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Got my first ever fave from Sean on twitter today when I told him I loved his "rip the fish's head off" bit. First fave from Sean The same day I come back to the forums. Coincidence?

So, I read the book this week. I spoil it for you: don't read it. It's really badly written and misogynist. The only real similarities are that a megalodon is kept in deep underwater with the hydrothermal plume then causes mass killings when it escapes into cold water when dives interrupt its habitat. Everything else is pretty different. But the current edition of the comes with the prequel (yes, this is a series of books). The prequel is all about Jason Statham's origin story about the mission from the first few minutes of the movie. It explains why people claimed he was "crazy" according to everyone else in the movie. In the prequel, Jason Statham is a deep sea diver for the navy. He's been diving too deep, too often too recently (four times in nine days or something). This is causing him to experience vertigo, hallucinations and general craziness. Despite knowing he's unfit to dive, Doctor Heller from the movie gives him the medical clearance to dive again. Some admiral basically forces Statham to dive. During the dive, Statham has an attack from underwater dementia which coincides with a megalodon attack. He surfaces without authorization. The meg attack and Statham's actions causes everyone on board to die during the ascent. Jason blames the shark attack but Dr. Heller and the admiral start a smear campaign against Statham to cover their own negligence in letting him dive. Statham is given a dishonerable discharge and put in a mental health facility for three months as part of the smear campaign. Some major differences are that Statham wasn't diving to rescue anyone on the mission. They are diving to get minerals. There are multiple parties who witness evidence of the megalodon. Statham physically sees it. The admiral sees the tooth stuck in the submersible. There's some non-navy boat that picks up a huge blip on sonar that they rule out being a whale (and theorize it's a giant shark). So, the book proper opens seven years later with Statham now a shark expert trying to prove megalodons still exist to clear his name.

Hey checking back in on the forum for the first time in a while, it looks all new! and the liking system has changed. While I'm not sold on the new forum style; I AM sold on HH still pumping out the best podcasts every week!

Yay, I just started with Season 1 Ep 1. Is that Chuffed Kevin doing a silly voice in the intro?

Should I start from the beginning? I'm new to this. Let me just get Stitcher Premium to start stitching now and she'll be done by next week I'm sure.

I already sent the boys a love letter and the mailman kicked it into the dirt and sent it back packing. Honestly I may have thought they were gay lovers at the time? I dunno, I was pretty silly when I wrote it. https://imgur.com/a/9TZQOzb Tomorrow night the boys will be in Booooostoon, if they aren't already! So much excite! I have my "Chilling with my peeps" shirt laid out and ready to go. (I thought the boys would prefer me being aloof than wearing my nice and being nice shirt like some sycophant.) We get let out of work at 2pm which is good because I need plenty of time to pace in a circle before the show. I'm meeting a fellow Handbook Head there as my date since my wife said, "no way" for some weird reason and I don't want to laugh alone in the dunce corner. I've heard so many drunk driving commercials lately I'm going to get an Uber there and back, despite being a cheap ass. I have the following presents to deliver to the boys / Chef Kevin at the merch table: 1 Hollywood Handbook hand-Painted Rock in honor of The Rockwell 2018 1 Boston Celtics Lighter (pronounced Kel-Tics, Sell-teeks, Ksel-tacks, Klaatu barada nikto) 1 Turkey Leg or Hog Leg for Kevin, his choice (an $8 or $15 pre-roll, legal in Mass as long as you give it away and don't accept any money for it. Does he still puff? Maybe he got clean after he found love. Anyway, somebody failed to come through in Chicago so I thought I'd do the right thing and step it up for him in beantown. Always nice to bump into the herbal essence when you're in a new place.) Happy Birthday Hayes. Thanks for the belly laughs. I've even gotten my brother into the show now. (Yes! That's one convert!) Sorry about my wife guys. I let you all down. Honestly I don't even go to movies anymore? I just watch Half in the Bag reviews instead. I don't watch TV anymore (excepting Netfleek, HBow, etc.) because I hate commercials. The only commercials I ever hear anymore are HH ones.

you should all consider subscribing to masterclass on stitcher premium, and get ready for season 2 which launches this wednesday. get a free trial with code "MASTERCLASS". shonk teaches writing to bang this season, you won't BELIEVE what happens next

Re-watching this, I was really disappointed with how things turned out with Cole. I just can't buy that Bruce Willis helped him all that much. So, in order to make the ghosts "go away" he has to help them finish their business? Does that mean he has to go running around town all the time tying up loose ends for the dead? Also, I feel like they just wrapped that whole thing up too quickly with the Mischa Barton story. You have all this build up to whether Bruce Willis believes Cole, and what they're going to do to help him, and he does one ghost a favor and zip-zap-Bob's-your-uncle, and we're done! Also, just a nit pick about the "mayor's award" at the beginning. Psychologists get awards for research and education. They don't get awards for being great therapists. Why? Because therapy is confidential. It's not like you can say so many people were this sick and objectively measure how much better they got. And why would the city be giving him an award unless he worked for social services? It's a bunch of hogwash just to build up Bruce Willis's cred as a therapist and it's unnecessary. In all, I think the film is just okay once spoiled. I don't think it bodes well for anything more than one additional viewing to catch what you missed. Cole is by far the best thing about it. He was amazing! Otherwise, the characters are really two-dimensional. We don't even get to know what Cole's mom does, or anything about her relationship with her mom. We also don't learn anything about Bruce Willis's relationship with his wife apart from what we see in the wedding video. How are we supposed to care about their relationship when there's no basis to understand how much they loved each other in life. I feel like a lot must have been left on the cutting room floor. I can see how the movie gets high marks for the cleverness of how the twist is played out, how young Shyamalan was, and how it left a mark on pop culture. But top 100? I don't think it really belongs there. I don't see it doing anything really significant or moving the art form forward in any substantial way.

(I was not 6 )

There was some talk in this episode about how weird it was that someone’s kid was running around like a crazy person and sitting at the controls of a multimillion dollar submersible. I’m a scientist at a major research institute and that felt very real to me. People work weird hours and don’t always have access to reliable childcare so I’ve for sure seen unsupervised kids poking at equipment that costs millions of dollars (including one that can shoot blinding lasers) and running around in spaces that are full of pretty gnarly chemicals. To be honest, the film makes a very subtle and subversive political statement about the need for expanded access to childcare for researchers and scientists. Congratulations to the editors for their attention to detail on that point.

I occasionally do a German language podcast where I exclusively review american brand name beers, like PBR and highlife ect. I've never released it.

I am super excited about this episode! The movie! The guests! I am about to start it. But last night when I couldn't sleep (insomnia, don't have it). I wrote what I thought was a more scientifically accurate opening for the movie. I thought I would share. AHEM A Garfield phone rings. JASON STATHAM: Hello? BETTY WHITE: Statham? It's Betty White. You know how I have a sanctuary for prehistoric animals at my farm? STATHAM: I've seen LAKE PLACID; I am up to speed. BETTY WHITE: Well that fucker Rainn Wilson stole my Megalodon. STATHAM: What? Why would he do that? BETTY WHITE: Hell if I know. He's playing a real rich douchenozzle. I need someone to keep it from hurting people. STATHAM: Why me? BETTY WHITE: I already sent the Rock after the gorilla. STATHAM: That makes sense. Can I play it like I am a drunk with PTSD so long as it never comes back or stops me from doing anything heroic? BETTY WHITE: Do whatever you fucking want just don't make me call Diesel. His Instagram videos creep me the fuck out. Anyway! I think this is better because it gets to the shark action faster, without the nonsense science. And then the sequel can be plane-based (for June) and feature Gerald Bulter (for Jason) fighting a pterodactyl or something. Maybe a giant bird (for Nick Kroll.) I haven't decided.

....They literally spell Kelsey two different ways on the same page.... I can't.....

I don't want to go into the all the differences between the book and movie because they are barely similar. I'll address a few things brought up on the podcast. They talk about Rainn Wilson's motivations never being clear. He's not even in the book. The research is funded by the Asian grandfather. It's also not a multi-billion dollar station. They do all their dives off of a boat. Jason brings up Jason Statham having a death wish. In the book, he has premonitions and dreams that he's going to die from the shark. When he finally does kill the shark, he basically says that it's like his dream and knows he's going to die even though he doesn't. The way Statham kills the shark is even crazier than Paul describes. He pilots a submersible into the shark's stomach where he recognizes the face of someone who was eaten. The book claims sharks can vomit by sticking their entire stomach out of their mouth which I assume is not true (right? that sounds crazy). The shark tries to do this and Statham gets out of the sub and uses a megalodon tooth to cut open the shark's stomach. Then gets back in the submersible and survives. They mention this movie feeling like a Chinese import. In the book, the Asian characters all have Japanese names (Masao Tanaka instead of Shuyin and Zhang) instead of Chinese names. None of the movie takes place near a Chinese beach. I think they changed all this to get a bigger financial gross in China. And here's just a sequence from the book that made me laugh. The Meg attacks a surfing competition. One surfer outsurfs the shark. He makes it to land, gets handed a trophy immediately for best surfing of the day and asks his crush on a date. This is only two pages of the book.

Story time: I was out with my friends (Hi Paul, I caught you looking at my insta-story! Excuse me while I die of embarrassment that it was my HS reunion!) and while we were at dinner there was a TV that showed a trailer of The Meg, and I commented on how ready I was to see it because it looked hilariously awful. My friend has asked me what it was bout and I told her it was about a Megalodon that came back to our time period. She then said, "Huh, this sounds like a book I accidentally read in high school. I picked it up because it had a shark on it and I wanted to read about sharks and then suddenly there are a ton of sex scenes." She kept describing things about the book and finally it clicked with me and I yelled, "Oh my god that's this movie! You accidentally read the book this is based on!" We had a good long laugh about how 12 years later this book gets made with Jason Statham and we immediately decided we have to go see it together. We haven't yet because we both work full time and she's in grad school but I'm hoping this long weekend will give us the opportunity. I just love that one of my friends as a teenager could find this in our high school library and expect a normal book about sharks and get so many sex scenes lol.

Now, I am going to ask an important question. The question is... what in the living fuck is Jason Statham doing here?!

hey if any of you guys feel sad that you missed the glory days of forum hangouts come catch the magic this weekend. it wont be exactly the same because we wont just be talking about HH but you can make me talk mostly about HH if you want

I wonder if we'll hear from a certain crustacean living under the sea, perhaps while talking about US President?!

my bobby is reaby

Cosmic Fog be praised

I was locked out of my office this morning, so was able to listen to the entire episode (v. funny) before work and then while I was at work the place where I was planning on buying new socks burnt down.

I actually saw a big geeky dude in headphones in downtown Boston with a Hello from the Magic Tavern shirt. I was so surprised to see a fellow Earwolfer in the flesh I swerved a bit and upset the bee in my car - usually he's the one upsetting me! We're still on shaky grounds to be honest.

Is Ben finally gonna become the ByeBye Man?

I think it's Fortnite now