August 8, 2026 • 36 mins
Saturday's Fifth Hour is another wicked pissah—a grab bag of beautifully unnecessary conversation. We go ghost hunting in the bowels of FSR, wonder whether a blocked caller ID apology from a celebrity is sincere or just another Hollywood magic trick, celebrate the lifelong curse of being the middle child, and somehow connect Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jan Brady's immortal "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" into one completely unnecessary conversation. History, pop culture, petty grievances, and premium nonsense—because self-improvement is overrated, but wasting an hour with us is oddly satisfying.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Kubbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto cutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The clearing House of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In the air everywhere. The Fifth Hour with me, Ben
Mallor and you. A very happy Saturday to you as
we hang out together here.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
It's the eighth day of August and we are a
day closer to the start of the NFL. We had
that sampler game the other night, the Hall of Fame game,
and no exhibition football till Thursday. Bunch of games on Thursday,
and then it is on every week, just about every
(01:02):
week until February. We got football. Almost every week we
got football, which is very exciting. On this podcast, we
have Poltergeist call me maybe, and a bunch of fun.
I didn't want to get to the word of the week,
the word of the week. Here's the word of the
week to this week. It is wicked, wicked and This
(01:26):
is a very popular word in the New England states,
especially in Massachusetts. It has become the signature word of
that state. And what does the term wicked mean? In
the Commonwealth it is used as an intensifier meaning very
(01:46):
or extremely as in wicked good or wicked expensive, rather
than the meaning of evil. And the roots the expression
originated in New England in the early twentieth century. And
they think, they who follow this kind of stuff, they
think it evolved from the Puritan religion language before becoming
(02:12):
just part of everyday life, every day life, and by
the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, wicked it became
the defining part, as we said, of the Boston lexicon,
with phrases.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Like wicked good and wicked pissa.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
That's a wicked pissa, yes, means very wet, very wet there,
and that is a regional marker as linguistic type. People say.
The Harvard there was a study done at Harvard that
noted that wicked remains a strong part of the identity
of New England across generations. This is a big part
(02:52):
of that and despite local dialect going away, that is
not the case.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
The term wicked and it got into pop culture.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
There's old movies like Goodwill Hunting that departed along with
a lot of the social media migration clips from those movies,
and so it has spread. There was a study done
by the University of Boston University.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
That said college students.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Use wicked more frequently than their parents, meaning that this
is a symbol of regional pride, the term wicked, and
it's been embraced a bunch of businesses have embraced it
in marketing all that stuff, so it's actually considered not
just slang. It's higher level than slang. The term wicked
(03:44):
is a regional part of the dialect that has crossed
over from slaying to be part of the cultural roots
of the area. And it's evolved way more than it
was originally designed to be the word of the week,
the word of the week, wicked, wicked the word of
(04:06):
the week on this Saturday. Now you.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Remember me? You remember me?
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Those words simple, harmless, perfectly pleasant when you hear those words,
you remember me?
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Hey, Hey, you remember me?
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Yeah. Also, for me, an introvert, the conversational equivalent of
hearing the emergency broadcast system, because now we have to
do small talk. Okay, if you say, hey, you remember me.
We have to do small talk, not real talk, like
(04:45):
the guy that used to call the show small talk,
the kind of conversation where everyone asks questions they don't
actually give a rats ass about, they don't need answered.
They pretend that this is not some kind of hostage situation.
The other night, I was minding my own business. Actually
I was mining my own business. Digging through another overnight shift.
(05:08):
I pulled up to the building. There in the malamobile
giant parking garage, right next to the iHeart Premiere Slash
Fox Sports Radio compound at the corner of some Pulvida
and Ventura in the oaks of Sherman Oaks. Now, if
you've never been there, and chances are you haven't, why
would you because you're not invited, you don't work there.
(05:29):
Imagine a building where thousands of hours of radio music
and talk radio are created every single week. Yet somehow
the strongest aroma in the courtyard outside the building is
hot yoga. So I grabbed my bags out of the malamobile.
I walked through the courtyard out of the garage. Through
(05:50):
the courtyard passed the yoga studio. Aforementioned yoga studio where
several middle aged men and women, and these fitness warriors
had apparently he completed a successful class in competitive perspiration
hot sweating in the hot yoga studio there. Now good
for them, their cars probably appreciated that fresh air. Made
(06:15):
my way towards the proper entrance to my building that
I'm in, made a quick detour to the powder room
after the long drive on the winding road from the
north Woods, then passed the little kitchen, the smurf kitchen,
past the editing rooms where all the sound comes from,
(06:35):
almost home free. And then as I remember, as I hear,
is that Ben Mallor that's what I heard? So I'm thinking, no, no,
it's not him, it's somebody that looks like him. It's
the other guy who's pretty tall, wandering the Fox Sports
(06:56):
Radio compound and looking sleep deprived, right going down those
hallways that have been haunted by legends of Fox Sports
Radio pass. So I had already walked past the editing room.
So now I had to execute the awkward one hundred
and eighty degree pivot. And there is really no graceful
(07:20):
way to turn around after someone recognizes you from a distance.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
You either spin.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Like you're an Olympic figure skater, or shuffle backward like
you've misplaced your dignity. Now standing, there was Garrett Writt.
So unless you've spent an unhealthy amount of time around
sports radio and congratulations, if you have a way to go,
(07:49):
you loser. You probably have no idea who Garrett is.
But behind the scenes, he is one of those guys
that everybody knows in sports radio. He's it's just about everything.
In his career, he has been a producer, a writer, editor, booker,
showrunner for TV on air guy occasionally. If sports media
had a utility infielder, a jack of all trades, Garrett
(08:15):
would have been playing every position except the mascot. So
the strange part was seeing the aforementioned Garrett. The strangest
part was also where we happened to run into each other.
That would be Fox Sports Radio. Again, the guy hadn't
worked there in almost twenty years. Yeah, I know, twenty
(08:41):
years in radio, that's roughly six six generations and people
have come and gone, homesteads have come and gone.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Now we've had a bunch.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
Of producers leave recently for different jobs, which has turned
the building that I work in kind of like Grand
Central station in New York, or a Greyhound bus terminal.
People are consistently coming and going. At this point, I
don't even bother to introduce myself to some of these
(09:12):
people because I don't even think they're going to be
here that long, and they don't want to talk to me,
so we don't really talk to each other.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Every week, I'll.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Pass someone in the hallway and the internal monologue in
my head I'm looking at these people and I'm wondering,
do they work here or are they just looking for
the free coffee in the blue smurf kitchen.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Well, apparently nobody sent me the memo.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Garrett, the old Fox Sports radio guy was back for
the second for the second time in a couple of weeks.
It was an alumni associating a lumni association get together.
I talked about Craig Sheman, the great Fox Sports radio alumnus,
to somebody heard me mention his name. He gave me
(09:56):
a call. We were text We had a good conversation there.
So on this one I didn't get the memo. Garrett
had returned, and it felt less like seeing an old
coworker and more like spotting Poultergeist and I'm talking about
like a scary poultergeist monster thingamajig with a big tongue
and fire, more like the ghost that shows up in
(10:20):
an old sitcom reunion special. Like you're surprised, you're happy,
and you're immediately reminded that everyone involved is older than
they'd like to admit. So we started talking and it
wasn't one of those marathon conversations. I do not do
marathon conversations. I did not try to solve the world
(10:43):
like weed Man does every week with world peace.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It was.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
It was a few enjoyable minutes of catching up. The
funny thing about work friendships is there, unlike almost any
other friendship, you spend thousands of hours together late nights,
early mornings, crazy deadlines, bad management decisions, incompetent management, equipment
(11:08):
going sideways, complete failures, inside jokes nobody else would understand
other than those in the building. And then something happens.
Management decides to whack the person you're working with. They
decide to leave for more money, and the music stops,
(11:30):
and just like that poof, you never ever see them again.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
That's it.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They're not your enemy. You're not upset that you don't
get to see them. You didn't hate them that they're
not even really forgotten. It's this weird bizarre it's this
weird bizarre world like they're just gone. I've dealt with
that with Eddie. Eddie Garcia was on the show for years.
(12:00):
He's been gone from the show for a couple of years,
and I I just he was my work friend. We
were you know, we text each other. Everyone wants so on,
not very much, but Eddie, you know, a guy that
was around for so many years and we both kind
of grew up as adults together and all that stuff,
and the company decided to get rid of him and
that was it. And then they's gone Gonzo the Muppet
(12:21):
and so a lot of this is like speed dating,
except instead of splitting the check after forty five minutes
and some bad some bad food, you split after four years.
Life moves on. Life moves on. Somebody else sits in
the chair, somebody else gets the.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Key card to the parking garage.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Somebody else learns that, you know, the good snacks are
actually hidden. You gotta go find the good snacks. Now.
We started, me and Garrett started reminiscing about the early
Fox Sports radio days, which I spent a lot of
time doing. At the time, we didn't realize what was
going on, and we didn't really care. None of us
really figured that this thing would last, and we just
(13:07):
kind of faked it till we made it. That kind
of describes most of the things that have happened. The
difference was back then, nobody, nobody would admit that that
was the case. Right, this is the situation. It's not
looking great. You know, we're getting killed by five other networks.
We talked about me and Garrett talked about the people
(13:29):
who were still around. There weren't many. There were a
handful of behind the scenes cockroaches or cockaroaches who survived
every single budget cut. There have been many, every management change,
every downsizing, every new corporate buzzword that they shove up.
You tuck as you know the time now, the civilization
collapses every so often, if it collapses tomorrow. If a
(13:51):
civilization collapses tomorrow, they'll still be producing updates somewhere.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
It was amazing how.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Few names we could come up with who were still
in the building. And radio has always been always been
musical chairs. The host will leave, the producers leave, the
board ops leave, executives come in promising to reinvent everything,
before they also disappear eighteen months later, you know, eighteen
months later they go become consultants in Texas, shows get canceled,
(14:24):
shows launch, everybody's the next big thing. Then they're doing
mornings in Des Moines or Syracuse or timbuck to wondering
what the hell happened. Yet somehow the network just keeps
rolling on.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Rolling rod and Roland, rollin, Rollin, Rowland.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Just keeps rolling on and on. Different faces, same microphones,
same glowing on air light. And I remember I looked
at Garrett and I thought, man, you know, you look
pretty much the same. You're a little older, a little older,
you haven't gained much, weighed all, a little grayer. He
probably looked at me and thought the same exact thing,
(15:05):
except with more wrinkles, little actually a lot less hair,
and considerably more mileage on the odometer because of all
the stuff that we had to do for the last
couple of years with the you know, sit down interview
things and things like that. So times as a way
of sneaking up on you, it does. We talk about
(15:26):
this a lot, but I feel like in my profession
it's a little more than most professions in the radio business,
where every day feels exactly like the last until suddenly, poof,
you realize that you've been saying coming up next.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
You know, we'll get to it next for a quarter century.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Now. As we wrapped up this very brief conversation, it
hit me that this might be one of the longest
gaps I've ever seen in between someone leaving the company
and coming back almost twenty years. It still is insane
for this cat Garrett who's back at Fox Sports Radio.
(16:11):
That's practically a boomerang with jetlag. And Garrett had gone
off and worked for some big name people. He worked
with Jim Rome. He was one of Jim Rome's producers.
Done a million different things in media and sports media,
very impressive resume, and somehow ended up back in the
same hallway with my fat ass where we had crossed
(16:35):
paths decades earlier. Life yet again showing it has a
very odd sense of humor. You would think certain chapters
are permanently close, certainly after the statue of limitations has
run out. And then one random night, after a brief
bathroom break and a walk past a hot yoga studio
(16:55):
that smells like defeat and deodorant and perfume from women
and men of a middle aged vat. And then you
all of a sudden, you go down and you hear
someone say your name right, you turn around, and for
a few minutes the calendar disappears. It just goes. I
don't know where it went. It disappeared. The buildings older,
(17:17):
the people are older in the building. The network is
infinitely just massively bigger, infinitely bigger than the little operation
we all started out when we were in the old
Michael Reagan's studio at the Premiere Networks. But again, for
one hallway conversation, it felt like we had jumped into
(17:38):
the hot tub time machine. It felt exactly the same.
Which in a business where almost nothing, almost nothing stays
the same, it's a pretty remarkable thing. So I look
forward to seeing Garrett more around.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Fox Sports Rada. Welcome back, Garrett, good to have me.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Welcome back now, Welcome back now, now, turning the page
on that there are two kinds of people in the world,
those who answer unknown phone calls and those who assume
anyone calling from an unfamiliar phone number is either selling
solar panels or announcing the death of a relative. Now
(18:16):
I aspire to be the second type. I fail with
alarming regularity. I do. The other afternoon, I was driving
home from the radio station, all the way back to
the north Woods, that familiar stretch of freeway where the
scenery changes from concrete trees and my personality changes from
(18:37):
public broadcasting man gashbagger to man trying to not make
eye contact with humanity. It is a drive I have enjoyed.
I don't hate it anymore. Every once in a while
I hate it, But for the most part I don't.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And nobody bothers me.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Nobody asks me anything. Usually the phone doesn't ring, the
dog isn't there, the microphone isn't there. Nobody wants an
opinion about the Dodgers, DDGs, Dodgers. It's just me a
cup of coffee that you know, I don't drink metaphorically,
of course, and I had some ice water which was
(19:19):
actually lukewarm. I think it could have been soap, and
whatever decisions the people at Apple Music think I should
be listening to from like.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
So then the phone rings and the screen says Brooklyn Comma,
New York, A color id has turned all of us
into amateur detectives. Forty years ago. You answered the phone
because it rang, You didn't do a bunch of psychobabble.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Well, who could it be?
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Maybe it'll be my boss. I don't want to talk
to my boss. What if it's the person from work.
It's not my boss, but they want to bother me.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know that whole deal.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
You know what if somebody wants me to send them
some money in the mail, well, okay, don't do that.
But today you examined the area code the way a
jeweler kind of studies a diamond. Right, you get a
little thingamagig out and you're suspicious and the whole thing
you're suspicious of. The geography Brooklyn, not Manhattan, not Buffalo, Brooklyn,
(20:25):
Brookland in the house now, my brother lives in New York.
He lives in Manhattan, the borough of Manhattan, not Brooklyn.
I have many cousins that are in the New York
area and Connecticut area.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
And New Jersey, although not in the Borough of Brooklyn.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
I briefly wondered if Uncle Moe had finally upgraded from
whatever prehistoric flip phone he probably had carrying around since
the George W. Bush era as President perhaps someone had
borrowed a phone, Perhaps someone had been when arrested, Perhaps
someone needed bail money. Unknown numbers are incapable.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Of delivering ordinary news.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Nobody calls unexpectedly to report that they had a pleasant lunch. Hey,
I just thought i'd drive up halfway through California because
I really do love that Chick fil a. Man, is
that a great restaurant? Big fan, big fan? Yeah. So anyway,
against every instinct in my body, in my bones, every
(21:32):
instinct I possess, I answered immediately. I regretted the phone call.
Not because it was a telemarketer. Telemarketers at least have confidence.
They know why they're calling. They have a script that
they followed.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
This was not that.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
This was Marcel capital m Marcel. Now, anyone who has
spoken with Marcel knows there is often a translatetionation issue.
There just is. Just as his words don't exactly arrive
in the chronological order, they travel in a loose convoy,
(22:12):
like grocery cards being pushed through a windy parking lot.
Usually that's the part of the charm, that's the charm there.
So this time, however, there was something else. Panic at
the disco. Yeah, panic at the disco. His voice, Marcel's voice,
had this unmistakable quality of someone trying very hard not
(22:36):
to cry, while simultaneously trying very hard to explain why
he may cry.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
All right, why he may cry? Now, I tighten my.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Grip on the steering wheel, if you will. I just
grabbed onto that. Immediately, my imagination began spending money I
don't have. Did something happen to Uncle Dynamite? About carrot Top?
Did someone get hurt? Was there a fire? All of
(23:06):
these things are going through my head. Did the apartment
building he's in collapse? That would be terrible. Human beings
have remarkable imaginations, like we can turn six seconds of
a pause into a funeral, right, we traveled to the funeral.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Meanwhile, Marcell continued talking bah.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Every third word landed, every third word landed.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
The rest dissolved somewhere between Brookland and the Pacific Coast Highway. Now,
finally I was able to piece meal this thing together.
Marcelle was not calling because someone had died. He was
not calling because he just wanted to wish me a
nice day. He was calling because fifteen seconds of the
(23:51):
radio show he was part of accidentally became a station
identification for a TV station in Knoxville, Tennessee. That was
the emergency, I said, Marcell, you couldn't even write some
jokes or something like that. Come on, man, you got
to give me some jokes. Oh to get to it,
which means by next year he'll be able to write
a few jokes and that'll be that'll that'll be all
(24:14):
she wrote. So Pete Alonso having a big year in Baltimore,
not that it matters, and on and on and on again.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
I felt this thing was like.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
An injury emergency room punchline. There wasn't a punchline. So
apparently in the middle of the show, listeners suddenly heard
a station identification from again Knoxville, Tennessee. Then the broadcast
resumed as though nothing had happened, the radio equivalent of
(24:43):
waking up during surgery hearing somebody discussed weekend plants and
then immediately going back under the anesthesia. Just like that. Now,
Marcel again he was devastated, not annoyed, not slightly upset. No, no,
he was really bummed. He was really bummed, and he
just drive the event with the gravity usually reserved for
(25:03):
aviation disasters. For a brief moment, I wondered if perhaps
Knoxville had declared its independence. Maybe that's why, you know,
you know, thirty one past the hour, they're going for it, right,
they're going for it. Instead, it was just a technical glitch.
And I don't know about you. I've always loved the
(25:24):
phrase technical glitch. I don't use it enough. It's a
good phrase because it sounds like an apology that refuses
to identify the quality or the quality of the apology,
the guilty party, all that, like all that stuff. You know,
nobody caused it, nothing failed. A glitch simply wandered in,
(25:48):
made itself comfortable, had a cigar, had to drink.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And that was that.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
It was wonderfully convenient. Imagine applying for you know that
standard we're talking about. Imagine I applying that elsewhere. I'm sorry,
I forgot your birthday technical glitch. I accidentally backed into
your mailbox. I apologize.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Don't worry. That's a minor software issue.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
We're going to upgrade that. Ate the last piece of pie,
Well you're not supposed to eat the last piece of pie,
but I wanted the last piece of pie Okay, you
can have the last piece of pie, but next time
the pie comes, I get the last piece of pie.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Also, you do the.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Old firmware update and all that. Again, the point of
all this droning on, and we thank you for still
being here. The point of all this is rather obvious,
rather obvious if you've been paying any attention here to
what we're getting at. And that would be like, you know, listen,
(26:53):
life is shortse glitches happen and things like that.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
You don't get worked up into a tizzy.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
And you know, radio stations are held together with enough
electronics to qualify as a small moon landing. And there's
wires that are like spaghetti and they fall, Computers freeze,
satellites occasionally develop personalities. The strange thing was Marcel. He
felt genuinely responsible. He apologized no less than like four
(27:22):
to ten times, and I kept saying, listen, Marcel, you
don't need to apologize. You didn't reroot or route the
signal to Tennessee. Though the more I thought about it,
the funnier Tennessee became. And why Knoxville? Why not Phoenix
or Fresno or San Antonio, and why not somewhere more glamorous.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Not that San Antonio is all that glamorous. You get
the point. So no offense, no offense to Knoxville.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
But it felt oddly specific, like accidentally dialing the wrong
extension and ending up in someone's accounting department. Well that
was you know, it's a price you have to pay,
and and that's it. It's a price you have to pay,
and so pay it you do, and that's all all
(28:18):
right now. Meanwhile, turning the page, you if it wasn't
for you annoying radio kids, we would have gotten away
with it. So radio listeners notice everything. This has always
fascinated me. If I clear my throat, someone will email me.
If I mispronounce a player's name, someone will say, oh, oh,
(28:43):
you didn't say that right. If I pause for three
and a half seconds because I'm trying to have a
simple water and some yawning and that kind of thing,
people think I've been kidnapped.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Now.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Years ago, I mistakenly referred to a Wednesday as a Thursday,
and a listener was able to.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Correct me before the hour ended.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Not because the calendar mattered, because accuracy mattered. You must
keep it right. I had a program director years ago
in radio, who said, Ben, you really work very hard
to try to get everything just perfect. I said, yes,
I do, boss, I want every take to be perfect,
and I work my ass off on this. And they
said that's great, that's really really good that you do.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
That means a lot. And then they pointed out that.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
You really don't need to do that. There's no need
to have that happen, Like, what are you doing? Like
seriously right? And you know, these are the kind of
people that may or may not have a stick up
there tookis who hear a microphone at two in the
morning and decide the Republic may be in danger, And
(29:57):
part of me admires them. I'm also terrified by them.
By the end of the conversation, Marcel had calmed down,
mostly because he realized that I wasn't angry that there
was something that annoyed me. I was not angry about
anything involving this particular chapter. So I found the whole
(30:19):
thing kind of comforting, not the glitch, the uninvited phone call.
There's something sweet about a man like Marcel believing that
ten to fifteen seconds of an accidental Knoxville TV situation
getting on radio requires a personal apology so in an
(30:42):
age where corporations regularly lose medical records, airlines, strand your
overnight baggage, you know, they lock it up somewhere and say, well,
you can't have that right now because we haven't gotten
it to where it needs to go. You've got that,
you know, all kinds of crazy things happening out there.
(31:06):
The we're experiencing higher than normal call volume when.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You're trying to get something and you have to have
the right zip code.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
Marcel still believes someone deserves an apology over the brief
radio hiccups, so I wanted to pass us on. Marcel
apologizes to you and to you and to you. It's
it's almost old fashioned, like I hung up, and I
kept driving. The freeway looked exactly the same. The trees
hadn't noticed, and my phone returned to its usual silence,
(31:39):
waiting for the next mysterious number to appear.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
And that's it.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
And I know, I'll tell myself, you know, not to
answer the door. Just don't do it, you know, just
leave alone, and I'll probably answer anyway. I'll probably answer anyway,
because every unknown call carries the impossible promise that this
one might actually matter, all right, and no next time,
(32:04):
before allowing my imagination to stage an emotional catastrophe, I'm
going to ask one question and one question only. Is
this an actual emergency or is this a Knoxville TV station.
The most amazing part is that Marcel was able to
find me and call me that blew me away because
(32:26):
he doesn't have my number. I've always called him a
block number. I'm like, how the hell did he get
my number? And it turns out that there are ways
on the social media platforms. I'm certainly not going to
give it away, but there are ways you can call
people on these different apps and for all the people
(32:47):
to talk about how messed up Marcell is and how
many issues he has. He was able to pull that off,
which is very impressive, very very impressive. Of Course, he's
got a lot of time as a Jets backer to
figure out what's going on and all that stuff. Meanwhile,
today you got a munch of holidays. It is the
eighth day of August. On this Saturday, it is Happiness
(33:10):
Happens Day. You can celebrate that International cat Day, Meow,
International Hangover Day, and my favorite the holiday that I
should celebrate make it all about.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Me, Middle child's day. What the f is that it's today?
Speaker 4 (33:30):
From what I've been told, The term middle child syndrome
very popular in pop culture. However, the experts debate whether
it truly exists as a universal phenomena. Middle children are
supposed to be the negotiator of the family, the peacemaker,
the diplomat, departridge into paratry, that whole thing with your
(33:54):
own spin on it, your own spin on it. And
there's been plenty of research on these middle children. Some
studies have found middle children tend to have strong friendships,
often relying on friends as an extended family.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yes, check check check on that.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
That happens a lot. Middle children are frequently described as
more independent because parents' attention is naturally spread among multiple kids.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I can go on on, I can go on and
on with this. There's a bunch of these things.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
How about this most famous middle child? Is it Abraham
Lincoln or Martin Luther King Junior? Both middle children? How
about j Lo Jennifer Lopez. She's the middle of three sisters,
so she's Jenny in the middle. Britney Spears, the middle
child between her older brother and her younger sister. She
(34:47):
got that.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Madonna she's a material girl.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
She grew up in a middle class childhood, in a
large family of six kids. Now in other departments like
pop culture, when you think middle child and you go
pop culture, that's got to be I know, it's an
old reference. Jan Brady, the Brady Bunch, The Brady Bunch,
(35:13):
middle child, she's the one. If you don't know, you
might have known about this phrase. You probably didn't watch
the show because it's been on and off the year
a million times. Marsha, Marsha and Marsha. That became a
moment we still talk about to this day. It's pretty
well she sent that out to Malcolm in the middle. Now.
(35:33):
Many sitcoms use the middle child as the character caught
between the overachieving older sibling and the spoiled younger one.
That's pretty much in every movie.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
That's it now.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
Middle children invented whatever. I can entertain myself.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I don't need you. I can do my own thing here.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
The middle child is too old to be cute and
too young to be in charge.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
So there it is.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
On that note, we are gonzo. We will have the
mail bag tomorrow. Tomorrow tomorrow, give me a spicy hot
mail bag.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
So check that out.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
I will not reveal who's in there. We have a
couple of feelers out for people for the mail bag.
I don't want to jinx either one of the people
that is a finalist for the mail bag. We'll let
you know someone will be there, come hell or high water.
And on that note, have a wonderful rest of your Saturday.
And as Dick and Dayton says, bye, why why why?
(36:37):
Yeah right, Dick, go to bed. Dick, come on, go
to bed. I know you need my nuggets, but go
to bed, please,
Kubbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto cutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The clearing House of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In the air everywhere. The Fifth Hour with me, Ben
Mallor and you. A very happy Saturday to you as
we hang out together here.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
It's the eighth day of August and we are a
day closer to the start of the NFL. We had
that sampler game the other night, the Hall of Fame game,
and no exhibition football till Thursday. Bunch of games on Thursday,
and then it is on every week, just about every
(01:02):
week until February. We got football. Almost every week we
got football, which is very exciting. On this podcast, we
have Poltergeist call me maybe, and a bunch of fun.
I didn't want to get to the word of the week,
the word of the week. Here's the word of the
week to this week. It is wicked, wicked and This
(01:26):
is a very popular word in the New England states,
especially in Massachusetts. It has become the signature word of
that state. And what does the term wicked mean? In
the Commonwealth it is used as an intensifier meaning very
(01:46):
or extremely as in wicked good or wicked expensive, rather
than the meaning of evil. And the roots the expression
originated in New England in the early twentieth century. And
they think, they who follow this kind of stuff, they
think it evolved from the Puritan religion language before becoming
(02:12):
just part of everyday life, every day life, and by
the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, wicked it became
the defining part, as we said, of the Boston lexicon,
with phrases.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Like wicked good and wicked pissa.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
That's a wicked pissa, yes, means very wet, very wet there,
and that is a regional marker as linguistic type. People say.
The Harvard there was a study done at Harvard that
noted that wicked remains a strong part of the identity
of New England across generations. This is a big part
(02:52):
of that and despite local dialect going away, that is
not the case.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
The term wicked and it got into pop culture.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
There's old movies like Goodwill Hunting that departed along with
a lot of the social media migration clips from those movies,
and so it has spread. There was a study done
by the University of Boston University.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
That said college students.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Use wicked more frequently than their parents, meaning that this
is a symbol of regional pride, the term wicked, and
it's been embraced a bunch of businesses have embraced it
in marketing all that stuff, so it's actually considered not
just slang. It's higher level than slang. The term wicked
(03:44):
is a regional part of the dialect that has crossed
over from slaying to be part of the cultural roots
of the area. And it's evolved way more than it
was originally designed to be the word of the week,
the word of the week, wicked, wicked the word of
(04:06):
the week on this Saturday. Now you.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Remember me? You remember me?
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Those words simple, harmless, perfectly pleasant when you hear those words,
you remember me?
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Hey, Hey, you remember me?
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Yeah. Also, for me, an introvert, the conversational equivalent of
hearing the emergency broadcast system, because now we have to
do small talk. Okay, if you say, hey, you remember me.
We have to do small talk, not real talk, like
(04:45):
the guy that used to call the show small talk,
the kind of conversation where everyone asks questions they don't
actually give a rats ass about, they don't need answered.
They pretend that this is not some kind of hostage situation.
The other night, I was minding my own business. Actually
I was mining my own business. Digging through another overnight shift.
(05:08):
I pulled up to the building. There in the malamobile
giant parking garage, right next to the iHeart Premiere Slash
Fox Sports Radio compound at the corner of some Pulvida
and Ventura in the oaks of Sherman Oaks. Now, if
you've never been there, and chances are you haven't, why
would you because you're not invited, you don't work there.
(05:29):
Imagine a building where thousands of hours of radio music
and talk radio are created every single week. Yet somehow
the strongest aroma in the courtyard outside the building is
hot yoga. So I grabbed my bags out of the malamobile.
I walked through the courtyard out of the garage. Through
(05:50):
the courtyard passed the yoga studio. Aforementioned yoga studio where
several middle aged men and women, and these fitness warriors
had apparently he completed a successful class in competitive perspiration
hot sweating in the hot yoga studio there. Now good
for them, their cars probably appreciated that fresh air. Made
(06:15):
my way towards the proper entrance to my building that
I'm in, made a quick detour to the powder room
after the long drive on the winding road from the
north Woods, then passed the little kitchen, the smurf kitchen,
past the editing rooms where all the sound comes from,
(06:35):
almost home free. And then as I remember, as I hear,
is that Ben Mallor that's what I heard? So I'm thinking, no, no,
it's not him, it's somebody that looks like him. It's
the other guy who's pretty tall, wandering the Fox Sports
(06:56):
Radio compound and looking sleep deprived, right going down those
hallways that have been haunted by legends of Fox Sports
Radio pass. So I had already walked past the editing room.
So now I had to execute the awkward one hundred
and eighty degree pivot. And there is really no graceful
(07:20):
way to turn around after someone recognizes you from a distance.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
You either spin.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Like you're an Olympic figure skater, or shuffle backward like
you've misplaced your dignity. Now standing, there was Garrett Writt.
So unless you've spent an unhealthy amount of time around
sports radio and congratulations, if you have a way to go,
(07:49):
you loser. You probably have no idea who Garrett is.
But behind the scenes, he is one of those guys
that everybody knows in sports radio. He's it's just about everything.
In his career, he has been a producer, a writer, editor, booker,
showrunner for TV on air guy occasionally. If sports media
had a utility infielder, a jack of all trades, Garrett
(08:15):
would have been playing every position except the mascot. So
the strange part was seeing the aforementioned Garrett. The strangest
part was also where we happened to run into each other.
That would be Fox Sports Radio. Again, the guy hadn't
worked there in almost twenty years. Yeah, I know, twenty
(08:41):
years in radio, that's roughly six six generations and people
have come and gone, homesteads have come and gone.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Now we've had a bunch.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
Of producers leave recently for different jobs, which has turned
the building that I work in kind of like Grand
Central station in New York, or a Greyhound bus terminal.
People are consistently coming and going. At this point, I
don't even bother to introduce myself to some of these
(09:12):
people because I don't even think they're going to be
here that long, and they don't want to talk to me,
so we don't really talk to each other.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Every week, I'll.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Pass someone in the hallway and the internal monologue in
my head I'm looking at these people and I'm wondering,
do they work here or are they just looking for
the free coffee in the blue smurf kitchen.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Well, apparently nobody sent me the memo.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Garrett, the old Fox Sports radio guy was back for
the second for the second time in a couple of weeks.
It was an alumni associating a lumni association get together.
I talked about Craig Sheman, the great Fox Sports radio alumnus,
to somebody heard me mention his name. He gave me
(09:56):
a call. We were text We had a good conversation there.
So on this one I didn't get the memo. Garrett
had returned, and it felt less like seeing an old
coworker and more like spotting Poultergeist and I'm talking about
like a scary poultergeist monster thingamajig with a big tongue
and fire, more like the ghost that shows up in
(10:20):
an old sitcom reunion special. Like you're surprised, you're happy,
and you're immediately reminded that everyone involved is older than
they'd like to admit. So we started talking and it
wasn't one of those marathon conversations. I do not do
marathon conversations. I did not try to solve the world
(10:43):
like weed Man does every week with world peace.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It was.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
It was a few enjoyable minutes of catching up. The
funny thing about work friendships is there, unlike almost any
other friendship, you spend thousands of hours together late nights,
early mornings, crazy deadlines, bad management decisions, incompetent management, equipment
(11:08):
going sideways, complete failures, inside jokes nobody else would understand
other than those in the building. And then something happens.
Management decides to whack the person you're working with. They
decide to leave for more money, and the music stops,
(11:30):
and just like that poof, you never ever see them again.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
That's it.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They're not your enemy. You're not upset that you don't
get to see them. You didn't hate them that they're
not even really forgotten. It's this weird bizarre it's this
weird bizarre world like they're just gone. I've dealt with
that with Eddie. Eddie Garcia was on the show for years.
(12:00):
He's been gone from the show for a couple of years,
and I I just he was my work friend. We
were you know, we text each other. Everyone wants so on,
not very much, but Eddie, you know, a guy that
was around for so many years and we both kind
of grew up as adults together and all that stuff,
and the company decided to get rid of him and
that was it. And then they's gone Gonzo the Muppet
(12:21):
and so a lot of this is like speed dating,
except instead of splitting the check after forty five minutes
and some bad some bad food, you split after four years.
Life moves on. Life moves on. Somebody else sits in
the chair, somebody else gets the.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Key card to the parking garage.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Somebody else learns that, you know, the good snacks are
actually hidden. You gotta go find the good snacks. Now.
We started, me and Garrett started reminiscing about the early
Fox Sports radio days, which I spent a lot of
time doing. At the time, we didn't realize what was
going on, and we didn't really care. None of us
really figured that this thing would last, and we just
(13:07):
kind of faked it till we made it. That kind
of describes most of the things that have happened. The
difference was back then, nobody, nobody would admit that that
was the case. Right, this is the situation. It's not
looking great. You know, we're getting killed by five other networks.
We talked about me and Garrett talked about the people
(13:29):
who were still around. There weren't many. There were a
handful of behind the scenes cockroaches or cockaroaches who survived
every single budget cut. There have been many, every management change,
every downsizing, every new corporate buzzword that they shove up.
You tuck as you know the time now, the civilization
collapses every so often, if it collapses tomorrow. If a
(13:51):
civilization collapses tomorrow, they'll still be producing updates somewhere.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
It was amazing how.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Few names we could come up with who were still
in the building. And radio has always been always been
musical chairs. The host will leave, the producers leave, the
board ops leave, executives come in promising to reinvent everything,
before they also disappear eighteen months later, you know, eighteen
months later they go become consultants in Texas, shows get canceled,
(14:24):
shows launch, everybody's the next big thing. Then they're doing
mornings in Des Moines or Syracuse or timbuck to wondering
what the hell happened. Yet somehow the network just keeps
rolling on.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Rolling rod and Roland, rollin, Rollin, Rowland.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Just keeps rolling on and on. Different faces, same microphones,
same glowing on air light. And I remember I looked
at Garrett and I thought, man, you know, you look
pretty much the same. You're a little older, a little older,
you haven't gained much, weighed all, a little grayer. He
probably looked at me and thought the same exact thing,
(15:05):
except with more wrinkles, little actually a lot less hair,
and considerably more mileage on the odometer because of all
the stuff that we had to do for the last
couple of years with the you know, sit down interview
things and things like that. So times as a way
of sneaking up on you, it does. We talk about
(15:26):
this a lot, but I feel like in my profession
it's a little more than most professions in the radio business,
where every day feels exactly like the last until suddenly, poof,
you realize that you've been saying coming up next.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
You know, we'll get to it next for a quarter century.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Now. As we wrapped up this very brief conversation, it
hit me that this might be one of the longest
gaps I've ever seen in between someone leaving the company
and coming back almost twenty years. It still is insane
for this cat Garrett who's back at Fox Sports Radio.
(16:11):
That's practically a boomerang with jetlag. And Garrett had gone
off and worked for some big name people. He worked
with Jim Rome. He was one of Jim Rome's producers.
Done a million different things in media and sports media,
very impressive resume, and somehow ended up back in the
same hallway with my fat ass where we had crossed
(16:35):
paths decades earlier. Life yet again showing it has a
very odd sense of humor. You would think certain chapters
are permanently close, certainly after the statue of limitations has
run out. And then one random night, after a brief
bathroom break and a walk past a hot yoga studio
(16:55):
that smells like defeat and deodorant and perfume from women
and men of a middle aged vat. And then you
all of a sudden, you go down and you hear
someone say your name right, you turn around, and for
a few minutes the calendar disappears. It just goes. I
don't know where it went. It disappeared. The buildings older,
(17:17):
the people are older in the building. The network is
infinitely just massively bigger, infinitely bigger than the little operation
we all started out when we were in the old
Michael Reagan's studio at the Premiere Networks. But again, for
one hallway conversation, it felt like we had jumped into
(17:38):
the hot tub time machine. It felt exactly the same.
Which in a business where almost nothing, almost nothing stays
the same, it's a pretty remarkable thing. So I look
forward to seeing Garrett more around.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Fox Sports Rada. Welcome back, Garrett, good to have me.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Welcome back now, Welcome back now, now, turning the page
on that there are two kinds of people in the world,
those who answer unknown phone calls and those who assume
anyone calling from an unfamiliar phone number is either selling
solar panels or announcing the death of a relative. Now
(18:16):
I aspire to be the second type. I fail with
alarming regularity. I do. The other afternoon, I was driving
home from the radio station, all the way back to
the north Woods, that familiar stretch of freeway where the
scenery changes from concrete trees and my personality changes from
(18:37):
public broadcasting man gashbagger to man trying to not make
eye contact with humanity. It is a drive I have enjoyed.
I don't hate it anymore. Every once in a while
I hate it, But for the most part I don't.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And nobody bothers me.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Nobody asks me anything. Usually the phone doesn't ring, the
dog isn't there, the microphone isn't there. Nobody wants an
opinion about the Dodgers, DDGs, Dodgers. It's just me a
cup of coffee that you know, I don't drink metaphorically,
of course, and I had some ice water which was
(19:19):
actually lukewarm. I think it could have been soap, and
whatever decisions the people at Apple Music think I should
be listening to from like.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
So then the phone rings and the screen says Brooklyn Comma,
New York, A color id has turned all of us
into amateur detectives. Forty years ago. You answered the phone
because it rang, You didn't do a bunch of psychobabble.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Well, who could it be?
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Maybe it'll be my boss. I don't want to talk
to my boss. What if it's the person from work.
It's not my boss, but they want to bother me.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know that whole deal.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
You know what if somebody wants me to send them
some money in the mail, well, okay, don't do that.
But today you examined the area code the way a
jeweler kind of studies a diamond. Right, you get a
little thingamagig out and you're suspicious and the whole thing
you're suspicious of. The geography Brooklyn, not Manhattan, not Buffalo, Brooklyn,
(20:25):
Brookland in the house now, my brother lives in New York.
He lives in Manhattan, the borough of Manhattan, not Brooklyn.
I have many cousins that are in the New York
area and Connecticut area.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
And New Jersey, although not in the Borough of Brooklyn.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
I briefly wondered if Uncle Moe had finally upgraded from
whatever prehistoric flip phone he probably had carrying around since
the George W. Bush era as President perhaps someone had
borrowed a phone, Perhaps someone had been when arrested, Perhaps
someone needed bail money. Unknown numbers are incapable.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Of delivering ordinary news.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Nobody calls unexpectedly to report that they had a pleasant lunch. Hey,
I just thought i'd drive up halfway through California because
I really do love that Chick fil a. Man, is
that a great restaurant? Big fan, big fan? Yeah. So anyway,
against every instinct in my body, in my bones, every
(21:32):
instinct I possess, I answered immediately. I regretted the phone call.
Not because it was a telemarketer. Telemarketers at least have confidence.
They know why they're calling. They have a script that
they followed.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
This was not that.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
This was Marcel capital m Marcel. Now, anyone who has
spoken with Marcel knows there is often a translatetionation issue.
There just is. Just as his words don't exactly arrive
in the chronological order, they travel in a loose convoy,
(22:12):
like grocery cards being pushed through a windy parking lot.
Usually that's the part of the charm, that's the charm there.
So this time, however, there was something else. Panic at
the disco. Yeah, panic at the disco. His voice, Marcel's voice,
had this unmistakable quality of someone trying very hard not
(22:36):
to cry, while simultaneously trying very hard to explain why
he may cry.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
All right, why he may cry? Now, I tighten my.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Grip on the steering wheel, if you will. I just
grabbed onto that. Immediately, my imagination began spending money I
don't have. Did something happen to Uncle Dynamite? About carrot Top?
Did someone get hurt? Was there a fire? All of
(23:06):
these things are going through my head. Did the apartment
building he's in collapse? That would be terrible. Human beings
have remarkable imaginations, like we can turn six seconds of
a pause into a funeral, right, we traveled to the funeral.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Meanwhile, Marcell continued talking bah.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Every third word landed, every third word landed.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
The rest dissolved somewhere between Brookland and the Pacific Coast Highway. Now,
finally I was able to piece meal this thing together.
Marcelle was not calling because someone had died. He was
not calling because he just wanted to wish me a
nice day. He was calling because fifteen seconds of the
(23:51):
radio show he was part of accidentally became a station
identification for a TV station in Knoxville, Tennessee. That was
the emergency, I said, Marcell, you couldn't even write some
jokes or something like that. Come on, man, you got
to give me some jokes. Oh to get to it,
which means by next year he'll be able to write
a few jokes and that'll be that'll that'll be all
(24:14):
she wrote. So Pete Alonso having a big year in Baltimore,
not that it matters, and on and on and on again.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
I felt this thing was like.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
An injury emergency room punchline. There wasn't a punchline. So
apparently in the middle of the show, listeners suddenly heard
a station identification from again Knoxville, Tennessee. Then the broadcast
resumed as though nothing had happened, the radio equivalent of
(24:43):
waking up during surgery hearing somebody discussed weekend plants and
then immediately going back under the anesthesia. Just like that. Now,
Marcel again he was devastated, not annoyed, not slightly upset. No, no,
he was really bummed. He was really bummed, and he
just drive the event with the gravity usually reserved for
(25:03):
aviation disasters. For a brief moment, I wondered if perhaps
Knoxville had declared its independence. Maybe that's why, you know,
you know, thirty one past the hour, they're going for it, right,
they're going for it. Instead, it was just a technical glitch.
And I don't know about you. I've always loved the
(25:24):
phrase technical glitch. I don't use it enough. It's a
good phrase because it sounds like an apology that refuses
to identify the quality or the quality of the apology,
the guilty party, all that, like all that stuff. You know,
nobody caused it, nothing failed. A glitch simply wandered in,
(25:48):
made itself comfortable, had a cigar, had to drink.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And that was that.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
It was wonderfully convenient. Imagine applying for you know that
standard we're talking about. Imagine I applying that elsewhere. I'm sorry,
I forgot your birthday technical glitch. I accidentally backed into
your mailbox. I apologize.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Don't worry. That's a minor software issue.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
We're going to upgrade that. Ate the last piece of pie,
Well you're not supposed to eat the last piece of pie,
but I wanted the last piece of pie Okay, you
can have the last piece of pie, but next time
the pie comes, I get the last piece of pie.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Also, you do the.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Old firmware update and all that. Again, the point of
all this droning on, and we thank you for still
being here. The point of all this is rather obvious,
rather obvious if you've been paying any attention here to
what we're getting at. And that would be like, you know, listen,
(26:53):
life is shortse glitches happen and things like that.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
You don't get worked up into a tizzy.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
And you know, radio stations are held together with enough
electronics to qualify as a small moon landing. And there's
wires that are like spaghetti and they fall, Computers freeze,
satellites occasionally develop personalities. The strange thing was Marcel. He
felt genuinely responsible. He apologized no less than like four
(27:22):
to ten times, and I kept saying, listen, Marcel, you
don't need to apologize. You didn't reroot or route the
signal to Tennessee. Though the more I thought about it,
the funnier Tennessee became. And why Knoxville? Why not Phoenix
or Fresno or San Antonio, and why not somewhere more glamorous.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Not that San Antonio is all that glamorous. You get
the point. So no offense, no offense to Knoxville.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
But it felt oddly specific, like accidentally dialing the wrong
extension and ending up in someone's accounting department. Well that
was you know, it's a price you have to pay,
and and that's it. It's a price you have to pay,
and so pay it you do, and that's all all
(28:18):
right now. Meanwhile, turning the page, you if it wasn't
for you annoying radio kids, we would have gotten away
with it. So radio listeners notice everything. This has always
fascinated me. If I clear my throat, someone will email me.
If I mispronounce a player's name, someone will say, oh, oh,
(28:43):
you didn't say that right. If I pause for three
and a half seconds because I'm trying to have a
simple water and some yawning and that kind of thing,
people think I've been kidnapped.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Now.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Years ago, I mistakenly referred to a Wednesday as a Thursday,
and a listener was able to.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Correct me before the hour ended.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Not because the calendar mattered, because accuracy mattered. You must
keep it right. I had a program director years ago
in radio, who said, Ben, you really work very hard
to try to get everything just perfect. I said, yes,
I do, boss, I want every take to be perfect,
and I work my ass off on this. And they
said that's great, that's really really good that you do.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
That means a lot. And then they pointed out that.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
You really don't need to do that. There's no need
to have that happen, Like, what are you doing? Like
seriously right? And you know, these are the kind of
people that may or may not have a stick up
there tookis who hear a microphone at two in the
morning and decide the Republic may be in danger, And
(29:57):
part of me admires them. I'm also terrified by them.
By the end of the conversation, Marcel had calmed down,
mostly because he realized that I wasn't angry that there
was something that annoyed me. I was not angry about
anything involving this particular chapter. So I found the whole
(30:19):
thing kind of comforting, not the glitch, the uninvited phone call.
There's something sweet about a man like Marcel believing that
ten to fifteen seconds of an accidental Knoxville TV situation
getting on radio requires a personal apology so in an
(30:42):
age where corporations regularly lose medical records, airlines, strand your
overnight baggage, you know, they lock it up somewhere and say, well,
you can't have that right now because we haven't gotten
it to where it needs to go. You've got that,
you know, all kinds of crazy things happening out there.
(31:06):
The we're experiencing higher than normal call volume when.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You're trying to get something and you have to have
the right zip code.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
Marcel still believes someone deserves an apology over the brief
radio hiccups, so I wanted to pass us on. Marcel
apologizes to you and to you and to you. It's
it's almost old fashioned, like I hung up, and I
kept driving. The freeway looked exactly the same. The trees
hadn't noticed, and my phone returned to its usual silence,
(31:39):
waiting for the next mysterious number to appear.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
And that's it.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
And I know, I'll tell myself, you know, not to
answer the door. Just don't do it, you know, just
leave alone, and I'll probably answer anyway. I'll probably answer anyway,
because every unknown call carries the impossible promise that this
one might actually matter, all right, and no next time,
(32:04):
before allowing my imagination to stage an emotional catastrophe, I'm
going to ask one question and one question only. Is
this an actual emergency or is this a Knoxville TV station.
The most amazing part is that Marcel was able to
find me and call me that blew me away because
(32:26):
he doesn't have my number. I've always called him a
block number. I'm like, how the hell did he get
my number? And it turns out that there are ways
on the social media platforms. I'm certainly not going to
give it away, but there are ways you can call
people on these different apps and for all the people
(32:47):
to talk about how messed up Marcell is and how
many issues he has. He was able to pull that off,
which is very impressive, very very impressive. Of Course, he's
got a lot of time as a Jets backer to
figure out what's going on and all that stuff. Meanwhile,
today you got a munch of holidays. It is the
eighth day of August. On this Saturday, it is Happiness
(33:10):
Happens Day. You can celebrate that International cat Day, Meow,
International Hangover Day, and my favorite the holiday that I
should celebrate make it all about.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Me, Middle child's day. What the f is that it's today?
Speaker 4 (33:30):
From what I've been told, The term middle child syndrome
very popular in pop culture. However, the experts debate whether
it truly exists as a universal phenomena. Middle children are
supposed to be the negotiator of the family, the peacemaker,
the diplomat, departridge into paratry, that whole thing with your
(33:54):
own spin on it, your own spin on it. And
there's been plenty of research on these middle children. Some
studies have found middle children tend to have strong friendships,
often relying on friends as an extended family.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yes, check check check on that.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
That happens a lot. Middle children are frequently described as
more independent because parents' attention is naturally spread among multiple kids.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I can go on on, I can go on and
on with this. There's a bunch of these things.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
How about this most famous middle child? Is it Abraham
Lincoln or Martin Luther King Junior? Both middle children? How
about j Lo Jennifer Lopez. She's the middle of three sisters,
so she's Jenny in the middle. Britney Spears, the middle
child between her older brother and her younger sister. She
(34:47):
got that.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Madonna she's a material girl.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
She grew up in a middle class childhood, in a
large family of six kids. Now in other departments like
pop culture, when you think middle child and you go
pop culture, that's got to be I know, it's an
old reference. Jan Brady, the Brady Bunch, The Brady Bunch,
(35:13):
middle child, she's the one. If you don't know, you
might have known about this phrase. You probably didn't watch
the show because it's been on and off the year
a million times. Marsha, Marsha and Marsha. That became a
moment we still talk about to this day. It's pretty
well she sent that out to Malcolm in the middle. Now.
(35:33):
Many sitcoms use the middle child as the character caught
between the overachieving older sibling and the spoiled younger one.
That's pretty much in every movie.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
That's it now.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
Middle children invented whatever. I can entertain myself.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I don't need you. I can do my own thing here.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
The middle child is too old to be cute and
too young to be in charge.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
So there it is.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
On that note, we are gonzo. We will have the
mail bag tomorrow. Tomorrow tomorrow, give me a spicy hot
mail bag.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
So check that out.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
I will not reveal who's in there. We have a
couple of feelers out for people for the mail bag.
I don't want to jinx either one of the people
that is a finalist for the mail bag. We'll let
you know someone will be there, come hell or high water.
And on that note, have a wonderful rest of your Saturday.
And as Dick and Dayton says, bye, why why why?
(36:37):
Yeah right, Dick, go to bed. Dick, come on, go
to bed. I know you need my nuggets, but go
to bed, please,
Fox Sports Radio News
Host
Jonas Knox
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