Contempt of Carport

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

This week, Contempt of Carport.

Gillie brings the case against her husband, Steve.

Gilly believes the neighborhood they live in is in the suburbs.

Steve disagrees.

Who's right?

Who's wrong?

Only one man can decide.

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

My husband, Pat, has a theory about watering our newly seeded lawn.

The water has to trinkle from heaven and fall like tender little raindrops.

Otherwise, the lawn won't grow properly.

Bailiff Jesse Thorne, swear them in.

Gilly, Steve, please rise and raise your right hands.

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

So help you, God, or whatever?

I do.

I do.

Do you swear to abide by Judge John Hodgman's ruling despite the fact that his home is neither urban nor suburban but rather subaquatic

I do Judge Hodgman now wait a minute I would say that my submarine in the Gowanus Canal it's it's pretty cosmopolitan it's pretty urban

and is awfully comfy it's all mid-century modern you know John just because your submarine is cosmopolitan and urbane doesn't make it urban yeah well your neighbors are narwhals.

Yes, that's right.

The Gowanus Canal is full of narwhals because they're whales and therefore they do not need oxygenated water in order to live.

Otherwise, all creatures under the sea die in the Gowanus Canal because there's no, they can't, it doesn't oxygenate properly, Jesse.

Did you know that?

That's the problem.

Oh.

That's why it smells so bad.

There's not appropriate tidal influx and outflux to get oxygen into that stagnant, grody hell stream.

Anyway, the submarine was cheap.

James Cameron just called you one day and said, have I got a deal for you?

Yeah, I got it.

Well, you know, I got my Google alerts set for cheap submarines in a 25-mile radius.

Gilly and Steve, you may be seated for an immediate summary judgment in one of yours' favors.

Can either of you name a piece of culture that I quoted directly from, did not paraphrase, did not change a word, as as I entered this fake internet courtroom.

Gilly, you can go first.

I'll take a guess and say it was from an episode of House Hunters where they were giving gardening preferences while looking for a house in the suburbs.

Gilly, is your guess House Hunters or House Hunters International?

Definitely House Hunters Regular.

I see.

All right.

The lesser househunters.

I will make a note of that in the guest book.

Now, Steve, it falls to you.

What What is your guess?

Is it House Hunters International by any chance?

It is not.

It's some sort of dystopia described by Malvina Reynolds.

Some sort of dystopia described by Malvina Reynolds.

What an alarming combination of vagueness and specificity.

What an intriguingly show-off-y guess.

I don't know who Malvina Reynolds is.

Who is that person?

She sang the song Little Boxes for Tiki-Tacky.

Right.

Can you sing it for me?

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes full of ticky tacky.

Good job.

You know what?

Beautiful.

You get a lot of credit for just going ahead with that.

I feel like I'm Mary Louise Parker and I'm living weeds.

Oh, right.

Was that the theme song for the TV show Weeds as well?

Yeah, I believe it was.

I liked, Steve, how you started that out to the tune of Silver Bells, the Christmas Carol.

Little boxes, little boxes full of holiday cheer, and the streets are lined with ticky-tacky.

That is an interesting and apt guess because, of course, that song is about suburbia, and it is not veiled in its contempt for life in a tract home.

But all guesses are wrong.

Steve, before I reveal the answer, before we started the recording, the engineer there in Colorado Public Radio did a very common microphone test by asking you both what you had for breakfast.

And you said something that

I wanted to hear again because I missed it.

What did you say?

I said for breakfast, I had

a mug full of oatmeal

and I use one packet of oatmeal and I take it over to the Keurig machine and I hit the four ounce button there and I get the perfect consistency of oatmeal.

That's guys with systems, ladies and gentlemen.

One of our favorite things on the podcast is that guys tend to have a need to come up with new systems to get things perfect.

Like, for example, making your wife water the lawn by

holding the sprayer above her head so that the lawn is tricked into thinking that they are tender little drops from heaven, which is what I quoted as we came into the courtroom.

And I was quoting from Bill Owens' great book of photographs, Suburbia.

And Suburbia, I don't know if you have this book, Jesse, but I need to get you a copy.

And everyone should put their hands on a copy.

But in 1968, David Owens is a photographer in Northern California and found that a lot of the countryside there was being built upon, that suburbs, this was the boom.

This was like the height of the boom of building suburban communities.

And he started taking photographs of the people who were moving into these homes and who had made their lives in suburbia.

And the book was a huge cultural moment because there had not been really a documentation of suburbia.

If you read the quotes on the back from like the New York Times and all those East Coast elitist newspapers like the Boston Globe, you know, they point it out like, you know, it's loving and scathing, rouses pity, contempt, laughter, and self-recognition because the book was really taken to be an indictment of suburbia.

But in fact, when you look at the photos, he turns a very loving lens upon the many different kinds kinds of people who are making a new life for themselves in suburbia.

And he quotes them, and these little elliptical quotes about their lives, some of which are really funny, some of which are quite moving, and some of which confirm that in heteronormative married couples, a guy's tendency to form systems, to think that he knows better, and to come up with new systems for doing things, stretches back at least to 1968.

We have evidence here in this book of this poor woman who's being made to hold this hose in a ridiculous manner because her husband has a theory.

There's also a photograph of a son complaining about his dad

because his dad makes him climb up in the trees as fall approaches and pick off all the leaves so they can rake them all off at once instead of having to do it more than once.

Incredible photo of it.

Steve is nodding like he understands the logic behind picking all of the leaves off the tree at once.

It's a tremendous book, and whoever wins this case, I will get you a copy.

Make sure that you guys give me an address for your suburban or maybe not suburban home in Denver, Colorado.

Isn't that where you guys live?

It is.

Right.

And your contention, Gilly, is what?

That you live in the suburbs or no?

Correct.

I believe we live in the suburbs, and Steve believes that we live in the city.

Okay.

And what do you do there in Denver?

I work for the city and county of Denver.

I'm a property manager and airline affairs manager for Denver International Airport.

Okay, I'm still here.

I'm just speechless.

Do you know how terrified I am of that airport, don't you?

I do.

To clarify for our listeners who do not know about my obsession, and by the way, it is not my solo obsession, with the Denver International Airport.

Some years ago, the airport that was close to Denver was closed so they could build a new airport, which they built it, how many miles outside of town, would you say, Gilly?

About 20.

About 20 miles in the middle of an enormous patch of gated off land.

It's like this weird castle in the middle of a barren field.

And there are a lot of conspiracy theories about this airport because of where it's located, how much land was appropriated for it that was not used, the length of construction, the incredibly terrifying statue of a blue horse that spits fire in front of it.

There's an incredibly weird dedication marker in the airport that is inscribed with the square and compass of the Freemasons, which are an international fraternal order that some people ascribe a lot of weird conspiracy theories to.

And then also it's dedicated by the New World Airport Commission, which is not only overtones of New World Order, which a lot of conspiracy theorists worry about, but the Commission doesn't seem to exist.

There's no record of it ever existing.

There's a lot of mysterious stuff going on.

So are you here?

Are you a member of the secret world government that's growing aliens in the basement or sub-basement of this airport?

I can't confirm or deny anything.

I do work for the non-shadow government, but it is a very big building with a lot of offices where a shadow government could be operating.

Let me ask you this.

Are you working for the federal government?

No.

No, I work for the city government.

Okay, so you're still being paid as of this recording.

That's correct.

I'm glad to hear that.

All right.

So you work at the airport.

You're a property manager.

And Steve, what do you do?

I'm a paramedic for Denver Health Hospital in Denver, and we cover the city and county of Denver.

So you have some familiarity with the city of Denver?

Yes.

All right.

So you're saying that one of you works for the city and and county of Denver and the other works for the city and county of Denver.

Different emphasis, yes.

That is exactly what we say.

You contend that you do not live in the suburbs.

What is the neighborhood in which you live, Steve?

We live in a neighborhood called University Hills.

Hmm.

And is that within the city limits of Denver?

It is indeed.

So why would that not be the city of Denver?

Why would that be a suburb, Killy?

So, when I think of the suburbs, our neighborhood is very much historically suburban.

It was built in the 1950s to accommodate the World War II veterans who were coming home who needed cheap housing to raise their families.

Those box homes that you see that were built in the 50s and built en masse in the suburbs.

And that is our neighborhood right now.

The developer built four models of the same house, repeating in tracks.

One of those models was called the suburban.

Okay.

So it really has that historically suburban feel.

And even though it's expanded and has changed in the last 50, 60 years, people have come in and torn down some of the old houses and built up more of the McMansion builder special, very large houses, but it still maintains that outside of the city kind of feel.

So, you know, Steve, Steve, I mean, what Gilly describes is essentially the definition of the American post-war suburb.

Development after the war when GIs were coming home, people had more disposable income, more people were entering the middle class, they had cars so they could get out of the central business areas of the city, even if there wasn't mass transit, and entrepreneurs building cookie-cutter homes all in a row.

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, Steve.

So why do you think you don't live in the suburbs?

Well, I agree that when the neighborhood was built, it was a suburb.

Much like many of the neighborhoods within a couple of miles of

downtown were at one point a suburb.

But as

the urban area has sprawled out, it has become part of the city.

How so?

Like, what?

You got a Chipotle there now?

We do.

Is that a marker of a city?

I don't know about that.

When I think of markers of the city, I think of being able to walk places.

I think of a little bit less homogeneous kind of areas.

And I do have that picture when the neighborhood was built.

It was this kind of like little boxes full of ticky-tacky sort of homogenous area.

But since then, in the 50 years since the neighborhood was built, there's been enough.

Oh, well, so give me some examples of the kind of the kind of crazy downtown nightlife that's been coming up in University Hills.

Where's the main drag?

Were you going to go to that cool coffee house and that bar with the guy with the mustache and everything else?

So we have within about a 10-minute walk, we have two grocery stores.

We have a movie theater that's been there for a long time called the Cheartiste.

There are a number of different kinds of restaurants, most of them sort of chain restaurants.

We can walk down to the bike path, walk over to the light rail station, and

everything that we need is within a 10-minute walk.

Well, it sounds like a lovely place to live.

Is there a university nearby?

Are there hills?

Yeah.

Or are those both invented?

There's a university, maybe less of the hills, depending on your definition.

I don't know.

Is Colorado famous for hills of any kind?

I think Colorado is famous for being entirely flat, right?

Yeah, that's my understanding.

I don't know, Steve.

It just seems to me like you don't want to live in a suburb, and therefore you're going to say that the suburb that you live in is not a suburb.

Well,

I think that the definition of suburb and the definition of city might not necessarily be mutually exclusive nor really even on

the same idea.

Is there another part of town where you'd like to live?

No.

No.

Well, no.

No.

Well,

what?

There are many parts of Denver that are great places to live.

Including University Hills, of course.

Yes.

Some of the best parts may be a little out of our budget,

I think is what he's getting at.

I understand.

You're getting paid Illuminati dollars.

You can't spend those everywhere.

People will ask questions.

Can't have that.

Yeah, exactly so.

And then you have to, you know, disappear them and there's a whole thing and windowless vans have to come and take them and you have to feed them to the giant scary blue horse statue.

It's a big deal.

I get it.

But if money were no object, Steve,

where would you live?

In Denver, if not the world?

Oh.

Because

I'm going to make this interesting.

Whoever wins this case gets a copy of Suburbia by Bill Owens.

And you know what I'm putting inside there?

What?

A check for $5 million.

Yes.

If it's me, I will send you an Illuminati thank you card.

Oh, don't think I haven't gotten them.

Tell those guys I've moved.

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.

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Let them know Jesse and John sent you.

Court is back in session.

Let's return to the courtroom for more justice.

I had this Instagram contest on my Instagram, John Hodgman.

And I was putting thinking putty, which is like silly putty but fancy, on top of things and letting it sort of melt over them and then making people guess on Instagram what they were, like a lemon and half a lime or whatever.

And I put Thinking Putty over this novelty Star Wars tiki mug that I got of an obscure character called Salacious Crumb, who was Job of the Hutt's little weird cackling pet.

And I said,

who was that?

That was Steve.

Steve, I find in Steve's favor, this is the sound of a gamble.

Well, that was what I was not expecting, Steve.

How much salacious crumb has gotten into the minds of people, at least who subscribed to my Instagram.

I imagine it's a self-selected population of nerds, so I should have known.

Salacious Crumb also reminds us of our cat.

Well, wait a minute.

Where is the evidence of your cat that looks like salacious crumb?

I didn't see that in the evidence that you submitted.

I didn't like him, yeah.

What's your cat's name, Crumb?

Mabel.

Screech.

What, you changed the name of the cat just then?

She has a nickname, and it is Screech.

All right, that's another episode of Judge John Hodgman for sure.

Let's try to stay on this one.

But the point I'm trying to say is,

in this other long digression that I'm doing, and I apologize, you guys, but I said, whoever can guess this, I'll pay cash mo value, you know, internet you, $100.

I thought I was in the clear.

Five people guessed.

Now, I only promised it to one.

But then the second person I felt bad for, because she's a follower of my Instagram.

And I said, well, why don't I send you the mug?

And

she said, great.

And then I left Maine, and I left the mug behind.

I felt bad.

I'm like, I got to get her this mug.

Maybe I'll just buy one online and send it to her directly.

And you know what?

They don't make them anymore.

And now that salacious crumb tiki mug is worth $450.

So now I'm in a real bind, whether I honor my agreement or not, because I don't want to give away $450 worth of salacious crumb tiki mug.

Sorry, Moscow, I was burning on Instagram.

I'll make up my mind soon.

But if I gave you $5 million, Steve, this is the point.

If I gave you $5 million,

where would you want to live?

Oh, man.

You know, Denver really is a great place to live.

Sure.

Not only do we both have family here, but

it's a great place where there's a city that has everything you need, but mountains nearby, and you don't have to drive for more than an hour to be all by yourself.

That may be what I order you to do.

If you don't win, go be by yourself yourself someplace.

Yeah, no, I get it.

I get a Chamber of Commerce.

You're going to stay in Denver.

What part of Denver are you going to move to?

And why?

I would love to live in

the Montclair or Park Hill neighborhoods that are older than our current neighborhood, full of sturdy brick houses that kind of give you that quiet neighborhood feel, but are still very much right there in the city.

So

are the the brick houses attached to one another?

Are they row homes or are they freestanding?

They're kind of like craftsman Victorian style homes.

Oh, okay.

All right.

All right.

I got you.

And they're closer to...

What's downtown in Denver?

What's that called?

Downtown Denver, I think.

The central business district is really the heart of downtown.

CBD.

Does anyone live there or is it just like a dead zone that people only go to during the daytime to work on their jobs?

They have high-rise condo buildings, buildings, but mostly

where people go to work.

Right.

Oh, high-rise condos, though.

I mean, that's the city, right?

That's city living.

I'm not sure I would want to live in the CBD, but Montclair sounds pretty nice.

What do you think of that, Gilly?

Where would you live if I gave you guys $5 million and it were your choice?

In Denver or in the world.

Oh, all right.

See, this is interesting now.

Somebody just got an email from James Cameron.

Because Steve immediately started defending Denver, but you're ready to jump off these mountains and go someplace else.

Well, I'll let you answer both questions for yourself, in Denver or the world.

Sure.

Denver is great.

And I agree with Steve and his choice of neighborhoods, Montclair or Park Hill.

Cranmer Park is another one that's very nice and very similar to how Steve described the other neighborhoods.

But in the whole world, I would definitely move to Toronto, where $5 million could buy you half a studio apartment.

Are you from Toronto?

I am.

Okay, phew.

I have never heard someone wants to move to Toronto.

I've often thought about moving to that hotel in the skydome.

For a while, John Toronto Blue Jays star Roberto Alomar lived in that hotel.

I believe at the time it might have been a hard rock hotel, something like that.

But there was a hotel in the skydome.

And as a 12-year-old, I could not imagine anything better in the world than to be a superstar baseball player who lives in the baseball stadium.

That's pretty awesome.

And I'm going to get letters from people in Toronto.

I love you, Torontonians.

I'm not saying your city isn't great.

It is great.

You gave us the gift of Ennis Esmer, but I also,

I just had never heard someone go, if I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Toronto.

But now that I know it's your home and you love it, wonderful.

And Toronto is a city.

That's a city, right, Killy?

Oh, very much so.

Yeah.

So

let's focus on Denver, because guess what?

I'm not giving either of you $5 million.

And Toronto shall forever be but a dream for you, Gilly.

I apologize.

Now that we've identified that, what was the neighborhood again?

Montclair?

Oh, sure, Montclair.

Montclair.

Would you say that that is substantively different?

less, more suburban than University Hills?

You know, it's funny.

If we exist in a city-suburb gray area, then Montclair to me also exists in a similar gray area in the sense that it's very much more historic to Denver.

It was part of the original city boundaries, I believe, which is really neat.

And the architecture is much less suburban, but it has similar, like things are walkable, but not super local.

It's not super dense.

So even though it's houses, it's older.

Yes.

Okay.

I would say compared to our neighborhood, it is more city,

but not aggressively so.

Right.

Okay, gotcha.

In my mind.

Yeah.

Because there are really only a few real cities in the world, and I'm sorry, Denver isn't one of them.

I'm more talking about New York City.

That's a city.

Toronto, obviously.

Paris, London.

San Diego.

Buenos Aires, San Diego.

Oxford, Mississippi.

Columbus, Ohio.

That's it.

Those are the cities.

Hong Kong, Shanghai.

If you are interested, listener, in all of the different neighborhoods of Denver, Gilly submitted some evidence, including a wonderful map of Denver neighborhoods, which is available for my perusal right here in front of me and for your later perusal or perusal right now if you're not driving over at the Judge John Hodgman show page and also at the Judge John Hodgman Instagram account.

And here I am looking at a map and I see that the CBD has been outlined and I see University Hills has been outlined.

And this is to show how far away you are from CBD.

Is that right, Gilly?

Yeah.

And where is Montclair in this map?

A couple miles north of University Hills.

So a couple miles closer to the CBD.

Yeah.

Got it.

It is a little more east of University Hills, but yes.

And Gilly, you mentioned the architecture of the homes in your neighborhood, and you sent some photos.

So here I'm looking at one, two, three, four, five, six photos.

And I would say the ones on the left are some pretty traditional, boxy, suburban-looking homes.

They kind of look like,

you know, when you're playing Sim City and you've only put down low-density roads, you know what I mean?

Like a Sims starter home.

Or these other homes on the right-hand side,

these really do look like once your Sims gets some money.

What's going on here?

Tell me, Gilly.

Yeah, so these are all houses that are currently on the market in our neighborhood.

So I just took pictures from the realtor website.

And on the left are those box homes, the original ones to the neighborhood.

Our house looks very similar to those.

And then on the right are the homes that people come in and they will tear down those box homes and then build these very, very large homes on those lots that look very trendy, very suburban to me.

And then they sell them for quite a bit more money.

Aaron Powell, yeah, I think we can go ahead and stipulate that the examples you've given in the right-hand column, the column of newer homes built on the lots of the older homes are characterized by their profound distastefulness.

Yeah, they're trendy.

These are ugly, ugly homes.

They're trendy in the sense that the trend is severely downward.

I wasn't being choosy about the homes that I picked.

I picked very randomly on the website.

So I wasn't trying to make them super ugly.

But yes, that is how they look.

Yeah, I mean, I'm stunned that none of these are what the architectural style they call Italianate,

which is to say, supposed to look like,

I guess, like a Tuscan villa in 1994.

No, this one on the top right is like they, it's, it, it looks like an AI fell down the stairs and

got about 15 different home models mashed up in its brain and tried to imagine what a human would want to live in because it's like it features

differently slanting roofs and one, two, three, four different front-facing surfaces.

There seems to be wood, there seems to be brick, there seems to be stucco, and then there seems to be the sort of gray siding.

It is a real mishmash.

It really looks like a computer-designed home.

That's actually from a pretty well-developed architectural school, John.

Pointy garbage?

Well, I'm glad you guys live in one of these other homes, these little cute boxes.

They're adorable.

And they are in their own way historic, right?

Definitely.

And it's as much space as we need.

And it's really neat to kind of see how people have put their mark on the house in the 60 years since it's been built.

It's been expanded a little.

People have torn down some walls, painted some different things.

It's really cool to see how everyone has made it their home while they've lived there.

And then you also send in an appraisal report from your official home appraisal when you purchase the property, and you say the appraiser noted this neighborhood as suburban as opposed to urban.

Correct.

Including the zoning code, SU, which is Denver code for suburban.

Steve, this is a preponderance of evidence.

And it's really hard.

I mean, there is a zoning code here from Denver, your favorite city in the world.

Why is it so important to you that this not be a suburb?

You know,

when I think of the suburbs, I think of sort of like

beige, homogeneous people storage

with a lot of chain restaurants and yeah, like where you live.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And chain, chain, well, no.

We also have non-chain restaurants.

No, I think of polo shirts and cable TV and man caves and just kind of

homogeny.

And I've always, I've always lived in this city of Denver, and I've always liked how

even for maybe not, like you say, a real city, it might be there is a little bit of everything.

Denver's a real city.

I was just being silly.

I mean, I think we were being serious when we said it's no San Diego.

It's definitely no San Diego.

I also work for Denver Health, the hospital that was a part of the city for 20 years ago.

I've been there for 10 years, and I really enjoy the work that I do there, and I really enjoy

kind of representing the city in that way.

And

it feels wrong

to be associated with the suburbs or the not city.

Well, you're within the city limits, but your idea of repping for the city is going on a podcast saying, my neighborhood is a suburban hellhole full of fake people in polo shirts.

No offense to anybody from the suburbs.

Well, wait a minute.

Is that too late?

Are those,

but you claim that this is not a suburb, so may I presume that

your neighbors are not what you fear the suburbs contain?

That they're nice people who don't just wear polo shirts or they have different sorts of lives?

Yeah, Yeah, I think

the neighbors that are very close to us are very

different and there's enough variety in the neighborhood that it doesn't feel like

the beige suburbs.

Is there diversity in your neighborhood?

Economic, cultural, ethnic, racial?

Yes.

All right.

And is there a neighborhood in the city of Denver, within the city borders, that you would point at, Steve, and say, no, that is a suburb.

That is everything I fear and loathe.

That is exactly what I, as a 32-year-old man, am terrified of becoming.

And therefore, I must claim that I live in a city and not in a suburb.

Yes, there's a neighborhood called Green Valley Ranch

on the driveway.

Of course there is.

That is a suburb, right?

You don't even have to say another word.

Green Valley Ranch.

No, no, it's ranch.

it's on the way to the airport.

And

there is a corner, the 56th and Piccadilly.

You stand on the corner.

And on one corner is beige, homogeneous cookie-cutter housing.

And on the other corner is, I think that's actually the Kansas border.

It's just a field.

I actually have a major development going up there, the self-parody at Green Valley Ranch.

Maybe you've heard of it?

Have you talked to any of your neighbors about their thoughts on this subject, Steve?

Like, do people agree with you or disagree with you?

I have not.

Some of Gilly's coworkers live in the neighborhood.

I can't believe I'm about to say this.

We actually asked our next-door neighbor.

Oh, yes.

And she sided with Steve.

She did.

That's very interesting for a number of reasons.

All right.

If I were to find in your favor, Gilly, what would you have me order?

That Steve stop talking about this?

He would absolutely have to admit that we live in the suburbs.

And then he would also have to, we like to grill in our backyard two very suburban things over the summer.

And I would have him purchase a apron that says something suburban akin to kiss the cook, just to emphasize how suburban we are.

You like being suburban, Kelly.

I am neither here nor there.

I love our house and I love our neighborhood, so I'm okay with whatever it is.

Do you think Steve doesn't love the neighborhood?

I think he likes it.

I think maybe he has higher aspirations in the future for a more historical neighborhood like the one that he grew up in, Park Hill.

But I think he likes it.

Is Park Hill in Denver as well?

It is, yes.

Steve, what would you have me order if I were to find in your favor?

Well, certainly, I would ask that Gillie admit to everybody that she knows that she lives in the city.

Secondly, I would like for us to have no activities outside of the city of Denver for one month and spend no money outside of the city for one month.

And thirdly, some sort of city-oriented tattoo.

For me or for you?

For you.

Well, that's not on the table.

This court does not

order people to modify their bodies.

You can modify your own body.

What would your dream Denver tattoo be?

In my capacity as bailiff, I hereby order that you both get the following city-oriented tattoo, a San Diego-style burrito with French fries sticking out of it.

You know, one day, a couple Halloweens ago, Gilly dressed up as Blucifer,

the horse out there at DIA.

That's right.

I forgot that that terrifying, fire-breathing, blue, huge stallion sculpture is called Blucifer.

How is it possible that we don't have a picture of that in our evidence?

Blucifer doesn't allow photographs.

So tattoo of Blucifer.

Well, we'll see if I ruled in that way.

All right, it's time for me to go into my

very downtown submarine chambers here beneath the Gowanus Canal, and I'll be back in a moment with my ruling.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Gilly, how are you feeling about your chances?

I'm not sure.

I felt pretty good when I came in, and now I really don't know.

It seems as gray as ever.

Steve, how are you feeling?

I think I'm looking uphill.

How far do the two of you live from Sweet Action Ice Cream?

We would have to get into the car to drive there, but it's about four or five miles.

It's close to my work.

I was going to say three miles.

Pretty close.

You know, my co-host Jordan and I I once went and bought a thousand ice cream cones for strangers there.

I bet you guys weren't there.

No, but I wish we were.

I find in favor of none of you.

We'll see what the judge has to say about all this when we come back in just a second.

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.

It goes rotten.

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

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

Let's learn everything.

So let's do a quick progress check.

Have we learned about quantum physics?

Yes, episode 59.

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

Yes, we have.

Same episode, actually.

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

Episode 64.

So how close are we to learning everything?

Bad news.

We still haven't learned everything yet.

Oh, we're ruined.

No, no, no.

It's good news as well.

There is still a lot to learn.

Woo!

I'm Dr.

Ella Hubber.

I'm regular Tom Lum.

I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.

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

Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

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

You may be seated.

So, you know, Gilly said that this is a gray area, and it really is.

I mean, this is

Denver is one of those cities that has spread out.

You know, Los Angeles is a world-class city, but it is really a collection of suburbs, right?

Downtown Los Angeles, the thing that looks like a city, is also the place people are least likely to go to, unless they're going to go listen to a podcast at the theater at the Ace Hotel or whatever.

And this is the quality of the city of Denver itself.

You are within the city limits.

You are not outside of the city.

You commute to work, which is a classic element of the suburbs, but at the same time, you have discovered and developed a walking distance life that is more common to the non-suburbs, to the city.

It is obviously a historic suburb in the classic definition of suburb.

And yet it has grown and changed with the time, both with the incursion of these horrible McMansions.

and the erasure of the what is now historic quality of the neighborhood.

It's not quite the same fancy fancy pants, older history of the arts and crafts neighborhood that Steve would prefer to move into.

But you are living in a historic home that is representative of a certain kind of architecture that we would call suburban.

But on the other hand, Gillie went over to her neighbor's house to ask her a question in person.

And that's not a thing that happens in the suburbs.

Normally, at least in our idea of what the suburbs are, the suburbs are exactly what Steve fears.

Homogeneous, tiny fortresses where no one leaves their home.

They all wear polo shirts for some reason and gradually age into sameness and death.

It is why people fear the suburbs.

But here's the thing.

Everything's a gray area.

Everything's a gray area.

This is what is driving Steve so crazy.

Because Steve is living amidst the markers, the clear markers of suburban life.

You look at these photos, folks, on our Instagram page, Judge John Hodgman, or on the show page at maximumfun.org, you're going to be like, yeah, these are the suburbs.

These are suburban houses.

He doesn't want to live in a suburb because he has seen Green Valley Ranch.

He has seen that place that is neither green nor a valley nor a ranch.

And he detests the phoniness with an almost Holden Caulfield-like way.

Steve, you're a snob.

You're a snob about the suburbs because not even the suburbs are the suburbs that you imagine them to be.

Not all of them, anyway.

And this book, Suburbia, as I said when I came into the courtroom,

what is the revelation is that while almost everyone in this book is white, for sure, they were the dominant members of this suburban middle class.

They're not exclusively white.

You have a more diverse neighborhood, it sounds like, than exists in suburbia.

But the diversity of point of view and way of life that is represented in this one community is astonishing.

On the one hand, you have dads telling their kids to pull the leaves off the trees and the most typical suburban family sitting around a TV, everything that would probably make you scream inside, Steve.

But then you have like young couples who are like, we just love having sex.

It's incredible.

And in every one, there are families that have found a place where they can build a home and a life and a world, particularly in 1968, where their moms and dads and families maybe never owned a thing in their lives.

And what this book revealed to me as I was reviewing it before the show was that the myth of the suburbs of being this place of no imagination, no fun,

no young people hugging and kissing, no cool people, no life, is a myth that is started by us snobs in the big cities of New York City and Toronto and stuff.

It is a sniffy way.

As David Halberstam points out in his introduction to the book, the people who turn their noses up at the suburbs are, the cultural critics usually are coming from generations of middle and upper middle class life.

These people, this was the entrance to the middle class.

The suburbs are noble.

and honorable, despite a lot of problems that they also cause.

But there's nothing intrinsically wrong with them.

You like your neighborhood.

You like your neighborhood so much that you don't want to call it a suburb.

The gray area that you're also facing, of course, is that you're getting older and you don't, you're 32.

30s is a hard transition.

You don't want to become that dad who wears a kiss the cook apron because it's such a cliche.

No one wants to be a cliche.

They want to be interesting for the rest of their lives.

That's why the idea of identical houses makes certain people really, really nervous because they're just like, I don't want to be like everyone else.

I need to, I don't want to become a cliche the way my parents did.

But guess what?

Your parents weren't clichés.

I'm not saying anything about your parents, but

the people who live in suburbs aren't cliches.

They're real human beings too.

So look, I can't help but say this is a suburb.

Historically, it's a suburb.

By looks, it's a suburb.

But I am glad to say that suburbs now as they were then.

are not the horror shows that you imagine them to be.

That one house is terrifying.

But culturally, the suburbs that you hate is more in your mind than it is in the world that you live in.

So I have to find, as you might have guessed, in Gilly's favor here.

And I would ask you only to embrace the grayness of the fact you live in a suburb, in a traditional suburban home, and appreciate the history, not just the arts and crafts history that everyone wants to get their hands on over there in Montclair.

but the history of what the suburbs were and what they allowed people to do, what they allowed generations of people to do, which was to create a life for themselves back when a middle class really existed and there wasn't the same kind of wealth inequality that we have today.

Enjoy your neighborhood.

Your neighborhood is University Hills.

And no way am I going to make you wear a Kiss the Cook apron because that would be mean.

But I do find in Gilly's favor,

you live in a suburb that is changing.

and a neighborhood that you like, and that should be good enough.

And I'm going to send you guys this book, but I'm not sending anyone any more tiki mugs because they're too valuable.

This is the sound of a gavel.

Judge Sean Hodgman rules that is all.

Please rise as Judge Sean Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Steve, how do you feel?

Well,

he made some very good points.

I think

the fact that it is a gray area is very much appreciated, and I'm glad it's a gray area and not a beige area.

When you get the tattoo, don't write San Diego burrito underneath it.

Because in San Diego, they don't call it a San Diego burrito.

They call it a California burrito because San Diego is the greatest city in California.

Okay.

Gilly, how do you feel?

I am kind of surprised, actually.

I thought for sure, because it's within the city limits, that the judge would rule that it was in the city and that because of that gray area.

But I am surprised and delighted, and I will keep his advice to Steve in mind for myself as well.

Gilly, since you won the case, if you want, you can just get carneos out of fries instead of the burrito.

It's your choice.

Thank you both for joining us on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Hi, I am Lori Kilmartin, and I'm Jackie Cashin.

Together, we host a podcast called The Jackie and Lori Show.

We're both stand-up comics.

We recently met each other because women weren't allowed to work together on the road or in gigs for a long, long time.

And so our friendship has been unfolding on this podcast for a couple of years.

Jackie constantly works the road.

I write for Conan, and then I work the road in between.

We do a lot of stand-up comedy, and so we celebrate stand-up and we also bitch about it.

We keep it to an hour.

We don't have any guests.

We somehow find enough to talk about every single week.

So find us.

You can subscribe to the Jackie and Laurie Show at maximumfun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, Goodbye.

Another Judge John Hodgman case is in the books.

We've got Swift Justice coming up in just a second.

But first, our thanks to Jane Hartung for naming this week's episode Contempt of Carport.

If you'd like to name a future episode, be sure to like Judge John Hodgman on Facebook.

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

Hashtag your Judge John Hodgman tweets, hashtag JJ Ho.

And check out the Max Fun subreddit to discuss this week's episode.

We're on Instagram at JudgeJohnHodgman.

You can see the evidence from this week's case, including those distasteful houses there.

This week's episode, recorded by Joe Pestovich at Colorado Public Radio, our producer, the ever-capable Ms.

Jennifer Marmer.

Now, Swift Justice.

Us answering your small disputes with quick judgment.

Kristen asks, Do you put lettuce on hot submarine sandwiches like a Philly cheesesteak?

I say no.

Husband says yes.

Husband is

not totally incorrect this time.

Wow.

Yeah, he's not totally correct either.

You can put lettuce on a Philly cheesesteak, but when you do it, two things happen.

One,

people in Philadelphia are going to write articles about what a monster you are.

And two, it will become a cheesesteak hoagie.

Even though people in Philadelphia are going to write articles for alternative weeklies about what a monster you are, based on my internet research just now about this to confirm my own memory.

If you order a cheesesteak hoagie, that is a Philly cheesesteak with lettuce, tomato, onion, or just lettuce or whatever, there is still a thing called a cheesesteak hoagie, and it is a real sandwich.

And it is its own kind of thing.

It is not exactly a Philly cheesesteak.

So in this sense, Kristen is correct.

But a cheesesteak hoagie is a real, legitimate sandwich.

I've had one, and it's delightful.

No sandwich should become a totem.

Put whatever you want on a thing.

Obviously, a cheese steak is a sandwich because you can cut it in half.

You know, John, as a native San Franciscan, I don't have strong feelings about hoagies, submarine sandwiches, and the like, but I do have a corollary strong feeling.

Yes.

And that is that you can put lettuce in a burrito, but you will achieve two things.

Number one,

you will make it a hot salad,

which, as we know, is only of interest to Nick Weiger from the Doughboys.

And number two, you will stop being friends with me.

I would never do such a thing to you.

Never, ever, ever.

Thank you.

So there you have it.

For once, the husband is correct.

That's about it for this week's episode.

Submit your cases at maximumfund.org/slash JJ HO or email Hodgman at maximumfund.org.

No case is too small.

We will see you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

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