PREVIEW: Leonis C. Malburg

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

I'm November Kelly.

I am the mayor of this episode and I'm joined by my deputy mayors, Matty and Riley.

How's it going?

I'm doing great.

I'm doing super well.

Just like me, someone who definitely did not spill a like glass of Pepsi over my desk twice sequentially within like a minute as I was starting recording this, also, we were having some internet problems, so we're recording without video today, and it did just kind of sound like a radio play back there, like you were doing some incredible Foley work.

And then I just hear you, like, far away from the mic, screaming, is that a sim card?

The thing about doing things in real life is that it sounds often like really good Foley work,

which is kind of the reverse of how Foley is supposed to work, but yeah, it's fine.

Um, anyway, hello, welcome.

Are you rippling a big sheet of metal over there?

It's something funny.

Yeah.

Wow.

It sounds like we're, it sounds just like we're actually at the big sheet of metal rippling factory.

If we can, if we can lightly skip past my oafish ways.

Sorry, Riley, you wanted to do something.

Oh, I just wanted to announce our sponsors for this episode: Seldom Tip Steady Glasses that Never Spill Your Drink and Pepsi.

Yeah, absolutely.

I really need to invest in one of those.

What I did was I did the kind of infomercial thing where a woman like drops a bunch of things at the same time to be like, has this happened to you?

The this in has this happened to you happened to me a couple of times in quick succession.

This led me to invent a new product that I'm calling the most expensive glass ever built.

And it's a gyroscopically balanced drinking glass that has a Torby on so that the Coriolis effect does not slowly spill your drink over a thousand year period.

Yeah, that was it.

It was the Coriolis effect.

So, hello and welcome to the episode.

And we're going to be talking about Leonis C.

Malberg, mayor of Vernon, California, scenic, beautiful Vernon, California.

And some of you don't know that that's a joke yet.

And I should contextualize this for you, right?

Like, because I bounced back and forth between choosing one of about four cities across two states, because what I stumbled upon in researching this was very similar stories of the same mayor-focused scam.

So as I tell you this story, I want you to bear in mind that the general outline of this has happened so many times in so many different places.

And what I did was I picked the nastiest one with the most details.

If you remember when Trump had that perfect phone call, of course we all remember that, the perfect phone call.

I all remember that phone call.

We were all on it.

Yeah, but what I did on the perfect party line, I kept reading perfect articles about Leonis Malberg.

But first, we have to do a little segment that we like to call mayoral roundup.

Beautiful, perfect mayoral roundup.

Thank you.

That was mayoral roundup.

It's now time for a segment that I like to call the rest of the episode.

So basically, we've established a format.

over the few times we've been doing this.

And our normal practice has been normal city, weird mayor, right?

Like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is a kind of basically normal city.

New York City is a basically normal city.

And then weird people

collected upon them.

Yeah, exactly.

Where I want to take you for this one is Vernon, California, a city whose name hits different if you've had the magnetic field song Reno Dakota stuck in your head all week.

I do now.

And Vernon, California is different.

This is weird city, weird mayor territory.

And in order to contextualize this for you in an audio medium, what I've done is I've included in the notes a couple of photos of the beautiful sights of Vernon.

And I'd just like to ask my deputy mayors to, with their beautiful words, I'd like to invite you both to paint the listeners a picture of each of these three images in sequence.

So

the first image here, image number one, what are we looking at?

The shot of Vernon, California?

What I appear to be looking at is

the phrase that has been bouncing around in my head while looking at this picture is hot wasilla, basically.

Interesting.

Interesting that you should say that because we will get to that in due course.

To me, I mean, like, so just like straight up, you see like a weird, it's a bunch of train tracks and then a humongous highway going over it and a bunch of warehouses.

But sort of, it looks like somebody ran over Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with a gigantic tank.

Like it looks like they flattened their refinery.

If you use like a kind of a color picker on this image, you would get every conceivable shade of brown and gray and some of the nastier greens.

But nothing.

The train trains look like somebody smeared them with shit.

It's really gnarly.

Yeah.

So if you see the Los Angeles River is in this drainage ditch that looks like a kind of puke green.

That's the river.

That's the river.

That is the river crossed by like an eight-lane interstate uh and then a rail bridge and then a bunch of like kind of industrial buildings around it yeah it this looks like something that if you make it in cities skylines like everyone begins to get sad faces yeah yeah yeah like if you built this in city skylines you are doing badly you are like not having a good time yeah i believe that's the the 10 the 10 beautiful the beautiful the beautiful ten if we go

to image two uh we see a kind of more sort of horizon-focused shot of, again, the beautiful city of Vernon, California.

And what we see here is in the distance, a beautiful Los Angeles skyline.

And in the foreground, what are we seeing here?

I see

sort of like a hell presented to you by our sponsor, Maersk.

Yeah.

This looks like a still from a promotional video about investing in Vernon, California, specifically aimed at people who want to pollute more.

Yeah.

It's a big train yard that runs through the middle of town and which is just filled with horrible containers of various types.

And then if we go to the third image here, this beautiful little kind of more portrait focused, more intimate one, what we're looking at here is, how would you describe this one?

Fabulous.

Downtown Vernon.

That's going to be funny tonight by co-mayors on this episode because you can't see the image.

It's a guy in like a hazmat suit with a hard hat in front of a what I can only describe as a pile of what?

Who knows?

A pile of substance.

And he's sort of

and then behind him is sort of a corrugated steel wall.

They're either inside or just outside of a warehouse of some sort.

Oh, this is inside.

This is inside where they keep the big pile of objects.

Oh, go ahead.

Did they build the warehouse around the pile to contain the pile?

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Very much.

The pile is growing.

It's malignant.

Yes.

So to be clear, if you haven't gotten a sense of it from these three descriptions, Reno Dakota is hell on earth, basically.

Like, every Californian that I asked about Vernon visibly shuddered at the mention of it.

I mean, first of all, we have to be clear, and this is kind of the crux of things to begin with: Vernon isn't really a city, except in like a jurisdictional sense.