Category: Uncategorized

Along with special guest Longinus, the boys drink and review Beam Me up, Stouty (a coconut stout) from Saugatuck Brewing, then discuss “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

The story is not about an escape, or an unusual day, or how something dramatic happened on this day. It’s just a typical day in a Soviet labor camp.

Solzhenitsyn’s account of this one day so captured the experience of the Soviet prisoner camps that he received letters from former prisoners expressing how perfectly he had captured the experience.

The characters themselves are not particularly wicked. You don’t come away hating the characters in the story, but the system. It’s all about ordinary, decent people caught up in a wicked system.

It’s a cold story. You might want to bundle up as you read it.

The boys drink and review Chimay Grand Reserve, then discuss the big stories of 2022.

Top stories included:

• Republicans take the House
• Musk buys Twitter
• The World Cup
• Pro-democracy protests in Iran
• Hurricanes Sophia and Ian
• Queen Elizabeth passes
• Boris Johnson resigns
• Liz Trust’s short term
• Mar-a-lago
• Jan. 6 hearings
• Roe v. Wade
• The media lies about abortion
• Uvalde Texas shooting
• Monkeypox
• Jonny Depp / Amber Heard
• High Inflation
• Russia invades Ukraine
• 2022 Winter Olympics
• First successful heart transplant from a pig to a human
• James Webb space telescope enters orbit
• Will Smith slap
• Pandemic is over
• Cryptocurrency problems
• Bad stock market
• President Chi increases grip on power
• ESG backlash
• Fusion energy breakthroughs
• Brazil goes left
• China conducted first military exercises around Taiwan
• Protests in Iran against morality police
• World population reaches 8 billion

They also review celebrity deaths, top baby names, the top 10 movies, worst movies of 2022, woke movies that lost money, and the top 10 albums.

The boys drink and review Glacial Drift, a spiced winter ale from Heavy Seas, then discuss housing, and why the prices are so high.

What factors have caused home prices to go so high? And how do regular families afford these McMansions? It seems the ratio of income to house prices has changed radically since the 1970s.

Part of it is the assumption of two incomes in each family.

Also, we have bigger houses with fewer people in them. Houses get bigger while families get smaller.

If you track the change in wages vs. the price of homes, inflation-adjusted wages have stayed about the same since the 1960, but houses are twice as expensive.

Are government regulations causing the increase in home prices? Or is it some other factor?

The boys drink and review a holiday ale from New Belgium, then discuss the erosion of public standards of conduct.

Is society allowed to expect basic standards of behavior?

What about business dress codes? Can McDonald’s insist on a uniform, even though people could flip burgers in sweats and a t-shirt?

Was it right for Zelenski to speak to the Congress of the United States in a sweatshirt?

Aren’t there any standards?

Hardly. And the few that exist all fly out the window if you mention gender identity. If you say your gender identity requires you to wear enormous pretend boobs, nobody is willing to tell you differently.

A recent example of this conflict of standards is the weird example of Sam Brinton. The man is a disgrace and a flaming weirdo, but because he’s “gender fluid” he gets a pass.

On the other hand, elementary school teachers can be fired for doing relatively normal things.

There’s no logic or sense to any of this.

In this end-of-the-year show, the boys review their home-brewed Christmas ales, then discuss New Year’s resolutions.

Lots of people use the new year as an opportunity to re-evaluate their lives and their goals and make adjustments. But some people think it’s a waste of time because nobody ever keeps them.

The boys discuss popular topics for resolutions and ways science has shown that can make it more likely to keep your resolutions.

• Frame the resolution positively.
• Piggyback habits. That is, attach the new habit to an existing one, like “after I shower I will read for ten minutes.”
• Link the new activity with something you want to do. E.g., I can only listen to audiobooks while I’m on the treadmill.
• Pick something small and manageable, esp. for the first week.
• Make it specific rather than vague — e.g., go to the gym three times a week, rather than “exercise more”. Use a number.
• Create a new habit to replace an old habit.
• Be accountable to someone else.
• Make resolutions measurable so you can monitor progress.
• Make them fun.

The boys drink and review Honey Kolsch by Rogue Brewing, then talk about how the media treats mass shootings. As with so many issues in the news today, you have to peel back the agenda from the news coverage. Often the media can’t even wait for the facts to come out before they start with their interpretations and explanations.

You can almost feel the hunger by the news organizations for a story that confirms their view of the world.

Mass shootings are almost always used as an excuse to promote new laws, even if the new law wouldn’t have done a thing to stop the latest outrage, and even if there were already laws on the books that should have.

In story after story, if a shooting fits with the liberal media’s agenda, we hear about it for weeks. If the story doesn’t confirm their agenda, it quietly goes away.

It’s all about identity politics. But only when that’s convenient and fits the preferred template.

The boys drink and review a peppermint Imperial stout, then discuss Christmas music.

What do scary ghost stories have to do with Christmas? It might be more complicated than you think!

Pigweed and Crowhill discuss their favorite songs, the duds, themes in Christmas music, and why the Christmas season is so special.

This is a light-hearted episode, sure to put you in the holiday spirit.

The boys drink and review Unicorn Farts After Dark by DuClaw, then discuss what they love and what they hate in commercials.

We’ve become accustomed to the idea that we pay for free television by suffering through the commercials. Consumers want humor in commercials. Like in the Super Bowl. But what we get is posturing and lecturing by the woke.

There are several trends and themes in commercials that the boys review. For example, if there’s a man and a woman in a commercial, the man almost always plays the part of the idiot, or loses the argument. It’s also acceptable to make fun of a man’s sexuality.

In some ways, the social agenda has become more important than the sale of the product. Many commercials have a completely fake-feeling, forced emphasis on diversity, for example.

Commercials are an interesting indicator of the culture. What do today’s commercials say about our culture?

The boys drink and review a homemade batch of Krupnikas, a Christmas cordial, then discuss how states often sponsor morally questionable behaviors, like gambling and drug use.

Maryland voters recently approved a referendum legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. Is this a good idea?

Some people try to put a positive spin on this by taxing the drugs and using the revenue for some good purpose.

Does decriminalization cut out the criminal element? Does that justify decriminalization?

And what about gambling? Is legalized gambling a good thing for society? Does winning the lottery actually help anyone? Does the lottery disproportionately affect the poor?

What happened to all the traditional arguments against gambling? Have we countered them, or just ignored them?

Along with special guest Longinus, the boys drink and review Space Dust IPA by Elysium brewing, then discuss a few short stories from The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

The premise of the collection is that you can see the stories in the collection played out by looking at the tattoos of a carny.

This podcast includes reviews of the following stories.

The Veldt – problems arise when spoiled children get addicted to their “smart room.”

Kaleidoscope – a tale of how people react when facing certain death on their own in space.

The Other Foot — all the Earth’s black population has moved to Mars. The remaining population on Earth destroy the planet and come to Mars begging for help.

The Man – Space farers, moving from planet to planet, just miss “the man.” The captain becomes obsessed with catching up with him.

The Rocket Man – Working in space is addictive. When you’re in space you want to be on Earth, and vice versa. The story inspired Elton John’s song.

With special guest Longinus, the boys drink and review a smoked maple porter from Flying Dog Brewery, then discuss Daoism and the Tao Te Ching.

Longinus starts with a general introduction to Daoism, looking at it from three perspectives: as a philosophy, as a New Age, self-help system, and as a religion.

Daoism competed with Confucianism in China, and was often repressed by the Chinese government.

Daoism is both practical and mystical, and often frustratingly vague. It can be approached from several different perspectives.

The Tao Te Ching, allegedly by Lao Tzu, doesn’t have a plot or a narrative. It’s a collection of wise sayings, somewhat reminiscent of the biblical Proverbs.

The boys review some of their favorite quotes from the Tao Te Ching, and reflect on its message and enduring value.

In the November 2022 edition of “five for five”, the boys drink and review a bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout from Guinness, then discuss five topics in five minutes each.

1. Gabby Giffords and the courage to fight gun violence. What is the “courage” here? Who is going around threatening people who oppose gun violence? None of the things her group are advocating for require any courage at all.

2. Qatar’s World Cup. Why is it in Qatar to begin with? Where are all the woke opposing Qatar’s human rights? And to add insult to injury, two days before the start they reverse their position and decide not to have beer in the stadium.

3. The Paul Pelosi story. In two months we get two weird stories about Paul Pelosi, and in neither case do we get the straight story from the media. What the heck is going on? And why the tyrannical insistence that we believe the first-day version of events, which almost always turn out to be wrong?

4. Candace Owens and The Greatest Lie Ever Sold. Once again, the media isn’t playing it straight with us. It’s entirely possible to believe that the officer murdered George Floyd without turning Floyd into a saint. So many elements of the story have been suppressed in the interest of a BLM narrative.

5. Trump is running for president. Will he make it to the election? Will he dominate the Republican primaries? Will his legal troubles catch up with him? The boys give their opinions and make predictions.

The boys drink and review Glacial Drift, a spiced winter ale, then discuss the controversies surrounding Hunter Biden.

Hunter isn’t really the issue. The question is whether the president of the United States has been compromised by foreign powers. It certainly looks that way. It seems that Joe is under the thumb of China and others.

What about the laptop? In hindsight, the old “this is Russian propaganda” thing seems to have “all the earmarks” of a cover-up, and both the FBI and the legacy media seem complicit.

Now it seems beyond dispute that Hunter used Joe’s political connections to get lucrative deals, and kicked back some of the money to Joe, aka “the big guy.”

The new GOP Congress may investigate it, but will anything come of it? Probably not.

The boys finish out the show with an installment of “Just Not Woke Enough.”

The boys drink and review a 2-year old bottle of Raison D’Extra, then discuss proposals to redraw state boundaries.

They start off with a review of federalism, and the idea that the country is a collection of states, not simply a mass of people, which is why tiny Rhode Island and sparsely populated Montana get as many senators as California.

What happens when residents of a state feel they don’t fit in that state?

The idea is being tested in Oregon, where the conservative, agricultural residents of the majority of the state differ drastically from the urban liberals in Portland. They’d rather join up with Idaho.

A similar thing is going on in Maryland, where the conservative eastern and western ends of the state don’t feel represented by the liberals in Annapolis.

But where does this end? Do county lines need to be redrawn? City lines? Neighborhoods?

The solution is not to keep redrawing lines, but to respect minority rights and making most political issues as local as possible.

In this quick episode, the boys share their favorite Thanksgiving foods and thoughts about this quintessentially American holiday, and reflect on why it’s important to be thankful and grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving!