BONUS Episode 51 PREVIEW: The Gateway Arch

Speaker 1 Okay, I got everything going.

Speaker 1 We're gonna do the sync point.

Speaker 1 Point of synchronization. Point of synchronization, yes.
Do three, two, one, mark. Three, two, one, mark.

Speaker 1 Shouldn't have been Lewis. Nailed it.
Lewis and Mark. Mark.

Speaker 1 It's Adam and Eve, not Lewis and Clark. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Almost.

Speaker 1 You know, my favorite fact about the Lewis and Clark expedition? What's that?

Speaker 1 My favorite fact about the Lewis and Clark expedition is that at the time, they carried a lot of laxatives with them because they were eating shit food. And

Speaker 1 like, so they needed them. And the laxative of the time was this solid ball of mercury.
No.

Speaker 1 You swallowed. And then...
you just fished out and reused afterwards. It was called the perpetual pill.
No.

Speaker 1 And so archaeologically, one of the most useful ways of tracking Lewis and Clark's campsites is, hey, is there a bunch of mercury leached into the soil here?

Speaker 1 Which is a nice metaphor for like settler colonialism, you know, to be like, hey, we literally shit poison all over this country. That you lit.

Speaker 1 I hold out hope, though, because you can't kill a human. Like, we'll do, we'll fucking eat balls of mercury to make a shit better.
I don't even... I don't give a damn.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Put that on the Voyager.

Speaker 1 Fuck a cockroach, man. Like, don't let let us come.
We will infest it. We will never be.
We will never go.

Speaker 1 Don't let the mercury ball get hot, though. That's not what you want to be swallowing.

Speaker 1 Hot mercury ball.

Speaker 1 Isn't mercury a liquid at room temperature? Well, it's only going to get to body temperature. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's going to kind of re-solidify afterwards.
Oh.

Speaker 1 That's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I actually boof my mercury. Do you guys not? Have I been doing this all wrong?

Speaker 1 Yeah, all right. This all right, mercury sounding rod.
All right, I'm done. done.
Folks, this is no no no no no no no no no no no no no no I'm back here with mercury sounding rod. Hit me up Francis.

Speaker 1 Yeah

Speaker 1 this is a bonus episode. You can get so much worse than Mercury for that like galleon.
This is a bonus episode of Balaries. No, it's not.

Speaker 1 No, this is going to be too silly to go on a main feed.

Speaker 1 You know who all of us are.

Speaker 1 Maybe you don't. We have a guest.
We have a guest. Yeah.
Yeah, you do. I'm Francis.
I am the St. Louisan that you know.
And is that really the term? Is that the title of St. Louis? St.
Louis.

Speaker 1 I always assumed it was St. Louisian for some reason.
St. Louisian.
No.

Speaker 1 We can't pronounce French that correctly. All of our French words have to be really dragged through the mud, beaten across a rock.

Speaker 1 We really, like, I used to think, I know that French, you know, Parisian French versus Montreal French versus Creole French, all kinds of different Frenches, but they can at least understand each other i feel like you come to st louis yeah i feel like you come to st louis it's just it's all over the place because we're we're hitting it phonetically and you know all those vowels

Speaker 1 so i've been wanting to do this episode for a while but never quite came together um it still hasn't quite come together but we're doing it anyway it's going to be very vibes based we're going to we're going to that's why it's a bunch we're going to talk about

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about a building. We're going to talk about a building, which I really enjoyed.

Speaker 1 It was amazing to look at the first time i saw it i was you know overawed i was like wow they actually built that damn thing we're going to talk about the gateway arch hell yeah now roz i want to i want to know what was your first live like when you saw the arch for the first time where were you because there's so many different vantage points to see the arch for the first time was it like when you're flying in you saw it Did you drive up like you coming down 70?

Speaker 1 How did you see it for the first time? This was coming off of another whopping building experience. I will say that.
Because I was coming in.

Speaker 1 This was when a bunch of us were on the private railroad car, the Swift Stream. So we came in on the train.
We saw it from the bridge. I saw it for the first time.
Oh, beautiful.

Speaker 1 This was a beautiful way to see it. Also, right after seeing the Union Tank Car Company, Geodesic Dome, that's right across the railroad.
Which I was, that was, well,

Speaker 1 sensitive. I terrified everyone.
out of the way. An uneasy kinship between because I was like, I just saw it and I was like, sensing an uneasy kinship between St.

Speaker 1 Louis and London in the sense of being the city of the shapes. Yeah.
Yeah. What if we just made a shape and we made it fucking huge? That's the art.

Speaker 1 I had no idea that the Union tank car dome was on the route. And when I caught it out of the corner of my eye, this was right after doing

Speaker 1 serving breakfast for like 12 people. I was like, holy shit, it's real.

Speaker 1 Son of a bitch, those crazy sons of bitches, they did it.

Speaker 1 They made the arch. Oh, this was the tank car dome.

Speaker 1 The arch, though, the arch was also very impressive, but I was expecting that one.

Speaker 1 I like that you were just, I like just the idea of you pressing your grubby little hands to the glass and be like, look at that fucking shit.

Speaker 1 But yeah.

Speaker 1 Sort of terrible, hubristic monument to American excess, which one day in the near future, a sort of second Napoleon, if you can imagine such a thing, is going to be sort of like using for artillery practice.

Speaker 1 Well, I would imagine it'll never,

Speaker 1 it'll never go away.

Speaker 1 You can't,

Speaker 1 and I know this, we'll get into it, but my brother worked at the arch for a very long time. He gave me the down low on it.
Those legs go down that far, too. They do just keep going down.

Speaker 1 How do you keep going?

Speaker 1 shape?

Speaker 1 630 feet tall, 630 feet wide, 630 feet into the ground. That shit's not going anywhere.
Not until Second Napoleon gets a hold of it.

Speaker 1 Second Napoleon may be November by the end of the year.

Speaker 1 Absolutely nothing will happen to the arch.

Speaker 1 This statue of me, Ozymandius,

Speaker 1 feeling pretty secure about the attachment of the trunk to the legs.

Speaker 1 What happens if

Speaker 1 existed in that sci-fi show that, what was that? That like one of those post-apocalyptic shows, and it took place in St. Louis and everybody was really excited.

Speaker 1 But the arch was still there, even after the apocalyptic

Speaker 1 fucking.

Speaker 1 To be fair, that's because of the like fungus zombies. They're not going to knock down an arch.
They don't know how to do it.

Speaker 1 I think the second Napoleon might make St. Louis his or her cat or their capital.
Yeah. I mean, we're French already.
We got French shit all over the place.

Speaker 1 Like, if you're going to go Napoleon, it's either us or Louisiana. Got to be they, them pronouns minimum.

Speaker 1 Gotta be, you gotta have like non-binary for Napoleon II. Crucially, Napoleon II, as distinct from Napoleon II, different and worse dude.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're gonna have to replace the last O with an X and make sure that we know it's non-gendered personality.

Speaker 1 For a person of Napoleon II.

Speaker 1 It's like Mark says, you know, all world historical personages appear as it were three times first as tragedy then as fuss third time get it right yes

Speaker 1 hey do you do you guys know why they call it uh chicken napoleon why is that it's it's because they remove the bony part ha i don't get it there you go

Speaker 1 oh wait no i get it now hold on yeah so in in in a real kind of like scotland in autumn moment someone is also making my already bad internet connection worse by firing off a load of fireworks outside the window.

Speaker 1 So you're killing. It's all going beautifully here tonight.
Wow.

Speaker 1 So before

Speaker 1 we talk about the arch, we have to ask a question, which is, what is St. Louis?

Speaker 1 Heck, yeah, that's right there. That's that's all of it.
I'm just future, future capital of non-binary Napoleon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's in the middle of the country. You can only, you spread your fingers in every direction.
Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's conveniently situated right there on the Mississippi River.

Speaker 1 You know, so you have, you have river access. You have the cardinals, which despite being a kind of bird, people don't like when you call them the birds.
No, that's us. Fuck off.
Yeah, that's, yeah.

Speaker 1 Different, different city, different sport. You have a weird kind of cheese.
We do our Frankenstinian Provell cheese, which I believe is a mix of like mozzarella and something else.

Speaker 1 When you buy it, you can either buy it in a loaf or you can buy it where it looks like they ran it through a meat grinder. So it's like string kind of Provel.
Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1 It tastes like melted plastic. We put it on everything.
That sounds good. Oh, those fireworks are really gone there, aren't they? Oh, yeah.
It's

Speaker 1 not great. I had one literally ricochet off the window at my old place.
What? Just while I was minding my own business.

Speaker 1 It was like getting hit with a nerf drone strike. It was crazy.
Is there a particular celebration happening, or is this just for funsies? No, I mean, it's

Speaker 1 around bonfire night, I think. Wait, no, it isn't.
It's past bonfire night, so I don't even know. Caesar the leftovers, gotcha.

Speaker 1 I know that. Wait, no, 5th of November.
It's fine. Yeah, no.
So it hasn't happened yet. So people are just like firing fireworks at the end.
You have a rhyme in your head. That's right.

Speaker 1 5th of November,

Speaker 1 Concrete Appreciation Day. i i literally did have to do the rhyme in my head yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 there is fried ravioli oh delicious yes yeah uh fantastic deep fried ravioli actually yeah i had one it was really good i was i was like damn i should have had this before i got to the airport um oh shitting that out of 30 000 no thanks

Speaker 1 I couldn't leave my seat for that whole flight. Too much turbulence.

Speaker 1 I flown with you. It's the worst thing in the world.
No, the fat. Just eating a lot of like mozzarella and additional substance cheese and then getting on a flight that's like a tumble dryer.

Speaker 1 I'll do you guys one better.

Speaker 1 We have a restaurant here called Twisted Ranch where you can order like 47 different versions of ranch dressing.

Speaker 1 Hang on, I'll open this up right now. To the Joker, that's just a normal ranch.

Speaker 1 Oh, you put buffalo sauce in your ranch. Now it's

Speaker 1 right next to the world chest.

Speaker 1 I kind of want to not edit any of the fireworks out so you just also get the experience of being under like the world's tiniest artillery bombardment for this episode.

Speaker 1 I don't know, Francis, you might have to take it away on this one. I don't know very much about St.
Louis. I was only there once and it was only for a day.
Oh, man. So, St.

Speaker 1 Louis, 250-something years old at this point. Um, home of the oldest uh farmer's market this side of the Mississippi.
Soulard Market still goes strong. strong.

Speaker 1 We have, God,

Speaker 1 we have a very fucked up situation here where like we have a city and then we have a county. So like when you say St.
Louis City, the population of St.

Speaker 1 Louis City is like under 300,000 people, which like is not very much for a normal size city. But if you take the counties into consideration, then it's like two and a half million.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, is that all of these counties have their own municipalities and all these municipalities have their own fucking cops. So, like, you have St.

Speaker 1 Louis police, and then imagine if you broke up Philadelphia and, like,

Speaker 1 every suburb got their own cops, and

Speaker 1 then just let them go fucking wild with it. That's kind of how St.
Louis is set up.

Speaker 1 That sounds like my idea of hell. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's, it's. Must be a great place to look for mayors if someone may have a podcast about men.

Speaker 1 I am sure because there are, I mean, there's like 90 of these counties, and they all have their own little fiefdoms.

Speaker 1 Actually, our sheriff is in jail right now for witness intimidation. Oh, okay.
Sheriffs love to be in jail. It's kind of like living at work for them.
Also, I noticed that the flag of St.

Speaker 1 Louis appears to be a kind of crypto-French Nazi South African. No, that is, we are at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri River.

Speaker 1 So it is the meeting of the two rivers, the fleur-de-lis, because we're a French town.

Speaker 1 And it's very, I like it's a very basic flag. Yeah, I like it.
But I also like the Missouri flag, which has like all kinds of like fucked up bears, high-fiving, and like 20-something stars.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So

Speaker 1 I would say that. This isn't like a scheduled display or anything, if you can still hear this.
It's just some guy.

Speaker 1 I love my city,

Speaker 1 brackets, European Philadelphia. I will say we do share this in common with you, that we do love to shoot fireworks at each other.

Speaker 1 The favorite game on Next Door, which is the local

Speaker 1 social network for your neighborhood where all the racist people can be really racist, is the game of gunshots or fireworks.

Speaker 1 It's fireworks. Come on.

Speaker 1 No, no, a lot of times it's gunshots. I'm going to.

Speaker 1 I'm going to pressure the city council into investing millions in shot spotters so that we can send cops after anyone who does this. Well, we have them all over the place and the cops don't do shit.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yeah, actually, I heard a couple. Like, the thing is, is that

Speaker 1 when you hear gunshots, like,

Speaker 1 there's a story being told in those gunshots, right? Like, sometimes it's just like one, and you're like, all right, somebody's probably just testing off the new gun. I gotcha.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's three, and that's kind of a hey, fuck off kind of gunshot.

Speaker 1 And sometimes there's a mag dump, and you're like, go to the range, because there's no reason for you to be making this much noise.