matte

Voiced by Emmanuel Lewis. Webster reads Webster.

How about John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees?

Cool! A new sub-podcast on Earwolf! (Hi-res over here.)

Ex Lapchinus

Great plan to fight terrorists with liquid nitrogen. Turn them into ISIS cubes.

Please don't stop doing Case Closed! Maybe the segment should just go back to simpler topics, like politics and religion.

My gut reaction to that is to say, "But words can have two meanings!" And then I immediately remember how uncomfortable I feel when people use "gay" to mean "lame." I realize that some things are wrong to say, but calling it "hate", (like,saying that it promotes hatred of a people), seems to conflate it. Really it's just rude. Maybe the way I wish people would react to these situations is to be like, "That is a sexist/racist/homophobic thing to say. You really can't say that." Instead of "That person is a sexist/racist/homophobe! SHAME THEM, so that others will fear the consequences!" It feels so angry mob-y. Now that's pretty cool, I like that.

Oof. I didn't get my comment written before Master Blaster stepped in, but I can't help myself... I definitely side with Matt on this one, that there is a major trend of people being quick-to-offend these days. There seem to be people out there looking at the world through “what could be offensive here” glasses, and they set off a chain reaction of offense. ESPECIALLY on the internet. It almost seems like this trend is the flip-side of cyber bullying: while it used to be super common to see a bunch of hate-speech, threats, and insults in the comments sections of articles, now it seems much more common to find people espousing on social justice. People are taking the same opportunities to insult people they don’t know, only now it’s totally acceptable because it’s coming from a moral pedestal. The troubling part isn’t that people are offended; that’s their right or whatever. What sucks is that their offense gets categorized based on which race/gender/etc may have been implicated; suddenly a minor incident is seen in a larger context, just based off of one little detail. Was the Sun Kil Moon song offensive? Definitely, and intentionally so: he was trivializing and insulting this journalist’s harassment of him by throwing some female stereotypes in her face. But there’s not much in the context of the song suggesting that he honestly feels that way about all women. Is Mark Kozelek a misogynist for referencing stereotypes for insult effect? Not necessarily. Is Tim Meadows a racist for referencing stereotypes for comedic effect? Not likely. Is that scientist sexist for referencing stereotypes to keep women from working with men? MUCH MORE LIKELY, so why not save the word for folks like that! And for everyone else, we say they’re being an asshole?

Always great to hear from Brad Hammerstone.

Higher-res photo here.

Rubbing two sticks together won't do much. The bow string on the horizontal stick is wrapped around the vertical stick, so that when you move the bow back and forth it spins the stick against the bark on the ground. That's where all the fire-starting friction is happening. Then around the base of that vertical stick you put some dry grasses and stuff, which will eventually ignite.

Agreed. You can check out http://www.existor.com/, and talk to it yourself. It does just bring up random subjects sometimes. But despite that, this is improv4humans, no chat bots allowed.

Ha! "Lake Else and Ever" (00:11:27)! If I'm not mistaken that's a reference to Lake Elsinore, a city about an hour South of LA, and my hometown! N'ever expected to hear that on this podcast.

Scott and Paul, you should check out The Price of Gold, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story, on Netflix. It really is a weird story.