

Have I eaten in Minnesota and was I disappointed?

Yes and yes.

Oh, how dare you?

How dare you?

Minnesota has incredible food.

The last time I was in Minnesota, actually, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy from Riff Tracks told me, who are Minnesotans, or they're Minnesota residents,

the longtime Minnesota residents, told me about this

kind of

like fish fry type situation where you go to like a VFW hall and you pay like $25 and then you just get huge piles of food brought to you.

This, I don't, I'm not a big fish eater, but I think there were other options.

This I'm in for, but when I went to a

public radio event in Minnesota and they were very excited to serve us a hot dish,

I did not like hot dish.

Hot dish is a catch-all term for casserole.

Yeah.

And I used, you know,

I love Minnesota.

I love Kevin Murphy.

I've stayed in Kevin Murphy's house.

You know how Brussels sprouts come on a big stalk?

Yeah.

He roasted a whole stalk of Brussels sprouts.

and with a maple glaze.

And I don't like sweets, but it was great.

That's really good.

People, look,

one of the things I miss about travel is not being able to go to Minneapolis, St.

Paul and see my friends Kevin and Bill and eat out.

There's an incredible food scene in Minneapolis and St.

Paul.

You know what I'm saying?

And then I'm excited to get back because I just remembered those cheeseburgers where the cheese is inside the burger, and that's really fun.

There you go.

And then, you know, there's a huge international population in Minneapolis and

to a certain degree, St.

Paul.

And then outside traditional Minnesota hot dish, like

it's just, it's just these people go through long winters and they think about and enjoy food a lot and a lot of it.

I love it.

But you grew up in San Francisco.

So here's my question for pizza.

Yeah.

Where was your favorite place to get pizza and how many burritos were on it?

You know, I've been obsessing over a half-remembered pizzeria in something like Burlingame, California, called Pizza and Pipes that was a pipe organ themed pizza restaurant.

Now, I want to be clear, Pizza and Pipes does,

when you put it in the Bay Area milieu, it seems like it could be.

It's got to be

an entire restaurant with like a 500-pipe pipe organ that went around the entire place.

And

I couldn't remember if this was real and Tony Macaulay had really had his 10th birthday party there.

But I mentioned it on Jordan Jesse Go, and apparently there was a really intense pipe organ themed pizzeria restaurant fad in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s

that then faded away almost as quickly.

And I think there is still like one pizza in pipes in Sacramento or something.

But pizza in pipes was a national phenomenon and along with its imitators.

Whoa.

I've just Googled an article from a website I've never heard of, so I hope that they are not white nationalists.

Tastecooking.com.

Probably not.

Probably not.

Yeah, probably not.

Called The Life and Death of Pizza and Pipes from 2018.

I'm going to read it.

But in any case.

That said, for me, it was Straw Hat Pizza on 24th Street.

But as you correctly identified, while I like pizza as much as the next person, and it was also a favorite childhood food, just like anybody else, as a native of the Mission District, it was a distant third to burritos and pupoozas on my like comfort food family dinner

list.

I miss those.

San Francisco burritos, San Francisco Sketch Fest.

Yeah.

But your pizza was cut into triangles, probably, right?

Of course.

Yeah.

Of course.

Yeah.

There are very few places where it's cut into squares, I think.

Detroit has a weird square pizza, right?

But he's talking about, Sam is talking about a round pizza cut into squares.

Yeah.

And actually, you you know, what I learned, people remember we've made reference before to the Sirius Eats Guide to Regional Pizza by Adam Kuban,

which lists how there are all different ways of cutting pizza, both in the United States and outside of the United States.

And I learned that square cut round pizza is a thing

in more than one place, including Minnesota.

So here's what I have to say to Sam.

Look, Sam, you got out of Florida.

Congratulations.

Don't complain.

You moved from one intense, weather-inspired, eccentricity state to another.

And you need to adapt to something called Minnesota nice,

which means it's no longer appropriate for you to get mad and scream shirtless on a street corner about your pizza rights being violated, but instead be nice and accept that there are genuine regional differences.

And as you know from the Series Heats Guide to Regional Pizza, square cut pizza is one of them.

So in the Midwest, I've learned Jesse Thorne.

You're going to see square cut or quote-unquote tavern cut pizza, tavern cut, because this started because it was sold in bars as a side snack with your malord or whatever, rather than as a meal itself.

It was like an appetizer.

And the squares go further.

And sometimes

they don't have a round pizza pan.

They have a square pizza pan in some of these taverns.

So it makes sense.

I also think that the square-cut pizza,

and this is just a guess on my part, but I think it's a cultural difference.

It's a deference to the Midwestern hot dish casserole tradition.

They are used to square things.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Now, are triangles.

All their foods come from dishes.

All their foods come from dishes.

Are triangles more efficient?

Yes.

Each triangle offers the full range of the pizza taste spectrum experience, from the molten central cheese lake to the twilight ring of sauce to the arid crust beach, ideally with a big lava bubble on it.

But this is only efficient if you are eating and sharing your pizza with a party divisible

or with factors of, I don't remember factors or divisors.

Look, eight slices in a pie, right, Jesse?

Right.

So like four people,

two people with some leftovers, or you know, if you're having a really nice night of it, one person.

But you try splitting those eight triangles into 16, and you're getting into gross pizza strips, which are no good.

So, here's what I'm going to say.

Square cut has its place.

It's for sharing.

Pieces are smaller, more to go around.

They cater to individual preference.

There are center cut people.

There are edge people.

And let's face it, you go beyond two toppings.

Triangle cut is a flopping mess.

You know, that's going to be flopping over your hand.

Flip, flap, flop.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, is it a triangle is better for walking around if you're a Fletner.

If you're walking around the streets of Fort Lauderdale or whatever, New York City or whatever.

One of those Fort Lauderdale Flintners.

You fold your slice and you gallivant about with it and you eat.

But in Minnesota.

Legendary Evander Berry Wall, the dandy dude.

Say it slowly so people can Google it.

Evander Berry Wall.

Google it.

You do want to Google that.

Google Google that, yeah.

But now you're in Minnesota, Sam.

You're not folding your slice while walking down the sidewalk.

You're sitting in a bar or a rec room, hiding from the cold, silently putting square after square of double cheese, extra everything in your mouth.

Maybe making jokes with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett if you're lucky.

But even if you're not, I'm jealous of you.

So no, I don't rule in your favor, Sam.

And I urge you and everyone to remember to check out the Serious Eats Guide to Regional Pizza.

Don't, you know, that's hard to Google.

I'm not going to say it slow.

Instead, I made a very handy bit.ly link for it.

Bit.ly/slash Sam is wrong.

Check it out.

All small letters, all one word.

Here's something from Charlotte.

My wife, Julie, does not say please when ordering coffee.

When greeted by the barista, rather than saying, hello, I would like a nice latte, please, she will politely say, I'll have an iced latte.

She argues the baristas are often short on time and appreciate the efficiency.

She believes a sincere thank you when paying and grabbing the drink is all that's needed.

I argue that niceties like hello and please are all that our shattered society has left to stand between us and Mad Max style anarchy.

She's a former barista herself, so she's probably correct, but I am still seeking an order for her to use hello and please when ordering coffee.

Thank you for your consideration.

I await your righteous judgment.

Well, first of all, Charlotte, I'm going to say that I don't think the dissolution of please and thank you is what's going to lead to an important Joe-style autocracy in this country.

I think that will probably have more to do with the Electoral College and low voter turnout.

So please vote, everybody.

Jesse, you remember when we were in DC and that person said that they weren't going to vote because they knew they were in a safe district for their vote?

And I let them off the hook?

Yeah.

I regret it.

Back on the hook.

Oh, a return to the hook.

Get back on the hook.

Look, I know the Electoral College is weird, but like, I believe that voting matters up and down.

The ballot and the popular vote matters.

Jesse, I'm putting you back on the hook too for dog poop.

I'm sorry.

I just got too many letters about you dumping dog poop and neighbors' things.

Yeah.

Nobody cares in my neighborhood.

All right.

Oh, boy.

Guess what?

I'm going to send you all the letters I get after that comment.

I'm only accepting letters from Mount Washington, Los Angeles.

When you go to a coffee shop,

what do you order and do you say please?

I order a ham and cheese croissant

because I don't drink coffee.

I really only go into a coffee shop when I'm traveling and need breakfast.

And that's the only substantial food they sell there usually.

But yes, of course I say please.

I'm a please.

My mama raised me right, John.

Yeah.

So you're saying that Charlotte's wife, Julie, was not raised properly?

I mean, I'm not saying that she wasn't raised properly.

I'm saying that I was.

Yeah.

I say please and thank you in an airport Burger King.

Of course.

Well, I'll tell you something, Jesse.

I'll be very candid with you.

I don't always.

I mean, I always say thank you.

But I get where

Julie's coming from.

And that I often find myself ordering something with an inflection of graciousness that I think everyone understands pleases implied, you know, where I'm not

being a jerk about it.

Like,

I'd like a latte.

And then I have to stop and remind myself, it costs nothing to say please.

Truly, truly it costs nothing to say please.

And especially during a time when

if we are trying to convey care for other people, especially the servers who have to work to give us this coffee, we are wearing masks.

A lot of the facial expression and body language and tone of voice is muffled or hidden.

And I think that it's probably best to err on the side of please.

I therefore order Julie, say please.

But I am not going to order Julie to say hello.

Because that...

as our friends in Scientology would say, opens an entirely different calm cycle that needs to be closed.

Like, yeah, hello, hi.

And then you go to, how are you?

I don't even want to answer that anymore.

We all know.

No good.

None of us is.

There is a place where I feel you can cut to the chase and say, the person says, What can I get for you?

And you say, I would like an iced latte, please, or whatever it is.

And then, get out.

Oh, but definitely don't do this.

If you ever catch yourself or someone you know doing, yeah, let me get a, you know, yeah, let me get it.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, let me get a, let me get a ham and cheese.

Yeah, let me get a ham and cheese croissant and pour some coffee in it, please.

I mean, even when you've said please, you've already started off wrong.

Don't do yeah, let me get a

let's take a quick break.

More items on the docket coming up in just a minute on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Hello, I'm your Judge John Hodgman.

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

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Oh.

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Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're clearing the docket this week, and we have a letter from Cameron.

He says, well, I've got some opinions about Alan Ruck.

That character

is called.

Oh.

Anyway.

Oh, boy.

What if this was Alan Ruck writing in as Cameron?

Oh, gosh, that would be wonderful.

You know, I have one of my best friends from college, Matt Dobbs,

really

favors.

Alan Ruck.

He really looks like Alan Ruck.

He's a handsome man, and so is Matt Dobbs.

And you throw a Detroit Red Wings jersey on Matt Dobbs, and he is the spitting image.

And we have never been able to figure out how we can take advantage of this.

I know exactly.

I know how.

I know how.

I know how, Jesse.

Cameo.

Do you know how many celebrity impersonators are on cameo?

No, many?

Yeah, well, a few.

More than a few.

What does it cost?

20 bucks?

You set your own price.

Why am I advertising for cameo?

i don't know i want to advertise for cameo i recommend the album rigor mortise

great cameo album word up all right but

cameo the celebrity greeting service you set your own price and there are lots of people who are like pretending to be robert de niro right and and they'll be like hey you looking at me

i don't see anyone else here

alan ruck isn't on cameo but matt dobbs could could producer jennifer Marmer, question.

Do we have money in the budget for a Red Wings jersey?

That's two thumbs up.

I'm going to send it to Matt Dobbs.

He can set up a cameo account.

We don't want any of the money.

Matt, just do Cameron from fake Cameron.

That'll be your cameo account.

And just set a reasonable price and we'll see what happens.

All right.

Sorry, what does the real Cameron want to say?

We have a neighbor with whom my wife and I are casual acquaintances.

The other day, this neighbor was wearing a very substantial neck brace.

I had a casual chat with her as I was walking in the neighborhood.

Later that day, I told my wife about it.

She was shocked when I said I hadn't asked about the neck brace.

She said it was rude to ignore it, as it may seem as if I don't care about our neighbor's health.

Of course, I was curious.

I thought it would be rude to ask.

Our neighbor is almost certainly tired of telling her tale of woe to every Tom Dicken mail carrier who passes her by.

Besides, it could be a very serious medical condition that she doesn't want to talk about.

Is it rude to ask or rude not to ask?

Now, Jesse, as I mentioned before, we're Zooming.

Yeah.

We don't get any money from Zoom for saying this.

We're video chatting.

But the point is, I can see.

And so I can see that aside from your hat and your mustache, you're also wearing sunglasses.

And the rest of your head is all bandaged up in white bandages.

I hope it's not rude to ask.

Are you drinking that invisibility potion again?

Yeah, of course.

All right, fair.

Why wouldn't I be?

Now I know this is weird.

That's my whole thing.

Now, I know this is weird because we're talking about invisibility potion.

Right.

But does my asking you feel uncomfortable or does it make you feel seen?

Well, given that it's a potion, it makes me feel seen.

I think if I had some kind of invisibility condition, it might make me feel uncomfortable.

I'm going to, you got to settle in for a little, a little tale from my 20s.

Oh, great.

Bang, ding, da, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

So no one told you.

Hodgman lived throughout the 90s, and he worked at a literary agency helping real agents.

And then one day, his boss had a prostate surgery.

And he was asked to deliver his mail to his home because the surgery was over.

And I said, I'll be there for you because you pay my paycheck.

I'll be there for you.

There's no direct deposit yet.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

It probably was direct deposit, but I didn't know how to do it.

Point is, brought my mail over to Al Zuckerman's home.

He had just gotten back from the hospital.

He was doing great.

Al Zuckerman, the owner of Writer's House,

incredible life, incredible guy, gave me my start.

And

an incredibly healthy guy.

He walked home from the hospital.

He had the surgery.

It was no big deal.

He picked up some soup and sandwiches and after I delivered the mail he invited me to lunch and it's like lunch with the boss.

He wasn't even my direct boss.

He was the big boss, the big, big boss.

And of course I said yes.

And we sit down to lunch and I'm eating my soup

and Al goes into incredible detail about his whole prostate surgery story.

from start to finish.

And I'm sitting there at the table going like, why are you telling me this?

I feel very uncomfortable about it.

And later at, I think, the office holiday party that year, I mentioned this to a colleague who, like Al Zuckerman, grew up in New York.

And I was like, I felt weird listening to this whole story about his body.

And this colleague said, oh, well, where are you from again?

And I said,

New England.

And he said, well, there you go.

Now, Jesse, I don't know if you know about New England.

This is a region of the United States known for two things, primarily, the Hartford Whalers

and a crippling emotional reticence.

We do not talk about our bodies.

We do not talk about each other's bodies.

Like my own mother-in-law, who's also from Brookline, Massachusetts, when her best friend was diagnosed with cancer, she went to visit her.

And my wife asked her mother,

How is your friend feeling?

And my mother-in-law said, Oh, I didn't ask.

It would be unseemly to ask.

Right.

I realized that, oh, okay, there are real cultural differences to how people

talk about their bodies and what comfort they feel about talking about their bodies.

And there's a great

This is American Life episode that touches on this from 2013 called The Seven Things You're Not Supposed to Talk About.

I'm not going to make you Google it.

I set up a bit.ly for it.

It's bit.ly slash Sam is still wrong.

You can check that out.

Great.

But I thought about

how lonely my mother-in-law's friend must have been in that moment where they just talked around

her cancer.

Right.

And obviously, Cameron's neighbor isn't his best friend, but it doesn't have to be that.

I also thought about how when I fell down into a door jam this summer in a laughing and coughing fit after a Matt Berry joke and I had to get nine stitches in my forehead.

How when my wife and I later visited her uncle and aunt a week or so later, they made zero mention of the obvious gash in my forehead.

And I'm sure they, they're New Englanders too.

Well, they're from Maryland, but now they live in Maine.

But like, I'm sure they felt they were being polite.

But I realized I felt strange about it.

Like,

just give me a chance to explain myself.

Please don't just casually accept that I'm a person who is constantly bashing his head apart.

A thing happened.

So, Cameron, you could be right that your neighbor doesn't want to tell the whole story about her neck brace again.

about how she was watching the toast of London or what we do in the shadows and fell down laughing at Matt Berry, which is probably what happened.

But you don't know how she feels about it.

I think

that's better to express some simple human concern for another person in a gentle way, just like, oh, gosh, I hope you're okay.

And they'll say, yeah, I'm fine, don't worry about it.

Or here comes a long story like John Hodgman just told without anybody asking him to.

Let them take the lead, at least let them feel cared for.

Jesse, thank you for letting me feel cared for, for telling that story about how I went to see Al Zuckerman.

Now I feel bad.

I can see you on the video conference, and I didn't say anything about that neck brace.

By the way, there's an incredible coda to that Al Zuckerman story, but I'm going to save it for after the break.

That's called a tease.

Let's take a quick break when we come back.

A case about drinkwear.

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Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're clearing the docket.

Ding, ding, and a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, wong.

One of the things I forgot to tell about that story of having lunch at Alice Zuckerman's house one-on-one with the big boss of the literary agency after his prostate cancer, we were eating soup, was that

he had the two little dogs that were running around the table.

And at the end of this uncomfortable lunch, very gracious, but uncomfortable on my part,

out of nowhere, he just says, you know, we're coming to the end of lunch.

And I don't know where he says, well, you're not going to lick the bowl?

And I...

Zuckerman.

I said,

no, I think I'm fine, Al.

Thanks.

I think I've I've had enough.

And he goes, oh no, I was talking to the dog.

And he put the, I had not noticed he would put

his soup bowl down on the floor.

And the dog was like, not even I want the soup.

You know how to lick the bowl?

Here's something from Jonathan.

My roommate has a small room and a lot of stuff, an unreasonable.

amount of stuff.

My girlfriend and I offered to help her clean and spent many nights cleaning.

We reclaimed a lot of the room, but there's still too much stuff to fit in the space with so many items left on the floor.

We concluded the culprit is a large, uncomfortable futon.

It takes up an unreasonable percentage of a small room.

We suggested my roommate remove the futon in the interest of reclaiming usable space.

She refused, as she keeps it for guests to sleep over a few times a year.

We offered the sleep sofa in the living room or an air mattress, but she insisted on a space in her room where a guest could crash with minimal effort.

I understand the desire to accommodate guests, but I feel she's doing so to her own detriment.

Well, obviously, guests are kind of hypothetical at this time.

But hypothetically speaking, Jesse Thorne, let me run a little quiz by you.

Let me get your.

This isn't a quiz with correct answers.

It's just a poll.

Okay.

A couple of different options.

You are going to visit.

what's your Cameron look-like, friend?

Matt Dobbs.

Matt Dobbs.

He lives in Sunnyvale.

In Sunnyvale.

And he doesn't, and you're going to go stay with him, and this is something you want to do.

Oh, of course.

See Matt and Jesus and their beautiful children?

Of course.

I'd love to.

Maybe go to a swim meet.

Right.

And

he doesn't have a guest room

because his guest room is now given over.

That's the pure Cameron cameo room.

That's where he does his Cameron cameos all the time.

That's his studio.

Right.

That's the moneymaker.

Yeah.

So here are your options.

This is an A-B, a couple of different A-B comparisons.

Would you prefer to sleep on a sleeper sofa with a spring mattress

at his house or an air mattress on the floor?

A

sleeper sofa.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I want the springs.

Yeah.

Air mattresses are better than sleeping on the floor, but they never work the way that you you want them to.

Really?

That's my experience.

No, look, this is, I mean, there's not a correct answer.

I find sleeper sofas with a spring mattress in them to be profoundly uncomfortable.

You're talking about like the one in your office that I often sleep on when I come to visit you?

Well, that one has a memory foam top.

That's a different story.

That's true.

That's true, it does.

And you're welcome anytime.

Thank you.

I find that to be very comfortable.

But the old, the old, for a while in the 90s, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,

my then-girlfriend, now wife, our only bed was a sleeper sofa with a spring mattress, and it was not, it was NG, no good.

All right.

Here we go.

Next question.

Sleeper sofa with a foam,

a memory foam top

or futon?

I mean,

obviously there's a broad range of futons.

Obviously,

one can acclimate to the futon lifestyle and get a lot of pleasure or comfort out of sleeping on a futon if one is the kind of person who stores a bicycle on their wall.

But I'm going to say as a former futon owner,

that there are few worse sleeping situations than a futon.

Now, to be clear,

I think this has come up before on the podcast.

We're talking specifically about

like post-collegiate American futons.

Yeah, the kind that you get at a store called Futon Outlet.

Right.

The futon sleeping is in

other countries, in Japan specifically, is

a different experience.

Yeah.

All right.

Final question.

Futon

or bare floor with no blanket?

I mean, I'll probably go with the futon.

All right.

I was setting you up for bare floor, no blanket, because I hate futons.

I'm not a heel.

I'm a babyface.

You are a babyface.

Wrestling terms.

Who's your favorite wrestler?

Andre the Giant.

Yeah.

Oh, that comic you sent.

So good.

Oh, yep.

Shout out to friend of Mac's fun, Box Brown, who wrote a wonderful

comic book biography of Andre the Giant.

Yeah, absolutely.

Check it out.

My son and I both enjoyed it a lot.

Yeah.

Andre the Giant's amazing.

Well, look, I think you and I, and Andre the Giant probably, all agree

with Jonathan

that futon is NG, no good, no good, not really good sleeping arrangement.

And I would argue, and you might disagree, Jesse, but I would argue that,

you know, there have been improvements in air mattress technology.

And I would argue an air mattress on the floor for a guest in your own room is not only probably going to be more comfortable than a futon,

but easily collapsible and storable, more than a futon anyway.

But then again, Jonathan, this isn't your room.

It's your roommate's room.

Ah, there it is.

What do you care?

What do you care if she's going to trip over a futon every time she needs to get up up and go to the bathroom and brush her teeth?

That's none of your biz.

She's already allowed you to,

quote, help, unquote, slash intrude upon her life choices already, to a point.

But now that point has been reached.

Now,

it seems to me like you're okay with her having guests come by, if and when it's safe to do so.

And if that's true, then how and where they sleep is not your concern.

I mean, frankly, a futon is so uncomfortable, it's probably an automatic regulator on the number of house guests she's having.

So you should be grateful.

Yeah, the level of passive aggression involved in cleaning up someone else's room on their behalf is so extraordinary to me.

Much less enlisting someone in the project and doing it over multiple nights.

Yeah, I mean,

I think that that deserves a little sit-down in the common area with a conch shell

to just really talk about how that made Jonathan's roommate feel.

Just a check-in to me, like,

to make sure that Jonathan's roommate is cool with what happened or maybe felt infantilized and intruded upon.

Can you pass me the conch real quick?

Yeah, here you go, Jesse.

Sucks to your Asmar, John Hodgman.

What the?

I can't respond.

I don't have to.

Kill the pig, slit her throat, spill her blood.

I want to say something, but I don't have it.

It's not my conk time.

So all I remember from reading Lord of the Flies in seventh grade is those two phrases.

Well, at least you read it.

Yeah.

How many books have I pretended to have read by simply watching half the movie?

Many, many, many, many.

Here's something from Veronica.

She says, I'm writing to you about a recurring dispute in my family over what to call drinkware.

When I visit my parents, I sometimes say to my mom, Would you please pass me my cup?

Or, I like these new cups.

Whenever I do this, she acts like she has no idea which object I'm referring to, then laughs at me for calling something a cup when she would call it either a mug or a glass.

What?

She says she has no idea where her daughters learn to call things cups instead of mugs or glasses.

She believes cup only refers to a plastic cup, like a kid's sippy cup or a disposable cup.

Can you please rule on whether it's appropriate to use cup as a catch-all term for mugs, glasses, teacups, and other drinkware?

Is my mom just being a weird mom and teasing us?

Could this be a generational difference or regionalism?

She's from the Midwest.

We grew up on the West Coast.

Are my sister and I just wrong?

Hmm.

I don't know whether it's a generational difference, but I wonder if it's a regionalism.

Jesse, you're from the West Coast, if I understand correctly.

That's true.

I was just reading your Wikipedia page.

Uh-huh.

I don't usually usually talk about that in public, so thank you for doing this.

No, I'm sorry if this is uncomfortable for you.

Sorry, but yeah,

you're from San Francisco.

You live in Los Angeles.

What is a cup?

I'm going to ask you: here we go, another fun poll.

Let me ask you about some cups.

Is a sippy cup a cup?

Yes, sure.

Yeah, okay.

Paper cup?

Is that a cup?

Yeah, sure.

Teacup?

Teacup?

Is that a cup?

Yeah, sure.

Coffee cup?

Cup or no?

I would say say only when modified by coffee.

And teacup is close to that.

Right, right.

Stanley cup?

Is that a cup?

Yeah, absolutely.

Is a mug a cup?

No.

A mug is a mug.

Is a hot dog?

That's why I would say, you could say,

I would accept coffee cup for a mug if there was coffee in it, but it would be a stretch.

Yeah, and I wouldn't call a mug a coffee cup.

I would call it, you know what I mean?

Like,

a coffee cup to me would be a.

Yeah.

Mugs are more for icy cold root beer.

Yeah.

Well, that would be a glass mug.

A frosted coffee cup.

Yeah, like from A ⁇ W.

Right.

Is a glass a cup?

Yeah.

What?

The thing about being a San Franciscan

is just an immensely democratic use of the English language because it is a city of immigrants both from abroad and elsewhere in the United States.

It always has been.

And I will accept almost any regionalism.

It's like

I have no dog in the

soda versus pop versus soda pop.

Of course not.

I'd accept any of those.

I have no...

I have no...

You could call it seltzer.

I don't care.

I mean, I would be disinclined to call it a Coke if it wasn't a Coke, which is something that they do

in and around Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Coke.

Yeah,

they'll call a frosty mug of A ⁇ W root beer a frosty cup of Coke.

Yeah, but like, besides that, I have pretty broad linguistic tastes.

I don't have a problem with almost anything being called a cup of cook.

I'm not going to.

Look, I came into this with a genuine question.

You're from the West Coast.

I'm from the East Coast.

I thought we were on the same page when you said a mug is not a cup.

I would be a cup of cup.

But a glass is a taste.

If you said to me, what's the difference between a cup and a glass?

I would say a glass is taller.

Whoa.

I don't even laugh.

But I would accept,

my own drinkware has some like 10-ounce shorter vessels and some, you know, 12, 14-ounce taller vessels.

And

I would accept pass me the cup for either of those.

And I would accept pass me the glass for either of those.

They are made of glass.

Not only did I look you up on Wikipedia, but I looked up cup on Wikipedia.

And

Wikipedia agrees with Veronica, and I guess you too technically.

Like, cup is a broad catch-all term into which all,

technically, all mugs, tumblers, steins, tankards, goblets, and even glasses may be tossed.

And then sniffed it.

But even Wikipedia is pretty plain.

If If it's transparent, it's called glass.

I would be very confused if someone.

But here you go.

I guess I was wrong about that.

To me, the apotheosis of cup would probably be what you described, which is the top of a Stanley thermos.

When you unscrew that and turn it up, it's short.

Right.

It's opaque.

And it doesn't have a handle on it.

Well, Stanley Thermos does have a handle.

I'm talking about the kind that doesn't have a handle.

I was talking about about Stanley Cup,

the number one prize in the sport of both hockey and extinct hockey.

Gotcha.

But either way, cups.

Well, the apotheosis of cup for me is what you slip into your trousers when you're playing the infield in baseball.

Also, not transparent, by the way.

Yeah.

Even though it could be.

It's being hidden by clothes.

To me, I think if it has a handle, I'm more likely to call it a mug.

And if it's made of glass, I'm more likely to

call it a glass.

But in between, most of those things are forms of cups.

Well, there you go.

I mean, I think that I feel the same way as Veronica's mother,

which is I am completely confused in a deep.

To the point where if she asked you for a cup,

you would just make one of those faces like, who, what, when, where, why?

Yeah, like I was doing on the Zoom just now.

I would be completely confused if you referred to any of my glassware as cups, Veronica.

But I must defer to my West Coastian friend Jesse Thorne.

Perhaps this is a reason.

Listen,

I can already hear you writing letters now trying to define what a cup is and what it isn't.

I don't.

That's a three-bean salad.

Oh, remember that?

Remember the three-bean salad?

I was just thinking about that.

Is it a soup, three-bean soup?

The vanilla chai latte?

Vanilla vanilla chai soy latte.

Chai soy latte.

Yeah, is it three bean soup?

Is it a three bean soup?

Yeah, that's pretty much the only one of those that I've ever found to be fun.

To quote Joe Rogan, think about it.

Yeah.

But I'm going to rule in Veronica's favor, or at least clarify that there does seem to be some support that there is a regional acceptance that glassware may too be cup, that transparent things may also have cupness.

Hey, if you're out there and in a region and have an opinion about the cupness of things,

don't write me.

Instead, start a thread on the maximum fun reddit.

That would be a fun thing to do.

There we can discover whether or not cup for glass is a real regionalism

and any other fun regionalisms that might be surrounding this issue that might come up.

But you don't need to write me with this one.

I got enough.

I want to hear your disputes.

I don't want to hear your theories.

Go to the maximum fun subreddit and I will be monitoring it and jump in from time to time.

Yeah.

I also recommend the subreddit, Ask Food Historians.

It's just fun.

Hey, Jesse,

do you know what our son and I did over the summer?

I don't.

Magnet fishing.

Oh, yeah.

Magnet fishing is the sport of royalty discovered by Jesse Thorne on a very important subreddit.

called what is it magnet fishing just i think it's magnetfishing.reddit.com yeah or whatever

and you just go, you get a high-powered magnet and attach it to a line and then drop it into a body of water and see what you pull up.

Yeah, you just swing it around a little bit in there.

We trolled Center Harbor and didn't come up with a lot.

We got stuck a few times on the old nails in the sunken schooner, which was cool.

Oh, that's fun.

And then I pulled up.

It's a part of a French pocket knife.

The blade guard of a French pocket knife that felt.

Well, that's nice.

It was exciting.

I mean, nothing amazing.

I know, but save Ray.

Le nif.

I don't know what the word for a knife is in French.

It's le

corie.

I don't know.

You know what?

Babel might be able to tell me.

I'm going to learn French and Babel.

I'll get back to you on that one.

Okay, great.

Well, justice is served.

The docket's clear.

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

Our producer is Jennifer Marmor.

You can follow us on Twitter at Jesse Thorne and at Hodgman.

We're on Instagram at JudgeJohnHodgman.

Make sure to hashtag your JudgeJohnHodgman tweets, hashtag J-J-H-O.

And check out the Max Fun subreddit.

That's at maximumfund.reddit.com to chat about this week's episode and to let us know whether you think cups are a certain kind of thing and where you live.

Right?

That's what we're looking for.

Yeah, that's it.

More or less.

Yeah.

More or less.

What do you call a cup?

What counts as a cup?

What counts as a cup?

What counts as a cup?

Hashtag what counts.

So, what are you, Nick Weiger?

That's right.

Submit your cases at maximumfund.org/slash JJHO or email hodgman at maximumfund.org.

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

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