Episode 172: The 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

All right, we good?

Yes,

I'm good.

I'm good.

All right, let's do it.

Yeah, yeah.

Locals going.

Oh, fuck me, dude.

Have you been recording this whole time?

Yeah.

We need to sync up.

We need to sync up.

We do need to sync up.

All right, I'm sorry, all those racial slurs were recorded.

Someone once accused us of bleeping me because I said slurs, and I'm just like, no, it's usually dope.

It's usually in that situation, because we usually, what we're bleeping is like, you say something like, I think the CEO of United Healthcare should be, and then a long beef.

And what you're saying in that situation is a series of racial slurs, I guess.

I don't track that either.

Dramatically, at least.

Let alone politically.

Again, I mean, we'll talk about Mamma Mia.

We'll talk about it.

Mamma Mia 3.

Mamma Mia.

Mamma Mia 3, where the protagonist, Pierce Brazin, of course, I've never seen Mamma Mia.

I have no fucking idea.

I just know he's in it.

Yeah.

I've seen Mama Miya once, but I wasn't paying much attention.

I've seen Mama Mia too.

I've never seen it.

I think

you should do that for Kill James Bond.

That sounds like

I'm unholstering my NKVD Commissar pistol to say we do a sync point now.

Okay.

All right.

Three, two, one, Mark.

Three, two, one, mark.

Oh, I was way early.

Fuck my ass.

It's fine.

It's in the ballpark.

It's in the ballpark.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Well, when Devin comes to my house

and they're armed with two letter bombs, I'll get it.

Sorry, Dev.

Here's the letter bomb.

Here's my spare letter bomb in case the first letter bomb doesn't work.

Surely you would send the letter bomb in the mail as opposed to the market.

Oh, that's gone now.

That's being privatized, you know.

Exactly.

Not the way Devin's doing it.

You can't even send letter bombs anymore because there's no postal service, you know?

Because of anti-woke.

Another traditional craft gone in the face of capitalism.

What would Uncle Teddy Teddy Kaczynski think of this?

I'm not endorsing his methods.

I sent my letter bomb by certified mail.

Hello, and welcome to, Well, There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him, and death to Barney, which we'll get to.

And with us is our, I don't know, I don't, I don't know what to call you, man.

None of us know why I am.

Friend.

It's fine.

Situationship.

Yeah.

Bringing our friend to Christmas like your, like you, like,

like your aunt and her roommate for the past 25 years.

Yeah, yeah,

we're going to do the cousin walk.

That's exactly.

This is the official podcast of the cousin walk, I think.

I believe that.

Yeah,

it's Cousin Gareth.

Cousin Gareth is here and his pronouns, my pronouns, are he, him.

I do think that

my aunt, who I don't believe listens to the show and who I wish a very timely.

Bleep that, please.

My mom will get mad at me.

She She is openly gay.

She's the worst woman in the world, my aunt is.

And I applaud her for living her truth, but her truth is fucking miserable, dude.

Suddenly fascinated about your beef with this woman.

If you didn't know anything about you, that would really sound like it was a specifically homophobic thing.

No, no, no.

It's just that she's mean to my mother.

Oh, I see.

And I love my mother very much.

And anyone who crosses my mama is going to get the blade.

Yeah, I think that's right to say.

That sounds about right.

So, yes, go on.

So, what we see here was a cat in a hat.

But now he has been reduced to an ordinary cat

without a hat.

Reduced in status, shamed publicly.

Shamed publicly, turned into an ordinary cat on some sort of weird.

Dr.

Seuss motorcycle type contraption.

Critically horizontal and and not vertical.

Yes.

Yes.

He has spun out and lost his hat.

And also, you will notice here, knocked over a streetlight.

Oh, yeah, there's some destruction.

There's a wake of destruction going on here as well.

Just lasering in on that and being like, this is a New York City streetlight.

It's not supposed to look like this.

This was originally entitled That Time the NYPD Killed Barney, but we're going to actually expand it out to several incidents, most specifically at the 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, but also the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in general.

Hell yeah.

I want to give many, many thanks to the people who maintain the impeccably detailed Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade wiki.

Oh, wow.

It is a gold mine.

Yes.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there.

Yeah.

They apparently also do a podcast called Let's Pod a Parade, where they do recaps of every year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

I didn't know there was like a fandom for this stuff.

Once I started reading the articles, I was like, oh, you can really foam this.

You can foam the balloons.

This is a foam

topic.

This is a foamable topic.

Yeah.

And my new diversity says yes to that.

I'm now looking up whether you can find out like technical details of the of the of the of these things whether they like find out what the thickness of the canvas is and like what technology they're used to in flight I'm now

do you think that they're like sports bores where they're like you're watching the Macy's Day parade casually and they're like locked in they're like thinking about like micron thicknesses of tarpaulin yeah hasn't it hasn't been hasn't been good since the 1997 Pikachu

take it back take it back these these new balloons don't know how to play hard-nosed uh parading that was real that was a real lunch pail Pikachu.

9 to 5.

But first, we have to do announcements, announcements, announcements, announcements,

announcements, announcements, announcements.

Okay,

so the tour, it's still happening.

The Northeast Corridor.

Or the Six Days of Sodom tour on ice sponsored by

the hostage we have.

Lynn Manuel, I can't say that fucking either, can I?

No, no, you can't say that we've taken Lynn Manuel Miranda hostage because it's not true, crucial.

It's not true,

no, no, it's again, I don't, you know, I can't fit him in my basement because someone else put a nuclear weapon down there.

Hold, hold this, just like, oh, you're gonna have to share.

Sorry, yeah,

Raw's shooting at the New Jersey droids to protect someone else's reactor.

Oh, we didn't even put that in the news.

Next time, next time we'll talk about the drones.

Yeah, it's on like a three-week delay, anyway.

Shut up, there.

Yeah, I was about to say there's so much fucking news right now that we can't cover everything.

I did see the Iranian mothership yesterday.

It was big, it was white, it was round.

There was like a little bite taken out of it.

I was like, wow.

It has been a like, it's been a decade of weeks where decades have happened.

Yeah.

So,

our tour next year, late April, early May, the April 29th show in New York.

It's April 29th, right?

I think so, yeah.

That one still has seats available.

The Washington, D.C.

tour is selling out quickly.

The Fillmore even in Philly, that one's also getting close to sold out.

So

buy those tickets.

We are filling more quickly.

Yeah.

Like an over-energetic top.

We are like following the instructions written on the side of the building.

Fillmore theater.

Yeah,

fill more seats.

So go buy the tickets.

Buy the tickets now.

The link's in the description.

Yeah.

As ever when I say this, my presence physically is contingent on U.S.

customs and immigration services.

However, I am working on that and I hope to have a definitive answer soon.

I do want to say something that's very funny is that the Fillmore, when they have big touring acts, they close

Richmond Street traffic to put the tour buses there.

Well, we don't have many tour buses or any tour buses, really.

We just have my wife's Toyota Rav 4, which we would have to do.

We have a tour bus on discount from the Dave Matthews band.

Oh, don't worry about what's happening to that toilet.

We could get a private railroad car and put it down the trolley tracks there.

I do want to see if they'll close the road for just my wife's car.

I don't think they'll let me do that, but I think it would be incredibly funny.

It's like, have you seen that little photo of the tiny little dog that got onto the pope's parade route one time on a pickle visit and he thought it was for him yeah that's that's gonna be like a like your wife's van you know the ram fors internal persona will have will be like skipping through like thinking like like like a cyclist way ahead of the peloton on the when they cleared the road for the tour de france it's yeah exactly um i love that i i also think you should get like a little aftermarket siren to put on the roof uh yeah that's that's probably legal yeah yeah as long as you pick a funky color for it, you know, I don't know, go for like

a

flashing green lights or something.

I mean, really, what is war?

What is more, well, there's your problem than a flashing yellow light on a RAV4?

It implies vaguely engineering and urgency, which is two things that we are interested in.

It's that or an inflatable, we take the inflatable hat off

off the cat and pop that on the roof instead.

Like an ad hoc construction hat.

We bring Milkshake to the show.

Yeah.

I don't think Milkshake would like meeting that many people.

I'm afraid of how many people I'm going to meet.

No, Milkshake loves meeting people.

That's his favorite thing.

He loves chewing on their beards.

He loves sitting on their heads.

Absolutely.

No, he's going to scratch everyone.

Just let Milkshake loose to tear.

Let Milkshake cook.

All right, what's our next announcement?

A toy drive.

Oh, yeah.

that's me, right?

Um, yes, yeah, so I tweeted about it a couple of days ago.

Uh, you hogs have outdone yourselves.

Uh, I don't have an exact number, I did tweet the photo.

That is not all of the toys.

Um, you filled, you blew by last year, and last year was pretty impressive.

So, I am very grateful.

Uh, by the time this goes out, uh, our Christmas, which is our busiest season, will have concluded.

Uh, Lutheran Settlement House can use your help all year long, though.

Uh, we'll put a link to our get involved tab where if you are local to Philadelphia, you can volunteer.

If you live in any other place

that's not the perfect and wonderful city of Philadelphia, Mayor Sheryl Parker not included,

you can donate to us.

We are always open to donations.

We are always grateful for them.

I have tweeted this number before, but the hogs have raised, I don't have the exact number in front of me, but since we started bullying them last year, something in the neighborhood of thousand dollars good

that's pretty and be proud of yourselves folks it's incredible and that is money that is non-restricted uh some of you have donated uh i'm not gonna call anyone out by name because i don't want to for the sake of anonymity i know at least one listener has donated five thousand dollars i know another has donated ten uh to our shelter through becoming involved in uh in in through this podcast so well done hogs man incredible that's very good

So, yeah, just very grateful for you.

Unironically, thank you, Hoggs.

Yes, thank you to the Hogs

for

doing lots of charity.

Speaking of charity,

another announcement here.

A friend and multiple-time guest of the podcast, Sean from the Antifada, suffered a series of small strokes during an emergency operation.

He's going to be out of work for a while.

I've at least texted with him.

He seems like he's in good spirits.

You know, podcast brain comes for us all, apparently.

And, you know, there is a, I believe it's called a meal train set up for him and his wife.

We will put the link to that in the description if you want to, you know, donate either a meal or a gift card for DoorDash or Uber Eats.

do the discourse somewhere else.

But that is, you know, that is something that i think they would very much appreciate um because again sean's out of work for a while so

and oh one very small announcement which i've been told in the discord that i should be doing and people have been shouting at me for not doing it is um is up front saying go buy my book if you want to it's a nice christmas present go buy the book

go buy the book how the earliest will fix the future it's available in the us in canada and the rest of the world you can find it uh on the third print run because it's been sold it's been selling like hotcakes so thank you to all of you who have bought it already.

That's all, I'll keep it short.

That's it.

Thanks to all of you.

I love you.

I'm on, I bought the book, I'm on page 20.

It's very good.

Oh, thanks, Roz.

Yeah, there you go, it's out there.

I'll

have a chance to sign that in person at some point in the next, not so distant future.

Who knows?

Maybe.

Let's hope so.

Let's hope so.

I know we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll solve that.

I will, I will discuss that off camera.

Yes, well, that's exciting.

Anyway, um, yes, announcements, announcements, announcements.

announcements

can we can you do me a solid um for the next announcements can we put a deafening train horn blast in there i don't know if we should do that i think we should do that i think we should do that here to wake them back up again yeah oh we do that

slopped off and drooling in your chair yeah yeah well you do the the big uh k5la off the uh off the acela obviously Oh, I have one joke to make before we

oh, that's probably good.

It's a comedy podcast.

It's a comedy podcast.

I gotta wrap it up.

Very serious podcast.

Yeah, dude, and I'm being shelled.

It's like work.

So I was watching the Polar Express with my wife because it is Christmas time.

And she said, you know, the annoying know-it-all kid who's like, you know what kind of training this is?

This is a blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's a bald one, which it's not.

It's a whatever.

It's a lima.

It's not a bald one.

He says it's a bald one, but it's a lima.

I know it's a lima.

Kicking this kid out of foaming.

Wait, yes.

My wife goes, my sweet, wonderful wife, Rennie, goes, you know, I used to hate that kid, you know, when I was watching this movie as a child.

And then I grew up and I married that kid.

And

now

I'm married to that kid, and that kid's best friend

is also like that.

And I was like, yep, it's me and Roz, baby.

Do the news.

All right.

It's time for the goddamn news.

New mixer.

It's kind of a lucky dip here.

that is that it that that is a drop of a guy saying fruit loops from the film in order of disappearance uh because of uh kill james bond thank you that's that's your job nova is to just is to have like that just in

chaos yeah yeah yeah yeah i i like to think of myself as a kind of like confounding factor i i also like to think of myself that way and uh while ros tries bravely to keep this narrative going i just like derailing it.

So

we have to talk, of course, about the man of the hour.

Luigi Mangione.

I think that

there's a non-zero chance this guy listened to, well, There's Your Problem and saw my tweet about kneeling the United Healthcare CEO over Ditch, and then some guy got mad at me two years later because I thought it was funny that he got killed.

How careful do you want me to be about what I say about this?

Because I've already said

on Trash Future that I thought it was good that the guy he killed was killed

and that I don't think he like this guy Luigi's mansion did anything wrong and that he should be freed immediately and awarded the keys to the city like I think that's clear I think Liam and I have discussed several times in the past we both believe murder is basically morally neutral yeah yeah yeah co-signed baby yeah

they're hitting him with uh with terrorism charges off of

terrorism charges you You can go into an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, kill nine people, and try to instigate a

race war.

A race war.

And yeah, I've seen the tweet about, well, actually, the feds got him, blah, blah, blah.

I don't give a shit.

Shut the fuck up.

Yeah, that guy got like Burger King after he was arrested.

Whereas this guy couldn't even get a McDonald's before he was arrested.

Without being betrayed by

Pennsylvania, the Judas state,

and

arrested, you know, because somebody tipped off the cops that he was in a McDonald's.

As

the person in the leftist podcast sphere who has most recently been to Altoona, Pennsylvania, to my knowledge.

Yeah.

If you were going to get turned in by a minimum wage worker, Altoona is the place it would happen.

And McDonald's is the chain that it would be at.

Like, had this man gone across the street to a sheets, I believe yes they would still be looking for him today he would be leaving more and more discarded jackets behind and they'll be tracing him across the country

more backpacks full of uh full of monopoly money yeah i mean listen i i know not everybody's just like a trailer not everybody has to be on board with this kind of thing right if you're squeamish about that i'm not going to hold it against you right if you want to do the like you know hold hands and be like why don't we just be friends sure right but for me personally knowing a little bit not even from personal personal experience, just from like from friends, from colleagues, from others, who like knowing a little bit about the American health insurance industry and about American capitalism generally, right?

Seeing the CCTV footage, immaculate, seeing him evade the cops for like a week with like four pins in his fucking spine, also very impressive.

Never ditched the murder weapon.

No.

He was just walking around with a backpack, with the manifesto in the backpack, with the murder weapon, with with the extremely cool murder weapon i think he was trying to get caught at that point he was like what the fuck is going on why haven't they caught me i i sort of that's kind of my thought too uh i will say uh as somebody who uh who has dealt who's who a has dealt with united health care uh numerous times um

yeah i i i uh can't say i'm entirely sympathetic to brian thompson uh he was a ghoul and uh

uh the other thing is my dad spent uh his his legal career doing

bankruptcy law, Social Security and disability law, and

spent

a lot of his time,

especially in the pre-ACA days,

arguing with judges over whether or not medical debt

was real.

People go bankrupt over that.

Yeah, routinely and in a way that like nowhere else in the world.

I think it's 64% of American bankruptcies are medical debt, but I could be wrong on that.

The industry at this point, you know, now that people are living longer, now that, you know, we have more effective treatments for cancer and heart disease and stuff like that, but those treatments are very expensive.

You know, we have better treatments for chronic disease, but those are also very expensive.

More people are using more health care, and the health insurance industry is like, I think at this point, inherently unsustainable, which is why the entire business model at this point is about denying care.

I should look at some more industries that are unsustainable and consider if there are ways to make executives not want to work in them anymore.

Are you talking about, say,

the

oil and gas?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just, you know, I just chiefly, but like, there's not a shortlist, right?

There's a lot of

stuff to go around.

There's a lot of verbs that begin with D.

You know,

it's fine.

The thing is, right, and the thing that's been troubling me about this, the only thing that's been troubling me about this is he wrote on the shell casings, like deny, defund,

fucking.

Defend depose.

Yeah, right, which is like tactics that the insurance industry uses to avoid paying out claims.

My question is, knowing that he had a magazine depth of like, you know, like seven rounds.

Did he write anything on the others?

And they just were like, you know, was he trying to make that point specifically?

What would have happened if he had like missed one and just hit him with the defend you know like actually i would i would like to have known what was written on the other casings yeah you're just like really down into the dregs you've got a dictionary open to d e and you're just like what the else did they do

yeah you could do delay that's another one did destroy i guess that's pretty good um um defenestrate defenestrate defenestrate

i feel like that doesn't hit unless you actively defenestrate the guy right I do like the idea of some bumbling New York City cop with his thumb up his ass being like, yo, boss, this one says Defen Eastrat.

What's that mean?

As Brian Thompson goes crashing through a window.

Well, it's obviously it's a dude's name.

You're looking for an Italian dude, as this was Defenestrate.

Defenestrate, yes.

This one says Fred Gile.

That must be Italian.

Yeah.

But yeah, so no, I mean, the thing is, this guy's ideology, I was hoping for a while

while he was ahead of the cops that he was going to turn out to be the same kind of communist as I am.

Right.

And obviously that's never going to happen.

What's interesting about this guy is, in terms of like radicalization, is that he seems like a completely normal, like kind of like center-right bro type.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's like a business success guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Based on his social media, he was like.

A little bit of like Jordan Peterson, maybe, but like nothing, you know, you know, nothing even really extreme by today's standards, depressing as that is.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, the first thing I saw, oh, he made this post about trad architecture.

And it's like, you know, after he does, he put together the manifesto pretty good because it's basically an elevator pitch.

Maybe we need these business success guys to take on the mantle of

radical politics, I suppose.

You know?

Yeah, I mean, I'll say this.

They do a better job writing manifestos than your kind of like Nazi type cranks who always have like a kind of like 80-page PDF with like, you know, sources to all their favorite columnists and shit.

Whereas this guy is just like three bullet points, you know?

Yeah, it's like, what, three, three bullets?

Yeah, that's always what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Guys like Steph fucking Curry out there, dude.

Yeah.

And

no collateral damage as well.

I mean,

what else can you say?

I feel like this is,

I mean, obviously the backlash to this is that like CEOs are going to invest even more in bodyguards and like armored cars and shit like that.

But there's something they're already doing.

Yes.

They're not starting fucking gun control.

Yeah, I mean, possibly.

I just, I really think that the like.

He printed this weapon.

So that cat, that, that's, uh, that, that horse has left the barn.

I I think the thing that really struck me was the kind of

across the political spectrum from left to right, there was a pretty broad lack of sympathy with the CEO.

Um, yeah,

because like almost everybody in the US has some experience with health insurance companies, and it's always all like always a negative one.

You're molten fucking.

Yeah, because healthcare should be a right.

It shouldn't be a like a commercial good, and it shouldn't be something you have to ensure.

Well, you know, we tried reforming it through the market and we tried reforming it through the market and we tried reforming it through the market.

Then there was this old Jewish guy who said maybe we should nationalize it and he was beaten to a pulp and then that happened a second time.

And then

we tried reforming it through the market and that still didn't work.

So

here is a third route.

Yeah, I mean, if you want to take the kind of lived position that what happened was bad, right?

Fine.

But in that case, you still have to concede that it's something that happened because every other safety valve was shut off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is this is this is the this is the boiler explosion in process.

I mean, one thing I will say is because this is still like sub UK, I know you don't have laws like that in the US because you don't care about trial processes, but like we don't legally know that this is the guy, right?

And I, for one, personally, would like to say I'm sure it's not.

In fact, I'm pretty certain I saw this guy in the UK at the time of the killing,

like thousands of miles away.

And, you know,

obviously known personally, close friends, he would never be involved in a thing like this.

And, you know, I just, you know, I think anything that we can do to just reinforce his innocence on a legal basis until the trial is concluded is to the good, you know?

Oh, yeah.

I don't even know where we've got the photo of this guy up here.

You know, he's just some guy.

He's just a very handsome man.

It's not even the same jacket, you know?

Yeah.

Eyebrows completely different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure I saw him down at the down at the Wawa on the day of.

So, yeah, I don't know.

I think I saw him in 711.

Yeah.

Just kind of taking in principle.

He's going to go to a lot of convenience stores.

He's a fan.

Just taking the logic of shoplifts

a step further to say that if you see someone murder the CEO of a health insurance company, no, you didn't.

This is going to get us.

This is going to go.

This is going to get us worse from the algorithm than the Air Marshall episode.

It's probably fine.

Listen,

people have been waiting to hear about what we think about this.

I think it's pretty obvious what we think about this.

I don't think anyone's going to be surprised

or scandalized, but

I think we would be doing our listeners a disservice if we didn't lay cards on the table here about this being

like good.

Yeah, yeah, this is uh, this is uh, this is the reality of when, you know, this industry has been so out of control for so long and so directly damaging to people's lives.

Right.

Um, if you make peaceful change impossible, and I've been quiet through this one, but I've, you know, the thing that I see this is, is this a bit of a canary in the coal mine.

And we've talked about, you know, we've talked extensively in various places and lots of discussion about CEOs kind of

putting the barricades up even higher.

But sorry, guys, it won't work.

But this is just a hint of what happens.

Given that liberal democracy is essentially failing as a process by which people are represented, this is kind of the like the way to avoid this happening more is to make

is to actually start doing things as governments, you know,

making people's lives actually better rather than just, yeah, this is the inevitable outcome, folks.

So hi there, all liberal politicians.

If you want this to not happen, then maybe start doing some things that make individual people's lives better.

Just a just a tip healthcare housing education transportation yes

god if only

no but another news uh

there we go

speaking of speaking of bad things happening to bad people um the secure starmer oh no no it's not

it's it's another authoritarian you're gonna have to get your you're gonna have to get your eyes checked and guess who can check them for you

Yeah, no,

it's another authoritarian leader sort of widely despised by his population

Yeah, so so it turns out that like um

uh invading Ukraine in a you know year-plus three-day special military operation really degrades your capacity to to prop up your friends in uh the Middle East, uh, which is something that the Russia has just found out.

Uh, Iran also is like reeling from like strike on Hezbollah.

And so consequently,

this has led to the fall of Assad in Syria, which good fucking riddance.

Yeah, I'm glad I never

fuck off.

Glad I never volunteered an opinion on this before, because I probably would have gone with a stupid contrarian one.

Yeah, I mean, I did back in back in the day, because I remember when a lot of the like online left and fucking Charpo Trap House on Down was very much into the idea of like, oh, this is kind of like, okay, he's not great, but whatever you feel about him, you know, it's like an anti-imperialist thing.

And, you know, what are you a big fan of NATO?

And it's like, no, if you look at the shit that this guy was doing, you know,

it's like the fact that he was doing it in a camp that is opposite to like, you know, the US or the UK's or whatever doesn't mean it's a good or acceptable thing to be doing.

When you're pulling people out of like torture prisons, you're like, well, fuck this guy.

You know, like, I'm not going to spend any any time burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials because he doesn't fucking have any.

Other people can be bad too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think there was, there was a lot of like, I remember a lot of jokes.

I fuck, I probably did a couple about like, you know, the white helmets or whatever the fuck else because I was listening to Radio War Nerd and convincing myself that Rania Kalek was like a worthwhile person to listen to on any of this shit.

And I just, it's, it's like,

I think as, you know, I'm deeply embarrassed by that now.

And as time's gone on, I'm just kind of like in this situation where, as kind of skeptical as I am, I think for good reasons about the new guys who are in charge of LHD.

Yeah, the new guys seem a little bit sketchy.

Yeah.

Wackage.

Yeah, especially since in the south, the new guys are Israel, apparently.

Yeah, and

Israel has like grabbed some more of Syria.

Turkey is bombing the Kurds.

It's like, it's a mess, but it's still all preferable to just Assadism forever, right?

And that's something that's been sort of like an unresolved question for well over a decade at this point, because Assad's always kind of like

pitch to people was, well, I'm the granter of, you know, security and like apre moi la deluge.

And I hope that that's not the case.

You know, I hope that as chaotic as it is, as like bad as it is, that I hope it doesn't get worse.

But also, you know, that's the same logic that every dictator's ever used.

And it's not enough.

It's a moment of of change, a moment of potential,

you know, potential escape trajectory, potential opportunity, potential hope.

There are an awful lot of very happy people in Syria, in Damascus.

There was a lot of very happy people

with this happening.

And that stands for something, right?

There's a moment that they can capture.

I don't know.

We wait and see.

There was an immediate coziness with the West when it happened.

But frankly, I can kind of understand why.

I can kind of understand that you're kind of like, well, you know, let's not burn all our our bridges now.

Let's, so I don't know.

I think this is one worry, you know, what's a good idea for all of us here is to let Syria get on with it for a little bit and do our best not to fuck around with it.

That feels from a geopolitics perspective.

Let's just keep, let's, yeah.

Or actually, what might be more helpful is to tell Turkey and Israel to do one.

Yeah,

I mean, it'd be nice to be able to, you know, tell Israel to do anything, but, you know, well, quite.

Here we are.

Well, again, it's more genocide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is, is, it is sort of like inadvertently or like, you know,

a huge, another huge win for Israel, right?

Which has been continually rewarded for everything that it's done, including the genocide.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Yeah.

I look forward to them reaching the cliff edge, but it doesn't feel like it's coming anytime soon.

And you know what?

The way the world works, sometimes the bad guys never reach the cliff edge, and they're just fine.

Yeah, I mean, even with Assad, right, like he is, he's like, you know, out of Syria, but he's got asylum in Russia.

So he's just going to be like, you know, chilling in Moscow, which is

like

kooky family members that he abandoned got out okay.

So like everyone seems to have got out.

Like, was there like some cousin or something that escaped that he doesn't like that escaped in a military helicopter?

Oh, God, probably, yeah.

I think his brother's in Iraq right now, supposedly.

It's a massive.

He just walked out.

Yeah.

I mean, it reminds me a bit of the fall of Afghanistan, where all of the like sort of like ISAF-aligned warlords were just fleeing the country, leaving convoys of trucks behind them, packed full of ill-gotten gains, you know?

I mean, listen, regardless of

camp, regardless of political block, I'm never going to be that sad to see people going through their former leader's

gold-plated study and like tearing shit off the walls.

Hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So yeah, we'll see.

I'll see what's that happens.

Yeah, too early to say I feel, you know,

as the line goes, condemned to hope, right?

Yeah,

let's hope this is a nicer al-Qaeda.

But

we saved the most important news for last year.

Oh, of course.

All right, so it's the 2024 Hess truck.

What do we think?

Go off, King.

I like this.

I like this.

Yeah,

it's much better than last year's, which, if you remember, was actually.

The Fascism Mobile, yeah.

It was the fascism mobile.

It had like a heavily armored police car and a heavily armored truck to bring it around in.

This is, we have the fire truck,

souped up fire chief car.

It's like a DeLorean Mustang kind of had a little baby there.

I like that.

That's very nice.

This just screams, I didn't have to license this from Ford.

Shut up.

Yeah,

the truck in particular, I like as a kind of like, it really, they've been reading someone at Hess has been reading all those Yimby guy Twitter threads that are like American fire trucks are too big.

We got to have smaller ones like everyone else because they've kind of compacted that

I think the car can fit in the back of the truck.

I mean that's usually I mean yeah

okay I mean I don't know about the motorcycle but apparently it has wheelie action wheelie action stuff so they can fully lie this is like a full Italian job sort of arrangement going on here.

Did you buy this Ruz or no no I'm just

reviewing the Hess truck as we, as for some reason, we do every year.

It's tradition, you know?

It's traditional 99 plus tax.

Suck my dick, bro.

Look, the Hess truck is expensive.

It's always been expensive.

I know.

Okay, so the motorcycle does actually go in the truck on the side.

You see that little does the rider come off?

Is it just like attached to the side?

Okay.

Yes, there's the door.

I'm on the 60th anniversary page.

Oh, yeah, I'm looking at it.

This is apparently already sold out.

Otherwise, I would have the various statistics about it.

That's a handsome.

43 lights.

It's a handsome red color.

I will say that.

43 lights.

That's a lot of lights.

Yeah.

How many lights?

43.

43 lights.

That's just a lot of trucks.

I think it's going to be 60 for the 60th anniversary, but like, you know.

You add one light each year.

Yeah.

It's just, I mean, you start with like one like beacon light and you just go from there, you know?

Well, I think the first test truck didn't have any lights at all

no it didn't start from zero the second one was a boat for some reason wow

it was the hess voyager yeah uh a boat the truck of the sea yeah

this is nothing this is absolutely nothing what i don't understand is why they they went they they stopped making like they just started making fire trucks uh well when my parents used to buy me the hess truck every year it was like a tow truck and then it was like uh yeah they had i can't remember the rest yeah it was an animal.

It's like this is the mostly white and green as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's what I'm saying, dude.

It's kind of like this is the most respected genre of truck in America because everybody loves sci-fi's as apart from those Yemby guys who are like, I want to put them in like a smaller truck and like lay off half of them.

So, like, I, yeah,

this is like the most, this is like patriotic truck, you know?

They did do a dump truck in 2017.

I feel like a dump truck is moderately patriotic, but like a fire truck is more patriotic than a dump truck.

I do like the original like

Steven Spielberg dual era like truck.

That is quite nice.

I am like a tractor trailer.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

The big Mac truck, yeah.

Oh, no, that's how Maximum Overdrive started.

I mean, I do have a problem with this in that with the livery, it is kind of normalizing a creeping kind of like fire privatization.

This looks like the private fire brigade of HASS

because of the branding.

There's no kind of like municipal link there, you know.

One of those private fire brigades that like big chemical plants have.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, these guys are all wearing like six layers of hazmat suit and they're

yeah, these guys are about to go fight the nastiest fire you can imagine.

Yeah, that's how they got the DeLorean Mustang for the chief, you know.

Yeah, municipal fire departments.

Shit, I mean, they can barely even pay people.

Most of them are volunteers.

So, yeah.

I will walk directly into the hydrogen fluoride cloud.

I'll do that.

Doing sick burnouts in my DeLorean Mustang in a cloud of HF.

I just

melt, and my skeleton falls out of the door of the car

when the smoke clears.

I'm just a thin soup in the bottom of the fucking mat.

I should have said it to recirculate.

You think that's bad?

The bike guy's having a worse time.

Oh, my God.

He's got an air tank on his back.

That's true.

That is true.

Yeah.

But no visible helmets.

That's just a regular bike helmet.

So, like, I'm thinking

about that.

I think he's doing right.

I'm just tracing down through years.

So, year of our birth, Nova.

1990 motherfucking one.

1990 motherfucking one.

There appears to be a Lotus Elan as the accompanying vehicle with the

way for anybody who doesn't know Liam without any words.

Liam just very politely dropped in the link to all of the historic hess trucks and all of us obviously opened it and have been tracing up and down whilst recording a podcast.

It's just a little peek behind the curtain, everyone there.

Yeah, inside baseball, which is just Roz, you didn't open the link, did you?

No, I did open the link.

Oh, good.

Just now.

Okay.

I'm looking at all the Hess trucks.

Oh, it was a Hess monster truck.

We're never going to get through this.

Oh, man.

Actually, it was a Hess Space Shuttle truck.

I know.

I know.

I think I had.

No, wait.

I had the one I can remember having is 95.

No, I had 99.

I had the space shuttle truck.

I had 95, and I didn't have 97 or 98, and I had 2001.

I remember the helicopter.

I like my plane in 2001.

I like the Hess Chinook.

I like 1993, the Crown Vik type.

There was

a bago.

1980.

The 93 one,

it's like a cop car, but it still says Hess gasoline on the side.

And it's like that, that kind of like speaks to the like, you know, the Bush era liberalism thing of being like, it's all about oil, man, when you get pulled over for drunk driving.

That fully like hits that.

It's like, yeah, of course.

It's about oil.

I'm trying to figure out what Hess truck I had.

It might have been the the helicopter one in 95.

I don't know.

I was shit talking.

I don't have an F-35.

I was shit-talking the boat, but you know what?

As someone who spent a lot of my time as a kid playing with Lego and using the two by four blocks I had to

create boats that famously aren't square.

I actually am a big fan of the 1990s, the 1966 tanker.

I think that's actually very nice.

Your modern Lego boat uses a one-piece molded plastic.

That's bullshit.

That is bullshit.

That's absolute bullshit.

How do you know how to make a nice hull when you kind of grid it?

Oh, it's, you know, I've made some people.

You feel like they floated in the bathtub, though.

Yeah, that's true.

And then you lost a bunch of pieces down the drain at the end of the day.

Yeah.

I know you can buy a drain when you go model the endurance, right?

I know that you could buy a Lego model of a Concorde.

Funny story.

I was in a stage, I was in the airport at Luton, and I was going, you know what?

When I get back, on the flight back from Luton,

I might buy this Concorde.

Unfortunately, I was in Serbia seeing family unfortunately that trip is when i was told i was uh suspended with pay um and i decided that buying a concorde maybe wasn't a good use of my limited funds at that point so it's like first things up

two pieces of news

look at this concorde

this piece of news is really good uh we we own this now

i i am struggling through building 9-11.

I know that that sentence doesn't make sense, but I have a Lego 9-11.

Not the Twin towers collapsing the car uh oh i see okay right okay i i was genuinely i bought i bought the lego 911 i i picture i pictured you just kind of like comes with the exclusive muhammad ata minifigure

just turning around to put another piece on my south tower diorama is it just like yeah

It comes with the George W.

Bush one, too.

And I sold him a little book upside down.

Just like opening the booklets, and I'm like, why are there a bunch of C4s in here?

Okay, hogs, get on Lego Ideas, make it happen.

How to get banned from Lego ideas in one easy stack.

These and other great Christmas gift ideas here on There's Your Problem podcast.

Oh, beautiful.

Right, let's crack on.

Let's do it.

Let's do the show.

That was the goddamn news.

48 minutes in, baby.

Oh, Christ.

Is it really?

We'll cut most of it.

No, we won't.

No, we won't.

I will say that we'll cut most of it, and that way people aren't allowed to get mad at me for it being long.

Oh, there you go.

All right.

We have to ask a question.

What is a parade?

Marching up and down the square.

Yes.

Yes.

You're in high school, and you play the cymbals.

It's in high school, and you've been invited to guest in an okay go video.

The York, Pennsylvania Halloween parade, and then

you want to kiss off the entire three and a half miles.

It's fun.

You make a whole bunch of nice uniforms, and then you want to show them off.

You can, other uses of parades, you can celebrate gay rights, for instance.

Hells yeah.

You could do like a carnival, you know, if you're in a kind of a place that does those, like Mardi Gras.

You can celebrate the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism.

Yep.

As I do at every Mardi Gras.

I'm on the like, oh, what's the fucking bullshit, like, NASBA?

The American Communist Party.

I'm on the American Communist Party Mardi Gras crew.

We've got to float with the big, like, polygonal

Lincoln heads.

That would be so fucking grim.

When it's throwing beads at anybody, because that's bourgeois degeneracy.

Exactly.

You can parade four trains in the same direction southwards on the East Coast mainline.

That one really rare time that I think I've shown in a picture on the

Great Heck episode years ago.

You can parade TGVs as SNCFs.

TGVs, yeah.

Yes.

Yep.

You have a military parade.

You bring a bunch of tanks out and destroy the pavement.

Yeah,

you can have an

answer.

You can do that.

I actually walked out into one of those ones.

I was in central London.

I don't remember what it was.

Like the, I don't know, Queen's birthday or something.

One of the Queen's birthdays that she used to have.

She had like

the year, and I never got which one was the real one.

Yeah.

And I was walking down central London and got...

uh like a fly past got like overflown by a bunch of uh like typhoons and f-35s and i was just like oh um so yeah you could you could do that you can do any number of things you can have a marshal for a parade which is when you give someone a sash um and they like lead the the thing so that what is the essence you make a bunch of shit all go in the same direction that shit can be anything it's there so you can show off your stuff and your guys yep it did yeah it's you know uh

just a fun activity you have a victory parade you could have a mummers parade you could have all kinds of parades

um what itself first attested 1650s as a show of bravado oh

definitely got a lot of that

but in terms of what we now know as the Thanksgiving parade or Thanksgiving Day parade, it started as a Christmas parade at none other than Gimbal's department store.

We had it first, Dickheads.

Yeah, Gimbal Brothers Department Store in Philadelphia.

It's not the first department store.

The first department store was Le Bon Marché in Paris in like fucking.

Yeah, but this was the first one with the parade.

Okay, sure.

Fine.

Arist DeBussico did not have a parade.

He did invent shopping, though.

Yeah, they did invent shopping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a very nice streetcar there that we're obviously not going to talk about about at all.

I do, however, want to talk about, and I know we're about to, but it's on the screen and therefore appalling my eyes.

What's this like carry-on film motherfucker doing in the old-timey car on two wheels?

Top gears.

I'll get to that in one second.

Oh, my God.

Okay, right.

Everyone, just hold, just get excited about that.

Like edge of seat shit.

What's going on?

So in Philly, we had it first, the Gimbals Thanksgiving Day parade in 1920.

There were a bunch of marching bands.

There were people doing stunts in the streets in little cars.

There were horrible paper-mâché grotesques you can see down here.

Horrible.

Amazing performance

right on Market Street.

One of the funny things about this, as far as I can tell from the photographs, they did not shut down the street for the parade.

No barriers.

I have another question.

Wasn't this right in the middle?

Wasn't this right in the middle of Spanish flu too, 1920?

Probably.

You can feel better about your like, you know, polio by sort of like having your iron lung wheeled to the no safety barriers,

like driving on two wheels bullshit, papier mache situation.

Can you imagine being the guy just like one, you're like in the Model T Ford behind that guy, just like a couple of car lengths, just in traffic.

You're trying to get to his line.

Trying to dodge this guy and the streetcars.

The finale of the parade involves Santa Claus climbing a fire department ladder truck directly to the eighth floor toy department of the department store.

Okay, that's a pretty cool bit.

I will tell you.

And therein began the tradition of people climbing up poles in the street in Philadelphia.

I think that started earlier.

Oh my God.

Yeah, maybe it did.

I don't know.

I was trying to find a wiki for

the Thanksgiving Day parade, and I stumbled upon a future episode, in addition to the future episode mentioned in the slide, in which Cal and Stanford just killed each other and 23 people died.

Huh.

We're going to have to what about that at some point?

Yes.

Continue.

Now, this department store is notable because it's the founder's son, Frederick A.

Gimbal, personally lobbied Congress to move Thanksgiving back a week to make more time for Christmas shopping.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about Gimbal is that he was really kind of a fixed point.

A lot of other stuff kind of like wobbled around him.

Yes.

You know, this, this, but the Thanksgiving Day parade was one of the first attempts to do, you know, really, really encouraged people to come buy toys at the department store.

This is at 9th and Market, which is now the Disney hole, which is a future episode.

The what?

The Disney Hole?

The Disney Hole.

The Disney Hole.

The Disney Hole.

The Disney Hole.

Don't explain.

Don't explain measuring like one half of the 9-11 memorial, but it's got like, instead of the fountain, it's just got like a pair of Mickey Mouse's ears.

Just

actually pretty close, but we'll get to that.

I was visualizing something scribbled on the inside of a cubicle, the Disney hole, and then applying an arrow to a hole.

Yeah, the entire block of buildings here was demolished, and later Disney came and were like, We're going to do a new urban Disneyland experience.

And then they dug out a foundation and then they abandoned the site.

Disneyland.

Someone

filled it up with dirt and put a parking lot on it.

And

yeah, the parking lot is just sinking now.

So less than 9-11 Memorial, more ground zero.

Yes.

Incredible.

Heading towards Ground Minus one at this point, by the show

why do they call it ground zero when it's clearly at a basement level yeah yeah exactly so this is picked up by a few other department stores most notably macy's in new york city um i've heard of them yeah so and not macy's first marathon of mirth were floats based on nursery rhyme stories the most elaborate of which featured santa claus riding his sleigh on a mountain of ice and snow filling the space between the floats were tumbling clowns, bareback riders, freaks, cowboys, and girls, other merry makers.

Live animals from the Central Park Zoo were brought in to create an impromptu circus featuring lions, monkeys, and camels.

Walter F.

Doner, a ringmaster turned assistant superintendent of delivery at Macy's, organized a circus division of the parade that included 35 clowns refereeing a wrestling match between two grizzly bears in an open cage.

You are John Macy or whoever the fucking you're just handed a telegram that just says grizzly bear has eaten cowgirl.

I was like, ah, accept, acceptable loss.

When you say cowboys and girls, I was like, cowboys and girls, as in that just had girls, just like girls and cowgirls.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, before

just like, check this shit out, women, women, wow,

I'm a little depressed by the inclusion of the freaks as well.

Like, yeah.

You mean that?

I guess so.

Just the podcast float and the Macy's Day parade.

It's just all three of us like astronauts in the back of a limo getting a ticker tape parade, but just waving.

That was directly.

I would hate to get a ticker tape parade, right?

Because you're never getting that shit out of your clothes or hair.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like,

you know, I don't care if I've been to the moon.

Like, why would you want me to do that?

Just dump a bunch of shit on me, like a bunch of shit paper.

It's like, thanks, cheers, thank you.

All right,

this started at 145th Street and Conjunct Avenue.

New York celebration where we dump a bunch of office garbage on you.

It's

a process of great art.

Like, that was a pack of staples, dude.

What do you mean?

Just throwing staplers at you from the 60th floor.

Yet another way in which New York copies us.

We did it first.

Tossing a box of batteries out, whole rams of printer paper.

Just playing Neil Armstrong in the side of the head with a AAA battery.

Throw an office chair.

Throw a desk.

You'll see a fax machine go down and you're like, well, I guess there's not going to be an Apollo 14.

Big reel-to-reel computer bank.

oh no and like three million dollar three megabyte hard drive the size of a storage closet 20 20 pound mechanical adding machine

one of one of the girls who does the spreadsheets you just throw her out

back to defenestration again yeah oh yeah well yeah so this parade started at 145th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem, and it ended six miles later at the Macy's Herald Square store.

There were floats, bands, and borrowed zoo animals, concluding with, as always, Santa Claus.

A quarter of a million people turned out to watch the parade because it was 1924 and no one had social media yet.

Yeah, it was fuck all to do.

That's nothing to do.

A million thrills.

A million laughs, a million thrills.

But this is.

Is 1924 still prohibition times?

Because that would explain a few things.

Also, Also, everyone was sober.

Oh, my God.

No, everyone was drunk, but they had to lie about it.

And drunk off of the most illicit, like, sawdust-filled great alcohol.

There's definitely, definitely a riot juice.

Strong chance of blindness.

That's where lots of coffee got like

lemon peels and shit, and you're just like.

Yeah, that's great.

This actually wound up replacing the previous festivities, which was the rag-a-muffin parade, where kids trick-or-treated dressed as beggars.

That became very unpopular during the Depression.

So people, you know, went to watch it.

Still staging it during the Depression, and you're like, listen, listen, I know it's sensitive, right?

But like,

it's an old tradition, it's fine.

And you just have a bunch of kids dressed like Charlie Chaplin.

Enough of your DEI walk crew parade.

You can't, you can't even, these days, you can't even dress as Charlie Chaplin's beloved tramp character merely because people are starving.

This route was later shortened to 110th and Amsterdam Avenue in the 30s for reasons we'll get into.

After World War II, when the parade was suspended for wartime material rationing, it was shortened to

77th and Central Park West.

She's a sort of hoo-hoo.

What the fuck is a mahoohoo?

I was asking that, yeah.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just reading through.

You're going to have to go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade to see the mahoohoo because I don't know what it is.

I know a wiki that might answer that question.

Parade foamers?

No.

Like, if you are a parade foamer, like, first of all, thank you for your service.

Second of all, what the fuck is a mohuhu?

All right, we got to know what the mohoohoo is.

Answers in the comments, folks.

Yeah, I'm gonna look into this very strongly in my own time.

So, here's a guy.

A rhinoceros.

Yeah.

That's a rhinoceros.

I gotta tell you, yeah, the guy, the balloon top right feels like it's targeting.

Oh, God.

I just realized targeting.

It does.

I know

it's not all about me, but that just feels like, you know, I don't know.

There are lists of things.

There are list of things that that's representing at the time.

Can I say one thing, which is that this is reflective of a time before Mickey Mouse dominance, when the most recognizable cartoon character in America Americans was Felix the Cat, someone no one has ever thought about since?

I do like that this guy said bomb disposal guys.

It's basically,

oh god, what's his, who is the doctor that the Mossad kidnapped?

Oh, God.

You're testing.

Eichmann, Eichmann, Eichmann.

I didn't go to Adolf Eichmann when you said doctor is the problem.

I got him confused with Meghan.

No, no, no, no, no.

He was was a doctor, right?

I think, but like chiefly known for other work, you know, right, right, of course.

I just, I'm seeing born in Guatemala, family moved back to Germany, and I'm just thinking, oh, he reversed Eichmann himself, which may explain the top rate balloon.

Tony Sarg.

Tony Sarg was born in Guatemala in 1880.

His family moved back to Germany in 1887.

He went to a military academy, commissioned in as a lieutenant.

And because he possessed charisma and a sense of humor.

Makes a terrible lieutenant.

Yeah, he was the center of attention at parties.

He was a well-known practical joker, generally an all-around good guy.

He was extremely unpopular in the German officer corps.

Yeah, dude.

I mean, I'm looking at him right now, and he doesn't have a bunch of like fucking fencing scars.

I'm sorry, I said that he was a reverse Eichman.

My bad.

Wouldn't it be a better thing to be a reverse Eichman?

Yeah, yeah.

If you had to be an Eichmann in either direction,

the less evil one.

one so he resigned his commission and moved to the uk in 1905 he married bertha eleanor mcgowan of cincinnati in 1909 he moved to cincinnati in 1914 presumably in anticipation of the subway uh but then a war broke out right so he finally wound up in new york city in 1915.

um

Sark had inherited a whole bunch of puppets from his grandparents and thus developed the fascination with puppetry.

Just anti-Semitic puppets.

Yeah, it's just like, sorry, we're dead.

Please take good care of our collection of racist puppets.

This feels like, I know that you get some, some, I hate to single out my mother here, who can sometimes look like what a Nazi character of a Jewish person looks like.

And I love my mother.

This is, this balloon is pushing it.

Jesus Christ.

He learned from the best in Britain, sort of studied their means of puppetry.

Elderly anti-Semites in Britain.

Yeah.

Well, you know,

someone's got it.

We rounded up the Jews and put them in a castle and burned the castle down.

So

we know what we're doing in this country.

Yeah, this is the worst, the worst of the worst.

Learn it here.

What place?

The Germans hadn't perfected anti-Semitism yet.

That was still the domain of the French, I think.

I think so.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's like the presidency of the UN Security Council.

It rotates between countries, you know?

He was commissioned to make a starfront display in 1917 and continued to have a working relationship with Macy's after that fact.

And Macy's started to have a problem with their parade.

The zoo animals got really tired and ornery on their six-mile death march, and that meant they started scaring the kids.

Yeah, they get eating cowgirls for sustenance, but like

you're marching them from Harlem to like lower Manhattan.

And, you know, the streets are terrible.

They're constantly getting like staplers thrown at them.

You're calling them shit like Maboohoos.

You can't work out in these conditions.

Yeah.

You got like

paperweights,

papers,

filing cabinets.

Hitting a rhinoceros with a filing cabinet feels like an uneven fight against the filing cabinet.

There's not many things you can say that for.

Yeah.

My favorite thing about

hippopotami?

is that they're herbivores and they kill you basically for fun.

Yeah.

For fun, yeah.

Yeah.

Just like, all right, right, that's enough of this human.

I've got

no longer.

I'm sick of this guy.

Yeah, he talks about them being the most dangerous animal in the continent of Africa.

It's apparently true.

It's not a fake thing.

It is a thing.

Oh, yeah.

They'll charge you.

Yeah.

They'll just murder you for no reason.

He slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch a face as God, but it's just an eight-year-old getting gored to death by a hippo.

Dropping a filing cabinet vertically and it getting impaled on a rhinoceros horn.

It's like...

These things have been walking for like hours.

They're grouchy, they're angry, they're pissed off.

At that point, if I'm already a murderer, a murderer,

then I'm being a grouchy murderer before

a myrbivore.

I was trying to go there and then realized

she didn't have the chops.

Sharks,

crowd, yeah.

Oh, man, fucking rolls.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, first you, first you get poked by the anti-Semitic Hitler balloon and then you get thorned by a rhino.

Well, no, the anti-Semitic balloon replaced

animals.

It's called harm reduction.

The anti-Semitic balloon is a historically progressive force.

Oh, God.

Sarg had just the idea in 1928.

He and his protege, Bill with one L Baird, wanted to do something big for the parade.

Yeah, people go with one out of ourselves.

We're going to do big puppets.

We're going to do really big puppets.

And that gave us the character balloon.

Here's one of the first ones.

It's Felix the Cat.

I like Felix the Cat.

I'm a fan.

And I feel like he's been unfairly marginalized by Disney.

You know, like, who even owns Felix the Cat?

Nobody.

I think he's public domain.

Yeah, he was not a Disney property to start out with.

I don't know if he was ever a Disney property.

No, he's just like a cat.

Give him our mostly unproblematic fave.

Shout out to Felix the Cat.

So he put together some massive balloons.

Some of these, the original ones, are very small because they were filled with oxygen.

But once they figured out, oh, you could fill it with helium, they got really, really big.

Yeah, they could be

oxygen.

Everyone smokes.

That feels small.

Weirdly, Felix the Cat was sold to DreamWorks in 2014.

But the early versions, like this one here, are public domain.

So we can make this guy right here the official mascot cartoon character of Well, There's Your Problem.

Oh, hell yeah.

Nice.

Let's go.

So

these were massive balloons.

The original ones, again, filled with oxygen.

Later, they were filled with helium.

Some of them were 120 feet long.

Some of them were 25 feet high.

So on and so forth.

These were all built by the Goodyear Rubber Company.

Of course, they were.

And they were.

Shout out to Mia Mulder.

Yeah.

The Goombi.

Stop it.

Stop it.

I said, stop it.

This was an instant and great success.

You know, the 1929

parade was the first one where they used helium balloons.

We have some illustrations by the man of the antique helium balloon that just says the stock market's going to go up forever.

Yeah.

Just a stonks guy, but 1928.

The hubris parade.

Yeah.

You're in Wolfram.

You see the massive stonks guy go past your window.

And you're just like,

yes, feeling good about the american century

wait why why are 50 of them um animals that look sad that have got a star a red star attached what's what oh good question i that's probably the macy star oh okay okay i was i was looking at the baby on the third of the of the of the of this kind of thing and i was thinking it's like

target marker it's unsettling yeah yeah well also they've got the stretchy dog from toy story and the one before so that's some pixar foreshadowing no that's Valdi, the mascot of the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Oh, golly.

I mean, there's a lot going on there.

There's a train, you know?

Oh, yeah.

I'm not liking the character.

There's a lot of pointy-nose characters that

rightly, I believe, Liam is looking at

once again.

And like, clearly, they have the technology to do other shapes of nose,

as you can see from.

They will do every human they represent other than Santa Claus with the strange oh my god anti-semitic santa claus is like a weirdly specific

here are some of the very early balloons in an airship hangar because they've made them out of the same stuff they just they just be drawing they just be illustrating everything like that right so funny

i i'm stuck

I'm stuck on guy being anti-Semitic to Santa Claus to be like, oh, well, he controls the supply of all the presents in the world.

Everything looks that they've all got those eyes that just everything.

Listen, if you were an animator or artist or whatever in like the 1920s and you drew

anything that didn't look like Pac-Man, they killed you.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

It was the style at the time.

The massive bags under the pig's eyes as well.

You know, he's got a severe addiction.

And all the animation at the time was like when they didn't have like elbows or knees, so they just like flop around.

I'm thinking of Olive from Popeye and just like how she moved.

Like, she just kind of flopped about the place.

I depicted you as the scandalized Macy balloon and myself as the smug pig balloon.

Oh my god.

Here, here's Sarg blowing up the elephant himself.

That's not where you blow, mate.

Quality of the rubber on these is so upsetting as well.

Like, I don't know if it's just that I haven't seen a modern one up close, but like, look at Mickey Mouse's dead, soulless eyes.

This is the first Mickey Mouse in the parade.

Wow.

What the fuck is the thing on the top?

That's

something.

No, Sarg did this as a practical joke,

which is he inflated it on the beach in Nantucket and told everyone there was a horrible sea monster on the

beach.

Everyone was wine drunk on like pure alcohol, so they believed it, presumably.

Yeah,

you're in fucking like season three of Boardwalk Empire.

You like leave your like speakeasy for the seeing daylight for the first time in three weeks, and you see this thing floating down the beach to you.

And then later it was in the parade.

Just

like we owned the rubes of Nantucket floating on a banner underneath it.

Just like this eldritch horror stuff.

No, everyone immediately got like absolutely.

Oh, I suppose everyone was just seeing people getting smeared across the road every couple of hours.

So maybe they were just kind of annoyed to the stuff.

But like, this is, this is like nightmare shit.

Well, I mean, this is prime Lovecraft times.

So it's like, it's like, this isn't horror.

Horror is when someone is like, you know, mixed race.

Yes,

yeah, yeah.

This, this makes, uh, this makes Lovecraft look like the Reverend Audrey.

And so, in the early days, at the end of the parade, when they reached the Herald Square store here, um, they would simply release the balloons.

Hell yeah, that's that's God's problem now.

Yeah,

and he's gonna meet Mickey Mouse and a fucking sea monster.

Yeah.

1928, immediately after the Stonks guy goes up to heaven, they release the sea monster in a kind of like tribute to American hubris to find and kill God.

So, yeah, when the parade reached the Herald Square store, the balloons were simply released with a $50 reward for anyone who subsequently found them and brought them back.

This led to all sorts of problems, right?

First, people would try and bring back random pieces of rubber and say, this is part of the balloon.

Give me a partial reward.

Incredible.

The second

incredible work was Daredevils.

What?

Clarence Chamberlain caught a balloon with his plane in 1931 in a stunt.

Oh my god, that's so sick.

You would never talk about anything else.

No, no, you wouldn't.

Like, I flew up in a fucking biplane and like, clotheslined the sea monster.

Yeah, I, I fucking, I fucking took out Pikachu.

I had an S-35 pilot painting Lord Pikachu.

Uh, like,

S-22 pilot, because, like,

fucking smoked Garfield.

There is no reason the Chinese spy balloon couldn't have been in Garfield form, other than copyright, I guess.

Yeah, the Chinese don't

recognize that.

Maybe they do.

I don't know.

When no Air Force base, you look up

there.

By God, is that Garfield's music?

In 1932.

Garfield trailed sensor array of cameras and shit.

In 1932, the next year, a more novice daredevil attempted the same to catch a balloon with her plane,

stalled, plummeted out of the air, nearly crashed,

managed to pull out of it at the last second.

That was hell for women's equality in the early days, you know.

Well, you know, you needed, you know,

we let women fly planes, but we don't let them vote.

Make it make sense.

Yeah, exactly.

That ended the practice of releasing the balloons.

They were simply deflated from then on.

Just like we ritually kill Felix the Cat at the entrance to Macy's.

His blood sacrifice renews the Macy's toy department success for another year.

Yes.

I'm hoping that this black and white image is just misrepresenting the colors of the balloons.

Because otherwise, an awful lot of them look a bit like...

Gollywog caricatures.

As far as racist balloons go, I will say the United Kingdom, the only country I believe, to have produced a Gollywog hot air balloon, still exists.

Price officers.

And

imagine seeing that come over the fucking horizon and realizing the nature of the country you're in.

These were mostly very, very colorful.

Oh, I bet they were.

In ways that are unspeakably offensive.

I mean, listen, I don't mind the Jew balloon, the Bajoon, bajoon, but I think it should do it in my image.

If we have any friends or listeners in charge of the balloons at Macy's, let us know what an estimate is.

I'm getting

my

balloon.

We've got Pikachu, we've got like the house from up, we've got Liam from well as you've probably got

no, it's at the uh, it's at the Philadelphia Zoo, the 6 ABC Jew balloon

with just my face projected onto it.

Yeah, get at me, Rick Williams.

Back when I worked at the zoo, I asked the director engineering there,

what happens if they lost control of the zoo balloon?

What if it got loose and he didn't have an answer?

Oh,

we're going to test their metal here.

Well, there's no zoo balloon anymore.

They got rid of the zoo balloon.

No, it's still there.

It's just gone for the season, dude.

68c was on it.

68 was six.

6APC was on it like three weeks ago.

Not three weeks ago, but like a couple months ago, they shot Adam Joseph there.

Did they?

I should clarify.

They did not shoot the weatherman with a gun.

He was just, they were shooting a segment and he was on it in the hot air balloon.

Oh, so there's a balloon at the Philadelphia Zoo you can go up in.

It's called the zoo balloon.

And it was gone for a while, but apparently it's back.

It's tethered to the ground.

You go up like five, six hundred feet and then come back back down.

I don't know what happens if they lose control of it.

It's like a balloon boy problem, you know.

But yeah, well, it would just keep going up forever.

Yeah.

So I want to

see monster.

Yeah.

I want to derail this podcast.

Derail this podcast even further.

Because this is already probably the best episode we've ever done, frankly.

We're going to have to pack it up after this, but we have a listener who emails us occasionally

who is,

as far as I know, yeah, fucking people.

She is, from what she said in her emails, a retired lawyer in her late 50s, early 60s.

So she's like a peer of my parents.

And

she sent us an email that was like, this is my feedback on the

boat, the last Fort Pendleton and SS Mercer disaster.

And she was like, oh, it was like a little too masculine for my taste.

And it was a good, honest feedback.

Wow.

Okay.

Sorry.

I'm trying.

Okay.

Hang on.

Well, I think it's actually Tom.

I think it's Tom's fault.

But she, she, I, I responded to her email because it was good honest feedback.

And

she's like, I didn't understand all the Philadelphia references.

And to you, Mary Sue, I can only apologize.

And also, I'm doubling down on the Philadelphia references.

Okay.

Yeah.

Next bonus episode after Catholicism is a cheesesteak.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

Anyway, so yeah, they stopped releasing the balloons is the point of this.

And started sacrificing them to ritualistically.

Yeah.

Have you played the Tomb Raider reboot?

It's just like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

So

for most of its history, the parade has gone from 77th and Central Park West.

That's over here.

By the way,

wait a second.

No, that's wrong.

How do I do that?

Do you wanna by the Historical Society, right?

Because that's 79th

by natural history so yeah 77th is like up here yeah yeah north is that way yeah north is north is that way yeah yeah so

77th and central park west over here by the uh natural history museum is where it starts it goes south down central park west it goes to columbus circle here which is a nasty part of the parade because there's high winds It used to go down Broadway over to God's own worst place in the world, Herald Square, where Macy's is down here.

Unspeakable evil.

You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, dude.

Yeah, I would say the worst.

Herald and dimes and times for that matter.

I'm not hearing anything good about squares in New York City.

Yeah, no, you know, you're going to feel foolish when we play New York a block off of Times Square.

And Mayor Julianis has a secretly killed.

But yeah, this is about two and a quarter miles, right?

Today,

since Broadway was pedestrianized, I believe they jog over two blocks and they go down sixth, I think.

They might go down seventh.

I'm not sure.

You know, but again,

over here, Columbus Circle, very high winds.

Over here, Times Square, also

I don't like stuff being named after Columbus.

You know, I think it should be named after

another great Italian-American.

So, you know, Mangion Square.

Oh, Manjon Square.

Luigi Mangione.

So because of these high winds, because of various things, these balloons, they have problems.

Almost hitting a perfect Trump cadence just

those balloons, they have some problems.

Okay, we're going to look into it.

We're going to look into it.

I love this one.

The terrible Turk hit an electric sign at 72nd Street and tore in half.

The terrible Turk lusts in his heart for a Chevrolet.

Yes.

1931 down here, the terrible Turk hit an electric sign at 72nd Street.

He tore in half.

Hold on, hold on, hold on a second.

The terrible Turk with the Fez.

1931, man.

Why the fuck?

Oh, I know, I know.

We do racism really good in America.

You know, maybe Eric Adams was just doing like New York City municipal reparations in his own way, you know, like granting them those contracts and stuff.

Same year, 1931, the cat that's here, just the cat, the cat, hit a telephone pole, caught fire, and burned to the ground.

No,

it looks like.

Can you imagine being an eight-year-old and watching this happen before your eyes?

Oh, the villainity.

1932, the Tomcat here is released in Harold Square, and that woman tries to catch it with her airplane and almost crashes.

Wait, so it wasn't even like a planned thing?

She was just, she was trying to like do like an emergency balloon rescue in mid-air with a plane.

Ah, I think it was planned.

Oh, my God.

I mean, she knew when the parade was happening, and there was a reward for doing it.

I guess so.

Try not to take taking out your light aircraft for a $50 reward.

Do not Zacharias Husawi the fucking Thanksgiving Day parade

like leaning over to president mckinley and being like they hit the fucking flatiron building

neither of those things chronologically related at all

1500 years off

1933 andy the alligator was torn in half at 70th street

again the the the sort of blood sacrifices that renew the kind of like uh parapsychological uh thing of the city of new york also why does it look like he's being walked by clansmen uh he probably is right i i it wasn't

three like yeah he's probably being walked by the clan

actually i bet it's like linguistically close i bet those are clowns because pointy hat white suits i'm just thinking that's that's like a like a uh what do you call that kind of clown it's not a harlequin the other kind

it's that uh the italians still have yeah a pier The kind of, yeah, that kind of clown.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm noticing

brief pause before we talk about

bad things happen to a mouse.

I quite like that Chevrolet advert.

And Liam, I think it's aiming at you.

Sweet, smooth, sassy.

That's me.

That's me.

That's me.

With this,

whatever the hell has happened to this.

Oh, God.

I don't even know what that's happening.

That's quite profound, actually.

It's like the dying goal.

It's like.

Yes, this is 1956.

Mighty Mouse deflates the collapse of

Columbus Circle.

Okay, with his one,

did not slip the surly bonds of earth, actually, quite the opposite.

But this is a photo that conveys how can a loving God know such agony.

Like, it's, it's wild, you know.

It looks like something out of the original film of Little Shop of Horrors.

It's quite frightening.

This is one of the greatest photos I've ever seen.

Like, no question.

The 20th century represented in one image.

This is the American condition, kind of.

1957.

Popeye's hat fills with water during a downpour.

The balloon tilts and spills it onto the crowd.

Oh, yeah.

Really?

I mean, water is seriously heavy.

So I'm just imagining a load of people just being like crushed to the ground by tons of waterfall.

You get hit with like a riot cannon, but it's Popeye.

It's Popeye.

Why yeah, yeah,

yeah.

And then you're just, oh, yes.

At least it wasn't a

lot of fun.

1961.

The gorgeous gobbler.

What?

That's what they used to call me.

The gorgeous gobbler's beak was punctured at the start of the route and his whole head deflated.

The only thing worth eating at Wahwah.

He completed the parade route regardless and headless.

Come on, that's where the turn comes from.

That's how they want the nose that you eat like literally like a headless turkey.

Yeah, it's where the phrase comes from, famously, of course.

1971, Snoopy was wrapped around the cab of a helium truck due to the high winds.

Good hello.

Yeah.

1975.

Snoopy was punctured by a lamppost at 73rd Street and was pulled from the lineup.

Underdog ran into a lamppost near Times Square and was also removed from the lineup.

He's got a play of race of attrition in the Vietnam War.

Jesus Christ.

Like forgotten here.

Smokey the bear's right hand was punctured by a tree at Columbus Circle and swung a leak.

Only you can.

This is the best episode we've ever seen.

The inherent humor of giant balloons is just

1982.

Bullwinkle suffers a helium leak and slowly deflates along the length of Central Park West until being retired four blocks short of Harold Square.

Almost made it.

Nope.

Oh my God.

Finally, got Muson Squirrel.

1986, Betty Boop deflates and due to high winds, only yards from the finish line.

I can relate to that.

My husband's going to be so upset.

Yeah, but that's it.

Deflating due to high winds.

Yeah, hard relate.

That's fair.

91.

Kermit collides with a tree, suffers a deflated head.

Oh my god.

That kept him moving.

Yeah,

walking him off the field like a football player with a concussion.

I really hope that someone's got like a boom box walking underneath.

It's 1991.

Someone needs a boombox just to play.

Play, it's not easy being green, but at half speed.

They take Kermit into the blue concussion tent for like they have in the NFL.

Oh, they got to take him out back like a horse, man.

This is brutal.

Oh, my God.

1993, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Okay.

Oh, God.

Oh, cool.

Why does he look so pregnant?

Finally, my Sonic Tails M-Prank fan pic is getting the attention it deserves.

They literally did inflate him, making him huge and round.

I'm like, I don't.

Handlers lose control of Sonic the Hedgehog at Columbus Circle, a notorious high-wind spot.

Sonic flew into a lamppost and caught it right in his eye, causing rapid deflation.

Oh, my, my, the inflation fetishes are good, have them.

It's not

deflation fetish?

I don't know.

When he pulled away, he took the light fixture right off, which fell and hit a police officer and then a 10-year-old girl, both of whom sustained injuries.

Ah, so we take a chance.

Years later, how did you get your NYPD like injured in the line of duty citation?

Sonic the Hedgehog dropped a light fixture on the bottom.

I'm like, this is 1993.

So the list of NYPD injuries is going to be like, you know,

all the 70s and 80s ones are like crashed own card dealing Coke out of the precinct, right?

And then the 90s ones are all like comedy shit like this.

And then it's like four pages of 9-11.

Yeah.

The balloon then fell onto the crowd where one person was overcome by helium fumes, but soon recovered.

You can do that.

One of the funniest ways to get overcome by fumes, I will say.

It's like, help.

No, I think I'm fine.

Sonic was removed from the parade, repaired, and returned in 1994 with no further incidents.

But in an age of increasing balloon size consequences for these people, they just move them on to another parade.

This was the worst accident the parade had seen so far.

In 1995, Dudley the Dragon.

I hate a stupid fucking high top.

Well, good news.

Dudley the Dragon was caught on another lamppost in Columbus Circle, whose fixture shattered.

And it showered the crowd with broken glass.

Jesus.

Dudley was caught fast to the lamppost and was removed from the parade.

Just inseparable.

Just like wrapped around the fucking thing.

Just like teams of people trying to get him off this lamppost.

The Pink Panther.

The Pink Panther collided with multiple objects.

tearing open his stomach and puncturing his eye

and completed the parade at low altitude.

Can I say

to the under-enemy radar, can I say something about

the attachment point for two of these tethers specifically that really, really, along with the collar, make it look like the Pink Panther is being pulled by nipple clamps?

No, you're not wrong.

Who's to say?

Folsom gets weirder every year.

The balloons were getting bigger and the stakes were getting higher.

And, you know, these accidents actually will get worse.

But first, we have to talk about something important, which is what is Barney the Dinosaur.

Okay, so you know what Coco Melon is now?

The kind of like

it's the thing you put on iPads if you want to destroy a child's brain in such a way that they don't bother you.

Or so I understand anyway, like a bunch of my friends are having kids.

So is this the one

where they

always go?

Is this the one where they're like, gabba, dibbid, girbid, gibbi, gibby, gibby?

I think so.

I haven't actually watched it, but as far as I understand, understand, it's the thing that puts toddlers into a kind of trance state.

I just do research that exists.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You do that, you do Elsa and Spider-Man, you do,

what's it?

There's a bunch of stuff with a bunch of needles for some reason that the kids like.

Yeah, weird, horrifying shit.

But like, anyway, exactly.

Bonnie the dinosaurs.

The chickens turn into alligators.

What?

They're different colors.

What?

Isn't that Bonnie?

Bonnie was like the 90s version of that.

Apparently, it's pure brain rot, no educational value, dancing fruits, according to my wife.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

All right.

Thanks, Ren.

Yeah, Barney the dinosaur.

He's a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

No, he fucking isn't, Barney.

He's also a war criminal because they used to use the Barney song in

Guantanamo Bay, amongst other places.

Yes.

For

on like on a loop.

So yeah, Barney is complicit with some of the like darkest crimes of the U.S.

Imperial State.

But Barney was sort of a vaguely educational, wholesome children's programming thing about a bunch of kids and the magic dinosaur.

What?

You know,

somehow now you read that sentence out loud, it rings different.

I

wish I hadn't

sort of a waste on him in a way that's obsessing to me.

Oh, he's got Kim Kardashian body.

I wasn't going to say it, but yeah, it looks like that one paper magazine cover.

Yeah,

he's a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

He's not a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Barney is a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Canonically, or what are we talking about?

Yes.

I've got a, I, I, okay, you know what?

Just carry on, bud.

Yeah,

uh, you know, when I was about nine, it was very cool to hate Barney and imagine him being killed in various violent ways.

I don't remember those rhymes on the fucking shit.

Yeah, because, like, Barney was always like very saccharine and like there was no depth to it.

And so, of course, kids were like, Yeah, I want to see, you know, it would be epic to see Barney get like beheaded by like a combine harvester or whatever.

Yeah, but you know, in real life, Barney would kill you in various violent ways because he's a T-Rex.

It's true.

But nothing personal.

Simply the nature of the T-Rex.

Nothing personal, kid.

Yeah.

As you're simply devoured by Barney the dinosaur or not putting your toys away in a timely fashion.

Yeah, kind of like the, you know, the hippopotamus or the mahuhu, you know?

And he's got jawline.

He's got a jawl that's almost as wide as David Coultard's.

It's quite, quite something.

Very, Very, very nice teeth.

He must have spent a lot of time.

David Coulthard's teeth.

He went to Turkey, yeah.

He's also got a, I think this is the set for the new version of the show.

Nice wooden bobber caboose back here.

That's lovely.

Yeah, it's very nice.

Just parked up there.

A lot of it's painted safety yellow.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway.

Safety first.

So November 27th, 1997.

Oh, God.

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Why the fuck?

Yeah,

I see some.

I see Hey Arthur there because

the Nickelodeon going on.

I hated Rugrats.

Always hated Rugrats.

Really?

I love Rugrats.

Never liked the art style.

Never liked it.

I hate this clown.

Hate these snowmen.

Yeah, the clown is giving me John Wayne Gacy vibes.

Do we see the clown Gacy?

Did we see the clown one?

Our balloon lineup.

New balloon, Arthur.

Right?

Sick.

Returning for the 10th time big bird okay returning for the 12th time

mixed feelings about big bird he's a national hero nova

big bird big bird has a complicated legacy kept us out of war

returning for the 12th time garfield uh-huh of course uh for the second time beatrix potter's peter rabbit what the hell with the brits again and the britchy yeah for the tenth time, the Pink Panther.

Chiefly notable in the form of balloon.

Yeah.

For the tenth time, the Nesquick Bunny.

For the fourth time, Barney.

Official balloon of diabetes.

Yeah.

For the fifth time, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Who was a previous like war casualty?

Yes.

Just like with a patch over one eye.

Dan Cruncher, but I want to say Sonic the Hedgehog had like a visible patch somewhere on it.

Yes.

Already a demon car.

Debuting the Rugrats.

For the fourth time.

Filing cabinets down at them and shit.

The cat in the hat.

Okay.

For the 11th time.

Spider-Man.

Yeah.

This is like old school Spider-Man.

Back when, like, you know, before any of the like alternate continuity shit where there was one Spider-Man and he fucking sucked.

Yes.

Hey, wait, wait a second.

Wait, wait a minute.

I loved Spider-Man as a kid.

I had a plastic toy that was my, my beloved.

God knows where it is now.

I think my parents stole it from me at some point, but I loved that.

Oh my God.

The animated Spider-Man?

I gotta single out Spider-Man as one of the rare few intellectual properties that has actually gotten better in the 2020s.

Not to say, you know, uncomplicated relationship with your kind of like mass media slop, but yeah.

Yeah.

I'll give you that.

I like to like when I have anyone take my 80s

Spider-Man cartoons away.

The amazing Spider-Man when it's like

Spider-Man, Spider-Man,

Spider-Man sort of thing.

That was a big fun.

I'm a man spider.

Oh,

yeah, check out my girth next.

For the first time, what the fuck is this?

Bumpei.

What the fuck is Bumpei?

Bumpei.

Bumpei.

Bumpei is right here.

That's Bumpei.

What?

He's He's a cow from Sweden.

Oh, he is.

Who changes into various things from the alphabet?

Roz, what the fuck are you talking about, babe?

What?

It's Bumpei.

It's Bumpe.

America's favorite, Bumpe.

I don't like that this rabbit has got full QAnon.

Oh, my God.

They made RFK into a balloon.

Well, because you can't vaccinate a balloon because you just puncture it.

Oh, yeah.

You just can square one.

That's it.

For the third time, Eben Bear.

Bear.

Ebon Bear.

It's a Macy's

iron-ass name.

Oh, my God.

This guy's wearing a big fur cloak is in Rift and for the first time, Petula Pig.

Right here.

Oh, the fucking

non-union Miss Piggy.

I see how it is.

Miss Piggy will not deem to be balloonified.

And frankly, I don't know.

She's like Jar Jacques Gabor.

She's not going to get out of bed for less than a million dollars, you know?

So it's the morning.

It's It's New York City.

It's cold.

And there are 40 mile an hour gusts and 20 mile per hour sustained winds.

Meanwhile, you're out there up early inflating Sonic.

Yeah.

You're putting the nipple clamps on the pink panther.

You're ready to go.

You're like, this is a normal American cultural activity I'm about to engage in.

Everybody, shut up.

It's not here, dude.

So.

Nonetheless, the nation is watching.

The show must go on because this is nationally broadcast parade.

Who is watching this nationally?

Everybody, my grandmother, also my mom who loves the Thanksgiving Day parade.

So, this isn't this isn't like this is actually like a beloved.

This isn't like a thing like the Super Bowl, where I watch it every year to see whether or not somebody banes the thing, you know, whether it gets 9-11.

Right.

No, this is a beloved cultural institution.

I'm supporting the culture.

Let's see what's less than that.

Is this to the U.S.

cultural dominance, baby?

Hey, don't get me the, don't maybe get the Pennsylvania dominance to drop out.

Is this a bit to the US?

Is this the same as like the former Austro-Hungarian Empire watching the Vienna Phil on New Year's Day morning?

Is this kind of the same level of cultural sort of sort of prescience?

Yeah, good enough.

Yeah, it sounds kind of right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They all do it.

Belgrade, they put the TV on.

It's Eurovision because Eurovision is a thing outside of...

just Eurovision.

And everyone just claps along to,

well, not Handel.

Everyone claps along to Mozart.

It's nice.

Not a thing we do in the UK because we're all hung over on New Year's Day, so we are not going to put on clapping.

New Year's Day, you go out and watch the Mummers parade, but that's only in Philly.

Yeah, and then you drink yourself sick.

Yeah, you go get ready to fire off a trash can at 9:45 in the morning.

Yeah, but I know.

Or if you're Scottish, you give yourself heart failure by running into a freezer, into the freezing cold Firth IV for no reason.

Oh, hell yeah.

Oh, Polar Plunge.

You guys do that too?

Hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, you know, me.

That's personally.

An official for Macy's is like, nah, fuck it.

We'll do it.

Send the balloons up, right?

Yeah.

It looked like the winds might be subsiding anyway.

So.

Yeah, you can just say that shit when you're the boss of Macy's.

You can just sort of say shit.

There's no like International Federation of Balloonery.

There's no one's your boss.

Like, you're just.

You're Gene Krantz and fucking Apollo 13.

You're wearing a white vest.

Literally every call for this one.

Yeah.

Things start to go wrong almost immediately.

Oh, yeah.

The first to go was first to go

the flying fish right here.

Oh, dear, one of the smaller and older balloons.

Um, an ignorable fish,

I like these fish.

Yeah, he was immediately shredded by high winds overnight.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

You make me pack bond with this fish, and then you kill him in the first scene like a red shirt just to establish the stakes.

This is so good.

Shredded by highway.

Shredded.

Just flowing down and landing on people.

Like a nuclear reactor.

We gave Flying Fish a hero's funeral.

He's with the angelfish now.

His amazing grace just blares out over the children.

There's just a bunch of balloon handlers with like solemnly bringing shreds of rubber top the parade route.

One block into the route, Sonic the Hedgehog making his triumphant return after reconstructive surgery, had his head ripped open by the wind and was retired.

How much can one hedgehog take?

This is like a tired dude.

Like, fucking Shadows thinks he's had it rough.

Getting your head torn open on a New York City lamppost in consecutive years.

The Nest Quick Bunny proved exceptionally difficult to control and wound up being significantly delayed, taking the place of Barney in the parade lineup.

Barney was slotted in behind a Westward Hoe float.

What did you call him?

That's Westward Hoe, second mentioned in the road in WCOP.

Why does Westwood Hoe have a float in the Macy's parade?

I don't know why.

Yeah, give us anything.

Have a float.

Why don't we have a float is the more important question.

So the Nest Quick Bunny struck a tree at 77th and Central Park West that ripped open his ear.

Okay, flesh wound at this point, but okay, okay.

Surviving.

Despite this, he continued the route until the deflated ear caught a stoplight at Times Square.

Handlers from the Pink Panther, which we'll talk about in a second,

assist, but it was too late.

The Nest Quick Bunny was ripped limb from limb by those stoplights

and retired.

Can you imagine just being like a six-year-old kid you got up early and just watching him advertise

limb from limb?

Torn bodily apart like a medieval execution, like a regicide, tanged drawn, and corn.

We scattered a deskwork buddy over Fort Green.

You're gonna have to bring in the bounty for like partial pieces of rubber back, you know.

The Pink Panther this year was a truly monstrous balloon, one of the largest the parade had ever seen.

It was seven stories high, it was uh several other dimensions as well.

Oh, God.

Oh, my.

I feel very strongly that if you look at the three photographers and one woman with a ponytail arrayed down the crosswalk here, this is us.

This is actually us.

I like this guy just climbing, bottom right, red shirt, climbing on what I believe to be, is that the tail of the Pink Panther?

got something long and slender at the lower part yeah i i this the eyes the bulging eyes

the dead lifeless eyes

who's anti-sambaric

childish and pessy massad operation

in these winds in these winds the pink panther could only be flown horizontally

at 52nd street at 52nd 52nd street the pink panther began to behave erratically it's kind of catching a gust of wind and throwing many of its handlers to the ground

getting like resistant

getting like body slammed onto asphalt by the pink panther

the pink panther caught a lamppost but did not tear yes at times square though things took a turn for the worse

you have to have a like patrick o'brien like uh like sort of like early 19th century Royal Navy rigging crew level of like rope handling and cohesion and like fighting against the elements and you're doing it all in a pink panther jumpsuit.

A much stronger gust of wind, which is amplified by tall buildings, caused the balloon to rear up, taking its pilot with it.

Jesus.

There's a pilot?

There's a pilot who is like directing everyone else for the balloon.

With just hand signals or what?

I assume he's also holding on to something.

Oh, Christ.

All right.

Getting tossed into the getting yanked into the air like

a huge ball.

Suffered like a nasty fall afterwards,

but no injuries.

Oh, yeah.

Ah, cool.

No problem.

So the balloon was still undamaged, and the handlers pressed onward.

Just this limp pig pilot.

This limp pig pilot is like

so much street furniture.

This is so obstructive.

Like, if you think about all the stuff overhanging a street in Manhattan.

Yeah, we'll get to that later.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

That might be my least favorite phrase on this show.

The balloon finally caught a traffic light and ripped open.

Oh, God.

It mostly deflated, but still had enough helium in it to stay airborne until a police officer stabbed its tail.

This stabilized the balloon and brought it to the ground.

Then, some 30 New York Police Department officers took to the scene and stabbed the Pink Panther to death.

Not even an officer involved shooting, an officer involved stabbing

them climbing all over it.

Their instincts,

their eyes like flick back and come back forwards again, and they just all enter extreme violence.

It's like an Italian moment, right?

And that moment, the kind of the epigenetics speak and they fall on him like Caesar.

Oh my god, you too, Brute.

Oh my god.

I think the funniest thing, right, is like from an institution we know very well is like extremely violent in set ways, but a complete mismatch of method to be stabbed to death by the NYPD is like

testimonies from the scene indicate a mother and daughter were trapped under the balloon, and some handlers were briefly overcome by helium gas.

Well, it's a good shoot, then it's self-defense, you know.

Internal affairs rolling up and taking statements.

Every single one of these cops gets their like union rep.

who's in fear for my life planting a gun on the pink panther inflatable.

Listen, the pink panther has a long criminal history, right?

I think we can be

covered this gun off of the suspect.

Oh,

this one's gonna kill me.

This one's going to kill me.

Handlers went to assist the Nesquig money and managed to get it six blocks further to 36th Street, where it too was ripped open and was retired.

This is a death march.

You've won it off.

You've owned it.

Now get ready for the basis Thanksgiving.

You've won it off.

Why is it still

going?

This is like fucking this scale.

This is like Rocky Balboa's fight doctor organizing.

slaughter of this scale in downtown New York would not be known for how many more years?

I could stab a guy on Fifth Avenue, stab a balloon on Fifth Avenue.

Yeah, they'd still vote for me.

Anyway,

the most infamous scene from this particular Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade was the murder of Barney the dinosaur.

Oh my God, he's being torn by thunder.

Oh, that really is good.

Oh my god.

This was entirely cut on video, and you can watch it on YouTube.

There's like a family and their kid, and the kids just laughing the whole time.

I mean, if you're a nine-year-old and you're like, yeah, I want to see Barney get decapitated, you're about to have the best day of your fucking life.

On the other hand, where's the combine harvester I asked for?

That's the inflatable one behind.

In an event that would go down in history is extremely funny.

Barney became uncontrollable around 52nd Street.

To the point where handlers were lying down on the pavement to keep him under control.

We're having sort of a Jurassic Park moment here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Barney managed to...

You can go to that video and like cut in some of the Godzilla roars, please.

Godzilla Roars, the guy, just like some guy going, clever girl.

There's shit going on all left, right, and center.

Yeah, well, Barney managed to wreck himself into a streetlight, which tore a massive gash in his side and exploded his tail.

I told my wife what we were doing for the episode tonight, and she sang in the cadence of the Barney theme song Off the Dome: I Love You, You Love Me.

I was killed by NYPD.

Emboldened by their successful despatch of the Pink Panther, the New York Police Department immediately swarmed Barney and stabbed him repeatedly in the face, stomach, tail, arms, legs, etc.

This was a police riot.

Riot is the language of the unheard, and it's just Barney the dinosaur on a loop.

Yeah.

Barney was soon a flat sheet of rubber on the pavement and was retired

yeah yeah

oh my god they look how they massacred my boy

and his dead soul is fly

petula pig listen i will say one thing

I will say one thing for policing, right?

Irrespective of abolition or whatever, one thing its defenders do say is true, which is that just fucking any shit just lands on on cops, it seems like, and that they're just left to be like, Yeah, I have no balloon handling experience, but what I do have is many knives, I guess.

And that combination of being the like public service of last resort, and also having like a very specific set of training that does not account for Barney the dinosaur being uncontrollable leads to maybe the funniest thing I've ever fucking heard.

Oh, Jesus.

Absolutely incredible.

Wait, there's more.

Ross, there's more.

So, Petula Pig did not start the parade.

Disappointing.

Even Bear

did not start.

That is the most not that IP ass-looking balloon I've ever seen in my life.

It's like

getting a DNS for not her.

You'll never be her.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit struck a streetlight hard at 72nd Street, but did not deflate.

Americans coming to your little English village and being like, hey, can we adapt your beloved children's character two weeks later?

You have watching your tiny little British TV, seeing a gigantic balloon of him being slammed into a New York City streetlight.

It's what she would have wanted.

But the worst incident was with the cat in the hat.

This wasn't the worst.

We've seen so much blood and gore at this point.

Like, it's just...

Well, here he is.

He's on the screen.

I mean, I've seen the Michael Myers movie.

That's pretty.

Oh, my God.

He is missing his hat, thus rendering him an ordinary cat.

And he is sideways.

So at 72nd Street, the cat in the hat started to get angry.

Spiritually a milkshake, yeah.

He's like a tall balloon.

It's very susceptible to wind.

He's tall.

He's got very broad sides.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He started bucking wildly from side to side.

He hit a streetlight.

In fact, the same streetlight that Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit struck.

Then he hit it a second time,

knocking an arm from the streetlight onto the ground and into the crowd,

injuring four people, including one baby.

Kathleen Corona, who was nearly fatally injured and went into a coma for a month,

suffering permanent brain damage.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

You're just almost murdered by

a Dr.

Zeus balloon.

Just a regular giant.

Do you remember fucking six feet under?

That's the way they used to start episodes to like grab you for the rest of the, for the rest of the hour where it's like Dexter being gay and sad is like, oh, you know, a woman getting killed by the cat in the hat at the Macy's parade.

Yeah.

I mean, this, I don't think she suffered particularly debilitating brain damage, but a little brain damage is still too much brain damage.

I don't want the damage parade.

No, that's not your friend.

It obviously fucks with you in ways that you can't even account for.

It's fun.

Yeah.

The response to this was to deflate his hat, leaving him a mere cat on a strange machine.

Well,

well, hold on.

We've nearly killed a woman here.

And their response is, well, we'll take the hat off as a compromise, but the parade is still going.

We're still going to do the parade.

The show must go on.

You're not going to call this off at any point.

The show must go on, Nova.

Okay.

Managed to get him as far as 36th Street, very close to Harold Square, where he became unwieldy.

Once again, he was deflated and permanently retired from the parade.

Okay, but why?

What social good was served from dragging this hatless cat?

The balloon abolitionist

40 blocks

when it's got blood on its hands, quite possibly, literally.

Why, though?

And why does the crosshatching make it look like it's got fucked up chest and armhair?

Robin Williams' ass-looking cat.

Ultimately, of the 14 balloons that year, only seven, Arthur,

Big Bird, Beatrix Potters, Peter Rabbit,

The Rugrats,

Garfield,

Spider-Man,

and America's favorite, Bumpe,

made it to the finish line.

You hate to give Bumpe credit, but like, he is a bit different.

Those Swedes, they know how to.

Favorite cow.

I mean, you know what this is?

It continues to be like unlimited Arthur supremacy.

Yes.

Arthur is just, you know, they're workingman-like.

He just walks to the finish line.

It's just a nice book.

He's got his book.

He's got his backpack.

You know, he says hello to everyone.

Real blue-collar blade.

Yeah, exactly.

He's left lunch pail nine to five.

Well, seven to three because he's at school.

I find Big Bird here lightly terrifying, to be honest.

Like the shadow under

something, there's a dark energy going on there that troubles me.

No.

So there's some sense after this incident, there needs to be some kind of reform at the parade after they lost half the balloons and put a woman in a coma.

The good news is they have the great, the, the, the most capable man for the job, uh, Rudy Giuliani.

Friggin Giuliani.

Check out No Gods, No Mans.

So, yeah, Giuliani does what any good mayor does and convenes a task force to figure out what to do.

They came up with a couple of recommendations.

Recommendation number one,

put the New York City Emergency Response Center in the World Trade Center.

Yes.

They're going to limit the size of the balloons.

The city's going to make the call to call off the balloons if winds are high.

They're going to require some kind of training for balloon handlers.

Just like that's

a little bit of a thing.

At the balloon handlers and be like, you go to school for that?

And the answer being no as well is like doubly funny.

They're going to tether the balloons to vehicles as opposed to just people.

Great.

So now Sonic's picked up a pickup truck and it's going to be swinging it around like Catanari.

And they're going to actually prepare the parade route for balloons by moving like streetlights and things like that.

Seven movies feel like things they should have done already.

Why would you do that?

Kathleen Corona made a partial recovery, and after suing Macy's, the city, the streetlight manufacturer, and everyone within two miles, eventually settled out of court.

Then, in October 2006, Yankees pitcher Corey Lytle flew a Cirrus SR-20 into her apartment.

What?

Not intentionally.

Yeah.

I was going to say, that's a strange series of events.

What?

I have to be honest.

If this had happened to me, I would attribute that to the earlier brain damage.

I would think I had to leave.

Honestly, yeah.

She was not in her apartment at the time.

Yeah, okay, still, but like, if you get like a fucking Wesley sniped in in like baseball 9-11,

why did he was

Why did all this happen to this woman?

And then we got the coronavirus as well.

Like, I think genuinely we should, this woman should seek some kind of like spiritual investigation.

That's the only thing I can think of.

Contact a media.

I'm going to have to have to talk to a priest about this one.

See if you can get some kind of financial settlement with God.

Running up that hill to make a deal with God.

God settling out of court with no finding of liability.

Don't worry, we will get to the Catholicism episode.

God has to replace your apartment.

Anyway, so this meant there were never any incidents at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade again,

except for

2003.

The new turkey exploded due to thermal expansion.

Get on my nose there, man.

2004, Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown's football deflated.

Okay, that's the funniest possible arrangement.

Charlie Brown deflates?

Funny.

Charlie Brown and the football deflate?

Funny.

Charlie Brown is fine, but the football deflates?

Hysterical.

A loosey balloon floating away from the sea.

2005, the red and yellow yellow M ⁇ Ms brighten up the holidays balloon.

That's the name of it.

They have a handling line catch a light post sending the fixture into the crowd.

Oh, yeah, the scattered glass shards into the crowd situation.

I mean, listen, I would be fine with that if it was the green M ⁇ M showering me with glass, but like, what happened?

Who's to say?

Hey, I'm not here to kingshame.

2010, the wiggle worm.

The what?

What?

The wiggle worm.

Oh, my God.

Excuse me.

First of all, don't talk about my penis like that.

Second of all, my penis does not have these dead, soulless eyes.

Yeah, the eyes are full of my eyes are actually.

Yeah, that's it.

The wiggle worm was punctured by a one-way sign.

I guess there wasn't enough wiggle room.

2012.

Thanks, Liam.

Pikachu's ears exploded due to thermal expansion.

Can we actually attribute this to climate change?

Because it only seems to be happening in the 2000s.

Like, 90s, nobody's exploding.

They might be killing people or almost, but like, nobody's having their ears blown up.

2019, Goku.

What did he do to New York City?

Goku, Goku knocks down three balloon handlers in a gust of wind, leaving one with an injured shoulder.

Well, now he's defeated them.

That means that they're friends.

Yes.

And one of the art balloons, the new art balloons they have, called Love Flies Up to the Sky.

Oh, this sucks.

I hate it.

Wrecked into a portable restroom trailer and broke its face,

then had a tentacle ripped off by a subway map stand.

Oh, my God.

The city is fighting back.

I just imagine this weird tentacle thing smashing into a truck full of porta potties and just sending porta potties

this is this is a beautiful tradition i hope they keep doing it forever yes this is uh i i love to see a giant balloon uh of my favorite cartoon character be destroyed accidentally

potentially causing danger to life and limb i i i get it now i was skeptical on the Macy's parade, but now

I'm converted.

I'm a believer.

Oh, you will get me appearing like that guy in the gif who has the like pop-out chair and he just smacks it open.

He's a menace.

That will be me at the next one of these.

It's just, this is incredible.

This is a bit like F1.

So, you know, the regulations get tired, but the murder and slaughter gets more and more diverse.

It's joyous.

It's scarcely by nice.

I love this so much.

This has been life-changing.

It literally has.

I'm a different human.

The Gareth before is gone.

The Gareth nude rises.

And now I have a new model for whenever I'm feeling particularly shitty.

I can just be like, damn, I feel like Sonic the Hedgehog being slammed into a light.

Stabbed in the eye.

There's a video of that one, too.

It's pretty gnarly.

Oh, God.

Does he like one of Wince?

It's like he got it

right in the eye.

I don't remember the French word for hedgehog off the top of my head, but

if anyone ever needs cheering up, the wiki art, the entire wiki for this will provide endless joy.

Yeah, I'll put a link to it in the description.

I was going to say, literally, we have to do that.

Yeah.

This is one of the most like

fucked up things Americans routinely like continue to do on a yearly basis.

Like this is baked in like drunk driving deaths.

It's just

like

free health and shows.

Exactly, exactly.

We're gonna have to kill some cartoon characters each year.

Yes.

Listen, I,

you know, obviously I support murder in some cases, but I don't support taking away someone's ability to view the next year's Macy's parade.

Exploded due to thermal expression.

I need badly to see Pikachu's ears exploding, I think.

I'm going to seek that out.

Oh, absolutely sensational.

What did we learn from this?

The NYPD, the thin blue line, protecting water

balloon chaos.

Were it not for them,

every New Yorker would have been killed by Sonic the Hedgehog, the Pink Panther, and Barney the Dinosaur.

You'd just see Pikachu looming outside your like 50th floor apartment.

Just

even the parade day.

Yeah.

Batman returns, but you just replace all the characters

in Bane's team with these balloons and they have to fight the cops at the end.

I would pay Pikachu.

We learned that maybe it shouldn't be up to an employee of a department store whether or not to fly a bunch of huge balloons down a street in one of the most populated cities in the world.

Yes.

No, we didn't learn that.

I learned nothing from this except I

by heart, I hunger for more balloons.

Yeah, I need to see more of this happening.

We need the Will Airs Your Problem balloon.

Give us a balloon.

Give us a balloon.

It's just

the big Do Not Eat Subway token with the hot hat on it.

I'm going to have to do that in a Boscov's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Or now, now it's the 6 ABC Dunkin' donuts thanksgiving day parade that's the philly one i don't know if anything funny happens looking forward looking forward to settling out of court when the subway token like kills somebody

using using some of earth's finite reserve of helium on this as well is incredibly funny oh yes yeah it's like so many mri machines i mean luckily you can't afford them anyway because of insurance companies but like if you could

that helium is being diverted to Charlie Brown's football, which feels like an apt metaphor.

It's just then deflated before your eyes.

Well,

there's a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Howdy, loyal subjects of milkshakes.

and any potential guests

milkshakes.

Yeah, I only have one milkshake here.

We love it.

yes i have a tale that shows how one can follow the correct correctly safety protocols and still wind up in a situation where they're doing something that's really stupid nice near the turn of the century i was a trade school student i don't like that that's a phrase you can use now

desperately trying to get a job in the field that i was studying for namely machining

despite the fact that i've been school for a couple years i couldn't get a job in my field as i didn't have enough experience.

You know how there's that whole catch-22 thing: you can't get a job because you don't have any experience, and you can't get any experience because no one will hire you.

Anyway, I eventually managed to find a job working in a small foundry as a grinder/slash-pouring crew for far less pay than I could get working at the local Walmart.

But I took it since if I stayed at the job for a year, I'd have enough on my resume that I could claim experience and thus get hired at a machine shop that paid better than either Wally World or the foundry.

Fair plan.

Okay.

Yeah.

This particular foundry had a main furnace that could melt just under 1,000 pounds of metal at a time.

Roughly 100 pounds of molten metal would be poured into the ladle, held by a two-person crew.

I see the simplified Minecraft illustration here.

Yes, exactly.

It's the Tinker's Construct mod.

Let you cast the tools.

It's kind of fun.

That two-person crew would then

take it over to the various molds that were in the pouring area.

And after filling up a couple of the molds, they'd go back to the furnace for more metal to pour into the other molds.

Yeah, the pickaxe, pickaxe,

sword, hammer,

hoe, etc.

Yes.

The ladle was in the middle of what we called a shank that looked like two letter Y's joined at the base.

The forked part was where each person holding the shank was located.

Both of us wore the correct kind of safety gear, this being leather coats covered in silver mylar, leather gloves, and a welder's face shield.

I went a step further and wore draped cloth draped around much of my head to help protect me from the heat.

Looking very sliver punk, I imagine.

Yes.

One day, as I'm holding my end of the shank, as molten tool steel that was about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit was being poured into the ladle, I saw a drop of metal splash out from the ladle and head my way.

My thought as I saw the drop head towards me was, oh, that'll probably hurt if it hits me.

Yeah, I bet.

I want to point out that as a member of the pouring crew, be it the person who was operating the furnace, someone holding the shank, the mold setter, the person putting the insulation on the mold after it was filled in order to control the rate at which it cooled, or the QA person observing everything to ensure all proper procedures were followed, you could expect to get the kind of burns someone frying bacon in a skillet might get every time we did a pour.

They were annoying, but not particularly large or painful.

This drop was large enough for me to know just by looking at it that if it hit me, it would be far, far worse.

A few seconds later, I suddenly became aware of a serious burning situation on my right ass cheek.

Nope.

I mean, there's worse places for it, but like

still much.

Yeah.

And when I say serious, I mean serious.

If you've ever broken a tooth and had to wait a long period of time before you get pain meds stronger than aspirin, you have an idea of what I was feeling.

I also couldn't just scream and run around because if I made any sudden moves, there was a strong chance that the metal would splash out of the ladle, which could put myself and the person at the other end of the shank at risk of life-threatening burns.

Not to be a capitalist here, but I now understand why some of the other jobs wanted you to have experience.

yeah i had to stand absolutely rock still while screaming at the top of my lungs for someone to take the goddamn shank out of my hands as i was clearly being burned one of the other guys on the pouring crew came over grabbed my end of the shank out of my hands and i immediately raced off to an area not far from the pouring area where i was shielded from the heat and could begin stripping off my gear.

Once behind the shield, I began taking my stuff off as fast as I could, hoping hoping that this would get rid of the molten metal that was burning me.

I don't like the phrasing of that because this suggests that that does not succeed.

I don't like this and I do not like what's coming.

I quickly discovered the metal was in my ass and not embedded in my safety gear.

So I reached down, grabbed a hunk of seared flesh, and tossed it away.

Jesus Christ, dude.

They were doing you like a Macy's Day balloon.

Yes.

I had to do this a second time to get it all out of me.

I then probably collapsed on a pile of stuff.

I had no idea what it all was in front of me.

Because you were self-excavating one ass cheek by hand.

I was gasping like someone who'd just been saved from drowning.

A moment or so later, the guy who'd taken the shank from me walked back to where I was and asked me if I was going to be able to finish pouring the rest of the heat.

A heat being the amount of time time it took to pour all the metal in the furnace.

A smart person would have responded no, but because of the toxic masculinity culture of the job, we're admitting that suffering from anything other than a sign of life-threatening injury meant you were a wimp.

I know.

And you've got one ass cheek left.

Yeah.

You're going to need a prosthetic to sit down.

Yeah, you're going to need

to put you in the iron butt.

The man in the iron butt.

Yeah.

I nodded, yes.

I put my gear back on and I finished the heat, even though I was in severe pain.

Just like a

set of ass cheeks that looked like the phantom of the opera.

That Joel and Bead mask.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got you.

Yeah, yeah.

After we finished the heat, I inspected my gear to try and figure out what had happened.

My assumption was the drop of the metal had hit the outside of my coat and burned its way through to my ass.

I discovered that what actually had happened was that the droplet had managed to perfectly sail its way between the gap in my coat and my neck, caused by the position I needed to be in when the metal was being poured into the ladle.

And it was only when the droplet hit my belt that it stuck out

due to how I had to be crouched over that the molten metal was directed into my ass.

I don't like that.

I don't like that.

I don't want bad things to happen to my glass.

And the idea of it being shredded and then I have to rip out.

You have to do the damage to yourself.

It makes you rip off your own ass.

Yeah, that's not.

I don't like this at all.

My solution.

Autogluteectomy or something.

That would be it, yeah.

My solution to ensure this never happened again was to wear a backwards baseball cap while we poured.

So if any metal tried to follow the same path, it'd be stopped by the bill of my cap.

I don't feel

more faith than I've ever put in the bill of a baseball cap in my life.

Also, it just ripped, it just ripped and shredded an ass, you know, widened this person's intergluteal sulcus by several inches, and yet they're relying on a baseball cap.

I just a doctor with a clipboard sitting you down and being like, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you'll never wear a thong again.

Sounds like butt butt plugs aren't for you.

Actually, you might need one because the sphincter doesn't work anymore.

Oh, Jesus.

You ripped off your own ass.

That's going to be a vivid, a vivid, like,

no, I know.

I'm still throwed with knowing.

This is a medical butt plug.

This is not a sex thing.

This is safety care.

Fuck off.

PPE for my ass.

My Mylar butt plug.

Yeah.

My asbestos butt plug.

Should be fine.

You're not breathing it.

Like, what's the problem?

Yeah, exactly.

There's a lot more I could say about that job, like how I came to be in possession of goods.

I came in possession of the business.

What's possession of ripping off half of your own ass.

I can't think of many things.

Like how I came in possession of a good-sized hunk of magnesium in case I needed to unalive a supervisor, but that probably wouldn't play on the show.

Sign you've said it now, and it's on record.

So, you know,

yeah, plus, I will say, this is this is a pretty distinctive injury.

If anybody has ever met you, they're going to know because they'll be like, oh, the guy with like

the man, the man with the man with half an ass.

Do we know this?

The person, actually, we don't know gender.

Yeah, we don't.

We've heard of the man who knew too much.

Now we're going to refer for the man who pooed too much.

Signed a guy who wouldn't be upset if a particular McDonald's in Pennsylvania burned down because a chunk of flaming magnesium hit it.

It's

throwing a chunk of magnesium into the deep fryer and leaving.

Is it the camp?

Is it the Camp Hill McDonald's?

Because I have beef with them.

Not just because of the Altoona.

It's the Altoona McDonald's.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Whoever was in charge of not providing you with the safety equipment for that should have one half of their ass burned off in a kind of like blood money.

Well, no, they have to donate their ass to you.

Who do you think donated the ass cheek?

You turn around and look, and it's the safety officer who's lying on another bed at a 45-degree angle because they're missing one ass cheek.

It's like a train going around a carriage.

Yeah, okay, yeah, nice.

I applied cant on my ass.

Yeah, okay, yeah, fine.

Oh, you got to put some pseudocram on that, man.

It's uh, whoa.

I, I,

this might be my least favorite.

Ripping out your own.

At least it's got like a nice char on it, like a barbecue.

You know, you're like, probably overcooked is the thing.

Also, I don't know.

I don't know how much this guy is into auto cannibalism anyway.

I don't think it's a great idea.

That's just my own opinion, though.

This is

upsetting.

This has been upsetting.

This has been upsetting.

This is going to haunt me.

This is going to be in my dreams tonight.

Catch me wearing a Mylar turtleneck.

Yeah, like sort of a tungsten kilt.

I'm going to be in a...

That actually that that's an mpcr suit made of marble and lead yeah

oh the sound the marble suit makes when it moves is obsessing

just like grinding rock noises while you're walking

captioned crevices here

you actually have to move like the fucking angels from doctor who no one can look at it

yeah

this isn't to speak up people it's just i love british tv of like oh this is too cheap to animate how do we do it?

And we turn that into like really affecting horror.

Yeah.

Something this country is good at.

Something your country is good at.

Balloon catastrophe.

Yeah.

You're welcome.

Absolutely.

That was safety third.

Shake hands.

Because of you guys that were having balloon catastrophe in English, you know.

Yeah.

Otherwise, it could be dust balloon and catastrophe.

Yeah.

That's goomie catastrophe.

Fuck off.

Oh, best episode, worst safety third.

What a, what a, what a night.

Yeah.

The duality of man.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Subscribe to the Patreon.

It's, it's, uh, we're funny.

This is funny.

Yeah.

We'll have we'll have a bonus episode out this month or so help us god.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I, it, this, so help us God is relevant to the topic, I think.

Yeah.

Otherwise, you know, we'll have an angry patron

come and shoot us three times.

Delay, delay, delay.

Yeah.

Listen to all the 150 podcasts that we're all respectively on.

Yeah, listen to No God, Snowman.

We're having a good time with it.

We just put out an episode on Michael Applebaum, the former mayor of Montreal.

Beautiful.

So much fun because

a very brief cutaway, and yes, we will wrap this up.

It's like 30 seconds.

So I work for Atkins, a company that SNC lavalan there you go uh nova you'll now understand the connection bought out to greenwash their own name um and it didn't work to the point where they've now jettisoned their old name and renamed themselves atkins rayalis um and it still hasn't worked and the amount of corruption training they have to do internally is is genuinely obstructive to them doing their day jobs it's quite hilarious it's very funny

So yeah, listen to that episode because it's a lot of fun.

I enjoyed listening to that episode quite substantially.

It's gone great.

What a pod.

What an idea for a pod.

Thank you.

My plug is also that Tom Payne of this parish occasionally is coming on Rail Matter.

We've recorded a very funny Americana episode about stupid flights that shouldn't exist, but that should ought to be trains.

And we ended up going extremely long because we both got, well, I got, well, we both got quite drunk.

So

I heard about that.

It was fun.

That'll be going out on literal Christmas Day because the release schedule of Rail Matter is insane.

So enjoy that.

All right.

And I was just on a podcast about The Simpsons

called Mole Man in the Morning.

We talked about Marge versus the Monorail and also the episode after that.

It was very long, so you better listen to it.

So my time was worthwhile.

Exactly.

And buy tickets to the remaining shows, see the start of the episode to understand which precise places you need to buy tickets.

If there's anybody left after the, I don't know, delirium psychoses we all entered when,

again, Barn of the Dinosaur

suffer trails were scattered across

scattered off Long Island Sound.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

I think they actually repaired that balloon somehow.

They scooped up its insides, popped them back in, and got stitching.

Yep.

Lattice stitching.

Just imagine them all with like bandages and patches like the year after.

Just like, just like these actual bands.

Anyway, it's beautiful.

I am, we should do a big trip to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving parade and get everyone along.

That would be really funny.

But also, everyone should bring a pitchfork to just protect themselves

if the balloons get too close.

Bring sharp objects.

You'll never take me alive.

Broken bottles.

All right, let's wrap this shit up.

All right.

Yeah.

That was a podcast.

All right.

Good night, everyone.

Bye, everyone.