grudlian.

funy

I was supposed to read it in high school and did not. I tried reading it after college since I still had my copy. I made it maybe one chapter in. I might try the podcast but, depending on how often Michael Ian Black comments, that might be a very dry podcast.

The official list included foreign films until the 2007 update. I think you're good.

I'm not sure Friedkin siding with our against the protagonists of French Connection. Knowing he was coming right off documentaries (which was news to me), I wonder how much was him wanting to document this type of person/situation over judging them. I'd certainly put French Connection in over The Exorcist. Z wouldn't qualify because it isn't American. Going back to Friedkin as a documentation, I think he's trying to present, to an extent, that cases aren't all exciting. Sometimes cases are long stretches of just working them. I'm kind of speculating here as I don't have any evidence to support this.

I remember Sullivan's Travels, and all the Preston Sturges movies I've seen being well made but not charming me the way I think they intend to. I've run into this problem with, I think, just about every romantic comedy pre-1950s save His Girl Friday. So, I think that's just a personal thing.

I was unemployed for three months out of college and I couldn't stop sleeping with my friend's kids and/or moms. Thank goodness I finally got that job.

If I stole $600 million, I'm not looking to work ever again. I'm certainly not managing a strip club. Once I wash enough cash to live the rest of my life, I'd probably throw it into stocks.

If I just robbed the US Treasury, I'm going to try and keep as low of a profile as possible. I'm going to be worried about running into the one yacht dealer who won't break the law for me. I'm going to try my best to get my boat legit. If I'm the yacht dealer, I'm definitely going to remember the guy who comes in with a quarter million in cash... who doesn't want to fill out a standard tax form... that only exists to limit criminals with cash. I might be willing to do it but I'll be expecting feds.

You wouldn't be able to but a yacht cash without completing tax forms. You'd be able to do it with a fake identity but I'd be wary of that. I definitely agree with getting international as soon as you can though. I really like the idea of a yacht or a big boat. It's the easiest way to carry huge wads of cash internationally. You could fit a pallet of cash on a boat. I don't know anything about piloting a boat on open seas but it might not be hard if you follow the coastline down. I'd strongly think about going from Florida to the Bahamas for a bit. There are casinos to launder the cash in large amounts. Go down there for a week or two and live like a king at a casino but your really just exchanging cash all day.

This is absolutely the route I would take if I wasn't worried about the cash potentially being tracked. That's my biggest worry is that money stolen directly from the treasury would have recorded serial numbers. I think it's going to be difficult but if a bunch of notes make it back to the treasury, it's plausible to vaguely follow it's path. They could at least figure out which armored car brought it in which could give you the region of the country if not the specific bank. Once they narrow that down, I would think its only a matter of time before they close in on you. If you made sure to have cash heavy businesses all over the country, that would certainly help cover your tracks. But that's probably going to involve me knowing a money launderer in a few places. I guess if I'm planning a $600 million heist, I'd probably do that legwork beforehand though. Let's not forget that I don't need to move $600 million myself. It was being split 6 (we're their 6 robbers?) ways. I'm technically only moving $100 million.

I should be there. I'm excited to watch a movie with everyone even if it's Love Guru.

The technobabble line I looked up was "This ZBC stuff is so crufty." Crufty is an actual word meaning hastily thrown together. I felt really stupid looking up the only word that actually exists.

How easy is it to exchange money internationally? I've been to Europe and I remember banks at airports being able to do it. There were functionally ATMs that would exchange US currency for Euros but I assume you can't do millions or even thousands without raising some eyebrows. This would be a very long, boring way off doing it. I would think any international casino would be perfect if you can get enough cash out of the US (provided they exchange money which I'm sure a large casino would). But getting a couple million in cash, even if it was all hundreds, is a lot of space. According to Google, $1 million in $100 bills is about 1 cubic foot. If you're willing to stuff a couple suitcases with $100 bills, you could get a few million out so long as you don't get stopped by customs somewhere. Couple this with the money from driving around the country opening bank accounts and you could certainly live a comfortable life. Other than the first few months on the run around the US, it would probably be pretty safe especially if you could set up in a country without extradition laws. I hadn't thought of the ATM but that's definitely a good way to wash your money in small amounts. Every little bit helps keep the feds away from you. I think the main thing is always be on the move and diversify how you launder your cash. If you get too comfortable with one method, that's how they'll get you. Of course, all my schemes rely on the feds even being able to track the serial numbers in a timely fashion. If there's a delay of even a few days, they will probably be unable to catch someone unless they stay still or have a very obvious travel pattern.

Opening multiple bank accounts was my thinking as well. The first thing I would do, even before the robbery is buy some fake identities. Driver's licenses, birth certificates, whatever I need to open a bank account. I'd also get passports for those identities. Let's say 5 new identities. I'd also have a disguise planned. Grow a beard just to shave it, hair dye, fake glasses, anything to make me look different. I'd also get a storage shed somewhere to hold a pallet of money. Then you start opening bank accounts in large cities. I'd probably do a few large chain banks to make access to the money a bit easier. Give each bank a different identity and put in $10,000 because larger than $10,000 in cash requires IRS forms to be filled out. Get your debit card. Repeat five times that day once for each identity. Then drive to the next city. Make sure not to use a fake identity at the same bank and you're probably good. This way you're effectively washing $50,000 a day depending on drive time between cities. Once you've opened a few accounts with each identity in each city, go back and close them. Get your cashiers check and the moneys washed. You can test your account with your a debit card (and pull out money to launder it there as well). Repeat this process in a few different regions of the country. But you could do a quarter million a week in each region of the country. If you pass any casinos as you drive around, change out money there as someone mentioned from Hell Or High Water. I'd also think buying a new used car every once in a while just to be harder to track as you drive across the country. This is a really tedious way to do it all but it keeps you mobile. If you can keep records of which identities you've used where, I think it would be effective. Once you've got a few million dollars washed, have a separate fake identity to open a final bank account in where you can just store cleaned money. Use one of the passports to leave the country and you're good. It doesn't get your full cut of $600 million, but you've got living money forever. If you keep up on your storage locker with a pallet of money, you could always do the whole thing again in a year or two.

I thought about this but I only understand money laundering in theory. Wouldn't the money launderer run into the same problems if the bills can be tracked at all? Couldn't the treasury find the source of the bills the same way I speculated but now through the business fronts the launderer uses? I guess that's the money launderers problem but they could certainly flip on you.

This is what I'm thinking. This money will pass every counterfeit test because it's not counterfeit. A store isn't going to bother checking a bill against a database of stolen serial numbers. But what about banks? Would the Treasury Department or Mint give banks a database to track incoming money? Can the treasury track where the currency the destroy comes from (I suspect they can but don't know)? If the treasury can track incoming bills to be destroyed, then you're probably screwed. They would eventually realize they are getting a lot of bills from a specific region. Then narrow it to a specific state or city. Down to a bank or branch. Figure out the armored car delivery and where they pick up cash from. If you start seeing lots of bills from specific stores, you just get feds to hang out there until the robbers come back once you've figured out a general spending pattern. It also helps that these criminals are certainly on camera the entire time they are robbing the treasury. You could probably bypass a lot of this by living a mildly nomadic lifestyle. If you travel the country, it's going to be much harder for them to get an idea on where you're spending your money next. And I assume there's a time delay on when the Treasury could even track the money of a few days if not weeks or longer. So, you might be good there but, again, you're probably super famous right now. You're picture from the robbery is everywhere and the news is going to tell everyone to watch for people spending cash for every purchase. You could put your money in a bank, but a bank is going to question opening a new account and depositing tons of cash. I'm sure that gets checked and I'm sure the treasury is going to be interested especially after they got robbed. So, banks are definitely out for a while if not forever unless you're depositing small amounts over a long period of time. So, I think this is definitely plausible to get away with it and live a life. I think it would be a weird, tedious life where you probably couldn't spend tons of money on large ticket items that draw attention to themselves with large cash purchases. Who steals $600 million without wanting to splurge a little bit?

It gets brought up a couple times that How Did This Get Made is affecting the numbers for Hurricane Heist. They also bring up the power of HDTGM and its listeners with Face/Off. So, this got me curious how much money is How Did This Get Made bringing in for The Hurricane Heist. Let's do some math. I looked at the seating chart for the Athenaeum. A quick count puts it at 1012 seats. It cost $14.99 to buy this movie. That's 15169.88. To my knowledge, Earwolf doesn't publish numbers but here is a thread on reddit looking at some numbers based on Soundcloud downloads. These are certainly very lowball numbers because its 1. two years ago and 2. it doesn't include listens from other sources like Stitcher, Howl, etc. But let's just go with 343238 for average listens (subtracting live show attendees for this episode). Multiply that times the $5.99 to rent on Amazon, that's $2,055,955.62. We're looking at a total of $2,071,165.50. From this point on, I'm going to have to do a ton of speculating. We know a ton of listeners never pay money to see the movie. They just don't watch it. They watch it in groups. They share Amazon passwords. They pirate the movie. I'll pull a number totally out of my ass and say 50% never pay money for Hurricane Heist. That still puts us at $1,035,582.75. The lifetime box office gross of Hurricane Heist is $6,115,825. So, HDTGM conservatively brought in 16% of Hurricane Heist's gross in two weeks. That's pretty impressive and I'm sure one of those 29 producers is probably getting a paycheck thinking "Maybe we should have kept this in theatres a second week! It's doing okay on VOD."

The main guy is a synoptic meteorologist. He doesn't make mention of storms being sentient which leads me to believe he either 1. Isnt aware of them being sentient or 2. Or this is totally commonplace and not worth noting because all storms are sentient in this universe. I'm leaning toward the latter but only because he speaks to the storm occasionally. He says something like "You're stronger than they're expecting." You think he might try tel the storm to calm down a bit.

The audience member mentions the hurricane would be category 17 hurricane but the scale only goes up to category 5 hurricanes. I could pretend I know this next part, but I'm just going to link to wikipedia about which has information about category 6 hurricanes. In a movie filled with bad special effects, my absolute favorite was this scene where it's very clear the trucks were entirely CGI. I had to record this because it made me laugh so hard. The wheels can be seen through the concrete barrier.

You're right. The podcast doesn't say that. That's more of a response to my own post where I argued maybe put in Top Hat instead of Swing Time. That way one doesn't need to endure the black face.

One thing I've wondered is if the AFI wanted to make sure you include certain types of movies. Maybe do an all encompassing look at 100 years of film as opposed to the actual best 100 movies. And an old fashioned musical/dance film needed some kind of inclusion. I might have pushed for Top Hat over Swing Time just because one doesn't feature a racist minstrel section in black face.* Not that I think these movies are bad but if I were ranking the top 100 American films, I wouldn't include Swing Time at all. *On the other hand, I don't necessarily think we should be erasing black face from history. People of the time fucking lived with it. It's really shitty but pretending it didn't exist for the rest of time is minimizing the struggle people of color had at the time. Presenting stuff like Swing Time with the proper context and acknowledging how difficult it was for black dancers and actors who could have been as big as Fred Astaire is important.

This for sure. If you want to pay tribute to Bill Robinson, maybe dance with Bill Robinson. Not that Bill Robinson wasn't hugely well known from the movies he did with Shirley Temple at this time (which is, I believe, the first interracial dance couple on film) but include him. Robinson was only in a handful of movies and died penniless. His funeral was paid for by Ed Sullivan. I think Robinson gave a lot of money to charity but still Fred Astaire was a millionaire until he died. And, since Swing Time has no Simpsons appearances, here is Bill Robinson:

You can tell Paul and Amy don't play table top role playing games if they don't know there are 100 sided dice before this.