View Episode 252
Originally aired 01.03.2011
1:16:31
2:24 – Start the year off this Monday night on Lifetime with The Craigslist Killer: “Be careful what you search for.” The bus poster features the delete button from a keyboard with a blood-stained fingerprint and the female gender symbol on it.
7:09 – Seth recommends watching another documentary to your queue in addition to the two mentioned in Episode 251: the TLC special Extreme Couponing. Four people who are master couponers at the top of their game show you how to be the best. One of the women who also likes to dumpster dive: “Don’t judge me, but I cashier profile.”
26:04 – Thanks to HBO’s little cousin Showtime, this Sunday, Jan. 9, Seth will get a seven-episode series of a show titled Episodes starring Matt LeBlanc. It’s about an English husband-and-wife team who have a hit show in England and they’ve come to America to remake it. LeBlanc gets cast in it.
53:01 – Seth watched a Bait Car episode from San Francisco and was blown away. Usually a bait car needs to sit on the street for 9 to 14 minutes before people sit in it, but in San Francisco they leave the bait car in the Tenderloin district for a matter of seconds and the car has already been taken. There was a black guy in his 60s in the Mission who gets in the car, and he’s in full disbelief that he got a car. He’s so excited and in a dream state that he captured the vehicle and laughs to himself that he’s a drunk driver. Another guy is arrested and claims it’s not stolen. One guy won’t give his name and finally says “Fair Game. That’s my whole name.” He says he’s from Mars, then says “You got tapes? I got tapes. You wanna see my tapes?”
50:23 – In 2011, we will see the arrival of new menu items at several fast food chains. Dunkin’ Donuts is launching pancake bites – bite-sized sausage links wrapped in maple-flavored pancake – for $1.59. Taco Bell will partner with Cinnabon for the Cinnabon Delight ($1.49). Burger King will unveil the “utterly astonishing, unbelievability” of funnel cake sticks – hot and crispy strips of funnel cake covered in powdered sugar with a cup of icing dipping sauce. Sonic will launch a red velvet cheesecake blast shake. Seth wonders if you can still order a McDLT at McDonald’s (Episode 105, 22:43).
What Seth Learned on the Monsterweb
38:06 – Jason Mraz and Tristan Prettyman are both accomplished singer/songwriters. They dated in 2005-2006 and were madly in love. She ‘opened’ for him on some tours. Rumor has it they broke up in 2006. She went on a tour with G. Love and supposedly dated him. G. Love had a song in the 90s called “Cold Beverage.” G. Love was on vacation in Paris in November when he announced his engagement to Sarah Rabby Frigo. Then, this week, Mraz and Prettyman announce that they are engaged on Twitter.
40:09 – Rachel Weisz separated from her director/boyfriend Darren Aronofsky. They’ve been together since 2001 and have a kid. She’s now dating Daniel Craig.
41:02 – Scott Rosenberg – a screenwriter from the Massachusetts area who wrote Beautiful Girls, Con-Air and High Fidelity dated the beautiful actress Bridget Moynahan for three years, and she dumped him to go out with Tom Brady. Moynahan was pregnant with Brady’s daughter when he dumped her for Gisele Bündchen.
55:15 – Seth thinks Bait Car is the next best thing to To Catch A Predator. It has so much Dateline flavor to it.
27:07 – Jonathan remembers wanting to change his first name a lot when he was a kid. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but for some reason “Jonathan” just didn’t feel good to him. As much as it was a common name, there were no other Jonathans he came across in his upbringing until later on in life. They were all Johns.
28:39 – Jah’s friend Chris “Wag” Wagner wanted to change his name in school because they called him “Pissy Chrissy” or “Piss Chris.” He went home mad and told his mom he wanted to change his name. His mom asked what he wanted to change it to, and he said “Leroy Brown.” Then his mom said, “Honey, then they’ll just call you ‘Peeroy.’” He got really mad and lashed out at her.
29:29 – Seth wonders if J-dawg has ever heard the phrase “over-the-shoulder boulder holder,” and says he never had before watching Bette Midler singing in the movie Beaches. An old gay dude Seth knows saw him looking at a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and asked him, “What are you lookin’ at? Some over-the-shoulder boulder holders?” and Seth erupted in laughter. Everyone looked at Seth like he was strange.
47:06 – A stripper at a bachelor party Seth went to told him he smelled good, had great hair and had a perfectly symmetrical face while he was enjoying his only bachelor party at the Hyatt House on Sunset. There was a dinner before the party at the Saddle Ranch. This was for Seth’s friend Kurt. Jah has only been to one bachelor party in Las Vegas. He recalls it being the dregs because he was stone-cold sober at the time. Seth had just gotten sober at his. Seth filled his truck up with booze and everyone except him was passed out at the end of the night.
51:52 – Seth went to a Sonic on New Year’s Day coming back from Abiquiu, N.M., post-Y2K, on the way to L.A. He got a bacon double cheeseburger and it was the best thing he’s ever had in his life.
1:10:03 – Seth really has been noticing that people are up on their phones all the time. Wherever he is in the world, he doesn’t have a phone in his hand, so whenever he looks around people are actively inside their phones and getting into them.
11:06 – There was a double shooting of some Australian twin sisters that left one of them dead. Investigators said it was a suicide pact that they were acting out after interviewing the surviving sister. The 29-year-old women had been in the Denver area for about 5 weeks before they went to a shooting range. Investigators say each woman shot herself in the head with ammunition bought at the range – one using a rented 22-caliber revolver and the other using a rented 22-caliber semi-automatic handgun. The surviving sister remains hospitalized and in serious condition and physical evidence and surveillance video from the range supports her claim that she and her sister had shot themselves and not each other. The twins were staying at a La Quinta Inn about five miles away from the shooting range. They took a cab there. The family was notified but they had no idea which sister had died and which had not. Surveillance video also shows them each simultaneously falling backwards as they do this.
14:58 – Just Go With It is a new rom-com coming out in February, starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.
19:04 – A San Antonio, Texas Roman Catholic priest was arrested on charges that he solicited a hit man to kill a teenager who had accused him of sexual abuse. John Fiala first offered the job to his neighbor, who blew the whistle and helped police arrange the sting, and they said he got as far as negotiating a $5,000 price for the slaying before the investigators moved in. The 52-year-old priest was arrested at his suburban Dallas home and jailed on $700,000 bond. In April he was named in a lawsuit filed by the boy’s family, who accused Fiala of molesting the youth – including twice forcing him to have sex at gunpoint while staying in a motel during a Chrstian youth event.
32:44 – A white separatist drew complaints from neighbors and a visit from law enforcement officers after building a snowman shaped like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He put it on his front lawn in Kootenai County, Idaho. Sheriff’s deputies told Markus Eliseuson on Wednesday that he could be charged with a crime because the 10-foot-tall snowman was holding what appeared to be a noose. Neighbors called the deputies. Eliseuson could have been charged with creating a public nuisance. Idaho defines public nuisance as anything “offensive to the senses” or that interferes with the comfort of an entire neighborhood. He removed the noose and toppled the snowman after he spoke with officers. He angered neighbors at Halloween when he passed out bullet casings and said that he had run out of candy.
36:31 – All new first-class stamps will no longer feature a numbered denomination as all stamps will now be “Forever Stamps.” The first will be the lunar new year, “Year of the Rabbit.” The first Forever Stamp came out in April 2007 – the Liberty Bell. It cost 41 cents at the time, and stamps are now 44 cents.
57:57 – Jah wants to discuss the issue of rampant prostitution among female correctional officers in the prison system. Jah explains that they’re pimped on the outside and then sold to inmates through the prison debit cards they’re issued.
59:50 – Indiana University is home to the Kinsey Institute for research in gender, sex and reproduction. It was started by biologist Alfred Kinsey in 1947 and the center is home to the Kinsey Collection – a collection of more than 14,000 films and videos running the gamut of human sexuality. Perhaps the largest and most historically valuable consists of more than 2,000 one-reel stag films made independently through the 1920s and 1960s. Kinsey had relationships with police departments across the country, who would send him copies whenever they were confiscated. All amateur, all real.
1:57 – Jah and Seth say “sayonara” to 2010
24:17 – Seth just went sideways with his hat. It makes Jah think of Sideways with Paul Giamatti.
28:19 – Seth thinks they need to with their middle names, “Preston” and “Joey,” from now on in association with UYD.
30:32 – Seth finds out that bras are crazy expensive. Jah confirms this. Jah says one of the reasons that Victoria’s Secret is so successful is because it isn’t ridiculously expensive despite the quality.
32:26 – Seth wants to know what Mother Nature looks like. He knows what Jesus looks like but he doesn’t have any visual representation of what she looks like. J-dawg thinks she looks a lot like Gilda Radner.
1:04:34 – Jah asks if he’s allowed to leave Facebook. Seth says no; he’s locked in and he’s signed the contract. Jah is approaching the Facebook friend limit of 5,000 friends.
4:33 – A fleeting thought about a handful of M&Ms; might be enough to derail your diet, but imagining yourself eating the candy-covered chocolates in painstaking detail could make you want them less. Obsessing about a particular food in a particular way appeared to dampen its appeal in an unusual study that demonstrates that merely thinking about food without actually seeing, touching, smelling or tasting it can actually help sate hunger through a process called “habituation.” It’s an experiment described in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. Researchers asked volunteers to devote about one minute and a half to methodically imagining chewing and swallowing 30 M&Ms; one after another. Then, when presented with a bowl of actual M&Ms;, those volunteers ate about half as many candies as volunteers who imagined eating only 3 M&Ms; – or none at all.
44:25 – According to papers published in the journal Science titled “The Theory of Mind,” babies as young as seven months old may be able to take into account the thoughts and beliefs of people around them.
1:03:34 – A Stanford psychologist initiated a study when he noticed that some of his friends would become agitated while on Facebook after reading other people’s status updates. “They felt disappointed with their lives when they logged on and browsed the apparent ‘perfect’ lives presented by their peers.” His research found that people are systematically biased in their judgments of peers’ interpersonal lives. We have a tendency to underestimate negative experiences of people around us, in large part because we see people in groups when they are happy – not in their solitary moments when they are sad and irritable and bored and alone.
5:41 – Seth predicts that the gym is going to be packed this week.
36:08 – Seth predicts that Valentine’s Day 2011 is going to be explosive with love.
15:50 – Seth reads through all of Adam Sandler’s films over the past 5 years and says “No.” after each one of them.
42:56 – Seth can’t figure out who would blow Johnny Depp now that he’s wearing seven different-colored Gap scarfs with denim chaps and a crazy fedora cap with eyeliner and black-rimmed glasses. He also goes layered with open chest (LWOC).