⚾️ Dinger dreams 🏟️ scroll if you want to 🤳 Boris? 🍿 beef burgundy? 🍽️
🍭 👂He looks like a squirrel with a mouthful of nuts 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, September 2. In case this newsletter is too long: art spawned from hatred isn’t always good but this time it is, even people who hate baseball will love this baseball podcast, this true crime takes you from the Killing Fields in Cambodia to Hollywood.
Have a nice weekend.
xoxo lp
p.s. Want to advertise here? Fill out this form or let me know.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Michael Ornelas is the host of “Fine” Dining, the search for the most mediocre chain restaurant in America.
What do you hope listeners take away from your celebration of mid?
I am such a fan of the chains that I’m visiting for the show, but I also want us to have an honest conversation about them. They’re not the best. They’re familiar environments with bright, flashy signs out front where prepackaged frozen food is served to us by a wait staff that’s just trying to get through the day. And yet we keep coming back. I wanted to explore this abject mediocrity via a love letter to these places, while tracing back their origins to when they had the heart needed to catch on in the first place.
The concept of celebrating the average is really unique. Do you think this approach has influenced the way you view other aspects of life?
I think it’s made me more accepting of myself! I feel that as a 90s kid, I was constantly told I could do “great” things, but that pressure would make me feel disappointed when something I did was “just okay.” Reframing my mindset to celebrate mediocrity has truly made me more tolerant of others and more forgiving of my own inadequacies.
What’s been the most memorable or surprising dining experience on the podcast so far and why?
I spent 10 months on the waitlist for Casa Bonita, a big pink castle that mixes a theme park atmosphere with pretty average Mexican cuisine, and I finally got to go for my season 3 premiere (coming this November). Having been recently renovated by the creators of South Park, it was an overwhelmingly stimulating time. Magic shows, cliff divers, puppetry, a roaming Manbearpig gorilla mascot…it really highlighted the idea that making a successful restaurant is about the full experience it offers, and food is only a part of that.
“Fine” Dining features some incredibly fun sound design, including recurring theme songs and an ironically patriotic eagle sound effect. How did you come up with these elements, and what role do you think the sound design plays in the listener experience?
In school I wanted to be an orchestral percussionist, and I played piano for 15 years. Sound and music have always been a part of me, and I simply couldn’t resist the allure to mess around with the possibilities when making a podcast. I have a couple friends who are composers, who brilliantly turn my silly ideas into reality (my Olive Garden, Medieval Times, and Cracker Barrel episodes all have original songs in them). But then I discovered I could create soundscapes and add even more to the story I was crafting from these restaurants via audiodramas and skits (I recommend the Medieval Times or “TGI Friday the 13th” for the best examples of this).
Your Septemburger series is back, with 8 burger chains battling it out in a single-elimination tournament. How can listeners join the fun and what inspired you to make this an interactive event?
I created a March Madness-style bracket to find the best burger in town! Septemburger is a tournament where 24 burgers from 8 different restaurants face off in a single-elimination contest. Listeners can fill out the bracket for a chance to win $500! You can find it on the homepage of my website or right here! Here are the first-round matchups:
Culver’s vs. Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers
Steak ‘n Shake vs. Rally’s
In-N-Out vs. Whataburger
Shake Shack vs. White Castle
Listeners can hear the Septemburger Kick-Off episode on September 4th to get the first two match results free before brackets are due on the 10th.
If “Fine” Dining were a restaurant, what would be on the menu?
The complementary table bread would be the rolls from Texas Roadhouse or the rosemary Italian bread from Romano’s Macaroni Grill with olive oil
The Thai Crunch Salad from California Pizza Kitchen would be there to appear healthy
I’d definitely steal the Bloomin’ Onion from Outback Steakhouse for the appetizer because it’s actual perfection
On the side I’d go with the fries from Islands and the fried rice from Benihana
Entree options would be the Italian Beef Sandwich from Portillo’s, a pepperoni slice from Joe’s Pizza, a slider from Dave’s Hot Chicken, and literally any pancake from The Original Pancake House
And for dessert, there’s the standard Cinnabon, the Legendary Monster Cookie from Cheddar’s, and the Great Wall of Chocolate from P.F. Chang’s
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Strangeland tells the stories of crimes in mostly immigrant neighborhoods, and every single season has really grabbed me. Season one was about a mom in tech who got murdered along with her baby in a New Jersey suburb. That one was strange because the setting seemd so normal. The new season spans the Killing Fields of Cambodia to Hollywood to tell the story of Haing Ngor, an Oscar-winning actor and humanitarian who, before surviving the genocide in Cambodia during the Khmer Rough, was gunned down in an alley in L.A.’s Chinatown. LAPD said it was a drug-fueled robbery and put three young gang members in prison for doing it. But many Cambodians think this was a targeted assassination—Haing starred in The Killing Fields and was publicly calling out Khmer Rouge executioners all over the world. This season of Strangeland, hosted by journalist Ben Adair and Cambodian-American podcaster Mayly Tao, is about a murder (that makes no sense if you’re listening to the LAPD) and how the murder is understood through the lens of the Killing Fields. I listened to episode four, “Kill the Chicken Scare the Monkey,” twice. It talks to Cambodians, including Mayly’s mom, who made their way to southern California after the Khmer Rouge about what it was like to survive, and what that has to do with the case.
notes
✨GuestCast lets you generate a podcast feed based on a person, not a show.
✨Read Marketing Your Indie Career for Job Searches in Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨My friend Rebecca Grierson is the producer of Matt Buechele’s What Is Going On, and they just dropped an interview with Fred Armison. Matt and Fred are both musicians and it’s this really interesting conversation about the overlap of music and comedy, and Fred talks about the origin of cymbals and how Turkey, the home of the cymbal, should market themselves. Listen here.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Commons’ Inside Kabul in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Will Weldon hates Bill Maher so much that he created an entire podcast about it, I Hate Bill Maher. Art spawned from hatred isn’t always good, but this time it is. Will and his guests tackle individual episodes from Real Time and other media from the Bill universe, really examining things moment by moment. The inaccuracies, the absolute racism/misogyny, the narcissism, the lack of absolutely any research whatsoever. (The fact checkers on this show, if there are any, must be ready to jump off the roof. We know that Paul F. Tompkins quit and said he’d “never in a million years work with Bill Maher again.”) It’s really something that Will and his guests need to get off their chests, and it isn’t baseless. Their lists of complaints is long but I’d say the biggest issue seems to be that Bill isn’t funny, and that his jokes are confusing at best but mostly just offensive. At one point in the Emily Heller episode (oh—he gets great guests) Will says that this show is anti-education. I wrote down what Emily said: “This is a show about giving you permission to stop thinking and to go with your worst gut reaction, your first thought, your most impulsive evil reaction to information.” Bill Maher prides himself for being like “I don’t think like everyone else.” I Hate Bill Maher is building an argument that he thinks like a lot of other really shitty people. This show makes me angry, it makes me laugh. I guess it’s a catharsis I didn’t know I needed. For the amount of comedy Bill Maher sucks out of this world, Will Weldon is funneling it back in. Listen here.
How I found it: A guest on The Daily Zeitgeist randomly mentioned she was a gust on it.
🎙️Lost Patients opens with reporter Will James describing the way we treat people with severe mental illness like a fucked up house in which every room, doorway, and hall passage was designed by a different architect working without any sense of collaboration. The rooms are not connected and you can’t really walk through the house. The house sucks. That’s am image I can’t forget, and I think it could be a metaphor for a lot of government systems. After we get a tour of this shitty house, we are invited into the inside of someone's psychosis, it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to knowing what this must really feel like. This is only in the first few minutes of the series. Lost Patients does a lot of work to explain why the house sucks and brilliantly describes how scary and heartbreaking this is for helpless family members who have suffered, have lost people, are suffering, are losing people to mental illness. In this shitty house. Some of these interviews are burned into my memory—mothers willing to kill for their kids but cannot for the life of them protect them or get them the help they need. Another mother is doing this despite the fact that this same kid lashes out to her, is cruel to her, makes her feel unsafe. The history is explained to sort of make sense of it all. We used to throw women in asylums / give them lobotomies if they were on their periods or experiencing postpartum depression. The extreme backlash makes it nearly impossible to get people with severe mental illness committed. We once had places for these people to go, but not anymore. Lost Patients is part history of the house, what’s known as the churn and the churn’s origin story, deinstitutionalization. It’s part investigation, and full of mini stories and interviews that put real people to this issue. It’s about not just mental illness but how the world responds to it. Listen here.
How I found it: Cross promo from another NPR show
🎙️I wouldn’t consider myself a sports fan, and I especially would not consider myself a baseball fan (what is the opposite of a fan? that is what I am with baseball) but I will listen to anything Richard Parks III makes, and his new podcast Dodger Blue Dream, a documentary of the Dodger’s 2024 season made in real time, is proof that he can dazzle me no matter the topic. I already wrote about how Richard covered the rocky start to the season, with Shohei Ohtani's translator, Ippei Mizuhara, stealing millions of dollars from Shohei to pay down illegal gambling debts. Ippei pleaded guilty, is being sentenced on October 25 (when the Dodgers may likely be playing in the World Series) and faces 30+ years in prison. That story has not died down, and neither has the podcast, which somehow has me squinting my eyes to imagine the swing of a bat or googling videos of Shohei holding his breath before he hits the ball. This is an animated storytelling podcast packed with humor and Richard’s love of baseball allows him to kind of be my tour guide for the sport, the person who isolates the interesting things I’d be missing otherwise, or the tiny moments of magic and science and athleticism that happen on baseball fields. Are they called fields? Well, Richard has not taught me everything. I have been listening to the whole season and I think you should too. Like right now go listen to the one about Shohei’s breath, “Shohei's Breath.” It’s short and will scoop you in. "The Talented Mr. Ippei" and "The Complaint Against Ippei" are INCREDIBLE. “Freddie’s Return” explores the five sides of Freddie Freeman and what makes him such a paradox. That is nuanced and character driven and what I love most about story. This is baseball I can get behind! Listen here.
How I found it: I listen to anything Richard makes
🎙️I could probably write about every episode of Sixteenth Minute of Fame, Jamie Loftus’ show about what internet fame does to people (and a lot of other stuff too.) The latest episode, a two-parter about “I Love My Curvy Wife” guy Robbie Tripp, was so much more fascinating than you’d think, so much more complicated than you’d think, and, despite what you might think, very deserving of two parts, or even more. (I was like “two parts of this? yikes.” but it needs it.) Jamie does a good job setting the scene for the post, looking at the larger context of body acceptance and where Robbie Tripp fits into all of this. And where Mrs. I Love My Curvy Wife Guy, Sarah Tripp, fits into all of this, too. And! Why the media grasped onto this stupid post, anyway. Nobody made them do it. They’re the reason we’re sitting here, with the copy of the original post nearly memorized by now, and having had to listen to Robbie’s viral “chubby sexy big girl banger / hot wife music projects” he made for his “gordita gang.” Blame media. In Jamie’s interview with Robbie, I think he thinks he comes off pretty great. Only listeners of the podcast episode know that when Jamie responds to him with a “hell yeah,” she is really shutting her brain down. I have heard people complain (on Reddit, so yeah) that these episodes aren’t edited enough and that Jamie lets her guests talk too long and I couldn’t disagree more. I love hearing the real conversation, how Jamie constructs her interviews, how she responds, how everything is timed, and I love hearing the guest go on and on. And really (Wil Williams pointed this out to me) isn’t that what this show is for? To let these people tell a huge cultural story from their perspective? It would be weird to cut them off. Jamie cares, she is curious, she is kind but critical, and she doesn’t go into these conversations with an agenda. I was talking to my mom about this episode (I talked to a lot of people about it) and she’s like, “yeah that’s a deadly combo, curious and funny. And that’s what Jamie is” and she’s right. Listen here and here.
How I found it: I listen to anything Jamie makes.
🎙️Illuminated is BBC Radio’s newish hub for one-off documentaries from creative audio makers. Stories surround communities of people with dementia, in gang warfare, natural sounds, and everyday things. It’s like an audio magnifiying glass. Ross Sutherland (who makes my favorite podcast, Imaginary Advice) made a piece, “Infinite Scroll,” about the effects of the intimate in general. He ties in a story from One Thousand and One Nights about Scheherazade, who used the idea of infinite storytelling to save her life, to illustrate the idea of the infinite as a safe place between life and death. A third place. That we live in now, continuously, on our phones. It’s really thoughtful and beautifully made. Listen here.
How I found it: h/t Eleanor McDowall
🎙️”This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care.” —the content warning at the beginning of each episode of Noble. And they are not fucking kidding. I truly think this show might break a record for the amount of graphic descriptions of dead bodies. If you can’t picture/smell the dead bodies at the beginning of episode one, you will by the end of episode two. In Noble, dead bodies are front and center. But really Noble is a fascinating story about Tri-State Crematory, a crematory that wasn’t cremating bodies, instead throwing them into a huuuuge mass grave. It’s also about the town of Noble, Georgia, home of Tri-State Crematory, the criminal family who just started flinging these dead bodies around their property and their legacy, the characters involved with the discovery of all these bodies, and the family members who thought they were cremating their loved ones, but weren’t. It’s even about what we owe our loved ones who pass, what happens to us when we go. Despite all the dead body talk, there is one sweet detail burned in my brain, from a woman who sent her husband’s body to Tri-State Crematory He liked to eat Hershey’s Kisses when he hunted but so as not to alert animals with the uncrinkeling of the wrappers, his wife would spend hours unwrapping them for him, ahead of time, and putting them in a Ziploc bag. I keep joking about all the dead body talk, and when I first started listening to this podcast I thought, “okay we get it, enough already!” But on second thought, I think it’s necessary to illustrate just how grim this story is. But again, if you’re not ready to go there, don’t. But if you are, listen here.
How I found it: I think I saw it in Pocket Casts somewhere?
🎙️I hope Jordan Crucchiola’s Feeling Seen never ends. I think it has the potential to tell the stories of so many people who discovered a movie that made them feel seen and not alone for the first time. Jen Kober’s episode made me wish I have seen a single episode The Facts of Life (which I will do in the future,) but I mostly loved the episode for its analysis of the 1976 version of Freaky Friday, which reminded me that it might be the funniest movie of all time. I loved hearing about it from the lens of a queer woman who felt seen the first time she saw little Jodie Foster thinking that she had a crush on Boris. (Of course she had a crush on Boris! She wasn’t into guys!) Thank you Jen for reminding me about this movie (I texted my mom "can we watch Freaky Friday next time I’m home?”) and Thank you Jordan for helping us appreciate these movies in really important and fascinating ways. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe
🎙️Your Mom Is a Podcast is kind of like The Newlywed Game, but instead of asking husbands and wives about their whoopie-making routines, they quiz people and their parents about their relationships. It’s a quiz I would love to play with my own parents. The guests are great, so it’s fun to hear them talk, and it’s pretty interesting to hear the thought processes of the moms and dads behind them—what they remembered about being parents, what was important to them, and what they thought about these tiny humans they were parenting. Tiny humans who grew up to be…Laci Mosley! (That was a really good, emotional episode.) I also loved the episode with Travis McElroy and his dad, Clint. It swung from heavy stuff like the great loss these two men have shared (Travis’ mom) to funny stuff, like arguing over Travis’ favorite meal as a child. (“What child likes beef burgundy!? I’m not even sure I know what beef burgundy is!” Listen here.
🎙️On Scam Clinic, Nick Stapleton talks to people who have been scammed, which is both interesting and a service. Admitting you’ve been scammed is embarrassing but can help people. Nick does a good job guiding these people through their stories. For that alone, it’s a good storytelling/interview show. But episodes feel playful and unstructured. On one episode, Nick has a rather long conversation with one of the scammers (who starts asking him for podcast tips!) and on another he confronts a scammer with some of the obvious lies they’ve told. I’m into this show but it’s not an easy listen. It’s heartbreaking to hear from the victims, who became scam victims because they were in a bad spot in the first place. I think they should receive compensation for their work, but what do I know. (Maybe they are?) Listen here.
How I found it: Podnews
🎙️The only Armchair Expert episode I have ever listened to was the one where Dax Shepard made Jonathan Van Ness cry, so I can’t say I’m a good judge of whether or not it’s good or bad or my thing or not my thing. But I did start listening to Flightless Bird, a show produced by the Armchair Expert team that was born in the Armchair Expert feed. New Zealand journalist David Farrier is exploring things that Americans like to try to get a better sense of the culture, and figure out why we are obsessed with monster trucks and hot dogs. I have listened to many, many episodes, and they really feel like 101s of …things. I wish there was more exploration as to WHY these things are so American. This is such a great idea and could be done much better. Still! I’m listening. Particularly to three episodes that you knew I would listen to first—two about Disney Adults (one’s here, one’s here) and one about EPCOT. David went into his investigation kind of confused by Disney adults and left with a much better understanding of them, and we can thank his interview with his guest Juliana Covax for that. She loves Disney but is self-aware enough to know the problems that come with that. She’s critical about the way Disney pays workers, how the company has been lead, and how it handles racism on rides and in movies. Disney adults aren’t mindless zombies. We care about that stuff, too. These episodes give history and secrets, and we also get to go into the parks with David, who at one point tags along with Dax and Monica (who love Disney) like he’s their seven year old child and it’s cute. Listen here.
How I found it: Trending on Pocket Casts
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From October 5, 2020] Those Happy Places is one of my favorite shows—I am so overly cautious to relish every single episode, which analyzes theme park attractions like literature. Because I love Disney, and Disney is kind of the king of storytelling via attractions, it takes up the lion’s share of Those Happy Places content. So this show is *my* happy place. The Haunted Mansion episode was a careful inspection of the ride and the significance of every creepy creak and grim grinning ghost inside. It presents The Haunted Mansion in a way I can’t imagine that any of us have thought about before, and takes the listener through it in such great detail it’s like you’re on the ride. But the moment that made my jaw drop was a fan theory that suggests that if The Haunted Mansion is a story, it not only takes you through a haunted house, but makes you a character in the story—a character who is flung from the top of the attic, to your death, turning you into a ghost that’s forever part of the ride. Buddy and Alice are skeptical, but I am convinced that this fan theory is true. And I will never river visit the Haunted Mansion without thinking about it.
THOSE HAPPY PLACES MENTIONED