The Perfect Show

Hello? Hello! It's been a while. I've come back with a short episode and a quick announcement about a new season of the show coming up! Stay tuned.

This episode Scot dives into the world of compliments, via the story of a pair of pink shoes. What's so special about pink shoes? Scot explores how they act as a magnet for compliments, and what is even going on there.

Scot also ventures into some new territory by going to a local punk show and meeting a band there. Hear his voyage into live music for the first time since college, and discover a strong connection between pink shoes and punk shows that wasn't obvious at the beginning.

Special thanks to listener Steven, Jeff Clemens (https://twitter.com/jclemy) , and of course Nicole, Jerry, Julio and Israel, aka Rival Squad for the interview and introduction to punk.

You can find them online here:

https://linktr.ee/rival_squad

Bandcamp: https://rivalsquad.bandcamp.com/

Spotify: https://sptfy.com/LDLD

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_rivalsquad_/

Other music from this episode by:

Mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31

Steveaik7 - https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7

Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov

Trappy 808 - https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_

Dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:22

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I'm tremendously fascinated by compliments. Not in the way where you compliment me I drop everything and like go on, tell me more, but in the way that I contend a successful compliment pulls off the closest you can come to a real magic trick. Now, I don't believe in magical powers, but I do believe in the power of compliments. I've seen them change moods or shift whole situations. I've seen compliments stop fights and also open locked doors kind of like magic words. Actually, on today's episode of the podcast, I want to explore compliments and the energy they produce, and one surprising lightning rod I found to attract that energy A simple pair of pink shoes. So what am I talking about with compliments producing energy? Well, I'm saying what happens for me anyway. When someone gives me a compliment, especially when it's unexpected, it gives me a little, almost literal zip of energy. It feels like a little extra charge just runs through my system. That term brightens someone's day, that is what it can seem like, and after a compliment you might see someone perk up, some walk a little straighter or smile in some way. That's why I compare them to magic words. You say them and sometimes there's an immediate, noticeable real world effect. But some physicists out there may be shouting, scott, that would put you at odds with the law of conservation of energy, which says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. And that's a good point. Also, thanks for listening, weird pedantic physicist guy. I don't think we're at odds with the law of conservation of energy because I think it's not actually creating any energy, merely transferring it, like the law says. All genuinely human compliments start with one thing in common attention. That attention is then the energy that gets transferred to the other person through the compliment. You notice someone's new haircut or nicely matched outfit, pay attention to a child's work at school or some artist's new creation. It takes a little effort, it takes a little time to learn how to always be looking for those things, but you translate that attention into some kind of a compliment and when it hits its destination it can actually lift the spirits of whoever was on the receiving end. They're not the only one affected either. I mean, if I land a compliment and I can tell it was successful, I get a little zing out of it too, sort of a positive shrapnel that radiates off the compliment and gets you as well, which I guess speaks to how powerful the thing attention is and how much energy is really involved in it. So, as always when I need a little infallible wisdom on a subject, I turn to the world of Hollywood. We're talking big budget studios, rooms full of award winning writers, people who can and do work obsessively over a screenplay until every last letter and punctuation mark are perfect. So then, when I Google the best compliments in the history of movies, what comes up? I mean, it's a pretty subjective thing, but there does seem to be a consensus for number one. Actually, I think this one gets noticed in part because it's got big actors. They did pretty good with awards, nabbing Oscars for leading actor, leading actress, supporting actor and best picture. And well, it not only gives a compliment, but that compliment happens during a discussion about compliments and then it gets commented on directly. So I think it's especially highlighted in people's memories. I'm speaking of the 1997 movie, as good as it gets written by James L Brooks, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, both of whom won Academy Awards for their roles. Like I said, in the film, nicholson is a prickly writer who is rude and downright awful to everyone around him, and Hunt is a waitress with far too much patience for a person like that. But there's a famous scene in the middle where they're having dinner together and it starts like this Okay, now I got a real great compliment for you, and it's true.

Speaker 3: 4:51

So afraid you're about to say something awful.

Speaker 2: 4:54

Don't be pessimistic. It's not your style. Okay, here I go. Clearly a mistake.

Speaker 4: 5:05

I've got this. What Ailment.

Speaker 1: 5:15

And then Jack proceeds to ramble about himself and not wanting to take a medication His doctor prescribed, while Helen stares at him. And then he finally gets to this destination.

Speaker 4: 5:25

Well, my compliment to you is the next morning I started taking the pills.

Speaker 3: 5:37

I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Yup, I'm team Helen here. It's not a compliment for her, okay, so what do you have to say to that Jack?

Speaker 2: 5:50

You make me want to be a better man.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Ooh, okay, helen, let him have it.

Speaker 2: 6:01

That's maybe the best compliment of my life.

Speaker 1: 6:04

What? No, helen? I mean, they sell it. They are great actors, but that's a terrible compliment, helen. That's when you should be saying this one again.

Speaker 3: 6:16

I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me.

Speaker 1: 6:19

All right, we need some help here. The definitions I get when I look up compliment are a polite expression of praise or admiration and to politely congratulate or praise someone for something. So when Jack pulls out the you make me want to be a better man thing. It's not congratulating or praising anything about Helen's character, he's commenting on himself and I know some people will be like, yeah, that's the point they're making, because he's such a self-centered guy that that's all he can muster and it's a huge thing for him and sure, fine, but it still is a terrible compliment that still makes it all about him, and Helen shouldn't have said that's maybe the best compliment of my life because it wasn't even a compliment. Can you imagine telling someone about it? Like trying to tell someone about the compliment you just got? Wow, you're not going to believe the compliment I just got. Oh, tell me. Well, you know that awful guy, the one everyone hates. Well, he just said I make him want to be better. Better than awful, yeah, I guess, but not even good. Just better than completely awful, yeah. And then he gave you a compliment. No, that was the compliment, oh Right. But Nicholson and Hunt were on top of their games, delivered their lines like real pros, and it worked. I'm not saying it didn't work, just that it doesn't make sense and I think it sort of should. If it's going to get marked down as the best compliment in movie history and I'll argue, it actually took that crown from another famous romance relationship movie that came out just one year earlier, the Cameron Crow smash hit from 1996, starring Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. I'm talking, of course, about the film Jerry Maguire If you haven't seen it. Jerry Maguire, tom Cruise is a sports agent who leaves his big agency to go at it solo, and Zellweger plays a single mother who doesn't know if she and Maguire are partners in business, in romance in both or in neither. It's a great movie. Tom Cruise is doing his thing and Renee Zellweger kills it. Cubic Coding Jr Pulse down an Oscar for his role. Regina King and Jonathan Libnicki are perfect, and everyone starts quoting Jerry Maguire all over the place. Two of the most famous lines are actually in the clip I want to play In the movie. At a time when they have been apart, an emotional Tom Cruise comes to see Renee Zellweger and gives a manic, impassioned speech to win her back, which culminates in this I love you.

Speaker 4: 8:58

You Complete me. I'm not just Shut up, just shut up.

Speaker 2: 9:03

You hate me, I'm not. Just Shut up, just shut up, you hate me, I'm not just Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Speaker 5: 9:12

You hate me at hello, you hate me at hello.

Speaker 1: 9:23

Okay, renee, fair enough, jerry Maguire could probably have me at hello too. I mean, we're talking about Tom Cruise in 96. That, the peak of his Tom Cruise-iness. He could probably have at hello most of us, if we're being honest. That's not where my qualms is. I'm talking about this part.

Speaker 4: 9:40

You.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Complete me. Okay, Helen, can you come here real quick? What was that thing you said?

Speaker 3: 9:51

I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Right, you complete me. Is that a compliment? Let's run it through the simulator again. Picked up another compliment, this time from Jerry. Oh, what did he say? Well, he was giving a big speech and then at the end he said you complete me and that's the compliment. Then, yeah, why? What's he complimenting about you? Well, he's complimenting my yeah Ability to complete him. But honestly, it didn't matter what he said, he already had me at hello. Totally fair, it's Jerry Maguire, I get it. But yeah, that's another one. It's like as good as it gets where it's not really a compliment at all. It's totally about the person saying it, completely self-centered and just pretending to be a compliment, and if these are the best examples that movies have to offer, well then maybe this topic needs a bit of attention so we can define the bounds of what is actually a compliment and then also maybe explore what the flip side of that would be. All of this compliment talk got me to thinking about the best compliment I've ever received, and once I decided to get into the story of what that was, I actually wanted to reach out and see what other good compliment stories I could find, so I made a mini episode about it a few months ago with a number to call in and tell me stories of your best compliments, and now I'd like to play one listener story that I received.

Speaker 2: 11:23

Hey Scott, this is Steven in Silver Spring, maryland. So my story of the perfect compliment that I received was from my now wife, and the story was we went on our first date, but I had a lot of baggage because I had been married previously and my previous wife had died a year earlier, and so I talked about that in our first date and maybe I talked about it more than I should have. And so after our first date, we had a really good time. We went on to ice cream after dessert afterwards, which was usually a sign that people want to spend more time together and then I followed up with her and continued our email correspondence and let's meet up again this weekend. And then that coming weekend, I think, was a long weekend, and I went through the whole weekend and did not hear anything back from her and was getting very anxious because I had I'm not going to call it love at first sight, but I knew that this was a person. This was the person that I wanted to be with. I just knew. I didn't hear from her over the weekend and I was heartbroken. And finally, on the Monday of the holiday weekend, I got an email from her saying thanks, I had a really nice time, but I think we're just not meant to be together. I think this just isn't going to work or something. Something very sort of simple and bland and non-explanatory. And so I was heartbroken by that. I wasn't sure what to do, and then, finally, I got this idea. I remembered this sort of humorous letter that had gone around, sort of a viral thing. It was a humorous letter that was written by a hypothetical job applicant who had been rejected and they rejected. They wrote a letter rejecting that rejection, using the same language back at the original. Anyway, I decided to write a rejection of her rejection letter and my basic premise was if you're not into me, that's great. You know I'm not great. But if you're not into me, you know, I understand I'm not going to try to change that. But if it's about these other things, this baggage that I'm bringing, then let's talk more. You know, let's explore this a little bit. And so I wrote that. I worked on it really hard, I thought about it. I'm sure I did multiple drafts before I sent it, and then I sent it to her and about a day or two later I got a response saying essentially okay, let's talk, let's meet again and it's all worked out. Since then. You know not that there haven't been some bumps along the way, but it's worked out really well. And she told me later. She said it was your writing. It was your writing that really got me. I really I really loved your writing and I think that's the best compliment I've ever received.

Speaker 1: 14:33

So, piggybacking off that my perfect compliment came when I was living in Japan, and it's much less the result of my own actions than Steven's. Actually, it happened when I was with my friend, jeff Clemens, who was on the Park Golf episode with me, but we also sat down and talked compliments when he was here too. I'm back with Jeff, my friend from Canada, who I met in Japan. Jeff Clemens hi, hey, how's it going? What's happening? So I wanted to have, while I was here, I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk about an experience that I'm putting into one of my episodes, but I'm thinking back to you. You were a key part of the best compliment I've ever gotten. The experience I'm thinking about is back when we had this. You reminded me it was an international. What is it? The International Society?

Speaker 5: 15:23

Oh yeah, it was the International Association of Takikawa. There you go, or some. I can't remember their correct words. I don't know if they could, because they were wonderful. They are wonderful people.

Speaker 1: 15:35

And it was run by the CIR in Takikawa. While we were there, Matthew Caesar and he had grouped together a bunch of some English speakers and then a bunch of Japanese native speakers to have lunch together, and the loop for us was like your lunch is going to be paid for and then the appeal is that you can. Then They'll talk to people at our table or whatever. We'll have practice English conversation.

Speaker 5: 16:01

Well. So it was funny because Matt had always invited every English speaker. Matt was like this is an open invitation to every English speaker, Please come for lunch. And most people were like, well, I teach so I can't. And for us we were like, yeah sure, We'll just make sure that we have that time open. I think it was once a month, every Tuesday, or once every two weeks, every Tuesday we were like we will keep that open for free lunch.

Speaker 1: 16:26

And I didn't go to that many because of what you're saying. I was. Usually I had to do something at the junior high schools that I was working in, and for some reason this time I didn't, and I was free and I don't know if school was out or I didn't have classes or whatever, but I was able to go to the lunch with you all, and so I showed up and we went and it's this. Revista was a farm restaurant. It was kind of like a large log cabin and they served kind of really nice delicate pastas and just different dishes is what I remember. I don't know, I don't know what else to when I was here, I feel I always got soup curry because they did.

Speaker 5: 17:00

They always did a really good soup curry and they always put whatever the freshest vegetables were into it. Well, that's cool. And interesting enough is we almost always went to Victoria for English, like English shout was almost always at Victoria, which is steak Victoria. Yeah, I would always get the hamburger Hamburger sitting on rice with cheese melted on top the hamburger Doria. So usually we did that. So you actually have on the best one.

Speaker 1: 17:26

I came on the best one we went to like a special place. Because now I'm like in my brain that's the one you went to every time, but that sounds.

Speaker 5: 17:33

I think we only went once.

Speaker 1: 17:34

I'm learning that's the only time. Okay, well, this is a special occasion, but I was. I remember being seated at a table across from two nice older ladies. So I had a haircut much like I have right now, and that is, I had like shaved my head all the way down I'm sure it was summer or something and I just go short so that I don't have to think about it. So I had like a buzz cut, maybe a little bit longer, and I have kind of like a light, dirty, blondish color of hair. And so the lady sitting across from me and the Japanese lady sitting across from me said you look like Brad Pitt. And I stopped for a moment. I was like whoa, did you just say I looked like Brad Pitt? And she goes yes, you look like Brad Pitt. And then she holds her hand to her forehead and she goes from here up. And she holds her hand to her forehead and goes from here up and I go from here up, mentioning basically my short hair, that is, brad Pitt hair colored. I go, yeah, and I go what about here? And I hold my hand into my forehead, I go, what about here down? And I move it past my face and she like gives me a stern look and then she's like, no, here I go, but here up. And she's like, yes, and I'm like one eighth of Brad Pitt said I will take it, I will take it. That is still the best compliment I've ever received, likely ever will receive. I'll take it. So I was officially. I, without prompting. Someone said you look like Brad Pitt. There are some contextualizations to it, but that doesn't always have to be part of the story. No, it's just I was doing like Brad Pitt and I was like, oh, and from here up, but I'm like I will take it. That's good. That's the best compliment I think I've ever gotten. It happened there. I was just so tickled I remembered it still to this day very much.

Speaker 5: 19:26

So so I always found that interesting when they would compare us to celebrities Like you look like this celebrity and that similar group. One of them said you know, you look like Daniel Craig. And I looked at them and I went and I don't, I don't think you do Like I don't. I think our eyes might be similar color and I think that's where she was getting it is that our eyes were similar color. And she goes you look like Daniel Craig. And they all kind of nod like yeah, yeah, and I'm going, oh, that's good. And one of the others goes or Jack Black, and that's a that's a pretty good one. That was not bad, that one's not bad, yeah. And I was like, wow, you went on either end of the spectrum of who I might look like.

Speaker 1: 20:11

Yes, yeah, all right Well this is great. Thank you for letting me sit you down on Mike.

Speaker 5: 20:17

Yeah, no thanks. Thanks for inviting me to. Yeah, cool, bye, success.

Speaker 1: 20:25

One of the things about doing a podcast that I love and also didn't ever consider before starting is that it gets me to research some strangely specific things sometimes and this episode I spent some of that time going through photos of each and every Brad Pitt movie because I really wanted to figure out exactly which one my hair was making her think of. Now I'm sure this was only necessary for me. Really, everyone else probably already has the history of Brad Pitt's hairstyles locked in their long term memory still rattling around from those late nights in the quad studying to get their Brad PhD degrees, which of course stands for Brad Pitt hunky dude degrees. Brad is. Brad is a long hair boy, sometimes Troy legends of the fall interview with a vampire. He's got a short scruffy cut more often, like in seven or 12 monkeys in the oceans movies, but he's only done that buzz cut like I had a couple of times. And that means this kind old Japanese lady was most likely thinking of the movie Mr and Mrs Smith, the Doug Lehman flick, where Pitt starred alongside Angelina Jolie as competing assassins who also had the hots for each other or something, I don't know. I think it was mainly an excuse to film beautiful people in large explosions with movie cameras, but that description actually applies well to a ton of films. So we're talking Mr and Mrs Smith, brad Pitt. The timing works out. That would have been a movie in circulation back then and the only other option for a buzz cut Brad Pitt at that time would have been like the last third of Fight Club. So I think the Smiths are a safer bet. So this lady did look like a pretty strict rule follower. So if she wasn't a Fight Club, I imagine she wouldn't have told me about it. Per Club rule number one, the end number two. Now, was there a reason I was telling you this? Yes, is it partly to tell people that I was compared to Brad Pitt once? Yes, does it help that this is an audio medium and people can't see what I actually look like as I'm telling them this? Maybe, but there is a larger point to why I'm bringing this up. It was a momentary thing, completely unprompted and sort of silly actually, but it has stayed with me all these years and thinking back on that small momentary thing still brings a smile to my face, as it has many times since it happened. It was a gift she gave me that I still have the power to tap into and mine little bits of real positive energy out of. So I maintain a pretty basic wardrobe. I wear jeans most of the time. I have t-shirts with different things on them, but I usually am wearing a plain long sleeve shirt over the top covering it up. That's my usual look. I've been sticking with it for a while now. I don't do too much to accessorize no necklaces or piercings or pins but one thing I have come to enjoy immensely is a pair of colorful shoes. Now, colorful or crazy shoes on someone whose whole outfit is also crazy can be too much for me. That might be a person to avoid for any number of reasons, but someone with an exceedingly normal outfit, except for one fun accent like colorful shoes, well, that's just some good, clean fun. Right now, the shoes I wear for this purpose are all the same make and model. My habit of owning several different colors of the exact same article of clothing extends, of course, to my shoes too. The shoe I go with, my regular shoe, is the Chuck Taylor All Stars by Congress. They're the classic canvas high top shoe with a thick white sole and a white shell toe. There's a circle with a star and a Chuck Taylor signature is on each ankle. In fact, the shoes are often just called Chuck Taylor's or Chuck's All right, I knew I'd get a chance to paraphrase from Wikipedia to you. So okay, here we go. I had thought Chuck Taylor was just a famous basketball player from before my time. I mean to get his name on the most iconic tennis shoe of a generation. It had to be, and he was a basketball player, but Wikipedia lists his name with the word salesman in parentheses afterward, taylor was born in 1901, only 10 years after basketball was invented and five years before they switched from using peach baskets to metal hoops. He played in high school and then went semi pro. Pro basketball wasn't at all like it is today. There was no NBA. That wouldn't start until 1946. So Chuck Taylor played on his first team and then that team disbanded after his first season. He played on a bunch of other teams and by the 20s he was a shoe salesman for Converse. He would eventually become the player manager of the Converse All Stars, a basketball team based out of Chicago that would put on traveling clinics and exhibitions sponsored by Converse, like kind of like the Harlem Globe Prodders, I guess, but they would go around and show off and sell their shoes. A shoe that, with the input of Chuck Taylor, would eventually become the Converse All Star that we know now. A shoe that became so famous and unrivaled that most basketball players wore these shoes for 50 years, from the 20s through the 70s, and they were the official shoe for the Olympic Games from 1936 to 68. At their height in the 60s, this one model of shoe accounted for 70 to 80% of the entire basketball shoe market. That's astounding, but I didn't know anything about that when I decided this was the tennis shoe I wanted to wear. I saw this shoe in movies like Back to the Future, Rocky, in comic books and cartoons. To me this shoe was the shorthand for tennis shoe. When I drew my own cartoon characters, if they were in tennis shoes they almost always wore chucks. Once I unlocked the high school achievement of being old enough to work, drive and buy my own clothes, I found a Converse Outlet Store near where I grew up. I got my height later, but my flippers were large early and Converse All Stars have always been the same, at least as long as I've been wearing them. So once I knew and liked the fit of my size in that shoe. I've been able to buy new shoes confidently, without needing to try them on at all, ever since. It saves me time, it saves me hassle. It's honestly one of the things I appreciate most about this long-standing tradition of mine, and I appreciated the memory of it even more when I moved to Japan. My shoe size jumped from 13 to 31, and the selection of footwear available to me fell to zero. There were rumors people would swear that this one store had huge shoes and they may have had one pair of 28s, or we should go to this bowling alley because they carry every size, which ended up meaning they topped out at 29. By the time I moved to Hokkaido, I had all but given up on finding shoes my size in Japan at all, just wore what I had, which had been holding up until then. They would not have held up the whole four years in Hokkaido, though, but from the amount of time and the regular wear and tear itself, hokkaido is rough on shoes. Whether it's the summer spent hiking and exploring nature, or the winter sloshing around the snow, ice and road salt, my shoes wore out there faster than any place else I've ever lived. Strangely enough, it was an outlet store that again came to my rescue A whole outlet mall actually. We found a huge outlet mall with many Japanese but also American stores and brands in Chitose, hokkaido, a suburb city next to Sapporo where Hokkaido's main airport is, and this mall had a Nike outlet store. Inside. I found two pairs of shoes, my size, I think. One was a plain shoe that would be good for some boring Japanese office work situations, but the other pair was actually how do I describe it? They were white and green and blue and yellow and, I think, a little purple in a few places, probably. Yeah, they were really colorful. I did buy them, but only after a bit of hesitation. Me, the person in desperate need of footwear, debating whether or not I could wear a pair of loudly colored shoes. My reasoning was that I had actually never worn a pair of shoes that intentionally stuck out before. Prior to this, I had focused my shoe energy on trying to fit in or at least blend in the best I could. In most situations, no shoes that say notice me would have been the last thing I would want to wear. But now I was in a world where blending in wasn't ever an option. I was never going to fit in, no matter what in Japan, and anything I wore on my feet would have to get in line behind a lot of other things about my whole look. That said, notice me constantly. I know I started out by saying I love a pair of colorful shoes, but it's because of these shoes. This was my first colorful pair, but first it was a situation of beggars can't be choosers. I needed shoes. These were my size. There was no telling when or if I would find other options in my size without going across an ocean, and back then online shopping wasn't what it is now. But the more I wore them, the more I enjoyed them. I liked seeing the little flash of color out of the bottom of my peripheral vision as I walked. I liked seeing them on a shoe rack and a lineup of super similar black and brown shoes. I mean that was hilarious anyway, because my shoes always looked comically large in those situations and usually stuck out the back of the shoe rack or some other thing. That would make me basically feel like a Sasquatch on a daily basis. But I loved those bright, colorful shoes. I loved having them. I wore them to schools. I wore them part golfing, I wore them walking around on the snow and playing basketball. I wore them when I moved back to the States and I wore them until they wore out and fell apart. During all that time I picked up random compliments all over the place, just out and about. Kids and adults alike would sometimes comment on my shoes, and they proved at times to be excellent icebreakers and conversation starters, all on their own. Meanwhile, back in the States, after the demise of my colorful Nike's, I'll admit I bought random shoes for a while until I happened to discover that I was once again close to my old friend, the Converse Factory Outlet Store. I switched back to Chuck Taylor's. Before Japan, I had always gone high tops, but a stretch in Japan and then also in California, where taking off shoes to enter houses is a more common occurrence, made lacing the high top chucks up and also taking them off a huge pain. So I started mixing in the low top version of the shoe as well. The way I understand the outlet shoes that don't sell at other stores are cycled out and make their way to this outlet store, where they are then marked down further and then also put on sale. On top of that, at least in my size, it's usually chock full of bright and colorful options that have fallen through the whole system getting to this final stop. So after discounts and coupons, I usually walk away with a new pair of chucks for $10 to $30. I mean, I can come in and be done shopping in only a few minutes because, again, I literally never have to try the shoes on. I know exactly what my size is and exactly how it'll fit. I find comfort in that, buying the same thing over and over again. Maybe it's the pleasure of efficient shopping, maybe, but maybe it's also the safety and security of knowing that anytime something wears out, gets damaged, destroyed or fails in some way, I can replace it easily, quickly. But more importantly, exactly, I have found shoes to be the place to come out of my shell in an outfit. It helps that the wacky and bright colored shoes are usually the cheapest in the store. I didn't document this, but anecdotally I feel like I've seen that the more out there in odd colors and styles usually sport the lower price tags too. So I tried a few low tops with fun colors and I really liked the accent. I also got random compliments, many from kids and even teens, which, I'm not gonna lie. When a teenager compliments your clothes. It feels sort of like okay feather in my cap there. I've noticed shoe compliments while wearing brightly colored yellow, purple, blue and green chucks, but I got decidedly more when I wore my pair of pink low top Chuck Taylors. The shoes that I'm placing at the center of this whole thing I'm trying to describe here are about compliments. I got some non-bright colors from time to time over the years too, like black, white and gray, but the colorful ones are by far my favorite. Now I've gotten to a point where when I go in, the more colorful or wild the design is, the quicker I lock it up. Those are the ones I look for exclusively the weird statement shoes or the ones that are going to prompt some sort of response. I guess A pair of bright pink shoes instantly gave my usual outfit just the right amount of personality and made it look good. I thought the difference in compliments I got when wearing these shoes versus any other that I had ever tried was undeniable. It had to be the shoes. They were the only variable I changed in my regular uniform. These pink shoes sparked comments often and at a variety of places the gym, the grocery store, a restaurant, a doctor's office. Honestly, it could be anywhere really, and any random compliment would genuinely give me just a little boost, which would last different amounts of time, but still it was always there. That's why I talk about compliments in terms of generating or transferring energy. That's what I would feel happening to me in those shoes. Stop getting a random compliment out of nowhere. Is there a way to measure how much renewable energy that produces? I mean, it's not nothing. But there were also the other comments. I've talked about the compliments, but the pink shoes also served as well. Let's call them crab detectors. The same way that when I wore my pink shoes, there was a noticeable uptick in people saying nice things about them, which was most people, to be fair. There was also a noticeable uptick in people who would use a man wearing pink shoes as a chance to show well, what a crab they were. A crabby person might look at my feet and say something like oh hey, really nice shoes or something. I mean it wasn't always exactly that or the same thing, but you know, and in that way they actually functioned really well for me on the crab detector front. Does that work? I mean, a lot of times you might be a few minutes into a conversation before a crab says something crabby and outs themselves, but this puts it up front. Crabby people who are going to say crabby things about my shoes usually open with them. By the way, the best response when someone gives you a sarcastic comment like that and I've tested this a few times in these shoes is just to take the sarcastic compliment as a genuine one. So when they give you a hey, really nice shoes, you can reply back in the most genuine way possible oh, thanks, yeah, I really like them, or something like that. You have to play it completely straight, but I found that this sort of deflates the crab and puts them in the spot where they have to either drop it or then try to stick their heads back out to explain their crabby joke. And well, crabs don't like to come out of their shell when they know someone's there waiting for them, so usually just ends there, problem solved. Oh, and extra compliment received double points. The pink low top chucks quickly became my go to pair, and even though I had a few more on the shoe rack next to them, those only really went into a rotation when I was running late and couldn't find my pink ones or something, and what happened was that I literally wore them out. So much that I literally wore them out. At the end I had worn the treadway down. The soul was coming. Apart from the rest of the shoe, at the sides they were cracked and dirty in a bunch of places and well, I'd gotten much more than my original $14 worth out of them. That was probably back over a year ago now, and there have been two major factors in play since then. The first is I finally started acknowledging my backlog of converses pairs that are in really good shape or even new, that I should wear before getting a whole bunch more. But the second factor is that X factor that's in play whenever you're dealing with outlet stores. The inventory is constant but unpredictable. If something is there, it may be the only one of that style, and then it's only there until it isn't. When I went into the store for a really long time, I didn't see the same style of pink shoes. I mean, I only went on occasion, but I saw lots of wild style, some even louder than my bright pink model. But having had so many pleasant experiences with my color and style, I had sort of convinced myself that they were the perfect shoe. So that's what I wanted to find. And then earlier this year I walked in, expected to scan the shelves for a minute and turn back without finding my price. But this time was different. This time I found what I had come for Size 13, converse, chuck Taylor, all Stars in low top and the exact same bright pink that I had before. After markdowns and discounts, we're talking well under $20, like my first pair. So I grabbed them and made the purchase. Pink shoes were back on the menu. Well, actually I still had that backlog of previous shoes I was working on, so the pink shoes went directly into the closet. It was like that famous short story for save pink shoes never worn. But I've been wearing the other shoes out slowly, two by two, and I've really been anticipating getting those pink ones back into the mix someday. Looking for the perfect time, looking for a good excuse. Did I spend countless hours making a podcast just so I could justify wearing a pink pair of shoes a little earlier? Well, actually I was looking for a lot of things with this episode. I mean I wanted to talk about my pink shoes, yeah, but then what I mean like after I say I had pink shoes and the compliment stuff, where do I go next? And so I googled the topic and my city to see what came up. Actually, this is a step that pretty much every episode of the podcast goes through, where I Google relevant words or phrases or the topic and check to see if there's anything semi local that I don't even know to be looking into. For this episode, that meant searching a few terms, but among them was pink shoes, oakland. Now I hit enter, but then Google must have done a double take and been like, oh, this can't be right, let's help this guy out. So it took my search for pink shoes, oakland and served me up right right at the top in blue. Did you mean punk shows Oakland? Because then there's no way what you searched for is what you actually wanted to search for. That must be some mistake, and I hesitated here. But ultimately this show is about me having new experiences Well, really about me trying to have old experiences again, but also new experiences related to those old experiences. So my response no, I did not mean punk shows Oakland, but I do. Now, I wouldn't say that I'm any kind of a punk person. I mean, I think I've said this before, but I'm not much of a music person in general, I've only been to four concerts really, not counting small performances or, like my friend's high school band, carnivorous grass, but four real concerts ever. Number one was in high school when my sister, the exchange student from Belgium, we hosted one summer. My best friend who I had a crush on, but I couldn't tell her and I all went to Starlight Amphitheater in Kansas City to see my first real concert ever Hootie and the Blowfish. It was good. They played songs I knew from the radio. I got to stand there while they played, hold my hand, wishing I was holding the hand of the girl next to me whose hand I was not holding. It was great, but yeah, a bunch of hits. Nice outdoor concert, it was a good time. My second concert was a festival in Lawrence, kansas that I went to my freshman year of college when a girl on my dorm floor that I had a crush on invited me to go with her. I'm sorry, more accurately, there was an open sign up sheet for anyone on our floor and she was the one organizing it, but I mean, that's basically the same thing, right? So I went to a hot outdoor field where a couple of stages had been put up and wandered around with some various people from my dorm floor wondering if I was going to run into the girl I had signed up for. I didn't, and caught some bands in the process. The one I really remember being there for multiple songs of was Everclear, who I was pretty into. But after several hours of not accidentally, on purpose running into the girl I liked and realizing that there were really only three options of what to do with myself, which were walk around a field, stand still in a field or sit on some hay bales, I decided to head back to the dorm at that point and probably watch a law and order rerun or something else more my speed. Our dorms at KU were only a short walk away from the lead center where the university put on lots of concerts and shows, and I was able to get tickets at a student discount to see Beck open up for the flaming lips in a pretty awesome show. That was concert number three, and my last concert was also in college when I went with my girlfriend. See, I finally had a girlfriend for one. They aren't all sad boy things. We went to see Coldplay, which actually might be the most sad boy band. There is Easily the biggest concert I've been to yet indoors in a proper Kansas City concert venue, and I did love it Actually. It was really great. So, yeah, hoody, ever clear, beck, the flaming lips and Coldplay no one really even remotely punk. I guess early ever clear maybe, but I was more into their pop songs and ballads. Also, I genuinely did a thorough search for pink shoes, oakland too. I didn't just see the punk shows suggestion and completely stopped looking, but I didn't really find anything interesting there. So I decided that the best excuse to break out my new pair of pink chucks and see if they still have the same compliment getting power could be to just go to one of those punk shows in pink shoes and see what happens. But which one? Where? How do I find it A little bit of looking. Later what I found was a Facebook group called East Bay punks that would post events and flyers for local punk shows all over the SF Bay area, and there were a lot. I was a little overwhelmed by all the options, things happening most weekends and also sometimes during the week. I finally posted asking the group for advice on what show to go see and got a bunch of helpful replies. One was from someone named Nicole who just so happened to be in a band performing at a punk show in Oakland soon. The band she's in is called Rival Squad. They're a punk band from San Diego and Nicole sings vocals. Rival Squad's show was going to be at a place called Stagold Deli in Oakland. Since joining the Facebook group, I had seen tons of flyers for shows at Stagold. It looked like a pretty decent venue that was always putting on all ages shows with cool lineups of local and out of town bands. So on a Sunday night in September I got ready to go to Stagold Deli and see Rival Squad perform at one of their punk shows in my pink shoes. All right, I'm wearing my pink shoes, got them out of the box for the first time and we're taking them on a, taking them on a trip. The other thing I'm dressed to fit in as best I can.

Speaker 6: 43:54

I did my best anyway.

Speaker 1: 43:55

I've been looking at a lot of different punk stuff, researching and trying to figure out what show to go to, and I think I see a lot of black shirts with white lettering on them and that works. I actually have one black shirt with white graphics on it and so that's what I'm wearing, but it says Star Laboratories on it. It's a little faded, a little distressed now because I've had it since the beginning of the CW show for the Flash. I'm a huge comic book fan, grew up reading, collecting comics, loved the Flash and so when they made a TV show of it, I was on board and got t-shirts at the beginning with the Star Laboratories logo, which is kind of like a flash shirt, but not overtly flash. It's kind of incognito nerd stuff where sometimes people will see it and be like, hey, and if they don't, no big deal. But that's what I'm wearing. I think I fit in. I think I'm wearing just some jeans, my Star Lab shirt, pink converse and I've got my coat up. So here we go. I contacted Nicole when I knew I'd be able to come for sure, and asked if the band would have any time to talk with me for the podcast. So we decided on meeting up before their set out back in the large patio area that Stagold has.

Speaker 6: 45:26

All right.

Speaker 1: 45:29

So welcome everybody. Thanks for joining me. I'm here with Rival Squad and I'm at my first punk show ever. So we're at Stagold Deli and yeah, so this is exciting. I'm just sitting down with you guys and could I get you guys to maybe introduce yourselves one by one for the show.

Speaker 6: 45:51

Of course I'm Nicole. I do the vocals for Rival Squad.

Speaker 7: 45:55

I'm Jerry. I play the guitar. Julio, I play bass.

Speaker 3: 45:58

Israel play drums. Awesome, awesome, thank you.

Speaker 1: 46:03

So how long have you all been together? What's kind of a quick history of your band, I guess.

Speaker 6: 46:08

Quick history we came up during COVID and we started just practicing. So we've been together for three years. First year and maybe the second year we didn't really play too much just because of the COVID restrictions yeah, we started right before COVID. Yeah, right after COVID.

Speaker 1: 46:22

Right on. How would you describe your music? I don't know genres and subgenres, but is there a specific way or how would you describe your music? That's a Jerry question.

Speaker 6: 46:31

He's a master at this one.

Speaker 7: 46:32

I think it's just it just comes from whatever I'm feeling, I guess. Okay, so you know anything like kind of Crust Punk, hardcore, db, subpensive, mech, we call each other like an umbrella turn of like Hardcore Punk, but in reality there's many songs that like.

Speaker 6: 46:50

There's songs that differentiate that a lot and that sound very fast paced crust, yeah, and then there's other songs that are actually even slower than that and sound more slug sludge like. So it's kind of it's a mixture of a lot, but I think we use the umbrella turn of Hardcore Punk just because it can fall into it's, yeah, a big umbrella turn. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1: 47:08

I'm new to the whole genre. I asked my music friend to make me a playlist like a while back when I was starting this, and so he made me punk that started with like surf rock.

Speaker 6: 47:17

Oh, love it. Yeah, yeah, so many subgenres, this is all punk. He's like this is all punk, this is all punk. I'm like great this is cool.

Speaker 1: 47:24

So it's really cool. That's excellent. All right, you see, how did you all get into punk music? Is it something you grew up with loving and then turned into musicians, or I don't know how that works. I'm not a musician myself.

Speaker 6: 47:37

Yeah, Personally for me. I grew up in a really rough neighborhood, so you could either like gang bang or not, and if you didn't, you're probably a punk Gotcha. There was a little what to call a venue down the alley from me and it was called the Yard in San Diego and it was an all age spot. I started going there when I was 13 and just met a lot of really cool people, people that had this little release that I did, and I chose to kind of stray away from like what I would say most of my peers were doing at the time and decided to just go a different route. That's how I got into the music, just actually because I stumbled upon this venue.

Speaker 7: 48:15

Awesome, Very cool After me. I just I was a teenager in Florida and had nothing else to do, so I started playing guitar because I had nothing, you know, I learned how to play and it started with, like, you know, like pop, punk and like the popular stuff, like the thing that whatever's on TV, yeah, like the easy riffs, but then it kind of, you know, I got more into it, you know, eventually, like metal and stuff, and I started going to shows, yeah, ever since.

Speaker 4: 48:42

Oh yeah, what do you think For me? I got into it at a very early age because of my sister. She was really into like metal and all that. My aunts were too.

Speaker 1: 48:53

Older and younger sister.

Speaker 6: 48:54

Yeah, so yeah, they're all older on the youngest one.

Speaker 4: 48:56

Yeah yeah. So she introduced me to like Guns N' Roses and Iron Maiden. Yeah, my aunts favorite band is Mega Death, which is weird here and then, like you know, cleaning the house and music. But yeah, that's pretty much how I got into music and everybody in my family's a musician, so just being around everyone Very cool. Yeah, it kept me out of trouble.

Speaker 1: 49:17

Yeah, I can that seems excellent.

Speaker 3: 49:21

With me. Same as my brother. He's my brother. Same thing in Florida. I just listen to pop, punk, stuff like that, and then we just trail them to metal and stuff like that. We're not from Florida, by the way, we're from Chicago.

Speaker 6: 49:34

For the record, not from Florida.

Speaker 3: 49:36

We didn't grow up in Florida.

Speaker 7: 49:39

We lived a year there.

Speaker 1: 49:42

Has Rival Squad had any wild and crazy stories from shows? I mean, that's one of the things that strikes me about all the punk music I was listening to. It's just there's so much raw energy just right under the surface and I was going to ask. I was like, does that? I mean that's got to pop out of the surface sometimes and just get great.

Speaker 6: 49:58

It really does, honestly, yeah, sometimes it's really good.

Speaker 7: 50:02

Sometimes, you know, some people get a little. Of course, they enjoy a little too much and you know it gets out of control.

Speaker 6: 50:07

Yeah, it does Especially. You know it's a drinking and whatnot. But I mean, for the most part we don't really have wild stories. If anything, we have actually really good stories. Yeah, throughout our whole tour we've met nothing but people with pure love for us, like have like put us up in there, like in our houses, have, like you know, brought us out to breakfast, have, you know, everything. It's just it's been really great.

Speaker 1: 50:29

Just really awesome people across, the across all the different stops. Yeah, yeah, just complete love and just complete support.

Speaker 6: 50:35

That's fantastic yeah we've been very grateful to have gotten that experience, because I know sometimes it does get kind of crazy with bands. So yeah, we've been a little lucky. We've been a little lucky For being our first tour.

Speaker 1: 50:44

A string of good stories is excellent. That sounds great. That sounds great. This might seem a little cliche, but I did wonder what's your favorite part of performing? Like what I don't perform, I don't. I don't get like a crowd. My thing I do, and then I go back into my cave and create it. I don't really get a live reaction. But what's your favorite part of that? What's your favorite part of performing?

Speaker 6: 51:05

I would say that my first, the first part in general, is even just being allowed to have that platform, because I don't think I'm ever really able to speak about things that I, you know, that things that bother me, or things that that I feel that are like crazy, that we overlook, that you know daily things, lives that we overlook, like how is it that we live like this and these, like these injustices are happening right under our noses, things like that that I really feel like. Even just having the platform to shed some light onto those things being that I have most of my families in Mexico, I make it a point to also shed light on, you know, injustices that happen in Mexico as well Just to. It really is kind of just like an overall platform for, like my, for my experience, what I have lived, whether it's racism or just pure right, like just in human rights that you know we have either in the US or Mexico. Just having that and people agreeing and or even people saying, oh, I didn't know about that, that's crazy. That brings like even just bringing awareness brings me all the joy.

Speaker 7: 52:12

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's one thing, you know, that's an important thing. But I guess, music wise, I, whenever anybody like digs, like the, you know the raves, the noise that we make. I just can you know something that I think it's just we're making noise. It might sound like music at some point, but if people dig it, it's always feels cool when people like it.

Speaker 4: 52:35

The things I get out of shows is just being able to, you know, be creative and just express yourself musically. I mean that's the best satisfaction I get everybody seeing everyone having a good time.

Speaker 7: 52:45

You know, that's the best feeling in the world. That's awesome.

Speaker 3: 52:50

Favorite part of performing, just like having fun, just be out up there, like just don't even think about what's going on, just have fun and hopefully everybody else is having fun with you. That's pretty much it All right.

Speaker 1: 53:04

Here's where my terrible memory kicks in. Who is the drummer? Again Me this guy. Okay, because that is extra impressive to me. Because my rhythm skills are zero to negative.

Speaker 3: 53:14

Yeah, when you're just sitting down, I have to entertain myself. You know I can't walk around and you know, try to pump up the crowd.

Speaker 7: 53:21

I'm just sitting down in the background, I'm just going to try to have fun with myself. If there's a good job, I keep it on track. Yeah, sometimes.

Speaker 1: 53:28

It's really good, awesome, awesome. And then just I just had some kind of fun questions like what was the first concert you ever went to or favorite concert, just kind of talking concerts, I don't know, I don't know I can't remember my first concert like big concert, but I did go to a lot of backyard shows.

Speaker 6: 53:44

One of my favorite one was actually the ska band from San Diego called Esqueda and it was like an all ska lineup but it was just so fun, how like it was. Nothing but like. Sometimes, at like some shows, people can get like too rowdy and fight and whatnot. This particular show I remember just everyone being like happy, everyone just being like giddy and stuff like that, and then that was one of my favorite shows and it was at the yard and then till this day actually I still know like some of the band members and they still come to our shows and stuff like that. So it almost brings up like another, like just like really good community sense, like hey, I grew up going to your shows and now you're coming to my shows, right, right, cool experience.

Speaker 7: 54:25

That's so cool. I don't remember my first concert, but the most favorite recent, I guess was I got to see Merciful Fate in Vegas a couple of months ago and you know, they haven't been to the States, I think, since the 90s or early 2000s, so they they're here, so I got to see them and that was pretty cool. I've been a fan for a long time.

Speaker 4: 54:49

Mine. I don't remember my first concert concert, but my favorite one had to be the Damned in San Diego. Yeah, that one was really good. They're really good. Live, to say hold up pretty good.

Speaker 3: 55:01

I think my first show was a leftover crack show, I think Nice. I was in high school.

Speaker 7: 55:07

At the epicenter.

Speaker 3: 55:08

Yeah, epicenter, epicenter and Merciful, Something like that, yeah.

Speaker 7: 55:11

A recipe no longer there. It's a fun show.

Speaker 1: 55:16

Well, how can people find you or find your music, how can people catch up to you online or in?

Speaker 7: 55:22

person. We're pretty much everywhere All the streaming YouTube. Yeah, some people uploaded our stuff on YouTube. Okay, yeah, spotify Bandcamp.

Speaker 1: 55:33

Bandcamp. Yeah, bandcamp is where I was listening.

Speaker 7: 55:36

Apple music, I think. And you have Instagram. Yeah, underscore, rival squad, underscore and then, yeah, we're also on tape. We're not just all digital.

Speaker 1: 55:50

Analog and digital. It's covering it all. Yeah, Very cool Right on. Is there anything else?

Speaker 7: 55:54

you guys want to talk about. What do you feel? You know what the songs represent.

Speaker 6: 55:59

Our songs are purely just really politically charged, like just we. Most of our songs are in Spanish. We try to kind of keep it half and half, just because you know, but yeah, it's just mainly, yeah, politically charged. A lot of really heartfelt stuff, just things that we tend to overlook sometimes, or even things that are normalized and we kind of just seem like, oh well, there's no way out of this, this is just how life is. But I think we kind of just try to bring some hope into people that there is a better way of life and that there is a chance of change.

Speaker 1: 56:35

Okay, when you're coming up with a new song, does that start with like the political idea, and then you're like I want to form music around it, or do you have music kind of forming and you're like, I think I know an idea that can fit in here.

Speaker 6: 56:50

The music happens first. This guy. It's maybe a mixture, right, maybe a mixture. I kind of tend to do the music.

Speaker 7: 56:57

We do the music first, and then Nicole has some stuff written down and we try to like connect, you know, find a way to make it fit.

Speaker 6: 57:06

Other times, though, I think like I'll hear something he's doing and it'll just feel like heavy air will feel dark, and I'm like, okay, I think I know what to do. Is this not go like a certain route?

Speaker 1: 57:17

Start to match that.

Speaker 6: 57:17

Yeah, yeah, like that Other times it's like, hey, we need to work on a new song and I'll be like, okay, well, like this political event just happened, like abortion rights like being overturned we were that's going to be probably one of our new songs that we're working on, just because it's like a relevant case and that you know we need, you know exactly. But then at some times it's more of like a political thing happens and then we're like all right, this is our next song. Other times it's like Jerry just has a really cool riff and I'm like all right, all right you know like I'll work with it. It's a mixture, it's a mixture, but yeah, just wherever it comes from.

Speaker 1: 57:50

Yeah right, it's a train of just whatever, yeah, whatever happens. That's so cool. Okay, well, thanks. I should probably let you get ready for your stuff too, but I'll thank you.

Speaker 6: 58:01

Definitely I'm happy to be having you. I appreciate it. Yeah, definitely I appreciate it so much, thank you guys. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 58:10

Rival Squad was so cool. Check out the show notes and website for all the links to all their things. But Rival Squad on Bandcamp, rival Squad on Spotify it'll all be in the show notes Just Rival Squad everywhere. Like they said, I bought some nice merch from their table too a shirt, pens and patches. I would have gotten a tape, but I literally have no idea how I would play it, so I'll opt for the digital versions. But the shirt was you're not gonna believe this black with white graphics on it. I know my poser days were almost over. I now owned the real deal. So while they talked to fans and got ready, I buzzed around and checked out the other bands on stage Tonight. The punk bands were all led by female singers, some absolutely ferocious hard-rocking ladies, and while they switched, the band set up getting ready for Rival Squad to close out the night, I took a break from all that sound and stepped outside to talk about how it was going so far. This was really fun. I was really fun. Actually, I did do the old man move and saw that they were offering ear plugs like at the same place where I paid to get in, and so I asked if I could get a couple ear plugs and did and put them in, and it blocks out a chunk of the noise, not everything, and actually that puts it right in the zone where I can get in and get down with it. It's great, so I'm happy about this. I got them in my hand right now and I'll put them back in before I go to hit up more music. Yup ear plugs. They were just what I needed inside Stay Gold when the bands were playing. It did make it harder to monitor the audio. I was recording, though, but spare the ear and spoil the recording or whatever. I also by the way, I definitely don't think the mic picked this up because the music was blasting it up, but I picked up a straight up compliment on my shoes immediately. While I was in there. The first thing I did was go in and wait in line to use the restroom and in line the dude who was in line before me while we're over there. He leaned over and he was like, hey man, nice shoes. I was like thank you. So I doubt it picked it up, but I'll check it back on the tape. But there you go, I already got one. I wasn't expecting to be able to hear any of what I just described at all, but when I listened back I was able to find it here. I've dropped the music way down and if you're listening for it, you can make out him saying I like your shoes and then me saying thank you. But how great is that? Right? I went there hoping to get an unprompted compliment on my pink shoes and I totally got one. I was stoked that that actually worked out, and then it was finally time for Rival Squad to take the stage. I got their blessing ahead of time to keep recording during the show, and I did. But, man, their music overpowered my recorder at first until I eventually got dialed in. But here are some moments from their set.

Speaker 6: 1:01:25

Here are Rival Squad in San Diego, California.

Speaker 1: 1:01:34

Rival Squad played for 23 minutes of fire. The energy in the place was palpable. There were people dancing, people mashing, people singing along in places. I was there recording with my your Plugz in really enjoying the first ever punk show.

Speaker 6: 1:01:56

This next show is about being something. We we're going to call it Burnout. We're like, oh, I'm so burnt out, I can't do this but things I actually enjoy.

Speaker 5: 1:02:05

I'm so burnt out we're going to explode down a little bit, but this next song is going to be a bit of a navigate.

Speaker 6: 1:02:38

I'm so burnt out, I'm so burnt out, I'm so burnt out.

Speaker 1: 1:03:22

And then after their set, rival Squad got a huge ovation and everyone cleared out to the patio to meet all the bands, buy their stuff and just hang out until last call. At which point I made my way from the Stay Gold patio back to my car and I want to play that part a little later, but first, here I am driving home as I process what I had just seen and heard. One of the things I really liked I didn't know this was coming One of the things I really liked was I felt like I knew there was energy in the punk. There was just raw energy. I said that to Nicole and the band. I was so angry at stuff. Everything is anger. That's when I grew up. There were songs that got to the radio, which is how I engage with music a lot of times. There were songs that got to the radio that were anger songs, but for the most part those songs, the anger was very vaguely directed. It was I'm angry at, I'm just angry. I'm angry, I feel bad, I'm angry, or like I'm angry at love or I'm angry at very vague concepts, very vague concepts. And this felt the anger was there and you can feel it and it feels directed. It feels directed at not vague things at all, very specific things. It's like this is because of I'm angry at this injustice or about this platform, and this was in all ages shows. So that includes people who are 18, people who are under 18. I saw teenagers in the mosh pit doing like moshing with everybody else and that was cool. It's cool to see that much energy focused very specifically. I found it very engaging, it was very cool. So, yeah, that was a really cool experience. So, yeah, I thought about this some more. The bands I'm thinking of, I mean the ones that had that punk sound at least my ears and made it to major radio play where I would hear them, were like Green Day, the Offspring, blink 182, some 41. And they were, for sure, angsty and putting that emotion on front street. But, like I said before, it's like mad at love or mad at life or mad at growing up, whatever. But they were pretty clipped politically and I still love Some 41. So no disrespect is there, but I don't really clock their music as in any way political. I guess the exception, though, the notable one that got through even to my pop and top 40 self, was rage against the machine. They have been strongly political throughout their whole career, while still topping charts and putting on humongous shows all over the world. Even now, you can see online people discovering the lyrics and complaining that they've gotten political now, and it's just hilarious because that's who they've always been. The anger and rage songs isn't vague or inert. It's specific and directed. It's free speech and protest in the form of music, and that was the vibe I had gotten at Stagold that night too. The songs I heard were more like protests and marches, just in a different form. You know what I mean the same energy, the same thing I'm bringing from people. And also I saw overlap of different groups. I saw people who, to me and I'm not good at doing this by sight at all, nor should people by sight but I saw people whose clothing made me think that they're punk, that they would say they're punk Minor threat shirts and different logos and stuff on things that I've seen. I saw people who, when I was growing up, I would classify as goth. They had different makeup and aesthetic you know, studded leather things and different, just a different aesthetic. And I saw people who were just in t-shirts or tank tops and jeans or shorts, just like I was Everybody overlap and it was really cool. Yeah, very. A lot of young people, a lot of overlap, the dad and me, these people pushing and shoving in a mosh pad.

Speaker 2: 1:08:27

It's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no no.

Speaker 1: 1:08:31

But they work it out, it works out. I saw people get knocked down and I thought, uh-oh, is this going to be a real fight? Like I mean, after my cruise ship experience a couple of months ago, the uh-oh, is this going to be a real fight? It does actually happen in my brain more often. But you know, hey, he got picked up, they kept going. I think there was mutual respect, mutual consideration and everyone I it. I don't really talk about this a lot, but I do jujitsu, and I don't talk about it because there's already a podcast, uh, centered around comedy, that talks about jujitsu heavily. And I don't I don't need to be that guy either, but what? But the mosh pit most closely reminded me of jujitsu, where you're engaged in this intense physical activity that, for people who are not initiated, seems terrible and like something you would never want to do, which is true. Try to strangle someone while they're trying to strangle you and be the first person to get to the finish line. But you're doing that in a way that from the outside, looks like two people wrestling and savagely fighting each other at times, or whatever it looks like, but it from the inside, I'll tell you. There is a care and a compassion. At least in good gyms, good gyms with a good, healthy vibe, there's a care and compassion between training partners when you're doing jujitsu. That I think I saw. The same thing in the mosh pit is what I'm trying to say, and that was really cool, because jujitsu is not for everyone, just like mosh pits aren't for everyone, and for me mosh pits are not, at least tonight. You know what? No, I'll just say it. I will make the blanket statement that mosh pits are not for me across the board, but that's okay, because I saw them tonight with a different set of eyes than, honestly, I've ever looked at a mosh pit before with, and that's kind of cool. None of my other concerts I ever went to had mosh pits the there's no mosh pit in Hootie, the Blowfish no mosh pit at Coldplay yeah, this might have been my first one. I noticed that I keep talking about the energy, the energy I was seeing and feeling all around me at the show, and that's where this whole thing started, with compliments to feeling like they generate this palpable extra energy out of nowhere, but really it comes from directed attention that someone turns into that energy, and I think with punk music what I'm seeing is the exact same reaction, just in reverse. I mean, it was a random chance that I went from pink shoes to punk shows via a Google suggestion, but I do really think that they are actually closely tied together. What I had just experienced was people with energy and tons of it, directing that energy into attention. Attention on themselves, sure, but attention on different issues, on human rights, attention to the plights of people in need, attention to just being political and paying attention. Just the hopes, then, that the attention turns to action, the energy continues to move forward and things eventually get better. Punk music, at least what I heard, is commentary that is trying to direct action, to address problems and to make change. Compliments are things you notice that you say that become energy also through a commentary. From the outside they may seem opposite, but the compliment path of attention turned into energy and the punk commentary path of energy turned into attention are just opposite directions on the same highway. So what then? What do we do with this information? Well, I think you sort of look at where you are on this line and see what you can do to better the world around you. I mean spoiler alert, that's always my answer, but in this case, it means assessing and reassessing frequently, because energy changes. But see where you are on that line. Do you have extra energy that you're able to direct into attention on things that needed or could use it? Or maybe you don't. Maybe even the idea of extra energy is an insulting one, especially if you feel like you hit empty before your day is even over. Well, in that case, I'd say you can use your attention, which we all have complete control over, and turn it into energy by finding a chance to compliment someone in a real way, a way that turns your attention into energy for both them and you, because remember from my experience that little jolt of good zings in both directions. And I just want to close with this tape from earlier, when I left the show and walked to my car.

Speaker 6: 1:14:23

It's last call.

Speaker 1: 1:14:39

What a cool place. Yeah, man, that was more fun than I thought I had more fun there than I thought it would. But I'll be honest, that's not my usual type of music. I mean, this probably is zero surprise if you've heard anything with my music or anything I make. I put, like chill, low-fi beats, stuff you would find on the YouTube, study beats channel, that sort of stuff under. But that was very nice man. They artisted energy in a room. It was super cool. Please suppose this door geoledственnet, okay, okay, okay, I can't heard from that. It's talking. Okay, okay, I'm right on the spot. I guess I have a new favorite punk band, red on.

Speaker 5: 1:15:58

See.

Speaker 1: 1:16:35

And with that, pink shoes and punk shows become the next entry into the Perfectorium, the index of perfect things. Visit PerfectShowPodcastcom to see pictures and videos related to this and each episode For this one I'll have pictures of my pink shoes, me interviewing rival squad, pictures of their show at Stagold, and more. You can see all the entries to the Perfectorium at the direct link for it PerfectShowPodcastcom. Slash Perfectorium. Special thanks to Nicole, jerry, julio and Israel, aka rival squad, for sitting with me. You can find them on Bandcamp, spotify, apple and just wherever you are to get your music. You can also find the info and links for all the other musical artists in the show notes and on this episode's webpage too. As always, if you'd like to contact the show, you can email PerfectShowShowcom at gmailcom and connect on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name PerfectShowShow. This episode was recorded and mixed at Marina Studios in Oakland, california. Please be sure to rate, review, subscribe and all that jazz, or rather all that punk this time, but mostly, if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the show, let them know about it. Word of mouth is still the biggest driver of people finding a new podcast and remember, think of a compliment as a weapon that's always with you, like a samurai sword in feudal Japan or a six shooter in the wild west. You can't control when you get a compliment not really but you are in complete control of when you dish them out and you can look at it like you're a compliment outlaw, roaming across the landscape ready to quick draw and ooh, sharp outfit, or this really beautiful work at a second's notice. Anyway, until next time I'm Scott Moppen, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

For this episode, Scot talks sports! One sport in particular. A Japanese sport that may be new to you. It's the wonderful game of Park Golf, and we give it a glowing deep dive.

Small club, big ball, rubber tee, and you're ready to hit the course. Listen to stories about Park Golf from Japan and adventures I have in America.

I talk with Kris Beyer Jones from Destroyer Park Golf for an interview with the first park golf course in America, and some of my usual unusual hijinks with my friends Jeff Clemens and Alex Yocum.

Find Destroyer Park Golf at https://destroyerparkgolf.com/

Find the International Park Golf Association of America (IPGAA) at https://ipgaa.com/

Find Wormburner Park Golf at https://www.wormburnerparkgolf.com/

And find the Japanese Park Golf Association at https://www.parkgolf.or.jp/

Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode:

https://perfectshowpodcast.com/14-park-golf/

Music from this episode by:

Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31

Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee

Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov

Gui Moraes - https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes

Isehgal - https://www.fiverr.com/isehgal

kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound

rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify

Yashchaware - https://www.fiverr.com/yashchaware

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I am your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection Ah, sports. I'm not much of a sports guy anymore. I mean, I certainly had my phases both as a player and as a fan, both in my childhood. That was the end of that sentence. Both of those were in my childhood. That's why it's weird to me that I found a totally new sport and then became an avid player and fan of it completely in my adulthood. This sport may be new to you too, and if it is, please allow me to proudly introduce you to the game of park golf. Throughout my childhood I had played, and then quit, a number of sports, or rather, I would often hit a ceiling on both my natural athletic ability and my willingness to practice things past when they stopped being fun. But as a kid I had done t-ball and then baseball, soccer for a little bit early on, basketball for a bit later, and then track in seventh grade as well. All of those were over by high school, though, where I was on the high school tennis team for one year as a freshman before not making the team again my sophomore year. You know what sophomore me thought of that Whatever, because you know what sophomore me thought of pretty much everything Whatever. But on the fan side of things, as a child growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, I was of course, into the Royals for baseball and the Chiefs for football. Basketball was trickier since there was no pro team nearby. I think the Chicago Bulls were the closest to us geographically, but the Kansas J-hawks were in Lawrence, just a half hour from us, and they pretty much filled all the same fandom needs that a pro team would Now like a lot of things. That all changed when I went to Japan, but first I remember trying to keep up in absurd ways having my dad record football games and then mail me the tapes, but that stopped pretty quickly. The only game that NHK, which is the main Japanese television network, carried live was the Super Bowl, which, because of the time difference their Sunday night game actually airs on early Monday morning Japan time. Some expats tried each year to get something going, but the morning vibe, along with the strangeness of the game being broadcast, but none of the commercials. A lot of the time we were watching the players standing and waiting for ad breaks to end and eating like eggs or donuts or some morning food. I tried to get into some Japanese sports too. I went to a couple of Japanese baseball games, I tried to watch some sumo, but it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that a sport truly took hold of me again. Now I'd have guessed that sport would have been skiing. I had liked skiing as a kid and I'd even tried to go skiing once in Japan, but they didn't have any boots in my size, so actually I ended up spending my first ski trip in Japan just sitting while everyone else skied. When I applied for my next job in Japan, it was with the JET program, a program that places native English speakers into schools and town halls to help with language and culture exchange. But in order to get a position on JET, I had to go back to the US for an interview. I had put Hokkaido as one of my top choices and I was keen not to have a repeat of my first Japanese ski trip. So there, during the hottest part of the summer in Kansas, the flattest state in the US. I bought some ski boots in my size and hauled them back to Japan with me. I did end up getting placed on the northern island of Hokkaido Very, very far north Hokkaido actually and I skied some, but my real sport was something we accidentally stumbled on during my first summer there, and that sport was park golf. I had lived in Japan for over a year in Kyushu, and it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that I even heard of park golf. And that's because, even though park golf is an international sport, technically, it was invented in Hokkaido, japan, and with the more spacious nature of Hokkaido compared to the other Japanese prefectures, that's where the vast majority of the courses are as well. Wikipedia tells me park golf started in 1983, invented in the town of Makubatsu, japan, which is also on the northern island of Hokkaido, although it also says the sport is like a cross between golf and croquet, which I think is off. There's no wickets or hitting other players' balls or anything. I'd say it's more like the midway point between regular golf and mini golf. You get to crack the ball when you hit it more than mini golf, and the ball is bigger, like a baseball or a billiards ball, so you have a much larger target than a normal golf and you can put extra English, extra spin on the thing when you hit it. No spinning windmills or statues, but plenty of land and sand challenges. Rules run roughly the same as golf. You count your strokes for each hole and add them up at the end. Low scores are good and high scores are bad. That's all the same. Wikipedia also says the creators wanted it to be really accessible to everyone, so it's designed to be played with really simple equipment For park golf. You only need one ball, one tee and one club, making it cheap to play and to buy equipment for. Speaking of equipment, driving, chipping and putting are all done with that same stubby club. I'd say the club looks like you took a regular putter shaft and handle, then shortened it and stuck the head of a driver on the end of it. I'm 6'1 and I hunch over a lot to get a good hit with one. Most Japanese people weren't that tall, especially the older Japanese people I would often see out playing park golf, and so they didn't have to hunch over nearly as much, but there's still more of a well, I'll call it a hunch and whack style to hitting a park golf ball than the wind up and follow through of a regular golf swing. Meanwhile, what you're hitting is a hard plastic ball, 60mm wide or about 2, 3, 8 inches, so that's just a little smaller than a tennis ball, which is 65 to 68mm. Many are just a simple solid color. I started off with those, but I enjoyed splurging on one new ball to begin each new park golf season and I eventually opted for something cooler. Maybe a ball with a marbleized color or gold flecks that sparkle in the sun, or one where the outer plastic is clear but you can see an inner complex geodesic dome structure inside of it something like that. With the larger ball, it also makes sense that you would have a larger hole. The park golf hole is between 200 to 216mm across, making it around 8 to 8.5 inches in diameter, pretty much twice as wide as the 4 and a quarter inch hole for regular golf, which means we're dealing with a park golf hole that has four times as much area as a regular golf hole when you multiply it out. Holes are supposed to be limited to a maximum of 100 meters long, that's 109 yards, and a nine hole course is supposed to total a maximum length of 500 meters, which is 547 yards. But I gotta say I definitely played many courses in Hokkaido that exceeded both those limits and some of my favorite courses were the longest and most sprawling. So I'm not sure how strictly they monitor that rule, but that is definitely one for official courses. Wikipedia notes that, despite it being accessible for every age, there are a vast majority of the parkers which is what it says park golf players are called but that's literally my first time ever hearing that term. But it says that most of them by far are retirees, and I definitely can concur. But I also think there's a bunch of reasons why that is, and it doesn't seem so strange to me really. First off, the best times to park golf were during times when non-retirees would be either at work or school, so it makes total sense that would become a spot where you'd see it as an activity for retirees during that time. Japan also has a strong culture of activities planned and available for its older population. That doesn't so much exist in the United States. It's definitely built into the culture, but it's also built into Japanese society. A lot of care and attention gets paid to elder care and quality of life, so I also saw park golf being encouraged as an engaging physical activity, less demanding than actual golf for an older player, but it still got people outside walking, hitting and socializing in fresh air. I would probably say the next largest group after older Japanese players were younger foreigner players. My data may be really skewed, though, because every time I went park golfing I saw a group of those. As a group we rarely, but sometimes clashed with the oyajis, which is Japanese that translates to old man or old men, as we refer to the older Japanese players, who often did their own thing, but sometimes would jump in to help our group and let us know we weren't quite playing right. We'd thank them, but when they left we'd go right back to what we were doing, which was play our modified version of the game. For example, there's an out of bounds, referred to by players as OB, but when we played, unless there were other players nearby, there was no OB rule. If you could play it, you could play it Something oyajis really tisks at us if they saw, but it was important for us because we had money riding on these scores A hundred yen a whole usually, with the possibility of going on a hot streak and quitting enough for a meal paid for by your less lucky friend. And those meals those were the most delicious kind. Hokkaido snow would start sticking to the ground in October and then stay around on the ground until April a full six months of snow. Playing park golf in the fresh Hokkaido air was an amazing way to spend the six non-snowy months outdoors. It was challenging enough to be continually fun, but easy enough to do with new people the perfect pastime For my job on jet. I was an assistant English teacher in my town's junior high schools and I would often be done with work while students were still at school or doing after school activities, with several hours of sunlight still left. So I would meet up with other teachers. We'd grab our clubs and play whatever course was up next. We had favorites, but also anytime someone discovered a new course it was a good enough reason to hit that one up next. But every town seemed to have at least one course, usually more than one, usually way more. I think the first Hokkaido town I lived in had some nearby but, like with groceries, the best collection of park golf courses in the area were in the city of Naioro. There were a ton there and really all the towns around too. The second Hokkaido city I lived in was where I really got into playing park golf more often, because there were over 20 different courses within a 15 minute radius of our spot in Takikawa. There were also courses set up and maintained by onsen and hot spring hotels all across the island. In fact, my all time favorite course is at an onsen hotel in Kenbuchi, hokkaido, where there are 36 holes up in the hills with just spectacular layouts and natural views of the local river valley. Another evolution to our gai koku jimbajin of park golf was the jump tee. A normal park golf tee is a squat little cylinder about an inch tall with a wide base all made out of this rubbery plastic. You only use it on your first shot like a normal golf tee, but unlike a normal golf tee it doesn't really give you much lift at all. You can try to scoop up under it or pop it up, but it doesn't really give good lift, no matter what you do. That's why we invented the jump tee. The jump tee's sole purpose was to give the park golf ball some lift to let us pop it up and over instead of going around some obstacles, like the course designers wanted us to. The jump tee was made from two or, sometimes rarely, three regular park golf tees stacked on top of each other and then driving the ball while it's balanced atop this tower. It took some getting used to and some harkening back to those long, dormant tee ball skills, but the jump tee opened up our game vertically and probably intensified the attachment we all felt to our special brand of the sport, and for four years, when there wasn't snow on the ground, I played it pretty regularly. Winter wasn't free of park golf activities, though. That's when the oyajis would shed their old wares and get new ones. So that meant the start of a new type of season for me. Like I said before, park golf is a game where you only need one club, but some of the more well-off or serious Japanese players like to make sure that they had a new one club each season. Eventually, new one-clubs become backup one-clubs and backup one-clubs become clutter, so they get taken to the recycle shop, this wonderful, magical, amazing place in Japan called the Recycle Shop. In the US it would be called a used goods store or a thrift shop like Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but again, like many things in Japan, it has a completely different feel than its American counterpart here in America. I think the thrift stores are looked at as sort of the last stop for something like places without too much expectation or status. I think American thrift stores are probably ranked just a notch above a flea market. Maybe In Japan, though, the Recycle Shop seems like the first place things go, and you can find all manner of items there, from nice clothes like really nice clothes to electronics or furniture and interesting odds and ends to, often times, very decently priced park golf equipment. Park golf balls were a different matter, because there is some good distance to these holes. They got whacked around quite a bit so I didn't see used balls often, and when I did see them they were pretty banged up. This was another reason I would get a new one each year, especially since new ones were only like $10-$20, or maybe $25 if you want to spring for something really nice like the fancy ones I was describing Now. Recycle Shops do not pay much for the stuff they buy from you. I could say that for many first-hand experiences. But you don't sell stuff to them to get rich. You do it for the love of the game and because you got good gets from the Recycle Shop before. So when it's time to move your stuff, you just go there first. I mean, you hit up your friends first and try to offload stuff they might want for a decent amount, and then you take anything that they don't want to the Recycle Shop after that. But yeah, I'd scour Recycle Shops for clothes in my size, exercise equipment, tables and chairs sometimes. But whatever reason I was there for initially, I'd always check for park golf equipment before I left and collected a bunch of my own clubs and gear that way. Not so that I could have a set of clubs for me remember, this is a sport where you only need one club but I got a bunch so that I had enough for a group of four or two groups of four to go out park golfing together. I mean, I also have a left-handed club and I've never been left-handed, not even a phase in college or anything. Some of the nicer park golf courses came complete with places to get scorecards and rent clubs and balls, which would usually only cost 500 to 1000 yen or like 5 to 10 dollars. If you brought your own equipment, it would be significantly cheaper or sometimes even just free. In that sense, I played enough that the used equipment I bought tended to pay for itself over the season just in saved rental fees alone. But the main reason I had my own clubs was because only some park golf courses were staffed. Many were just open, like places near riverbeds or in parks, and unstaffed, so you couldn't rent anything there, but as long as you brought your own equipment you could play for free as much as you wanted. These were the places that we really haunted over and over until they became courses we knew well. Now each one of my clubs has a little sticker on the shaft certifying that it complies with the official size restrictions for park golf equipment, and each of those stickers cites the power of the IPGA, which stands for the International Park Golf Association. Just like park golf spread over Hokkaido, it continued to spread across Japan all the way down to Kyushu and Okinawa. As you'd expect, the more rural an area is, the more park golf courses it seems to have. The official ones are all members of the NPGA or Nippon Park Golf Association. Oh, I don't know if this is at all needed, but Nippon is one of the ways to say Japan in Japanese. But what makes the International Park Golf Association international, of course, are the courses outside of Japan. I found a few different park golf courses in Korea and also saw listed that there were courses in Sweden, brazil and Paraguay. It was hard for me to search in most of those countries because I don't know the language or what they might refer to park golf as, but there's only one in all of North America. On their map of officially registered courses, this course is actually the only one the IPGA even lists outside of Japan at all. It's in the United States, in Akron, new York. Akron is a small village in upstate New York, about 40 minutes from Buffalo and 45 from Niagara Falls, and it's the home of Destroyer Park Golf, the first park golf course in America. After I came back from Japan, I searched the internet for park golf in America and crossed my fingers that I could find a place to play in the US. That's how I first learned about Destroyer Park Golf. Now I feel like I've traveled all over America except the Northeast. I've never been to New York or anywhere in the New England area, so it wasn't a place I could go in person. But when I decided on doing a park golf episode, destroyer Park Golf was the perfect place to turn to. That's how I found myself one afternoon on a phone call to Akron, new York, for an interview. Can I get you to start off by introducing yourself for the podcast by saying your name and maybe your position there at Destroyer Park Golf?

Speaker 3: 20:12

Sure yeah. My name is Chris Byer Jones and I'm a co-owner of Destroyer Park Golf with my husband, whose name is Chris Jones.

Speaker 1: 20:20

Excellent. Well, hi, it's great talking to you. How are you doing?

Speaker 3: 20:24

I'm doing very good, thank you. It's beautiful out here for a change.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Oh yeah, what's the day look like out there today?

Speaker 3: 20:30

It's beautiful, sunny clear skies and about 78, and not humid.

Speaker 1: 20:36

That does sound perfect, yeah.

Speaker 3: 20:38

For us that is.

Speaker 1: 20:39

How did you first encounter park golf?

Speaker 3: 20:42

if I can ask, yeah, I actually encountered it through my dad. He kind of brought the concept home with him from Japan. He's a professional wrestler named the Destroyer and he's an avid golfer. I'm one of his tours to Japan. A friend introduced him to park golf and he said man, this would be great in the US. He came home with clubs and balls and put two holes up and down his front lawn.

Speaker 1: 21:09

That very much sounds like a person who puts his mind to something and then gets it done. That's incredible. Yeah, it is. That actually answers what my next question would have been, which was where does the named Destroyer Park Golf come from? That sounds like from your dad's wrestling name, the Destroyer.

Speaker 3: 21:26

Yes, it does. Park golf obviously came from Japan. They wanted to use better use of public park space. My dad was a very famous wrestler both in the US and in Japan. We named it after him and it's his legacy, so we can say Amazing.

Speaker 1: 21:44

That's awesome. I love the name Dick Beyer. Chris's dad was a professional wrestler who was best known as his masked alter egos, the Destroyer and Dr X, wrestling extensively in Japan against many of the other top names of the industry during the 60s and 70s. He was huge. I was looking at clips and interviews of the Destroyer and found people ranking him as the number one masked wrestler of his time, and you can find great highlight reels of some of his matches on YouTube. The Destroyer passed away in 2019 at age 88. But a museum of his memorabilia and media from his decorated pro wrestling career is open in the clubhouse at Destroyer Park Golf the perfect place for any fans of the Destroyer or Park Golf to visit. How long have you guys been open? When did Destroyer Park Golf first open?

Speaker 3: 22:39

We first opened in June of 2013.

Speaker 1: 22:44

Oh, next year will be 10 years, amazing.

Speaker 3: 22:47

So this is our 10th season, but next year will be our official 10-year anniversary.

Speaker 1: 22:52

Awesome, well, congratulations, that's fantastic. So when you were opening it up back in 2013, was it difficult to find the right place to set up a park golf course?

Speaker 3: 23:05

Actually, that's probably the most interesting part of the story is my dad owned property out here in Akron. He owns about 81 acres of farmland that's becoming more and more residential, so we actually put it on part of the farmland that he owned. Oh, okay, so we have plenty of room and we put up a new barn that became like our machine shop as well as our pro shop area. We actually had the land, so that was very helpful.

Speaker 1: 23:36

So that's where it is now.

Speaker 3: 23:38

That's so cool, that's where it is. So we had to turn the farmland into nice course material. But other than that we were very, very lucky to have the property.

Speaker 1: 23:49

So when is the normal park golf season there in Akron, New York, run from and to?

Speaker 3: 23:56

Yeah. So luckily for us we've got the good example from Japan Park. Golf started in the Northern Island of Japan, hokkaido. They have exactly the same temperature that we do, very similar as far as agriculture is concerned cows, corn, butter, cheese, that kind of stuff. We run pretty much the same calendar that they do in the Northern Island. We run from May until October.

Speaker 1: 24:22

Yeah, when I was looking up where you were, it was actually the same latitude as Sapporo, which is the capital city of Hokkaido.

Speaker 3: 24:30

Wow, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:32

I know Japan loves their regulations, so is there a process where Japanese park golf officials have to come out and regularly check your course out, or do you have to do anything to fulfill regulations or anything like that?

Speaker 3: 24:48

We chose to fulfill their regulations and we did go through the entire process of having them actually certify our course. So we are the only sanctioned certified course actually in North America by the Japan Park Golf Association. We are a member of their association but we also myself and many of the business kind of a wide range of people from the businesses that we know and interact with formed a not-for-profit organization, the International Park Golf Association of America. There is a website on that, wwwipgacom, where we are hoping and we have been working towards helping people to open up park golf courses here in the US but that meet the regulations of the Japanese traditional park golf.

Speaker 1: 25:46

That would be incredible. Yeah, I had found in my research. I had found that you guys were the only ones in America, the only ones in North America at all.

Speaker 3: 25:56

Yeah, there is actually one more they had bought equipment from us, came out and checked up on our course, etc. And they were actually located in Ohio.

Speaker 1: 26:07

Oh, excellent.

Speaker 3: 26:08

But that's the only other 18-hole park golf course. It's come at Hawking Hills RV Resort and their name of their course is Worm Burners Park Golf.

Speaker 1: 26:20

And what part of Ohio is that in?

Speaker 3: 26:23

It's near Akron Ohio.

Speaker 1: 26:24

Okay, akron, new York.

Speaker 3: 26:25

Akron Ohio that's it, but we actually have hosted everything from a wedding to a life celebration. This next weekend we have a Jack and Jill party.

Speaker 1: 26:38

I mean, I gotta admit I would take pretty much any opportunity to get out on the links in place in park golf, so I can't blame people for using any reason as a reason to go out golfing. Yes, and there's just something about the way they've engineered it where it's just such a satisfying. When you get a good whack at it, it feels great, I don't know. I don't have a poetic way to describe it.

Speaker 3: 27:04

No, but actually it's interesting that you say that, because part of the design requirements for certified equipment for the ball is bounce height, which I would imagine would be the same for golf, but also sound Like what's what? What decibel range that that sound has to hit no-transcript. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:24

I didn't know that's part of the process. That's really cool. How do you pitch the idea of park golf to someone who's never played before? Or how do you kind of hook, hook, a new hook, a new person into it?

Speaker 3: 27:36

I think that that was probably that, not even that was probably. It was the most difficult part of opening the first park golf course here in the US. Is that? Trying to explain it is Difficult, so really it really takes a person to put a club in their hand and to hit the ball right. It. We tell them that it's like put, put on steroids or that somebody's you know shrunk golf, yeah, anybody, at any age, can play. You still have to get the ball in the hole. So there's still is the element of accuracy. And Still for the first few years, actually up until the last couple years people like, oh, I don't play golf, I'm like, okay, golfers in the name, but it's like not golf right, or they're a seasoned golfer and they're like, oh, yeah, whatever, you know you're basically talking about many when they cross over and they try it, to be honest, they're hooked.

Speaker 1: 28:34

And I think you're right that once you get someone to play a little bit, there's no more explanation needed. It explains itself right away.

Speaker 3: 28:42

Yeah, I agree, you know, oh, probably the best advertisement that we've had. We advertised in the beginning, but again, very difficult to explain what park golf is in a TV ad, radio commercial print ads. So we rely now on social media and word of mouth almost a hundred percent. A gentleman from a TV program called adventures in golf. He travels all over the world doing episodes on unique golf Adventures, just like it sounds, and he came here and did an episode and we have had so much traffic the. The program is sponsored by United Airlines, so people have seen it on the United Airlines flight and then and then they come here.

Speaker 1: 29:31

They want to become the destination, exactly, yeah, very cool. Is there anything else I've forgotten to ask, or that you'd like to add, or anything at all?

Speaker 3: 29:39

Yeah, it's a great. It's a great way for people to come out enjoying an afternoon, you know, out in the natural setting that was part of Japan Park golf hope and mission was that it would be a way for people to get out in Nature and kind of feel that harmony with nature, as they were able to enjoy enjoy a game with friends.

Speaker 1: 30:02

Thank you so much for your time and Thanks.

Speaker 3: 30:07

You know, have your listeners check out our golf, our park golf site, destroyer Park golf, calm, and there's a great video on there of the TV program that I just told you about and that will give you the Best overview of park golf that you can imagine.

Speaker 1: 30:22

Fantastic. We'll send them there. Destroyer park golf, calm, very cool. Thank you so much, chris. I'll I'll let you get back out to enjoying the perfect days. That's on, all right.

Speaker 3: 30:31

Okay, yeah, thank you so much, scott. Thank you for taking the time to share. You know my dad's dream.

Speaker 1: 30:38

So, yeah, it was great talking with Chris about their course out there, destroyer and her dad and the sport itself. Be sure to check out their site at destroyer park golf calm, where they've done an amazing job of showing off their course and you can see the video segment we talked about, which is about nine minutes and really good, under the what is park golf tab. I also looked up the other part golf course she mentioned. It's called worm burner park golf and it's in Logan, ohio, which is about two and a half hours south of Akron. Their website is worm burner park golf calm and Both courses have great websites and are very active on Facebook. Also, of course, if you're in or around Akron, new York or Logan Ohio, think about getting a group of friends or family together and treat yourselves to a nice day outside Playing around or to a park golf the surprising king of all sports. Oh, and while I had Chris on the phone missing a nice day outside, I had one final question. I know I gave you a heads up that I wanted to ask something a little weird and here it is If, if there was a word and I mean there's probably not, but if there was a word, like a secret code word between golf course owners that you say to them and then they let you play park golf on a regular golf course. And I'm not saying there is a word like that. In fact I'm saying there's probably definitely not a word like that. But Hypothetically, if there was, what do you think or imagine that word might be? Or is there a word that you would put in that answer?

Speaker 3: 32:13

Yeah. The definite word that I would put in that answer is destroyer.

Speaker 1: 32:18

Destroyer.

Speaker 3: 32:19

Yeah, that's the word I would definitely use.

Speaker 1: 32:21

Okay, thank you.

Speaker 3: 32:23

And it does not exist, but I think of the week's cart. Well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 32:26

I'm saying I believe you it doesn't wink. I understand wink, wink, yeah. So I should probably explain that. I know it's weird and I know I'm weird, but that's just like a little more than my usual level, right? Well, there's a 90s sitcom I've always loved called news radio. It was about a bunch of people working in a news radio station, hence the name. And there's an episode in season 3, episode 15, titled Rose Bowl. It aired February 5th 1997 on NBC. The A story in Rose Bowl is about the employees evaluating each other's performance and it's great, typical, hilarious news radio stuff. But the reason I'm bringing this episode up is because of the B story. In this plotline the station's eccentric billionaire owner, jimmy James, played by Steven Root, brings in a box of stuff to show station manager Dave, played by Dave Foley.

Speaker 4: 33:24

What you doing? Oh, just doing some editing on the. Oh, what's that? Just inching to take a look at some Hollywood movie memorabilia.

Speaker 1: 33:31

No, I'm doing some editing, okay.

Speaker 4: 33:32

Okay, you win memorabilia. It is Well. Thanks, sir, you don't normally give in so easily. Yeah, I'm feeling generous because I just bought a whole box of this movie memorabilia stuff from a big collector. Hey, do you ever see Ten Commandments? I just about once a year. Oh yeah, all right, get ready. Are you ready? All right? The original stone tablet Charlton hasn't carried in the Ten Commandments.

Speaker 1: 33:54

This one's way smaller.

Speaker 4: 33:56

I thought it would be bigger than that. Yeah, I think they use some special effects on it.

Speaker 1: 34:01

Here's the other one, uh-huh and the second tablet he pulls out is a completely different size and color.

Speaker 4: 34:07

We are talking with the Ten Commandments, for Charlton has to know me. Yeah, I don't know. I've never seen it.

Speaker 1: 34:11

It's obvious that Jimmy has bought a box of fake movie memorabilia, but Dave has to tell him that because he's oblivious. So in this next scene, jimmy James is sitting in the break room with the station fix it guy, joe Gorelli, played by a young Joe Rogan and if you're familiar with podcasts, yes, it's that Joe Rogan. But Jimmy and Joe hatch a plan.

Speaker 4: 34:33

Okay that's it. I am taking them to court. Well, I guess if anybody's got the legal team to pull it off, you do. No, my lawyers have left me out of court. No way I'm telling them about this. No, I will be representing myself, sir, you know what they say the man who represents himself as a fool for a client. Yeah well, who do you suggest me? Excellent, me and Joe were talking about the legal system. See, I'm suing the guy to rip me off for this stuff. Yeah, all right. Well, when you're done, joe, I need you out there.

Speaker 1: 35:03

I'm not gonna be done for a while I'm Jimmy's lawyer.

Speaker 4: 35:07

Jimmy's case is in the bag. We know something at the other side, doesn't? Mm-hmm, what's that? They're all federal, state, local judges and members of a certain obscure sector. The Freemasons now hold on hold on. Our strategy Is that all judges are masons. There's more to it than that. Like why? Well, there's a secret Masonic word which, when uttered, obligates judges to ruin your favor and they have to go paddle each other off in a secret cave somewhere. And what's that? I could tell you, but then I have to kill you. Okay, but it better be good. Clearly, you're in good hands. Counsel good day. Wait a minute, but my, you're basing my whole case on some silly secret word. Joe, give it up, I get it. Tell me genuinely. How was the?

Speaker 1: 36:07

My strategy all right, and so that was what made me ask Chris the question about if there was a word I could say to do the same thing for me in my quest. How does it turn out for Jimmy and Joe in court, though?

Speaker 4: 36:18

Would Jimmy James please approach the bench and this would be your counsel. Yes, I am the master builder awaits the bearman. I beg your pardon, I bet you do. Okay, and would the defendant please approach the bench? Okay, this is the guy that sold me the stuff. He just you know. Just stay cool, because he's a real shark. Hello, kyle.

Speaker 1: 36:47

I've never seen this dude before in my life, and the gag here is that he's just a teenager. Jimmy and Joe proceed to put on a terrible and incoherent case, and here's what the judge has to say to them at the end.

Speaker 4: 36:59

You have successfully proven that you have a large box full of junk. I applaud you. Not since the People vs Junkyard Jones has a box full of junk been quite so thoroughly documented. In fact, if I were this young man, I would counter-sue you for reckless prosecution and for defamation of character and for just generally wasting everybody's time. Do you have anything to say in your defense, tubal cane? I hereby find in favor of the guy with the box full of junk, and I sentenced the kid to one month in a juvenile ward for psychiatric evaluation.

Speaker 1: 37:50

The judge marches past the shocked courtroom as the bailiff puts the kid in cuffs, giving Joe and Jimmy the sudden wing, and that concept just stuck around in my brain all this time. Clearly, some things just worm their way into my brain and then they stay there forever. I've remembered the nonsense word tubal cane for decades now, I guess similarly to how I remember the crack of hitting a park golf ball so vividly too. In Takikawa, the closest park golf course to where we lived was one of my favorites. But exploring Hokkaido and finding new courses was part of the fun of it all. We would go all over and try out any course we came across. Park golf was a part of where we traveled, where we camped and where we went to the onsen. At my peak I was probably playing 18 holes with friends after work, three to four times a week, and usually one, if not both, the weekend days. It was fortunately something I shared, in common with my girlfriend, with my guy friends, with my northern friends and with my musical friends. Oh yeah, I was part of a stage musical we put on in Hokkaido, but that's a different story. When my parents came to visit me in Hokkaido, I went with my dad, and he enjoyed it so much that for Christmas that year I gathered up a set of my recycle shop clubs and got them back to the States for him as a present. What dad ended up doing was making use of an existing disc golf course that was set up where he lived. He would play there when it wasn't being used for disc golf. I couldn't really imagine how that worked when my dad first told me it, but partly because I hadn't ever played disc golf before. Disc golf spaces your tee off place a good distance away from your target for the hole, which is a large metal basket with a series of chains around the upper part to snare discs that hit it. The disc in disc golf is a Frisbee-like disc you use to throw at the basket. Eventually, getting it in, my dad was going down to the disc golf course at the nearby college and hitting part golf balls on it, going hole for hole, teeing off at the tee's and having his standard for completing the hole be hitting the pole with the part golf ball. I honestly didn't really understand how disc golf worked until I played it myself for the first time on a vacation to Missoula Montana one summer. It turns out I really liked it. I enjoyed being outdoors and the game, while challenging and me being not particularly good at it never reached the wrong side of frustration, where things just shift from simply challenging to fully unpleasant. I think I took that and added it to what I knew about myself and golf, which is that I don't like regular golf but I like mini golf, and I always have. I'd had many a childhood mini golf, birthday party, family mini golf night and teenage mini golf date. Well, maybe not many of that last one, but a few. I like mini golf because it's about golf a little, but it's also open for button mashers, like a video game, where I feel if I just bounce it off enough angles, maybe it'll find the perfect through line and get into the hole. I love putt putt mini golf, but I don't like regular golf. That's just how it is. And then I tried park golf and I loved it. So then now I love mini golf and park golf and disc golf, but I don't like regular golf, though am I sure of that, truth be told, I actually haven't ever played a game of regular golf. Golf like golf. I don't like regular golf, but I do like it. I don't like regular golf, but I really do like it. I do like it. I don't like it, I don't like it. Truth be told, I actually haven't ever played a game of regular golf golf like never. I just assumed I wouldn't like it and never tested that theory, even when I tried and loved every single other kind of golf I've encountered. I've practiced putting. I've been to a driving range a handful of times, I've spent an hour trying to make my Tiger Woods character as close to me as the game allows, but I'd never played a real game of regular golf golf. So I started asking people around me if anyone would be interested in playing a game of golf sometime. I think this is where the divide happens with most real golf players. They can't fathom me wanting to go out without practicing a bunch, and I really just want to play one round of golf to more than anything else. Say I've done it, so I'm not worried if I go out there and do awful. It's more just a matter of finding the perfect person to humor me while I'm being awful. All right, so I hit record and I'm in the car now with Jeff. Oh, am I allowed to use your name?

Speaker 2: 42:47

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1: 42:49

I'm all over the internet. I've been, I've been in the car with my friend, jeff Clemens, and we are on our way to golf for me for the first time ever. So, and my secret, my secret sub plan, is to see at some point if I can get the park golf equipment out and do some park golfing on the regular golf course. So I went with Jeff. He's a longtime friend. I met him and his wife when they were also in Takikawa, japan, teaching English. Jeff's a great guy anyway and he's a real life Canadian on top of that, making him just about the nicest golf partner I could ever hope to find for my first round of golf ever. He lives with his family in Calgary, canada, but they had stopped by Oakland to see us for a few days on their way back home from Comic Con in San Diego this year, like Chabot, golf course. Yeah yeah, okay, so let's get our stuff out. All right, so we head into the clubhouse, I assume. Hello, hello, checking in for a tea time.

Speaker 2: 43:58

Where it is our first time at this course. Yeah, if you go down this route across the street where it says part return it's going to be the first thing on the left.

Speaker 1: 44:06

Sweet, Thank you. Turn left. I think this is it.

Speaker 2: 44:13

Is that the hole there? That's the hole. That's not very far at all. No, we're playing because we're on a part three. It'll be a little bit shorter.

Speaker 1: 44:19

All right, so we're on a part three. That's a thing that means something to golfers, but I'm learning.

Speaker 2: 44:25

So our part is based on how long the goal is. So if the course is a shorter, like a part three course, like we're on, all the holes are shorter.

Speaker 1: 44:35

So they're saying part three on here as in like maybe you drive it, maybe your second shot you get it closer and your third shot you put it in, ideally in a perfect world, so a new ideal with a part three is that your first shot goes on the grain.

Speaker 2: 44:49

Oh, okay, and your second, and then you take two pots.

Speaker 1: 44:51

It's a lot of pressure.

Speaker 2: 44:52

Okay, that's how it always. That's the idea.

Speaker 1: 44:54

Okay.

Speaker 2: 44:55

And so the hope is that you can get a birdie.

Speaker 1: 44:58

Birdie. Birdie is one under par. There's one under par. See, I do know these terms from part off. This is the Lake Chippewa golf course, about 10 minutes away from the studio. It's a part three and when we got there it really looked sort of like a park golf course. Lake Chippewa has a larger 18 hole course, but the nine hole course is a total of 1023 yards, making it a short course in terms of regular golf, which I guess is just what a par three course means to golf folk. But I was still learning.

Speaker 2: 45:30

So do you want to lead off?

Speaker 1: 45:32

I guess so.

Speaker 2: 45:33

Or do you want me to?

Speaker 1: 45:35

No, I'll do it. I'll do it, so I'm going to pull out my driver.

Speaker 2: 45:39

Um, probably want more like a three wood or five wood.

Speaker 1: 45:43

I have a three wood or five wood, three wood.

Speaker 2: 45:46

Because you won't hit quite as far, I mean I'm not going to hit that far anyway.

Speaker 1: 45:50

Oh my gosh, this is nerve wracking. Okay, I'm hitting my first shot off of hole one. Okay, all right, I hit it. I don't know where it went. Oh, there, it is About halfway to the hole. Okay, all right, so I should back away. Well, jeff hits his first shot. He's using what club are you using? A nine iron, which is what he said I should use next. Whoa Nice, much farther, a beautiful bounce gave you back toward the green. Beautiful shot, very nice. Yeah, the ting of hitting the ball was very satisfying. I remembered that being the case from driving ranges years ago and indeed it is still the same. We continue to play the first couple of holes. There we go Chip, chip, chip, chip. Oh yeah, too hot, I didn't know I had that kind of power with this. Okay, cool, all right. Way too weak. Six, all right, okay, and how do we know where number two is? Oh, beautiful, I see Gotcha. Okay, here we are Right up the hill. Okay, good advice, thank you.

Speaker 2: 47:23

Yeah, you cranked that one.

Speaker 1: 47:25

That felt good. I can see the allure Like that that ting is really. It's really fun and satisfying. Yeah for sure. I feel like. I feel like I'm more tended to over hit it than under hit it. Come on, come on, come on. Got onto the green and it didn't go past. I'm happy with that Boom. Get in the hole. One, two, three, four. That was four. I'm happy. That's one over. Ooh, nice, nice, nice, jeffrey, that is a beautiful putt. Very nicely done this is a hole for putting yeah, Okay so that's the farthest one yet, yeah. Yeah this one's 100. Should I get the driver out?

Speaker 2: 48:18

I'd use your three-hand. You're hitting real good with it.

Speaker 3: 48:22

Oh man, it's good to try that driver out sometime you could.

Speaker 1: 48:25

No One. 62. This is the longest one. Well, this is the one. I got to try it out. Yeah, this is the one you got to try. If I'm going to use my driver, I got to try it here. Okay, that's the. Is it a one?

Speaker 2: 48:39

It's a one.

Speaker 1: 48:40

The one would. It's a one, is it so? How is this different? Are they longer handles or are they bigger? A bigger head.

Speaker 2: 48:49

It's different. Uh lost in elevation.

Speaker 1: 48:52

Oh, I see that Like it's. It's pitched at a different angle.

Speaker 2: 48:55

Yeah, so this one won't get as much height, but it gets a whole lot more directional Boom.

Speaker 1: 49:00

Oh okay, all right, let's try it out. And here we go. First shot with the driver oh, hop, skip, jumper up there. I'm happy with that. It went right up the middle, I'm okay, I might be the only shot I hit with this club. That was the only shot I hit with that club. And then Jeff wisely noted that we were sort of away from any prying eyes or other players and pointed out that this could be a pretty good spot for some ulterior motivating. Or, I want to hit a par golf ball. I will hit a par golf ball here. Would you like to hit a par golf ball? Yeah, here you are, thank you. And here I are, and I have two clubs, neither of which I have any attachment to anymore. So whichever you like Works. I remember this one from the one with this. Yeah, I haven't gotten any new ones recently. I have to say, okay, I'm going to hit a par. Oh, I've not done this in so long. Here we go, par golf. Now that's a satisfying crack to me, dude, the crack I'm going to get a little. I'm just going to stand a little close to you so I can hear your hit. Nice, oh, that was beautiful. Look at that shot. And as satisfying as that ting was on the golf club, the crack of that par golf ball, the first one I've hit in years, was actually far, far more satisfying. I have to say, all right. So now that we're, I guess I hit my par golf first. All right, oh, this is so nice to be playing par golf. Nice little crack right over there toward the hole. Slow down and okay, with that, all right. And then nine iron is probably for my regular. Yeah, nice, chip up on there. There, it is All right, chipped this over. Oh, I'm going a little sideways, but it is kind of weird adjusting for the two different hits. It's a really nice hit. All right, park golf time. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, so close. If that was a regulation park golf sized hole, that would probably have, of course. Okay, this is the first test to see how well it. I mean, it's definitely a smaller hole than a park golf hole, but I mean it works. Jeff, we just played a whole park golf in America. Oh, there's people behind us, okay, cool. Yeah, I don't think we should do that on every hole, but that was a good one for it. No, good call, that was good. I was like there's no one behind us, that was the time. And if that, if there's not another time, then we at least got it. Oh, that was satisfying, that was very satisfying. I'm pretty sure Jeff and I had just played the first hole of park golf that has ever been played in California, actually probably on the whole West Coast. We continued on to the next hole. This is a steep down, like. So there's like a square platform up top and then way down there is the hole. Like wait, like there's a lot of elevation between us, it's a down elevation. Why can't I talk about stuff? It's down elevation. I know I'm my brain is malfunctioning because I got to hit the park golf ball. So there's the pin. Here we are. Okay, cool, here we go. Don't hit it all the way left and keep my head down. If you can see it, it's going to roll down the hill, but that's okay, I can. I can find that. Yeah, have to say this would also be really satisfying to hit a park golf ball. I might do that. All right, I'm doing this. It's just too, it's too tempting. Okay, this is just too tempting not to launch it off of this. All right, let's see. There we go. Oh nice, oh so lovely, and that's a beautiful shot. Man, I'm so much better with the park golf club than I am with the regular golf club. I've a lot more practice for sure. All right, how do we get down there now? To be fair, the really fun part of that of hitting the park golf ball was the initial shot. On that one. I can just be able to crack it off of that. I felt I was going to be unstoppable without. When I had to hit it there, I had to look for my first hit and eventually wrote it off as a gift to the out of bounds gods and took a drop to continue. But by that time the party behind us had caught up. So I just finished the hole for my regular golf ball and not my park golf ball. We just played regular golf after that, which went pretty so. So with the one exception of this hole. Now do I want to not hit my wood because I've been cranking it with that? Should I try the nine?

Speaker 2: 54:52

Try the nine you can put like a seven.

Speaker 1: 54:55

Okay, I've never seen you use a seven. How is the seven different than a nine?

Speaker 2: 55:00

A little less loft, okay, a little more distance.

Speaker 1: 55:03

Oh, all right, that felt good. What, what, what, what. That was a legit good hit. That was amazing. Okay, I'm happy with that, like a real thing. This one. I'm happy with that. That looks like it's a real thing. I'm going to hit my two About 20 feet away here. All right, let's give this a shot. Nope, it's my three par, that's right. The most impressive golf highlight I have is of me achieving the average. Whoa, okay, so I liked the club I used.

Speaker 2: 56:10

Yeah, that was good, that iron.

Speaker 1: 56:11

Should I try that again? Maybe seven iron? Yeah, okay, I'm not against it, I had good results. And do I have one bad hit with it and then I'll be like forever you are banished. So this is seven. We have three left. Yeah, this is enjoyable.

Speaker 2: 56:35

That's going to go good, hey.

Speaker 1: 56:39

All right, I'm happy with that. I'll take a seven. Yes, I don't need to take my scorecard home and burn it or anything. I'm not ashamed of how I've done.

Speaker 2: 56:48

That's the first round.

Speaker 1: 56:50

I'll find, with this, nine holes. This is what everyone was talking about Golf, this is golf. And then, a mere 80 ish minutes after we started, jeff and I found ourselves at the ninth hole, the final one for this course. What do you think? Nine from here? There's nine Iron. You're hitting them pretty hard. The irons are. I'm with you on this iron thing they're easier to control. It's doing me well. All right, here we are, man, I didn't get much of it. I need one more piece because I intend to do two things here, cause this is whole nine and I'm doing the part. The guys aren't even on our tail yet. So here I go, I'm going to hit this part golf ball on hole nine. Oh, that one felt great Dude, that just feels so good hitting that ball. I mean even just back to back with the golf. It's just there's no comparison. They've done something with the part golf ball that has made it so satisfying to hit. I saw my part golf ball. It's, it's a beautiful shot. I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie, but we'll see it when it gets up there.

Speaker 2: 58:22

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 58:24

I figured the risk. The risk now is very low, all right. So I'm still looking at my nine. Is that right? Probably I don't do. I have a P, I have a P. I have a shot. I have a.

Speaker 2: 58:38

I'll go up a little higher.

Speaker 1: 58:40

All right, using the P club P. Do you have to say P when you hit it? All right, let's see P. Oh, that was nice, that does go up. That's very satisfying. Okay, zing Zang, I'm mad at that. Now there's a part golf ball out here somewhere. Oh, it's right in front of me. Whoa, okay, great, I was happy with my shot and that is why I'm going to level up this part golf ball first. Now, that is about as straight as I could have hoped for. About 30 feet, too hot, but right on the money as far as aim, pretty much. If that had been a part golf sized hole, we could have that could have gone in. And then I've got a little part golf business here to finish. There we go In the hole. Ninth ball, ninth hole of the course. We did it. We did it All right, I'll grab my stuff, we'll get out of their way and then go Telly up. I guess that was really pleasant, jeff, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:00:07

Yeah, that was fun.

Speaker 1: 1:00:09

It's really fun, all right, so do we have to go back in or anything? We just leave, we're good. Well, there you go. What I loved about part golf is so many of the places were free, or, if anything, they were like I don't know 500 yen.

Speaker 2: 1:00:22

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

You're like okay, that's way affordable. So the end result of the the course is a part 27. Yeah, you shot a 40. I shot a 49.

Speaker 2: 1:00:34

It's really good for your first round.

Speaker 1: 1:00:36

I'm not mad at a 49.

Speaker 2: 1:00:40

Well, so did you. Did you enjoy your first?

Speaker 1: 1:00:42

I really did. That was really enjoyable, I think. I mean thanks you as well. I think you were the right person to go with because there was no frustration or pressure at all and you had great advice for me and, yeah, that was really fun. Also, you know part golf, so my shenanigans with wanting to hit a little part golf aren't quite as ridiculous with you. No, I think that turned out really well. How about you I? really enjoyed it and we are pulling up back in home after successfully completing my first round of golf ever. Couldn't have gone better, I have to say. I'm so happy with that. Thank you so much, jeff. That was super fun. Thanks for letting me be part of that. Oh man, thank you, and let me stop recording it, and hopefully this all turns out. Bye, bye, all right. So we're back here at the house. It's been a few hours since the golf and I'm here with Jeff on the mic. Thanks for coming out with me. I had a lot of fun. Yeah, I hope it wasn't like awkward for you at all, but that was a lot of fun for me.

Speaker 2: 1:01:53

It was great fun. Like when you first suggested like hey, I want to go golfing for the first time, I was like, oh yeah, I totally would be in for that. Like that's something I would 100% do.

Speaker 1: 1:02:04

And I got to do, I want to say two and a half holes as part golf holes as well. It all worked out well. So I was pretty chuffed about it. I was pretty happy. So you lived in Hokkaido as well with us. That's where we met and we played a lot of part golf. Do you have like a comparison between golf and park? You had played golf before, park golf Obviously. So what are your thoughts on park golf? How did you enjoy or how did you discover it, or what do you remember, I guess?

Speaker 2: 1:02:34

Well, so you, you were actually the one that taught us part.

Speaker 1: 1:02:37

Oh, really Did I drag you out there, I was like, yeah, I'm going to say yes Because you said it's awesome.

Speaker 2: 1:02:51

I feel like that could go very poorly at some point here. Totally hey, let's do this. It's awesome, sure, that's, I'll do it.

Speaker 1: 1:02:59

And it could go, terry, it hasn't yet but turns out it's robbing a bank and I think that's awesome and you just committed a felony.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

Yeah, but I mean we're Canadians, so we'll just, we'll just go up, we'll all go up, and I think that's the best time is people love it Totally the thing to do but yeah you, you took us out and we went, as all of all of the foreigners. And I mean the interesting thing about being a foreigner is, you know, like you're like, oh, you speak English and I speak English.

Speaker 1: 1:03:23

We're friends, we have an instant connection, we're instantly friends and we're both experiencing this like Completely different sort of thing that you never had before. So you, you're tied together on that like core level. With everyone you meet who's a foreigner, and you're just like oh and you can go from there, and then that's a great bouncing board to start a friendship, I feel yeah, and so you, you said you've got to try this.

Speaker 2: 1:03:46

And we said okay, and we, we gathered together all like the first time we went was in the it was the town next to us, I think it was in was the one where the foxes all the time on the course shinto tzukala, shinto tzukala.

Speaker 1: 1:03:58

That was our favorite.

Speaker 2: 1:03:59

That was one of our favorite ones, yeah and so you, you all, took us over to shinto tzukala and you were like Okay, there's this giant ball, this is the ball we're going that okay. Okay, and here's the club. It's some weird combination of a, a putter and a driver together Yep, and we just hit the ball into the hole In the least strokes possible and it was that moment. It's, this is golf. Yeah, but it was also free there, or, I think, free.

Speaker 1: 1:04:29

Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, if you had your own equipment and you showed up, you just yeah, it's just there be played on which yeah, it was that moment.

Speaker 2: 1:04:37

It's like, okay, let's, let's do park golf and and so we play. I think we played two rounds that day and and so, like I just, we went to all these different courses and it was a great way to see these little towns. Mm-hmm and then also all of you had these cool things in each of those little towns that you would. You had traveled to park golf, we'd found, and then you had found something cool, yeah, in that town. Like you're like, oh hey, we're gonna drive to this town, we're gonna stop at this roadside weird place, yeah, and we're gonna eat corn dogs, but they're called American dogs. Yeah, and they're phenomenal.

Speaker 1: 1:05:11

Okay, I want to break in here for a second. I know that corn dog. This is from years ago and I know the exact corn dog he's talking about. It's from this highway food stand in Mikasa, a small town just north of Sapporo, that we would pass by when we were going there. But he's right, this place served the best corn dogs I've ever had, and I grew up in the Midwest going to county fairs and old settler stays every summer, so that's actually an incredibly high bar. I've even been thinking about making an entire episode about corn dogs, and I still might, but this corn dog in Mikasa Was the real deal, so much so that before I became a vegetarian and I was a vegetarian for six years I did a training wheels period of like six months before leaving Japan, where I was completely vegetarian Except for two things, and one of them was corn dogs from Mikasa. Okay, back to my conversation with Jeff.

Speaker 2: 1:06:08

And, like, as we traveled around playing park golf, we had these cool other experiences.

Speaker 1: 1:06:13

So, yeah, but that's awesome. I I definitely used park golf as an excuse to travel around the island and Used traveling around the island as an excuse to park golf and like it was just once we owned our own clubs, once we got some at the recycle shop and I had like a set where I'm like we could play with four people or eight people or whatever. Then it was like it's on, anytime we can find a course, we'll just hop out and and you were always the ringleader for it.

Speaker 2: 1:06:41

You'd always be like, hey, let's, let's, let's, let's do park golf.

Speaker 1: 1:06:45

I don't think there was a day that I wouldn't be like have been in down for park golf. It was pretty much a bottomless cup for me.

Speaker 2: 1:06:53

Well it was, we be like hey, what do we want to do today? And you'd be like park golf, just immediately, park golf. And and yeah, okay, cool, where, I don't, I don't know, and it wasn't always you would have the answer of where. But it would be like all of these foreigners together and be like what are we gonna do? Park golf.

Speaker 1: 1:07:11

Yeah, oh, golf in general we talked a lot about, but is there anything else? Did you have any other thoughts on just golf in general? Since you've had a, you've had a longer history of golf than I have, for sure, at mine's hours old I.

Speaker 2: 1:07:25

I mean I think the I've had. I've been lucky enough now to experience multiple people their first time Going golfing, really, because my taking my daughter out and okay, how did I do compared to other people? I, you, you definitely did better than a snow, what oh? Okay, you did better than a seven-year-old. You actually did really good for a first time, and I'm not just being nice. I wasn't just being Canadian.

Speaker 1: 1:07:47

I wasn't ashamed of my performance. I'll tell you, I was okay with that.

Speaker 2: 1:07:50

It was. It was very consistent. Like you, you hit very straight, which I think is probably the park golf probably.

Speaker 1: 1:07:58

The compliments are nice, but the real reason I was riding high at that moment was that I had just gotten to do something that I've been joking about for years but really actually wanted to try. I played my first round of golf, golf, golf Not a thing I think I'll do very regularly, but I'd definitely be down to go again sometime. I'd be far more than down if I knew I could slip in some more part golf, though. Jeff and I even talked about this on our drive home. No, that was really fun. I yeah, good first golf experience. I don't know that. It like Hooked me to the point where I'm good, I'm itching to get out there on the green again, but that was really fun. I mean the lure of being able to go out and hit a park golf ball. It would maybe get me out there on the green and sometimes in that I mean that course you could use.

Speaker 2: 1:08:53

I wonder. I feel like that course of any course could definitely like. I Bet you could ask about your your mind.

Speaker 1: 1:09:01

Yeah, you're not wrong, that is. That has some potential. So a little while later I asked my friend Alex if he'd be up to try something new and the two of us headed back to the Lake Shabou golf course with only one club Beach. Hello, yeah, I just had a weird question for you. Kind of, I was here last week playing golf on the nine hole course and I really liked it. I noticed it looked kind of perfect for another thing called Park golf. Have you ever heard of this? Okay, it's a Japanese sport, but I just I'll show you it's. It's just it's like kind of like the same as golf, except it's got here. Check it out. It's you just use one club.

Speaker 3: 1:09:44

This is.

Speaker 1: 1:09:44

Omar I'm talking to, and now I'm handing him my club so he can examine it for himself. The balls are big and so I was wondering if I could do greens fees and Then go out and play park golf through the course instead of for his big off or regular golf and and also destroyer I don't know if that there by to whatever yeah, shouldn't, shouldn't mess anything up, okay. Okay, can we do that. Then can I get two greens fees or whatever. We do that. Thank you, mopping MAU PIN. I paid for the round and we were out the door a second later. So I explained the whole news, radio and secret word then Chris had given me to Alex. I hadn't told him about it first because I was really nervous and I genuinely wasn't sure if I was going to back out of doing it at the last minute or not. We made our way to the first tee and I set up to hit first, about to play part golf on this par 3 regular golf course. All right, so my goal is to get a good, good crack from here, and you kind of have to hunch over. It's just weird, but it's super fun. That is great. Now. I recorded it before and it's still good on this mic, but this time, since I was playing with permission, I had brought a better device to really capture the sound of the crack. Here is that same shot I just hit, but from my field recorder. Oh man, did you hear that? I love that sound. Next up was Alex hitting a part golf ball for the first time ever. Yeah, you can set it up anywhere and just give it a nice crack. Nice, that's all good, that's all good. We'll find that he hit it off into the woods beside the fairway, which he went and got and then re-hit much straighter, but even so, once again, listen to the perfect sound that the field recorder captured of his first hit. We proceeded to play the nine holes out and we got to satisfyingly hit the park golf ball tons of times, tons and tons of times actually, because we're not great and it took us a while to get it into each hole, while also experiencing more than a few near misses due to the hole being a quarter of the size that it should be. Comparatively, yeah, and it's like each each course, I mean each hole is usually like probably twice as long what that would have been. That counts in a real, that counts in the sport we're technically playing. I keep expressing that same sentiment. I think if I become a regular part golf on golf, golf course player, that's gonna be something I'll just have to make peace with, okay, so now I'll get back to our round at the end of the ninth hole, last shot, hopefully last shot on the last hole, and that's around a part golf. We are the first people to play around a part golf on the western coast, you don't think?

Speaker 3: 1:14:26

anyone else just do what we just did.

Speaker 1: 1:14:29

No, I don't, no, I don't. I think we are the first. I think my, my buddy and I were the first ones to hit part golf on the entire probably Pacific Coast and I think we're the first ones to play nine, nine holes. If someone, I'll put out a call. If someone else played nine holes, please let me know. But I mean, I've definitely never heard of it before no well, what do you think, what's your, what, your opinion of? part golf right on. Well, thank you for coming out with me. I mean, I'm the first person to do that in the entire Pacific time zone ever. Wow, amazing. Am I glowing, can you tell? Do microphones here glowing? Hey, it's probably not all that different from how Neil Armstrong felt walking on the moon. Well, actually, destroyer part golf should be Neil Armstrong. I guess we would be buzz Aldrin then, wait, no, worm burner in Ohio would be buzz. Okay, then Michael Collins. I mean I'll take that the part golf, michael Collins. Oh, you mean Scott Moppen? Yeah, I think called worse. And with that part golf becomes the next entry into the perfect orium, the index of perfect things. Go to the show's website, perfect show podcast calm, to see pictures and videos related to this in each episode. For this one, I'll have pictures of my equipment, me playing golf, and a video of my awkward but effective swing, and and more. You can see all the entries to the perfect orium at the direct link for it. Perfect show podcast calm slash perfect orium. Special thanks to Chris Byer Jones, jeff Clemens and Alex Yelkamp for being on this episode and putting up with a large dose of my nonsense. Visit destroyer part golf in Akron, new York, or at destroyer part golf calm. Visit worm burner part golf in Logan Ohio or at worm burner part golf calm. Find the Japanese part golf association at part golf dot o r dot, jp. They have an English section so you can read it in either Japanese or switch it to all English and the International Part Golf Association of America you can find at IPGA a calm. You can find all that info and the links for all the music artists in the show notes and on this episode's webpage. As always, if you'd like to contact the show, you can email perfect show show at gmail calm and connect on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name perfect show show. This episode was recorded and mixed at Marina Studios in Oakland, california. Again, I'll remind you of the very obvious fact that I don't make these on a set schedule, so subscribing via your favorite pod portal really is the best way to get every episode, and if you are enjoying these and want to drop us a rating review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show. I asked for new reviews last episode and that worked, so I'll do it one more time. Ratings and reviews help people find the show and I'm hoping for that to become the number one way people discover this podcast, taking over from what is currently number one, which is me hitting them up with a call or text saying hey, I have a podcast, would you be able to help me out with something for it? Also, if you do know me in person, we can just find some grass somewhere with a bit of space and I'll let you try out hitting the park golf ball a few times, because if you just give it one good crack, you'll understand everything immediately. And remember there's no such thing as a secret word that just automatically helps things go your way. Not in court and not in golf. That's definitely not a thing. But I mean, just in case, let me cover my basis here one more time. Real quick, abracadabra, two-bulking destroyer, candy man. All right, I think that's it anyway. Until next time, I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the perfect show.

Speaker 3: 1:19:06

I need 50 eggs.

In this episode we examine what happens at sea in the middle of the night, culminating in a crazy night in a Frankenstein-themed nightclub. Join Scot on a discussion of boats, water, staying up all night, and then join him aboard a ship in the middle water and in the middle of the night for this topic.

Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: https://perfectshowpodcast.com/13-cruise-ship-3am/

Music from this episode by:

Simon Carryer - https://www.simoncarryer.com/

Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee

rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - "School" - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/school/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 2: 0:24

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I present one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I've always been a very land-based human. I grew up in Kansas where, from the right vantage point, you can see oceans of land, with waves of crops blowing in the wind Really the only form of ocean I knew growing up. Other people tell me that looking out over the water makes them feel at ease and gives them a calm sense of peace or serenity, but I've never really felt that. To me, oceans are the home of monsters who can all breathe where I can't, which is not really the calmest or most peaceful thought. That's why it's strange that I'd want to make an episode about basically surrounding myself with nothing but water on the biggest boat I could ever imagine and about finding perfection on that ship in the middle of the night. I think being surrounded by water affects people differently. Some people find peace out in the open water, others the water gives them a different energy and brings chaos. But, like getting seasick, you don't really know how you'll react until it's too late to do much about it. I talked with a friend recently who told me about having this feeling, but even more so she told me the scientific name for it it's called the Lassophobia and it's the intense fear of large bodies of water. I don't think I'm at that level at all, but it was interesting to hear her talk about her intense feelings around water, because I recognize so much that I have, just on a smaller scale. So I said I didn't like water, and that's true. But boats are a different thing. I like a boat, though I haven't really been on that many In my earliest memories of any boat at all. I'm sitting on Smithville Lake in Missouri with Grandpa Moppen, and maybe Grandma or Dad were there too. But fishing was one of my grandpa's passions and he shared it with my sister and me from a very young age. I'm not sure how many other boats I had even gone on, and what gets included under the classification of boat. The Kansas City area has a couple of examples that I don't know if I should really count. At Worlds of Fun, the big theme park in the area, I rode on a mock riverboat that was really just being pulled along on an underwater track at the park so that one seems borderline. Probably shouldn't count it, but what feels completely out of the question are Kansas City's riverboat casinos. Now, to me gambling always seems to have the oddest hoops to jump that make it go from completely illegal, go to prison crime, to 100% A-OK, super profitable business. To go from a place where it's not allowed to one where it is, you may have to cross a state line, like in Lake Tahoe, where the California side of the state line just has hotels, but across the street on the Nevada side they've become large hotel casinos due to the different state laws on gambling. Or the line between the United States land and tribal lands, where the laws are different as well. You might even have to cross from land to water in the case of the floating casinos on the Mississippi River where, as long as there are businesses on the water, the laws are different than they are on land. So these boats sail up and down the river, fulfilling that requirement regularly. But the riverboats in Kansas City are, well, they're different. For one, they are large complexes the size of shopping malls and you might wonder how well a riverboat could float in water, being that size. But don't worry, these riverboats aren't surrounded by water at all, but rather by enormous parking lots locking them in acres of concrete on all sides. Now, it might be hard to conjure up the image of a riverboat, considering the description I've just given you, but a few of them have put forth a nominal amount of effort to remind you that they are in fact boats A lit up display, smokestack, maybe a neon paddle wheel that is completely stationary you know stuff like that. So what makes these riverboats boats, you ask. I mean, why are they even called riverboats? Well, of course it's water. Most of the riverboats casino concrete foundation is taken up with restaurants, shops, movie theaters and the like. But to go on to the gambling floor in the middle you have to first step across the threshold, a small one foot gap bridged by a textured metal plate, beneath which runs a one foot wide stream of water that has been diverted out of the nearby Missouri River and then, after flowing under the metal plate, eventually flows back out to the Missouri River once more. And that's the magic that does it in KC. Walk across a rain gutters worth of water and now you're on a boat, which always felt so weird to me, so I don't count those really in the list of boats I've ridden. I guess that would be my auto boat dog right, no, and that means I don't really have that many boats in my past at all. The short boat trip in India I talked about last episode, a couple of ferries to Bershiri and Reibu and islands in Japan when I lived there and a short one in Seattle, but until a few years ago that was really it for me and boats, fishing with my grandpa, a bunch of non boats and some ferries. But then, in 2019, we got the call from the big leagues. It was a family trip being planned by people higher up in the tree than us, and we were invited to go on a cruise with a large group of relatives, something I had definitely never even thought of doing before and before I knew it, we were booked and packing for a big trip on the biggest boat I could imagine. We'd be departing from Seattle, washington, and then sailing north to see glaciers in Alaska, where I'd never been before, then back to Seattle, making a few stops in between. Now, this ship, the cruise ship, really was like a floating city. The ridiculous premise of a shopping mall slash casino being a boat because someone ran a hose through it was the fake version, but that idea was the reality of a cruise ship. The ship we would be sailing on, the Diamond Princess, had 13 decks, held 2600 passengers and another 1100 crew members and, like any cruise ship, it had to be designed with the goal of keeping over 2000 people entertained or at least occupied all day long, day after day. On a ship, they can't leave. So there was a lot to do Things starting all over all the time. You just looked at what was happening when and you could choose which things to hit up. But more even than the non-stop scheduled events, I was fascinated by just the fundamental differences that being on a ship brought. The first surprising discovery on board the ship, one that I didn't even know to expect at all, was the way the boat moved. At first you noticed some minor rocking back and forth while it leaves the port, but when the ship reaches open water it really picks up steam and the minor rocking becomes much more intense. The whole ship moves with the waves, but because it's so big, the time it takes to rock back and forth makes it feel like whatever ground you're on is either rising or falling slowly. I'd probably have a more poetic description if I'd been on ships all my life, but walking down a hall was almost like walking across one of those plank and rope bridges where as you walk you make the thing bounce and by the middle you're dealing with the whole bridge just rippling up and down in a wave. People were having a hard time with the rocking and more than a few of our family party just stayed in their cabin and tried to deal with their seasickness. The surprising part to me, mr Land, guy. Well, I was just fine Better than fine, actually. On my first trip where I could get seasick, I discovered that the rocking up and down and sort of moving floor feeling was something, well, something that I really enjoyed. It was like being on a slow motion trampoline, or maybe like the best parts of being tipsy, without any of the cost, calories or other negative parts of drinking. I get why people don't like it and I had never rolled those dice before, but if, when I did, I had found that I get really sick from the rocking motion, I'd feel the same way too. I didn't, so I didn't. For people who have been on a cruise before, or just people with enough wear with all to actually know what one's like, please bear with me, I was not in that camp prior to this. So the ship has shops, shows, places to eat, swimming pools, a gym, a casino and even a hospital jail in morgue in case something goes drastically wrong while you're cruising. It was huge, I'll be honest. It was also very overwhelming initially. I am not an extrovert. Often, and I'm also not particularly a swim in the sun or dance the night away type. There were people everywhere, and I'm not really a fan of that either. But the boat is huge and while there were crowded spots that were easy to find and often located by whatever popular activity, party or event was being put on right then, I was able to find some quiet spots too. It was away from the main throng of passengers and places to really appreciate what I was experiencing there. On especially windy or cold days, which on a trip north to Alaska was most of them, I could find some space up on the observation deck and also look out on a site I never really get to see, being surrounded by water to the horizon in every direction. On one of these walkabouts I was lucky enough to see a couple of whales swimming alongside the boat, and on another I caught a lazy otter cruising in our wake who looked like it was enjoying a nice breakfast made up of yummy things that the enormous engines were stirring up below. And this was how I sort of got acclimated to cruising on my first few days. I would hang with people for as long as I had the energy for it, and then I would find ways to slip away from any action to recharge on my own Most of the time I'd been exploring the vast boat. This ship had 13 floors or decks, each one the size of the cruise ship, and it had been built out extensively to make use of all that space. Back when I first moved to Kita, kyushu, japan, I did this same thing At night. I would pop in headphones and just go out walking, going down streets or alleys I hadn't been down before gradually making a mental map of my surroundings as I went A few walkabouts around a new area, and I tended to get a much better sense of the space and get my bearings enough to explore much more intentionally later. Doing this, I found nooks and crannies that were interesting to me, different businesses and restaurants off the beaten path that I was curious about, parks or other green spaces that are tucked away between tall buildings, and I even made friends with stray animals on occasion, and the same tactic worked pretty well on the boat too. There weren't any stray animals there, of course, but everything else went pretty much the same as in a city. It definitely helped me feel like I knew where things were on the boat in short order, where to sneak away when I needed to, and also gave me a mental list of what things were available to see or use, and I thought this worked really well for the first few days. Then, as can sometimes slash often happen, my weirdness got in the way. I've always been a night owl. I would stay up late as a child reading with a flashlight. Once I got a TV in my room, that turned into staying up late while watching what few broadcast TV stations we got on the rabbit ears and enjoying their latest of late night offerings while laying on the carpet and drawing pictures in front of the screen. I would stay up until 2, 3, 4am on school nights and then short change myself on sleep. Not a great plan for middle school and high school, but it didn't seem to matter. I was a night owl, awake all alone while everyone else was asleep, and I liked it. In college, staying up late started to have social advantages. I could schedule my own classes and gravitated towards ones that started later when possible, and then I would just leave my dorm room door propped open. When I was up late doing stuff. Other students would come in and hang out on their way back from a night out, maybe, or taking a break from an all night cram session before a big test, possibly someone dropping by to give their roommate some privacy. But I was usually up and ready to talk, watch a movie or listen to music. The older I get, the less attractive being a night owl has become. After college I moved to Japan and worked in public schools which very much have their own set schedules and are not open to an assistant teacher setting separate hours. I mean, I assume I didn't ask, and I have found that in professional life the need for all-nighters goes down sharply from my college days. Or maybe I've just gotten better at not procrastinating as much. But that night owl skill trait, characteristic. Whatever it is, it does still come in handy sometimes. Having a baby immediately throws you into a stretch of months where time has no meaning. It's wake up time when there's crying, it's sleeping time when there is napping, it's everything else time somewhere in between. But being able to be alert in the middle of the night or conk out for a few hours mid-morning made me a pretty good new baby wrangler. Staying up all night before a flight and then sleeping on the plane is also good for minimizing the effects of jet lag on long trips, I discovered. But really the older I get, the less useful of a habit, predispositioned or a quirk it seems to be. That's why I didn't find it helpful when I started feeling completely awake in the middle of the night on the cruise ship. At home I can go to another room and turn lights on or do things without disturbing anyone's sleep, but on the cruise my family was all in the same room together. Any lights or noise would affect other people and I didn't want to just sit there fully awake in the windowless cabin for hours. So I found myself quietly getting dressed in the dark and heading out to explore in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep Well, not everyone actually. I found a few people still in the nightclub, one of the last places on the ship to shut down Literally a few like three people, and it looked like it was closing up soon. Walking out around the usually crowded spots, it felt a little like a ghost town. Everything was empty. These places that were never empty during the day because they were always full of people or getting set up to be full of people At night, those spaces and places were all abandoned, patiently waiting for the morning so they could fill back up, but in the meantime they just sat there open, curiously empty and quiet. Well, if you heard my last episode, you know I like to paint. When I have the time and a bit of inspiration, I like to sit and make watercolor paintings, but on a boat with thousands of people freely roaming at all times, there are rarely any chances to sit down and find a subject that's not going to shift or change or be different in some way over an hour or two. But now, in the still of the night, there were large chunks of time to paint spaces that were normally filled with people, and I made a mental note to take advantage of these opportunities. Later I noticed another thing about the middle of the night too. There's no shortage of staff on a cruise ship. There are tons of people on board who are there working. During the day, we would see all the hospitality professionals, entertainers and staff that you're meant to see, but at night, while they slept, an entirely new crew emerged. People I never saw during the day came out and started going over and checking everything on the ship, resetting each piece for the morning, as well as doing maintenance, which must always be needed, but I never saw it happen during the day when changing a light bulb or doing HVAC work might be unsightly and get in the way of guests, but once the cruisers had gone to sleep at night they popped out like a pit crew for a race car repaired, replaced and reset everything before the morning. I was completely fascinated by this. It's as if a shark had gone to sleep and these little cleaner fish were out in force picking out anything that didn't belong there, missing no detail. I walked a bit more and found another wonderful night-only feature. When I went to the end of the ship where the dining rooms were in the pre-dawn hours of early morning I discovered that there were whole sections of the boat that smelled like fresh bacon, because they shared some airway with the kitchen where the cooks were preparing breakfast items for some 2,000 people. I know I've talked about how smells get me before. This was another one. I would walk outside and smell the saltwater air, but to come inside and be hit with the warmth and the unexpected smell of fresh bacon is just pretty spectacular. I gotta say this first night I had been walking with just my headphones and exploring every nook of the ship. I could think of that I hadn't checked out for hours on end. Then I came back some time pre-dawn and slipped into bed for a little shut-eye before everyone got up. I had just planned to leave the room for a bit and not wake anyone else up, but instead discovered my favorite aspect of the cruise being up on the ship in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep. It really felt like during these hours this ship meant for thousands was really just my personal exploration zone and that I was seeing a secret side to the ship that other people never got to experience. I think I sort of shifted my plans then, making sure to nap during the day to make up for being awake during the night. After the first night I did this, I also planned my little night time adventures a bit more intentionally. Knowing now what the empty ship held, I was able to pack a bag with my watercolor things and over the next few days, usually at 3 or so after the final things to do on the ship ended, I would slip out of my room. I started my nights by wandering around the ship looking for a good subject to paint. I picked a spot on the top deck next to one of the swimming pools and set up facing a now closed bar and tile mural that I would never have gotten a clean view of during the daytime. Night time painting had another benefit I hadn't thought of when I planned it, and that's the light Painting in sunlight. During the day, the light changes over time, especially over a couple of hours, especially, especially on a rocking ship that's sailing and maybe turning as well, but night, well, of course, at night the ship is lit up by artificial light, which would stay consistent throughout my painting and make the process just that much easier. So there, in my windbreaker, and probably listening to some film score through my headphones, I sat and spent the next 2-3 hours on what felt like an abandoned ghost ship and loved every second of it. I could even leave my painting stuff spread out there on the table and walk around, maybe grab a bite to eat or drink, and then come back and pick up where I left off, something I would have never considered doing when everyone was up and about, both because I don't just want to leave my stuff unattended, but also because when the decks and pool get crowded it feels rude to take up a table that I'm not actively using. I repeated the process the next night, setting up in the main lobby that is usually a bustling and busy thoroughfare, and painting part of it, with the spiral staircase, bar piano and bronze globe in the background. It was during this painting that I really saw the crew come out like elves and expose some of the hidden workings on the ship opening panels that I didn't know opened, sliding pipes out into the hallway and working on electric wires through subtle conduits that I had just considered decorative elements. It was like I had snuck into a place I wasn't allowed to be, but no one was kicking me out, so I could quietly stay out of the way and just watch it all happen. It became my nightly routine. I don't need to bore you with each night's painting or exploring, but on the ship or really in any new or unfamiliar place, I generally like to have some time to get my bearings, to not have to be on for anyone else and to explore. These middle of the night crew sessions gave me the perfect dose of all three. It not only made my nights better, but with that bit of regular self-care, I was a more pleasant person to be around. All the rest of the time too. The stuff that was initially so overwhelming became much easier to navigate. I had done my bit while everyone was asleep, so I was less anxious about the rest of the group dynamics or going to this or that activity, because I had checked the most important activity off my list already, so I was easy to do whatever. It was really my favorite part of the cruise and some of my fondest memories from the ship. That's why later that year, when the opportunity came up to get a free cruise by sitting through a time-shared presentation, we decided as a family it'd be worth it. We heard the spiel, watch the PowerPoint presentation, got our free cruise voucher and then scheduled our next cruise for March 28, 2020. Now some of the keen date heads out there may have noticed something odd about that timing and then remembered that March of 2020 was when the entire US, as well as the rest of the world, was shutting down and trying to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. So one week before we were supposed to depart, the cruise got canceled officially. We were given a chance to reschedule 12 to 18 months in the future for a date that also ended up getting bumped and re-rescheduled. And now, over two years since we were supposed to leave initially and three years since that time-shared PowerPoint, we finally found ourselves once again getting ready to go on a cruise. Different cruise line, different route, slightly smaller boat this was the carnival miracle, and it holds about 500 fewer passengers and 150 fewer staff, but there's still some 3,000 people on board. This time we'd head south, from San Francisco to a place in Mexico and then back again, and this time it would just be the immediate family. My wife was excited to just relax and look out over the ocean. She's a California person, so she doesn't understand my fear of the monsters underneath the water. Uh, my daughter was excited because this cruise would have water slides on it, and I was, of course, excited to see what this ship would be like in the middle of the night, when everyone was sleeping, and so so it's a little after three in the morning and I've decided to get up and explore during my favorite time on a cruise ship. So let's go see what we find, shall we? I left our cabin and decided to start by going to the upper decks first and then working my way down, crisscrossing the boat as I went.

Speaker 1: 25:30

Deck nine.

Speaker 2: 25:32

I'm assuming it'll be cold. I mean, let's see if we can get up one more flight and go up to 10.

Speaker 1: 25:41

You know what?

Speaker 2: 25:43

Not only is there more work to take the stairs. I don't get. The front of the elevator dings for the show, so for the show, for the show. I will take the elevator up one flight. Normally, of course, I would absolutely take the stairs, but for the show.

Speaker 1: 26:05

Deck 10.

Speaker 2: 26:06

That's what we're looking for. Looks like I could go outside right here. Okay well now I'm up on deck 10. I've got a good view from up here, got a wind noise too. Whoa, whoa. This is a fine. There's a little shower here next to the water slide that you're supposed to shower off in before or after you hop in, and I'm using it with the glass half circle around it as a real windshield right now so I could actually talk. But I can't hang out here all day. I'm going to head out and let's see what else we got. We're on 11, heading out and exploring. Here we go. Now. A lot of what I got outside ended up being heavy wind noise, which got louder the higher I went, and me commenting like wow, can you believe all the wind over and over, which normally I'd try to figure out a way to include? But there's some big noise stuff later that I'm going to have to ask you to buy in on, so I'm trying not to ask too much of you until then. After discovering that outside would mostly just produce wind noise, I ditched my jacket back in the room and got these much quieter snippets from inside, starting with the large theater at the front of the ship. And also don't worry when you hear me talking about the painting. I know I surprised you with having to listen to me paint last episode and I promise I'm not going down that road again. Well, not so soon anyway. So don't freak out when I refer to that plan. That's not what's going to end up happening. So now I'm in the large theater, the large amphitheater at the front of the ship. This is where they do all the stage performances. We saw a singing dancing show here earlier and they have, like, actually a pretty amazing stage, that that goes up and down on hydraulics, and it was pretty surprising. Every time a new part would lift or fall I was like whoa, that part moves too. Okay, all right, now let's keep exploring and see what will be fine. So two and three are the main spots where, like, there's a lot of stuff across the boat. Parts four through eight are almost completely state rooms, which means rooms where people are staying in and back with the shops. Now, oh, I definitely look like I'm doing something. I got my reflection in a mirror just there and I definitely look like I'm making a podcast, that's for sure. I've got big old headphones on and a microphone in front of my face as I just wander a ship in the middle of the night. All right, deck three Well, three is just a higher view of the Phantom. Right, the Phantom is the name of the big theater at the front. Now I'm definitely feeling the swaying up here as I walk. I have the inclination to kind of swerve left and right as the boat shifts with me, because I haven't had anything to drink, so I know everything I'm feeling is boat. This big theater starts on the second deck but extends up to the third deck and fourth deck as well, with balconies. All right, so I'm going to go back to the elevators here and take these back down To what? Three or two.

Speaker 1: 30:11

Maybe two is where I should go.

Speaker 2: 30:14

That wouldn't be bad right. Hop down to two from here.

Speaker 1: 30:18

Back to two.

Speaker 2: 30:21

I was saying maybe tomorrow I get out a little bit earlier. If I get out a little bit earlier I might run into some fun people, and fun people can be fun on mic, so that could be a fun little bit. How about if I save fun a few more times? Oh, it's a 4 am brain, you know, doesn't know a lot of adjectives at its disposal, but maybe I think about what. Oh, do I want to paint the insides of theater, the big theater here? Well, it's empty. That could be cool. Or what if I sit at the front and turn and paint the back of it? That might be the move. Oh, hello Stevie. What do we got here? A bunch of chandeliers.

Speaker 1: 31:21

How many how many is this?

Speaker 2: 31:24

12 chandeliers. All right, ship, Settle down. You don't got to flex so hard on me. That's crazy. Then I found a pretty crazy place on the ship that I had walked past a bunch but never gone into. No, I've never been in Dr Frankenstein's life. What is this?

Speaker 1: 31:45

place, oh what.

Speaker 2: 31:50

Oh, no, that's fun. No, this is a little nightclub. Then there are steps down to a dance floor. To that is fun. What a giant Dr. No, a giant Frankenstein monster on the wall. Okay, how tall is that? Geez, I'm going to go down and see it. Oh, there are some giant panels from Frankenstein comics on the wall. These are old EC comics I know of. So if I head downstairs Dr Frankenstein's lab, to the dance floor, I come up on Frankenstein. Hey, big guy, that guy is 11 or 12 feet tall. I am coming up to his belly button, maybe. And then is there a way out down here, is it just? This is the depths of the nightclub. I think this is the depths. I think if you want to get out of the nightclub, you've got to climb those stairs again. Oh it's going to come in and then drop down into the nightclub.

Speaker 1: 32:55

And then head back up Fascinating.

Speaker 2: 33:02

I think I will try and come out here when there's people and just see what this is like, maybe not holding a microphone. I think that might alter the atmosphere I could observe. Okay, cool. So, pretty uneventful. But I mean, that's the whole point right, trying to get out when it's uneventful and seeing the ship that way, because literally every other time in every other space on the ship, you're not going to have that. So coming out again tomorrow, maybe meet some fun people along the way, I got to say a Frankenstein themed nightclub. I was not expecting that. It made me hope that other cruise ships had coordinating ones, so like an invisible man nightclub, a wolf man nightclub, a mummy nightclub, all the classic universal monsters, which after I returned I knew I shouldn't, but I looked up anyway and yeah, that's not a thing. Sorry, there's a werewolf club in London that Yelpers say is closed now, dracula club in St Moritz, switzerland, but not the interconnected monster nightclub universe I was hoping for. The next night I switched to a lavalier mic that I clipped to my shirt and then tucked the recorder away in a hot pink fanny pack I wore under the shirt, since I had noticed a lot of funny looks, and rightly so. When I was using my other setup I started up in the corner, tucked that under my shirt and set out on the ship. Alright, it's about 1.30 am and I'm headed out, for this is the last night on the ship, and so I kind of wanted to run into people, or just you know see what I could get into. I started outside first again this evening, so remember earlier when I said I needed to save my loud noise points for later. Well, this is later Now. Mind you, I've already worked on the audio here and dropped what's about to happen by some 40 odd decibels. So it's fine to hear, but it still may be somewhat alarming. The windy deck may just be nothing but wind. We'll see, okay.

Speaker 1: 35:49

Let's try out here. I see people walking.

Speaker 2: 35:53

Let's see, that is right there. I walked up right as it hit and I was right in the blast radius. Oh my gosh, Well if I was tired at all before I am fully awake now.

Speaker 1: 36:23

Oh my gosh, that's a. Okay, that does its job. It is foggy, fair enough, oh right.

Speaker 2: 36:40

I don't know that I need to be up here that much. I'm going to get hit with that horn every few minutes. I want to walk back the other way, but I'm scared of that horn.

Speaker 1: 36:54

I'm on the other side of it right now and I'm not mad about that, but yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:03

That's way more doable back here.

Speaker 1: 37:06

Whew.

Speaker 2: 37:08

Oh man, I cut out most of the fog horns, but I think you get the idea that was happening every few minutes and a few times it really got me right in its blast zone and that is an intense noise. So after getting some tape outside, it was time to go in again. Alright, let's go from 9 down to 2 or 3. There we go, there we go. Start on 3, yeah, because I ultimately want to check out the night club and that's on 2. And we can do that Now. If I want to go in conspicuous, I just take my headphones off, put them in my backpack and I'm walking with the same setup.

Speaker 1: 37:51

Go through it.

Speaker 2: 37:53

A little different. I lost my audio there for a second. Sorry, I think one of my connectors is a little sus. Let's try heading down to 2. This may be the time I check out Frankenstein's lab. Okay well, I ducked in for a second. I would say it's maybe lightly crowded. That's cool. Some people enjoying the last night on board Having fun time, drinking and dancing Sounds good. I'll try to be a little social and we go sit in the night club, which is going to turn my mic volume way down, but I'll leave it running just because why not?

Speaker 1: 38:50

Just in case I don't mind going through all this tape. Hey, that's 2. Here we are Got an eliminated. There you go. I got away y'all. I got away Before I go in here.

Speaker 2: 39:07

I'll do a little bit of adjustment on my setup here. I adjusted my setup, which mainly meant putting away my big headphones before I went into the club. Again, these are snippets. I was probably in there for three or four songs that have been cut down to these clips. I also tried to talk into my mic over the music at certain points, but it's pretty unintelligible. If there's something I'm trying to say, I'll repeat that when the music isn't playing. Okay, I'm wired now. I turned it way down. Let's go into the night club and drink a lemonade. I'll stay here as long as I got this drink. I guess here's where I talked myself into going down the stairs and sitting next to the dance floor to start with. You know what? Why not? If I'm gonna do it, go all the way. So, yeah, I tried to get myself to dance a bunch of times, tried to talk myself into it and be like okay, next song I'll go out there. I'm not a never dancer, I'm a rare dancer. But this night, in front of a room full of strangers, my intro version got the better, but there was one guy out there who didn't seem to have that problem. I mean, there were a lot of people out just dancing, but I'm talking about someone else who was mainly sitting on the sidelines, like me, and I'm gonna call this guy Mr Big Fun. So Mr Big Fun was sitting over at a table with his group and he seemed like he was having a great time. But every so often, when the vibe in the club would dip too low, mr Big Fun got up from his seat and strode out onto the dance floor. Now he wasn't dancing, but instead Mr Big Fun paraded around in a large arc all around the dance floor and hyped everyone up, group by group. Then he would come back off the dance floor and each time it was popping and the energy was strong. When he finished, it was genuinely impressive. I think our lemonade is done at a crunch of the ice. Oh, I'm almost out of ice. That was only my last excuse. I commented on my recording, which is hard to hear, but I got to the end of my lemonade and then getting to the end of the ice was what made me decide to pop upstairs for a quick refill. Now the next bit I'm gonna play in real time, no cuts. So I'll talk over it a little. It starts with me climbing the nightclub stairs heading up to deck 9 for more lemonade.

Speaker 1: 41:53

Alright, whoo Alright, hold on.

Speaker 2: 42:02

That's a trip.

Speaker 1: 42:04

Let's get a little more lemonade and then come back, shall we. I don't mind that.

Speaker 2: 42:21

That is not my scene. That is very much not my scene, but I'm okay. I cannot force myself to dance, it seems. I get one in alcohol Deck 9.

Speaker 1: 42:35

I'm not working with that tonight, so, alright, let's see Back here.

Speaker 2: 42:46

So let me explain the drink situation a little bit. Here On the boat. They offer drink packages one for alcohol, a different one for sodas, with per day or per trip prices. So of course the nightclub serves drinks. But If you're like me and you didn't pay for a package, the choices were water, iced tea or lemonade. That was all free, but the iced tea slash lemonade dispensers were on the ninth floor at the eating area.

Speaker 1: 43:24

Alright, refreshed lemonade.

Speaker 2: 43:29

Head back down to the lab. Now I'm doing this in real time because I'm only gone from the club for 2 minutes and 10 seconds total, but during that time everything changes. You'll hear the walkie-talkie of a security guard who catches the same elevator as me. Listen.

Speaker 1: 43:49

Come on, come on, come on, come on, Alright, go ahead, that's it. That's it. Hold me high. Good, right, perfect, go on, continue.

Speaker 2: 44:07

Some sort of a security thing happening.

Speaker 1: 44:12

Oh my gosh, I stepped out of the fight.

Speaker 2: 44:21

I returned to a full-on, all-out brawl on the dance floor. I'm talking 20 people, at least 10 aunts and uncles of one family versus 10 aunts and uncles of another family. It was wild.

Speaker 1: 44:35

That's sort of a big fight.

Speaker 2: 44:38

Some of the people were trying to get at other people, some of them were trying to hold back those people and some people were just trying to get out of the way.

Speaker 1: 44:45

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 44:51

The problem was that everyone was falling down all over the dance floor at the same time. It looked like some full drinks had hit the ground, covering the area with tons of liquid which people were slipping and falling in. I left for like two seconds. Other people were slipping while they tried to help people up and a bunch of them were clearly operating deep into their drink packages at night and, oh yeah, the whole thing was on a ship that was literally moving up and down the whole time. The security guard who rushed in from my elevator was one of 10 guards who had piled into the club to join the one guard who was there before the fight and they were working hard to sort through the chaos separating fighting parties and get everyone out of the nightclub. It was a lot of this kind of audio and then, because I wasn't wearing my headphones to monitor the audio, I didn't notice with my microphone just totally cut out. When I got to a spot I could check my audio. I fixed the connection, so I went back up to the only place food was still available and waited to see if anyone else from the nightclub would come up too. Alright, I started a new one. Let's go see if we can find some pizza. That was man that fall corn is still prominent, even inside a lot of the corn. Man that fall corn is still prominent, even inside, way back here. Hi can I do pepperoni pizza? Awesome, thank you. And sure enough, two groups did show up looking to eat one last free pizza. But also talk about the fight.

Speaker 1: 46:37

Wait, did you all happen down there? Well, all I know is that I can only start a trip around people, and if I'm directed by association. I'm gonna have to start a trip around people.

Speaker 2: 46:49

The guilty tripper speaking now is none other than Mr Big Fun himself. He sat down at one table and tried to get the other group to sit with him, except they were a solid trio and were more deep in their own conversation, but I wasn't so. Guy looking to talk meet guy wanting to listen. I turned off my mic for reasons I'll explain later, but I had a great talk with him and his girlfriend. I found out Mr Big Fun's real name was Darryl, that this was their first cruise and his story of what happened during those two minutes and ten seconds. I was gone because Mr Big Fun was, of course, at the center of it all and yeah, it could be subjective and not completely how it happened, but I love this version so I'm going to choose to believe it happened exactly as Mr Big Fun described. According to Darryl, on one of his hype walks, a guy who was big into dancing from the other family stopped him and challenged him to a dance-off. I kid you not, that is where this starts, okay, so one guy challenges Darryl to a dance-off. Darryl says I don't dance, fight, I just fight, fight. Now, the way Darryl said it to me didn't sound like any kind of a challenge at all. But guy one responded oh, I do that too. Darryl said this was the point where it felt like it was a challenge. So he said oh, we can go outside on deck nine, which is really funny to me, thinking of two guys mad enough to fight each other being patient enough to go upstairs and wait to take separate elevators up seven more floors and all that. Guy one says or we could just stay right here. And I guess that's when things got physical. It was a one-on-one thing, but since everyone was with a bunch of people, it quickly became a bench clearing brawl. Darryl says he didn't start it, but once it turned physical he felt obligated to jump in and be in the middle of it all for his family. That's what the guilty-by-association thing was referring to earlier. So then, after all that, I hooked my recorder, mic and headphones back up to talk about it, and you can hear me trying to process my thoughts in this montage. Hi there, checking back in. Oh boy, that was a big. That was an interesting night. I didn't want to record, but I'll tell you why. So I ended up sitting down getting pizza at about three. It's about 4.45 now, and the past hour and 45 minutes I have been catching up with a couple people, a little bit more information about what I missed when I went up for a root limit, but people felt like they had to start getting physical again. And then a little bit of that turns into a lot of that when people come in to jump in and help other people in their groups and a little thing turns into a physical thing turns into a big thing real quick. So, but I met up with a couple of people, talked to them. They were good people, had a good conversation, I think Just one of those cases where alcohol didn't help things and then neither does people feeling like they can't take a step back Drunk too. I don't know Really really kind of fun to get to know someone and sit and hang with them. I didn't think I was going to be hanging with anyone tonight, but I was going to be off by myself and maybe do a painting. I don't know about the painting anymore, or sort of. I think I sort of changed when all that popped off, but everybody went to bed, it looks like after kind of winding down and decompressing. The reason I didn't roll tape with those guys was well, just, I mean, everybody had a little bit to drink. I don't think it's really fair to stick a microphone in someone's face when they're not exactly sober, Especially if you don't spring it on them after a big night like tonight.

Speaker 1: 51:26

But the night club's kind of neat. I would have liked to come back here. It's all good.

Speaker 2: 51:42

I guess I was here for the most eventful part. I'm going to have a story to tell, but yeah, I didn't feel like interviewing people when they didn't drink and didn't have an emotional situation. I don't need to take advantage of that. I did want to talk and just hang out and find out what happened, because I'm human, that's curiosity, right.

Speaker 1: 52:07

But yeah, okay Wow.

Speaker 2: 52:18

Well, that was, that was an unexpected turn of events. I'll say that For sure, that was an unexpected turn of events.

Speaker 1: 52:32

And.

Speaker 2: 52:37

I mean I was trying to think when the last time I'd been in a nightclub was before all that popped off. It's got to have been. I mean, it had to have been probably the last time I was on a cruise and the nightclub that I showed up the first night that I kind of like went out exploring late and found like three people in it. That was probably the last time I was in a nightclub until this time. And I don't know, I figured I'm, I figured that being on a cruise and having everything kind of be free or taken care of already, I was like, oh, maybe that means people don't get into it in like nightclub situations. And then, of course, just to put an exclamation point on how wrong that is, I see the most dramatic example of me being wrong. In real time I am seeing more like early people who I classify as early risers now, people who look like they're getting up at five, not staying up to five. That makes sense. I don't know what to do with this tape. Honestly, I don't know what to do with this episode anymore. It definitely is not what I was imagining it would most likely be, and yeah. I don't know what to do. So I think the events of that last night really did alter the trajectory of this episode. It was all about how calm and quiet the ship can be in the middle of the night, and just well. That's not what my tape really showed, but the early am cruise walkers were telling me that morning was inevitable. So I took one last lap around the boat on my way back to the room. A lot of natural noise that happens out here. This is really the noise I've never come upon. All these ship noises are not in my daily Well, I mean, except that one. Obviously I have fog horns at my house just for fun, but besides that all the other ship noises are just the stuff I don't have around. So it's kind of nice to be able to come out and record and experience it all here at all through the microphone. Okay, headed back in.

Speaker 1: 55:21

Okay, it's been a good trip. It's been pretty successful.

Speaker 2: 55:30

Strangely, maybe cruising is a decent compromise for me between a normal vacation and staying at home, Because I do get to kind of feel like I'm at home. But this is one of those places. I think the second cruise I felt similar to the first and sort of my feeling on the way out is I would do it again. Yeah this has been good, okay. Well, I'm at my room now. Beyond this door are a couple sleeping people, so I'm going to say goodbye as well. That was a little bit loud. Okay, talk to you later. Bye, wait, that sounds like I'm on the phone. Okay, signing off? No, that sounds like I'm on it. Okay, well, that's it, bye. There were subtle differences between my two cruise experiences. For instance, no bacon smells on my cruise this time and no hockey sized fights on the first cruise Potato, potato. I was half hoping that the giant Frankenstein would come to life as a huge robot bouncer just grabbing the fighters and holding them apart from each other. But it didn't do any of that. It didn't do anything, not even a light up or a bounce at shoulders or anything. I mean, if I go to all the trouble of making a 12 foot tall Frankenstein, I feel like bouncing shoulders are like bare minimum. But yeah, I had gone out expecting a peaceful, quiet night and got the complete opposite. But this is all about having experiences, and that was my experience this time. I mean, I still went out and found that solitary piece on the first night and on the first cruise, but ultimately, going out at 3am is about being open to whatever is going to happen that wouldn't during the day, and sometimes I guess that means nightclub fights. It's all a part of it, really. Oh, and I contacted Mr Big Fun after the cruise to find out one more thing. See, I knew security was escorting people down to their cabins because Mr Big Fun and his girlfriend told me they got escorted down but then waited until security left and snuck back out to get pizza, and I was curious if anyone had gotten in any real trouble from the brawl, like if there were any land cops waiting for them as they got off the boat. I mean, this was a real concern for Mr Big Fun while we were eating pizza. So I asked him after and he said that nothing had happened with him or anyone else in his party that he knew about. It sounds like the situation was like a teacher on the last day of school, when kids are acting up and they're just like there's literally five hours until people start getting off the boats. Could you all just chill please? So yeah, no repercussions. It seems Just a good old fashioned slobber knocker, but a legendary fight like that, especially because it happened on a boat out at sea, deserves they demands to have a suitable song made for it, and I'm nothing if not a slave to tradition. So here to forever commemorate the crazy night we had, I present the cruise ship 3am Sea Shanty. Take it away. There once was a ship that put to sea. It held my daughter, my wife and me from Frisco down to Mexico. Oh, blow that big horn blow. We made it through nights one to four, night five's the last we'd be aboard. But things happened on the dance floor while Foghorns outside blow, in a night club themed like Frankenstein with a statue of him 12 feet high. A dance off turned into a fight and that's what stopped the show.

Speaker 1: 59:50

Cruise in at 3am completely surrounded by sea. Again had in too much luck a engine and things are bound to blow.

Speaker 2: 59:59

I left it with the music playing, I came back to a Patrick's ways and some push and shove in misbehaving. The fight was on the go. The peaceful dancers here before now, ants and uncles, spent on war till ten guards pushed them out the door while they said no, no, no.

Speaker 1: 1:00:20

And then the lame part of the fight, when they sort out who's wrong and who's right. Listened to everyone for half the night, then let everybody go A wild brawl in the early morning.

Speaker 2: 1:00:32

new legend had just been born, and we'll announce it with the horn, the kind you blow in Fogh.

Speaker 1: 1:00:40

Cruise in at 3am, completely surrounded by sea again had in too much luck a engine and things are bound to blow Cruise in at 3am, completely surrounded by sea again had in too much luck a engine, and things are bound to blow.

Speaker 2: 1:01:25

Special thanks to Simon Carrier for the banjo tracks in this episode, like this one and on the Sea Shanty. You can find his contact info, as well as the links for all the musical artists, in the show notes and on the episodes webpage. If you'd like to contact the show, you can email perfectshowshowcom and connect on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name Perfect Show Show. This episode was recorded and mixed at Morena Studios in Oakland, california. As you may have noticed, I don't keep to a set schedule with these, so subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop us a rating or review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show and I haven't seen any new ones in a while. And remember, I'm not a singer and I'm not a teenager, I'm a dad. So doing TikTok sea shanty memes way after no one else cares about them, with my own weird owl lyrics is completely on brand. I'll have you know and I don't feel a bit of shame for my actions here. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

This episode Scot revisits stories of the most amazing building he's ever been to, the Taj Mahal, and the magic that happens to it during an Indian sunrise.

Scot also looks more locally to see if there is anything around his area that can help recreate this experience and even complete a part of it he could never do in India.

Check out all pics, videos, and for the first time a rough transcript on the webpage for this episode: https://perfectshowpodcast.com/12-the-taj-mahal-at-sunrise/

Trappy808 - https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_

Gopakumar1830 - https://www.fiverr.com/gopakumar1830

rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify

Tushar Lall - https://youtu.be/Xrk6uRZK38w

mwmusic - https://www.fiverr.com/mwmusic

aarchirecords - https://www.fiverr.com/aarchirecords

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

Scot's India Sketchbook - https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipM5Q-rMxYzFAzmzOWmUeXGw8RhLAzJ_yUolsQ-y

Floating Taj Sausalito official Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tajmahalsausalitoofficial/

AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:25

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospect, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. Photographs usually do a pretty good job of showing you what something looks like the colors, shapes, sort of giving you a sense of that thing. Photography is built around this idea. Tv and movies are built around this idea. Online shopping is built around this idea. Photographers and cinematographers know how to take the time to make something look so great it looks even better than the real thing. But then there are those things that are so amazing in person, so spectacular, that no photo ever does them justice. The best they can manage is a pale imitation. One of those things for me is the Taj Mahal. My mom was an elementary school art teacher for 40 years and we always had these gigantic books of different artists' work with huge, detailed pictures of their paintings. She would use them as resources in class to show students and for her own classes as she worked on her master's degree in the summers. Monet, dali, rockwell, picasso, gauguin, van Gogh, matisse I was flipping through all of them over and over again from an early age. We would also go regularly to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, so I grew up seeing paintings both in books and in person a lot. It got me interested in art, eventually allowing me to enter college on an art scholarship, and pretty much affected everything in my life. During college I would have one art history course each semester, which would put me in a big auditorium twice a week looking at giant projections of paintings on a screen. One summer, while traveling through Chicago, I made a visit to the Chicago Institute of Art Museum where I got to see a traveling exhibit of Van Gogh paintings, including one that I had seen on screen in art history class and also in my mom's books. It was small in real life smaller than the giant screen projection, of course, but also smaller than the reproduction of it I had seen in the book. The real painting was smaller than a piece of printer paper, which really surprised me and modest. It wasn't showy at all. It was just a small painting of the sun setting over a wheat field. I didn't really pay much attention to it on the screen or the book, just flipped right past it, but there in person it stopped me in my tracks. I remember having the absurd initial reaction of thinking they shouldn't allow photos of this to be in books or online because you just lose so much the type of thing where it feels almost rude to show people the photograph of it first and let them think they've seen what the real thing is like. Pictures hadn't shown me the texture of the gloves of paint or really represented the vibrance of the colors well at all. I hadn't had this sort of jarring disconnect when seeing any other paintings before and I had seen a lot of paintings. This was just the one for me. It shot up to the top of my list immediately. The photos had shown me what the image looked like, but not at all what it was like to actually see the painting if that makes any sense Like a replica that doesn't really replicate the thing. Now this sort of phenomenon has happened multiple times over my life, most often with landscapes or sunsets stuff that just flattens and dies in a photo. It's happened a few times with paintings like the one in Chicago, and once with a building. That building was the famous Taj Mahal in India. I mentioned last episode that I had my honeymoon in India and we went there without a real plan apart from visiting the Golden Triangle Trio of tourism cities, which are Delhi, agra and Jaipur, and then adding on a fourth city, udaipur. Okay, so it's geography time again. This is beginning to become a regular feature on the show, I guess, but the Golden Triangle is that trio of cities in the northern part of India. India's total population is 1.38 billion. Delhi, india's capital city, holds 18 million of those people. Then, to the south of Delhi, 220 kilometers or 137 miles, a two to three hour train ride away, is Agra, a beautiful city known for the Agra Fort, but more famously for the Taj Mahal, which sits in Agra on the banks of the Yamuna River. Northwest of Agra, about the same distance, 230 kilometers or 143 miles, another three to four hour train ride away, is Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, and it's a center for a huge market of shops and bazaars and trade. Then Jaipur is 260 kilometers from Delhi again, and these three cities form a rough triangle. So that's the Golden Triangle that people talk of when they're talking about India. Down southwest of Jaipur, the second city I told you about, nearly 400 kilometers or about 250 miles outside the Golden Triangle is the city of Udaipur. It's a seven to eight hour train ride, so that's an all day thing from Jaipur or an overnight thing from Delhi. Udaipur is a city built around a huge man-made lake called Lake Pichola. I say man-made and because I'm an American, that always serves up a certain connotation in my mind as to what time period we're talking about. But India is a way different place with a way different timeline, so you have to adjust a bit to how that changes things. This man-made lake was completed in 1362, nearly 700 years ago. So Lake Pichola has one island with a super fancy hotel on it. I mean, the hotel is the island out in the middle of the lake and it looks like a palace. This was featured prominently in the James Bond movie Octopussy, and restaurants around the lake continually remind you of that point by trying to beckon you into their nightly viewings of the film over a lake backdrop. But more on that later. I talked my new wife, misha, into my bright idea of landing in India with zero plants or reservations of any kind, because I'd read to be wary of online reservations and getting a bait and switch when you register for hotels that way. So I thought it would be better to just be dropped off somewhere central, make our way to lodging and then inspect it when we got there. Of course this was as my ideas can sometimes be terribly underthought through. I am far too quick to just think, ah, it'll probably work out somehow and not plan too much for the trip. We hopped off the plane late, I think nine or ten at night, hailed a cab and asked for a ride to the New Delhi train station. People sometimes use Delhi and New Delhi interchangeably, but there is a difference. New Delhi is one of the districts within the larger city of Delhi. While the larger city of Delhi has been in place since the sixth century BC, new Delhi was really overhauled, restructured and remade in 1911 by the British when they occupied India. A lot of the buildings and roads are made with European architecture influences. So it's a trip to go from Outer Delhi into New Delhi and then start seeing that British influence on things like Karnat Place, a large shopping area. New Delhi is where India's seat of government is and holds India's capital, but New Delhi is only 42.7 square kilometers compared to all of Delhi, which is over 46,000. So using Delhi and New Delhi interchangeably would be like using San Francisco interchangeably with Fisherman's Wharf. So it was the New Delhi train station where we had asked to be dropped off that night on our cab ride from the airport. I thought that seemed like a good place to orient ourselves, check maps and make a plan, so we hopped out and started plotting our moves right there in front of the station, which had the effect of inviting other people to try and insert themselves into that process. We got approached almost instantly by many eager gentlemen keen to show us to the spot we just must be looking for. We knew about these guys too. They get a cut from the hotel if they can bring in paying customers, so they will say anything they need to, not so much making sure it's all true. So we just started walking instead, which momentarily kept people from taking an interest in us. Stopping especially to consult a map or book, though, would get us swarmed with unhelpful helpers offering unhelpful help. We must have looked like bright, shiny idiots that night, a beacon calling out for anyone who wanted to test their luck on the two new kids. We hadn't really gotten a chance to get our india legs yet. Ultimately, we stayed at a nicer place than we had budgeted for because of this, willing to call off our search because it was late. The place was very nice, it would only be for the one night. We were exhausted and besides this was a honeymoon. Right. We had planned what cities we would go to, but not what order or how many days we'd stay in any of them. So in the calm of that nice first hotel room, we decided that maybe Delhi wasn't our speed yet and made plans to hop a train to Agra the next day. Agra is a smaller city I mean everything but Mumbai is a smaller city than Delhi, but Agra is also a slower city. This is the city with the Taj Mahal in it, and its economy largely revolves around the tourism that building attracts. That's what had brought us there. We had read that the best times to view the Taj were sunrise and sunset, with sunrise being the better of the two. The way tickets to the Taj work is you have to get in line to purchase tickets for the day separate lines for men and women get your ticket and then wait in another line for the security check. There are a lot of rules for what you can and can't bring into the Taj, and they have armed guards who seem pretty serious about you following them. No food or drink, but you could bring a small transparent water bottle, meaning like a small disposable plastic one. This is all the water you get for your time inside. You can bring your camera, but not a sketch pad or book or any writing utensils. I was making a sketchbook of my time in India, so I remember this rule well, because I had wanted to come in and sketch or draw the Taj Mahal for sure, but found out the night before that I couldn't bring in my drawing stuff. I didn't dig too hard, but it does make sense to be on multiple levels. Firstly, of course, keeping out food and drink helps keep food and drink spills from happening on a priceless monument, prevents destructive critters who might want to eat that food and drink from being attracted. And the no pens or pencils thing makes sense too, because while I wanted to bring it and draw a picture of the Taj, I can imagine the temptation for people who want to visit and then draw or write on the Taj. When I visited Stonehenge in England, we had to view it from a ways away because they used to let people just walk up and touch the stones, but too many were chipping off small pieces to take home with them. So they had to rope it off and keep people a certain distance away because if they hadn't, according to the Stonehenge people, it would have been completely gone. At the rate it was being chipped away before. So no one gets a chance to write on the Taj Mahal because we as a species completely can't control ourselves and weed to face and destroy pretty much anything and everything when given even the slightest chance. Yeah, that sounds about right. They are very serious about keeping the place nice and they post lists of the prohibited items all over. We saw ours in front of our hotel the night before, in time to leave anything on the list back in our room, and you'd be wise to take note of these signs because if you bring something on them with you, either it's not getting in or you're not getting in. Take it or no. Items on the website and sign include drones, any tobacco products, firearms, candy, any wire, bags of any kind, stickers of any kind, tripod or material for prayer. Also, no electronic devices apart from your camera or phone. Mobile phones are to be switched off or on silent mode when you're inside and they ask you not to make noise in or around the mausoleum. They even enforce a half kilometer radius from the Taj where you can't operate any polluting vehicles, so that less smog would be in the air to stain the monument. That might be the most impressive ban to me, because Agra may be comparatively small to Delhi, but it still holds 1.6 million people. I'll tell you, anywhere else we went in India, a zone like that seemed like a completely impossible thing to establish and maintain. Even so, the Taj Mahal doesn't avoid all pollution, and every so often it undergoes a process called Motiyane Mithi, a traditional mud pack, where mud is caked on by hand and then brushed off, and then the brilliant white shine returns until it's time for another rejuvenation later. Other items on the banned list might seem more curious at first books of any kind, tripods, phone chargers or extra batteries, prayer materials. But this ties into the second reason why I couldn't bring my sketchbook with me. That reason, I think, is a less obvious one, though. The Taj grounds are open from just before sun up to just after sun down, but your ticket is only good for entry once, no reentry. So if you wanted to come in and see the sunrise and sunset, you'd need to stay all day and not go out. Stay all day without food, with whatever small amount of water you got in with under the heat of the Indian sun, extended drawing projects, books to read, cell phone chargers or meals, would make it easier for people to stay longer, which means the site gets more crowded, less magical. Fewer people get to cycle in per day, they sell fewer tickets and make less money on the attraction as a whole. Speaking of tickets, they are different prices depending on your nationality. For Indians, the tickets are 50 rupees, about $1 when I was there, or 64 cents now Google tells me. For foreigners, the price is 1100 rupees, with an additional 200 rupees B if you want to go up and see the main mausoleum building, which you should definitely do. To go all that way and not see the main thing, I mean, just count the 200 rupees in the price of the ticket. So 1300 rupees total, or $16.74 today. Oh, and currently you have to buy all tickets online, since they don't have the in-person ticket window I talked about open because of COVID when Misha and I went in 2009,. It was 500 rupees for the ticket plus 250 for the mausoleum add-on, so 750 rupees total, which was about $15, and so not that different comparatively. It makes sense that the prices are so contrasted between Indian and non-Indian. It's an important Indian site and it really should be accessible to everyone there. Also, the level of wages and cost of living disparity between India and the countries people come to visit the Taj from really makes it necessary to set the separate prices. Since we wanted to see the sunrise, we requested a wake-up call for like 3am the next morning, a wake-up call which ended up being a person coming over from the hotel office and banging loudly on the door with both fists, and then we made our way in the dark over to the Taj gates for sunrise. You can see the top of the Taj Mahal from some places around it, but the grounds have a tall red sandstone wall around it, which makes going inside the only way to really see the front of the structure. After getting through security, there's a large lawn with a long, beautiful pool and some walkways between you and the main buildings. Those main buildings are up on a raised platform above ground level. This is the view of the Taj Mahal that probably 99% of the world is familiar, with the pool of water reflecting the structure. To make a second image of the Taj for the photo. We were among the first people being led in that day, so we made our way pretty directly to the main buildings. I remember it being quiet. India had been a place that, up to that point, had seemed extremely loud to me, with sounds always coming from every direction. But this was quiet, tranquil even, especially considering I was among a bunch of other tourists at the very moment. At the base of the platform there's a spot to put your shoes. It's optional, but I'm really glad I did it because, without my sandals on, I was able to stand foot to marble on one of the most amazing structures on Earth. I remember the ground being cool, not cold, but more than anything, I remember it being remarkably smooth under my bare feet. So the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, meaning it houses a tomb inside, and it was built between 1632 and 1653 by Emperor Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan was Emperor of the Mukhal Empire, which controlled a giant chunk of South Asia, and was, in many ways, india before India. He had the Taj commissioned as a mausoleum to house the tomb of his favorite wife, mubtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to her 14th child Wow, 14th. Okay, so there's the white main building that most people are familiar with, but the Taj Mahal complex is actually three buildings next to each other. On either side of the white marble Taj Mahal are giant red sandstone buildings that face inward towards the Taj. One is a mosque. That's clear. The other's purpose is a bit more ambiguous. Theories are that it could have been a guest house or used for something else. It could have even been built just to balance out the mosque and make the site more symmetrical. I read that theory too, but it seems the knowledge of why it was originally built has been lost over time. The mausoleum in the center what most people think of when they imagine the Taj Mahal is made of white marble with intricate carvings and inlaid precious stone. Most Mukhal buildings of that time were constructed of the red sandstone that made up the buildings to either side of the Taj and the nearby Agra Fort. But Shah Jahan, one of the Tajs, made out of white marble and he was sort of the first person who did that and it caused a wave of similar design in Mukhal architecture following the Taj. The building is 73 meters, or 240 feet tall at the tip, which includes the famous large onion-shaped bulb on top that accounts for 35 meters, or 115 feet, of that height. The precious stones are inlaid in Pietra Dura designs which look like vines and flowers on some of the marble surfaces, in beautiful circular and overlapping patterns. The building is also surrounded by four tall white minarets or columns, on the four corners of the platform. These minarets are 40 meters or 130 feet tall, and an interesting bit of trivia is that they aren't perfectly vertical. All four of them lean slightly away from the Taj Mahal's main structure so that in the event that they were to collapse or be toppled over something that happened from time to time, wikipedia says then they would fall away from that main building and be less likely to damage it. So the main reason why we were there at sunrise and why the guidebooks suggested it, was that during sunrise the Taj Mahal was supposed to change colors as you watch. Well, I mean, it doesn't actually change colors, but it appears to be different colors at different points in the sunrise. That was the claim anyhow, so we were there in part to test it out. By the time we reached the building, it was a bit lighter in the sky close to sunrise, and over the next several minutes we watched the sun come up and its effects on the Taj Mahal. There's a lot going on with this building, so the best place to see this color change effect is via the smooth, large bulb on top. Because of the dome's height, the colors sort of start there and then wash down over the rest of the building gradually. In the beginning the whole structure is a bluish hue in the early morning light with the cool night sky behind it. Then it almost imperceptibly shifts to a beautiful pink, briefly, first on the dome, then down over the whole thing, followed by a gorgeous yellow for a bit and then ultimately transitions to the brilliant white that it wears for the rest of the day. I've never seen the northern lights, but I imagine that's the same feeling of planning out something and then being in the right place at the right time to witness a phenomenon. I locked that moment into my memory, with the cool wind blowing and quiet conversations in many languages just barely audible in the background, watching the most amazing building I had ever seen in person magically change colors before my eyes. Actually, it was really the most stunning uh created thing I had ever seen, up to that point, or even after top number one thing made by humans that I've seen in this world. I think it was while watching the color change that the same thought popped into my head again. There shouldn't be pictures of this thing. They just flatten what is magnificent about it on so many levels. But of course there should be pictures. That would be nuts right. Sorry, no photos of this thing. It's too beautiful for photography. But that's again where my brain went, standing before it, sort of resentful even that I thought I knew what this thing looked like from photos and that no one had told me how different it really was in person. In the light of the full morning sun, and having successfully seen the thing we were there to see, I went in and explored the rest of the building more leisurely. It's huge, but also smaller than I had expected inside, or rather, I don't know what I thought would be inside the main building, but I guess I had imagined it to resemble a house in some way, being divided up into rooms. That's not at all what it was like. There's no electricity there. Maybe that's obvious, but it means that inside you can look at the mausoleum and touch blocks of marble that were intricately carved hundreds of years ago, but the light you're working with is whatever has made its way in from outside and then was not also being blocked out by other tourists. Inside the center of the structure are two ornate tombs one for Shah Jahan's wife, mumtaz Mahal, and the other for Shah Jahan himself, who died in 1658, only five years after the completion of the construction on the Tash. Well, actually, wikipedia says the main building mausoleum part was essentially done in 1643, but work on other phases continued for the next ten years or so, so he really died more like fifteen years after the Tash was built. These two ornate tombs, however, are both empty inside. The real tombs for Shah Jahan and his wife are on a lower level, closed off and arranged very specifically, with their heads turned to face Mecca. After exploring the main building, we explored the mosque and the maybe guest house maybe just built to be symmetrical house, on either side of the mausoleum. They were less crowded by far, but I just kept turning back and looking at the Tash from whatever other building we were at. I couldn't help it. Meanwhile I of course took tons of photos, some of the Tash, some of us in front of the Tash, the thing where you pretend you're touching the tip of the dome from the right angle or whatever. When push came to shove. There shouldn't be pictures thing didn't really slow me down any here. I don't think I remember hanging out on the grounds for a little while, soaking in the everything I could, until probably mid morning, when we decided it was about the right time to head out. After a short nap to recharge in the hotel, we were back out on the streets of Agra and I was still processing the Taj Mahal. We had come to Agra just to see it, and now that we had, we were planning on leaving Agra the following day, but I was still churning over the experience that had floored me that morning. The next day, we would be hopping a train to the third city on our journey, but that also meant one more sunrise here, and I was keen to try for a second bite at the apple with regards to seeing the Taj Mahal. The problem was, however, that this would be a Friday morning and the gates of the Taj are closed on Friday, so no tickets and no one inside the walls. But there were other options. There's an entire side industry based around every way possible to see the Taj without going through those gates, and Friday, of course, was the busiest day of the week. The monument is built on the western banks of the Yamuna River, a big waterway which runs through Delhi, through Agra behind the Taj and eventually into the Ganges River. So the next morning before sunrise we walked down to the water where you can hire a boat to take you out to see the Taj from the river. This is probably the second most famous view of the Taj, and if in pictures you are seeing it reflected over a wide stretch of water and not a narrow one, that's the Yamuna River and you're seeing it from the back angle. This is also possible because those tall red sandstone walls that go around the monument stop at the banks of the river and there is no wall around the backside. So it seems like this would be a good place to slip around the edge and maybe get in for free, but the multiple armed guards I saw patrolling these points might disagree. We found a boatsman with a large, flat wooden barge type thing, negotiated a price and then he used a large stick to propel us slowly out into the middle of the Yamuna waters, like you'd see them use on canals in Venice. The river was pretty calm, making it nice to lay back on the barge and check out the view we had just paid to see. Again, the sunrise was amazing, as sunrises usually are, but while the skies lit up in different colors from this orientation, they didn't have the same effect on the Taj Mahal. Well, I mean not on the side we could see, which was the backside. The early morning light changed colors again, but the Taj really didn't this time. I think I caught a little of it, off the sides of the bulbs and column maybe, but not really the same at all. The boatsman hadn't been as strict with his security procedure, so I had brought a backpack aboard and was using it as a pillow, and I had also brought my sketchbook with some pens and pencils. I sat up after we got a good enough view and started drawing. The boat was moving, constantly changing the angles of what I was seeing, so I had to work fast. I had to do a few quick sketches in pencil and then spent the rest of the ride trying to work on one ink. I enjoyed drawing, as I usually do, but I wish I could have had longer or been on a more stationary point to work from. Still, this was letting me draw the Taj Mahal, which 24 hours ago had not been possible, so I wasn't trying to look any gift horses in any mouths. We went back to the shore after a bit, got off the boat while the boatsmen negotiated with new riders, and walked back up to the city. For the rest of the morning, until our departure time. We had checked out of our hotel that morning, so today we would just have to power through until we boarded the train. We were joined for part of our walk by a skittering pack of monkeys loudly running away from some absent-minded tourists who had apparently left their bags of chips and snacks a little too un-carded. And that was it for Agra. We went to the station after lunch and hopped on the train to the next city on our itinerary, jaipur. We did a little exploring and shopping in Jaipur. We went to see a Bollywood movie from the balcony of the famous Raj Mandir theater there, but for me nothing there really compared to the Taj Mahal. I think the city itself was maybe full of more interesting points than Agra, but none of those points peaked as high as the Taj did in my book, if that makes sense. Oh for the movie. We just went to see whatever was playing, which ended up being the perfect one for us. The film is called Dubole Hadiba and it well, let's just say it isn't rated strongly on IMDb, but we quite liked it, maybe even for the same reason that IMDb viewers didn't. It was a simple story that was easy to understand even without subtitles, about a young woman who was amazing at cricket and wanted to play cricket for her team, but they wouldn't let her play because she's a woman. So she dresses up as a man to get on the team and meanwhile it starts crushing on the team captain. But oh no, he thinks she's a man and doesn't look at her the same way, or what confusion and hilarious mixups which ensue. Oh, the elaborate shenanigans she must concoct. And we're talking toodaloo dry by fruiting Mrs Doubt fire levels like a reverse ladybugs with Jonathan Brandis. It was about cricket, which I don't really understand, and in Hindi, which I understand even less, but the gender-swapping love story part was simple enough that we followed along just fine, with killer songs and elaborate dance numbers along the way, complete with long flowing strips of colorful cloth and ferris wheels just delightful. Buying tickets for the movie had been a little bit tricky, though. Many places in India and this was true for the tickets to get into the Taj Mahal as well. There are two lines to buy tickets one for men or gents, as they would label it, and one for women, or ladies, as it's labeled. Read Ladies and gents those were the two terms I saw everywhere. The gents line was way shorter so I just hopped into it first and it turns out that when I got to the front I only had access to tickets from the lower sections. It's a man, which meant I could buy tickets for certain areas of the theater but not the higher balconies. I left my line and tagged Misha in, so she got into the ladies line and was able to buy tickets in any section, including the balconies. The reason for this was so that single women going to the theater could sit in separate sections and not be harassed and creeped on by single men. So women had access to more parts of the theater and married couples wanted to sit in those nicer sections of the theater too. So the ladies line was long because it represented single women and the women half of many married couples looking to buy tickets in those nicer sections, like how we were. But we got balcony seats. Ate samosas loved the movie and just the whole experience was wonderful. Our next destination was Udaipur Remember the city built around that lake from Okta Pussy, and we had more adventures here. We did eventually cave to one of the constant barkers wanting us to come watch that James Bond movie over dinner, and whatever we were expecting wasn't what it was. We walked up some narrow steps to the roof of a building near the lake and sat at one of the tables. There were no other customers there. We were the first, but it wasn't that late anyway, so we were probably just early for dinner time. However, when we got midway through the meal and there was still no one else around, we asked about the James Bond movie. The thing we had come here primarily for. The guy on the street had literally said come upstairs and watch it while you eat. That one Up on the roof was a big rectangular cement block wall that had been painted white. Now, I've been to a lot of theaters and I know a screen setup when I see one, so I started looking around for a projector and, sure enough, the guy we had asked about the movie had disappeared and now reappeared with a long extension cord and a rolling cart. What the man was wheeling out with the extension cord wasn't a projector, though. It was a small television set on a cart we're talking the old kind with a big, thick cathode-ray tube. Below the TV sat an equally ancient-looking VCR. Do people know what a VCR is? It's a machine you hook up to a TV and you can play video from VHS tapes, which were the way to watch movies before streaming and DVDs. He wheeled the small 15-inch screen out and created just a hilarious image for me of watching the movie on that small dark box instead of the massive white wall behind it. So we finished our meal to octopus-y under the night sky. The food was good, even if the atmosphere was bizarrely crazy. But actually pretty much all the food in India was good. We got to have Indian food for every meal and it was amazing. I don't remember any of them being bad, but also I don't remember the food from really any of these meals specifically. It was just great Indian food throughout the whole trip that we had at like a zillion different places. We did deviate a couple of times, both during the Indian holiday of Diwali, which happened while we were there, and most, if not all, of the traditional restaurants around us closed shop as people traveled back home to observe and celebrate. First we went to see what McDonald's in India was like, and that was a trip. They don't serve beef, which may be obvious or may not be, but people who practice the Hindu religion don't eat beef, and that's a sizable percentage of the Indian population. Another sizable chunk of India is Muslim, and practicing Muslims don't eat pork, so there was none of that at McDonald's either, meaning no hamburgers or bacon, and that meant a ton of sandwich and menu options that I had never seen before. The McChicken seemed like the flagship item, with a McVeggie by its side because, again, a large number of people in India are vegetarian. So all the menu items like the Pizza, mcpuff, another thing I saw were coated with little green dots to signify they were vegetarian items, or red dots if they weren't. The other Western restaurant we tried one night during Diwali was Papa John's, and that was surreal as well. I mean, I think it was just pizza with Indian-ish toppings as options, but the fact that we found a Papa John's there in Kanaat Circle, new Delhi, of all places, was just wild to me. All the Indian restaurants we ate were chock full of delicious curries, but nothing that really stands out individually. It's just in my memory that all the food on our trip was really really good. In all, I loved my trip to India. I really want to go back and explore different parts, but I also don't think I would ever turn down a chance to see the Taj again. I'm obviously not the first one with this take on the Taj Mahal. It's not even all that unique. I mean, the building is so undeniably impressive that it drives the industry for an entire city. So impressive that it became a symbol for the country, really one of the biggest countries on earth. People have been inspired by the Taj since it was originally built, and I'm just one in a long, long line. Another person ahead of me in that line would be Bill Harlan. Back in the 1970s, bill Harlan, a wealthy land developer of turned vineyard owner, was so inspired by the Taj Mahal that he decided to build one of his very own. There are actually several replicas of the Taj Mahal in different parts of the world, enough of them to have their own Wikipedia page, where I would say some are definitely more notable than others. There are scaled and incomplete replicas in Bangladesh. Other replicas are Taj inspired buildings across India, including the BB Ka Makbara in Arungabad, built by Shah Jahan's son in an attempt to outdo his father's Taj Mahal Classic father son stuff. Luckily, my dad didn't build a Taj Mahal, so I didn't have to build one either, but Emperor Arangzeb wasn't quite so lucky. The page has small Taj replicas in theme parks in India and China, as well as a Lego version at Legoland Malaysia, which I looked up pictures for, and it's impressive. It looks like they made it to scale for the size of the Lego minifig people. Some mosques made the list. While not exact Taj replicas, you can see the clear and heavy inspiration on these partial copies. But one replica on the list stuck out to me the most, both because of its location and its description. The location was Sausalito, california, less than an hour from where I live in Oakland. The second interesting thing about this entry was the replica's title itself. It's listed as the Taj Mahal Houseboat, what Google calls it the Floating Taj Mahal. It's a houseboat that was built with distinct architecture inspired by the real Taj Mahal, but this is the replica that Bill Harlan decided to make 50 years ago. Okay, here we go. The kid from Kansas is about to talk houseboats. I never grew up around water or boats. Really, I didn't know much about houseboats certainly, so I ended up doing a little bit of research for this. Now, boat heads, don't worry, I'm one of you, now I got your back. So first of all, to be qualified as a houseboat it would need to have a motor and a means of navigation. The Taj and Sausalito doesn't have that. So technically it's a floating home, not a houseboat. But the terms have come to be used interchangeably a lot of the time, including during my research, and I may use them that way too. But to all you boat heads, just know that I know. So. Sausalito, california, has a sizable houseboat community. It dates back to just after World War II, when people moved up to the city just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and found calm waters there in Richardson Bay, without any regulations or rent to pay. There were soon all manner of homes making up this houseboat community pretty much anything that floated would do. Then, during the late 60s, a man named Forbes Kitto decided to do a bit more. He devised a waterproof concrete mixture and a way to mold it into deep concrete holes as foundations for floating homes. Now it might seem odd to start a floating house with a thick, heavy concrete base, but it's durable. You can pour them to have enough depth to displace enough water to float them, and the heavy weight at the bottom allows you to build more significant and elaborate structures on top without worrying about the whole thing wanting to tip or flip over. Forbes made several of these holes to varying specifications, but two are far and away the most famous. One is a floating home called Forbes Island, which bounced around a bunch but spent many years anchored off a pier in San Francisco as a private restaurant run by Kitto himself, and the other one is the floating Taj Mahal. Forbes originally built the 360-ton hole for a Prentice, cobb hail, who had an idea to make like a kitschy space to entertain people. That would be Taj Mahal themed, but sort of really over the top, like if it was an attraction in Disneyland. They drew up plans and constructed the hull in 1968 and started building a wooden structure to go inside it in 1969. But eventually Hale had to abandon the project. That's where Bill Harlan stepped in. As I said before, harlan made his money in real estate before turning to follow his passions and become a vineyard owner. He followed his passions with the floating taj plans too, overhauling the ideas that Hale had drafted and wanting to make the structure less about a stereotypical aesthetic and more authentic instead. So in the 70s, harlan went to India on a research trip for five to six months where he studied mohall and moorish architecture, as well as studying the large houseboat communities that exist on the Dal Lake, in Kashmir, india and in Aberdeen, hong Kong. Armed with new knowledge and experiences, when Harlan returned, he set out to build the shell of the floating taj and incorporate everything he had learned on his travels. The structure he built is pretty spectacular and different from any other houseboat in existence. Some changes from the design of the real Taj Mahal, like scrapping a large central dome for two smaller domes closer to the sides, which are made of fiberglass, not marble, of course, were just practical decisions based on physics and buoyancy. When finished, the floating taj was three levels with 12 rooms making up 4500 square feet. There's an elevator, a staircase, a wine cellar, a spa and jacuzzi downstairs in the master bathroom, and much more. He designed the spaces and shapes to mimic the architecture he had studied, and the brilliant white floating taj became a fixture in Richardson Bay. He outfitted the windows and door portals with filigreed openings, meaning those little scallop shapes along the top of the pointed doorways, there are pillars inside a back patio that opens out into the bay, and the wooden exterior has that recognizable Pietradura design on certain panels, though this one is carved in the wood and painted instead of being precious gems in late and marble In the 80s. When they reworked the zoning regulations to better define what did and did not constitute a houseboat, many of the odd structures people had been living on were cleared out. A marina with spaces for houseboats was established and the births quickly got filled up, meaning everyone else would have to find another spot to live. The Taj got one of the births at the marina and it has been there ever since. After completing its construction, harlan lived there with his wife and son, who grew up inside the home, for 25 years. They sold it in 2007 to John and Rhonda Luongo, who updated and fixed up a lot of the structure and, curiously to me, painted the white houseboat a blue-green tinted top because of its lack of high contrast with the shades of the water. As a person who has tried to not stick out before in a place where I clearly stick out, no matter what, this seems like an odd choice to me. I mean, looking at pictures of the floating Taj. It's clear that it's going to totally stick out, no matter what color you paint it. The floating Taj has been sold a few more times since operating for a bit as a bed and breakfast and the last several years as a private residence. You can get glimpses of the spaces and the views inside from an Instagram account run by the current owners, which has the handle of at Taj Mahal Sausalito official, which will be in the show notes, and you can see pretty cool views of the floating Taj from these pictures. But my whole thing this episode was that pictures don't always tell the full story and this Taj replica is close enough. I could go there myself and see how good a job these pictures do at giving a sense of this Taj Mahal replica and how good the replica does at giving a sense of the real Taj Mahal in India. So one morning I packed up my recorder before dawn and headed out on a little quest. So I'm driving out to the houseboat and the plan is to check it out during the sunrise and see if it changes like the real Taj Mahal does. Spoiler alert, I don't expect it to, but let's see the sunrise anyway. The houseboat is moored in a marina, but just like a house on a public street, you can walk up to check it out. Just be respectful about it. Okay, so I've arrived in Sausalito. It's 5.40 in the morning. It's getting to be a little light out. I'm making my way to the dock to see this before the sun gets all the way up. I see it down at the end of the dock. The floating Taj is in silhouette, mostly gray. I can make out the features on it. It's not that dark, so the angle I'm at, it's like the marina is like a, it looks like a parking lot for boats, and so there are two spots here that are empty and I'm standing on the wooden walk out between them, which I can definitely feel the water waves and the movement up and down on, but I also feel like I'm the least in anyone's way because I'm between two empty spots. The sky is getting brighter. The floating Taj still seems the same color to me. Oh, my goodness, hello, I didn't realize. Right next to me, on the other pier, are a couple of seals. Hi guys, he's just up here on top, kind of like 10 feet away from me. Hi, there's one guy and then there's another one back there, I think Yep, on the edge. Hi Whoa. I have never seen a seal this close. He looks like a little dog. That's so crazy to me. So then I was sitting and watching the sunrise with my new friend. Google said sunrise would be at 555 and we're at 549 now. The skies are definitely lighter, but I don't see any direct sun yet. Hi, guy, are you here waiting for the sun too? Oh, he's falling asleep. Are you napping? He's falling asleep like my cat does in the window. I also love that the seal is here because it gives me sort of a plausible reason why I would just be sitting here in the same spot. That's not. I'm watching your house as it gets lighter, it feels. Unless you've heard the whole story, that feels very awkward to try to present as my reason for why I'm doing this. But the seal here gives me cover because I can be watching this little guy and watch him. I did. I cut the tape way down to make you not have to listen to the sunrise in real time, but also to remove about a million cutesy noises I made to the seal. It's 559, so we have officially passed sunrise time. The sky is, I mean, I don't see a sun in the air but the sky is reasonably light. I see clouds and stuff, a little bit of orange coming up over the pink's kind of gone. I'm seeing also now that it's lighter. The designs here that I thought were just cut out designs are really kind of like the Tosh. They look like they're inlaid with if not jewels, probably not jewels. They're probably inlaid with paint to make them the different colors. It's like a flower design with purple flowers and green leaves and stems. I bet those are just painted in there. Yeah, of course this was before I had learned the term Pietro Dura, but that's exactly what I'm trying to describe there. The color has not changed. On this, I think it's, first of all, it's not made of the same material at all and secondly, it's not really the same shade. It's a darker off-white and since it's painted and not the structure itself, it's going to absorb light in a different way than marble would. It's beautiful in the sunrise, though I guess sunrises are beautiful. I can see little bits of light through the paneling on the side. The edge of the sun is really picking up right next to the floating top and this is the first time it's hitting direct, direct sunlight and the bulb's still seeing to be the same off-white sort of color. The sun is now fully above the edge. I see the full circular shape at 614. Between this whole process, the floating tach just stayed the same color as my chunky boy over here done. It was a lot different between this floating tach Baha on the real one, of course, and seeing it didn't really give me any deja vu of India or anything. But I wasn't just here to watch the sunrise, I was also here to do one thing I could never do at the real tach. The sun is on. The floating tach is the same color and I'm going to go back to the car and get my painting stuff. Yeah, alright, be right back, chunky boy. Okay. Well, that was cool. My first sunrise in a while and I get to do it for this. I'm not bad. Got up at 4.30 on a Sunday when I didn't have to, but I'm not bad. So I loaded up my painting kit in the car and I had to switch to recording with my phone because I discovered my SD card was about to be full. So if you detected difference in the audio from before, that's why. And I painted for about two hours, which I've condensed down here to about 10 minutes. I'm walking back down, the tach appears to be the same color. I'm really curious if my chunky boy is still there. I hope he is. Hey, my chunky boy is still there. Hi, chonky. Now I'm going to sit on my jacket right across from this chunky boy. This is a much better angle to paint from. I'll spend all day with this seal, alright. So we're going to do some drawing and painting. Let's get out our drawing and painting stuff. Drawing and drawing is a pretty quiet deal. I'll try and talk some, but this might be like video games, where I'm better at doing than I am at doing and talking. Whoa, he just went right in. Where'd he go? My chunky boy is gone. He just up and went right in. I didn't even have a chance to take a picture. My phone is sitting by lap and I couldn't get that guy. But he is gone. Wow, I hope I got the sound of that. Alright. So I have a sketchbook here. I'm going to do a few thumbnails, get my bearings on the drawing before I start on the real thing. Everything is floating. Getting a solid perspective point is a little impossible, but let's see what it's up to. Everything is floating. Everything is floating. Where do I want that dome? Maybe I start with a place in the dome in my composition. Put everything else around and the right spots, right portion. Oh, there's a bicycle. I make that noise not because I hate bicycles, but everyone sees bicycles all the time. You kind of know in your head instinctively what a bicycle looks like or doesn't look like. So when you try and paint one or draw one and it's off, it really sticks out. Make some note of some other details to be sure to include on my painting. Okay, do some all-painting. Now I move on to my watercolor paper. Brushes, paints and water that's all I need. I miss my chunky boy. The next step is drawing it on the watercolor paper. This is one of the more crucial parts of the painting to make sure that all my proportions and shapes are the right sizes. Make sure this is riveting podcasting I'm listening to someone draw a watercolor. But I do enjoy doing this. It clears my head, kind of settles me down. Okay, maybe I start the painting here. I am painting Now. Talking about watercolor painting while you're, watercolor painting could be the most boring thing I've attempted, but to me, painting is a process where you're finding it the entire time. It's a non-stop discovery process. There's no point in a painting where I just go okay, well, this is autopilot for the rest, because as soon as I do that, or as soon as I've done that in the past, that's when it gets out of control. So what I want to do first is I want to lay in some sky. Here I see some sort of orangeish coming up on below. Now I don't want to just put yellow in with the blue sky, because that's going to give me a green. That I'm not looking for. What I am looking for is kind of this hazy orange and I'm letting the blue dry. At the runtime, the float entange itself. I think I have seen it as kind of a pale green. Let's put a little pale green in with that brown. So if I can just hold that kind of a wash, that'll keep the green from getting too strong and it'll give it sort of a tone over. Okay, let's move it through Like that. It's giving me the green I'm looking for. Something about watercolor painting is it attacks my perfectionism I have, especially when I was drawing with pencil on paper. I would have a real problem making myself latch onto how I wanted it to be exactly and giving no room for any deviation. And if I did deviate, accidentally or for whatever reason, I was completely beside myself and often just threw the thing away. So it's a conscious exercise for me as an adult to learn to let go and learn to live with mistakes. I like this green. I think I might need more of it later. I didn't always enjoy watercolor. I think there was a time when I associated it with elementary school, you know, because that's you know you get this little like pan of watercolors when you're a kid with like six or seven or eight, and that's what you consider watercolor this very pale, difficult to work with but easy to clean paints. I think a lot of people that's there where they stay with the idea of watercolor. They don't realize that oh yeah, it was garbage. Because it wasn't. Not because it was watercolor. It was. It was stuff built for little kids to handle, so it's going to be comparatively low quality and easy to clean. That makes a lot of sense. This is a complicated structure. Even though I'm sort of like, yeah, it's not the real touch, this is a complicated structure to paint. One of the other things about watercolors is that they dry lighter than they go on. So sometimes when you think you've done something terrible, you look back a few minutes later you know like it's not so bad, actually, that's fine, it's workable, it's very peaceful, you know it's a. For me anyway, it's meditative quiet. I think it's getting to a point where the details I'm seeing now that I feel like I was like oh, I missed that. It's because the light is getting more intense so I'm able to see more details. It's not that I missed it earlier, it's that I weren't visible when I was working that part of the painting before. And I think we're getting to the part where the light is changing the building so much that I should probably finish up and call it and I dry enough to put some dark darks up front. And then it is. Let's see what it does. I've managed to not drop anything in the water yet, which is good. Just as I say that I drop a piece of, it's not super important, but just as I said that I dropped a piece of this brush the thing that holds it and keeps it pointy or protected inside the tube I dropped that and it went right into the water and sank right down. That's gone, all right. I think my painting is dry now so I can pack it up. That was pretty fun. I should, actually I should come out. I should do this more of weekend, get up early and sort of come out and paint. That is a spectacular way to spend the morning for me. Final view of the floating Taj Mahal here in the sunlight the cool building. Even though it's not as cool as the regular Taj Mahal, that is still a really cool building. It takes lots of trial, and error after error after error, to paint a good likeness of something. Part of the challenge is getting the colors, perspective and proportions right, of course, but it's also to capture the essence of the thing and to have that come through the painting in some way as well. Photographs depict perspective and proportions pretty perfectly, but at least with the Van Gogh painting and with the Taj Mahal they don't really do the part about capturing the essence well, in the end, this replica of the Taj Mahal, the floating Taj Mahal houseboat, wasn't at all like seeing the real Taj. It didn't have the same feeling, the same energy that made the real Taj so astounding. So in that sense, as a replica it doesn't really compare to seeing the real thing. But that's kind of where the story started too. The floating Taj wasn't a good representation of the real building, but none of the hundreds of photos I'd seen if it were either. The Taj Mahal is one of a kind, it's one of the wonders of the world. For a reason, a photograph may feel like it does the job and it does to an extent, but in reality the original building is like some paintings, like some places in nature, one of those things that can be copied but never quite perfectly, things that defy depiction, that resist replication. Strangely, the floating Taj did remind me of my time with the real one, as did all the honeymoon pictures from the Taj Mahal that I went back through for this piece. And I think the difference is having already had the experience in person before. When you haven't seen the genuine artifact, I do think a photo just leaves out so much. But if it's already something you've experienced, then a picture or replica, while not showing others what the real thing is like, can trigger in you memories of that real thing and let you swim around a bit in the feelings and thoughts you had at the time. Does that make sense? Pictures of a thing before seeing it, I think, sometimes blunt that experience or are a poor replica of it. But pictures of one of these things that you've seen in reality can bring back the vivid memories of it and revitalize those experiences in your mind. Now I'm not urging everyone to just book passage to India and go see the Taj Mahal for themselves, far from it. There need to be that one at all. These spots are around, big ones, small ones, just things you encounter that you know no picture could do justice, things that you realize in the moment. You have to be there to really appreciate. I think most people come up on a few over the course of a life and a few people are lucky enough to have several of these More if you go out chasing them. But I think everybody gets the chance to see some, as long as your eyes are open and you're open to looking for them. Then after, you can revisit those memories from time to time, wipe the dust off the surfaces and clean the cobwebs out of the corners, keep the colors from fading. I mean, that's a little bit of what I do here with this whole podcast Attempt to sort of describe and revisit things from my past that I don't want to lose, while I try to connect them with something in the present. The gift I hadn't expected this episode to give me was the quiet morning of painting and watching the sunrise by myself Well, along with my new Chunky Boy seal friend, of course. I think that may have been the first sunrise I've seen since that morning in India. It seems crazy, but I had really forgotten how magnificent of a sight it can be. And with that sunrise on, the Taj Mahal becomes the next entry into the Perfectoria, the index of perfect things. You can visit it at the new online home for the Perfect Show, perfectshowpodcastcom. A direct link to the Perfectorium is at PerfectShowPodcastcom slash Perfectorium, which is spelled P-E-R-F-E-C-T-O-R-I-U-M. Special thanks to Trappy808, who did most of the music I used in this episode. You can find the info for all the other artists and music credits for everybody in the show notes and on this episode's webpage. You'll also find some pictures there I took of the Taj and other things in India that I talked about here. There will be a scan of the painting I made so you can check that out, along with photos I took of the floating Taj, the Chunky Boy and a little video that shows off both of them a little bit. Contact the show through PerfectShowShowcom. Contact on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name PerfectShowShow and our call-in number is 616PerfectZ, that's 616-737-3329. This episode was recorded and mixed in South Lake Tahoe, california, while my wife and kid are out at a pool. They're great outside. I, however, have the complexion of someone who should spend the sunniest parts of the day inside making a podcast, and so I have Subscribe. If you'd like to get every episode, and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the PerfectShow, a perfect rating or review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show. And also, can I ask a small favor? If you're liking these, could you share it in some way? I haven't figured out any sort of marketing strategy for this, apart from making the best episodes I can, but if you can tell someone else who you think might enjoy what I'm doing here, that's really the way it can grow. And remember I didn't really talk about this enough, but if you love Indian food, like I do, then India is actually a fantastic place to get it Like all over at tons of places, just some really good meals. So yeah, if Indian food is your jam, then that's really one of the best spots for it, india, anyway, until next time I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the PerfectShow.

This episode is a special one. Scot is going to dive into the story of Morena, the place The Perfect Show's studio is named after, and recounts the story of one of the most amazing places he ever found in Japan.

The story wanders to Indian restaurants, Hokkaido festival life, and Dr. Pepper.

This one's been on the slate since the idea of this podcast first happened, and I'm excited to finally share it with you now.

Bossa Nova Chirstmas Songs:

Marcela Mangabeira - All I Want For Christmas is You

https://youtu.be/ne2r3378-ZU

Monique Kessous - Last Christmas

https://youtu.be/Tp_yks2Fl7E

Tahta Menezes - Happy Christmas (War is Over)

https://youtu.be/US-9cddsu2Y

Here are links to Kisha Solomon's two-part essay "Black in Spain: Beauty Standards and Exoticisms"

Part 1: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/black-in-spain-an-exotic-beauty

Part 2: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/morena-negra-whats-in-a-name

NEW:The Perfect Show has a new website! Now find us at www.perfectshowpodcast.com and put images to any audio you are wondering about.

Special thanks for the cover song:

Romaana Shakir - romaanashakir: https://www.fiverr.com/romaanashakir

Instrumental by Chevy71Corvette on Youtube - https://youtu.be/8zyhnWDhcrM

And for the Japanese segment:

Japanese Voice Over - araccyn: https://www.fiverr.com/araccyan

English Translation - nwcoast90: https://www.fiverr.com/nwcoast90

Original Piano Composition - steveaik7: https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7

Music from this episode by:

mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville

nikas_music - https://www.fiverr.com/nikas_music

brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

adam_mejghi - https://www.fiverr.com/adam_mejghi

Desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee

Lofi_rob - https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:25

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little negative perfection. Hey there, this one is a really special topic to me. You may hear me say at the end of most of these episodes that they're recorded at Morena Studios, which is just a name I've given to my little setup here. But for this one, I want to tell you how I picked that name and where it came from. Today, I'd like to tell you the story of Morena. I think it's pretty natural to get homesick when you're living in another country for an extended period of time. Moving within the same country to a place with a different enough feel or culture can do it too. The thing at the heart of that homesick feeling is separation from an environment that you know and immersion in an unfamiliar one. When I left Kansas for Japan, I was pretty ready to go. I was ready to see the world and live on the other side of it and discover who I was going to become. But even if someone is completely ready for that change. I don't think there's any way of avoiding missing what you leave behind. People for sure. That's the big one for most of us, or I should say people, pets, loved ones let's just extend it to loved ones but also haunts, familiar environments, favorite foods and drinks, or even just commonly available foods that you may take for granted until you look around and they're suddenly not available anymore. One that got me in Kyushu was we found a vending machine out in Fukuoka City, one lone vending machine that, along with the more standard choices you would find in Japanese vending machines like Coke or Pepsi, pokari, sweat and energy drinks, this one had Dr Pepper as an option. This one vending machine was the only place I had seen Dr Pepper in over a year. Now. Dr Pepper is not a beverage I drink. I've had maybe three in the last ten years, but seeing Dr Pepper in Japan just triggered something and my roommate and I got like six cans each. We took them back to our apartment to save her a little taste of home over the next few days or however long. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Dr Pepper as much as those. So I'd have bouts of homesickness like that here and there, usually prompted by seeing something American in Japan or hearing about something happening back in America, where I wasn't. But mostly I was on board for Japan and everything that meant. So those times were few and far between the English-speaking foreigners in the Japanese places I lived tended to know each other. When I lived in a big city there was an informal social and support network of other foreigners. We would get together regularly and travel in many of the same circles. At these get-togethers we would trade tips or stories and reminisce about the things we missed from our various homes. Honestly, just having conversations at natural speed in English was a pretty significant comfort all on its own. It lets you sort of turn off the non-stop translation machine that's usually running while you live there. Also, as just a person who loves other countries and cultures, it was a real chance to overload on them. In my daily actions I would be immersed in a foreign culture, but it was always Japan. At these get-togethers I was mingling with and getting to know people from Canada, england, ireland, scotland, south Africa, australia, new Zealand, singapore, mexico, indonesia, malaysia. I met someone from the Isle of man once. I mean just so many places. Socializing in Hokkaido was very much the same but, like with everything in Hokkaido, it was really the scale that was different. The foreigners there, like everything on that island, were a little more spread out from each other than in Kyushu. For my first Hokkaido town, I would need to drive a half hour or so to reach the next nearest English speakers and another half hour to meet the next closest. Those of us in the Northern region became a close-knit group despite that distance. We had an emailless server that operated like a text thread would now, and we would meet up fairly frequently to hang out or do things. Usually that meant heading to a bigger city nearby, which, where we were, meant Nairo. Nairo is a medium-sized city for Hokkaido, small for the rest of Japan but positively metropolitan compared to Nakatombezu, the tiny village where I was living. Now let me take a left turn at this point in the show and a moment to explain my relationship with Indian food. It'll tie back in, trust me, but I never had Mexican food in Kansas. The first burrito I ever ate was in Japan, if that gives you a sense of how adventurous of an eater I was as a child and I had absolutely no awareness of Indian food. My first time having Indian was also in Japan where I discovered that I absolutely loved it, as did many others in my circle, and it became sort of a linchpin. My friends and I would plan around if we knew we were headed somewhere large enough to have an Indian restaurant. There were a bunch in Kyushu and they weren't terribly hard to find, but I was in a really urban setting there and remember everything in Hokkaido is more spread out, which is especially true for non-Japanese restaurants. The easiest place to find Indian food was Sapporo, hokkaido's capital city and the largest one on the island. Sapporo has a population of nearly 2 million people and that meant they had a number of curry places we would hit up trying anywhere we could find that served Indian or Nepalese curry and revisiting our favorites any time. We came back. A few hours north of Sapporo stands the city of Asahikawa. It is the second largest city in Hokkaido with a population of around 350,000. So the second largest city in Hokkaido only has 17% of the population of the largest city. Just to give you an idea again of the size, drop off of cities and how the scale of things is just different up there. Sliding down the list of Hokkaido cities, you reach Naioro at number 24, with a population of about 30,000. This was the big city for my northern friends and me, about a 45 minute to an hour drive away on Waini Mountain Roads from where I lived. Naioro had wider food selection than where most of my friends and I lived, and so I'd go to the Saijo there for grocery shopping, and we do celebration dinners at the restaurants there when there was an occasion, and it was also the nearest spot to quench any fast food cravings that cropped up via the Moss Burger Drive-Thru, which is still there across the street from the Yamada Denki electronic store where I bought so many things, and it looks like there's even a McDonald's in Naioro now too, which didn't used to be the case. So, uh, good job Naioro. I guess One thing Naioro lacked, though, was an Indian food spot. We would recheck from time to time Google Naioro and Indodiyo-Di from our K-Ti phones, ask Japanese friends who lived in Naioro and just check with each other regularly to keep ourselves up to date with the latest version of the FFDB, the foreign food database. My wife and I, back when we were just dating, bonded in part over our love of Indian food. We had it at our wedding, we went to India for our honeymoon. But before any of that we would roam around Hokkaido together looking for new Indian restaurants to try, especially if a work function or teacher meeting had us going to a new city that we hadn't searched before. When I was traveling down to one of these meetings, I got a text from my Australian friend, sam, who had left his town earlier. We all were usually given like time off and a little travel money for these things and then just expected to make our way to the hotel or wherever on our own and show up by whatever time. But Sam texted that he had heard of an Indian restaurant called Morena, not Naioro, but in Shimokawa, a nearby town with a population just under 4,000. I feel like Sam hadn't even been there himself yet. He was just updating the FFDB with a new entry. So Naioro was between the towns where my girlfriend Misha and I lived. If we were headed somewhere across Hokkaido, like to this teacher meeting and it made sense in any way we would often meet up there, leave one car at the Naioro train station and then drive together the rest of the way. This time we would do that same thing, but with an extra stop plotted at Morena. Shimokawa is about a 15 minute drive from Naioro, and Morena's address wasn't in the main part of Shimokawa either. It was set sort of off to the side, over by some farmland and a river. This was a restaurant at the edge of a small town, which was on the edge of a small mountain city, quietly hidden in the far north of Japan. Shimokawa, the town we were on the edge of, had an attraction that they were known for. Every winter, shimokawa's thing as a town was the Ice Candle Festival, and they would make ice lanterns by freezing water in a container made to produce these thick walled ice cylinders and then put them around candles. The ice cylinders blocked the wind from blowing out the candles, and the flames light up the ice like lanterns. Elaborate rows of these ice candles are placed in designs, in long walls and structures at night, and people come to visit and enjoy the beautiful combination of fire and ice. Town attractions are nothing unique to Shimokawa, though. In Japan, most every city in town has its own attractions that they base festivals or parade around at specific times of the year. The biggest festival in Hokkaido and one of the biggest in Japan is the Yukimatsuri, the Sapporo Snow Festival. This is where, every year, snow, which is in abundance in Hokkaido. One year my city got 40 meters of snowfall over the winter. That's a little over 131 feet of snow Every day. It would be common to have to remove like between 1 to 2 feet of snow from my car and driveway before I could go to work in the morning, pretty much every single day, which is how you eventually get to 131 feet. Sapporo also got a ton of snow, and then they would import extra snow from all the other towns, as those towns were plowing roads and clearing public spaces. So these giant truckloads of snow being taken to Sapporo to dispose of were then dumped in giant piles on empty lots and parks that aren't used during the winter. Then, for weeks, teams of sculptors from different places and organizations start carving these giant snow mountains into unbelievable designs Huge portraits or dramatic scenes, cartoon characters, movie stars, backgrounds everything built entirely out of snow and ice. It's like a huge parade where everyone spends an unbelievable amount of time making floats with incredible detail, but instead of the parade moving past you, they stay put and you go around the city visiting them instead. Prizes are awarded to the best sculptors in a bunch of categories, and the festival brings in an additional 2 million people to Sapporo over the week that it runs. Flights and hotels are crazy booked up several months or even a year in advance and I was only able to go every year because, a I lived on Hokkaido and could just drive there and, b because we had good friends in Sapporo who let us crash on their floor a few times. But back to Shimokawa the Ice Candle Festival gave their town personality and while the various festivals and town events all have their own individuality, they're also very Japanese. Baked into the celebration of the small area was also a celebration of Japan, which makes sense. We were in Japan, surrounded by Japan, living and breathing Japan, and the amount of Japan everywhere could sometimes get to you or me anyway A slow build that you sometimes don't even notice until there's some real pressure behind it. We would use non-Japanese restaurants as little pressure release valves and somewhat alleviate or beat back those homesick Though maybe a better term would be away full feelings for the time being, until the next, little venting was needed. Not that they all reminded me of home, because Mexican or Indian, nepalese or Indonesian restaurants certainly didn't remind me of the home I had left, but it was more about periods of relief from all the there that was there. So that was the state we were in when we went searching for this new Indian restaurant working just outside of Nairo that we had somehow missed over the past year of scouring that area pretty hard. I should also say I was in the state of young love. That's not something you can always replicate. I mean, one of the things that makes it so special is the unplanned nature and irrational priorities it puts in your life for a time. But looking back on this time, that was definitely a factor helping color everything I was experiencing, making the world feel more colorful, electric and alive. So then, after a bit of driving on the small highway, we came to a gravel road. There was a hand painted wooden sign that just said Cafe Morena and an arrow up the gravel drive. We turned in and pulled up. It was just before dark when we arrived. It wasn't late, but being that far north, in the winter the sun sets pretty early. The gravel road gave way to a small shoveled parking area in front of a modest white two story house with a green door and a garage next to it. We got out of the car and were genuinely unsure where to go. There were no lights on in the garage. There looked to be some on in the house, but the door was closed and the only sign had been back at that road. So as we opened the door to tentatively enter the house, I remember feeling like maybe we were just walking into some random Japanese person's home. And if that were the case, well, the amount of surprise I would feel would pale in comparison to how much surprise I would cause by being a large blonde American just standing there inside. But my fears proved to be unnecessary, as the door led to a short hallway and then opened up into a larger, warmly lit room with tables and chairs. We had found Morena. Now I really want to take this entrance slowly, because a lot happened all at once. As soon as we opened the door, my senses were bombarded with change. So let's go through them one by one. First, let's talk sound. When we entered, we were hit with the warm sounds of Bossa Nova Christmas music. This was an album of Christmas songs in English sung by non-native English speakers over smooth Bossa Nova beats, giving us an immediate sense of things that were both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. At full capacity, the space would probably seat 18-20 people, and that would indeed feel very full. It looked to me like a place that had fallen directly out of a Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movie. Actually, that was the case for the outside too, with a thick blanket of quiet snow covering the ground and the house and smoke slowly meandering up from the chimney Touch. The other warmth that immediately hit us was the literal warmth of the inside itself. When opening the door, our bare faces were immersed in a wall of heat from a wood-burning stove. Hokkaido homes and apartments are usually heated with tonyu or kerosene delivered in these large, elevated tanks outside your house by a tanker truck once a year or more, depending on how fast you went through it. Kerosene heaters give off great heat, but there's something different about the heat from a wood-burning stove. It has a different feel, a different quality. It gives a sense that you are actually in a warm space instead of how somewhere heated by kerosene can feel to me like a cold space that's just been painted warm for the time being. Coming inside from outside in Hokkaido makes that temperature change even more pronounced. You're naturally bundled up for outside and encountering this new warmth, you'll find that removing layers quickly moves up your list of priorities, so that covers sound, sight and touch. There wouldn't be anything to taste until later, but what we smelled may have been the biggest shock of all. While we were processing the unfamiliar music, with the familiar feeling of needing to get our coats and hats off quickly, the most familiar of unfamiliar smells hit us Freshly Baking Pumpkin Pie. For non-piers, I apologize, but I'm going to go off here for a minute. Walking in on the smell of freshly baking pie is a needle scratch record. Stop the phone. Sort of moment. Even in America, apple, cherry, rhubarb, whatever, it's a gauntlet being thrown, one that says, yeah, everything you smell right now is about to happen. You'll be tasting these smells soon. To me, pumpkin pie smell says all that and in addition it just gives an overall sense that it's food time, because pumpkin pie only comes out around big eating holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. It says a feast is about to be had and is letting you know to get ready. This mythical dish, pumpkin pie, had a starring role in my presentations for classes explaining to Japanese kids about American holidays and cultural traditions. It's one of the things I had really grown to miss, without even knowing I was missing it my one trip back to the US at that point had been in the summer, when there's no pumpkin pie around. So I'm clocking probably three years since the last time that smell hit my nostrils at this point. So we stepped in and I was just absolutely bewildered by what I was smelling. My brain was trying to balance an equation with the factors American pumpkin pie, indian restaurant and Japanese house, but just coming up with question marks. I mean, pumpkin pie can be a pretty powerful smell on its own when you're already expecting it. But it's hard to describe how absolutely off guard it caught me when an amazing pumpkin pie smell just hit my nostrils out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere Japan. There's no real way to adequately describe it. So I was processing all this as we made our way into the cozy space, put our coats onto the backs of two chairs and sat down at the nearest table, unsure what we were in store for. The only person there was a Japanese woman in the kitchen, presumably the one responsible for the delicious pie smells. She came out a minute later and brought over some water and a boat import that had a bunch of papers tacked to it in different places. The woman introduced herself as Fumiko and she set the board on a third chair at the table and then went back to the kitchen. The slips of paper on the bulletin board listed the items you could order at that time and this was how Marina did their menu. There was no standard printed menu. I would learn that it changed regularly as different ingredients became available or got used up and as they tried out new dishes or retired old ones. The menu had pretty short titles of the dishes without descriptions some items we recognized, like curry and rice, and some that we didn't like gado gado salad. We started discussing what combination of dishes we would share, and that's when a second figure, who we had missed earlier, appeared. He waltzed in, eyed the chair next to us, came over and sat down without saying a word. Then he looked at us with eyes that said so what exactly do you think you're doing in my restaurant? And we looked back at him thinking Well, this is an extremely forward cat. We picked a few dishes and then called out to Fumiko who came to take our order. While we were ordering, fumiko surprised us by having really good English. We ordered a bunch. We just really wanted to try everything we could. So Fumiko whisked back into the kitchen to get things started and me and I chatted in the atmosphere. The restaurant was so small we could just speak a little louder and talk with Fumiko while she was in the kitchen. So we did, because we had so many questions. Turns out she learned English while traveling the world with her husband, which is how they both learned Indian cooking too. When the food came, we were treated to yet more delights, with all the smells around us. The food was exquisitely good. The hot chai tea was amazing. As for the curry, it wasn't purely Indian in the way it looked and tasted and it certainly wasn't Japanese. It was, like most things I would find at Marina, unique to the place itself. It was a wonderfully flavorful curry with beautiful yellow saffron rice and a recipe only to be found here. While we were sitting there, an older man with a neatly trimmed mustache and floppy hat walked in from outside. He changed from snow boots to house shoes, like Mr Rogers, came into the main space and was greeted warmly by Fumiko. This was Fumiko's husband. Hide Hidehiko and Fumiko Kuriyua were the owners, the chefs, the everything behind Marina. We stayed for hours. They spoke excellent English as well, so we would chat some in English, some in Japanese and a mishmash. If there was something one of us couldn't find the right word for, it felt like home, in part because it was Fumiko and Hide's home. Their living quarters were on the second floor and they had made the first floor into the restaurant. There was a small shelf too, with rows of photo albums, a few books and some more books at the top on display. We thumbed through the photo albums as we sat and talked and drank chai tea. They showed us photos from their trips backpacking across Afghanistan and Europe, an album of pictures from traveling around Okinawa in a camper truck named Wonderbird that they had built themselves. What I saw was evidence of what looked like not just one life the two of them had lived, or even two, but several. Hideh pulled out a guitar at one point and treated us to some styles of music he had picked up as well on his travels. He had learned this beautiful Spanish style of guitar playing. At a later visit I was able to record a little bit. So here's a taste of Hide playing a little guitar for us in a video I cherish very much. That's my friend Kevin who is with us, and that's Hide. Fumiko and Hide were unlike any Japanese people we had ever met. They seemed to belong to the whole world and could never be limited to somewhere so small as just Shimokawa, hokkaido or even Japan. The orange striped cat was later introduced to us as Achan, short for Anesto, which was short for Anesto Hemingway, or the Japanese pronunciation for Ernest Hemingway. He was an incredibly chill cat and loved sitting with guests and having his chin scratched. Hide and Fumiko were just cool. They looked cool, they dressed cool, they talked cool, they named their pets cool names, they made cool food and had cool lives. We found out that in the summer they would also do beekeeping with a few hives nearby, grow their own vegetables and spices in the yard beside the house, which was covered in a thick blanket of snow on this first visit. But they'd trade those with other local growers, sell a few and mostly use them in their dishes, which were constantly changing. That's why the menu was scraps of paper pinned to a bulletin board. A printed menu would have been outdated almost as soon as seeing dried. At some point we asked about the pumpkin pie and Fumiko seemed surprised, since I don't think it was on the menu yet, but then again it didn't really need to be. That smell was like a neon sign all by itself. We had some pie with homemade whipped cream and it was just absolutely perfect. When it came time to pay, fumiko rang us up for some stuff, said other stuff that we had eaten was her trying out recipes like? She said that she was still experimenting with the pumpkin pie to get it right before selling it. So that was just free. Total made us wonder if we had maybe misheard the number. It was just a small number for what we felt like the value of what we had just received was and Japan doesn't have a tipping culture, so we couldn't just give extra money either. But we had been maybe some of, if not the only, customers that night and we couldn't imagine how this functioned for them to turn a good profit on what had just been a jaw dropping meal. They had these little jars of sauce for sale, so we bought some of those like different jams and jellies and sweet peanut sauce that had been on the gano gano salad. I think she may have had some bread for sale. That part is fuzzy in my memory. After the night we had the restaurant. Everything related to it had a blanket seal of approval, so there was no pondering if we were getting too much. We just loaded up on pretty much anything that was available. Also, that book display on top of the bookshelf. Those were books of off the beaten path farmhouse restaurants in Hokkaido called Sudou na Cafe o Tazunete, or let's Visit a Slow Cafe, and they were books compiled of just the restaurant feature, parts from issues of a magazine called Northern Style Sudou. The magazine would come out and have all sorts of articles and features, including features for these small restaurants, and then the farm restaurant articles got collected by themselves and published in these books afterward. There were three volumes of the book, with Morena being featured as one of the restaurants in volume one. We bought a copy of each. We basically wanted to take anything of this experience we could back with us and hold on to it if at all possible. It was the vending machine with Dr Pepper all over again. In fact, I actually still have those three books. I kept them all this time and so, with the help of some people from Fiverr, I'll play the Japanese entry for Morena in that book and I'll read excerpts of the English translation as well. The epitome of Morena is the relaxing food and atmosphere and the story of the journey that is told by the restaurant owners the Kudiyuwa, hidehiko. Kudiyuwa was originally a businessman in Tokyo and moved here to Shimokawa at the age of 47, and it has been a decade since he opened Morena. He has been inspiring to a life of travel since he was 30 years old and started to visit countries around the world, mr. Kudiyuwa travels because he wants to draw. He travels because he wants to feel the thrill. His travel style is wandering around places and if he finds something interesting, he stays for about a month at a time. He even ended up staying in India for about a year.

Speaker 5: 30:10

this way, the soup curry is a superb piece of Morena's menu.

Speaker 1: 30:37

I was thinking about how delicious the meal was, but also it feels healthy and apparently it really is healthy. The vegetables and herbs are pesticide free and supplied by a private farm as much as possible. Sometimes they don't even notice customers because they are out in the vegetable field. In addition to that, Mr Kudiyuwa is also a musician. When you visit Morena and if you're lucky enough, you might get a chance to hear him play the Flamenco guitar, which he learned to play in Spain. The relaxing atmosphere of the cafe can only be provided by those who've traveled the world and experienced the culture firsthand. The pictures in the book feature their bowls and dishes with a beautiful blue design around the edges. You can see the same dishes on the Wikipedia page for the town of Shimakawa, where a picture of Morena's food is one of the few images featured for the notable assets of the town. The same dishes are in the cell phone pictures we took of the food and in the pictures on Morena's website, pictures that I can almost smell when I see them. I know that food so well. The truth is, it was sort of hard to separate some of the aspects of the first time we ate there, because for the next three and a half years it became and remained our favorite restaurant. I mean, I could even say our favorite place period. We went there whenever we could. We stayed for hours. I even took naps on the floor of the long table room a couple of times. When we first met it already felt like we had been friends for a long time, but Fumiko and Hide were more than just friends. They were like a really amazing uncle and aunt. Midway through my time in Hokkaido I moved to another city and Morena stopped being as convenient to get to, but we still went back frequently. No longer the waypoint on a journey between our two cities, morena was now the primary destination, a lot of times all on its own. And those farm restaurant books. We spent all three and a half years going to each and every entry in that book we could make our way to, especially if there was a work trip or we were going to a teacher conference somewhere on the island or just traveling to see the sights of Hokkaido. We'd cross-reference these restaurant guides to see if there were any that were going to be nearby. They were so important they even got to stay in the car with the SuperMaple, the paper map book that we had for Hokkaido. Oh, that's right. I lived in Japan during a very pivotal time of technology change. Japan was where I got my first cell phone in my 20s, but I was there when the change from flip phone to smartphone happened. It was also a time when the standard for maps went from a folded up paper map or one in a book to then a jump where it was sort of functional on the flip phone. And I had a pretty ridiculous flip phone. It was doing video calls back when I lived in Kyushu and had like a little joystick that let me control cursors so I could browse real websites and not just mobile ones, even though I had to do it on the small two and a half inch screen. But I was impressed. When I moved on to my second car in Japan, my best map option instantly became the SuperMaple CD-ROM that went into the disc player of that car and showed up on a little screen that came out and flipped up in front of the radio area. It did what Google Maps does now on Navigate with a little car icon that represented my car on the map moving along in real time. The screen was probably the size of a small tablet, but this was 2007, so I felt like I was driving fully into the future. Some cars and trucks at that point were popping up with screens in the backs of chairs or like in the radio spot where I had mine, sometimes flipping down from the roof like sun visors, and even some embedded in steering wheels, like right in the middle, which was a thing I saw shockingly often. These screens were supposed to have limiters that kept them from showing video while the car was in drive, but I don't think that was much of a hurdle for anyone, myself included. I regularly saw businessmen in luxury cars that had been modded watching their shows in the steering wheel or front console. Truckers too, I saw, had often figured out ways around the moving video restrictions. On my end, my car screen would read off a disc that would shut down when it was in motion for anything other than the map. But it also had a set of the red, yellow and white RCA jacks on the back and when I plugged those in to the core that connected then to my video iPod, I could just play whatever. I loaded onto it whole TV shows, movies, music videos, whatever and that worked whether the car was parked or in motion. But the screen came in the most handy when I used this car, which was a pretty comfortable sized station wagon, as my overnight lodging, by folding down the back seats, putting a futon and some blankets back there and then, if it gets cold during the night, just wake up and turn the heater on and run that for a few minutes, not instead of a hotel room, mind you Having a real bathroom and toilet gives those a clear edge but sleeping comfortably in my hard shell of a car that even had its own heating and cooling system, if I needed it was a pretty great tent. Alternative Pretty greater is being comfy in your car futon and watching a dope movie like Step Up To the Streets on that small screen in the front dashboard, which is something that I did and something that they did. I watched that movie in my car and they stepped up to the streets and then, by the time I left Japan, everyone was using Google Maps on their phones. My stay in Japan basically covered the complete period when the world made the switch from paper maps to digital ones. So, anyway, we would use those books to plot out different restaurants to see on our various journeys, and when we ate at one, we would try to get the chef or owner usually the same person, but we'd try to get them to sign their entry in our book, which would always amuse them to no end. And we were able to gather a lot of signatures over our trips across Hokkaido, but none of them could compare to Marina. It just had the instant warmth and feel of home, that same returning to a place you belong, feeling that people get when they go home for Thanksgiving, or at least in the movies where people go home for Thanksgiving. So I got like a small jewel to that. Every time I went to Marina we took friends a bunch of times it was like a litmus test for our friendship. If you went with us and you were just like meh about Marina, then we were just like meh about you. On one of those trips we took our Canadian friends Kevin and Kathy and even recorded a little bit of video on Marina. This is the night where that video of Hide playing guitar earlier came from. But I also have this wonderful video of Hide explaining the origins of the name Marina. My video is old, a little crackly, so I'll recap what he says. But here's Hide.

Speaker 4: 38:19

So now my restaurant. I cook Indian curry. It's very delicious, thank you. Before I go to India, I'm very square man, I'd say- square but after India I changed.

Speaker 1: 38:50

I know that's a little hard to hear. So before India, hide says he was a square like how you would say in the 60s. But after India he changed.

Speaker 4: 38:59

The name Marina, marina, yes, what does it mean? Marina is Spanish language, the women in the Spanish mix women. They say Marina.

Speaker 1: 39:20

He says that in Spain, marina is a name for women with brown hair or brown skin. I looked up the details because, as I've said before, spanish is not one of my languages, but I found a really excellent two part essay called Black in Spain Beauty Standards and Exoticisms, by Kisha Solomon, an American writer living there, where she discusses the term Marina, how it's applied in Spain and the nuances about which words people use in Spanish to refer to black and brown people and the connotations of each. I'll put links to it in the show notes and the web page. But Marina is the term she prefers to use in mixed company, which P Day and I would certainly qualify as what the Marina means is sometimes earth, earth, earth is Earth is.

Speaker 4: 40:07

Yes, yes, marina's skin color is like earth. Yes, brown, brown, yes, yes, and the Marina sound is very beautiful. I love the sound. It sounds very nice.

Speaker 1: 40:27

So Hide likes the sound of the name Marina and Fumiko. Let us know it being easy to say was important too. Very easy to say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 40:39

First time he thought that the Russian name was Sotiro. Sotiro, sotiro, it's also Spanish Sotiro. Yeah, and we call the telephone company of it. It's the name Sotiro. It's a woman, not understand, sotiro.

Speaker 1: 41:06

Sotiro, sotiro oh, that sounds very bad. Here Fumiko is saying something. I had forgotten that Marina was originally going to be called Sotiro, but they got a phone call from someone so confused by that name in Japanese that they changed it to Marina. And she dug that because it was easy for everyone to understand. And that's the video I have of them Short but full of color and flavor, a lot like our time at Marina. We came back to America together, misha and I, back to the San Francisco Bay area where she's from and where we got married. I wrote to Fumiko and Hide a few times, but they weren't really set up for digital life. That made sense to me. There's was one of the few Japanese spaces where I didn't really see technology dominating anywhere. But I also let go of the rope some on my end. I got busy moving to a new place, learning how to be in America again, getting married, learning how to do that and then having a kid, etc. I reached out to the one email address I had gotten before we left, with occasional letters attaching current pictures of Misha and I with our new daughter, that sort of thing. But I didn't hear back and eventually the email started bouncing back as undeliverable. The restaurant website was a static page with contact info including the email address I had, and it had been the same simple webpage since we started going there in 2005,. So that wasn't much help for my quest either. Eventually, though, I tried a different method. Through my English teacher and Japan connections and Hokkaido ties, I was able to locate and message the current ALT, which stands for Assistant Language Teacher in Shimokawa. That's the foreigner who was there doing what I was doing in my town back then, and that teacher, a Canadian named Sean Slater, messaged me back the good news. Sean knew Moreno very well, frequented the place New Kudisan which I guess is what everyone else called Hide, shortening his last name, and then sent me pictures of Achan the Cat. Now for the bad news. I had gotten in touch with Sean just after he finished his contract of three years and moved to another part of Japan. While I could find out that Moreno was still open, I couldn't really get a message to Hide through Sean, because he is gone and the new ALT, who I didn't know, wouldn't be moved over and settled in for a little while yet. Then I let there be more gaps, more living life here, more not doing the steps to track down the person there. But when I started doing this podcast last year, I decided pretty early on that Moreno was going to be the subject of an episode. Once I had an idea for how to tackle it and I suddenly had a renewed reason to reconnect. I did the same thing as before, putting out a call to be connected with the current ALT in Shimokawa, and then I got a message from that ALT, annie Williams. Annie let me know she'd been to Moreno, meaning it was still very much open. Achan was there plotting around, as was Hide. I explained who I was and asked if she could pass along my info in person. She agreed and also tipped me off about the existence of a book that Hide had just published about his life and travels, showing me the cover. Annie got back to me a bit later to let me know she had gone to Moreno and delivered my contact info and that Hide still remembered us well and said hello. I guess maybe here is the point where I acknowledge that I've just been saying Hide for a little while and not Hide and Fumiko, because during this process I found out that Fumiko had passed away some years back and so Hide runs Moreno by himself. Now Hide's book actually turned out to be two books, one for each of the drop everything and travel the world with basically nothing trips that he took in his youth. We bought the books, had them shipped over from Japan, and when they got here, mishina and I went through them. They were fascinating for different reasons. Both were mostly memoirs which Hide had written in Japanese, and neither of us are at the level where we can sit down, crack a book like this and just read it with any real speed. But the pictures were where we focused the majority of our attention. In the book about his first trip, the White Book, a few photos are of young Hide by himself in London where he worked for a stent and studied English, which we had seen in those albums years ago, but others are him in different countries with a woman that we've never seen. Turns out this woman was his first wife, teruko, and so we instantly knew why, if we hadn't seen the photos or mementos from these trips before Turkey, syria, iran, afghanistan, living in villages in Nepal and India. Hide's first trip went until he hit a bad bout of hepatitis in Bombay, waiting to take his ship to Africa, ending his world journey and sending him back to Japan. The Blue Book was interesting for the opposite reason. This one is about his second time taking a trip, this time with his wife again, but now his second wife, fumiko. His volume was interesting exactly because it was full of these pictures we knew so well already. From leaving Japan again in 1989 to travel the world and then returning in 1995 to open a restaurant, hide and Fumiko were gone that time for six years, the same length of time that Mishinai were gone from America too. The Blue Book has most of the pictures I remembered well from those nights in Morena, the tales of the two of them traveling the world and experiencing all that life had to offer. I love that I have these books now. And then the strangest thing happened. The timing on this is just really crazy to me, but while I was working on this episode, two months ago in March of this year, after years of being the same, morena's website got completely redone, now beautifully designed and organized, with several pages and sections covering the restaurant and its food, as well as Hide, his life and philosophies, the animals and Hide's art and writing. It's really gorgeous. You can find it at wwwcafemorenainfo. That's C-A-F-E-M-O-R-E-N-AI-N-F-O, and even if you don't speak Japanese. There's a great drone shot of the house and the photos of the food and restaurant all speak for themselves. The pictures of Hide, his travels and artwork are fantastic and I legitimately poured over every page on the site for hours. That's where you can read all in Japanese, mind you about how Hide Fumiko and their friend Mr Matsumoto started Morena in an old farmhouse back in 1995, refurbishing it, repairing it and building it by hand, funding the construction of Morena by selling boxed lunches that they would make along the way. They were keen to buck the trend that you needed a large sum of money up front to open a restaurant and that friendship and experiences are more important than money. Anyway, you can see many of the photos from the books here, also a great shot of Achan yawning and just wonderful pictures all over the restaurant, the food and the place. It was when I was reading over this website that I discovered the journal record that filled in the missing pieces about what happened from when we had left Japan until now. We left Hokkaido in 2009, and that's when I lost touch. But in early 2010, hide had a stroke at age 66. He was hospitalized nearby and journaled every few days as he was rehabbing and working to reverse the effects of the stroke. He put these journals up on the new Morena site as part of his writings. They tell the story of a man who had been so defined by his fierce independence, now dealing with this new reverse situation of being completely dependent on others for so many things. He shares anecdotes of friends who visited the other patients there in the stroke world. Hide was considered young for this in Japan. So many of the other patients he writes about are quirky older people, but he shares about Fumiko and how hard it must be on her, but also sweet glimpses of her kind encouragement to him. After five months in the hospital, hide came home to Morena and continued his recovery bit by bit. He writes about it being important to relearn what he can do, but also to do the things he can despite his condition. This included installing railings in places to make moving around the yard and house easier and discovering he could use his hand-tilling tool like a cane to let him continue to work in their kitchen garden. Speaking of the garden, that was always one of the most amazing parts of Morena to me. We didn't get to appreciate it on our first visit because it was winter, so you were spared the long description treatment earlier. But Morena had a pretty special garden. Hide explained his philosophy to me once he had tilled a field and tried conventional gardening before, but he didn't like the process and he had then shifted to just going out to his fertile ground, finding spots to plant the amount of whatever vegetable he needed and trying not to disturb any of the plants that he didn't have to in the process. Instead, he would just plant this new fruit or vegetable in and among whatever was already there. That way it would have to grow and flourish along with the other things that were already there, disturbing only what it needed to as it grew. Sure, hide said it wouldn't produce the biggest or most vegetables this way, but the ones that came through would be in harmony with everything else and would have been made strong by the process. The easy analogy there for how people could live, how Hide and Fumiko chose to live, was not lost on me. There were different patches of plants all around just outside of Morena's glass doors and when cooking, fumiko or Hide might walk out and grab a sprig of this or a pinch of that, maybe cut a squash off the vine to come back in and put in a curry. I was a picky eater well into my 20s, but at Morena, anything they cooked I would eat. I probably tried more new vegetables in that house than in the house I had grown up in, and they were all cooked to perfection. Hide's journal tells of him starting to work in the restaurant again, bit by bit, and you can read his clear joy in being out of the hospital and back in his home again, that restaurant filled with the memories of their travels. The journal also shares some sad details of Fumiko passing away from cancer the following year, in 2011, and a local memorial concert that had been planned for her not happening because of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami disaster that happened shortly after in March of 2011. I learned of Fumiko's passing in 2018, still several years after it happened, but I hadn't really gotten a solid picture of the timeline of things until I read Hide's journals for this story. The Morena I had left had changed a lot shortly after and the Morena I had imagined going back to all this time was really just that a place that only still existed in my imagination After Fumiko passed. Hide writes really openly about slipping into a dark place, about isolating, diving into alcohol which he steered clear of since the stroke, and grief. He writes about feeling so alone and then not knowing what to do. And then he writes about emerging a little at a time to see what he could still manage around Morena, about working in the garden slowly, but working still, and cooking dishes and sharing his food with others as much as he could. He writes about how he's making sure to sing and play the guitar every day and do a lot of painting and writing. It was during this time that he started working on the two books he released last year, and he's working on a third volume of his memoirs now. Hide draws the parallel between his challenge now and that of the plants in his no-till garden to find a way to flourish and produce beautiful fruits despite the challenges that surround them, and grow in harmony with life. It reminds me of the saying no one can step into the same river twice, because the next time both the river will be different and so will the person. Sure, I can't go back to that Morena that I miss, because that Morena's not there anymore, but also that me isn't here anymore either. The river has changed and so have I. What's that thing. They say you can't go back again. That's a good way to put it. You can't go back again, not to the same place, same you, but sometimes you can go back again, knowingly different than before, and catch the past up to where things are now. So then there's one final leg of this journey to tell you about, literally. While I was putting the pieces of this episode together, I reached out once more, this time to Hide, his longtime friend Saiko Tominaga, who does have a presence on social media, and I was able to message a bit with him about what I'm doing. He writes, dear Mr Mopin, this afternoon I could hand in the printed message of yours to Kudisan. He was so delighted. Below is his message and I translate it. So this is Hide's message through this friend Hi Scott, the world is really small now, isn't it? Thank you so much for reading my book. Of course, for your radio program, I am happy that you will mention Morena and me. I believe those who love traveling can enjoy my story of journey in such COVID time. Take care and see you again someday, hide, at Morena. Then Hide's friend sent me his phone number and told me he was happily waiting for my call, and so Okay. So I think all the audio is set up right. Shall we call Hide? I'm really nervous about this.

Speaker 2: 55:10

I think that's understandable and okay.

Speaker 1: 55:14

Can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: 55:16

Right now.

Speaker 1: 55:17

Sure.

Speaker 2: 55:17

Sure what, like I'm Misha, what do you?

Speaker 1: 55:22

want me to say Not usually like a question mark, maybe I should. Yeah, you do that. I'm here with Misha, my wife, who features prominently in the stories about Morena in this episode, and we're about to call Hide Hidehiko Kudiyua and reconnect after not having talked to him in, I guess, since we left Japan in 2009. Alright, so any more dialer? Alright, here we go. A machine answered and then, after a quick recorded message in Japanese, what the end it says.

Speaker 2: 56:22

You're connecting you, so please wait.

Speaker 6: 56:27

Hello.

Speaker 1: 56:30

Can you hear me?

Speaker 6: 56:32

Yes.

Speaker 1: 56:33

I can Hello. This is Scott.

Speaker 6: 56:38

Can you hear me?

Speaker 1: 56:39

Yes, Scott.

Speaker 6: 56:41

Hello, how are you?

Speaker 1: 56:43

I'm fine, oh Kurii-san.

Speaker 6: 56:48

I'm able to speak Japanese.

Speaker 1: 56:51

So we connected. It worked. We broke out some rusty Japanese and then we had a chat in English some and Japanese some, and both at times, just like before, if you don't know mo-shi-mo-shi or mo-sh-mo-sh or any number of ways people say, it is the way you say hello when answering a phone in Japan, but it's only used on the phone. You'd never say hello to someone in person with mo-shi-mo-shi or put mo-sh-mo-shi in a text just when talking on the phone. So we started to catch up some talk about work and where we lived. Where did you live? In California, california.

Speaker 6: 57:29

Oh, that's great. So I think you are in London, but now you are in California.

Speaker 1: 57:44

Yeah, I'm back in California actually, because Misha was from California, so Misha and I came back together. Actually, I have Misha on the phone too with us Mo-shi-mo-shi ohi-sashi-buri desu.

Speaker 6: 58:00

Konnichiwa, konnichiwa, genki, desu Genki desu Nice to talk to you. Ah sashi-buri da ne hon-tori ne Soushisne.

Speaker 1: 58:12

We have your books. We have your books here in California. They are so beautiful. Hon-tori ne Book yes, the Heisei and Showa.

Speaker 6: 58:27

Ah, my book. Yes, I have your books. Did you read my book?

Speaker 1: 58:35

I can't read Japanese very well, like very quickly, but I looked at all the pictures and there are so many great memories. It's so amazing. I do have a bookshelf of Japanese books, some Haruki Murakami novels now Hide's two books, the three restaurant books from before, and I've tried to sit down and read some novels with a dictionary before, but I was just having to look up far too many words to get any satisfying momentum going on the reading front, so I never got more than a few pages in before moving on to something else. Congratulations on being an author. Yeah, congratulations, it's beautiful work.

Speaker 6: 59:21

Thank you, I was writing the third book.

Speaker 1: 59:27

I read that on the website.

Speaker 6: 59:30

Now I am writing the third book Very nice. The third book is Around Japan. Around Japan, I bought a very small car. Only 360cc About 40 years ago. Yes, I was young at that time.

Speaker 1: 59:55

Oh, this would have been when you were even younger. Okay, very cool.

Speaker 6: 1:00:04

The third book is about Japan. It's about 1970.

Speaker 1: 1:00:13

Oh it's the same Hide's third book will be released in Japan soon, and if he didn't catch it in our back and forth, this one will be about his time before either world trip about 40 years ago, traveling all over in a small car. All the books have been 1900 yen, or a little under $20, which is pretty stunningly low to me considering how beautifully made they are. Ah, Achan. Are you still there? Are you still there?

Speaker 6: 1:00:41

I'm still fine.

Speaker 1: 1:00:44

Wow.

Speaker 6: 1:00:45

I don't know if you know about Scott, but I bought a dog called Mario.

Speaker 1: 1:00:52

Mario doesn't know about it. He told us that Achan the cat is still alive and well around Berena, along with the dog named Mario. Oh Sugoi is just a Japanese exclamation like wow, we're amazing. You'll hear more of it in these clips.

Speaker 6: 1:01:09

Did you see my home page? Morena home page.

Speaker 1: 1:01:14

Oh, yes, I read the whole thing. Yeah, it's beautiful Sugoi.

Speaker 6: 1:01:18

Sugokoro yes. Amazing home page. So it's not I produce, it is my friend's produce home page.

Speaker 1: 1:01:31

Yes, he helped me. He did a great job. It's very good your home page. I heard about your stroke from the writings on the website and so reading about your recovery and reading about a Ah, I had the sickness over head.

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:02:05

But now I come back again.

Speaker 1: 1:02:08

Amazing yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:02:10

So now I Morena is fine. We're so glad to hear that.

Speaker 1: 1:02:16

Yeah, I'm so happy about that. So now I'm making a podcast here in America. So I'm making, I'm making an episode. I want to make an episode about Morena, about how, how. I love, how I loved Morena Junen.

Speaker 6: 1:02:32

Junen, it's my story.

Speaker 1: 1:02:35

Yeah, yeah. And about Misha and me finding you and finding you and Fumiko and Morena and just how much we loved it Wonderful memories and ties at Morena with you. Yeah, so I'm excited to talk to you and I haven't talked to you for so long. It's amazing to be able to reconnect, yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:03:06

I'm very glad to listen to your voice. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 1:03:17

I asked about reading on his website that he still plays the guitar every day.

Speaker 6: 1:03:20

Yes, I, I, I play my guitar every day. Wow this morning I played guitar, also Nice.

Speaker 1: 1:03:36

Yeah, I remember.

Speaker 6: 1:03:39

When I was young, or two hours. I play guitar continuously and sing a song with guitar, so this is my hobby.

Speaker 2: 1:03:54

Yeah, very cool.

Speaker 1: 1:03:56

I remember your songs and guitar.

Speaker 6: 1:03:59

When I was young, that's when I was in London and that's when my job is street musician. You know, I guess, yes, I got money. Yeah. Or to London on the street. Very cool, it is my memory. Very cool. I continue, yes, because I love music.

Speaker 2: 1:04:27

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:04:28

Yes, yesterday I have a Spanish lesson. I'm a Spanish small school. Oh. At the Morena. Yes, oh nice.

Speaker 2: 1:04:43

What is? What is Spanish? Small school. Like for Spanish language.

Speaker 6: 1:04:48

Yes, my friend is Pablo. Pablo is from Chile. Uh huh, it is a nice chance, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:04:59

Hide told us his friend Pablo is cycling around the world and is in Japan until August and currently near Shimokawa. So they get together some mornings to do a Spanish school together and Pablo helps Hide in a bunch of ways. It sounds like. It also sounds like even when Hide doesn't have a way to go out and see the world, the world finds a way to come in and see Hide. Great, it's so, it's so good talking to you. It sounds the same. You sound the same as uh, as as 12 years ago. It's so strange to me, ah, I'm tongue. The same, the same, the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:35

Ah, is that so the same? The same, the same.

Speaker 1: 1:05:36

The same, the same, my, my voice is the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:41

The same, exactly the same.

Speaker 1: 1:05:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I imagine you the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:47

Ah, your voice is the same, okay, well, so I am very glad to listen to your voice, and you are my wife's voice also. I was waiting for your home, thank you, so I can very glad listen to your voice. Yes, I'm happy. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for talking with us. Yeah. It was very good to hear your voice too.

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

All right.

Speaker 6: 1:06:18

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:06:20

Bye, bye, hideo, okay, all right.

Speaker 2: 1:06:26

Nice.

Speaker 1: 1:06:27

That was really cool to talk to him. I have a big smile on my face, yeah. It was so good to talk with Hideo again. That was surreal for me. I hadn't heard from him in so long, and what's wild to me is that he still sounds the exact same Still as genki, or lively as ever, and making and sharing his art with the world every day. So his music, his singing, his painting, his writing, his food, really his whole life. What I didn't expect is that this story became about the feeling of being homesick, but being homesick for somewhere else and someone else really for a moment in the past, a place that ultimately doesn't exist the same way as it did when I left. But that's the feeling I got when I came back to America after living abroad for a chunk of time too, like, oh, this is what I was wanting and it has those same elements that I had been missing, but at the same time it is somehow different than I expected, different than I remembered. You have to recalibrate a bit, because subconsciously you're expecting it to be more like hitting a pause button, and now you're just unpause and go back to that time, and you're in everyone else's life too. But of course the pause button doesn't exist. Everyone continues making their paths while apart, and the question when you return isn't how to go back in time and unweave what you've been making, but rather how to weave the whole cloth of who you are now back into the tapestry of the world you've returned to. Feeling homesick in Japan was part of what made my bond with Morena fast and strong. And then, being home again, I found myself with homesickness for Morena, maybe more so than for anywhere else in Japan. And can I say homesickness when it was never my home in the first place, Although I ate there and drank there. I met with friends and listened to them play music for me. I even slept there a few times. So maybe home isn't such a bad way to think about Morena after all. I've been thinking a lot about Hidey these past few weeks. He's 78 now and still running the restaurant along with Aach on the Cat, mario the Dog and a community of friends and fans who all love and support him, and with a beautiful new website. It looks as though he has no plans of stopping anytime soon, I think. Reading the account of Hidey's stroke and recovery and then about Fumiko's passing even though it was a long time ago it really got to me. I also hadn't known the part about her memorial concert getting cancelled. If there was anyone who wouldn't have wanted to take any spotlight from the victims of a disaster, it would have been Fumiko, of course. I think a light like hers deserves to be celebrated, even if I'm 11 years late. There's this Ben Folds 5 song called Magic. It's a beautiful, meandering song about the passing of someone close and I've always loved it. It's also the song that popped into my head when I heard about Fumiko's passing and the concert. That wasn't so. I had a cover of that song made and I'd like to take a bit of space here to have a little, I guess, memorial concert for Fumiko, however small it may be. Here now is Romana Shakir singing Ben Folds 5's beautiful song Magic, in honor of my late friend Fumiko.

Speaker 2: 1:10:14

There are similar photos of her pulling this in history, but she wrote one with these.

Speaker 7: 1:10:57

You're the magic that holds the sky up from the ground. You're the breath that blows these cool winds round Training places with an angel now. Saw you last night, danced by the light of the moon. Stars in your eyes, free from the life that you knew. Saw you last night. Stars in the sky smiled in my room.

Speaker 1: 1:12:19

And with that Morena, and by that I mean the man, the restaurant, the memories, the magic all of it becomes the next entry into the Perfectorium, the Index of Perfect Things. You can also find the credits and links for the music in the show notes or on this episode's webpage. That's where you can also find pictures of that night in Moreno, where my video clips came from, and the videos themselves. If you'd like to put faces to the voices and here's something new To see that webpage you're going to need to go to a new location because the Perfect Show site has moved. It is now located at PerfectShowPodcastcom. That's right, we grew up in Ghanacom, like the big kids, so now you can find a direct link to the Perfectorium by going to PerfectShowPodcastcom. You can still contact the show through PerfectShowShow at gmailcom. Connect on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name PerfectShowShow. That's all the same. And in case you missed the last mini episode, there's a call-in number now, so call 616-737-3329. That's 616-PerfectZ. Or check out the last episode to hear what that's all about. It's like four minutes, it's quick. This episode was recorded and mixed at Moreno Studios in Oakland, california. Subscribe to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the Perfect Show, a perfect rating review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show and remember. Actually, you know what. Just remember to be kind. Explore the world when you can eat good food and tell the people you love that you love them whenever you get the chance. Anyway, until next time. I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

Speaker 7: 1:14:40

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Speaker 2: 1:15:03

I'll see you in the next one. Bye, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Short episode trying something new where Scot puts out a call to action, calling on you to call in with some compliments. Tell me about the best ones you've ever gotten and tell me about the best ones you've ever given.

A short 4 minute episode to introduce the new Podcast Call-In Line at 616-737-3329. Call and leave me a voicemail that could get played on a later show!

That's 616-737-3329, 616-PERFECZ

UPDATE: I have made the episode this call-in was for, so I'm no longer taking calls, and the episode I used this for is ep 15 - Pink Shoes / Punk Shows.

Check it out and be on the look out for more of these in the future.

Visit perfectshowpodcast.com for more.

Music on this episode by:

Noah Makes Music: https://www.fiverr.com/noahmakesmusic

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hey everybody, it's Scott and this is the Perfect Show. I'd like to try something new today and see if I can interact a little with you all. So I set up a call-in number and I'm looking for listeners to call in with responses to two questions First, what's the best compliment you've ever gotten? And second, what's the best compliment you've ever given. That's it. So that means to you call in and let me know your answer for either one or both of those questions. Tell me the compliment, tell me the story, if it needs a little context, but I want to hear it. I want to know about the best compliments you've given and about the best ones you've gotten. You call in, leave your name or however you want to be referred to in a short message that I may use on a future show. Mind that I'm thinking of for the show as a funny one, but funny, serious, long short. I want to hear whatever you got. So, about the phone number, you know how you can pick your number sometimes and the numbers on phones will spell out things if you're using old phones or texting T9 or whatever. Well, I got the Google voice number. That spells out 616-P-E-R-F-E-C-C. That's right, 616-737-3329. Don't call 616. Perfect. It's one number different than I was able to get, because, of course, all the ones that spell out perfect or already taken, I mean I didn't have some special early invite to Google voice. So we are 616 perfect Z no T 616-737-3329. Give it a call. Tell me about some compliments. Also, you might predict that if I don't get any calls I'll be sad and think I don't have any listeners. But no, no, no, no, no. Well, you'd be half right. I will be sad because it will only mean that my listeners are all clearly very terrible, rude people who never compliment each other. But that's okay. It just means you'll need whatever I'm making all that much more. So if you're hearing this, try not to wait until the last minute. I'm a procrastinator myself. I get it, but that compliment that just popped into your head when I asked about it just now. You're going to forget that one if you wait too long, and I really want to hear it. So just call up our shiny new voicemail at 616-737-3329. Maybe unsurprisingly, I make this show pretty slowly. So if you figure it's been a month and you are too late, you aren't Up until you see an episode that uses the compliment voicemails. It's still fair game, so call in and add your story to. I am working on the next episode already. It's almost done. So this isn't for that and that will be out sooner than a month. But this will be for a different episode later on. Hello there, this is Scott from the future In rejecting to let you know I have now finished that episode and it's episode 15 about pink shoes and punk shows. It should be in the same feed. You found this just five episodes later in the timeline. So the original window for calls has passed. But I'll try to do more of these down the road somewhere in the future, especially if I hear that this is the type of thing you'd like more of. That's it. I just wanted to jump in and say thanks for listening to the show and I hope you like what I made out of this. Okay, now back to the original episode. Okay, so you can find the number here a bunch of times It'll be the show notes and on socials for you. Yeah, the gauntlet has been laid Lied. I have lied down the gauntlet. Gaunt laid, gauntlet lane. Yeah, call up the compliment line and that number one more time is 616-737-3329. That's 616-perfect Z, Perfect Z, perfect Z, perfect Z for non-Americans and lay some compliments on me. Lay, lie, lay your compliments upon me. The Perfect Show site is perfectshowsite. Perfect Show Show on Twitter, instagram and YouTube. Perfectshowshow at gmailcom and now 616-perfectz. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppen, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show. I'm going to eat 50 eggs.

Today's episode is all about music that exists in multiple languages. Join Scot on a journey of discovery exploring the ins and outs of some of some great examples of this phenomenon. We talk The Beatles, Shakira, BoA, Encanto, Phil Collins, Avril Lavigne, Shania Twain, Johnny Cash, and more!

From all over the world find out about the artists that have done this strange yet impressive feat and hear them in the act.

Check videos for all the songs discussed here:

http://perfectshow.site/09-multi-language-songs/

Check the original songs here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxDnKc4gzWuwjpl1tz6WUw

Special thanks to fiverr artists who worked on the songs from this episode:

Cana Rialto - canarialto: https://www.fiverr.com/canarialto

Chloe Chan - jiachen782: https://www.fiverr.com/jiachen782

Arunabh Kumar - arunabhkumar: https://www.fiverr.com/arunabhkumar

Charu Haran - charuharan: https://www.fiverr.com/charuharan

Ekata Sharma - ekatashreya: https://www.fiverr.com/ekatashreya

Thomas Mennuni - thomasmennuni: https://www.fiverr.com/thomasmennuni

Lucas GM - lucas_gm: https://www.fiverr.com/lucas_gm

StudioBlackroom - studioblackroom: https://www.fiverr.com/studioblackroom

Music from this episode by:

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

Bastreon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Handanu - https://www.fiverr.com/handanu

Shawn Korkie - https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie

KG Rap Official - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

Lofi_rob - https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

Mall - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328

A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Helice_Awesome_Dance_Adventure_/a-calm-moment-to-remember-before-taking-the-dangerous-roa

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:19

Hey, it's Scott. Quick disclaimer here at the top this episode has clips from a lot of songs and one of them has a curse word that I haven't beeped, so if that's something you like to be aware of ahead of time, well, now you are Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I find it very impressive when people are able to function in multiple languages. I've had conversations in mixed company that switch back and forth between English and Japanese frequently, and those are the moments when I really feel the seams of my own language ability stretching much more so compared to times where I only need to operate in English or Japanese. But some people just seem to be able to flip back and forth between languages mid-sentence effortlessly. I'm also quite impressed by musical ability of any kind. In particular, singing Instruments carry their own complexities, for sure. I played a few growing up and I get that. But to me they are maybe less daunting because, as long as they are in tune, they usually have an obvious mechanical action for achieving a note, like press this key or cover that hole. Singing feels like you're asked to do the same thing just without the help of any equipment or machinery. You're just expected to nail the note all on your own. So then it should come as no surprise that people who can sing in multiple languages nearly short circuit my brain. I've memorized some non-English lyrics to a few songs over the years. But to be able to perform musically in front of a microphone while operating in a language that isn't your well, I can't even say native language, because some people absolutely do grow up speaking two, three or more languages, but it's just a stack to me, you know. Difficult thing on top of difficult thing on top of yet another difficult thing and pulling it all off. That's why this episode I want to celebrate music that travels across languages and the singers putting their skills on display. Now let me jump out here and set up some guidelines, because there are some gray areas in that statement, but I'm looking for songs that follow a very specific set of rules. First and foremost, it has to be the same singer doing both languages. I came across some foreign language versions of songs, but they were sung by a different singer and I'd consider that to be pretty much a cover song, even though it's in a different language. But that's not what I'm talking about here. So the singer needs to be the same, but also I'm looking for the song to be the same too. Right, someone singing all their regular songs in English but then throwing it in an Ave Maria on a Christmas album or something? That's not going to count. Same singer, same song, multiple languages. By the way, the more language versions the song has, the happier it makes me. I mean, remaking a song in a second language is mind-blowing enough to me, but some musicians don't stop it only too. My joy about the whole thing just increases exponentially for each additional language that's involved. When I started this search, I only really knew of a handful of examples, most of which I had personally collected over the years as just oddities and curiosities, and I'll get to each of those. But in researching for this episode, I discovered a ton of additional examples and started taking notes. Remember, I love this type of song where some people may light up at the first edition of a famous book. I light up at the French edition of a famous song. In collecting all the songs for this, my multi-language music collection grew way bigger, like Grinchart style, and when the song list got long enough, I started to see some similarities among the different tracks, and what I came up with was three different categories for these songs on my list. Category 1 Category 1 the first category is for singers who release music in multiple markets regularly. Usually, if I find out about them, there's an English version involved, and oftentimes, if there's another version of the song, it'll be in Spanish due to the large overlap of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking markets where I live. I'm sure there are a ton of examples that I have no idea about out there with songs and pairs or trios of languages that just don't involve English. Now, this may seem obvious, but a lot of the artists in this category are multilingual, meaning they speak two or more languages. I mean, it's got to make it easier to sing in a language if you're already comfortable communicating in it, right? Ricky Martin, who became a huge star in the late 90s, early 2000s, has a ton of songs like this. A good example is Liv and La Vida Loca, which, like a lot of his songs, has an English version and a. Spanish version released simultaneously to play in both the Spanish and English-speaking markets. Same thing with Gloria Estefan, who has released a ton of her songs in two languages for those two markets, as both a solo artist and as a member of the Miami Sound Machine, making her an icon of Latin music. While Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were battling it out at the top of the English pop charts, christina was pulling double duty, with her songs climbing the Latin music charts at the same time. The first time I heard Christina's voice sounding like this but it was also on different radio stations and rotations sounding like this Shakira is another great example for this category of musician. Shakira is a Colombian singer who got huge in Colombia and other Spanish-speaking countries. Then her success started to prompt her to venture into other markets, first from Spanish to Portuguese for the nearby Brazilian market, then from Spanish to English, starting in 2001. So on her crossover album Laundry Service, shakira hit it big with the lead single Whenever.

Speaker 3: 6:13

Wherever.

Speaker 1: 6:31

But I remember this happening. It was everywhere and taught the English-speaking world the name Shakira, but where she was already hugely famous, they were hearing this wonderful version. There are a ton of examples from this group, especially in African, latin and South American countries, that I haven't mentioned because I just don't know about them. I have huge blind spots here for sure. I feel like I'm trying to skim over all the music from everywhere in the world from all of time, so I expect I'll miss a ton. Sorry, it's not on purpose. I'm gonna miss some and not for nothing, but that would be a great type of thing to make a note of and email me to let me know about through the show's email address, perfectshowshowcom. Okay, at the core of these songs is the language ability that the singer already has or sometimes develops. I mean they can conceive of doing the song in another language because the language ability is already there In each case. I think the singer's language skills are at the heart of the idea, and being able to be the song's voice in more than one language really helps them gain footholds in each language's music industry. Speaking of singers with impressive language talents, shakira is fluent in Spanish, english, portuguese and Catalan. She can also sing in Italian, french and Arabic, which is justwow. Looking at that list, arabic might stick out as a language not as closely related to the others, but Shakira is of Colombian Lebanese descent and has released music in Lebanon, where the official language is Arabic. Now, if Whitney Houston had sung Whenever, wherever, instead of Shakira, I'm sure it would still be a great song and probably even a massive hit, because Whitney Houston is a hitmaker, but she probably wouldn't be able to sing hers perfectly in seven different languages. As an honorable mention to this category, I want to list someone who did something sort of the same and sort of different. Canadian singer Shania Twain also wanted to cross over between two different music markets, but they weren't in different languages. Shania was a country music star to this point. She was selling tons of albums but wasn't a mainstream pop artist. So she put out her own crossover album in 2002, meant to take her not from a Spanish market into an English market or vice versa, but from the country charts to the pop charts. That album is called Up, and the unusual thing about it is that it came with two discs. Each disc had the same songs, just mixed and remastered in a different way. One was a green disc with the songs mixed in the modern country music style that she had been doing up to that point. The other CD was a red disc with the exact same songs but mixed and built for pop and top 40 radio stations. Being an American with an older sister who was into country music, she owned Shania's album, so I was familiar with both of these versions. But outside of the US there isn't really a market for American country music. So Shania Twain's international CD also had two discs the red one mixed as pop songs, and a blue disc where instead of country music it had the same slate of songs but this time mixed in more of a world music style with some eastern instruments and rhythms. So the same song would sound like this on the red pop disc and then like this on the green country disc and then like this on the blue international disc, and it worked. All that effort really paid off. That album was a number one smash and it was huge for Twain's career. It also really wrote a playbook for how future artists like Taylor Swift would make the same move. Well, maybe without the world versions. I haven't heard any T-Swift songs like that, with the sweet sitar sounds playing underneath, though I'd be into it. But the first multi-language songs that I ever became conscious of were when I was living in Japan and first got really exposed to the world of J-pop. J-pop is a genre of music where the J stands for Japanese and pop stands for popular music like how we use it. There's J-pop, k-pop, of course, for Korean pop music, but also C-pop for Chinese music, v-pop for Vietnamese, t-pop for Thai and so on and so forth. You get the idea. Pretty much every language is going to have its own pop music scene and stars, because these markets can be smaller individually. The mega, mega stars often have appeal that overlaps into multiple music markets, appeal that even reaches the teenagers of another country and has them singing the lyrics and doing the dances of these pop idols BTS, anyone. This is where I came in. Well, not the singing and dancing part, but when I was teaching junior high schoolers in Japan, they'd often have questions for me about what it was like, where I was from and what the kids their age did in America. I would share my experiences, but also ask what kind of TV or music they were into too. Then I would head down to the rental store with a list of media to look for. I say the rental store to set it apart from a video or DVD rental store Not that those even exist in America anymore, but because of the bigger rental stores in Japan, like Tadaya Rented Movies, sure, but they also rented video games, books and music CDs too. I'd talk to my students and ask them to check my list to make sure I got the names right, which you may think is an unnecessary step or an exaggeration, but I would need to remember new artist names and sometimes weird J-pop music group names, so that I could go to the store later and search for the latest single from bands like Rip Slime or Bump of Chicken, small detour. My daughter saw this bit in my notes and was really curious about the Japanese band Bump of Chicken and what their name meant. Having lived for years in Japan. I got pretty used to seeing strange English phrases like that so I hadn't wondered about it. It was just Bump of Chicken's name, if anything. I guess I would have assumed it was about pieces of chicken that you eat, although no form of chicken I know of is measured in bumps. But sure Turns out it's actually a sweaty English translation for the Japanese phrase Jakshan no Hankeki, or counter attack of the week. In this sense, chicken is their way of saying like a coward or weakling someone you might hear called a chicken, and the Bump is more along the lines of a pro wrestling term, meaning a hit or an attack. That's interesting to me. I'd never do that before. Okay, bump of Chicken aren't out there singing their songs in English, so I should probably get back to the main topic, end detour. Anyway, I would find these singers that my students were listening to Deep dive on their albums for a weekend or so, photocopy the lyrics from the lyrics book and try to memorize some lines to show my students that I cared about what they were into, and in turn I would usually get students more engaged in my classes. It was a mutual benefit. This also wasn't any kind of torture for me. I like J-pop. I like all music for the most part, and while I'm aware that's an obnoxious thing to say, I just don't know any other way to describe it. I'm way more particular about any spoken audio I'm listening to than I ever am about music. So I already liked rock and rap and alternative and R&B, but I also liked super pop music like Backstreet Boys, hanson, you know whoever. That part made the transition to J-pop easy and pretty seamless. I gave anything a chance and since I wasn't listening to the radio or seeing whatever anime it was from, I would just pick the songs I liked off the albums with no real context apart from the way they sounded, put them on my iPod and then listen whenever I rode the bike or the train. This was the way I discovered Boa. That spelled B-O-A, or more specifically, with a capital B, lowercase O and then a capital A. I don't have anything more interesting about that. I just thought I should say it, since I'm not confident that you could just pick up with your ears, and I'm pronouncing it with a capital A at the end Boa, okay. Boa is a J-pop star and was on top of the charts when I lived in Japan. I dipped in on a lot of the chart-topping music. This was the era of Ayumi Hamasaki, tadahikaru Kotokumi Otsuka-Ai. The boy groups were there too, like Orein, shidaenji, glee and News, but Boa was a juggernaut. She's one of only a handful of artists in Japan to ever have six albums in a row hit number one on the Oricon charts, which would be like the Billboard charts here in America. Boa fit right in with the classic J-pop songs of the early 2000s, with her bouncy dance tracks and soulful ballads. It really was wild to see the pop aesthetic of American artists like Britney and N-Sync fully replicated in these Japanese pop acts, all the way down to the outfits, vocal ticks and dance choreography. The thing that set Boa apart, though, was her scope. She wasn't the biggest selling artist in Japan, sure, but Japan also wasn't the only place she was selling music. Boa's full name is Boa Kwan, and, for those unfamiliar with East Asian languages, kwan is not a Japanese surname, it's Korean. I was hearing Boa in Japan for the first time like this, but music fans in Korea were hearing her like this. Other people heard her singing Mandarin Chinese like this, and then there's also the people that heard her first in English like this. Boa was first discovered by a talent agency who decided she was someone they wanted to turn into a pop star. So they got her taking lessons in singing, dancing and Japanese, because a crossover career was very much in the plans from the beginning. She debuted with moderate successes in Korea as a teenager and then switched to focus on the Japanese music market and a music career in Japan. Her first Japanese album came out in 2002 and debuted at number one, which was the first album by a Korean artist to ever do that in Japan. A huge part of her being the first Korean to do that had to do with timing. Boa was very much a case of right person, right place, right time. Not only was she young and talented, boa was achieving her popularity right as the worlds of Japan and Korea were changing forever. So there's a huge history under this. It's complicated, it's ugly and I certainly won't do much of it justice here, but Japan and Korea have had tensions with each other for a very long time. It's pretty mild now, but there's a lot of history there, from World War II and many years after Korea was occupied by Japan, and it wasn't until decades later that they could end the occupation, form a democratic government and become the South Korea we know today. In the wake of ending that occupation, south Korea also implemented bands on Japanese music or media from being imported, sold or broadcast on Korean stations, which led to a mutual ban between the two countries for decades. Right now, in the year 2022, it's still against the law to broadcast Jappies music or TV over South Korean terrestrial stations. But the first part of the ban started to be lifted and open back up in 1999 and 2000,. Then, slowly, more and more, over the next couple of years. Bowa was a Korean artist atop the first wave, the hallue of Korean music popularity that was gaining real force in the early 2000s, right when the restrictions in Japan were finally lifted. Those restrictions were pretty much all out of the way by the end of 03, culminating in the date of January 1, 2004, when it once again became officially legal for stores in Korea to sell Japanese music media movies, animation, comics, etc. After the ban that had lasted for decades was over, bowa released her first major albums, originally in Japanese, where she had gained immense popularity, and then, writing that popularity, she started releasing albums in Korea, again containing many of the same songs on her Japanese albums, but now in Korean. Of course, some of the singles on those albums came out Mandarin, chinese and English as well, which allowed her music to move across nation and language boundaries, cementing her popularity in multiple countries across Asia. She is a humongous star, and I was just diving into Japanese music when she was doing her thing and cranking out hit after hit, so naturally a lot of her music wound up on my iPod. I want to also add Sebastian Yatra as a really current example. He sings the song Dosorugitas, or Two Little Caterpillars, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda for the Disney animated film Incompto. The song appears on the soundtrack twice, first in Spanish and then again in English, both sung beautifully by Yatra. This actually segues quite nicely into my next category, category 2. I'm going to call this category cog in the machine songs. I know that's a terribly clunky title, I'm working on it, but what I mean is that these songs only exist as part of a larger thing needed to make that whole thing run, and in that regard, disney songs are a perfect example on a couple of levels. On one level, the songs in Disney movies are cogs in the movies themselves. A classic hallmark of musicals is that they tell part of the story through the songs. If you were to cut out any of the songs, you wouldn't get the complete story. The songs are built specifically to function as both music and plot. CATEGORY 2 Since Disney is an international mega corporation, they release their big movies translated into many languages, and since the songs are a key part of those movies, the songs get translated too. The translations from my first category started with a singer creating the song and then a version, but with the Disney model and the channels for distribution, it's actually the reverse, where they know for a fact they will need a translation of the same song into 27 different languages before there even is a song or a singer. Without fully getting into the cynicism of Disney actually being a merchandise company and these movies existing largely as means to sell colorful plastic trinkets en masse, it's a good bet to think that these animated musicals will continue to happen, especially since they've been knocking it out of the park with them lately, which means Disney's world-conquering song translation machine should also continue chugging along. Now, while Disney movies hit over 2 dozen languages, they understandably search within each language's speakers for vocalists who can deliver solid songs in that language. Let it Go was a monster of a song for Frozen, and I saw that video of it being sung in every language, but each one of them had a different vocalist belting it out. That makes total sense to me. You have a machine that needs to keep rolling, so you get the person who can do the job and you move on Back to Incanto. Though I don't speak Spanish at all, and when the song Do Soro Guitas plays in the film itself, it's Yatra's Spanish version. The English version does play later over the credits, but in the movie the Spanish version plays without subtitles and it doesn't matter at all. With that guy's voice, with the imagery they're presenting, with just the way the notes sound, you get it.

Speaker 3: 22:10

You totally get it.

Speaker 1: 22:16

Interestingly enough, with Do Soro Guitas. While it's rare for Disney to have a song sung in two languages by the same artist, what's rare still is that it's not covered in any of the other languages that the movie's released in. In all the other versions, on all of the soundtracks, the other songs are translated into the different languages French, flemish, serbian, swedish, etc. But Do Soro Guitas appears on all of them in its original Spanish sung by Yatra, and then again, as in English version, by Yatra. None of them have it in another language. Strong evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks the song does a pretty good job of Transcending words and language on its own. Now, I said that this was a rare thing because I am aware of one other instance of this happening in a Disney movie, and pretty impressively so. I just didn't become aware of it until years after it came out. In 1999, disney released an animated film called Tarzan, and it was about Tarzan, the baby who gets raised in the jungle around animals and grows up really good with the environment, wildlife, that he gets discovered by people who are like whoa. Hey, check this weird guy out. You know it Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs is Tarzan, but an animated version with talking animals and catchy songs For Disney's Tarzan. These catchy songs all come from Phil Collins, the British musician who has had a huge career both in a band called Genesis and as a solo artist. Phil was pulled in to provide the songs for this, which was a move Disney had been refining. Disney started with interlinking one song by a major recording artist per movie, like in Beauty of the Beast or Latin, and it would usually run over the credits. But then Disney hit real gold on the Lion King, without John doing all the songs, and that's basically what they were trying to replicate, again on Tarzan, but with Phil Collins. So Tarzan has four different songs and a reprise in the movie. There's another song that's all percussion, but it doesn't have any lyrics or singing, so I'm not counting that one for this. Another track is a longer version of one of the earlier songs for the movie's credits and radio play. So it feels fair to call it four songs in a reprise. Phil Collins sings those four songs on the Tarzan soundtrack. That much I knew when the movie came out, sure, but it took moving to Japan and running into the movie on DVD to find out the next bit. Tarzan got released in 35 languages. They were expanding the reach of their animated films and this was the most languages. To that point, japanese was one of those languages. So when I was living in Japan and went to the DVD, it was set to Japanese as a default. Also, spoiler alert, phil Collins doesn't sing the Japanese songs. That's not where I'm going with this. But when I'm switching languages and looking at the choices on the DVD menu, I see that it also gives me a whole bunch of language options. Now, I was already a fan of the soundtrack. I had it on my iPod and I was into the tracks. I'm not afraid to say these songs are bangers. They're solidly good. So as I'm watching the movie, I start to wonder how they deal with the songs in the different languages and I start flipping through the Audio tracks with the remote while Tarzan is playing. First I'd be hearing Phil Collins sing Son of man in English. Then flip, now it's in Spanish. But wait, is that still Phil Collins? It is flip, again French Phil Collins, and again and again English, spanish, french, italian and German. Phil Collins himself sang all the Tarzan songs in five of the languages that Disney released them in. I Also briefly thought he might have done the Bulgarian version too. But that's not Phil, it's just a talented Bulgarian musician who does a pretty good Phil Collins so Phil Collins is madman records four songs in a reprise in five separate languages. That is just unbelievable to me. I actually have all of Phil's versions in my music library too, and that makes the comic book collector and me very happy to have a Complete run. But what makes this happen on Tarzan? Well, here we clearly have the perfect storm of a person from category one who can handle multiple languages being used in category two, where there's already a pre-made need for the translated songs when the project starts. It also helps that several of the songs are pretty short, under three or even two minutes, which is not to downplay anything at all about what Phil Collins did. I am truly in awe of that kind of ability. Maybe this would be a good time to shift gears again and talk about the third and final category. I was able to break these songs down into category three. So if category one is driven by the singer and category two is driven by the well, maybe the company or the producer, for lack of a better word. Then category three is driven by the song. Sure, song popularity overlaps with the overall popularity of a singer. But some songs just take off like a rocket and they're huge hits for a musician, even when compared to their other hits. I guess the first one of these I ever knew about would have been 99 red balloons from 1983, which I learned about way later during the one year of German I took in high school. The song was in German first as 99 Luftblüten's and then was such a hit that recording artist Nina rerecorded it in English for the American market. Another German band named Romstein would do the same thing in 97 with their single do host. Five years after that Russian duo tattoo recorded their hit song oh Boy, okay, I'm gonna give this one my best shot. But they recorded their hit song yes, I saw some ah. And released all the things she said in English. Doing any internet search for these type of songs, I'll tell you a band that pops up front center lot is of course the Beatles. If we're talking about pop songs that were such Huge hits they break borders and cross cultures. I'm not sure anyone can even touch the Beatles in that arena. They hit such a popularity level that their songs went everywhere in the original English form. You'd have teens in Poland, egypt and Peru all singing Beatles songs in English. But before this was the case, they were trying to get famous just like any other pop band and early on their record, execs Told them they would need alternate versions of the songs to break into non-English markets. Wikipedia says this was a time when that was a standard practice and the execs finally convinced the Beatles, so they recorded a single and released it in Germany with two Beatles songs I want to hold your hand and she loves you. But now in German, I want to hold your hand because come get me or die in a hot. You may have even heard this one recently. It was just prominently featured in the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, directed by Tycho with TT and she loves you, of course becomes she leaped deep. The German versions did well in Germany, because of course they did. It's the Beatles German version of I want to hold your hand hit number one. But the Beatles followed it sort of a different strategy after this. Instead of making more foreign language versions of their songs, they've just decided to become the biggest band in the world so everyone could come to them and they wouldn't have to bother translating their songs again for anybody. I mean, I'm kidding in my characterization, but that is essentially what happened. The Beatles never made another alternate language version of one of their songs again, and the popularity of their English songs and music is even credited with spreading and boosting the popularity of the entire English language across Europe and into other parts of the world. That's, that's just an insane amount of cultural outreach. But other artists who weren't quite as big as the Beatles a category that included literally everyone else continued to record some of their biggest hits in other languages for other markets. Country music legend Johnny Cash also released an EP in Germany with him singing five songs in German, the most notable one being his famous hit I Walk the Line.

Speaker 3: 31:15

But of course in German.

Speaker 1: 31:31

But of course in German. And you've probably heard Johnny Cash sing Ring of Fire. You may not have heard him sing it in Spanish, but he actually put out a few tracks in Spanish when Ring of Fire was coming out, figuring that would overlap well for Latin music markets with the Mariachi style riff in the song. Abba is the number one selling Swedish band of all time and the first band ever from a non-English speaking country to have consistent success on the music charts of English speaking countries. Being a quartet of Swedes, abba was of course able to sing in their native Swedish, and we knew that they could sing in English. But then, in that classic European move, they translated and sang their biggest songs into a ton of other languages too. So we have English for most of their songs, but ABBA's song catalog also has four Swedish songs three in German, one in French and fifteen in Spanish. The Spanish songs came from a play that makes waves and inroads into South America. Those were all released on an album called Oro, which is essentially an ABBA greatest hits album, but the songs were all re-sung in Spanish. It's amazing. The current landscape of musical royalty has produced a few great cuts, for my collection too, also in Spanish. All millions of English speakers were here in the Spanish market heard. That's right. Beyonce is also a player in this game and, like she usually does, she killed it. In her next album, she did the same thing with If I Were a Boy.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Leading to this wonderful Spanish version.

Speaker 1: 35:15

Beyonce's voice still slays, no matter what language she sang it. In 2012, the American band chairlift released their second album, and the single I Belong in your Arms Also got released as a Japanese version. They made the Japanese version as a bonus track for the Japanese release of that album, a thing I saw a lot in Japan and had already known from showing out what were big bucks to me as a teenager to get Japanese albums from bands I love, just for that extra song or two.

Speaker 2: 36:13

Now not.

Speaker 1: 36:14

A lot of artists on this list are going from English to an Asian language. This chairlift song is one, and there are a couple more examples coming up, but for the most part the western artists I've got on here are translating their songs from western languages to other western languages. I started studying Japanese when I was in high school, so I've been around language study for a while and there's this pervasive thing around Asian languages in America anyway about them being impenetrable or extra hard or impossible for whatever reason. I personally think that a lot of that is wrapped up in Orientalism and this fetish desire in the west to characterize anything Asian as mysterious and unknowable. But I also just think different brains take languages differently. I took a year of German in high school, like I said, and never really felt like I was getting it. Japanese had challenges, for sure, but a different set than the challenges I was having with German, and I found that Japanese just made a lot more sense in my brain and I enjoyed learning it way more. I guess what I'm saying is Japanese is hard in certain ways and not in others, just like any language. In my experience, the hardest part about learning Japanese for a lot of people can be starting with the mentality that it's some especially hard thing to learn. Another artist that fits right in here is British singer Charlie XCX, who, if you don't know her by name, maybe you'll recognize her voice from this Iconopop hit that she also wrote. Well, charlie XCX also did the same thing as chairlift and other bands. For one of her albums, japanese releases, she added bonus tracks of two of her songs translated to Japanese. Charlie worked with J-pop artists to translate the songs and now, because of that, we get to hear 2014's Break the Rules in English and also Japanese. Likewise, in this album, we get to choose which version of her song Boom Clap we want to play English or Japanese. Now there's one final singer I want to talk about in this category, someone who's released a song in the most number of languages I could find. So, if you've been keeping track, boa songs were coming out in four languages Japanese, chinese, english, korean. Shakira was also a four language, or Spanish, portuguese, english and Catalan. Phil Collins sang guitars and songs of five English French, spanish, italian and German. Abba's another fiver. So I know you're wondering well, scott, who could you be saving for now? Who could have more than that? Well, how about some hints. She's Canadian. She's an icon famous worldwide for decades now. She's known for her ballads and her pop songs, selling millions of albums and going multi-platform. In fact, she currently holds the title for the biggest selling album by Canadian artist in the 21st century. Oh, and she sang a big song in a Disney movie. Do you have it yet? Do you know who it is? Well, I'm talking about, of course, the one and only Avril Lavigne. It really felt like I was going to say Celine Dion there, right? I mean, I did that on purpose, with those clues. That's what I would have originally thought to, and I do find Celine Dion to be conspicuously absent from this discussion. She's definitely someone who has multi-language singing abilities, but she used those skills to release albums in different languages with completely different songs on them, and then, as her popularity started to skyrocket, her song releases more closely followed the Beatles pattern, where the song would be so huge, like my Heart Will Go On from Titanic, that it topped charts worldwide while staying in the original English version. Celine didn't pack her multi-linguistic singing talents away, though. There are videos of her singing in 9 languages, but the difference here is she's often singing a famous song originally from that language, not a translated one of her own, like a famous Italian aria in Italy for a huge stadium, or a classic Spanish ballad that showcases her voice and range in Madrid no less impressive for sure, but just a slightly different flavor of amazing than what we're focusing on here. But back to Avril Lavigne. All those things I said that could have made it Celine Dion are also absolutely true about Avril. The Disney movie she did a song for was the live action Alice in Wonderland, and her top selling album All Time for a Canadian artist is her debut album Let Go. That's the one with Skater Boy and complicated on it. But I'm going to focus more on her third album, the Best Damn Thing, and the lead single from it, girlfriend. If you've listened to other episodes of this podcast, this might not surprise you, considering my clear love for this drop. The album came out in 2007 when I was still living in Japan, and let me tell you Avril was, is and will continue to be very popular in Japan. Avril's whole thing. It's very much in line with Japan's whole thing. Her look and music merge with the Japanese fashion and J-pop music scenes pretty seamlessly. So when her third album came out, I was seeing it being promoted on Japanese TV and in stores and heavily marketed different places. Now I am already an Avril Lavigne fan of fan role Lavigne, anyway, I was a fan at that point too, but not as big of one yet. I think Girlfriend was the song to really change that for me. I put her whole new album on my iPod. I remember that iPod was one of those tall, thin iPod nanos that I had a little armband for so I could wear it running, and it connected to a little Nike Plus doodad that I clipped to my shoelaces, and together the two devices would measure how far and how fast I was going on my runs. This is something that pretty much every phone does now, but I was excited by this very cool and very new technology back then, excited enough that it even got me to start running regularly, which was something I didn't particularly like to do at all. Another exciting feature for me on that iPod, one that I looked at as sort of a secret compartment or something, but you could program it to designate a power song. A power song was a track you set and whenever you pressed and held the center button oh, apple devices used to have buttons but you held the center button for a second and it would stop whatever was happening and fire up your power song and my power song. Well, I discovered that my sprinting pace at the end of a run matched the tempo of Girlfriend perfectly. So I would head out, listen to whatever I was listening to, run my route, and then, near the end, I would get ready to empty whatever was left in my gas tank on a sprint to my finish line. And so I would reach up my left hand to my right arm, find the raised button area through the moisture wicking meal print sleeve, and I was off. The song is three and a half minutes of pure pop perfection. One of the things people hate about pop music is the artificial energy it injects, but I actually love that. I mean, I used it literally for that purpose, to inject energy into my body when I was running on fumes. So I really liked Girlfriend, but I'm easy. What about the rest of the world? Well, girlfriend was a mega success. The video became the most watched video on YouTube of all time song hit number one in eight different countries. It gave Avril her first number one song in America In the effort to make it a success in other markets and worldwide. They created a total of eight different language versions where the verses were still in English, but that one infectious chorus part was translated from English, the first language, and then recorded in seven more. Even though she only recorded the chorus in each language, it's not a long song and the chorus repeats five times throughout, so that still leaves a decent percentage of each one in the new language. The versions were all released together on the Avril Lavigne girlfriend international single, which, bringing us back full circle, is a CD that I checked out from a Japanese rental store, and the rest is history. Okay, here we go. The girlfriend international translation lineup is English, spanish, french, italian, portuguese, german, japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Wikipedia says there was also going to be a version in Hindi, but they scrapped that one after two failed attempts because, according to a quote from her manager, we tried Hindi twice but the diction and meter of how you sing in Hindi versus the Western rhythms just didn't match and we just couldn't pull it off. So they stopped at only eight languages. They were focusing on Asia because, also according to a CBC article, asia accounted for more than half of Avril's total music sales at the time of girlfriend's release. It also says Avril spent time working on getting her pronunciation right in each language. I have no real authority in any of the other languages, but, honestly, in her Japanese version the pronunciation is actually not bad at all. It's a bit choppy and stilted, but, to be honest, that's how the English of that chorus sounds to me anyway, and I've also heard tons of J-pop singers sing Japanese in very similar ways. Back when the album was released, mtv News put out a piece where they assembled some native speakers for each of Avril's versions and critiqued the translations and pronunciations. Well, while they were less generous about some of the Western pronunciations, their Japanese speaker agreed with me that the Japanese version isn't bad. Oh, before I play these versions, wikipedia also clued me in on one strange coincidence that I wanted to bring up. Avril Lavigne is mainly known as a musician, but she has acted a few times. Her first role was in an animated movie called Over the Hedge as the voice of an apostle named Heather. Funnily enough, when that movie was translated into different languages, the voice of Heather was done by Boa for the Japanese and Korean ducks in that singer's very first acting role as well, that's all. No big meaning behind that, just thought that was a fun parallel dimension. So, at long last, let me now play these different versions for you, as we've already heard it in English, I'll start with the Spanish version and the French version, italian, and then we've got Portuguese, german and Japanese, and then we've got the Spanish version and then we've got the English version. So I've already said, the Japanese sounds pretty good. The English version, of course, sounds good to me, and even though they were critical of some of her pronunciation in the MTV newsroom, I'm going to assume that it didn't hamper the song that much, based on the fact that she won the award for most addictive track at the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards and it was ranked the number one song of the year by MTV Latin America, which just leaves one version left Mandarin Chinese. This one's a little different. I've studied Mandarin a bit, but I am in no way any kind of an expert. Still, I can tell that there are some issues with Averil's Chinese on this and some of the chunks, well, they just sound super over-processed. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am fascinated by Averil taking a swing, this big, absolutely fascinated, but that Mandarin sounds crazy to me. Back to the MTV newsroom article. Their Mandarin speaker compliments her pronunciation in hitting the tones, which is a hard thing to keep in mind coming from a non-tonal language like English. In Mandarin there are four tones, meaning four different accent patterns that any syllable can have A falling tone, a rising tone, a high tone or a falling, then rising tone. Changing the tone of the syllable changes the word you're saying, so it's important to get those right. The MTV employee goes on to single out the line in English that goes I want to be your girlfriend, because in the Mandarin it sounds very chopped up and robotic here. Listen again. I suspect that's another function of having to hit the tones right on the syllables but not being able to connect them all in one string over the melody and tempo. So it sounds like they got Averil to correctly pronounce each syllable separately and then Frankenstein them together on the song's rhythm. But, scott, you say, can't you cut the woman some slack? She's in the middle of writing and releasing super popular music, touring the world and running some sort of fashion empire, while you simply look down on her from your ivory podcasting throne. And I'd say absolutely. You can only expect one person to do so much, and you can also only expect so much from an English speaker who's dealing with Mandarin Chinese for probably the first time and not only has to worry about the four tones but also being in key and on pitch while she does it for sure. And then you'd probably say and Scott, don't you also regularly get super strong urges to hire people on Fiverr and commission them to make music for you to use on the podcast? Sometimes by golly you'd be right again, I absolutely do so. I reached out to a Chinese singer on Fiverr and asked her to cover the Chinese version of the song, but to see if she could make sure the Chinese lyrics sounded really good this time. Well, I actually reached out to two, but the first one replied in quotes haha, it does sound cringe. And then that it was actually too cringe for her to sing and she wasn't interested. So I reached out to another Chinese singer and her cringeometer was apparently less sensitive because she agreed to it. When she delivered her version, she let me know she had changed the Chinese lyrics so they sound more natural, which is exactly the type of improvement I was hoping for. So now let's see if we've corrected the only flaw on this international single and come up with the good version of Girlfriend in Mandarin. Here's Kanari Alto singing her cover.

Speaker 3: 51:38

You're so fine, I want you mine. You're so delicious. I think about you all the time. You're so addicted. Don't you know what I could do to make you feel? Alright, Don't pretend I think you knew I'm damn precious and hell yeah, I'm the motherfucking princess. I could tell you like me too, and you know I'm right. She's like. So whatever you could do so much better, I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. I hate that girl. I need her. I'm in love with her. I can love her until I'm in love with you. I don't know if you like me or if you want to lie to me. I want to have the love you love me. I can see the way. I see the way you're looking at me, and even when you look away, I know you think of me. I know you talk about me all the time, again and again. So come over here, tell me what I wanna hear Better yet, make a girlfriend disappear. I don't wanna hear you say her name ever, again and again and again. She's like. So whatever you could do so much better. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. I hate that girl. I need her I'm in love with her. I can love her until I'm in love with her. I don't know if you like me or if you want to lie to me. I want to have the love you love me. In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger cause I can cause I can do it better. There's no other. So when's it gonna sink in? She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? What the hell you're not gonna do? Wish you all the good things done. What could you done? It's just a lie. Hey, hey you, you. I know you like me. No way, no way I want to lie to you. Hey, hey, you, you. I want to have the love you, love me.

Speaker 1: 54:42

It's beautiful. Kana really did a great job on this.

Speaker 3: 54:45

Hey, hey, you, you, I need a new one. Hey, hey, you, you, I can love you.

Speaker 1: 54:55

And with that, songs sung by the same singer in different languages become the next. That's weird. I was crunching all the show data through the data crunch-a-tron 5000, like GuyNormally do, but it says this experience is stuck processing at 99% and it's just showing me a spinning wheel. Animation Looks like something's missing One piece. That's still not quite complete, but we did everything, well, everything, except we tried Hindi twice, but the diction and meter of how you sing in Hindi versus the Western rhythms just didn't match and we just couldn't pull it off. Just couldn't pull it off. So I know what that missing 1% is. That's right, the unfinished Hindi version that Avril and her team abandoned back in 2007. Now I don't have the ability to go back in time and convince her not to give up, and I've never met Avril or anyone in her circle, so I have no ability to contact her in the present either. I do, however, have the ability to contact some very talented musicians in India who agree to not only translate but also sing Hindi lyrics. For our very own, very, first and very only one in existence the perfect show's bootleg version of Girlfriend by Avril Levine in Hindi. And so the perfect show would like to present the often-rumored, never-completed, long-lost Hindi version of Avril Levine's Girlfriend. This will finally complete the ancient set of nine sacred girlfriend versions and should unite the world once again in blissful divinity, usher in the girlfriend's aunt's and bring about the Avroclips.

Speaker 2: 57:19

Let's get this shit around to. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about.

Speaker 3: 57:36

Ha, ha tu tu bani teri basana Nei nei nei nei chai tu zi nei Ha ha tu tu bani. Sa bhi tu Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei Nei nei nei nei basana nirani Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana.

Speaker 2: 57:59

I can see the way. I see the way you look at me, and even when you look away, I know you're thinking me. I know you talk about me all the time, again and again, again and again. So come over here, tell me what you wanna hear. Better yet, make a girlfriend disappear. I don't wanna hear you say her name ever again and again, and again and again, cause she's like so whatever, and she can do so much better. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana, nei, nei, nei, nei chai tu zi nei. Ha ha tu tu bani sa bhi tu. Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei, nei, nei, nei, nei bai chai teri basana. Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana. In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger, cause I can cause, I can do it better. There's no other. So when's it?

Speaker 1: 59:05

gonna sink in. She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger Cause I can cause. I can do it better, there's no other. So when's it gonna sink in? She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana Nei nei nei nei chai tu zi nei. Ha ha tu tu bani sa bhi tu. Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei Nei nei nei bai chai teri basana. And with that song, sung by the same singer in a different language, that type of song becomes the next entry into the perfect tour, the index of perfect things. You can find a direct link to the perfect tour by going to perfectshowsite. You can also find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes on this episode's webpage. And usually the web pages for these episodes are pretty sparse. They have the episode, the show notes and links to the musicians, but this webpage will be way more involved. I wasn't going to play the whole songs that I used as examples here. I don't own any of them, to be clear, but I will embed the youtube videos for them on the webpage of this episode and you can head there if you want to listen to any of these cuts in full. I want to thank all the talented musicians on Fiverr who made the end of this episode possible. I continue to be impressed and amazed by the things that people create for me there, and those songs created by my Fiverr artists will be added to the perfect show youtube page and included in the list of videos on the webpage for this episode as well. This seems like the perfect time, then, to remind you that the perfect shows youtube channel is under the name perfectshowshow and you can connect on twitter or instagram with the same handle. This episode was recorded and mixed in Lake Tahoe, california. Subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the perfect show, a perfect rating or review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show once again. The perfectshow site is at perfectshowsite. That's S-I-T-E also. This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive. I have found many more examples. By the end of making this episode, then I had going into it, as I said, and I'm sure I've missed some great ones out there along the way too. So if you do know of a good one that I missed and would like to clue me in on it, well, that'd go perfectly in an email, along with any comments or music or other things, which you should send to perfectshowshow at gmailcom. Oh, and Avril Lavigne just released a new album in February called Love Sucks, with sucks, of course, spelled S-U-X, which is such a perfect Avril thing to do, but it's out now. My favorite tracks are currently Avalanche and deja vu. It's solid work. Check it out, by the way, for people who have been with me for a few episodes, do you remember that thing in the Dan song episode where I ordered multiple songs in case the first one fell through, but instead I got two songs and they were both worth listening to, so I found a spot to play the other one at the end of the episode instead, would you believe I did that again. Well, that first artist on five, or the one who said it was too cringe. She wrote me back with a counter offer that was double her normal singing price, and I agreed to her cringe tax. So now we have her version too. Here's Chloe Chan with her cover of Girlfriend in Mandarin she's so much better and we should get together now.

Speaker 3: 1:03:21

And that's what everyone talk about. Hey, hey, you, you, I don't like your girlfriend. Oh hey, no, I need your signal. Hey, hey, you, you, I'm gonna rush in and put you. Hey, hey, you, you, I know you're a fool. Oh, no way, no way, I'm not a good singer. Hey, hey, you wear out another new dress. Hey, hey, you, you, I don't like the way you look. I know you're talking face. Oh, I wanna just tell you no go, no go, no go. So come over here and tell me what I wanna hear better say oh hey you, I'm gonna rush in and put you. I'll never again look at you again. She's like so whatever you could do so much better, I think we should get together now. That's my son. Let me talk about you.

Speaker 1: 1:04:31

I wish you were your father. No way, she only has a single name. I'm not gonna let you know, and just remember whoever you are out there. I don't like your girlfriend and I think you need a new one. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

Speaker 2: 1:04:59

I'm gonna eat 58.

The Perfect Show is back with a new look and a new episode!

Scot dives into the video game world and puts a magnifying glass on a special spot from his time in Japan, the Ten Yen Arcade. Explore the world of bits and bytes with him in this episode all about arcades and playing games

Special thanks to:

Drew, Lee, and Shane, my video game playing friends.

Music from this episode by:

Cloud Cuddles - https://www.fiverr.com/cloudcuddles (who did the amazing chiptune cover of Otsuka Ai's 'Amaenbo' at the end of the episode.)

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

Bastreon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Igthun - https://www.fiverr.com/lgthun

Ismael Eldesouky - https://www.fiverr.com/ismaileldesouky

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

Songs: School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/school

Mall - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328

A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Helice_Awesome_Dance_Adventure_/a-calm-moment-to-remember-before-taking-the-dangerous-road

Beach - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/plage

Creo - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo

Song: Memory - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo/Dimension/Memory_1520

Rolemusic - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic

Song: Alamak - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/Pop_Singles_Compilation_2014/alamakmp3

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:26

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Tell me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I was never a really big video game guy, but there was a point in my life, when I was living in Japan, where video games were the core of a perfect experience for me. When I say I wasn't a big video game guy, I mean specifically the mainstream video game path that everyone my age seemed to have. I never had any of the Nintendo consoles, nes, super Nintendo and 64 Gamecube Wii none of those. I did have an old working Atari from a cousin's garage sale with a ton of games and Sega Genesis, but with only three games ever. I've had a PlayStation once I think it was a PlayStation 1 and an early Xbox, but I didn't own either one for longer than a couple weeks. Those are separate stories. So If I was going to go about playing a game now, I'd probably rather play a board game with people in person. If I'm going to play a game on my phone, it's probably an app version of a board game like Risk or Majon. I'm pretty basic. Now I do have a computer that I will download and play games on, along with all the other computer duties that I have it do, but that's a relatively recent, only since the start of COVID thing. So, yeah, I'm maybe not the typical video game guy. In fact, when I'm playing games now online and get frustrated, you can frequently hear me saying stuff like I hate video games and making plans to cut them out of my life. Basically, my ability to handle all the well just the normal stuff about video games is on the level of a 10 year old or younger, because I never really got used to dealing with it as a kid. I mean, that's my theory. Maybe I'm just a big baby man when it comes to video games, but hopefully the first thing Alright geography time. After college I moved to Japan, to Kita Kyushu, a city of about 1 million people in Fukuoka Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. So Kyushu is the southernmost of the four main islands in Japan. Hokkaido is the northernmost island. Below it is Honshu, the biggest and most central island of Japan. That's where Tokyo, osaka and Kyoto all are. Now Honshu is kind of an elongated island. It stretches pretty far north and south, but off its southeast side is the island of Shikoku and down south of Honshu is Kyushu. Kita Kyushu, the city I first lived in, is on the northern end of Kyushu. The Kita in Kita Kyushu is north or north Kyushu, so it's just on the other side of the water from the southernmost tip of the main island, honshu. In fact, and I know this from personal experience, if you are going home on the train late at night and fall asleep, you just might wind up missing your stop, going under the water between the islands and being awakened by a nice Japanese train conductor at Shimono Seki station on Honshu, then needing to make your way back down to Kyushu. The winter and spring were very mild in Kyushu, but in the summer the weather got hot. I was working in the public schools, and in Japanese public school there is a summer break, but it's not as long as the traditional break for US schools. It happens later in the summer and it's treated more like a mid-year break, how we do winter break, because the Japanese school year starts in April and ends in March. Once it really heated up, I was often in sweltering, unericonditioned classrooms during the hottest hours of the afternoon I call the classrooms sweltering. Like any of the other rooms were any different? They weren't. The heat was pervasive. I was really sweating those first few weeks. I remember being puzzled why no one else looked like they were having a hard time. And then, a few weeks or so into being in that heat all day, every day, my body sort of adjusted. I stopped sweating everywhere all the time and was pretty much normal like everyone else. Kita Kyushu is also where I learned about the fifth season of the year. Like I said, kyushu is down south in Japan and much farther south than anywhere I had grown up or lived in to that point. Latitude wise, it's about on the same level as LA, but it's an island environment. So that means, as the locals would explain to me, that there were five seasons there, not four. Fall goes into winter, which goes next into spring and then summer. That's all the same, but between summer and fall in Kyushu anyway, that's when it was to you the rainy season. It stayed as hot as summer, but added a heaping helping of humidity for good measure, setting the stage perfectly for the occasional typhoon that would come through. I never had school off for a snow day in Kyushu, but we had multiple days off for typhoons. What was new to me was how the weather didn't really change the heat. Where I grew up in Kansas it would get oppressively humid, but then after it rained, the air would clear out and feel lighter for a bit. In Kyushu, during the rainy season it would be at maximum humidity, downpour rain for like an hour and still be exactly as humid afterward, and it would usually rain downpours like that a few times a day every day. Stepping from air conditioning outside during Tsu-yu felt like hitting a wall. The difference was that noticeable. My first rainy season in Kyushu I was living in an apartment with a roommate and the place was fine, but we didn't have air conditioning. I was alternating weeks teaching at two different public schools and neither one of them had air conditioning either. I rode to work and then back home on my basic mama-charity Japanese bicycle again no air conditioning, and this was pretty much my regular weekday pattern. In the evening it wasn't so bad, but during the heat of the day it got to be 40-45 degrees Celsius, which is 104-113 degrees Fahrenheit, and practically everywhere you went was sweltering. My brain started making a mental map of the places along my roots, where you could get free AC, even just for a quick walkthrough, much like the mental map I made back when I first arrived to the places in the city where you could find a western toilet if you needed one, as opposed to the traditional Japanese toilet. Basically, information that could come in very handy for either myself or someone else in their time of need. In fact, the main places where we did get access to free air conditioning were retail establishments Some restaurants, big department stores, smaller ones were hit or miss, but it would mainly be places where you had to pay to be there in some form or another. Kokura Eki, the train station closest to where I lived, had a shopping center with a number of nice stores in AC, but they were pretty well tended by clerks who for some reason seemed to be more interested in helping you shop than just giving you space to cool off and avoid melting completely. Convenient stores were often well air conditioned, but you couldn't stay in one of those for too long without attracting even more attention than I already did as a non-Japanese person. I did try. I got pretty good at the whole pick the thing up and turn it around and be like oh, what's this item. Let me examine it very slowly. Ingredients, you say, Let me see what those are. Oh, a magazine rack? Better make sure I look through every option on there. Yeah, sometimes when you're hot, you got to do what you got to do. Near the station, though, just across a huge pedestrian plaza, was a mall called IME. Like the contraction, for I am IME, that's the name of the mall. That's Japan for you. But it was a really nice spot for shopping and eating that had recently been built, and there was a beautiful courtyard with an open central area inside of the building where you could even look down over all the floors. So this would have been a great spot to hang out and soak up some artificially cooled air, except for one small thing. The rumor I heard was that it was built on the site of an old Shinto burial ground and that the mall was cursed because of that. Now, I do not believe in curses, but if enough of your Japanese and non-Japanese friends decide that they do, you end up having to look for a different spot anyway. So the train station was out, the cursed mall was out, and this led to my friends and I exploring a bit. And on the other side of the pedestrian plaza, we found a towering building that was a little run-down but filled to the brim with different small shops and random businesses crammed into every level, accessible through one tiny elevator and presumably a set of stairs that I never saw. The stores and the levels had no real rhyme or reason, just businesses that could survive and attract clients to a beat-up building next to several fancier and more modern ones A small bookstore, a little cafe, a collectible store. But there, on one of the levels, sat the place that would become our air conditioning lifeline, our go-to cool-off and wind-down spot, the Ten Yen Arcade. Japan has tons of arcades. Like, imagine a place with a lot of arcades. Now, double that or maybe triple it, but yeah, a lot. Here's where my lack of familiarity with video games kicks into high gear. So please forgive any terminology blunders I make here, but a big arcade in Japan would have tons of cabinet games with regular joysticks, dozens of different games where instead of joysticks you use a guitar or a dance pad or a drum set, or a sushi table with a giant plastic cleaver yeah, that is one I saw once. Also, it would have tons of UFO catcher games, which is the Japanese name for the claw machines where you position your grabber claw and try to drop it down and grab a prize with it. Because there are so many arcades, there are homes for tons of video game franchises and several generations of the really popular games. Games numbered one higher than the last one, with a sign on them hyping what's new in this version, and it seemed like there were new ones of those replacing old ones nearly every time I turned around. What this also creates is a whole ecosystem of places where the games go after they're no longer the latest and greatest version of the block, like a plinko ball falling down and bouncing on pegs. A game machine in Japan will hit several levels before it gets all the way to the bottom. They may move around their original arcade a bit, from being in front and center at first to maybe back in a corner later, but whether they're updated with a newer version of themselves or something shiny or takes their place, eventually they leave the top shelf arcade. Mid-level arcades will snap up most of these, and then some might go to the entryways of Daiei grocery stores or the parking lot of a Don Quixote variety store. Like I said, there are lots of places for a video game machine in Japan to land on its way down to the bottom. One of the last stops they hit before they are shipped out of the country is the Ten Yen Arcade, and this is exactly the place I found in that stack of random shops, complete with its own big, beautiful, steadily chugging air conditioner. It's called the Ten Yen Arcade for the obvious reason that games inside all cost ten yen to play. So right now the exchange rate is 115 yen to the US dollar, so ten yen would be roughly 9 cents. In a new arcade the games would cost more like 100 to 200 yen per play. So ten yen to me felt like nothing If you haven't handled yen before. There are different denominations of bills, but the smallest bill is the thousand-yen note. So about the ten dollar bill? Everything under that is handled only in coins which come in one, five, ten, fifty, one hundred and five hundred yen varieties. The Juandama, or Ten Yen Coin, is the second largest coin after the five hundred and the only one with its unique bronze color. They had changed machines at the arcade that spit out Ten Yen coins, but Japan is also a way more cash-based society than the US and without a 25 yen coin in the currency mix, I actually wound up getting Ten Yen coins as change a lot, so after that first time I usually just saved up my change and brought the Ten Yen coins with me to the arcade. Maybe this is a good place to jump out and say as I've been working on the next chunk of episodes, I'm refining the theme of this show and instead of just telling stories about these perfect things or experiences, I'm going to see if there's a way to recreate them, either for myself, like in the Tiny Tense episode, or for others, like in the Perfect Road episode. And then also, after I run out of my experiences to share, I want to see how it goes replicating other people's nuggets of perfection too. As I was looking for ways to recreate this perfect experience, I ran across a 5-cent arcade named the oh Wow Nickel arcade in Fresno, california and I was going to be in Fresno, actually so I stopped in for a visit when I was down that way a few months back.

Speaker 3: 14:31

I'm going to clip my microphone on here. I'm wearing a mask, though, so it's a little weird. Alright, let's do this. Get 100 nickels. There they come.

Speaker 2: 14:47

Oh, that.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Games for only a nickel 5 cents. I mean by those numbers. I may have even found a place that was twice as perfect as a 10-yen arcade in Japan.

Speaker 2: 15:00

Oh, my God.

Speaker 3: 15:01

Oh, it's dropping Nickels, nickels. Alright, seems to be done. Now Pick up the ones that I dropped. Hand sanitizer here there.

Speaker 1: 15:21

Okay, sure, some games cost two or three nickels, but I wouldn't really know what was up unless I checked this place out.

Speaker 3: 15:27

Here's a punching thing. It takes three nickels. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, let's try the first one. Here we go Two, all right, three, sorry, wow. Oh, 898's the high I got 522. I'm pretty weak. All right, let's see what else we can do. All right. Old school games, fighting games.

Speaker 2: 16:17

That's what.

Speaker 3: 16:18

I'm looking for All right. Marvel vs Capcom takes two nickels, 10 cents, perfect. Let's try the right side. Maybe there we go. Let's see how this goes.

Speaker 2: 16:41

First off what.

Speaker 1: 16:45

I wandered around with my Styrofoam cup of nickels checking out all the games, playing anything that looked fun or interesting, but, being by myself, met no one to talk to, so oh, no, oh no. I wound up with long stretches like this one of me just playing a game.

Speaker 3: 17:09

All right, there it goes.

Speaker 1: 17:13

And also much shorter stretches like this one.

Speaker 3: 17:17

Galaga is fun. One nickel, I don't really play Galaga much, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, I'm bad and I'm dead, all right. Well, I'm not good at Galaga.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I cut it way down for the show, but I was there for about an hour on that $5 and played a lot of games.

Speaker 3: 17:43

This backman solid Donkey Kong there there. Oh, hungry, hungry, Hippos, dance, dance Revolution. Oh, no, not that, just a similar Interesting Daytona USA. Daytona USA, cruisin' World. Yeah, I'll play that for two nickels, absolutely All right. Sitting in the seat. One One, there it is All right. Oh, that's cruise Japan, right, we gotta go to Japan.

Speaker 1: 18:29

All right, man. Most of the games were old, not all were good, few didn't even work. But this is a place that is trying to blow you away with quantity, not quality. There you go.

Speaker 3: 18:39

This is a little hound game, man Ready set go and enough.

Speaker 1: 18:45

We're up and running to keep me playing and entertained for an hour you can do it.

Speaker 3: 18:52

I can second All right, done, done with that, what else is?

Speaker 2: 19:03

there.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Alien game, ski ball machine Shooting, basketball game. That's out of order. Little kid stuff. Well, that's it, let's go All right. Well, that's, oh wow, actually better than I thought it was going to be. You know, that's fine, it's not. It's not really what I was not really what I was looking for. But then again I didn't really think it was going to be, and, yeah, not bad.

Speaker 1: 19:49

I went during a cooler part of the year so I wasn't really testing any air conditioning component of this experience. The games were older, how you'd expect a lot of classic arcade games and others that seemed like leftovers that ended up there somehow. But it was nice and I had a good time. I wouldn't, however, call it perfect. Even though it was super cheap video gaming, it lacked some major pieces of that 10 year and arcade experience in Kyushu like being there by myself, and I thought there must be better ideas for recreating that experience than this. But back to the 10 year arcade the space was cramped but there were no clerks caring whether you were actively playing or not, only open doors and, amazingly, artificially chilled air. It was just the place I had been searching to hide, and when the days got their hottest, I put out the word to my roommate and two of our other friends and we decided to meet up there on a future afternoon after teaching. Meanwhile I soaked up all the cool air I could while I perused the games that they had. I figured we'd mainly be playing fighting games like Street Fighter, because that was practically the only thing I had experience with, and playing them the same way I did back home too, which meant mostly button mashing and crossing your fingers. But when we actually got together and started hitting up the machines, two games far and away outpaced all the others in terms of getting the majority of both our time and our dimes Our Juendamas and our Tamas. Nope, this is where I learned about Mobile Suit Gundam or Kiro-Senshi Gundam, which is part of the people in giant robots fighting other people in giant robots. Genre Gundam was everywhere in Japan on the toy shells and the magazine racks, tv movies and, apparently, in video games. Off to one side in the Tenian Arcade, over in a little cove behind the base deray of air conditioners, were eight machines connected to each other with built-in stools to sit on. It was the Gundam Arcade game. It was amazing. You chose your Gundam robot, picked your special primary and backup weapons and then you were dropped into a 3D city environment and tasked with finding and blowing up the other team of Gundam robots. Since there were four people in our group, we could frequently play as a full squad that seems like such a weirdly intense term for friends playing a game, but whatever and then we'd often play against another squad of four, usually Japanese junior high or high school students in the after-school versions of their uniforms, which meant maybe a missing tie or rolled up sleeves, earrings or spiked hair that wouldn't have flown in the classroom. And they were also there in the afternoon doing exactly the same thing. We were avoiding the heat. The four of us in my group were myself, my roommate Trell from Atlanta, ken from Alaska and Cesar from Mexico City. We all worked for the same education company and we're all English teachers at junior, high and high schools in the city, so we got along with our opponents pretty naturally. We also got completely mollywopped by them at first, but at only 10-year-old in a play, and since we could be posted up there for hours at a time, we slowly got better at the game, as well as getting better at friendly and not so friendly trash talk in Japanese. Now let me break away from the 10-year-old arcade again for a moment and tell you that there were lots of other arcades I would go to with my friends. Like I said, there were many levels of arcade in the Japanese arcade ecosystem to accommodate each phase of the game's life. Another level of arcade well, arcade, and then some, was JJ Club. Jj Club was a place where you got a wristband, going in and got it scanned on the way out, and then you paid for all the time that you were inside. I think it was 100 yen per 15 minutes. But then everything inside, all the games and activities, were free. The inside of JJ Club, which was a franchise that had a ton of locations across Japan. The inside of each one was slightly different. I don't remember JJ Clubs for the video games so much. I mean they had the usual assortment and a couple of odd ones sometimes. Okay, I do remember playing a skiing game where you race the person next to you down a virtual mountain but you're standing on these moving platforms that look kind of like chopped off skis. But I think of JJ Club more for the other activities inside, like pool tables, an indoor volleyball court, some small basketball courts, a rock climbing wall at one, and then there was an entire floor of books to read, ping-pong tables and a soda fountain slash slushy machine. When I moved up to Hokkaido later on, there were still JJ Clubs that I went to, but I also started seeing a place called Round 1 popping up in those same cities and they were usually in larger spaces like, I think, often closed down shopping centers. Round 1 had pretty much everything I described about JJ Club, along with roller skating, fishing where you could catch actual fish. Theoretically I never did that one because I couldn't imagine what I would do carrying a fish in a bag or whatever for the rest of my time. But you could do it. You could also do curling ride, a mechanical bull batting cages. There was a mini golf course, mini motorcycles that you would ride around the roller skating rink. When they shut it down specifically for the mini motorcycles every few hours, it was unbelievable. I mean, obviously, having someone else there to play with you is huge to the experience. I never went to a JJ Club or Round 1 alone. There were always other people with me. Same with the Tenian Arcade. That was one thing I didn't get at the Nickel Arcade in Fresno, so I called up my friend Drew.

Speaker 3: 25:56

Hey Scott, hey Drew.

Speaker 1: 25:58

There's an arcade called High Scores in Alameda, california, and you pay to get in and then stay for however much time you bought, and inside all the arcade games are free, like how JJ Club in Japan was. This place was only arcade games, but that's perfect, because that's all I was really looking for.

Speaker 3: 26:17

Thanks for doing this with me. I was figuring we'd just go in and play some video games old school style and just have a good time. That's really it.

Speaker 2: 26:26

It's going to be easy.

Speaker 3: 26:27

I haven't been to an arcade in years. This is really nice for me, man.

Speaker 4: 26:31

How you doing today Good.

Speaker 3: 26:33

I wanted to get two one hour tickets to the arcade?

Speaker 4: 26:37

Sure thing. So, guys, most of the machines here are going to start up automatically if you just hit the one or two player start button. Okay, you see a yellow button down on the point door. You just want to press that first added credit and then you can hit the start button. We've got several machines like Furgood Time over here, zalada. There's a couple other ones in there that are multi-caged, so they play a whole bunch of games on them, not just arcade games. We've got console NES, super NES, sega Genesis. So if you're looking for a game in particular, just let me know, okay, thanks, thanks yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:08

This is actually my first time meeting Drew in person. I was a little nervous. We had connected early on during the pandemic and a text thread with a mutual friend and had played computer games together online, but this was our first time seeing each other in real life.

Speaker 3: 27:23

You want to just take a look around? Yeah, oh shoot, I didn't know there was a Super.

Speaker 2: 27:28

Smash Brothers arcade Whoa Okay.

Speaker 3: 27:30

I'll play that a bunch, yeah yeah. What is this Pac-Man Battle Royale? Alright, you a Pac-Man man, I am.

Speaker 1: 27:44

Just like at the Nickel Arcade, we bounced around and hit up any game that caught our attention.

Speaker 3: 27:49

Well, we can alternate pick and stuff if you want to, if you see stuff you want to go for.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Whatever?

Speaker 3: 27:55

Let's try a game you want to try. Alright, the straight up old Donkey Kong. I've never played this. Old Donkey Kong. Let's play it. Is it two player? Yeah, okay, you know I switch in and out. There's only one button jump. You just have to avoid. Really so Donkey Kong's rude. He takes our girlfriend up to the top of this thing and then he throws barrels at us and we have to jump over them. There's a place to get a hammer if you get up high enough, but I usually die.

Speaker 2: 28:26

So Donkey.

Speaker 3: 28:27

Kong's a bad guy. Donkey Kong's a total bad guy, absolutely Wow, I'm going to go up here. Oh, oh, I need to get this hammer.

Speaker 1: 28:40

We played a ton of games. Both of us got to introduce the other two some games and we had a great time. It was way more fun playing games with Drew than it was going solo. Before I edited out a lot of the audio that was just us playing games, but we stayed there a while.

Speaker 3: 28:54

Alright, I don't know how much time we got. You want to try any stuff in here? Let's go in here. You want to try the?

Speaker 2: 29:11

shooting one, let's do it.

Speaker 3: 29:13

Alright, let's do it. We're shooting aliens, or?

Speaker 2: 29:16

wait, are we doing maximum force or area 51?

Speaker 3: 29:20

I don't have any Either way. Maybe area 51. We got to kill those aliens. Beginning yeah.

Speaker 4: 29:39

Oh, my gosh dude, I have played this game.

Speaker 3: 29:42

I have played this game, dude. I have not seen this in more than a decade.

Speaker 1: 29:48

It turns out that, even though I am not good at video games, I am also not good at being conversational and present while I am video gaming either, so I would probably be a terrible Twitch streamer.

Speaker 3: 30:01

What about the helicopter? Oh wow, this one has like a bunch. What's this one? It's like I think this is the emulator he was talking about where it has a bunch of things. Does it have my favorite? No way, wait a minute. How do I? It's alphabetized right.

Speaker 2: 30:29

D, f, D B. No okay, Ultimately.

Speaker 3: 30:34

I was looking for Bomberman. If I could find it on this, that would be like my Holy Grail. Yeah, no, okay, cool.

Speaker 1: 30:45

So remember how I said, there were two games that we really got into at the Tenian Arcade? Well, one was Gundam, but the other one was just a single unassuming cabinet directly diagonal to the wall of air conditioning, holding a simple four-player game called Bomberman. I guess Bomberman is a Nintendo staple, but back to me not being a video game kid, this was my introduction to the game. If you're not familiar with it either, bomberman is a game where players start off in different corners of a square map and there are blocks separating them from each other. When the timer starts, you run around and drop bombs near the blocks to blow them up, collect any power-ups inside and make your way toward the middle of the map and the other players. Using power-ups over the course of the round, each player can get more bombs, make their bombs affect a larger area when they explode, get the ability to move faster all sorts of fun things. The rules are simple, though. If you get hit by a bomb blast even your own you're out and you play until there's only one player remaining. The end of the round becomes a fast-paced, chaotic frenzy of trapping each other and escaping giant bomb blasts. Bomberman might be the most fun I've had playing a video game in my life. If Gundam was where we went to trash talk with Japanese players, then Bomberman was where we went to trash talk with each other. The rounds were only two minutes, but to win the match you had to get three victories. That meant if each of us put in 10 yen and we all got two wins apiece before someone got a third, we were playing nine games, so like about 20 minutes on that 10 yen and we were all getting better at roughly the same rate. So no one really dominated our match and an even spread of wins like that happened pretty frequently. 30 cents an hour for incredible fun and amazing air conditioning in the heart of Kokora that's a pretty unbeatable deal. A perfect place to hide from the heat.

Speaker 3: 32:38

Leo Geo Press it. Oh, this plays 100 plus games. Hold on Really, for 10 seconds to see the menu. Hey, I've played this game. Hold on a second, I get to see the menu. If I hold this, oh, there's like a menu and stuff.

Speaker 5: 32:57

I don't know that's what it says Okay On Leo Geo multi-video system, An SK.

Speaker 3: 33:02

That was like Bomberman. Are you kidding me? Let's do it Bomberman. Hold on a second I want to see what else is here. Dude, if Bomberman's on here, that's like the holy grail for me. Okay, Rubble Dude, that's crazy. I can't believe. I looked it up on an arcade place looking for Bomberman arcades and I couldn't find one. Okay, Bomberman number 10, that's it. Oh my gosh, it's probably old, old school Bomberman, but that's okay, it's a pretty old game dude. This looks old. It's going to be cool. Yeah, it is Well. The game, the core of Bomberman, is so simple. You're just dropping bombs and walking away from them. You know. That's all right. That's in Spanish, that's weird, oh it is in Spanish. Cuegos solo con su. So do you start? This is older than the version I played. Choose the place in which word you want to play. Are you in?

Speaker 2: 34:11

With who do you want to play?

Speaker 3: 34:14

Oh, you can move too. Okay, I'm going to try.

Speaker 2: 34:16

This is a regular Bomberman.

Speaker 3: 34:19

Who's this guy? All right, so I think the same thing goes, we go, we drop bombs.

Speaker 2: 34:25

Dude, look at me. I'm camouflaged the flames make you get longer the skates make you go faster.

Speaker 3: 34:34

This is actually. It's wild. What's with the arrows on?

Speaker 2: 34:40

there, yeah, it's really old school.

Speaker 3: 34:42

It's nice, oh flames.

Speaker 1: 34:50

Now, the version I found here was an older generation of Bomberman and entirely in Spanish. That was on an emulator with a ton of games that had been placed into a cabinet. But this Bomberman didn't really remind me of the one I played back in Japan. To be honest, it was a bit janky of a version to begin with and I'll admit, bomberman also lacks a bunch when there are only two players instead of four.

Speaker 3: 35:15

This game is great, man Dude, it's so fun.

Speaker 1: 35:17

I know, I know I was just crowing about having two players for these games, but like with a lot of games, board games and video games that, like changing the number of people playing can really change the dynamic of the game. Game developers try to compensate for this with computer players, but even the best AI player falls short compared to playing with real people.

Speaker 3: 35:42

I think maybe we should skedaddle. We should skedaddle. Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, you skated a little longer. That was fun, dude, it was man. I hit everything kind of long behind. I can't believe I found a Bomberman. That was ridiculous and I lost it over and over again. Thank you, thank you. Get some of that you too.

Speaker 2: 36:00

Thank you All right, all right.

Speaker 1: 36:08

High scores was really fun. I had a great time playing games with Drew, but at the same time, it was still missing some central aspect of that 10-yen arcade that I was trying to recreate A dynamic that's just not going to be the same with only one or even two players. I searched for both Gundam and Bomberman online. I found a version of what looks like it could be the Gundam game I played on Steam, but it's like $70 and I can't totally be sure if it's the right game. Also, gundam is my second choice. Anyway, my first choice was always going to be Bomberman, and I happened upon a version of that on Steam as well, called Super Bomberman R Online. It looked pretty much exactly how I remembered the version we used to play, so I downloaded it. It's a free game to play, but I shelled out $10 for the premium version so I could host a private game with people. And then I asked a group of online friends if we could play Bomberman one night. Oh, I found out. This game is also on the Nintendo Switch, so you can find it there if you have one of those.

Speaker 4: 37:09

I literally don't have any idea what's going on.

Speaker 1: 37:12

right now it's about to drop us down in separate spots on the map and you put a bomb down by hitting space and you run away from your bomb because it's going to blow up. And you do that over and over again to blow up the block and get power ups and then also to try and attack each other when we get through all the blocks that are between us. It'll take a little bit of getting used to, but once you get used to it it'll make a lot of sense.

Speaker 5: 37:43

And shortly try to blow up the other people, not yourself.

Speaker 1: 37:45

Two of these voices should be familiar Mine and Drew's from earlier in this episode.

Speaker 3: 37:51

Hey Scott, hey Drew.

Speaker 1: 37:53

The other two are Shane and Lee. Shane and Lee go way back and we all play video games together online from time to time.

Speaker 5: 38:02

Can I be green? Is anybody else green? It was all.

Speaker 2: 38:07

How do you change your color?

Speaker 3: 38:11

Oh, you can change the bomb skin. You can change that. Yeah, it's dope.

Speaker 5: 38:23

But I mean, yeah, the original was. I think it was an AES game.

Speaker 3: 38:28

Oh, look at that.

Speaker 5: 38:35

Oh, this is sick. And the second Bomberman that I know of, anyway, was Bomberman 64, and at the time it was an Nintendo exclusive. Well, maybe it had on like Gameware play.

Speaker 2: 38:50

Did you want that? No, I think you did.

Speaker 4: 38:54

So basically we're getting resources like in Fortnite.

Speaker 1: 38:56

Yeah, we're getting power-ups, we're getting better weapons, we're upgrading our bomb. Back once again to me not being a video game guy. I didn't start playing computer games online with friends until the pandemic started and everyone was stuck in their houses, but it's been one of the regular things during this. That has helped me keep it mostly together most of the time, or maybe somewhat together some of the time.

Speaker 2: 39:36

Whatever, oh no.

Speaker 1: 39:48

After a bit of getting oriented to the game, especially since the controls are so simple, it was really easy for us to have random conversations while we played, the kind of unplanned spitballing discussions that are nothing really but also are everything Shamed throughout. The hypothetical scenario where, if you get a room and then you could plunk down three arcade machines in it to own and play whatever, what are you picking? I mean, I mean like the extended machines, like arcade machines if I get three, this is definitely one I think I also might want a street fighter game yep, that's on there, yeah, yeah, the turtles, the turtles. I was gonna say either the turtle or I have another soft spot that might really be out there. Yeah, the four player x-men game where you could be colossus yes, yeah, and and and I like my car uh-huh

Speaker 2: 40:41

uh-huh I came we're feeling it.

Speaker 5: 40:44

We're on the same page here she's paining.

Speaker 4: 40:50

I know because we worked in an arcade circus.

Speaker 5: 40:53

You know the best how I ever had I if I could make a third of the money I do now to do that job, I would quit my job right now we should do it, shane, we should, we should go back and work I would so do it. That was the.

Speaker 3: 41:06

I'm so sad that it's not there oh, no, oh, this poison makes me really slow.

Speaker 5: 41:13

Come over here, drudin, now it's yours oh no friend that worked at chucky and he says he got kicked in the nuts. Oh, I got kicked in the nuts, man. Oh yeah, but it was still worth it. That was the best job ever only one problem, shane, you get kicked in the nuts no, that part, that part sucks, but you just had to guard them.

Speaker 3: 41:36

I work up man I think I killed the game.

Speaker 5: 41:38

I'm sorry that's okay, I started again all right, creating room.

Speaker 3: 41:42

All right, I think I'm gonna be pink this time I'm not holding.

Speaker 5: 41:46

I'm gonna stick with green.

Speaker 3: 41:47

I'm a green dude it's got good suggestion man this is a fun game.

Speaker 1: 41:52

I love this game. I mean, I just played it over and over again. The tenian arcades do still exist, tucked away in larger cities. Uh, I did a google search in japan just now and a few popped up here and there. I remember being in tokyo on a work trip and finding a tenian arcade in the basement of a skyscraper one night with a group of friends. But we had to look it up intentionally and search it out even then. So they are findable, just probably a bit off the beaten path all right.

Speaker 5: 42:21

So here's the here's a couple. If we're gonna expand on games in our personal arcades, I have a couple that I really want yeah I'm gonna go beyond the three limit here. I'm gonna say I have a whole room for all the consoles that I want, I want, I want asteroids, I want asteroids and I want and I want pacman, I want donkey kong jr. Not donkey kong, but donkey kong jr why jr? you know what it's because it was. There was a pizza joint next to the the house that my mother moved into and my parents got divorced. He lived there for like two and a half years and that pizza joint was like two doors down and I went there every day to buy a garlic bread pizza for four dollars and it was delicious and they had that game and I played it waiting for my garlic bread pizza, and so like there's, it's like some of my happiest memories of childhood and so wanted for that reason I want it. I remember waiting for my garlic bread pizza for four dollars and playing that game over and over, and I loved it.

Speaker 3: 43:31

It's great I want to change.

Speaker 1: 43:35

I want to change the three consoles I would have in my thing. You made me think go so I would keep bomber man, I would put in cruising, like one of the cruising usa or cruising world, whatever the oh my god, I have a story that, like the driving game, I'll put one of those in, oh my god. And then I would put in the taiko no tatsujin, the taiko game from japan, where you're playing the taiko drum oh, that's a good one.

Speaker 5: 44:04

That's a really good one. Oh, that's a hard one to be. You can't say no to that one, jen. Yeah so good it's satisfying to give that a good. Oh yeah, that's so good. That's such a great one. There's so much fun to be on for that one and that's one of those things we like that, like the in-house peripheral just doesn't make the grade. Like you got it. You got to get the thing in the arcade. Yeah, you got to get the big old thing.

Speaker 1: 44:26

Yeah, man, that's good stuff while researching for this episode, I came across an article on kotakucom that said that in one decade, from 2006 to 2016, 10 000 arcades closed down in japan, making the number go from 24 000 to 14 000. It also explained the domino effect of tax raises on the arcades. The owners collectively decided that they had to stick with the one coin model. For instance, they wouldn't consider going from a 100 yen, which is one coin, to 110 yen game, two coins. Or in the 10-yen arcades case, that would be going from a 10-yen game, which is one coin, two, and 11-yen game, two coins. The arcade owners in the video game industry opted just to absorb the tax and take slimmer margins over and over, and that's not even accounting for inflation, not to mention. It's a different landscape when everyone has access to a device with a constantly refreshing supply of new games in their house or even in their pocket, when you can connect to friends and strangers through hd video across the globe while you play, then how long can a house of aging cabinet screens and joysticks really last? A japan times article reported that the official number was only 4 2022 by 2019, and that number was pre-covid, which I can't imagine helped the arcade industry there. If things are this on the decline even in japan one of the last holdouts for the video game arcade they may be on their way to extinction for good, which would be a real shame. Of all the experiences I tried for this episode, playing games online comes the closest to taking me back to that time, back to playing games for ten yen a pop at that wonderfully chilly arcade in the height of the sweltering kyu-shu summer, making friends, having relaxed conversations and the occasional panic attack, laughing fit or both so. And with that, the ten yen arcade in japan becomes the next entry into the perfectorium, the index of perfect things. Don't forget. You can find a direct link to the perfectorium by going to perfect show dot site slash perfectorium. You can also find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes or on this episode's web page. I want to thank drew, shane and lee for letting me use the audio of us in this episode and also just for being fun guys to play games with. This episode was recorded in fresno, alameda and oakland, california, and mixed up marina studios in oakland. Subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop. The perfect show, a perfect rating, a review? Please do. It's easiest way to support the show once again. The perfect show site is at perfectshowsite. That's s-i-t-e. Email any comments, music or other things to perfectshowshowcom. Connect on twitter, instagram and youtube to the name perfect show show. And remember if someday, decades from now, you find yourself looking at an exhibit in the smithsonian learning all about what arcade games were like before they went extinct, and they happen to have a playable version of that four-player x-men game and I happen to be there at the exact same time as you, I called, did some colossus. Anyway, until next time, I'm scott moppin, and thanks for listening to the perfect show.

Speaker 4: 50:12

I'm gonna eat 58.

The Perfect Show is back with our biggest episode yet about the tiniest thing we've covered so far.

Scot chases down the Tiny Display Tents that used to be in stores, and trying to find out what happened to them takes him on a tiny adventure in this episode. If you've ever marveled at one of those miniature camping set-ups you are not alone, this episode is for you, and anyone who wants to join the fun.

Special thanks to:

Chelsea Hinkson, Ben Reburn, and Dr. Carla Marie Manly, who you can find at https://drcarlamanly.com/

Music from this episode by:

Shawn Korkie - https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

Bastreon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Ben Reburn - https://www.bandlab.com/benreburn

Freeadmusic.com - http://www.freeadmusic.com/

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

Kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 2: 0:22

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as one of these little nuggets of perfection. There was a time back when I was in high school, or maybe even before, when I would go out to a store for something the one I'm thinking about right now is Target, but it could have been one of any number of department stores or sporting goods stores and before leaving with whatever I came to get, I would take a short detour over to the camping section and check out the tents they had for sale. Now, I wasn't ever needing to buy a tent, I didn't even really like camping all that much, a point that was repeatedly confirmed through Boy Scouts but the draw for me was that they showed you what the full-size tents would look like all put together, by having miniaturized, fully assembled versions of them on display, which welcomed you to kind of like look all around them and inspect that model's features and details tiny stitching like tiny flaps, little tiny rain flies, tiny mesh doors with tiny zippers All the features of the Big Tent there in perfect miniature. I would walk back to visit these tents on my shopping trips, like going to check in on a friend's pet that I secretly think loves me more than them. But this perfect little row of display tents, each one slightly different tents for four people or six people, tents with extra brooms or tiny tents with tiny vents for when it gets hot. There was something intangibly pleasant about walking through this shrunken retail campsite, zipping flaps open and peering down inside. So for this episode I will be exploring the perfection of these little, tiny display tents, as well as when they vanished and where they went. For a long time it was something that I kept to myself, a private joy of mine, that I wouldn't talk with anyone else about. Because why would I? It's not like it was embarrassing, it was just something that would hardly ever just bring up in natural conversation. But when it did, I found out that I was far from alone in my fascination. One trip, with a friend I think, I started making up some reason to venture back to the tiny tents and my friend was like dude, yeah, of course those things are awesome. In fact, pretty much every time I've broached the subject with other people, I get this rush of enthusiasm spilling out back to me almost uncontrollably, like people start gushing and telling me that they love these tiny tents too, almost like they were just waiting for someone else to break the ice and get the conversation rolling. Researching for this episode, I found that my personal experience echoes that of tons of other people. Online there are Reddit threads filled with people waxing poetic and remembering how much they always loved these tiny display tents. These messages usually include some version of, and all this time I thought I was the only one. I mean, it was seriously hard to find information on the tiny display tents themselves, sometimes due to all the different comments and results that were just people gushing in random ways over the internet about how much they love these things. The last time I remember seeing these in person was probably around 2009 or 2010, just after I moved back from Japan, and I saw them in various stores here in the Bay Area, like Target or REI, which is a big outdoor store that is here that I didn't have where I grew up. I was even ready to try and haggle to own one, and I remember asking a few different store employees about that possibility, but all of them told me it's really something that they couldn't sell, and the only time they can sell them or get rid of them is when they stopped selling that model of tent, and at that point the timing on that was pretty unpredictable, and employees themselves also usually know when that happens first and get first dibs on it, which totally makes sense. So then, about a year or so after that I think, I noticed that they were gone from those two store chains and I stopped seeing them or being able to find them anywhere else. I mean, it's hard to put a pinpoint on when you stop seeing something, because it's only after a while of not seeing it that you really noticed that it hasn't been around for a while, but I feel like it was probably around the 2011-2012 time that I noticed that I just hadn't been seeing these and I wasn't seeing them anywhere, but I don't think I really questioned it. To be honest, the tiny tent seemed like the product of a past era. Now I was imagining interactive web pages where you can view, zoom or spin digital recreations of the tents, lessening the need to have physical displays anymore. Over the 10 years since then, web development has only gotten more capable and digital displays are more widely used, so it would make total sense to me if everything had gone digital. Every tiny display tent had to be made individually, and then it's really only useful for one retailer in one location. Meaning scaling up that process also directly scales up all the work for the tent makers. A digital copy, however, once it's built and deployed online, it can just be accessed by any customer or retailer anywhere in the world at the same time. So hopping onto websites for the biggest tent manufacturers, that's what I expected to find, but they seem instead to be focused on a good amount of photos and videos showing and describing the tents. I didn't really find any digital spinnable models like I had imagined at all. I did reach out to one of them, coleman, through their contact page just to ask about the old physical tiny display tents and why they weren't around anymore. I wasn't holding my breath for a response. I mean, they're a big company. So I spent a bit of time also searching the internet for alternate options to see what other ways you could buy a tiny tent the kind like I grew up seeing. There were some on eBay, a few genuine tiny display tents, but they were selling for about as much, or even more, than full-size tents cost, even right now. I just looked these up to be sure that they're still there. It seems to be a route that's always going to be open, as long as you're willing to pay the price for a ticket. I love these in theory, but I just couldn't justify spending $1 to $200 on one of the tents just for this episode, so I continued my search. I actually ended up finding a few places that sell brand new small tents in this vein, one of which was TinyTentscom. Reading the About Us page on the TinyTentscom website, I discovered yet another pocket of store display tent fans, but they had actually gone out and created a product around it to allow others to get and own something we always were only ever able to visit in the stores. Now, from the look of it, these were a little different than the classic store display tents because they're designed for the purpose of being purchased and assembled by the consumer, whereas the other display tents were specifically designed to be perfect tiny replicas of that full-size tent for each one. Now, as far as I know, these TinyTents that I was looking at were designed to be built just based on their own thing, and they're not adapted down from a full-size tent which already existed. So I happened to discover them just as they were releasing a new model of tent and it was at a price point I could manage, so I went ahead and bought one. I just had to wait for them to ship it to me. But that actually brings us to. We have a sponsor, which means I get to do my first ever ad spot. I bought the tent using some birthday present money, so this episode is proudly brought to you by Birthdays. Birthdays Is your main problem with Christmas that it happens to everyone at the same time. Would you like a lot more attention with no pressure to share the spotlight? Then you need birthdays. Like a selfish Christmas, you get all to yourself. Birthdays Make other people all celebrate you instead of everybody celebrating the time together. Don't even limit it to the day itself. Be one of those people who announces that you require special attention for the entire week or even month. You were born Talking too loud. It's my birthday. If you can the pool birthday. Make a fool of yourself at a concert. Birthday in two and a half weeks baby. So if you are someone who has been born at any point in time, then this is a message just for you. Okay, reading the ad copy and here's the call to action For those of you who have been on the fence about having a birthday up until now give it a go Sometime this year. See if you can't make the time to have a birthday, I highly recommend it. Use the promo code PERFECT at checkout. Okay, also, so outside of this joke, yeah, this is where I was going to tell you to go to birthdaycom to enter the promo code. But I figured I should probably check through to see if that was already a real domain. And it is. But it's a parked domain for sale with a place to name your price. So I put in an offer pretty high by my standards $300, but clearly not enough to persuade whoever owns it. So I felt like my $300 was probably safe. But who knows right, I was safe. It turned out very safe. In fact, I didn't know just how safe I was until I got the counter offer back and their request and minimum wasn't the $300 I offered, but they started at $3 million, yeah, 3 million. So birthdaycom remains unbought for now. Anyway, now back to the show. So in the meantime, while waiting for my delivery, I continued to poke around looking for why I and others are so attracted to these tiny tents. When something is so widespread, I start to wonder if there's something more than just the tiny tents being cute. So I got in contact with Dr Carla Marie Manley, a clinical psychologist, podcast host and author, who agreed to talk with me for the show and helped me try to understand some of the things going on below the surface with this widespread fascination with miniature objects. I was going to say first, I was wondering if you could introduce yourself with your name and give your title please.

Speaker 3: 11:34

Absolutely. I'm Dr Carla Marie Manley. I'm a practicing clinical psychologist and wellness expert in Sonoma County, california. I'm also an author with three books, and my latest one is Date Smart and my first one is Joy from Fear. So that's a little bit about me.

Speaker 2: 11:52

Welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for talking with me about this episode. I'm actually I've been making an episode about tiny tents, the little, tiny display tents that I would see in stores or at different places. That kind of were the models of what the big tent would look like full-sized Well. So I was trying to figure out what it is about tiny stuff or miniature things that kind of speaks to us or draws us in, what sort of things would be behind that.

Speaker 3: 12:29

Absolutely. I think there are so many levels to it. And so, for example, when we see something little, whether it's the, let's go with the miniature tent, right, and we're seeing that tent. So on a practical level, we're able to look at that tent and say, hmm, here are the proportions, here's the size, here's the shape, I can envision having that and doing something with it, or not. So, on a practical level, there is that piece that lets us look at it and see does it work for our life? On another level, and actually many levels, tiny items, I believe, take us to a place of nostalgia, to childhood, when we played with tiny versions of tools, of cars, of dolls, of hammers, things that we couldn't manipulate, we weren't strong enough to, or we couldn't afford at these different times in our lives, or simply were too small to be able to handle right. And so, as we have as adults, we can look at these items and say this is really interesting. Interestingly enough, we're approaching the holidays and you see people with tiny objects everywhere, right, Miniatures on their trees, miniature this, miniature that, and that's another piece where we see that tiny objects give us the ability to hold on to and perpetuate memories from childhood forward. So if it's somebody having a little train installation under their tree or something like that, it's an opportunity to say you know, I can't afford, nor do I want a full sized train, you know, buzzing around my property. But once a year I can bring out this cute little train or this village or this little you know set of animals or even a nativity set and be able to almost be transported to another place and time just by a mini. So you can see, even as I'm talking about, it many people they're very soothed and I remember growing up my sisters I had lots of older sisters and they would unpack all of these mini Christmas items. Just so much work, but it gave them such a sense of being grounded and soothed.

Speaker 2: 14:48

So I was also trying to think about this from a few different angles and I wanted to run a couple of my thoughts by you and see what you see, what you thought about that. But I was thinking about in the world of animals, the way I feel like around large animals versus around small animals. I think small animals give me a sense of ease where I don't feel threatened at all and it's not like an object would threaten me. But I think I was wondering if feeling larger than a thing kind of makes me have a sense of ease where I don't feel in any way threatened. I don't know how to put that into a better phrase. The other direction I tried to think of was in the opposite, because it hasn't been a number of times, but sometimes if I'm around really massive objects, like large geological things or big city buildings, I get a sense of perspective where I feel kind of insignificant in sort of a healthy way, sort of a humbling way, and I wonder if that works in reverse, sort of kind of makes you feel significant, or if I'm just now inventing completely.

Speaker 3: 15:59

I think you're absolutely onto something when you are, for example, I can't remember where I was, but there was a Lego city around us. Of all of these, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge was done in Legos, the Eiffel Tower was done in Legos. So when you're, you know, underneath the real Eiffel Tower, you're going, wow, it's magnificent, it's so huge, I'm so small in comparison. And then you're the opposite end, where you're looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, right there, you know, and you could put your arm from one end to the other or the Eiffel Tower, and you're taller than it. So it makes it feel like, oh, maybe I'm not so insignificant after all, somebody at some point in time made a model of this scale, likely to create the ginormous structure, right, and so I do think it gives our minds a sense of, oh well, I'm not so, so tiny and insignificant after all, and I think that that's a very important piece, because that's, I believe, where we come from as children, when we are able to master, you know, building something with Legos or dressing a doll or you know, painting a model car, where we get a sense of mastery, that we matter, that we can control our environment, and that then it prepares us for going out into the big world and being respectfully and beautifully overwhelmed by the magnificence of the real structures.

Speaker 2: 17:26

Fantastic, yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely, now, I did. I wanted to plug your newest book, which we talked about earlier, but it just came out this summer and it's called Date Smart Transform your Relationships and Love Fearlessly. So I was looking on your website at DrCarlaVanleycom and in the book you address a ton of common dating issues like setting healthy boundaries and dealing with mistrust, spotting red flags and even stuff like ghosting. I know a lot of people coming out of lockdown in an extended period in quarantine are just getting back into it and there's probably a huge uptick in dating and a ton of people could really use this advice right now.

Speaker 3: 18:11

I've had people comment who have read my book. They bought it for somebody in their 30s where they kind of scan through and they're like, oh my goodness, this is helping me in my relationship. So then they bought another copy for the person it was intended for. And the reason is and I agree with you for people who are venturing back out into dating, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, because I have so many people who come to me for dating and relationship issues and the essence of date smart is really finding out who you are, what you have to offer, what do you want, respecting yourself. And then some people say, well, you should never date until you fully know yourself and fully love yourself. Well then you know, I would probably never have dated in my life because I will never fully know myself and I will never fully love myself. It's a journey, right, and so that, to me, is what you know relationships are about. I wrote Joy from Fear, which is a more intensive book. Joy from Fear really is focused on people who want, you know, global wellness in their lives from the inside out, particularly if they struggle with anxiety, depression, stress. So that's, you know, a different type of book, and then the other book is Aging Joyfully, which is about no matter what age you are, don't let yourself be limited by a number, never.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Right.

Speaker 3: 19:32

And also on my website there are free worksheets for people to download under the your Journey section that give you an opportunity to do some self-work without paying a penny.

Speaker 2: 19:45

That's fantastic.

Speaker 3: 19:47

Thank you. And just one more piece about the you know the minis, because I think there's a part, too, that we can't forget when we're looking at something miniature, we see it and it's intriguing, and it we become curious because we look at it and we say, oh, my goodness, look how tiny this is, and we get curious, and curiosity is one of the most important things we can ever do is to be curious, and I think that minis whatever the miniature item is, it's just they become fascinating and our brains love to be fascinated. And so I want to end on that that never forget the power of a miniature item, whether it's a little sandcastle or whatever it is, or a wonderful motorcycle that you know. You know you'll never own or you want to own or you don't really want to own. Never forget the importance of allowing yourself to be fascinated.

Speaker 2: 20:47

Very wise advice. Yes, yeah, I think that's very wise indeed. You can find Dr Carla Manley at her website, drcarlamanleycom, where you can find information about her newest book, date Smart, as well as her other books, and check out the podcast she hosts called Helping Families Be Happy, and I figured that was pretty much all I would be able to learn about these tiny tents from the outside, without some sort of connection or inside contact. I mean, how much is there really to track down for something like this that disappeared 10 years ago? But then, as I continued to wait patiently for my tiny tent to arrive, one morning I checked my inbox and there, to my genuine surprise, was a response from Coleman, the tent company I had contacted earlier to ask if they had more information on these store display tents from years ago. My friend and actor, chelsea Hinkson agreed to help me out and be the voice of Coleman's email for this episode.

Speaker 5: 21:53

Dear Scott, thank you for contacting Coleman, the outdoor company. Our goal is to provide you with exceptional products and the highest quality of customer service. The Miniature Coleman tents currently seen in stores are made only for retail accounts, under special order. The tents are sent directly to the store and cost about the same as full-size models. Because of their size, the miniatures must be made by hand and cannot be mass produced. No extras of the miniatures are made. The miniature tents are not sent back to Coleman but are the property of the stores. Some stores may sell the miniatures at the end of the year. You might check with the store manager and see if a purchase is possible. We appreciate your business and we're happy to help. Sincerely, coleman.

Speaker 2: 22:34

Okay. So apart from me being pretty excited to even receive this message, I also noted a few key details in it. It makes sense that the tents are only made via special order and that, because of the nature of that, they cost about the same to make as the big ones. That checks out both with what I imagined had to be the case logically, and also what I was finding on eBay. It also checked out that these tents stayed with the stores and then, when they were no longer needed, they were just disposed of by the store in whatever way, or rescued from the trash by an employee in the right place at the right time. That confirms what I had heard a long time ago when I had originally started asking about these. The thing from this email that stuck out the most to me, though, was that the person writing this, from Coleman, was using all present tents verbs to talk about these tents.

Speaker 5: 23:27

Currently seen in stores. The tents are sent directly to. No extras of the miniatures are made. See if a purchase is possible.

Speaker 2: 23:36

And well, that doesn't feel like the way I should be reading about something that disappeared a decade ago, so I followed up to ask more questions about that and to see if I could get any more information about the current state of these display models if there was such a thing and then a little while later I got another reply for them. Here's Chelsea again.

Speaker 5: 23:59

Dear Scott, thank you for your prompt response. We are glad to provide you the information for the tiny tents. As we checked, the tiny tents are still being manufactured. As some of the retail stores still have them on display. We do not have the information about where these tents are now. However, these tiny tents can be located at physical stores, since they are being used as a display. We appreciate your business and we are happy to help if you have any further questions. Sincerely, coleman.

Speaker 2: 24:24

Wait, did I read that right?

Speaker 5: 24:27

Some of the retail stores still have them on display. These tiny tents can be located at physical stores, since they are being used as a display.

Speaker 2: 24:36

I had just assumed I was right that when I stopped seeing them it was because the companies stopped using them. But now it seemed like maybe that was just a change in the stores that I had seen them at before and that they may still be out there after all. Could it be that simple? I had to dig deeper, so I had last remembered seeing them in 2009 and 2010. On my first research dive, I had seen people posting about these in a few archived message threads from that time, so I just figured that was the end of the story. But now I was back looking again with new eyes and this time I found a lot more. It's funny how many things you can find only once you know that you should be actually looking for them. It turns out my search led me to Reddit and to a subreddit called rslashmildlyinteresting, which, to be honest, feels almost like a passive, aggressive jab of a categorization. But I found one post from four years ago with a picture of several field and stream tents in a store display. The comments reveal tons of personal stories of both people wanting these tents and the retail employees talking about what happened to the ones at their stores when they were done. Some were given away to employees and some were even sold to customers, and yet other stores would sell them off in a silent auction and then give the money that they raised to charity. And with all the tents being the property of the stores, and at the point when they're no longer selling the model that the display is for, it really seems to become a mixed bag of what the plan is for each store. And at this point now I've seen over a dozen different versions of how they were dealt with. So it was not a standard process. It was very much place by place, it seems. But this whole discovery and it being only four years ago completely re-energized me. I started calling places, first close by and then farther. I mean, where would I have luck? I called a lot of REI locations and also tried my hand at a few smaller camping stores, but big, small, it didn't matter Pretty much.

Speaker 4: 26:58

Every phone call went like this Thank you for calling Bass Pro Shops. Our world's foremost outfitters are excited to help you get connected to the great outdoors. To better assist you, please listen to the following options.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Probably hitting zero, right yeah, what do I got?

Speaker 1: 27:35

Okay.

Speaker 2: 27:41

It's the middle of the day. It shouldn't be impossible. Uh-oh, just transferred it, but we'll get a recording now let's see. Hi, yeah, I'm looking to talk to someone, I guess in camping or about tents. All right, let me get you over there. Hold on one sec. Awesome, thank you, you're welcome. Three-pronged, is that what works before? Hello, camping. Hey, I have a question about tents, if that's okay. Uh, yep, yeah, so in yourthis is kind of strange, but in your tent department, do you guys have the just pictures of the tents, or do you have those like tiny display tents that show you what they'll look like when they're built? Do you know what I mean? No, we only have the pictures, gotcha. Okay, that's what I figured. And how late are you guys open tonight? Uh, I think seven. Yeah, until seven. Awesome, thank you so much. That's all I needed, no problem. All right, have a good one. Bye, you too. Then I stumbled upon another post in the same subreddit from only three years ago. Getting closer, it also had a thread of similarly themed comments, but this one had a new clue for me at the top. I'm not sure if you guys have seen it, but I'm sure you've seen it. I've seen it in the past few months, but this one had a new clue for me. At the top, it labeled the picture as being from a sporting goods chain called Dick's Sporting Goods. I had seen some talk about the tents at a chain called Sports Authority, but they had all closer locations in 2016. Dick's, however, was still around and is a place I noted to make sure to check in with Then. The third and final post in the subreddit about these tents was from only two years ago, the summer of 2019. I had seen some comments, and it was encouraging that it was from so recent, but there was really no new information to aid me in my search. The new nugget I did have to cling to, though, was to search out at Dick's Sporting Goods, and there were three in my area, so I did some poking around and discovered that this was the store where the displays pictured in the first two reddit posts were taken Same signage, fixtures, same merchandise. Now here's where I did something a bit out of my ordinary playbook. Maybe it was because I just made so many phone calls, or maybe the reddit posts and lack of having considered this store before was just filling me with some confidence, but whatever it was, I decided not to call ahead and instead go with the gut instinct to just go to the store and see if I could find them there. Of course, I would need a partner on this endeavor, so I recruited one of my favorites my wonderful daughter.

Speaker 6: 30:20

This is gonna look so weird.

Speaker 1: 30:22

What is?

Speaker 6: 30:23

One of my four phones and that we're tied together.

Speaker 2: 30:28

We just have to kind of walk and be not sneaky.

Speaker 6: 30:33

I know, but it looks so weird in this, it's gonna look weird in public, which is what I'm worried about.

Speaker 2: 30:39

It's not gonna be that bad.

Speaker 6: 30:40

Yes, it is.

Speaker 2: 30:41

Well, we'll give it a test out in the parking lot and see what you think. You're worried about the microphone, so right.

Speaker 6: 30:47

Yes.

Speaker 2: 30:48

Okay, well, they're tiny microphones. I know how to hide them.

Speaker 6: 30:51

No, I'm not worried about the microphones, I'm worried about the cord.

Speaker 2: 30:58

Yeah, we put it like underneath our clothes and then nobody sees it.

Speaker 6: 31:01

That's too weird.

Speaker 2: 31:09

So you know I'm making an episode about tiny tents, right, right. I got a reply from a tent-making company to an email I sent and they said that some stores still have them. So I started looking around. This seems like the type of store that might have them. People took a picture of the tiny tents in there as recently as two years ago.

Speaker 6: 31:34

If they were here two years ago they could totally have been sold out in those two years.

Speaker 2: 31:39

Totally true, and they could totally have changed the way they show off their tents. Now, if it's there, how are you gonna buy it? Whoever I'm talking to, if they say you know what, I would sell this to you for $30. I'd do that. I would probably do that. What if?

Speaker 6: 31:55

they said they would sell it to you for $1,000?.

Speaker 2: 31:59

Okay, this is good If they said $1,000,. I would definitely not do it, definitely not If they said $100,.

Speaker 6: 32:06

I definitely would not do it so.

Speaker 2: 32:07

I was gonna say where's my line. It's somewhere between $40.

Speaker 6: 32:11

$30.

Speaker 2: 32:13

It's somewhere between $30 and $1,000. And I think you're right if they said $100. No, no, no, I would think about it for a second, but I wouldn't actually think about it Now if they say $50.

Speaker 6: 32:25

$50 can be your limit.

Speaker 2: 32:27

I might think about that. I still think it's probably a bad use of $50.

Speaker 6: 32:33

I feel like $40 should be your limit. It's a bad use of $50.

Speaker 2: 32:36

I mean, it's a bad use. I don't need it. But $50 might get my gears turning and I might start thinking about would I be in this ballpark Now? $40, I think I'd be more likely to go. You know what? Let's just do this. $30, I'd go.

Speaker 6: 32:58

yes, I just want to make sure that you have enough money to buy me a treat.

Speaker 2: 33:02

I have enough money to buy you a treat. You sure I'll get you a treat. Good, we're good.

Speaker 6: 33:08

I think you should just try my plan while I'm pretending to be it, you give the highest, then you start going down.

Speaker 2: 33:15

Okay, sir, lady, yes, I need to buy this tent.

Speaker 6: 33:23

Sorry, $40.

Speaker 2: 33:24

$39.

Speaker 6: 33:28

Okay, fine, I'll do it for $40.

Speaker 2: 33:30

No, I said $39. You missed out on $40.

Speaker 6: 33:33

Fine $38. $37., $37.

Speaker 2: 33:39

Now I'm getting annoyed with you.

Speaker 6: 33:41

You are out of this this was your plan.

Speaker 2: 33:43

This was your big plan. You told me this was the way to do it.

Speaker 6: 33:45

No, I was going to have you say that you were going down and have you do it. I am going down, and well, you didn't tell me you were doing that.

Speaker 2: 33:54

You figured it out right away though.

Speaker 6: 33:55

No, that's because I know what you were trying to do, what, and you need to say how quickly you're doing it.

Speaker 2: 34:01

I told you how quickly I'm just going to get down one by one.

Speaker 6: 34:06

Fine, start again.

Speaker 2: 34:06

All right, I'm offering you $40.

Speaker 6: 34:11

Okay, I have to answer quickly, or else you're going down and like that's not, but you didn't know.

Speaker 2: 34:17

How would you know? You didn't know that I was going down at that time. All right, you have to wait until you figure out that I'm going down, and then you have to start itself Okay, ready, I'm going to offer you $40 for that tent. No, hmm, $39.

Speaker 6: 34:36

Wait, what? No, no, give me it, give me it $37.

Speaker 2: 34:38

Okay, fine, you can have it. $36, $35. You can have it $34. You can have it For how much? $33? No, $32. No, for $31. You can have it $30. You can have it $29. You can have it. You can have it. You just give it to me. You're just going to give it to me. No, you can have it for $29 $28.

Speaker 6: 34:59

I don't think I can have it. $29. It's going to work.

Speaker 2: 35:03

I know, I know you need a buckle. Yes, all right, so we're here.

Speaker 6: 35:09

No, we're here, yeah, we're here.

Speaker 2: 35:12

The worst time of my life.

Speaker 6: 35:13

No, we're about to do the best time, all right.

Speaker 2: 35:20

So then we took off our gear, got out of the car, hooked it all back up and headed inside to look for these tents. All right, we're looking for tents, tent and camping stuff. Oh, I see it over here.

Speaker 6: 35:34

Yeah, I have to say Tent and Camping.

Speaker 2: 35:36

Over here. I see Tent and Camping.

Speaker 6: 35:40

I'm not as tall as you, so I can't see Tent and Camping.

Speaker 2: 35:43

I know it doesn't say Tent and Camping, it says Coleman and Thule, bertoulli, field and Stream.

Speaker 6: 35:51

There's one thing that I do like about doing this.

Speaker 2: 35:53

What's that?

Speaker 6: 35:54

I like how warm the inside of the store is.

Speaker 2: 35:57

Yeah, you haven't been into a lot of stores because you were waiting until you were vaccinated. Now this is the spot, so the tents are here. What is this? It's a small tent.

Speaker 6: 36:16

It's a small tent?

Speaker 2: 36:17

Well, it's not. I mean, it's not a tiny tent, but it's meant for probably one to two people. Three people, three people, huh, well, no tiny tent's here. I was thinking we might run into them, but shocker, it's OK. So even here, where I thought there might be one, looks like they don't do them anymore either here.

Speaker 6: 36:46

Let me see here what's it. What are these?

Speaker 2: 36:49

Those are sleeping bags.

Speaker 6: 36:51

OK, here follow me. You kind of have to I do?

Speaker 2: 36:56

We're on a package deal right now. Where are you taking me?

Speaker 6: 37:01

This way I saw it. I think I saw a tent thing.

Speaker 2: 37:05

Did you? Let's just double check to make sure. Is that the answer? It's no tiny ones, just the regular size tents. What do you think? Ok, I take full responsibility for that one not working my gut let me down this time, and I absolutely could have called first and just saved myself the trip. But I did get one piece of new information from an employee who wasn't able to go on the record. She said she's been there for 30 years and when I told her I was making a podcast about these tents, she told me how much she dug them to, but that they had all been gone from the store for months. I stopped to make sure I had just heard right, I'm sorry, did you say months, I asked. I was under the impression that these have been gone for years. Oh no, she replied. She told me that the store she was in had only gotten rid of theirs earlier this year, this year, as in 2021. Yes, she said. She saw them as late as the first few months of this year. Oh man, I was excited to find out that they were still around years after. I assumed that they would have vanished, but now finding out that these were so close and yet still just as gone as those from 10 years ago. Well, I'm not really sure how to describe that feeling. Does it feel worse to only barely miss something rather than to whiff it by a mile? I know it doesn't seem to feel better, and I wish I had a better landing to stick than that. You know, I was really expecting that at the end of this tunnel I'd have managed to figure out some way to track down the genuine article store display tents somewhere and find them once more out in the wild. But then again, maybe it's not the end forever, just for now. But then, after all that, there was one last piece of this puzzle that was still in motion A package delivery from North Carolina addressed to one recently disheartened podcast host, and inside a pretty excellent consolation prize. My tiny tents dot com order had arrived and we're recording.

Speaker 6: 39:47

Meow, meow, meow.

Speaker 2: 39:51

Okay. So what I thought we'd do is get out this tent and put it together and then see if we could get the cats interested in playing it. This is a tiny tent.

Speaker 6: 40:03

Dump it out. Dump it out, dump it out.

Speaker 2: 40:07

What do we got here?

Speaker 6: 40:08

Tent poles.

Speaker 2: 40:09

We have a flat kind of unrolled version. Tent poles Two packs. Okay, I slid mine down the edge, so there are these tiny tent poles.

Speaker 6: 40:24

You're a tiny tent pole, but they don't go together really.

Speaker 2: 40:28

Oh wait, they do. Each one has like a.

Speaker 6: 40:31

Magnetic thing? I think a few. Well, it's got like a elastic oh yeah, it has like a elastic thing that pulls them together.

Speaker 2: 40:38

It's like a regular tent pole. It's just tiny Boop.

Speaker 6: 40:41

Well, I don't know much about setting up tents.

Speaker 2: 40:44

How many? How many tent poles do we have total? Are these different lengths? We have long ones and short ones here. Okay, did this come with instructions? It probably did, I hope it did.

Speaker 6: 40:56

Oh, you know what I'll put it up here.

Speaker 2: 41:00

It probably did Check inside that bag.

Speaker 6: 41:07

I found this. I don't think these are instructions. Here they are.

Speaker 2: 41:11

Here they are. Here they are. So here are the instructions. We have the front door. We were thinking this is the front door, okay, and then we slide in the long poles.

Speaker 1: 41:19

Are there multiple doors?

Speaker 2: 41:21

I don't know yet Ready. We slide the poles in A symbol. Another long pole, Put it in the other.

Speaker 6: 41:31

There's only one door it looks like you slide the poles in through these little holes.

Speaker 2: 41:38

See, we have to push it through the loop and then follow the same line of loops.

Speaker 6: 41:47

It's hard to get open the loop. You want me to hold it open. Something open.

Speaker 2: 41:50

Yeah, I'm going to slide it in through on this side of the Got one.

Speaker 6: 41:57

I'm working on number two, got two.

Speaker 2: 42:03

How are you getting these loops?

Speaker 6: 42:04

open. I'm sticking my finger.

Speaker 1: 42:06

I'm sticking my nail in, then my finger.

Speaker 6: 42:10

I can help with that part, because I'm good at that. Yes, good at this.

Speaker 2: 42:14

We're going to have a traffic jam here in the middle. Now it says to put the pins in, even though I don't feel like it's very intuitive.

Speaker 1: 42:45

What do you mean?

Speaker 2: 42:47

The pins go into the bottom to hold it in.

Speaker 1: 42:50

What do you mean by intuitive?

Speaker 2: 42:52

I thought maybe it would be like a pin-sized hole for it, but it looks like a long hole.

Speaker 6: 42:57

I know it's way too big.

Speaker 2: 43:00

But maybe if we start with one pin on one side. So here's what I'm going to try and do. I'm going to put it one pin under.

Speaker 5: 43:06

These are tiny tent stakes. You think that these are holding it in?

Speaker 2: 43:10

Yes, okay, here we go. So more tent stakes Good, good, good, and then when you have enough, I can pin it. Put one of those two pins into the bottom.

Speaker 6: 43:27

Oh yeah, that fits.

Speaker 2: 43:28

You got it Good Okay.

Speaker 6: 43:31

I'm getting better at this.

Speaker 2: 43:33

Yeah, it's getting quicker. It's just good, because it's no less getting more impatient.

Speaker 6: 43:38

Is that it in Good? This is more work than I thought it would be Well.

Speaker 2: 43:46

I mean we're building a tent. This is still bigger than I remember the tiny tents being.

Speaker 5: 43:55

This looks like it could be functional for a small animal.

Speaker 2: 43:58

Right.

Speaker 5: 43:59

Like the other ones I feel like were tiny, like a little bit more mini like doll-like, Okay.

Speaker 6: 44:08

This one in.

Speaker 1: 44:10

Wait, don't go too far.

Speaker 2: 44:11

Don't pull on it. Let me push, because if you pull on it, we can.

Speaker 5: 44:14

Wait, don't go too far, because you want to be able to stick it into the next one.

Speaker 6: 44:18

So let me open the next one. This is a cool tent. It's very cute.

Speaker 5: 44:26

Good, okay, hers is in.

Speaker 1: 44:28

Okay.

Speaker 5: 44:30

Oh, snowball. Snowball is the right size for you. I don't know about the doorway.

Speaker 1: 44:36

She'll be good.

Speaker 4: 44:37

She'll be good, you also have a big booty, A big long booty.

Speaker 2: 44:43

You in.

Speaker 6: 44:44

Okay, in.

Speaker 2: 44:48

And I'm in too. Do you want to introduce the cat to the microphone, or do you want to say you want to describe the cat?

Speaker 6: 44:58

Who is this cat? This is Snowball.

Speaker 4: 45:00

Describe her.

Speaker 6: 45:02

She is a lilac Siamese and she's very playful and curious about what we're building.

Speaker 2: 45:08

Yes, okay, cool, awesome Can.

Speaker 6: 45:13

I open up the door.

Speaker 2: 45:15

I think we need to open up the door.

Speaker 6: 45:16

I don't know, she'll be fine. There's a screen door.

Speaker 2: 45:21

Open the screen door, then what's it like inside?

Speaker 6: 45:25

Inside there's a zipper.

Speaker 2: 45:27

Now it looks like they have little loops.

Speaker 6: 45:29

Yeah, they do.

Speaker 2: 45:30

They have little loops to tie up the window flaps I want to do that I can do that Snowball got up.

Speaker 6: 45:39

Oh look, she's looking in the window.

Speaker 2: 45:40

She's definitely interested.

Speaker 6: 45:42

She's looking inside.

Speaker 2: 45:44

Let me see what's inside here.

Speaker 5: 45:47

Wait but when she goes in, do it at an angle so I can see her. Of course, Snowball go in.

Speaker 6: 45:53

Uh oh, she's trying to figure out how. Oh, are you dumb, dumb Snowball, go in. But this isn't the door, this is the window. You're the window.

Speaker 2: 46:07

All right, so here we are. Welcome in Snowball. Would you like to give it a test?

Speaker 1: 46:14

Oh.

Speaker 6: 46:17

She might be able to fit. She fits.

Speaker 2: 46:23

Wait, let me get a shot, let me get a picture. So she immediately took to the place Snowball, snowball.

Speaker 4: 46:34

Oh, oh you cute, oh you cute Hi cutie, she really likes that, hi, cutie.

Speaker 2: 46:46

She's going to dig that place. Actually that's a nice size for her. I was worried it would be too small and actually if it was a tiny tent, the size that I remember, it would have been too small for her. But this is great because she fits perfectly. She loves that. She's settling herself in yeah of course she looks good inside there too.

Speaker 5: 47:06

You look good.

Speaker 2: 47:08

And it turned out I had a little bit of birthday money left over after getting the tent, so I used it on something to reward us for completing the build successfully. So here's what I thought we would do. I wanted to make tiny s'mores with our tiny tent, and so here's what I got. I got I got golden graham cereal.

Speaker 6: 47:28

Can I taste test one?

Speaker 2: 47:30

Yeah, we'll have to taste test one, but this is our graham cracker. Golden graham, hi cutie, oh you're cute. I have miniature marshmallows and I have chocolate, and then we're going to roast the miniature marshmallows on these tiny lights, tea lights.

Speaker 5: 47:45

Snowball All right.

Speaker 2: 47:49

So here's what I'm going to do let's open up the golden grams and test them. Okay, yeah, make sure these are good.

Speaker 6: 47:55

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 47:55

You've never had golden grams before. No, how old are you?

Speaker 6: 47:58

Eight.

Speaker 2: 47:59

Okay, well, this is a big thing Now. These were a thing I ate when I was a kid. I think I was allowed to have these because they didn't have marshmallows in them and they didn't have like candy in them, but they were still sweet. So they were like just above the, just on the other side of the line, like kicks in cornflakes.

Speaker 1: 48:19

I don't think this is on the same level as kicks in cornflakes.

Speaker 2: 48:25

No, this is. Those are healthier and this was my more unhealthy.

Speaker 1: 48:29

They do taste like graham crackers.

Speaker 2: 48:31

Yeah, they're a little graham crackers, little tiny graham crackers that we're going to use to make teeny tiny s'mores.

Speaker 6: 48:36

We need to taste test the marshmallows too. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 48:38

I think so, I think you're right. So taste one.

Speaker 1: 48:46

Let me taste this marshmallow. Can I have a graham cracker also?

Speaker 2: 48:51

No.

Speaker 5: 48:51

What, what You're gonna eat?

Speaker 2: 48:53

them together. No, you have to wait.

Speaker 6: 48:56

Can I please have a few marshmallows? Can I please have a few golden grams?

Speaker 2: 48:59

You too, are really difficult to podcast with.

Speaker 6: 49:05

One marshmallow Before you light it.

Speaker 1: 49:09

please explain the whole thing, thank you.

Speaker 6: 49:14

So what are we using this to pick for?

Speaker 2: 49:16

These are our marshmallow roasters. You have to take a marshmallow, you have to put it on the toothpick.

Speaker 6: 49:26

Like this.

Speaker 2: 49:28

That's right. So I don't know how quickly or slowly this will be.

Speaker 1: 49:32

Do we have to have one light each?

Speaker 2: 49:34

Yeah, I think just one light Like a campfire.

Speaker 6: 49:37

Somebody else can have this, and then I'm gonna get the chocolate ready.

Speaker 2: 49:43

So here's what we have to do After we.

Speaker 5: 49:46

That chocolate's not proportionate.

Speaker 2: 49:47

It's not. I looked for a small chocolate.

Speaker 1: 49:50

I found Chocolate chips bro.

Speaker 2: 49:52

No, they're not the right shape, though, so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna break this into teeny tiny.

Speaker 6: 49:57

Squares. Those look really good. Thank you, get the golden grams up too. Yeah, bro.

Speaker 2: 50:04

And you guys know how to make s'mores, right? I was thinking these shouldn't be called s'mores. We need, like, a different name because they're small, like Teeny tiny s'mores. S'morps.

Speaker 1: 50:15

No.

Speaker 2: 50:16

S'morps.

Speaker 4: 50:20

That's lit.

Speaker 5: 50:22

Candle lit, blow it out.

Speaker 6: 50:27

Marshmallow are being cooked.

Speaker 2: 50:29

Don't give it space. I don't know how much it takes to cook a mini marshmallow. I've never actually tried to toast it.

Speaker 6: 50:37

Good. Look at how good my marshmallows are.

Speaker 2: 50:39

I think you've got a lot of control over them. Oh, I started to get browning.

Speaker 6: 50:52

That's why I'm not going that close.

Speaker 2: 50:54

No, it's good Means that I'm like almost done.

Speaker 6: 50:59

Mine aren't.

Speaker 2: 51:01

Okay, I think mine's ready.

Speaker 6: 51:02

I think mine is okay.

Speaker 2: 51:04

I'm putting the chocolate on, I'm putting the graham cracker, I think mine's ready. My other graham cracker.

Speaker 5: 51:14

And then make a little sandwich and then pull out the stick, like this Ta-da.

Speaker 2: 51:18

Hold on, here we go. Look at this.

Speaker 6: 51:20

Good, let me eat mine.

Speaker 2: 51:26

A little bite-sized s'mores.

Speaker 6: 51:27

Cute.

Speaker 2: 51:28

That's cute.

Speaker 6: 51:30

Okay one more.

Speaker 2: 51:32

You can see pictures from this whole process on the webpage for this episode, or I'll have them up on the Instagram as well. This seems like good content for that, but check out our tiny tent and our cat and the tiny s'mores we were making and all the fun we had.

Speaker 4: 51:50

Ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh.

Speaker 2: 51:53

Getting it on fire is not a bad move, by the way.

Speaker 6: 51:58

I'm not going to try.

Speaker 2: 51:59

It's not a bad move.

Speaker 6: 52:02

Now, let me just catch a marshmallow.

Speaker 2: 52:04

The marshmallows and graham crackers. That's the right ratio.

Speaker 6: 52:08

I'm gonna eat one extra.

Speaker 2: 52:10

Oh my gosh, why do you keep reaching above the fire?

Speaker 5: 52:12

Because the cereal is on the floor.

Speaker 2: 52:15

The fire is right here oh jeez. Weird when they catch on fire. You can hear them on the microphone.

Speaker 5: 52:23

Yeah, right Did you hear that.

Speaker 1: 52:24

Yeah, yeah, we have a crackle. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 52:26

Even though we're not shoving them right up on the microphone. There's this like it's the crackle of a fire. Look, you're on fire, bro, Blow it out.

Speaker 5: 52:35

Ooh, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 52:36

Here hold on.

Speaker 1: 52:39

So while we're in that tent, it's way cute. I know I'm a big fan. Did you think she was?

Speaker 4: 52:44

gonna want to be in it.

Speaker 2: 52:46

I thought it was gonna be too small for her.

Speaker 4: 52:48

Me too. She's a 12 pound cat.

Speaker 5: 52:50

She's a big cat, she's the biggest cat we know.

Speaker 6: 52:54

Mmm, that's good. You ate it without the s'more.

Speaker 4: 52:56

That's good.

Speaker 5: 52:57

Just eating the marshmallow Like toast it and then eat it like a regular marshmallow.

Speaker 1: 53:02

Yeah, oh sure.

Speaker 6: 53:04

Perfect. Oh yeah, that's really good.

Speaker 2: 53:10

I forgot how good going grandfathers are. They're fun.

Speaker 6: 53:12

I forgot how good s'mores are.

Speaker 2: 53:14

Really I remember them.

Speaker 5: 53:18

This is nice, that's what people say about campfires also.

Speaker 1: 53:23

Cheers.

Speaker 6: 53:26

Perfect.

Speaker 2: 53:27

Alright. Well, let's stop the recording and I'll put away the equipment. Thank you all for doing this with me, okay.

Speaker 5: 53:33

Thank you for having us Appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 53:42

Got a tiny tent that we built together and we ate some s'mores that we cooked real careful on a tiny adventure that we had inside and here's a tiny song about that tiny time Do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do.

Speaker 2: 54:14

And with that, those tiny display tents and stores become the next entry into the Perfectorium, the Index of Perfect Things. Don't forget, you can also find a direct link to the Perfectorium by going to perfectshowsite slash perfectorium. You can find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes or on this episode's webpage. Special thank yous once again to Chelsea Hinkson, ben Rayburn for singing the song you just heard, and Dr Carla Manley, who you can find on DrCarlaManleycom and her newest book, date Smart, is available now wherever books are sold. And I want to also extend apologies to the dozens of camping stores and sporting goods stores that I called asking questions about tiny tents. Subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the Perfect Show, a perfect rating or review, especially on Apple podcasts, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show. This episode was recorded and mixed at Morayna Studios in Oakland, california. Once again, the Perfect Show site is at perfectshowsite. That's S-I-T-E, email any comments, music or other things to perfectshowshowatgmailcom. I'm particularly interested to hear from people who may also have a fascination with these tiny tents, or if you are out in the wild and you see them somewhere in a store. I'd love to hear from you, so connect on Twitter, instagram and YouTube to the name Perfect Show Show.

Speaker 4: 55:46

Thank you for calling Big Five Alameda. This is Alex speaking. How can I help you?

Speaker 2: 55:49

Hi, I wanted to speak with someone in tents or camping, I guess.

Speaker 4: 55:54

Sure one second.

Speaker 2: 55:55

Okay, thank you, and remember, just because the episode ends doesn't mean my abnormal obsession does too. I'm still holding out hope that maybe someday I'll pass through the right door or call the right store and these extinct creations suddenly prove to be not so extinct after all. Hello, sir. Hello, I had a question about tents.

Speaker 5: 56:17

I guess yeah, go for it.

Speaker 2: 56:20

Where you guys sell the tents is it? Do you actually have the tiny display tents that show what they'll look like full built, or is it just with photographs and pictures?

Speaker 4: 56:31

Just photographs and pictures. Our store is too small to put the display down.

Speaker 2: 56:35

Gotcha, gotcha, Okay, right on. Thank you for letting me know. All right, bye, Anyway, until next time. I'm Scott Moppin and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

Speaker 1: 56:53

I'm gonna eat 50 eggs.

Speaker 6: 56:56

When can we eat tiny s'mores again?