August 14, 2026 • 37 mins
Benny opens the vault for a never-before-told tale of a spur-of-the-moment midnight ride aboard the legendary Maller Party Bus, rumbling through deserted desert wasteland on a pilgrimage to the Mecca of multi-pump refueling. Along the way, Ben conducts an “expansion draft,” bonds with his favorite rodent and somehow turns a simple road trip into another chapter of Maller Madness. There are twists, turns and a reunion with a long-lost radio colleague, capped off by a five-star rustic dining experience — al fresco on the hood of a car in 100-degree heat, because apparently tables and air conditioning are for aristocrats. We even break out the CompuBox Stats to measure the damage from this great desert odyssey. It may not be a good year, but it’s a damn good story. Plus, appetizers featuring Creamsicles, Kool-Aid, Navajo Code Talkers, Tajín toppings and enough random detours to leave your GPS begging for workers’ comp. No hocus pocus, just focus!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Kabooms.
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 soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to clearing House
of hot takes, break free for something Special. The Fifth
(00:23):
Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Eat the air Everywhere, The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben
Mahler and you.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We are together again through the power of the pod
on this the Friday episode. Although keep in mind, based
on the analytics, you know, I love my analytics. You
people listen to this at all different times. A lot
of you do not even listen the day we do
the podcast. That's the magic of the podcast. It's a
(00:59):
bit you can listen whenever you want. However, just for
the record, it is duly noted that this podcast is
available here on this fourteenth day of August. It's early
on a Friday, the two hundred and twenty sixth day
of the year, which means, according to Malarmath and my
computer like brain, there are one hundred and thirty nine
(01:21):
days to go in the year, and this the podcast
that is pretty random, not very sporty. Very rarely is
this podcast sporty. So let's jump in the hot tub
time machine and go back back, back, back, back back back.
So there I was. The other day. I was sitting
(01:44):
in the Malar Mansion. I was not here in the
remote podcast studio at the Malor Mansion. I was in
another room. It was Friday afternoon, and I was contemplating
the utter existential dread that is having to Phil not one,
not two, but three weekend podcasts. Now. At that point
(02:04):
I had already done one, but I had other podcasts
to do. Now, if you have listened at all over
the years, you know I'm not exactly Evilknieval. Like nobody
is listening to this, Like you're not listening to this
to watch me, you know, middle aged guy, you know
gas bag launch a Harley Davidson over sixteen school buses
(02:29):
and some fountains in Las Vegas. You're not doing that. Now.
If I tried that, my spine would instantly disintegrate into
the fine bone powder that you can buy on the
internet on the dark Web. And the last thing that
my wife needs is to spend her weekend scraping up
her husband off the pavement somewhere in San Bernardino. Don't
(02:52):
need that, don't need it. So no, my brave athletic
feats typically involve sitting in the driver's seat for hours
and hours and hours, probably destroying my prostate, and aggressively
consuming caffeine pills until my heart beats like a panicked hummingbird.
(03:14):
Pretty much, because as I have often said over the years,
life is all about the stories you pick up along
the way. It's all about that, right, And in order
to do that, you actually have to occasionally leave your house,
even if you would rather stay at your house. So
in my case, it's about doing it for the plot.
(03:36):
And by plot I mean having something, anything, literally anything
to talk about into a microphone so I don't get
replaced by an AI bot named chat sports Bro from
barstool or whatever. You know. You know that's coming. They'll
be Chat sports Bro AI right around the corner. And
(03:57):
when that happens, it's all over all right. So this
brings me back to last Friday, a week ago. The
decision was made, The executive decision had been made. We
were leaving the People's Republic of California. Now, I know
what you're probably thinking. Oh, Ben, come on, you've got
(04:17):
perfect weather, you live in the mall or mansion. You're
in southern California. Why would you ever leave? Well, I
can do a different podcast on that. I'll tell you why.
Three hundred in this case, three hundred and fifty miles away,
give or take, across the vast desert wasteland sat the
(04:40):
Holy Land, the mecca of MULTII pump refueling, the north
Star of convenience stores, BUCkies Tea. Yes, the beaver, the
giant cartoon, red hat wearing rodent. My pal Bucky has
(05:00):
somehow built this empire larger than most small European nations
simply by offering cheap gas, clean toilets, and smoked meats.
That's all you need. Now, I am no stranger to
the beaver. Me and the beaver are tight. I popped
(05:21):
my BUCkies cherry in South Carolina. I think it was
at the I believe it was the Columbia location if
I remember correctly. They only have one in South Carolina.
So I was at that one. I was visiting my
niece over in Charleston. We drove all the way across
South Carolina and went to the BUCkies. And a few
months back, during a Mallard meet and greet we did
(05:42):
in Newport, Kentucky, right across from Cincinnati. Right after we
had devoured delicious strongs brick ovened pizza from the pizzaia there,
we ended up taking a midnight ride on a midnight
ride to Dayton, Ohio to pay homage to the Beaver.
So we've been there a couple of times now. That
(06:03):
grand excursion included Absolute Sports Radio Legends, Royalty in the
Malard Militia, Robbie the Mariner fan who's pretty much part
of this podcast now, Queen Roxanne, Tommy in Atlanta can't
close the deal, Neil and his son Corbin, And that
was the night we all went to the Reds game.
(06:24):
We ate ice cream. Tommy fled to his hotel because
he had an early flight. Neil and Corbin also had
to bail. However, the three amigos, that's right, Queen Roxanne,
you're one of the amigos. The rest of us all
made the pilgrimage over to BUCkies and it was one
of the greatest nights I've done a lot of these
meet and Greece. That was so much fun to hang
(06:45):
out and you just have a great time. And it
was a whirlwind trip. I was only in that area
for like a day and a few hours, and it
was it was just a lot of fun. So when
the itch returned last week, I didn't just load up
the rental malormobile with my wife, because we did run
a car. My wife, the nine to one to one dispatcher,
(07:07):
who voluntarily agreed to this madness. No no, we expanded
the roster. We had an expansion draft, and we invited
two of her work besties, Jen and Ashley, and suddenly
my rented suv was not just a car. No no, no,
no no, it was the official Malard party bus. We
(07:30):
did not have the lighting we needed, and we also
needed one of those balls rolling around, but everything else
we had. So we drove out originally to a secret
location in the San Gabriel Valley to load up. Now
my wife, knowing that this was going to be the
Mallard party bus and her friends were going to be there.
She brought enough snacks to survive nuclear fallout, so we
(07:53):
were good. If there was some kind of nuclear situation,
we were good. So I took the wheel. I was
at the dry as always destination, Good Year, Arizona. We
left at four thirty in the afternoon. Let me get
the pause button right here, so let that thing sink
into your skull here, all right, So four thirty in
(08:18):
the afternoon on a Friday in the Greater Los Angeles area.
On the global pyramid of horrible life decisions, departing LA
at peak rush hour ranks right between investing your entire
life savings on beanie babies and petting a wild badger
(08:39):
somewhere in that world. So we were immediately swallowed whole
by a sea of red tail lights. As far as
you could possibly look, there were red tail lights, bumper
to bumper to bumper to bumper, creeping along at four
miles per hour while the sun beat down on the
pavement like a giant, angry heat lamp. We were in
(09:02):
a sauna. We were in a sauna. And and look,
I don't really mind driving long distances. I do that
quite a bit. But I gotta be awake, right, gotta
be awake. And you put me on a clear highway
and give me a stretch of asphalt, and I'm okay,
(09:23):
I'm fine. I don't know that I'm happy about it.
I'm okay. But traffic. See, that's the thing. Traffic. Traffic
is a machete to my soul. It destroys me. My
whole attitude changes, right, you know. I know my hair
(09:44):
started giving up years ago, But sitting in traffic for
a couple of hours just gives me more time to
contemplate all of my shortcomings in life. Now, to survive,
I executed the malar maneuver, the protocol of utter desperation.
I was popping caffeine pills, washing those down with massive
(10:07):
iced Starbuck teas purchased by my long suffering wife, and
stared blankly into the middle distance with this red glow
from the tail edge. Now, if you've never driven from
LA to Phoenix or vice versa, most of you don't
(10:28):
live in that area, I understand, So let me try
to explain it. So, the route to Phoenix from Los
Angeles is really not complex, really not complex. It is
not scenic. It's you jump on Interstate ten, the Eye ten,
and it is a straight shot, straight line. You leave
the city, you go out past Palm Springs that area,
(10:53):
and then you just keep going and going and going.
It's the energized Bundy of highways. There really are no turns.
There are no real bends on the road. There is
only the vast, empty, soul crushing expanse of the desert,
(11:15):
the desert Southwest that goes on and on and on. Now, naturally,
because we were pumping our bodies full of ice drinks,
you know, different teas and lemonade and water and various
non alcohol liquids, our bladders began a furious movement to unionize.
Every forty five minutes or so, it was time to
(11:39):
pull off off the road. So one of our pit
stops occurred. I want to share this when with you
because it's kind of cool and I'd not been to
this place before. So we were driving. We got through
Palm Desert and there was this desolate gas station, kind
of a gas station village. Really. It was on the
outskirts of Palm Desert near Joshua Tree National Park where
(12:02):
people go to look at the stars, the real stars,
not those fake Hollywood stars. Because the reason you go
there to Joshua Tree is there is not a single
piece of civilized infrastructure for at least fifty miles. Like
we talk about the boondocks, the dusty Winnemucker Road. This
(12:24):
is where it is. So you get off the freeway,
you make a left crossback over the overpass, and there
it is. There's a mobile gas station, a mom and
pop Mexican restaurant, and a handful of what appears to
be mostly deserted storefronts. That mobile station is it. That's all.
(12:47):
That is the absolute edge of the earth in terms
of human beings until you get way down the road. Now,
beyond that point there are no tow trucks, there are
no canics, there are no human souls. There is only see, say,
sixty miles. The sign said no services for sixty miles,
(13:11):
sixty continuous miles of barren, sun bleached desert where the
ambient temperature is hovering around a very mellow one hundred
degrees fahrenheit. So if your fan belt snaps and you
don't have to worry about calling Triple A because there's
(13:33):
no cell service, you just accept your new reality as
a sun baked mummy. If only they could put a
pyramid out there and you could toss your body into
the pyramid. So eventually we rolled into blythe California. Have
you ever been to blythe You have not okay, Blythe
is what we call the final frontier. Before you cross
(13:55):
into the promised Land, the free state of Arizona. You
cross the Coloradeido River, that is the border there. You
step over the state line into Arizona, and a miracle occurs,
a modern miracle occurs, an absolute, undeniable, biblical miracle. The
price of gasoline drops by a dollar fifty a gallon.
(14:20):
Ta da. Yeah, same land, same air, same gasoline. But suddenly,
because you crossed an invisible man made line on a map,
the price plunges. In California, I was going to Costco.
I filled up before we left. It was five dollars
and twenty cents five twenty at Costco. That's a deal
(14:43):
in LA. And it was three seventy nine, which I
still think is a little high across the Arizona border.
It is a stark, painful reminder of how the Golden
State loves to gouge with taxes the people of their
state there, and they love, the politicians love to reach
(15:04):
into your back pocket and extract every single cent you
own in taxes, not that they actually spend the money properly,
because you might not have as big a problem with it. No, no, no, no,
it's a disease. They're addicted to that. Anyway, I can
do that rant another time. So you would have to
be an absolute, unmitigated knucklehead, a Mama luke, a person
(15:28):
of truly staggering foolishness to buy gas on the California
side of blythe you drive three hundred feet over a
bridge and you save what forty bucks on a fill
up and laugh all the way to the bank. So
once you're in Arizona, the void resumes. Hours of driving
(15:49):
through Native American land. There's even one part that has
its own time zone separate from Arizona, and so there's
nothing in sight unless you're like Actus and all that stuff.
Just nothing going on. Now. I will give the Grand
Canyon state credit. Arizona gets its truck stops right. In California,
(16:12):
truck stops often look like the set of a post
apocalyptic horror film. Most of the time they're closed, that's
the first problem. Most of the time they're closed, and
when they're open, they're dilapidated. They smell like a mix
of old cottage cheese, cabbage, urine feces, and broken dreams,
(16:34):
and you feel like you need some kind of protective
hazmat suit and a shot of penicillin. And I'm allergic
to penicillin. Right when you walk in and walk out.
Now in Arizona, the truck stops are pristine. Several of
them were air conditioned, spotless. I would think you would
(16:56):
need air conditioning because even at night, the temperature on
the highway was topping way over one hundred late at night,
one hundred and ten in some places, and surrounded by
towering cacti and surreal dry lightning storm. We saw off
on the horizon on the right side, ripping across the
(17:18):
black sky, and we didn't see any rain. It was
not a single drop of rain, which is seemingly pretty
weird doodle bug weather. It's no wonder. UFOs love flying
around Arizona. The lizard people, the reptilians can't get enough.
If I were a reptilian alien, I would check out
(17:40):
the lightning show also and slither around the desert. So finally,
at roughly midnight, at roughly midnight, we saw it on
the horizon, the glowing heavenly halo. There it was the
Holy Land, the Mecca BUCkies, good Year, Arizona. You could
(18:06):
practically hear the choir of angels singing Hellllelujah, Hellelujah as
we pulled into the parking lot and the banks and
banks of gas stations. But the night was about to
get even better. Yeah, the late night was about to
get better. I had pulled off a logistical coup. I
(18:29):
was able to convince my Curmudgeonty, former radio partner, an
original dues paying member of the Fox Sports Radio Alumni Association,
the one and only Turk Stevens to meet us there. Now,
this goes way back over twenty years back in the
(18:50):
early days of Fox Sports Radio. Turk and I were
a couple of young lads who were fired up to
do network radio, and Turk was often my sidekick in
those days. He was one of the original keepers of
the coin during the legendary Ben Versus the Coin segment
that we used to do. We had a million names
(19:11):
names back in the day before we settled on Benny
versus the Penny. Back then it was man versus Metal. Now.
He retired from the grind of sports talk radio several
years back, and for many many years he has been
an esteemed pe teacher and he has lived in the
Greater Phoenix area for a while. Now. Now I had
(19:31):
not seen him in some time. So here I was.
I pulled up. I dropped the girls off to run
into the store. I said, go ahead, I'll get gas.
Get gas right now here I go. So I pulled up.
I think it was pump number forty seven, pump number
forty seven out of roughly four thousand pumps at BUCkies
(19:55):
in goodyear Arizona. So there I am la la la
la la la la la la la la la, filling
up the malamobile with that glorious cheap Arizona fuel. And
that's when Turk walked up. Now I invited him. I
didn't tell him where I was going to be. Apparently
I stand out like a sore thumb. So Turk found me,
(20:15):
and it was like no time had passed. Now I
don't bel I don't buy all that chemistry mumbo jumbo
with sports teams and all that. However, Turk and I
we just clicked. We just get each other. Boom boom boom,
right back into the groove, finishing our thoughts on sports takes,
(20:37):
cracking jokes about radio instantly connecting the brotherhood the bond.
And let me tell you something. After being trapped in
a metal box for roughly seven hours or whatever it
took to get there, with three lovely women chatting NonStop
at high volume, I desperately needed to hit, you know,
(21:01):
somewhere I could find a little bit of testosterone to
mix into the night. And I needed a fellow middle
aged or older guy to stand near a gas pump
and complain about the Mets bullpen and just nod silently
and say, yep, so I led Turk inside. I was
the shepherd. I was the sherpa. I led Turk inside.
(21:23):
Now I am a seasoned, battle hardened BUCkies veteran. I'm
not some rookie. I know the protocol. However, Turk, my
man Turk, God bless him, had never set foot inside
one of these establishments. He was completely, utterly thunderstruck by
what he walked into. Now, keep in mind, on this
(21:46):
particular night, there were tons of Dodger fans. There are
a lot of Dodgers. Dodgers were playing in Phoenix against
the Diamondbacks last week, and so a bunch of people
made the trip the caravan to Arizona, and on their
way out, they were stopping by BUCkies to buy all
kinds of stuff, and so back to Turk. So Turk
(22:08):
walked through those automatic sliding doors and stopped dead in
his tracks, staring at what could only have been a
mind blowing scene. Like he probably thought he had just
been teleported to an alien planet where the local deity
is a giant beaver. It is a real life Wallyworld
(22:31):
from National Lampoons a vacation but with brisket. A wally
World with brisket? Does it get any better than that?
And oh the Brisket. I marched straight to the Center Island.
They have a couple of center islands and BUCkies. They
have the Nut Island, and they have the Fudge Island
that's kind of mixed together, and then they have the Brisket.
(22:54):
Oh my god, I would rather move there than any
of the Hawaiian islands. Brisket Island. Who doesn't want to
live on Brisket Island? Yeah, that is the prized item,
A hot Texas brisket sandwich. I grabbed some fresh meat,
warm roasted nuts. I snatched a bag of BUCkies homemade
(23:16):
potato chips. Now, meanwhile, my wife and her friends, Ashley
and Jen, the ladies went completely feral. They grabbed grocery carts.
That's right, BUCkies has grocery carts inside a gas station.
Began filling them with staggering amounts of BUCkies merch. You
(23:37):
got t shirts, you got hats, stuffed animals, onesies, you
name it, home decor whatever I mean. I didn't even
keep track of everything. It was like watching a supermarket sweep.
The Bucky beaver nuggets very popular, except everyone of these
items had a rodent's face stamped all over, right, all over.
(23:59):
There's only one flaw in the BUCkies universe, one tragic,
fatal design oversight. They do not believe in tables or chairs.
They don't, right, So there is nowhere to sit. You
buy all this food, there's nowhere to say. I guess
they want you to take the food home. You're so,
we were three hundred and fifty miles away. You're surrounded
(24:21):
by fifty thousand square feet of hot food, fudge, roasted nuts,
the beaver nuggets, all kinds of other snacks that I
didn't even mention, and there is not a single chair
in sight. So what do you do? Well? We did
what any refined, cultured group of intellectuals would do. My wife,
(24:45):
her friends, my guy Turk and I. We all gathered
around the hood of the Rental Malamobile in the parking
lot at By this time it was probably twelve thirty
or almost one in the morning, hundred four degree Arizona
night that late, and we were dining alfresco, dining alfresco
(25:07):
on smoked brisket sandwiches and beaver chips and giant lemonade
and just eating it off the scorched metal of a
Rental Sedan suv. It was glorious. So after about an
hour normally takes about twenty minutes to eat. After about
an hour, we went and took photos with the Bucky
statue out in front, bonded with Turk a little more,
(25:31):
and we just we loved it, right, absolutely loved it.
I bought my souvenir. I always get a location specific
Bucky's T shirt. This one said Arizona. I actually got two,
once at Arizona, once at Goodyear Arizona. That's my way
of marking my territory. I have my South Carolina Bucky
shirt and I have my shirt from our trip to
(25:52):
Ohio to date, and so that is it. Went back
used the Pristine bathroom one more time and hit the
road and we piled back in the malormobile a little
after one in the morning, and the ride back was
a completely different vibe. The energy was not the same
(26:14):
we had conquered. Reached the peak of the mountain, the
volume dropped from a ten to a zero. The girls
immediately passed out. There may or may not have been
heavy snoring coming from the back seat. So I drove
through the pitch black desert, only had to stop a
couple of times, powered by sheer will power and the
(26:36):
really the fear of missing the overnight show, and if
I got somebody had to stop in the desert, might
not make it back in time. So I limited my
liquid intake on the return legs so we didn't have
to make fifteen pit stops. I will tell you, and
I'll pass this on a pro level malar life hack
(26:57):
for late night desert driving. You can always if you're
out in boondocks, just go outside. And the animals don't
go to bathrooms. They they poop and pee out in
the desert, so you could do that. If you need
a clean restroom, find a casino or a hospital. Casinos
are always open, and hospital lobbies have air conditioning and
(27:18):
immaculate bathrooms, also hotels as well, So any of those casinos,
hospitals or hotels, you're welcome. Sorry. We pulled back into
southern California as the sun was peeking over the horizon,
dropped off Chen and Ashley, my wife's friends, and finally
walked back through the front door. It was a little
(27:41):
after six in the morning, give or take there on Saturday.
And let us look now at the official compu box stats,
or I guess these are the unofficial CompuBox stats for
this Bucky's Mallard madness. Total time on the road, total
time of the journey twelve hours. That's a let hours
driving and one hour eating and shopping. Total distance covered
(28:05):
over seven hundred miles. The brisket sandwich is consumed one
for each of us, so that would be one two, three,
four five brisket sandwiches. I had one bags of roasted
nuts secured three BUCkies beaver nuggets. That would be two
Starbucks runs. That would be also two as we said,
(28:28):
a gas station stops what is it one two, three,
four five six. That also includes one in and out
a casino and we did not stop at the hospital,
but the hotel was it ridiculous. I'm nodding my head. Yes,
absolutely was it completely unnecessary to do this without a doubt.
(28:53):
But I gotta tell you, these stupid spontaneous adventures add
a little spark to light. You just have to do it.
I learned that from my professor Nike. You gotta chase
the stories. You'll be glad you lived, trust me, and
the podcast will thank you later. Like right now, you're
(29:14):
still listening here and I don't know how long I've yapped.
I have no idea, and it's all about my trip
to Arizona. Now time for some fun facts. That's right,
fun facts. Let's see how many fun facts can I
get in to? Three minutes? Three minutes of fun facts?
Are you ready? We're on our way and go all right?
(29:37):
Today is National Creamsicle Day. Yeah, National creamsicle Day. I
recall in the past talking about this. The creamsicle is
a mistake, all right, It's a mistake by a child.
Say what? Yeah? The only reason the creamsicle exists as
we know it is because of an eleven year old
(29:57):
kid named Frank Frank Eperson who left a cup of
soda outside overnight. This goes back to the early nineteen hundreds.
It froze right, you left the soda outside, it froze
around the stick and boom. That was the proto popsicle.
(30:19):
That became the creamsicle. That was bored. That was born
that day, and that was back in nineteen oh five.
Now the creamsicle is part of the sickle family, the popsicle,
the fudgsicle, the dreamsicle. I mean, there's a bunch of
other ones. There's a bunch of them, and so they
used different things and all that stuff, and Good Humor
(30:42):
introduced the creamsicle on a widespread basis in the nineteen thirties,
and they sold millions of these things from those iconic
Good Humor trucks and by nineteen fifty two they were
pushing seventeen point six million creamsicles a year. Everyone wanted
to have. And it's got two layers. You know what
(31:05):
a creamsicle is, So I don't need to go into that.
The other fun facts about this. The popsicle, it's a
water based fruit. The creamsicle must contain dairy with ten
percent milk fat per FDA standards, and the production uses
scraped surface freezers spinning at up to two hundred and
(31:28):
twenty rpm and basically NASCAR. It's a NASCAR pit crew
for the frozen treat And it's been around, as I said,
since like the late nineteen thirties when good humor came around.
It's one of the longest running frozen desserts in America.
It's also National kool Aid Day today. Yes, kool Aid
(31:50):
started as a liquid concentrate called fruit smack before somebody
named Edwin Perkins figured out how to remove the water
pump or the water rather and then ship it and
pump it out to the people's what I was trying
to say. It was invented in Hastings, Nebraska, and Nebraska
(32:12):
years ago made kool aid the official soft drink of
their state. And they in Hastings, Nebraska, they have a
kool Aid Festival every August. So right around this time
of the year, they got a kool Aid parade, watermelon
seed spitting, kool aid, shrugging contest, all that stuff, all
(32:34):
that stuff. And did you know the colors are so
strong of the kool aid? How strong are they? They're
used to dye hair and wool red forty in cherry.
Kool Aid has a peak absorption at five hundred and
(32:54):
three whatever that means. And so it all started. The
mascot the kool Aid Man, first illustrated in the nineteen fifties.
It was inspired by a child smiley face on a
frosted window. Yeah, isn't that great? There you go. What
else do we have on kool aid? Let's see here
(33:17):
kool aid in the kitchen. You can use kool aid
to brine meats to the acidicity and sugar balance of
kool aid. Now, one of the reasons it's so popular
is during the Great Depression, that guy Perkins I told
you about. I remember the guy we talked about here,
(33:37):
Edwin Perkins. So this guy, during the Great Depression, trying
to help people out, he slashed the price of kool
aid from ten cents to five cents, and so it
was affordable. So people couldn't wait to get the original
six flavors of cherry, grape, lemonade, orange, raspberry, root beer.
There you go. It is also Navajo Code Talker's Day,
(33:59):
one of the great of US military history. One of
the most amazing chapters. The Navajo code Talkers created the
only unbroken code in modern warfare, and it was all
done because of some random dude in the military named
Philip Johnston. He was not a Navajo guy, non novo.
(34:23):
He grew up though, on a reservation, and he pitched
to his higher ups in the military the concept of
the native language code, and that was eventually what helped
win World War two. And they ended up starting out
with just a couple couple people, and by the time
(34:47):
they had finished, the program grew from you know, there
were like twenty nine people or something. By the time
they had finished, there was four hundred Navajo marines. And
there's a lot of myths that the code talkers were
so valuable that they were kept saying if they were
not on the front lines. However, they did have to
land on beaches under fire, including iwo Jima, where six
(35:09):
talkers sent eight hundred plus messages in two days. They
did not make a single error, not a single error
as the as that goes. So anyway, those I think
I went way over three minutes. You know, bad job
by me. Foody fun. Time for some foody fun. It's
foody fun, all right, here we go. Taco Bell has
(35:33):
introduced some new products this week, the Taheen Taco, the
Taheen Cheesy Gordita Crunch and the Taheen Pineapple strawberry Freeze.
So it sounds like somebody over at Taco Bell's headquarters
there in Irvine, California, said, why don't we just put
tahen on everything? Okay, that's a good idea. Why not, Well,
(35:57):
you want to save a couple bucks on a breakfast sandwich?
McDonald offering a two dollars breakfast sandwich deal in its
app that goes through October fourth. Dominoes has unveiled the
new personal Detroit style pizza, and this is the first
time in the sixty five year history of Dominoes that
(36:19):
a pizza they are producing has what in its name? Dude,
that would be the name of Dominoes. The Detroit Style
personal pizza is known as the Domino, the Domino. Hey
can I get that Domino? Why not? Red Robin recently
(36:44):
put together a new dinner double feature for seventeen ninety nine.
You can mix a match two half portions of their
favorite entrees along with an appetizer or dessert of your choice.
So there it is all right on that. No, we
will get out of here. Have a great rest of
your Friday. I will say, some of you guys in.
(37:05):
You really have to let us know who's gonna be
on the mailbag so we can craft our questions. I
don't know. I have a big board of people. We've
had Terry in England and no Stradinas and just Josh,
and it really just depends on who gets back to
me when I'm in my window to record the mailbag,
and we'll see what happens. Just send your questions in
(37:27):
and you'll be surprised what happens. Who knows. Have a
great rest of your Friday and we will talk to
you tomorrow. Tomorrow. Now, what does Dick and Dayton always say?
Bye bye, bye bye
Kabooms.
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 soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to clearing House
of hot takes, break free for something Special. The Fifth
(00:23):
Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Eat the air Everywhere, The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben
Mahler and you.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We are together again through the power of the pod
on this the Friday episode. Although keep in mind, based
on the analytics, you know, I love my analytics. You
people listen to this at all different times. A lot
of you do not even listen the day we do
the podcast. That's the magic of the podcast. It's a
(00:59):
bit you can listen whenever you want. However, just for
the record, it is duly noted that this podcast is
available here on this fourteenth day of August. It's early
on a Friday, the two hundred and twenty sixth day
of the year, which means, according to Malarmath and my
computer like brain, there are one hundred and thirty nine
(01:21):
days to go in the year, and this the podcast
that is pretty random, not very sporty. Very rarely is
this podcast sporty. So let's jump in the hot tub
time machine and go back back, back, back, back back back.
So there I was. The other day. I was sitting
(01:44):
in the Malar Mansion. I was not here in the
remote podcast studio at the Malor Mansion. I was in
another room. It was Friday afternoon, and I was contemplating
the utter existential dread that is having to Phil not one,
not two, but three weekend podcasts. Now. At that point
(02:04):
I had already done one, but I had other podcasts
to do. Now, if you have listened at all over
the years, you know I'm not exactly Evilknieval. Like nobody
is listening to this, Like you're not listening to this
to watch me, you know, middle aged guy, you know
gas bag launch a Harley Davidson over sixteen school buses
(02:29):
and some fountains in Las Vegas. You're not doing that. Now.
If I tried that, my spine would instantly disintegrate into
the fine bone powder that you can buy on the
internet on the dark Web. And the last thing that
my wife needs is to spend her weekend scraping up
her husband off the pavement somewhere in San Bernardino. Don't
(02:52):
need that, don't need it. So no, my brave athletic
feats typically involve sitting in the driver's seat for hours
and hours and hours, probably destroying my prostate, and aggressively
consuming caffeine pills until my heart beats like a panicked hummingbird.
(03:14):
Pretty much, because as I have often said over the years,
life is all about the stories you pick up along
the way. It's all about that, right, And in order
to do that, you actually have to occasionally leave your house,
even if you would rather stay at your house. So
in my case, it's about doing it for the plot.
(03:36):
And by plot I mean having something, anything, literally anything
to talk about into a microphone so I don't get
replaced by an AI bot named chat sports Bro from
barstool or whatever. You know. You know that's coming. They'll
be Chat sports Bro AI right around the corner. And
(03:57):
when that happens, it's all over all right. So this
brings me back to last Friday, a week ago. The
decision was made, The executive decision had been made. We
were leaving the People's Republic of California. Now, I know
what you're probably thinking. Oh, Ben, come on, you've got
(04:17):
perfect weather, you live in the mall or mansion. You're
in southern California. Why would you ever leave? Well, I
can do a different podcast on that. I'll tell you why.
Three hundred in this case, three hundred and fifty miles away,
give or take, across the vast desert wasteland sat the
(04:40):
Holy Land, the mecca of MULTII pump refueling, the north
Star of convenience stores, BUCkies Tea. Yes, the beaver, the
giant cartoon, red hat wearing rodent. My pal Bucky has
(05:00):
somehow built this empire larger than most small European nations
simply by offering cheap gas, clean toilets, and smoked meats.
That's all you need. Now, I am no stranger to
the beaver. Me and the beaver are tight. I popped
(05:21):
my BUCkies cherry in South Carolina. I think it was
at the I believe it was the Columbia location if
I remember correctly. They only have one in South Carolina.
So I was at that one. I was visiting my
niece over in Charleston. We drove all the way across
South Carolina and went to the BUCkies. And a few
months back, during a Mallard meet and greet we did
(05:42):
in Newport, Kentucky, right across from Cincinnati. Right after we
had devoured delicious strongs brick ovened pizza from the pizzaia there,
we ended up taking a midnight ride on a midnight
ride to Dayton, Ohio to pay homage to the Beaver.
So we've been there a couple of times now. That
(06:03):
grand excursion included Absolute Sports Radio Legends, Royalty in the
Malard Militia, Robbie the Mariner fan who's pretty much part
of this podcast now, Queen Roxanne, Tommy in Atlanta can't
close the deal, Neil and his son Corbin, And that
was the night we all went to the Reds game.
(06:24):
We ate ice cream. Tommy fled to his hotel because
he had an early flight. Neil and Corbin also had
to bail. However, the three amigos, that's right, Queen Roxanne,
you're one of the amigos. The rest of us all
made the pilgrimage over to BUCkies and it was one
of the greatest nights I've done a lot of these
meet and Greece. That was so much fun to hang
(06:45):
out and you just have a great time. And it
was a whirlwind trip. I was only in that area
for like a day and a few hours, and it
was it was just a lot of fun. So when
the itch returned last week, I didn't just load up
the rental malormobile with my wife, because we did run
a car. My wife, the nine to one to one dispatcher,
(07:07):
who voluntarily agreed to this madness. No no, we expanded
the roster. We had an expansion draft, and we invited
two of her work besties, Jen and Ashley, and suddenly
my rented suv was not just a car. No no, no,
no no, it was the official Malard party bus. We
(07:30):
did not have the lighting we needed, and we also
needed one of those balls rolling around, but everything else
we had. So we drove out originally to a secret
location in the San Gabriel Valley to load up. Now
my wife, knowing that this was going to be the
Mallard party bus and her friends were going to be there.
She brought enough snacks to survive nuclear fallout, so we
(07:53):
were good. If there was some kind of nuclear situation,
we were good. So I took the wheel. I was
at the dry as always destination, Good Year, Arizona. We
left at four thirty in the afternoon. Let me get
the pause button right here, so let that thing sink
into your skull here, all right, So four thirty in
(08:18):
the afternoon on a Friday in the Greater Los Angeles area.
On the global pyramid of horrible life decisions, departing LA
at peak rush hour ranks right between investing your entire
life savings on beanie babies and petting a wild badger
(08:39):
somewhere in that world. So we were immediately swallowed whole
by a sea of red tail lights. As far as
you could possibly look, there were red tail lights, bumper
to bumper to bumper to bumper, creeping along at four
miles per hour while the sun beat down on the
pavement like a giant, angry heat lamp. We were in
(09:02):
a sauna. We were in a sauna. And and look,
I don't really mind driving long distances. I do that
quite a bit. But I gotta be awake, right, gotta
be awake. And you put me on a clear highway
and give me a stretch of asphalt, and I'm okay,
(09:23):
I'm fine. I don't know that I'm happy about it.
I'm okay. But traffic. See, that's the thing. Traffic. Traffic
is a machete to my soul. It destroys me. My
whole attitude changes, right, you know. I know my hair
(09:44):
started giving up years ago, But sitting in traffic for
a couple of hours just gives me more time to
contemplate all of my shortcomings in life. Now, to survive,
I executed the malar maneuver, the protocol of utter desperation.
I was popping caffeine pills, washing those down with massive
(10:07):
iced Starbuck teas purchased by my long suffering wife, and
stared blankly into the middle distance with this red glow
from the tail edge. Now, if you've never driven from
LA to Phoenix or vice versa, most of you don't
(10:28):
live in that area, I understand, So let me try
to explain it. So, the route to Phoenix from Los
Angeles is really not complex, really not complex. It is
not scenic. It's you jump on Interstate ten, the Eye ten,
and it is a straight shot, straight line. You leave
the city, you go out past Palm Springs that area,
(10:53):
and then you just keep going and going and going.
It's the energized Bundy of highways. There really are no turns.
There are no real bends on the road. There is
only the vast, empty, soul crushing expanse of the desert,
(11:15):
the desert Southwest that goes on and on and on. Now, naturally,
because we were pumping our bodies full of ice drinks,
you know, different teas and lemonade and water and various
non alcohol liquids, our bladders began a furious movement to unionize.
Every forty five minutes or so, it was time to
(11:39):
pull off off the road. So one of our pit
stops occurred. I want to share this when with you
because it's kind of cool and I'd not been to
this place before. So we were driving. We got through
Palm Desert and there was this desolate gas station, kind
of a gas station village. Really. It was on the
outskirts of Palm Desert near Joshua Tree National Park where
(12:02):
people go to look at the stars, the real stars,
not those fake Hollywood stars. Because the reason you go
there to Joshua Tree is there is not a single
piece of civilized infrastructure for at least fifty miles. Like
we talk about the boondocks, the dusty Winnemucker Road. This
(12:24):
is where it is. So you get off the freeway,
you make a left crossback over the overpass, and there
it is. There's a mobile gas station, a mom and
pop Mexican restaurant, and a handful of what appears to
be mostly deserted storefronts. That mobile station is it. That's all.
(12:47):
That is the absolute edge of the earth in terms
of human beings until you get way down the road. Now,
beyond that point there are no tow trucks, there are
no canics, there are no human souls. There is only see, say,
sixty miles. The sign said no services for sixty miles,
(13:11):
sixty continuous miles of barren, sun bleached desert where the
ambient temperature is hovering around a very mellow one hundred
degrees fahrenheit. So if your fan belt snaps and you
don't have to worry about calling Triple A because there's
(13:33):
no cell service, you just accept your new reality as
a sun baked mummy. If only they could put a
pyramid out there and you could toss your body into
the pyramid. So eventually we rolled into blythe California. Have
you ever been to blythe You have not okay, Blythe
is what we call the final frontier. Before you cross
(13:55):
into the promised Land, the free state of Arizona. You
cross the Coloradeido River, that is the border there. You
step over the state line into Arizona, and a miracle occurs,
a modern miracle occurs, an absolute, undeniable, biblical miracle. The
price of gasoline drops by a dollar fifty a gallon.
(14:20):
Ta da. Yeah, same land, same air, same gasoline. But suddenly,
because you crossed an invisible man made line on a map,
the price plunges. In California, I was going to Costco.
I filled up before we left. It was five dollars
and twenty cents five twenty at Costco. That's a deal
(14:43):
in LA. And it was three seventy nine, which I
still think is a little high across the Arizona border.
It is a stark, painful reminder of how the Golden
State loves to gouge with taxes the people of their
state there, and they love, the politicians love to reach
(15:04):
into your back pocket and extract every single cent you
own in taxes, not that they actually spend the money properly,
because you might not have as big a problem with it. No, no, no, no,
it's a disease. They're addicted to that. Anyway, I can
do that rant another time. So you would have to
be an absolute, unmitigated knucklehead, a Mama luke, a person
(15:28):
of truly staggering foolishness to buy gas on the California
side of blythe you drive three hundred feet over a
bridge and you save what forty bucks on a fill
up and laugh all the way to the bank. So
once you're in Arizona, the void resumes. Hours of driving
(15:49):
through Native American land. There's even one part that has
its own time zone separate from Arizona, and so there's
nothing in sight unless you're like Actus and all that stuff.
Just nothing going on. Now. I will give the Grand
Canyon state credit. Arizona gets its truck stops right. In California,
(16:12):
truck stops often look like the set of a post
apocalyptic horror film. Most of the time they're closed, that's
the first problem. Most of the time they're closed, and
when they're open, they're dilapidated. They smell like a mix
of old cottage cheese, cabbage, urine feces, and broken dreams,
(16:34):
and you feel like you need some kind of protective
hazmat suit and a shot of penicillin. And I'm allergic
to penicillin. Right when you walk in and walk out.
Now in Arizona, the truck stops are pristine. Several of
them were air conditioned, spotless. I would think you would
(16:56):
need air conditioning because even at night, the temperature on
the highway was topping way over one hundred late at night,
one hundred and ten in some places, and surrounded by
towering cacti and surreal dry lightning storm. We saw off
on the horizon on the right side, ripping across the
(17:18):
black sky, and we didn't see any rain. It was
not a single drop of rain, which is seemingly pretty
weird doodle bug weather. It's no wonder. UFOs love flying
around Arizona. The lizard people, the reptilians can't get enough.
If I were a reptilian alien, I would check out
(17:40):
the lightning show also and slither around the desert. So finally,
at roughly midnight, at roughly midnight, we saw it on
the horizon, the glowing heavenly halo. There it was the
Holy Land, the Mecca BUCkies, good Year, Arizona. You could
(18:06):
practically hear the choir of angels singing Hellllelujah, Hellelujah as
we pulled into the parking lot and the banks and
banks of gas stations. But the night was about to
get even better. Yeah, the late night was about to
get better. I had pulled off a logistical coup. I
(18:29):
was able to convince my Curmudgeonty, former radio partner, an
original dues paying member of the Fox Sports Radio Alumni Association,
the one and only Turk Stevens to meet us there. Now,
this goes way back over twenty years back in the
(18:50):
early days of Fox Sports Radio. Turk and I were
a couple of young lads who were fired up to
do network radio, and Turk was often my sidekick in
those days. He was one of the original keepers of
the coin during the legendary Ben Versus the Coin segment
that we used to do. We had a million names
(19:11):
names back in the day before we settled on Benny
versus the Penny. Back then it was man versus Metal. Now.
He retired from the grind of sports talk radio several
years back, and for many many years he has been
an esteemed pe teacher and he has lived in the
Greater Phoenix area for a while. Now. Now I had
(19:31):
not seen him in some time. So here I was.
I pulled up. I dropped the girls off to run
into the store. I said, go ahead, I'll get gas.
Get gas right now here I go. So I pulled up.
I think it was pump number forty seven, pump number
forty seven out of roughly four thousand pumps at BUCkies
(19:55):
in goodyear Arizona. So there I am la la la
la la la la la la la la la, filling
up the malamobile with that glorious cheap Arizona fuel. And
that's when Turk walked up. Now I invited him. I
didn't tell him where I was going to be. Apparently
I stand out like a sore thumb. So Turk found me,
(20:15):
and it was like no time had passed. Now I
don't bel I don't buy all that chemistry mumbo jumbo
with sports teams and all that. However, Turk and I
we just clicked. We just get each other. Boom boom boom,
right back into the groove, finishing our thoughts on sports takes,
(20:37):
cracking jokes about radio instantly connecting the brotherhood the bond.
And let me tell you something. After being trapped in
a metal box for roughly seven hours or whatever it
took to get there, with three lovely women chatting NonStop
at high volume, I desperately needed to hit, you know,
(21:01):
somewhere I could find a little bit of testosterone to
mix into the night. And I needed a fellow middle
aged or older guy to stand near a gas pump
and complain about the Mets bullpen and just nod silently
and say, yep, so I led Turk inside. I was
the shepherd. I was the sherpa. I led Turk inside.
(21:23):
Now I am a seasoned, battle hardened BUCkies veteran. I'm
not some rookie. I know the protocol. However, Turk, my
man Turk, God bless him, had never set foot inside
one of these establishments. He was completely, utterly thunderstruck by
what he walked into. Now, keep in mind, on this
(21:46):
particular night, there were tons of Dodger fans. There are
a lot of Dodgers. Dodgers were playing in Phoenix against
the Diamondbacks last week, and so a bunch of people
made the trip the caravan to Arizona, and on their
way out, they were stopping by BUCkies to buy all
kinds of stuff, and so back to Turk. So Turk
(22:08):
walked through those automatic sliding doors and stopped dead in
his tracks, staring at what could only have been a
mind blowing scene. Like he probably thought he had just
been teleported to an alien planet where the local deity
is a giant beaver. It is a real life Wallyworld
(22:31):
from National Lampoons a vacation but with brisket. A wally
World with brisket? Does it get any better than that?
And oh the Brisket. I marched straight to the Center Island.
They have a couple of center islands and BUCkies. They
have the Nut Island, and they have the Fudge Island
that's kind of mixed together, and then they have the Brisket.
(22:54):
Oh my god, I would rather move there than any
of the Hawaiian islands. Brisket Island. Who doesn't want to
live on Brisket Island? Yeah, that is the prized item,
A hot Texas brisket sandwich. I grabbed some fresh meat,
warm roasted nuts. I snatched a bag of BUCkies homemade
(23:16):
potato chips. Now, meanwhile, my wife and her friends, Ashley
and Jen, the ladies went completely feral. They grabbed grocery carts.
That's right, BUCkies has grocery carts inside a gas station.
Began filling them with staggering amounts of BUCkies merch. You
(23:37):
got t shirts, you got hats, stuffed animals, onesies, you
name it, home decor whatever I mean. I didn't even
keep track of everything. It was like watching a supermarket sweep.
The Bucky beaver nuggets very popular, except everyone of these
items had a rodent's face stamped all over, right, all over.
(23:59):
There's only one flaw in the BUCkies universe, one tragic,
fatal design oversight. They do not believe in tables or chairs.
They don't, right, So there is nowhere to sit. You
buy all this food, there's nowhere to say. I guess
they want you to take the food home. You're so,
we were three hundred and fifty miles away. You're surrounded
(24:21):
by fifty thousand square feet of hot food, fudge, roasted nuts,
the beaver nuggets, all kinds of other snacks that I
didn't even mention, and there is not a single chair
in sight. So what do you do? Well? We did
what any refined, cultured group of intellectuals would do. My wife,
(24:45):
her friends, my guy Turk and I. We all gathered
around the hood of the Rental Malamobile in the parking
lot at By this time it was probably twelve thirty
or almost one in the morning, hundred four degree Arizona
night that late, and we were dining alfresco, dining alfresco
(25:07):
on smoked brisket sandwiches and beaver chips and giant lemonade
and just eating it off the scorched metal of a
Rental Sedan suv. It was glorious. So after about an
hour normally takes about twenty minutes to eat. After about
an hour, we went and took photos with the Bucky
statue out in front, bonded with Turk a little more,
(25:31):
and we just we loved it, right, absolutely loved it.
I bought my souvenir. I always get a location specific
Bucky's T shirt. This one said Arizona. I actually got two,
once at Arizona, once at Goodyear Arizona. That's my way
of marking my territory. I have my South Carolina Bucky
shirt and I have my shirt from our trip to
(25:52):
Ohio to date, and so that is it. Went back
used the Pristine bathroom one more time and hit the
road and we piled back in the malormobile a little
after one in the morning, and the ride back was
a completely different vibe. The energy was not the same
(26:14):
we had conquered. Reached the peak of the mountain, the
volume dropped from a ten to a zero. The girls
immediately passed out. There may or may not have been
heavy snoring coming from the back seat. So I drove
through the pitch black desert, only had to stop a
couple of times, powered by sheer will power and the
(26:36):
really the fear of missing the overnight show, and if
I got somebody had to stop in the desert, might
not make it back in time. So I limited my
liquid intake on the return legs so we didn't have
to make fifteen pit stops. I will tell you, and
I'll pass this on a pro level malar life hack
(26:57):
for late night desert driving. You can always if you're
out in boondocks, just go outside. And the animals don't
go to bathrooms. They they poop and pee out in
the desert, so you could do that. If you need
a clean restroom, find a casino or a hospital. Casinos
are always open, and hospital lobbies have air conditioning and
(27:18):
immaculate bathrooms, also hotels as well, So any of those casinos,
hospitals or hotels, you're welcome. Sorry. We pulled back into
southern California as the sun was peeking over the horizon,
dropped off Chen and Ashley, my wife's friends, and finally
walked back through the front door. It was a little
(27:41):
after six in the morning, give or take there on Saturday.
And let us look now at the official compu box stats,
or I guess these are the unofficial CompuBox stats for
this Bucky's Mallard madness. Total time on the road, total
time of the journey twelve hours. That's a let hours
driving and one hour eating and shopping. Total distance covered
(28:05):
over seven hundred miles. The brisket sandwich is consumed one
for each of us, so that would be one two, three,
four five brisket sandwiches. I had one bags of roasted
nuts secured three BUCkies beaver nuggets. That would be two
Starbucks runs. That would be also two as we said,
(28:28):
a gas station stops what is it one two, three,
four five six. That also includes one in and out
a casino and we did not stop at the hospital,
but the hotel was it ridiculous. I'm nodding my head. Yes,
absolutely was it completely unnecessary to do this without a doubt.
(28:53):
But I gotta tell you, these stupid spontaneous adventures add
a little spark to light. You just have to do it.
I learned that from my professor Nike. You gotta chase
the stories. You'll be glad you lived, trust me, and
the podcast will thank you later. Like right now, you're
(29:14):
still listening here and I don't know how long I've yapped.
I have no idea, and it's all about my trip
to Arizona. Now time for some fun facts. That's right,
fun facts. Let's see how many fun facts can I
get in to? Three minutes? Three minutes of fun facts?
Are you ready? We're on our way and go all right?
(29:37):
Today is National Creamsicle Day. Yeah, National creamsicle Day. I
recall in the past talking about this. The creamsicle is
a mistake, all right, It's a mistake by a child.
Say what? Yeah? The only reason the creamsicle exists as
we know it is because of an eleven year old
(29:57):
kid named Frank Frank Eperson who left a cup of
soda outside overnight. This goes back to the early nineteen hundreds.
It froze right, you left the soda outside, it froze
around the stick and boom. That was the proto popsicle.
(30:19):
That became the creamsicle. That was bored. That was born
that day, and that was back in nineteen oh five.
Now the creamsicle is part of the sickle family, the popsicle,
the fudgsicle, the dreamsicle. I mean, there's a bunch of
other ones. There's a bunch of them, and so they
used different things and all that stuff, and Good Humor
(30:42):
introduced the creamsicle on a widespread basis in the nineteen thirties,
and they sold millions of these things from those iconic
Good Humor trucks and by nineteen fifty two they were
pushing seventeen point six million creamsicles a year. Everyone wanted
to have. And it's got two layers. You know what
(31:05):
a creamsicle is, So I don't need to go into that.
The other fun facts about this. The popsicle, it's a
water based fruit. The creamsicle must contain dairy with ten
percent milk fat per FDA standards, and the production uses
scraped surface freezers spinning at up to two hundred and
(31:28):
twenty rpm and basically NASCAR. It's a NASCAR pit crew
for the frozen treat And it's been around, as I said,
since like the late nineteen thirties when good humor came around.
It's one of the longest running frozen desserts in America.
It's also National kool Aid Day today. Yes, kool Aid
(31:50):
started as a liquid concentrate called fruit smack before somebody
named Edwin Perkins figured out how to remove the water
pump or the water rather and then ship it and
pump it out to the people's what I was trying
to say. It was invented in Hastings, Nebraska, and Nebraska
(32:12):
years ago made kool aid the official soft drink of
their state. And they in Hastings, Nebraska, they have a
kool Aid Festival every August. So right around this time
of the year, they got a kool Aid parade, watermelon
seed spitting, kool aid, shrugging contest, all that stuff, all
(32:34):
that stuff. And did you know the colors are so
strong of the kool aid? How strong are they? They're
used to dye hair and wool red forty in cherry.
Kool Aid has a peak absorption at five hundred and
(32:54):
three whatever that means. And so it all started. The
mascot the kool Aid Man, first illustrated in the nineteen fifties.
It was inspired by a child smiley face on a
frosted window. Yeah, isn't that great? There you go. What
else do we have on kool aid? Let's see here
(33:17):
kool aid in the kitchen. You can use kool aid
to brine meats to the acidicity and sugar balance of
kool aid. Now, one of the reasons it's so popular
is during the Great Depression, that guy Perkins I told
you about. I remember the guy we talked about here,
(33:37):
Edwin Perkins. So this guy, during the Great Depression, trying
to help people out, he slashed the price of kool
aid from ten cents to five cents, and so it
was affordable. So people couldn't wait to get the original
six flavors of cherry, grape, lemonade, orange, raspberry, root beer.
There you go. It is also Navajo Code Talker's Day,
(33:59):
one of the great of US military history. One of
the most amazing chapters. The Navajo code Talkers created the
only unbroken code in modern warfare, and it was all
done because of some random dude in the military named
Philip Johnston. He was not a Navajo guy, non novo.
(34:23):
He grew up though, on a reservation, and he pitched
to his higher ups in the military the concept of
the native language code, and that was eventually what helped
win World War two. And they ended up starting out
with just a couple couple people, and by the time
(34:47):
they had finished, the program grew from you know, there
were like twenty nine people or something. By the time
they had finished, there was four hundred Navajo marines. And
there's a lot of myths that the code talkers were
so valuable that they were kept saying if they were
not on the front lines. However, they did have to
land on beaches under fire, including iwo Jima, where six
(35:09):
talkers sent eight hundred plus messages in two days. They
did not make a single error, not a single error
as the as that goes. So anyway, those I think
I went way over three minutes. You know, bad job
by me. Foody fun. Time for some foody fun. It's
foody fun, all right, here we go. Taco Bell has
(35:33):
introduced some new products this week, the Taheen Taco, the
Taheen Cheesy Gordita Crunch and the Taheen Pineapple strawberry Freeze.
So it sounds like somebody over at Taco Bell's headquarters
there in Irvine, California, said, why don't we just put
tahen on everything? Okay, that's a good idea. Why not, Well,
(35:57):
you want to save a couple bucks on a breakfast sandwich?
McDonald offering a two dollars breakfast sandwich deal in its
app that goes through October fourth. Dominoes has unveiled the
new personal Detroit style pizza, and this is the first
time in the sixty five year history of Dominoes that
(36:19):
a pizza they are producing has what in its name? Dude,
that would be the name of Dominoes. The Detroit Style
personal pizza is known as the Domino, the Domino. Hey
can I get that Domino? Why not? Red Robin recently
(36:44):
put together a new dinner double feature for seventeen ninety nine.
You can mix a match two half portions of their
favorite entrees along with an appetizer or dessert of your choice.
So there it is all right on that. No, we
will get out of here. Have a great rest of
your Friday. I will say, some of you guys in.
(37:05):
You really have to let us know who's gonna be
on the mailbag so we can craft our questions. I
don't know. I have a big board of people. We've
had Terry in England and no Stradinas and just Josh,
and it really just depends on who gets back to
me when I'm in my window to record the mailbag,
and we'll see what happens. Just send your questions in
(37:27):
and you'll be surprised what happens. Who knows. Have a
great rest of your Friday and we will talk to
you tomorrow. Tomorrow. Now, what does Dick and Dayton always say?
Bye bye, bye bye
Host
Ben Maller
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