View Episode 267
Originally aired 04.16.11
1:03:52
7:32 – The Mother Nature Network (“Improve Your World”) had a story on its website about the 7 funniest eco-comedians. Kristen Wong was one of the comedians. “People say it’s hard for single women in LA, but ladies, take the bus here and suddenly you’ll find that men offer you nothing but affirmation, affirmation, affirmation. Sure, some of them are wearing an adult diaper and nothing else, but…”
18:22 – Extreme Couponing is back. “I’m Nathan. They call me Mr. Coupon. I’m not your grandma, who uses coupons and clips one. I clip 20. I try to target what I’m buying, and I buy a lot of it. I’m like a marksman. Instead of a marksman who’s hunting a deer, I’m hunting deodorant.”
22:39 – Happy Endings on ABC features a lot of face acting. One scene gives the same character a different hairstyle after cutting away.
30:08 – Taking their cue from Lost, satellite service provider DirecTV is doing enhanced versions of Damages. The plot and character subtitles are written by writers on the show and appear on the screen to give viewers a look at the episodes they missed. DirecTV will launch the fourth season of Damages this summer and will show all three of the past seasons as enhanced repeats.
42:13 – Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution brings him into the LA public school system. They’re not listening to him. They’re just drinking chocolate milk and strawberry milk.
13:20 – Mid-calorie sodas are roughly 60 calories per 12 ounces. They are about to make another attempt at the soft drink market. Pepsi Next and Mountain Dew Next will hit stores soon. In 2004, Coke had a mid-calorie drink called C2 and Pepsi had Pepsi Edge. Neither lasted very long.
33:56 – Easton Bell Sports has created a prototype helmet to be worn by pitchers during baseball games. They hope to get a jump on the market, anticipating this will become a rule in the future where pitchers will be required to wear helmets.
15:06 – Seth was in Whole Foods and saw Marilu Henner (Episode 251, 51:09). He approached her and spun around her carriage, saying “Let’s test that super memory. Where’d we meet?” He wonders if she remembered seeing him at LAX. He gives her a hint that they were discussing food and it’s a place you can’t really get food. It then hits her and she says, “It was the airport. We were discussing soup.” At that time she was headed to San Francisco to do a live show.
20:33 – Jah’s dad is from New Orleans and they get updates from family and relatives fairly often about what the city’s like post-Hurricane Katrina. Since Katrina, the city has become overrun with feral chickens. There are no more stray dogs wandering the neighborhoods. The chickens descended from domesticated fowl that escaped from backyard coops during or after the storm.
31:51 – Jah doesn’t know if this is telling because of his current life state or psychology or if it has something to do with the world, but Jonathan has not heard the new Radiohead record.
42:42 – Jah didn’t understand Eric Bana’s accent in Hanna when he went to see it this week. He thinks it might be German.
56:14 – Jah was going through a photo blog on Rolling Stone when he was reading the UYD fluff piece, and there were 20 pictures of Kurt Cobain that were never really seen before. There was a picture of him in an apartment on his stomach with socks on living in Hollywood. On the table, there’s industry music mags with Def Leppard on the cover. It reminded J-dawg that Nirvana changed everything and wiped away all the old shit bands from the 80s.
1:00:12 – Seth was super nervous during the live Episode 266. As an example of how nervous he was, they were talking about Thai lady boys and all he wanted to do was make a Pete Townshend reference and couldn’t do it because he was so jittery up there. Jah understands and says you take everything you know and imagine that cut in half – that’s where your brain functions are at when you get into a situation like that.
4:35 – Students allegedly received lap dances from strippers in an ethics class at a Philadelphia university. The Inquirer newspaper reported on Tuesday La Salle University professor Jack Rappaport, who teaches business studies, was suspended after he reportedly organized strippers to attend a class on “the application of platonic and Hegelian ethics to business,” the newspaper said. About 30 students paid $150 each to attend the March 21 extra-credit class, which also was attended by strippers dressed in bikinis and miniskirts, according to two students who wish to remain anyonymous. Rappaport and students were given lap dances during the class, according to some students. Other students said that while there were scantily clad women at the lecture, no dancing actually occurred. Rappaport, who’s 57, has been teaching at La Salle University since 1979 and was well-known among students. According to comments posted on Ratemyprofessors.com, “Extremely strange man. Loves gambling, horse racing and strip joints. Talks about all of the above all the time.”
9:31 – An article in the Los Angeles Times profiled a group of women who go shopping with older black ladies to teach them about nutrition and healthier food options. One of the women was quoted as saying “I always thought artichokes were an uppity vegetable.” Seth agrees with this sentiment.
16:47 – The president of the American Atheists Association says that 675 people have already registered for the annual convention this week in Des Moines, Iowa. That would more than double the attendance of last year’s Newark, N.J., convention, and would also beat the record of 550 that was set in Atlanta, Ga.
28:08 – The LA Times Travel section features a piece on the bag fee dodger. “On a recent American Airlines flight, we were appalled that some people tried to board with oversized baggage which the airline then sent through like the rest of the checked baggage. They paid nothing for this while we paid $50 for our two pieces of luggage each way. The airline should make these people step aside while everyone else boards and make them pay accordingly. Do we complain to the Federal Aviation Administration or other governmental agencies to correct this?”
38:14 – He called himself the “supreme commander.” From a storefront in Temple City, Calif., decorated to look like a military recruitment center, David Deng raised an army of more than 100 Chinese nationals and claimed they were members of an elite U.S. special forces unit. Together they marched in local Chinese New Year parades. They even received a special military tour in uniform at the U.S.S. Midway Museum in San Diego. Chinese language newspapers even ran photos of the troops with prominent community leaders. But prosecutors this week charged that Deng’s U.S. Army/military special forces reserve was actually a huge immigration scam that preyed on Chinese immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley desperate to become U.S. citizens. Authorities alleged that Deng charged members up to $500 to join plus an annual $120 renewal fee. He told them joining the group would increase their chances of becoming U.S. citizens. The more money they donated to the organization, he allegedly told them, the better chances of becoming citizens. They were typically low-wage workers toiling away at Chinese restaurants. Most were from the LA area but some were as far away as Georgia. They were provided with fake documents and military IDs as well as phony uniforms, apparently purchased at a military surplus store. FBI spokesman said the investigation about 3 years ago when local police began noticing that some people pulled over during traffic stops produced fake military IDs but with full confidence. Last year one Chinese language newspaper reported that at Alhambra taxi driver was arrested near Los Angeles International Airport after he produced counterfeit military identification while trying to get out of a traffic stop. He told investigators that he used this to avoid getting traffic tickets and he also tried to get military beneifts and discounts. Some of the recruits were so convinced that they were part of the U.S. military that they actually visited real recruiting centers and tried to pay their monthly fees there.
44:52 – Angered by repeated releases of secretly filmed videos claiming to show the mistreatment of farm animals, Iowa’s agriculture industry is pushing legislation that would make it illegal for animal rights activists to produce and distribute such images.
47:18 – EA Sports will release Madden ‘12, which will feature a to-be-determined player on its cover, in August. The new version will sideline any player who suffers an in-game concussion for the rest of the game.
48:58 – Some gymnasiums have started a new policy to keep their new members on track. You pledge to work out a certain number of days a week, and if you don’t show up they charge your debit card.
50:43 – There are 3 new websites that allow you to post every single website that you visit every single day. One of them, VoyURL, uses the slogan “It’s OK to look.” Another is Site Simon, “What are you looking at?” and Discover.me – “discover a whole new web.” There are certain people whom Jah would like to track their online browsing history.
2:16 – Jah and Seth are a little tuckered out after going 90 minutes last week. They’re back in Seth’s apartment and back to normal.
3:01 – Jah and Seth received a gift in the form of an album, Bruce Willis’ The Return of Bruno. In the liner notes it says, “This album could not have been made without the help of the following people: My main mazain and co-potato head Robert Craft, the unwavering patience of Motown Records and lastly and most importantly, the big cat upstairs. Once upon a time, after wandering around in a daze for 12 years, in a hot, steamy, stankin’ Thursday night late in June 1986 I walked into a low-down and dirty dive called Club Babylon. It was my kind of place. On stage was a band who within 10 seconds had my little pink R&B toes tappin’. I knew I’d get along with these guys immediately. They all had dirty under their fingernails. I approached the bar, I ordered a Lamey Lo and quicker than a cat may blink its eye, the leader of these rhythm merchants said, “Hey Bruno, wanna sit in?” The rest as they say in this crazy mixed-up patchwork quilt of a town they call Hollywood is history. Your pal, Bruno.”
43:42 – Seth wonders if it would be crazy if he liked Jake Gyllenhaal. He won’t say it yet, he wants to do more research, but he thinks he just needs the right vehicle. Neither Seth nor Jah has ever watched Brokeback Mountain, but they think they might need to do it together.
58:20 – Jah understands that UYD is wanted in other places for possible live shows, and on that note he wants all to know that they are committed to doing that over the next several months.
1:01:54 – Seth warns everyone to hydrate this week.
11:10 – A new study conducted by the Pew Research Group, in collaboration with the Assocation of State Correctional Administrators, called “State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons,” found that 4 out of every 10 offenders return to a state-run prison in the U.S. within 3 years of their release.
23:18 – We all know that people who are at opposite ends of the political spectrum often can’t see eye to eye on things. A new report published online in Current Biology reveals that those differences in political orientation are actually tied to differences in the very structures of our brains. Individuals who call themselves “liberal” tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who tend to call themselves “conservatives” have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat.
54:09 – Previous studies have documented the overlap in brain activity between emotional and physical pain, but those focus mainly on the regions that layer on feelings about bodily pain. Studies linked purely emotional sources of pain like heartache or grief with the neural networks that register, say, the sting of a burned hand. For a new study, scientists recruited 40 volunteers who were recently and abruptly rejected by their partners. Using functional MRI images, the researchers showed that when the jilted participants looked at pictures of their exes, their brains engaged the same pain circuits that lit up when they were probed with a heat sensor equivalent to a hot cup of coffee. The researchers think the intensity of the subjects’ emotional hurt activated the brain’s sensory pain pathways that are normally tapped only by physical stimuli such as a slap or scorching, searing heat.