2025.10.09: Doing It Dry

I knew that.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is morning somewhere for October 9th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there, ready to accept your award.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley Burns.

I would like to thank...

Do you know what awards I'm talking about today?

No, what awards we're talking about today.

Wait, hold on.

Hold on.

This one comes with a million-dollar check.

I'll just tell you that.

A million-dollar check, not Nobel then.

It is, yeah.

Nobel has that kind of money?

Yeah.

Well, they invented dynamite.

They should.

That's the company that invented dynamite.

Oh, that's right.

Big dynamite.

That's the big boom industry right there.

One of the Nobel Prize winners.

You say Nobel?

Nobel?

You say Nobel Prize?

I called the Nobel Prize.

Let me try to erase everything we've said out of my memory, and I'll just say it naturally.

I won the Nobel Prize.

Nobel.

Yeah, there's like Nobel.

Like there's no bell in it.

Right.

And how do you say you say Nobel?

You can have some bells and you can have Nobels.

Word has lost all meaning.

One of the Nobel Prize winners

didn't know they had won an award because they saw a call from Sweden and didn't answer it.

That's one of the most relatable things a Nobel Prize winner has ever done, in my opinion.

It seems that pops up quite a lot with the Nobel Prize, actually.

I heard there was another winner at some point who didn't realize because he was like off the grid backpacking for several weeks.

There was someone else who like tried to call the number back because they just like missed the call.

Like it happens a lot.

When you have like really brilliant people, they can be a little weird.

right that's just a thing their brain works in a slightly different way that is they have different priorities and some of them are probably like i don't even know how to pronounce nobel i'm not going to answer

right

according to the article that i read on ap news some people know it's coming.

Like they get a heads up.

Or maybe their innovation or contribution was more recent than some people.

Like the people who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year, some of their work dates back to 1989.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

I feel like that one's a long time coming.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's Trios share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks that dates back to 1989.

Nobel Prize for Physics also went to a group of people for advancements in quantum tunneling research.

And then the Nobel Prize for Medicine went for someone who did a study about why the immune system knows to attack disease and not our own system.

So all really cool stuff.

And Nobel Prize for Literature is going to be

awarded later today, I believe.

Yeah, announced on Thursday.

It was not that long ago.

I'm not even sure if we ended up talking about it on the podcast.

We talked about it to each other, but the Ig Nobel Prize, which is like the awards for dumb science.

Yeah, I love that.

Where like some guys won because they theorized,

everyone's trying to figure out why zebras have stripes.

And someone theorized that they help keep flies off.

So they painted some cows with stripes and then observed how many flies they got.

And they were like.

Yeah, they have less flies.

And so they're trying to figure out what is it about stripes that sets the like that confuses the flies and keeps them away, right?

Like very silly stuff like that.

And so, and they always, they do like really dumb stuff.

It's imagine like all the silly, dumb jokes that like your science teacher in school thinks are hilarious.

Like if the if the winners' speeches went on too long, they had some guy in a suit come up and just shout at them, I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored

to like make them end.

Like that's what they do instead of like playing them off with music.

They just come up and shout at them.

You ever see those enthusiastic science teacher videos where they do something and it's way bigger than what they expected?

And they're like, whoa.

Yeah.

Like they, you know, throw a chunk of sodium in water or something like that.

It is.

It explodes.

I like stuff like that, though, where people take the time to do it because sometimes it can completely change your perspective on something.

Like for most of my life, I wondered, why is a tiger,

they talk about having stripes to camouflage it.

It's bright orange.

And then, of course, finally, I saw somebody did a rendering of what a tiger looks like when you look through the eyes of its prey, which can't see like we can see can't see all the colors that we can see so orange doesn't matter and then you they show you a photo of the way like a gazelle sees it and you're like i can't see the tiger

that tiger's invisible completely invisible meanwhile you got birds over here seeing things in ultraviolet they're like man this scene is just this is embarrassing that that that tiger is right there what are you doing gazelle see but then science also kind of makes me mad along the same topic remember the people who said they discovered a new color but they need to blast your eyes with radiation in order for you to be able to see this color?

Blast your eyes with radiation.

Whatever it was.

They like did a thing to turn off some of the cones.

Like you can't see some colors.

Like you can't see green without having some active red cones or something like that.

And so they disabled the red cones and you could only see with the green cones or something.

You know, I'm paraphrasing here.

And so they saw like this brilliant like

super turquoise-like color that you can't describe because we don't have a color to describe it.

I always thought how crazy it would be to be alive at the point in time where they discovered.

I understand why they call it the new world, you know, when they discovered the western hemisphere, when the eastern hemisphere discovered the western hemisphere.

And they found stuff like potatoes and tomatoes, which were indigenous to the American continents.

And if you think about like Italy got tomatoes from America and they didn't get noodles or pasta until...

They went to China.

Marco Polo went to China.

What the hell did Italians eat before tomatoes and pasta?

Olives?

Just non-stop olives and cream, and that's it.

I mean, it would explain a lot about like why they're so passionate about like their olive trees and olive products is that they ate olives, maybe olives and bread.

What was the last fruit you remember?

Or like, not fruit.

It usually is a fruit though, because it's usually naturally occurring.

Last food, though, you remember learning about like, where did this come from?

Like, I didn't know about this.

I'm not talking about like red velvet or salted caramel.

I'm talking about like dragon fruit or durian or something like that.

Durian's a big one.

Durian's a big one because durian is the one that's really stinky, right?

It's really smelly, and yet someone decided, well, this smells like ass, but let's eat it.

And it turns out it's delicious.

Have you ever had it?

No, probably.

I don't know.

I don't think I've had it.

I've probably had, I've never like sat down and been like, let's dig into a durian.

But I would assume that durian has probably been in something that I've eaten at some point in my life.

From what I understand, it's like custard.

What?

Yeah, the consistency of custard.

That's what I'm saying about durian.

So there's a lot of steps along the way where you would hit eject.

Like the smell of it isn't it like a thorny as well?

Like the outside of it is completely thorny.

And then it's custard, like liquid when you get to the middle of it.

At every point in that process, I'm like, get me out of this.

I'm not, I'm not trying this.

There's some foods that I can absolutely see people

figuring out how to eat it, like being really determined.

Coconuts are one of those, right?

Like one of those falls on your head, you're going to want revenge, right?

You're like, I'm going to eat you.

And now you're going to be sorry.

And then it turns out it's delicious.

Coconut's a lot of work work too because the coconut doesn't look like the little thing we see in the grocery store it's a gigantic thing that you got to take the husk off of it to get to the impossible to open nut in the middle of it

so many steps drill into it for the delicious water inside there's a new thing happening in the eu and i want to put this on your radar because We get that with the EU, we get really good things like, hey, we all have to have USB-C now.

So now all the charging cables are unified, except that not really.

And then we get really, really dumb stuff.

Like the EU has just voted that you're not going to be allowed to call plant-based products by meat-like names.

Like you can't call a veggie burger a burger.

That's reserved for meat burgers.

You can't call it burger?

You're not going to be able to call it burger.

You can't call it a burger.

What part of a cow is the burger?

You're not going to be able to call non-meat products sausages or escalope.

What?

Escalope.

That's a French, I don't know, like a fillet or something like that.

But they, here we go.

EU lawmakers voted on Wednesday to ban the use of the term veggie burger and restrict food descriptions such as steak, escalopa, and sausage to products containing meat as part of a proposed regulation intended to protect farmers.

I mean, I can get the philosophy behind it, but are you allowed to call it like a sandwich?

Like, isn't sandwich and burger the same category?

Not burger and say beef?

No, actually, sandwiches are going to be restricted only to products containing sand.

Okay.

Right, right.

Or the ashes.

Otherwise, it's misleading.

Apparently, this is also a follow-on.

The EU already

restricted things like you can't call oat milk oat milk because that implies that it's milk and it's not, which explains why it's called oat drink here.

I always assumed that that was like some sort of

like, I don't know, like marketing term or just like a local colloquialism, but that's like a federally, federally, a legally restricted term.

You can't call it milk.

You can't call it a dairy product.

Milk makes a little bit more sense to me because milk is a thing that comes out of a cow.

Like that's it.

A burger, even a burger itself, a weird thing here is what we call a chicken sandwich, a fried chicken sandwich in America is called a chicken burger here.

I've adjusted.

I like my chicken burgers.

They're good.

But a burger is a cat.

I'm not raised by any other name.

Yeah, like a burger, you do associate it with beef burger, but there's lots of of different burgers.

There's chicken burgers, turkey burgers, things like that.

A burger is a kind of, it's like a sandwich.

It's a sandwich.

Milk's not.

A sandwich with a bun.

Right.

Like, there's the only thing we have are like almond, like nut milks and oat milks and stuff like that.

But milk, you can't call it anything else.

Like, I could call a hamburger a ground beef sandwich if I wanted to.

I can't call milk something else.

It's milk.

It's what it is.

You can call it,

I don't know, cow.

Cow.

Cow fluid?

Yeah.

Give me a nice glass of chocolate cow fluid.

Gross.

Call that to a three-year-old and see if they drink it.

It's so weird that, like, it is, this, this seems like something that would come out of a different country entirely, where they're going after things that apparently seem to be healthy options to call them, and they don't want to confuse them.

Yet we call some kind of neon red syrup strawberry when there's no strawberry involved.

It's never met a strawberry in its life.

Never.

It's never even been close to a strawberry, right?

And it's it's like, how come we're not going after artificial flavors trying to mimic something else literally, as opposed to something that's like, hey, this is a replacement for a burger.

You know what this is supposed to be.

Yeah, I remember there's a lot of like really weird niche restrictions.

In the U.S., one that I ran across was

you can't call something that's not actually chocolate.

You can't call it chocolatey.

So to be like, chocolatey, it's like it's chocolatey flavored, but it has contains no actual chocolate.

Cheese is like that in the U.S.

too.

It's like, oh, it's like a cheese

flavored product.

Or they came up with this.

That's when you get like the cheese, yeah, the cheese in a can, where it's like, that's not cheese.

Yeah.

It's like, it's like a wink.

Or the quotations around stuff.

For a long time, I thought that American cheese was one of those types of things where it wasn't real cheese.

It wasn't until I think you did like a home cooking project to make American cheese here because you were so upset that the cheese slice you can get here.

It's just, it's like, it's like 98%

there, right?

It's really, really close but that last two percent is also the difference between like a gorilla and a human and so it's just like that two percent is a really important percentage and you couldn't like it just isn't quite right so you decided to make american cheese and you do that by adding something to cheddar right like if you wanted a human burger you wouldn't be very disappointed to get a gorilla burger

excuse me sandwich

so is human meat can that be a burger you're telling me a chicken what it's just veggies that's it yeah it's uh it's you're also not you can't it's you can't do veggie stuff or like i don't know if it's like a you know bread-based something or basically if it's not meat you can't call it a burger or a sausage this is a lobbying thing clearly and also also it's like it's so interesting when they make a rule for right now and you're like well what about clearly in two years when we have artificial beef and it is beef but it's grown in a lab or something like that.

That's coming.

Is that allowed to be called a burger?

Like we didn't go and chop it it off a cow in a field, but it is the same thing.

It is genetically beef.

Are we allowed to call that a burger?

The French people would probably say no.

So let me say this.

When you hear about a regulation coming down and it's the EU put out this rule, what country?

Like do you think of the EU as like a big conglomerate or do you think of a specific country?

I actually think of Germany.

I think of France.

That's interesting because I never thought about that till this moment.

But the reason I think of Germany specifically with something like this is because wasn't it Germany where all the farmers like drove into town and dumped a bunch of manure in front of like the parliament building?

I'm going to look this up.

I think that's farmers in every country, actually.

I think that's happened in every, except in Canada, where it was 18-wheeler drivers.

I don't know why.

Oh, that's right.

They blocked up the roads, didn't they?

There's always been some blockade or some caravan of like blue-collar, either farming, agriculture.

Oh, no, that was French.

Yeah.

French farmers.

That sounds very French to me.

It sounds like everything.

French farmers dump manure and running produce in central Toulouse.

There was a thing where George Bush Sr.,

not to be confused with his son George Bush Jr.,

George Bush Sr.

said he did not like broccoli.

He openly said that.

And this was a scandal that a president would say something like that, like that he did not personally like broccoli.

And a bunch of broccoli farmers dumped a bunch of broccoli on the lawn of the White House or something like that.

Like, did no one make you eat this when you were three?

Take me back to the time when that was a conversation.

That was like the big scandal.

I know, right?

Ah, feels good.

The president doesn't like broccoli, and that's it.

But I saw a thing recently.

We were talking about the quotations.

I was with this media library thing.

By the way, everyone really had a positive reaction to us talking about Jellyfin.

If we could get your suggestions for Jellyfin plugins, that would be dope.

It would be great if they were like first-party ones or ones that we can add through the actual catalog of the Jellyfin interface as opposed to like just randomly

grabbing stuff and hoping that it works.

Yeah, but yeah, I'd love to hear it.

But I I was one of the things that I just recently digitized, and I have to check them after I do it.

And then there's because these are movies that I like, that I'm digitizing.

Oh, I was also corrected.

But it's not digitizing, it's ripping or backing up or storing, but they're already in digital format.

Yeah, that person's going to get a Nobel Prize in semantics.

When I'm ripping these from the discs onto the drive,

there's some movies, of course, when I see a single frame of them, I'm like, well, I'm here for an hour and a half now.

And one of those is Looper,

the Bruce Willis movie about the time travel.

Yep.

And with,

what's his name?

The kid?

Who looks unlike himself in this movie?

Oh, right.

He wore a bunch of people.

I want to say G.

Gordon Liddy, but that's not.

It's Joseph Gordon Levitt.

You want to call him who?

G.

Gordy?

G.

Gordon Liddy.

He was like

an Alex Jones type before Alex Jones.

I think he was involved with Nixon and Watergate or something like that.

Yeah, him.

He was in Looper.

So I was watching Looper, and there's, if you've ever seen the movie, I fell in love with this production designer just by watching their work.

They have to put their blunderbusses away in like this little container in order to go collect their money.

And there's a sign saying, Looper blunderbuses go here.

And because it was like a sign in an office that somebody made, they improperly use quotation marks.

Like they put quotation marks around the here.

And I thought, whoever did that is a goddamn genius.

Because whoever makes a sign in an office will always put quotation marks around something that is not quotable.

Right.

It's like they feel like they have to have quotation marks, but none of the words are appropriate to quote.

That is somebody doing their job right.

That is somebody like looking at the sign on their computer screen.

Oh, I got it here.

Quotes around this.

They're channeling their life experience into art.

And I'm certain somebody on set goes, hey, you shouldn't have quotes around that word.

There's no reason for it.

I know.

I know.

That's right.

You're welcome.

That's right.

Speaking of channeling into art, I read the most ridiculous thing recently.

I guess it's Banned Books Week.

So we're going to be hearing a lot about it.

But there's an author that I've read quite frequently.

Her name is Sarah J.

Mas, and she writes like romantic fantasy.

And she's one of the big authors on

book talk, where all the girls are sharing what book to read and what books they're obsessed with.

And so she's one of these very, very popular authors.

And she's now apparently also one of the most banned authors in the U.S.

Why?

Sex, I guess.

It's like these books, they're sort of like young adult, new adult.

Like there's sex in them.

Like there's people having sex, but it's also nothing that I wasn't reading by like eighth grade stealing my mom's romance novels.

Right.

And, you know, have they ever read Stephen King, by the way?

Oh,

you say that, but in defense of the king, I believe he is the most banned author in the U.S.

Oh, I see.

He's the king of a lot of things.

The most banned.

Which I can understand because I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but I've walked in on you listening to Stephen King.

Yeah, that's right.

And I get it.

It's rough, man.

It's rough.

He's a weird dude.

Yeah.

Well, it's just like, you know, it's kind of like, yeah, we've talked about it before.

It's rough.

We don't need to go back down that particular road.

And then she showed him her boots.

No, that,

but there's just a weird.

That was a three-body problem.

That was also equally as bad.

Weird stuff gets banned, though.

Like, I read not long ago that Calvin and Hobbes is banned in Tennessee.

Get the fuck out of here.

Why would you ban Calvin and Hobbes?

Are you ready for this?

Yeah.

Child nudity.

Because it gets his butt out when he goes running away from the senior.

Yeah, like he escapes from the bathtub and he's like running naked through the house and you see his butt.

So it's child nudity and it's sexualizing of children, Bernie.

Listen, the person who proposed that ban, honestly, we all kind of go because they hide behind this thing that we all hate, which is, you know, the sexualization of children.

But when somebody proposes something like that, somebody needs to pull that person aside and go, hey, man, what's going on with you?

Are you okay?

Who even thinks about that?

Right.

Like, who's ever looked at Calvin and Hobbes and gone, right?

Oh, yeah.

You're worried about other people having thoughts.

That's your

so much of the world now is people projecting the bullshit on their head onto other people and then making it a problem.

That's that person's fucking problem.

That's fucking weird.

And that's weird.

And Calvin and Hobbes, of all things, it's like one of the most like beautiful, pure, like child experiences.

Like, it's this depiction of just like this absolutely like innocent hellion.

Right.

You also probably didn't eat his broccoli.

I guarantee you didn't,

you know, and it's just, it's just, it's weird that, like, of all things, weird that.

So it's weird.

It's what it is.

Just call it what it is.

It's fucking weird.

It's fucking weird.

But I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about it.

And by proxy, all you people in that county, now you're all fucking weird.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Tennessee, you weirdos.

Calvin butt lover.

I miss it, man.

I wish Calvin and Hobbes would come back.

But at the same time, some things are just better in the past.

You know,

we just played a clip today.

The drop today is an old vine.

And it's weird how, like, vine resurfaces all the time is just a period in history that people are so nostalgic for on the internet.

Like, we don't know how good we had it while it was there.

We made some vines with the rooster teeth.

God, I love those, man.

They were so much fun.

They're like, they're fun and they're chaotic and they're really challenging.

It's telling a story in six seconds is an insanely difficult problem.

You're also the young, unsung hero of those vines because you filmed them all.

I did.

You filmed like 90% of those.

And it was back before you could edit in vines.

Yeah, you had to do a clip by clip and you could you could erase the clip that you recorded and like re-record it again, like that section of the clip, but you couldn't go and like cut it down.

So we had to like get ready and be like, I'm going to do the button, get ready to like destroy that cake.

Ready?

One, two,

go, go, go.

You know what I learned?

There was a joke that we did with the gallons of milk, drinking those.

I can legally call those milk in the E because it was milk.

Uh, where I had to, at the end of it, the, the joke at the end was that we drank all of our milk and then I had to burp.

Burping on purpose is not hard to do.

A lot of people can do it.

Burping on a cue, like you got to hit a mark, you have to do it at this second, way harder than I realized it was.

Like you, it's like, hold it, hold it, hold it.

Okay, now go.

Like, you have to hit it right then.

Wow, that was tough.

I can't make myself burp regardless.

I can burp without intending to to all day long, but I couldn't, I can't make myself burp.

I've heard people who have the skill, like you swallow air in a certain way or something.

And I just, I, whatever that skill is, I don't have it.

I don't, I like, I can't do that.

I can't whistle.

I'm actually missing like a lot of like Calvin and Hobbes level childhood skills.

Are you?

Well, you won't get banned in Tennessee, so that's good.

Lucky for you.

We can still have our podcast up there.

I can.

burp on cube, but only if you give me a glass of water I can make myself swallow the air that way.

I just, I can't do it dry.

That sounds weird to say it that way, but I'm going to leave it out there.

The other thing I can do is a learned skill is I can swallow a pill dry.

Can you do that?

I can, but it depends on how big.

It's one of those like horse-size pills.

I'm going to have a little bit of trouble.

You're talking about a pill the size of a horse.

Yeah, that's difficult to swallow.

What pill a horse would take?

I think it's a pill for a horse.

I'm surprised that like horses haven't gotten together and had like a press conference going, look, everybody.

You can't call it a horse pill.

It's not made of actual horse.

Exactly.

It's banned in the U.

Or just like, hey, everybody, our medicine is the same size as yours.

Fuck off, everybody.

Elephants are even bigger than us.

Nobody's talking about the size of their pills.

Right.

Well, that's probably, they probably take them with the butt.

Well, how are you going to make an elephant swallow a pill, right?

It's like you just sit them down at the dinner table and be like, you can't leave until you swallow this pill.

You try and force an elephant to swallow it.

Elephants can't be treated for ailments in Tennessee.

They have to cross state borders because of that that weird dude who's thinking about Calvin's butt all the time.

The other thing I can do, though, is I can cure my hiccups.

I know

any amount of hiccups, I know exactly how to cure them and I can't communicate it to anybody else.

But if I get the hiccups, I can get rid of them.

And I've been able to do it since I was like 15 years old.

You just, you get a hiccup and you go, not today, motherfucker.

And you just stop.

Here's the, you just don't.

Here's the best way I can describe it.

I drink water in a certain way.

And that's all I can say.

I don't tip it upside down or any of the weird stuff you see, just like normally drinking a glass of water, but I drink it in a certain way that cures my hiccups.

That's, I, I, that's, I can win the Nobel Prize in curing my own hiccups.

And I can't tell anyone else how to do it.

I'm sorry.

I've, I've never matched all the things that the ideas that people have, like, predict when your next hiccup will come and it never will, or hold your breath, or

yeah, or whatever, drink a lot of water.

I guess I'm not doing it in a certain way.

I can't cure my hiccups.

What I do is I give up.

Yeah.

And then once I've given up enough, it seems like the hiccups go, all right, that's right, bitch.

Well, what else is going on in the world?

Anything else we should talk about?

Oh, yes.

One thing, and this is also to do with libraries.

It's not a book ban per se, but this is happening in the UK right now.

And it's ridiculous because it's been almost a year since we had a similar issue.

There is a series of books.

It's a very popular series of books for kids called like Spy Pups.

There's like spy pups, spy dogs, spy cats.

And the publisher, Puffin, is now calling libraries and schools, asking them to please get these books out of the libraries.

Not because they're banned exactly, but because

there's a website, I think it's the author's website that's linked.

They're like, to learn more about this character, visit this website.

And someone let the domain lapse and a porn company bought it.

Okay, so that's, listen, we don't live in a lawless world, right?

Put those people in jail, right?

Why would they go ahead and register?

Unless, what was the name of the pup?

Oh,

I don't know.

Hold on, let me.

I can't.

The thing is, no one, everyone's talking around it.

Like, they won't share what the website is because they don't want anyone to go to it.

And they say they're trying to avoid going to it themselves.

It's just inappropriate for kids because it's sexual content because it's a porn company.

Was it named?

Was it like a little word of the like chicken?

Was it named Cuck or something like that?

I mean, I'm trying to think, like, unless it was explicitly something that could be a pornographic URL if somebody went out and grabbed this thing just to redirect it that's that's a crime that's pretty shitty yeah like that's that's that's don't do that like at the very least you go you want to be able to say no not that there's there's a lot of things but no not that that dude in tennessee is like his his that's the stuff he should be paying attention to

Calvin's naked butt after the bath or whatever it was seriously like like save it for this like actual like bad faith stuff it doesn't it doesn't I guess they don't want to publish the URL they don't want to publish the URL I'm looking now I'm looking to see maybe the BBC will tell me.

Let's hope they hold on to their URL.

That could be a bad development.

All right, I'm not going to top that today.

So instead, we're just going to close out.

I want to say a big thank you to Kevin is Kevin and Zek Condale for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

All right, well, that does it for us today, October 9th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

Nobel Prize in hand.

We hope you'll be here as well.

Bye, everybody.