PREVIEW: Mega Municipal Roundup

You know what's really funny is that you keep saying, I'm not a podcaster.

I'm not a podcaster, but you bought a sound blanket.

Well, I bought a sound blanket to save my marriage.

You bought a sound blanket.

It's just a moving blanket with grommets, and then I put a bunch of hooks in the wall near my door.

I put the sound blanket up when I'm recording, which is great.

But between that and the thing I put under my door, it perfectly insulates this already hot room I'm in.

Hmm, the podcasting torture chamber.

And I just turned my air conditioner on and it was showing, it was showing up in my recording.

So I had to turn it off, which means by the end of this episode, I'm going to be wet.

Let nobody say that we don't suffer.

for the audience, you know, because we turn off our mayor conditioners and instead what we do.

I did the punchline before the setup.

I'm going to kill myself.

This motherfucker said may air conditioner.

I was going to say mayor conditioners on purpose you can't make fun of me for having said it by accident earlier in the sentence that i meant you know what though i i have more joy now in my heart i have more joy in my heart on a strictly utilitarian analysis i am a perfect angel This is a bonus episode of the show, so it's going to be a little loosey-goosey this week.

I'm looser and gooser even than usual because this is the week in which I have to write my dissertation or else.

So

I am in brain prison.

Yeah, my air conditioner is off.

It's so hot.

I'm eating on Mike

because we had to record a double today.

Everything is in chaos.

I'm wearing blue lipstick.

Yeah, I was taken aback by it.

It looks good, but I'm like, what?

No, it doesn't.

The thing is, it's because the reason why I'm wearing it.

Okay, now that you've said it, now that Juve said it.

No, I know.

It looks like absolute ass.

No, but the reason why.

is because I was fucking around, right?

Because now in the week of writing my dissertation is the classic time to do all of the little tasks and side objectives and quests because once you finish your dissertation you can't go back obviously well the well the end game for grad school is not very fun there's not much to do yeah yeah yeah exactly the high level areas um you're running around glasgow just like looking at birds and then they're appearing in a little sketchbook yeah yeah exactly so uh i don't know if i can do anything else dutch uh no so what i've got a little star in my save file for school i just need dutch i i just i was bored rotting dissertations and i'm Arthur.

Why'd you keep saying you can't do nothing else if you can draw an Ari Olin flying, Arthur?

No, what I was, what I was saying is, if you go back and look at my like pre-transition, early transition photos thread on Twitter search from post-Oktobrist telling my kids this was Johannes Vonk, you will see that some of my early, early transition things, I had this circus ass blue lipstick from Amazon.

And because I was like, I don't know, fucking 20 or whatever, I weirdly made that shit look good because I was, you know, like a twink and I was using a lot of filters.

So out of curiosity, I thought, well, it's been like almost 10 years.

And weirdly, you can still get the same costume ass makeup on Amazon, mind you, for no money.

And so I thought, yeah, I'll fuck around and try that just to see what it looks like.

And the answer is bad.

Yeah, I was like, I thought you died for a moment.

I will say also, I am, I am.

You have to reward yourself for like having written a paragraph, right?

You're like one paragraph down, time to, you know, do some makeup checking.

Time to check on the way.

It's coming off.

It's coming off.

It is literally coming off.

Yeah.

I mean, fuck, I hope it is.

I'm, I am with you here.

We are sisters in the grand, in the grand scheme.

Because like early in my transition, I also, there's a lot of photos of me in like matte black lipstick.

Oh, but the thing is, that fucks, though.

No, that fucks.

No, not on, not on me.

Not when you've still got a beard.

I listen,

I just will say thank you for the solidarity in not making fun of my clown-ass lipstick.

A clown that was dead.

Yeah, my dead clown lipstick, the saddest episode of Law and Order.

Law and Order circus crimes, circus victims unit.

Oh my God, CVU.

Okay, hey, by the way.

Are you telling me that

this sicko puts acid in the spritz seltzer bottle?

You said a sicko fell into a big fat acid.

Now he's chasing Batman around.

Just a bunch of guys moving, like being questioned by the circus victims unit, and it's a bunch of clowns moving boxes but constantly falling.

They're moving boxes with other clowns in them, like popping out comically.

I don't know.

I see a lot of stuff here now to wringling Brothers and Bottom and Bailey.

God.

I think that's all of it.

All right.

I'm good.

Hi.

I'm good.

Hi.

I'm back to the normal.

You look incredible.

By the way.

Thank you.

By the way, hello.

Hello.

Hi.

It's an episode of No Gods No Mares.

Oh, you're saying hi to them, not to me.

I'm saying hello to the listeners who I believe are in the room with us at all times.

I think, by the way, on this podcast, listeners hold up half the sky.

Only half, though.

No more than that.

Only half.

Yeah, then we all get one six.

I'm stuck on the lipstick because it's got this horrible, like, waxy taste, and you can't take on or put off lipstick without getting some fucking taste.

Yeah.

Anyways.

Hi.

So this is an episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

Thank you for being a patron.

Thank you.

We're loosey goosey today.

We don't really have, we don't have capital A, capital A, M, a mayor today.

Capital A, capital A, Air?

Well, the thing is, the Mertaculous has like scheduled maintenance hours, right?

We all went to the location in the basement of the World Mayor Forum where we record.

We're holding hands.

We open our eyes, now pupilless,

to look to the sky with sightless eyes to commune with the Meritaculus.

And it said,

check back next week.

So what we've got,

it's a magic eight ball.

Yeah.

Answer unclear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what we've got is a sort of mega muni roundup.

I am ostensibly the mayor of this episode.

We're all going to be mayors of different little bits.

Like there's a little bit I'm going to be.

Yeah, we've all brought something.

It's like a potluck, you know?

A mayor in town.

It's bring your mayor to school day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I've brought a couple of little dishes here that, you know, I hope people are going to like, but which I know in my heart are going to sit there slowly cooling in the dishes and nobody's going to eat.

Did you bring the hispy cabbage of mayor's, the grilled hispy cabbage?

I think we got a very different types of potlucks if we were if hispy cabbage is on the table.

I'm thinking more of a kind of a hot dish situation here.

Yeah, what Nova's named here is a food that's real and that I've heard of.

And Riley, what you've done is make something up.

I see.

Yeah, see, I'm in a situation of bringing like the potato salad, right, that nobody eats.

I eat that.

I eat that.

That's a dangerous game.

You can't eat everybody's potato salad.

And Riley has reached into the world of Dr.

Seuss and showed up with something called Hispie Cabbage.

No, Hispy Cabbage is what they use to torture vegetarians at restaurants.

Because it'll be like we or vegans, because it'll be like, we have, I don't know, we have like, you know, a bunch of things.

We have.

Langustines and garlic butter.

We have some kind of a, you know, venison ragu, whatever, whatever.

It's like, ah, I see some of you might be vegetarian don't worry we've moved on from a grilled portobello mushroom in place of a protein to a grilled hispie cabbage with a bunch of different sauces on it in place of a protein yeah yeah oh i see thank you so much for explaining and giving me a chance to take my final bite of lunch okay you wouldn't bring a dish of that to a to a potluck you'd be very unpopular at the potluck it would be a pot uh unluck bad luck a pot unluck yeah it would be it would be the uh the guy who did not become president of nigeria uh pot bad luck jonathan pot bad luck, Jonathan.

I can reason my way to that one being funny.

Make sure.

There we go.

Yeah, hold on.

I'm just going to check.

I got to make some calculations here.

And I'm looking.

The judges.

Sromania says funny.

Bulgaria, not funny.

I split the Balkans, and I'm hardly the first to do it.

Oh, Spain says funny.

You're funny.

It's a good joke.

Okay.

Everybody just votes for their neighbors anyway.

It's bullshit.

Okay, we're jumping in.

So I want to,

this one's old, but it is, it doesn't warrant a whole episode, I don't think.

But here is a mention of a mayor.

Thank you to the mayor Taculus for speaking through your chosen instrument, X the Everything app user, Pega Ace, who sends this one in.

Here's a headline for everybody.

Turkey, mayor replaces giant robot statue with T-Rex.

The mayor of Turkey's capital city has responded to complaints over a giant robot statue by replacing it with a huge T-Rex.

The robot first appeared in the middle of a roundabout in Ankara at the start of April, causing some people to assume that it was an elaborate April Fool's joke.

But it was actually erected to promote a new amusement park, a pet project of the city's longtime mayor, Melig.

I went really Meli Gochek, yeah.

Gocek, thank you.

We so, um,

here's the thing: a little peek behind the curtain, right?

I ask the Mertaculous fairly regularly about this guy to the point of like almost having lined up a guest about this guy.

I, he's, he's like someone I personally am keenly aware of, but the Mertaculus has always told me to wait.

So what we're getting is little like tidbits in the meantime.

Yeah.

Such as the statues.

Yeah.

So what's important here is that he put up a big statue of a robot.

Do we know which, which robot it is?

It was a fake transformer of some sort, and he put up a bunch of them.

And then he got sued for using taxpayer money on this.

And in response to the criticisms that the statue is, quote, a monstrosity and, quote, a criminal waste of funds, the mayor replied only, and i quote respect the robot

yeah i mean i think that's the thing that all mayors tend to say i think the mayor is as a position very submissive to robots like we saw of course eric adams doing the uh the unrequited like heart thing on the nypd surveillance but yeah mayors mayors love a robot they love to think of a robot they love to sort of like meet with a robot and they love to apparently erect a giant statue of a robot well i like that he was, it was either robot or T-Rex, which to me suggests that Meligocek is sort of doing the two different sides, he's paying equal homage to the two different sides of the kaiju robot Eternal War.

Oh, I was going to say he was doing, he was doing Transformers and Beast Wars.

He was just covering all of his bases.

Yeah, Beast Wars is so funny.