Ep. 100 She's Leaving Home

Welcome to episode 100 of the Modern Moron!  We do have a special guest for this landmark episode depending on how you define the word special.  Our guest is special to me as I’ve known this guy as my bff since junior year in high school.  We were both undersized, red-headed umm what?  Misfits?   Class clowns?  Maybe.  Outcasts?  No, he certainly wasn’t an outcast.  In fact he was smart enough to surround himself with two of the biggest guys in our class.  Neither of us were academics but he always had an angle and the angle was usually directed toward financial gain.  My dad loved that about him and when he would come over he would tell my dad that he was the son he never had.  My dad thought that was hilarious.  

I even had the honor of being best man at his wedding.

My guest, is referred to in this episode as Templeton, he gets that name from E.B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Webb’s” Templeton the rat.  Not because he likes to eat but because Templeton was always looking for that same angle of opportunity… He is also good friends with the Senator.  Both of them have something in common as it pertains to the title of this episode and the 6th track of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper Album She’s Leaving Home.  Both  of them are taking their daughters away to college… one for the first time ever and the other for their Senior year, but it’s after spending 14 to 17 months at home through the pandemic.  Not easy for either of them, but I think in particular for our friend Templeton.  You see Templeton is not a particularly emotional or animated person, doesn’t like to talk about feelings or emotions, you know, a typical male.  But he is very close to his daughter.  I don’t know all of the things they do or have in common but they do share a love of baseball.  They go to ball games together, they talk baseball.  She roots for the San Francisco Giants and he roots for the Oakland A’s, but it’s a real bonding thing and I know this is really hard for him as well as it is for the Senator taking his daughter to the East Coast for her Senior hear of College.

My guest also has a love of practical jokes, which I do not share.  I hate practical jokes, but in this case we pull a very short joke on the senator at the beginning of this episode and here is the setup:  I use a service called Zencastr to record this podcast.  Part of the process is that each participant has to sign in and everyone’s name is on the computer screen.  I had Templeton sign in with a phony name like “Audio Compression Engineer” or something like that, so if he saw it he wouldn’t know who it was.  As it turned out he didn’t look at the screen anyway, but Templeton decided to play with the Senator’s head and chimed in as if he was Engineering our recording session as a third party.  Also, it didn’t hurt that the Senator had already had his nightly cocktail.

Toward the end of the episode we talk about hiking as our guest had just returned from a trip to Yosemite to go on a couple hikes with his son.  Naturally the Senator loves to talk about his hiking accomplishments, namely the Tahoe Rim Trail.  But our guest confuses this and says The Senator hiked Pacific Rim Trail in three days.  The Pacific Rim as opposed to the Tahoe Rim, Consists of all the continents and countries that surround the Pacific Ocean.. I mean from Australia to the tip of South America and all points in between including: South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, China and Russia, Canada, the United States plus all of Central America and Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.  Meaning, the Pacific Rim is a little bigger than the Tahoe Rim, so enjoy that moment.

A couple of  tough Dad’s get sentimental about their daughter’s going from cradle to college on this 100th episode of the Modern Moron.  Thanks for listening...

CLOSE - See?  We knew what that he meant to say the Pacific Trail but said the Pacific Rim because he was watching a war movie about Korea and General Douglas McArthur which led him to think of the Pacific Rim Theater of operations… wasn’t that obvious to you?  What’s wrong with you people?

As you can tell, both the Senator and Templeton have a tendency to… confuse sayings and mispronounce a phrase or two from time to time.  And they both like to rely on the adage of, “you knew what I meant,” to which I usually call bullshit.  But I sure enjoy it and I hope you did too.

I have a feeling we’ll get Templeton back on this program to hopefully mix his metaphors, cause’ that is a lot of fun.  Thank you for listening, please forward this episode to someone you think might like it, hug your daughter if you’ve got one and we’ll see you next time on The Modern Moron.