View Episode 236
Originally aired 09.20.2010
1:13:41
12:27 – UYD: Orange juice-induced nightmares
1:04:11 – UYD: 10% human
18:36 – Seth watched Dateline NBC with his friend Kate Snow. They ran a test to see if kids left home alone would open the door to a stranger. A van was parked outside with the kids’ parents saying there was no way their kid would open the door. It was based on a real scam where a guy would come to the door saying he was the “milk inspector,” flashing a badge and saying he was a special agent with the sheriff’s department. In Dateline’s setup, the brother and sister went ahead and let him in under this pretense.
25:06 – Oprah kicked off her farewell season this week by treating her audience of 300 people to a vacation to Australia. A mockup of a Quantus A380 rolls into the studio. “Cue the pilot!” Travolta steps out in full pilot gear … Oprah then did a follow-up story to a town in West Virginia she went to during her second season in November of 1987. There was a 26-year-old dude named Mike Sisco who had AIDS. He and his sister went to a public swimming pool in Williamson, W.Va., and he jumped in the pool. It was pandemonium and people jumped out of the pool and asked to drain it and quarantine it. They did a town hall in a field house, and this dude with his mullet sits in the middle of 400-some people being cast out. They re-interviewed the surgeon general, who said the information he gave them then was the exact same info he would give present day.
48:07 – A contestant on the show Big Brother spent the last three months completely quarantined. Twenty-three-year old Britney Haynes left her Arkansas home she shares with her fiancée Nick and their two dogs in hopes of winning the $500,000 grand prize. After the final episode aired they did a live special. Her house in Arkansas burned down to the ground. The producers and the family discussed it and decided not to tell her because she was almost done anyway. She won $25,000 because she was voted on America’s Favorite Houseguest.
Games That Jonathan and Seth Play
9:03 – Seth asks Jonathan what the No. 1 seller is among supermarket categories by dollar sales – total U.S. food dollar sales for latest 52 weeks ending June 13, 2010. Every person Seth asks says “milk,” and that’s exactly what Jah answers. Milk is No. 2. Carbonated beverages are No. 1. Rounding out the top 10 are 3) Fresh bread and rolls, 4) salty snacks, 5) beer, 6) cheese, 7) cold cereal, 8) frozen dinners, 9) wine, and 10) cigarettes. The number one thing that Jonathan purchases at supermarkets is orange juice. He loves orange juice, and needs it at the house at all times. If Seth has orange juice after 8:00, he has nightmares.
What Seth Learned on the Monsterweb
50:28 – Volunteer readers at the Houston-based nonprofit Taping for the Blind read everything from daily newspapers to Playboy. Seth read an article about a woman who reads everything in a Playboy. The woman painted a picture for blind men with her audio: “She is a Latina. Brunette, with dark chocolate-brown eyes. She has long curly brown hair. She is in the first photo sitting in the ocean. She has a very large grin on her face. Pink lipstick. She has a small tattoo right over the small of her back, over the dimple area that appears to be some sort of tribal design. Her legs are kind of crossed. She is sitting in the water. Behind her shoulder, down past her arm, you can see her breast peeking out. There are no tan lines at all. She is not wearing any nail polish, or jewelry, or bathing suit, or anything.” Asked later why she mentions nail polish, she replied “Sometimes it’s all they have on.” She said describing Playboy models doesn’t get repetitive: “Each one is different. Each one is like a little snowflake. There are different poses or scenarios or features or attributes. Whatever is there I try to describe what I see so they get a picture in their head.” J-dawg says he wants to do a version of this on UYD since they have blind listeners.
3:06 – Jah and Seth talk about seeing people getting massages in public areas, which is too much for them (Episode 062, 14:10). Seth also gets panic attacks from seeing people getting chiropractic work done in malls.
12:39 – Amir showed Jah a video that’s currently on YouTube of him in high school with his friends, who were all in a popular band called Plow Posture. There is footage of them driving down Sunset Boulevard. Amir is in the front seat holding a portable television and they are watching the O.J. chase and saying they’re going to go see him. They go to the overpass where O.J. pulls off and gets off the freeway and makes a left-hand turn. It’s just him and nine cop cars following him.
14:08 – Jonathan admits that he lied to a Census Bureau worker. What was even worse was that she informed him that none of what she was doing was for official data because Jah had already filled out the form and mailed it in. He says it was something about his personal life. It was about the property he was at and he told the truth about that, then got weirded out about his own information
20:26 – Jah’s mom and him got into a weird altercation on a freeway off-ramp when J-dawg was 14 years old. The guy got really really mad at his mom and flipped out. As they got off the freeway, they came to a stop and he got out of his car and hit the window and flashed a badge. J-dawg and his mom looked at the badge and had no idea what it was. It didn’t look very official.
54:40 – Seth will get UYD voicemails, and sometimes girls will leave a message where they’re not saying or implying anything, but Seth is completely turned on by their voice. Jah knows exactly what Seth is talking about, and references getting “eargasms” (Episode 014, 7:21).
55:33 – Seth was having a conversation with a subscription representative from Sports Illustrated and found himself screaming “Do you know who the Cowboys are?!!!”
1:06:22 – Jah remembers when he got a Skytel Sky Pager
1:06:25 – Seth remembers booking his first commercial on his pager. It blew up outside of his acting class at Lankersham and Riverside. He ran over to the payphone and booked it.
1:09:06 – Seth saw Freeway Rick Ross (Episode 221, 30:07) this week at a vegan restaurant called Real Food Daily on La Cienega. He recognized and couldn’t place it so he walked into the restaurant to nail it down. Seth wanted to take it to him because there was something there, but he just couldn’t bring himself to buy him a cashew milkshake.
1:12:00 – Jah got hit up by a girl who works in a Michael’s and turned her boss on to UYD. She walked in the next day and the first thing she heard from him was “BALL-IN!” Jah says if you can turn a superior on to the show, it will make your life infinitely more awesome and easier at said job.
1:53 – Jonathan and Seth believe in the therapeutic healing power of touch. A single massage can produce measurable changes in the immune system and endocrine system of healthy adults. If Jah and Seth were rich men, they would get massages every day. Seth would need to establish a rapport with a man or woman before he got one, and he would need to keep his chonies on.
5:08 – According to a paper in the Journal of Headache Pain, if you use headache medications more than 15 times per month you risk developing a condition called MOH (Medication Overuse Headache). It is the aggravation of your headaches and an increase in their overall frequency.
33:57 – Georgetown University has a class, Philosophy 194, called Hallucinating. It is taught by James Mattingly. “We all make mistakes. We all sometimes remember things that didn’t really happen, and sometimes forget things that really did. We all get confused by optical illusions and the phantom pains and issues. We all sometimes believe false things other people tell us. We all sometimes confuse our dreams for reality. We all sometimes believe things because we really want them to be, even though we have good reason for thinking they aren’t. And sometimes we’re just plain hallucinating. How can we be sure we’re not mistaken about everything? What kinds of things can we know for sure? What is knowledge anyway? We’ll look at some old, not-so-old and even less old answers to and ways of thinking about these questions. Some of these will come from philosophers, but some will come as well from science, science fiction, literature, film, art, etc. The views we come across will be very different and we will spend a lot of time trying to sort out our own reactions to these questions. We’ll all probably end up with different answers ourselves, but then at least they’ll be our own answers. And we’ll have good reason for them. That’s the philosophy part.” They’ll be looking at The Matrix, Existence, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, William Burrow’s The Naked Lunch, Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, in part, recent research in cognitive science and psychology, Star Trek: the pilot episode, “The Cage,” some selections from Stanislaw Lem (the good stuff), some more philosophy stuff, parts of Don Quixote, religion and other mass delusions. Credits: 3. Prerequisites: none. Just an open mind.
38:52 – 33-year-old Richard Lorenc of Kansas had always been curious about his birth parents. Busy with a wife and two young daughters and a beautiful family of his own, but a recent back injury left him not only time to ponder that but also some medical questions in his rehabilitation. He called up the Department of Social Services in Kansas and asked if they could track down his parents. A letter came back six weeks later with the identity of his mother, 62-year-old Vivian Wheeler, who was living in Bakersfield, Calif. He set out to meet her. Turns out she was a Seventh-Day Adventist who was born a hermaphrodite with werewolf syndrome. Her father forced her from a very young age to be in a traveling circus as a freak show entity. She had 33-year-old Richard in her late 20s when she was fucked by a carny at a stop in Nebraska. The carny said she would not let her raise this child and stole him away from her. They found young Richard abandoned in a hotel in Atlanta when he was three years old, covered in bruises and bedbug bites. Fortuntately he was adopted by a loving family and grew up to have a beautiful life of his own.
42:48 – Men’s Health magazine rated the U.S. cities in their annual “Hotbeds of Sex” (Episode 114, 3:16). It was based on condom sales, birth rates, sex toy sales and the rates of STDs. The five top cities for sexual activity were: 5) Denver, Colo., 4) Durham, N.C., 3) Columbus, Ohio, 2) Dallas, Texas and 1) Austin, Texas. The five least active cities were 5) Manchester, N.H., 4) Charleston, W.Va., 3) Yonkers, N.Y., 2) Burlington, Vt., and 1) Portland, Maine.
57:06 – According to The Consumerist, a McDonald’s just closed in northeastern California, changing the “McFarthest Spot,” which is the number of miles that you are possibly able to be farthest away from a McDonald’s. Previously it was 107 miles. Now it is 115 miles.
59:12 – The FAA is reviewing a new airline seat designed to get more customers onto planes. The Skyrider seat would be a new class below coach. The seat is almost completely vertical and is shaped like a horse saddle. It has at least seven inches less than a traditional coach seat.
4:21 – Seth thanks UYD nation because they sold out the second show at the Broad.
44:03 – UYD will probably be playing their next live show in Austin, Texas.
46:06 – Seth can’t remember the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” Jah thought it was “Keep Portland Weird.” (Episode 116, 9:51)
1:13:27 – It’s Seth’s birthday on Wednesday
14:01 – Pew Research analysis of data from the Census Bureau shows that the number of U.S. children being raised primarily by their grandparents rose sharply to 2.9 million.
21:50 – A new study says that the annual household income needed to make Americans happy is $75,000. Jah completely agrees. Earnings above that have no further effect on contentment whatsoever.
46:32 – A 33-year-old federal inmate we know by the name of Jonathan Lee Riches has filed more than 3,800 lawsuits in nearly every jurisdiction in the country. He has sued the ancient philosopher Plato, he has sued the celestial body formerly known as Pluto, he has sued the Bonaroo Music and Arts Festival. Now the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Lexington, Ky., is suing him to make him stop. Mail sent by inmates is not subject to inspection by prison personnel. This petition filed would allow the Bureau of Prisons to screen his outgoing mail and if it contained frivolous filings that wasted judicial resources, they will be confiscated. … Seth is pissed because he sent a letter to JLR asking him to sue them (Episode 168, 35:37), and he thinks UYD should’ve sued his ass.
31:10 – Seth thinks he would be a good high school teacher. He would walk right in, take his chair, spin it around, look at the students and say, “Sup?” He would throw the chalk in the trash, size them up and say, “Just call me Seth.”