The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast

De : Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast.
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  • It is now mandatory for all US citizens to have podcasts, with episodes coming out at least twice a month. If I don't achieve a certain unspecified number of listeners, I will be executed. Help me. Please.

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    • The Most Gullible Man in Kansas City

      The Most Gullible Man in Kansas City
      Sep 5 2024
      I’m putting a call out to any confidence tricksters who subscribe to this newsletter, or to anyone reading this who knows a good flimflammer. I may have identified the most gullible man in the greater Kansas City area. I don’t know his name. I know one place that he goes to, though, and he’s easy to identify. A resourceful scoundrel could learn his name with ease. I was at the YMCA, some days ago. I went swimming, and then stepped into the adjoining sauna. The facility would close in fifteen minutes, and I wanted to feel hot. The sauna was filled with men. One was younger than I, the rest my age or older. Men of certain ages say incredibly stupid things, especially when no women are around, and so I knew all I had to do was sit tight and keep my ears peeled. I heard a man outside the sauna, telling yet another man a thing he liked about Donald Trump. He said that Trump had promised to reinstate anyone who was removed from military service for refusing to get a COVID vaccine. “That probably doesn’t affect many people, does it?” asked the second man.“Probably not,” said the first man. “But still.”The first man stepped into the sauna. He said hello to the younger guy, who asked what he had been driving.The guy who had just entered, the “first man” from before, said he had been driving his truck around town, which was frustrating.Frustrating how? asked his friend.“Well,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Kids yell at me when they see me. A lot of people take pictures, like when I’m at a stop light. They just lift their phone cameras and point them at me, you know? And I’m sitting there like, at least stop and say something nice about the truck before you take the picture! You don’t have to talk to me. You can say the nice things to the truck!”It was something much like that. I was so confused. It was like when I read The Expendable Man, the 1963 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, at the start of which the protagonist (spoiler alert) has just driven away from a small town where a crowd of people shouted at him and drove him away, rattling him, making him afraid for his life. There is no immediate explanation for why they’ve done this, and it’s peculiar. The reason it’s bewildering is that Hughes delays indicating to the reader until page thirty or forty or so, that the protagonist is a Black man. People drove him out of town because they were racist white shitheads, but she doesn’t make that so obvious at first, and it makes the whole thing even stranger and more unsettling than it would be otherwise. The realization I came to, some seconds after this man in the sauna complained that people were yelling at his truck and taking pictures of it, was that he owns a Cybertruck. I had seen one around town, and laughed at it. Now here he was, right in front of me: the guy who was sitting behind that ridiculous Cybertruck steering wheel. He said he was looking to get a new car. He has a Model Three, which I guess must have been his other, smaller Tesla. The conversation broadened to other subjects, and included other men in the sauna. It’s something that happens when you get a bunch of men together. Everyone feels like they’re part of the conversation, and all of the men seem to want to participate. Everyone pitches in, to guarantee quality colloquy. I never say a word when this happens. I have never felt like I belong in these impromptu conversations with groups of strange men, and it’s happened a few times in my life that someone has confronted me about that. I’m not kidding. It’s not cool.Anyway, the Cybertruck man shared with another man something he had learned the day before: if you spend ten minutes in an ice bath, it burns 1,000 calories. The other guy shook his head. “There’s no way,” he said. “1,000 calories? No. Maybe, like, fifty.”Everyone agreed that it was nonsense to think ten cold minutes could burn 1,000 calories. You might burn some calories, sure. But there was no way they would add up to 1,000. The Cybertruck guy then said that he noticed the other day how his phone kept showing him things he hadn’t looked up online, but had been thinking about. It was like his phone was reading his mind, it was so weird. Another guy said that had been debunked a long time ago, that your phone only seems to read your mind because it’s reading your eye movements. It’s tracking what you’re looking at and showing you more of it. If you were thinking of something, it was probably because you saw an ad for that thing, and you’re only seeing another, similar ad.From there, the conversation went on in this same vein. This guy would say something that wasn’t right, and the other guys would correct him. Then I left. I was getting too hot.So, yes, if anyone who knows how to rip guys off wants to travel to Kansas City, I will help you to identify this man in exchange for a modest finder’s fee of 5 percent. That’s all. If you want me to help with the...
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      22 min
    • Dogs: They Are Our Canine Companions

      Dogs: They Are Our Canine Companions
      Aug 19 2024
      A lot’s been going on, lately, that involves dogs. I don’t mean in politics or culture, I mean in my life, which is what actually matters.I saved a dog’s life the other day. I threw myself to the ground in order to rescue a pug that belongs to a friend of my younger daughter. I could have been killed, but instead I saved a life. And maybe, in doing that, I saved my own.Since this event took place, the other day, I’ve been thinking of writing a longish work of autobiographical nonfiction about saving the dog. I could self-publish it as a standalone book, and call it something like SAVING BETSY: HOW I RISKED MY LIFE FOR A FAT PUG AND WHERE PRIAPIC ORTHODOXY STANDS TODAY. I could do whatever I wanted with it. That wouldn’t have to be the title. It definitely wouldn’t be the title. I looked up what the word “priapic” means. But I could use the tale of my heroics to launder horrifyingly misguided ideas concerning society at large and how other people should lead their lives. Or I could just make it a comically self-indulgent account of something I did that only took half a minute, impressed no one at all, and is not significant. But I would do a really good job. I asked an image generator what a book with that title might look like. It created a man who doesn’t look like me, to go with the book that also does not exist:Who is this man? What necklace does he have on? Why is he wearing those rings? Is he supposed to be a Priapic-Orthodox clergyman? Is that how they dress? Are the beards mandatory? Why does he have that car?And is he taking credit for rescuing Betsy the pug? If so, I will be upset. In fact, that may have to emerge as a SAVING BETSY subplot.Wait a minute. That’s not the title, this is:The real title of my book will be HEAVENS TO BETSY: HOW I SAVED A FAT PUG by Begvey Belsh Bigg. That will be my nom de plume.Also, those things surrounding the pug do not appear to be clocks. What, I wonder, are they there to measure? Chewing GumI don’t like AI-generated stuff. I know I’ve used two AI-generated images in this Hoedown so far, but that’s because they came out looking incredibly stupid, and to me that’s very funny. The audio Hoedown sometimes features an AI-made theme song. But things made by AI are not good. My old friend Nick Perry said online the other day that an AI-generated video he saw was like fast food, that the way it looked cool but was also empty was like the way a McDonald’s hamburger may taste all right but won’t be good for you. Stuff made with care, attention, and maybe even expertise can be good for you. AI has none of that going into it. Not really.When I saw Nick make that analogy, I was like, “That analogy is tight. Hell yeah.”Nick is a great artist—far superior to any computerized image generator—and he’s got some prints for sale online that everyone should check out.Reservoir PogsOne thing that I haven’t lost is the ability to walk dogs. I have been doing quite a lot of that, lately, at the Kansas City Pet Project, a shelter for dogs and cats here in town. They take the occasional other sort of animal, too, like the alligator that escaped from an unlicensed traveling petting zoo that appeared at a middle school earlier this year. The alligator was a baby, with its mouth taped shut, and our older daughter goes to the school the reptile disappeared from. It was exciting.There are lots of theories going around, concerning how the alligator got away from the school, and why it reappeared just outside the same school exactly one week later. Actually, there’s only one theory I know of, which is that a kid from the school stuck it in their backpack and took it home, then returned it when they didn’t feel like having it anymore. There’s a main building for the Pet Project, which has well over a hundred kennels, each of them stuffed with one dog, and with a dedicated dog-walking outdoor zone with a pond and lots of grass and air and stuff. Closer to where we live is a satellite location at an outdoor mall. Since I registered to volunteer, and got trained and stuff, I can go to the shelter and walk the dogs they have in their kennels. There are around fifteen of them at any given time, puppies not included. They spend nearly all of their time in the kennels, and so if someone can come and take them out, one by one, it’s really good. That way they won’t go to the bathroom in the kennels, and they can destress a little before being restressed when they go back in. I can bring the kids with me when I do this. They give them treats. One thing a staff member told me, when she trained me to do this work, was that I shouldn’t hesitate to spoil the dogs. The whole point is to spoil them, to let them sniff what they want, give them treat after treat, and generally waste time walking around outside. This is the best part of a dog’s day, the trainer said. Make it as good for them as you can. Make them feel special.This is, I realized, once I...
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      22 min
    • Deadpool Wolverine and the Extrapolator of Thought and Mind

      Deadpool Wolverine and the Extrapolator of Thought and Mind
      Jul 31 2024
      If you listen to the audio version of this newsletter, then before the usual newsletter content, in which I read the newsletter, and talk about my life, you will hear about the Extrapolator of Thought and Mind, and the chamber that I, Robert Long Foreman, have been inserted into, so that I can get some rest while the Extrapolator writes and says in my nasal voice the things I would be writing and saying if I were still outside the chamber. How I ended up in this chamber is complicated, and not entirely something I volunteered for or consented to. But the Hoedown Quarterly Review marches on, and if you listen to the audio newsletter you may understand what this is about. I make no promises, except that my voice is indeed nasal and unpleasant to hear.If you change just three letters in the word NASAL, you get the word LASER, but the important thing is that everything you read or listen to here is real and new. It’s clean and it’s good, and it’s made by a man. It’s the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand.Deadpool WolverineI went to see Deadpool Wolverine, the new movie that’s taking up a lot of theater space right now in the land of freedom. I don’t go to movies much, and if it were up to me I would see better ones when I do. For example, later the same evening that I watched Deadpool Wolverine, the local theater was showing a fortieth-anniversary edition of Terminator. That would have been a fun thing to see in a movie theater. It brings me no joy at all to report this, but when I walked into the Deadpool Wolverine theater the smell of unwashed hair, skin, and clothing nearly killed me. Like, I almost died from how it smelled. I’m surprised I didn’t come out of there with fleas.I don’t go out much, so I haven’t smelled that smell in a while, the unmistakable odor of someone’s body when it hasn’t been cleaned in a long time. At first, I thought, Holy s**t, someone has not taken a shower this year. After sitting there for an hour, that smell going nowhere, I wondered if more than one person in the theater had not showered this year. I don’t doubt that’s an insensitive way to start the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand. I already feel bad for mentioning the way those people smelled. But come on, man. This is not the eighteenth century. It’s not even the twentieth century. The people in that theater didn’t smell awful because they were so poor they lacked access to indoor plumbing. They were at a Deadpool movie. If they can afford that ticket, they can get their hands on soap and water. But there really could not have been an audience more receptive to that movie than the one I sat in the theater with. They laughed at every joke. They got every reference to other Marvel films and comics, and they made sure everyone else in the theater knew they got the references. They hollered. They clapped. When that storefront appeared in the background of one shot, with the joke about artist Rob Liefield drawing feet, or whatever, they freaking lost it—even though they must have all known they would see the joke at some point in the film, because even I saw a photo of that storefront with the Liefield feet joke, months ago. I don’t know where I saw it. I imagine it was someplace online that sucks.But I didn’t hate watching the movie. It had its moments. My response was net positive. Emma Corrin was great. Matthew MacFayden did a fine job. You can always count on the English to elevate the substandard material they have to work with. Corrin plays a bald woman who reaches into people’s heads with her hands to read their minds, and the effects they used for that were weird and worth seeing. Whoever made those effects should get a raise. And I liked Wolverine’s hat. They did a great job making that hat.But I didn’t enjoy the movie nearly as much as everyone else in the theater did, and I never went to any Bible camps growing up, but I felt partway through watching Deadpool Wolverine that the movie must be what it’s like to watch your friends at Bible camp perform skits on the last night before everyone goes home so they can start school in the fall. In order to get the jokes made in the skits, you have to have been at camp all summer, because all of the humor refers to things that happened at camp. The jokes have the appearance of irreverence, too, because irreverence is fun. But they don’t cross over into anything like hazardous territory, or—heaven forbid—actual comedy. If you did anything like that at camp, like if you questioned how well the director was doing their job, or whatever, you might get in trouble. It’s not unlike how you can have Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool break the fourth wall and refer cheekily to how Disney owns Marvel, but you’ll never see him, let’s say, pissing on an image of Mickey Mouse. Something like that would be consistent with the quality of humor you see in Deadpool ...
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      35 min

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