372 Pages We ll Never Get Back

Zot!

Conor here! Got out of the woods after a weekend camping trip and beelined to the nearest brewery, Foley Brothers, in Brandon, VT. Foregoing the coffee, (even though it was probably more appropriate for the time of day), I just ordered beer and was moving back and forth between the brewery and the lovely Vermont summer day outside when suddenly, I noticed it...

The double eagled flag. Just like The Mister's tattoo. What are the odds?!

Unfortunately nobody saw me snapping a pic and...

2 Worthy Causes

Hey Patreon supporters! First things first, we won't be recording til Monday - the breakneck pace at which Maxim and Alessia looked at each other near a piano in this section made us have to tread slowly.

More importantly, as you may or may not know, we earmark a chunk of our patreon earnings every month towards a charitable/non-profit cause. Usually we're supporting 826 National, which teaches creative writing workshops in...

Conor Makes a Banoffee Pie

I will admit: while I made fun of the Banoffee Pie enjoyed by our starcrossed lovers in the last episode, I was secretly thinking "Terrible name, but that actually doesn't sound that bad." So I decided to make one and document it for you.

The verdict? It's... Kind of good. The toffee is difficult to cut, especially right out of the fridge. And then it's very chewy. It tastes good! But I may have got it TOO thick?

Hope you enjoy it! Let me know if you make one of your own. Now it's...

Episode 44 - Male Tasting Fingers

This episode is nearly two hours long, despite the fact that if you cut out all the sex from these five chapters, all our characters did was buy shoes and play chess. Oh, and they saw a deer.

Anyway, there's a ton of fun details to dive into. We've got a word count guessing game, an alternative ending for a book, a deleted scene that finds Maxim green with envy, fanfic, emails, and dumb sentences! Plus we'll kick things off with an announcement about the return of an old friend of the p...

Meme Contest Winner(s)

Once again, we received an abundance of great memes. Our first "Wicker Man, what's in the bag" usage. A very unexpected ZOT in the King of the Hill gif. And a great Sonos ad that came in at the last minute. We're very proud of you all! But, over all we picked two winners, the hilarious Guardian editorial, as well as a very funny Far Side.

All the entries are assembled 2019-05-30 20:16:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Conor vs Mike in a no holds barred battle of, well, who is better at whatever the hell this is!

Conor doesn't know about this yet, but next episode I'm throwing down this challenge: who's better at imitating The Mister in whatever this is: "Maxim closes his eyes, and a low hum of appreciation rumbles in his throat."

Stay tuned for that. Then vote for me, often. -- (mjn, in case it wasn't obvious)

My Bedside Books

And, hey, if you've never read any Mencken his "autobiographies"* are cracking good stuff, a great place to start.

*It's pretty clear that aside from the broad strokes he flat out made up most of the stories of his life. Also he was almost certainly a closet racist. Still, great prose!

[EDIT: this is Mike, by the way. As pointed out, Conor would of course also have a beer]

Episode 43 - Music for your what now?

WARNING: This section of The Mister may contain the dumbest sentence we've ever covered on this show.

Join us in pastoral Cornwall, where Maxim and the entrancing Alessia, who's beauty, we're often reminded, is very beautiful, are hiding out from Albania sex traffickers. What do they do to pass the time? What any two attractive (Alessia is very attractive) young people would do: eat fish pies and get busy as hell.

Along the way we'll learn that our hero can visually assess whether...

A 100% Random You-Must-Trust-That-I-Picked-This-at-Random-From-Trucking-Through-Time Sample

"Tell me, where did you learn those moves you put on Collins?" The Captain asked. [sic!] "I haven't seen that kind of maneuvering before. He was in total shock when he finally got himself together."
"Captain, that was known as karate. It's an art known by a handful of people back in the United States. The government was given permission to send a few men to China to learn the art. Chad and I were lucky enough to have been selected to go," Dale lied, hoping to convince the captain in order...

The Mister meme contest!

Alright, as promised, we're running a meme contest for The Mister. Hopefully we're far enough in to give you enough material to work with! Feel free to use material from this week's assignment.

We'll award a prize of $25 to the winner! So get meme-ing!

(we'll probably pick a winner next week, so no need to rush)

Episode 42 - Not A Groin Was Stirring

In part two of our deep dive into The Mister, author EL James gives her audience exactly what they came for: Sex! Nobody actually having it, of course, but people are being trafficked for it in a cheap attempt to lend gravitas to a tawdry romance novel! We were so disgusted our groins barely stirred at all.

This week we'll get to meet Maxim's bros and pay a visit to his family estates. We'll crack a smile anytime we don't see condoms, and finally get a good look at Alessia underneath th...

I read The Mister in public (and survived)

In our last episode I challenged those of you who were not so traumatized by the damage that buying The Mister had done to your Amazon algorithm to go and read it in a public setting. I would never ask you to do anything that I wouldn't do, so I boldly ventured to my favorite coffee shop in town (it is a total coincidence that it is a coffee shop that serves beer) with the book in tow, sat at my favorite table in a window so to be more visible to passersby, and read it for the better part of ...

Random Sentences from "Trucking Through Time"

"Next time partner, use one of those freezer bags and just toss it out the window. It would save you a lot of trouble." Chad said laughing at him.

"Now, you tell me. I forgot we had them. Thanks a lot."

"Anything for my pal, but if you have to take a crap, I don't know what to tell you." Chad answered with a roar of laughter. 

"Funny, partner. Very damn funny."

(I have no idea what is the context, I just cracked the book and saw that -- mjn)

Housecoat anyone?

As promised, here is the picture of the Nylon Housecoat that I surprised Mike with at the end of the last episode. I think we're all thinking the same thing: what if this is also the same guy inside the rubber cow suit?

Anyway, I'm placing an order, how many can I put you down for?

-Conor

Episode 41 - Handsome Buttocks

Who's ready to get British and horny?? This is our first episode devoted to The Mister by EL James, and it's obviously unlike anything we've read on here before.  We'll examine the author's clever methods for padding out the book length, as well as some very surprising similarities to the works of Ernest Cline. We'll also examine how a cartoon wolf might respond to the sight of someone polishing a piano in an alluring nylon housecoat. We'll also check out the dark web and establish some ...

Line...?

Did anyone else have Twilight flashbacks every damn time our two leads start "interacting" with each other?

Episode 40 - Book Number Seven

Time to start our seventh book together! This one promises to be quite the journey. Don't want to ruin this surprise, so get listening!

Episode 39 - Broken Camera Blues

We are back after a week in Nashville! While we were there, we figured that we would take advantage of the opportunity to record face to face. So we recorded a dynamic, hilarious, touching video rattling off some potential Next Book candidates (it was well shot too.) Unfortunately, Mike had a checked bag mishap with his camera on the flight home (the airline killed it, thinking it was a service dog)

So we have reprised the chat over audio for folks to listen to! We'll discuss six candid...

Bob Honey "winners"

Congrats to the two winners of our copies of Bob Honey!  Please email 372pages@gmail.com with your contact info and we will send them out to you.

Win our copies of Bob Honey!

We're done with Bob Honey and the titular stuff he just does. Now's your chance to win these one of a kind editions that we've scrawled illegible notes in and signed (along with the author himself, in Conor's edition!) No word on whether Pappy Pariah is available for signings as well.

To enter, just leave a comment here and we'll pick two random winners later in the week.

Episode 38 - 160 Pages We'll Never Get Back

Thank god this book was not 372 pages long. Neither of us could have handled that.  Bob Honey was fortunately only 160, and even so, managed to have three different characters crap their pants, two of them in this final section. It's a fitting metaphor for something, but we'll be damned if we're going to puzzle it out, we're too busy enjoying our heated pool.

There is a lot to discuss as we wrap up this entry: the appropriate theme music for one of Bob's killing sprees, the practic...

Episode 37 - I Laugh a lot When I Write

Our favorite unreliable narrator who is also a toilet salesman/mallet assassin is back to bring his book into the homestretch! We've got brand new onomatopoeias, lipstick smeared on teeth, and of course, boatloads of alliteration. There's also a literal boat, which our hero uses to abandon Hurricane Katrina relief effort volunteers to their death. (this is the "stuff" that he evidently "just do.") There's also got some fanfic which, though it may not be our most difficult batch yet, gives us ...

Conor's Poem

Hey Patreon, we're not recording again until Monday, but since I've been comparing Bob Honey to the terrible poem I wrote and performed recently, I decided to share it with everyone. May it enhance or ruin your weekend accordingly. If it inspires any more terrible poetry, please share!

-Conor

Meme contest winner(s)!

Truly excellent work on the Bob Honey memes everyone! Take a Maraschino Cherry out of petty cash. It was hard to pick just one winner, the payoff on the spongebob video was truly a work of art, but we had to go with these two. The Spider one nicely integrated nonsense from the book, and the airplane weirdos one was a good overview of t...

Episode 36 - We're Baffled By The Cherry Water

The enigma that is Bob Honey continues to baffle and frustrate us. From offering guests a drink that no human has ever consumed (and they accept??), to possessing a secret preternatural scuba diving activity, to being unable to comprehend basic figures of speech. Oh, and he's a literal superhero we find out too! So that's just delightful.

Our dark web contacts come thru again with more reenactments, Mike tries a social experiment on his patient wife, and a challenging round of Real or F...

Bob Honey meme contest

As we approach the halfway mark of the book, we figured we should do another meme contest. Same rules as before! Submit as many as you like, our favorite gets $25!

Special consideration may be given to memes mashing up content from previous books. Simpsons and Far Side references appreciated as well.

Create your own Sean Penn character

As mentioned in the latest podcast, Conor created a game to help you construct your own Sean Penn protagonist. Here's your own chance to play! If you write any adventures with your character, send them our way or post them in the comments!

Episode 35 - Uh... OK?

Sean Penn certainly has written a collective of words arranged into sentences! There's a lot to discuss in our first episode diving into Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. There's the mysterious backstory Penn created for the book, the maddening alliteration, and the book's strange ability to make you dislike stuff you previously thought you enjoyed.

We'll also play a round of "Create your own Sean Penn" character, to show you how easy it is to make a character this eccentric. Plus, the roots...

Daylight S**** Time!

Conor and I have been friends and colleagues now for longer than I think he would care to remember and I'm nearly positive that one of my many, many eccentricities that he pretends to put up with is my annoyance with Daylight Saving Time. (If you say "Daylight Savings Time" and someone corrects you, you have my permission to key their car).

The fact that a bunch of adults who should know better force an entire country of free people to pretend it's a different time than we all...

Important update

Conor here, I am pleased to report that immediately following Mike and I recording yesterday, I opened my front door and TWO packages had arrived. One, obviously contained the book Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, which I ordered in Used - Very Good condition. What I was not expecting was for it to be signed by the author himself:

This will clearly just add to the enjoyment of jotting "DSOTW" and "...