BONUS Episode 51 PREVIEW: The Gateway Arch

big arch full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/arch-144395122listen to hell of a way to dad: https://whatahellofawaytodad.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, I got everything going. Uh, we're gonna do the sync point.

• 0:04Liam McAnderson?

  A point of synchronization.

• 0:05Justin Roczniak?

  Point of synchronization, yes. Do three, two, one, Mark. Three, two, one, Mark.

• 0:11Liam McAnderson?

  Shouldn't have been Lewis, nailed it.

• 0:13Justin Roczniak?

  Lewis and Mark. Hmm.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  It's Adam and Eve, not Lewis and Clark. I don't know.

• 0:19Liam McAnderson?

  Almost.

• 0:24November Kelly?

  You know, um, you know, my favorite fact about the Lewis and Clark expedition?

• 0:28Liam McAnderson?

  What's that?

• 0:28November Kelly?

  My favorite fact about the Lewis and Clark expedition is that at the time, they carried a lot of laxatives with them because they were eating shit food and, uh, like, so they needed them. And the laxative of the time was this solid ball of mercury.

• 0:46Liam McAnderson?

  No, it wasn't.

• 0:48November Kelly?

  Swallowed. And then you just fished out and reused afterwards. It was called the perpetual pill.

• 0:56Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 0:57November Kelly?

  And so archaeologically, one of the most useful ways of tracking Lewis and Clark's campsites is, hey, is there a bunch of mercury leached into the soil here? Which is a nice metaphor for like settler colonialism, you know, to be like, hey, we literally shit poison all over this country. That.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  You li- I, I, I hold out hope though, because you can't kill a hu- a human. Like, we'll do, we'll fucking eat balls of mercury to make us shit better. I don't, I don't give a damn.

• 1:24November Kelly?

  Yeah. Put that on the, put that on the Voyager plaque.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Fuck a cockroach, man. Like, don't let us come. We will infest it. And we will never be, we will never go.

• 1:33Liam McAnderson?

  Don't let the mercury ball get hot, though. That's not what you want to be swallowing.

• 1:37Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh.

• 1:37Liam McAnderson?

  Hot mercury ball, right? Doesn't, isn't mercury a liquid at room temperature?

• 1:41November Kelly?

  Well, it's only gonna get to body temperature. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's gonna kind of re-solidify afterwards.

• 1:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, hmm, that's.

• 1:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, I actually boof my mercury.

• 1:53Liam McAnderson?

  Do you guys not? Have I been doing this all wrong?

• 1:55Justin Roczniak?

  Um, yeah, all right. This the.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  All right, mercury sounding rod. All right, I'm done.

• 2:00Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm back here with mercury sounding rod. Hit me up, Francis.

• 2:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is a bonus episode.

• 2:08November Kelly?

  You can get so much worse than mercury for that, like gallium.

• 2:12Justin Roczniak?

  A bonus episode of, well, there's your problem.

• 2:16Justin Roczniak?

  No, this is gonna be too silly to go on a main feed, I feel like. Um, uh, you know who all of us are.

• 2:23Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe you don't, though. We have a guest.

• 2:25Justin Roczniak?

  We have a guest.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you do. I'm Francis. I am the St. Louisan that you know.

• 2:30Justin Roczniak?

  And, and.

• 2:31November Kelly?

  Is that really the term? Is that the term of St. Louis?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  St. Louis, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35Justin Roczniak?

  I always assumed it was, uh, St. Louisian for some reason.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  St. Louisian, no, um, we, we can't pronounce French that correctly. Um, all of our French words have to be really dragged through the mud, beaten across a rock. Um, we really, like, I, I used to think, I know that, uh, French, you know, Parisian French versus Montreal French versus Creole French, all kinds of different Frenches, but they can at least understand each other. I feel like you come to St. Louis. Yeah, I feel like you come to St. Louis. It's just, it's all over the place because we're, we're hitting it phonetically and you know all those vowels.

• 3:12Justin Roczniak?

  So I've, I've been wanting to do this episode for a while, but never quite came together. Um, it still hasn't quite come together, but we're doing it anyway. It's gonna be very vibes based. We're gonna, we're gonna.

• 3:22November Kelly?

  That's why it's a bonus.

• 3:22Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna talk about.

• 3:23Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 3:24Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna talk about a building. We're gonna talk about a building which I really enjoyed. It was amazing to look at the first time I saw it. I was, you know, overawed. I was like, wow, I actually built that damn thing. We're gonna talk about the gateway arch.

• 3:39Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Now, Roz, I wanna, I wanna know, what was your first live? Like, when you saw the arch for the first time, where were you? Because there's so many different vantage points to see the arch for the first time. Was it like when you were flying in, you saw it? Did you drive up? Like, you coming down 70? How did you see it for the first time?

• 3:57Justin Roczniak?

  This was coming off of another whopping. Building experience, I will say that because I was coming in. This was when a bunch of us were on the private railroad car, the Swift Stream. So we came in on the train. We saw it from the bridge. I saw it for the first time.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Beautiful, beautiful way to see it.

• 4:18Justin Roczniak?

  Also, right after seeing the Union Tank Car Company geodesic dome that's right across the river. Which I was, that was, well, I terrified everyone in the car.

• 4:31November Kelly?

  Kinship between.

• 4:32Justin Roczniak?

  Because I was like, I just saw it and I was like.

• 4:34November Kelly?

  Sensing an uneasy kinship between St. Louis and London in the sense of being the city of the shapes.

• 4:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. What if we just made a shape and we made it fucking huge? That's the arch.

• 4:45Justin Roczniak?

  I had no idea that the Union Tank Car Dome was on the route. And when I caught it out of the corner of my eye. This is right after doing, serving breakfast for like 12 people. I, I was like, holy shit, it's real.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  The son of a bitch, those crazy sons of bitches, they did it. They made the arch.

• 5:07Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this was the tank car dome. The, the arch, the arch though, the arch was also very impressive, but I was expecting that one.

• 5:15Liam McAnderson?

  I like that you were just, I like just the idea of you pressing your grubby little hands to the, to the glass, be like, look at that fucking ship.

• 5:25Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah.

• 5:26November Kelly?

  Sort of terrible hubristic monument to American excess, which one day in the near future, a sort of second Napoleon. If you can imagine such a thing is going to be sort of like using for artillery practice.

• 5:40Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I would imagine.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  It'll never, it'll never go away. The, you can't, you can't, um, and I know this, we'll get into it, but my brother, um, worked at the arch for a very long time. He gave me the, the down low on it. Those legs go down that far too.

• 5:55Justin Roczniak?

  They just keep going down.

• 5:58November Kelly?

  How do you have a job at a shape?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  630 feet tall, 630 feet wide, 630 feet into the ground. That shit's not going anywhere.

• 6:08Liam McAnderson?

  Not until Second Napoleon gets a hold of it. Second Napoleon, maybe November by the end of the episode.

• 6:13November Kelly?

  Putting a real marker down to be like, hey, not absolutely nothing will happen to the arch. You know, that my this statue of me, Ozamandius, pretty feeling pretty secure about the attachment of the trunk to the legs.

• 6:27Justin Roczniak?

  What happens if?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  The, the arch still, the arch still existed in that sci fi show that, what was that? That like one of those post apocalyptic shows and it like took place in St. Louis and everybody was really excited. But the arch was still there, even after the apocalypse, it stands.

• 6:42November Kelly?

  Fucking, um, I think the last of us or whatever. Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:46November Kelly?

  But to be fair, that's because of the like fungus zombies, they're not going to knock down an arch. They don't even, that doesn't mean anything.

• 6:52Justin Roczniak?

  Second Napoleon might make St. Louis his or her cap or their capital.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we're French already. We got French shit all over the place. Like if you're going to go Napoleon, it's either us or Louisiana.

• 7:05November Kelly?

  Gotta be they them pronouns minimum. Gotta be, you gotta have like non-binary for, for Napoleon two. Crucially, Napoleon two, as distinct from Napoleon the second, different and worse dude.

• 7:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  We're going to have to replace the last O with an X and make sure that we know it's non-gendered Napoleon.

• 7:23Justin Roczniak?

  Person of Napoleon X community.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  A person of Napoleon.

• 7:27November Kelly?

  It's, it's, it's like, it's like Mark says, you know, all world historical personages appear as it were three times. First is tragedy, then is fuss, third time, get it right.

• 7:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Hey, do you, do you guys know why they call it chicken Napoleon?

• 7:43November Kelly?

  Why is that?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  It's, it's because they removed the bony part.

• 7:46Justin Roczniak?

  Ha, I don't get it.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 7:48Justin Roczniak?

  Ah. Oh, wait, no, I get it now. Hold on. Yeah.

• 7:51November Kelly?

  So in, in, in a real kind of like Scotland in autumn moment, someone is also making my already bad internet connection worse by firing off a load of fireworks outside the window. So it's, it's all going beautifully here tonight.

• 8:07Justin Roczniak?

  Wow. So before we talk about the arch, we have to ask a question, which is what is St. Louis?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Heck yeah, that's right there. That's, that's all of it.

• 8:20November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, future, future capital of non-binary Napoleon.

• 8:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  It's in the middle of the country. You can only, you've spread your fingers in every direction.

• 8:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I mean, it's, it's, it's conveniently situated right there on the Mississippi River. Um, you know, so you have, you have, uh, river access everywhere.

• 8:40November Kelly?

  Cardinals, which despite being a kind of bird, people don't like when you call them the birds.

• 8:44Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's us. Fuck off.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, yeah, different, different city, different, uh, sport.

• 8:50Justin Roczniak?

  You have, um, a weird kind of cheese?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  We do. Our Frankensteinian Provel cheese, which I believe is a mix of like mozzarella and something else. Um, when you buy it, you can either buy it in a loaf or you can buy it, um, where it looks like they ran it through a meat grinder. So it's like string kind of Provel. Yeah, it's great. It tastes like melted plastic. We put it on everything.

• 9:14Justin Roczniak?

  That, that sounds good. Although those fireworks are really gone there, aren't they?

• 9:18November Kelly?

  Oh yeah. It's, um, not great. I had one, uh, literally ricochet off the window at my old place.

• 9:26Liam McAnderson?

  What?

• 9:26November Kelly?

  Uh, just while I was minding my own business. It was, it was like getting hit with like a Nerf drone strike. It was crazy.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Is there a particular celebration happening or is this just for funsies?

• 9:37November Kelly?

  No, I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh, around bonfire night, I think. Wait, no, it isn't. It's, it's past bonfire night. So I don't even know.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Caesar the leftovers, gotcha. I know, I know that.

• 9:48November Kelly?

  Wait, no, 5th of November. It's fine. Yeah, no. So it hasn't happened yet. So people are just like firing fireworks off.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  You had to do the rhyme in your head.

• 9:55Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. Uh, 5th of November, Concrete, uh, Concrete Appreciation Day.

• 10:00November Kelly?

  I, I literally did have to do the rhyme in my head. Yeah.

• 10:04Justin Roczniak?

  Um, there is fried ravioli.

• 10:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, delicious?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yes. Uh, fantastic deep fried ravioli.

• 10:11Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, yeah, I, I had one. It was really good. I was, I was like, damn, I should have had this before I got to the airport. Um.

• 10:19Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, shitting that out of 30,000. No thanks.

• 10:24Justin Roczniak?

  I couldn't leave my seat for that whole flight. Too much turbulence.

• 10:28Liam McAnderson?

  I've flown with you. It's the worst thing in the world.

• 10:31Justin Roczniak?

  No, the fat.

• 10:32November Kelly?

  Eating, eating a lot of like mozzarella and additional substance cheese and then getting on a flight that's like a tumble dryer.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I'll do you guys one better. We have a rush. We have a restaurant here called Twisted Ranch where you can order like forty seven different versions of ranch dressing.

• 10:47Liam McAnderson?

  Hang on, I'm looking this up right now.

• 10:49November Kelly?

  To the Joker, that's just a normal ranch.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Oh, you put buffalo sauce in your ranch. Now it's twisted.

• 10:57Justin Roczniak?

  What a twist.

• 10:57Liam McAnderson?

  Right next to the World Chess Hall of Fame.

• 10:59November Kelly?

  I kind of, I kind of, I kind of want to not edit any of the fireworks out. So you just also get the experience of being under like the world's tiniest artillery bombardment for this episode.

• 11:10Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know, Francis, you might have to take it away on this one. I don't know very much about St. Louis. I was only there once and it was only for a day.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Oh, man. So St. Louis, two hundred and fifty something years old at this point. Home of the oldest farmer's market, the side of the Mississippi, Sullard Market still goes strong. We have, God, we, we have a very fucked up situation here where like we have a city and then we have a county. So like when you say St. Louis city, the population of St. Louis city is like under three hundred thousand people, which like is not very much for a normal sized city. But if you take the counties into consideration, then it's like two and a half million. And the thing is, is that all of these counties have their own municipalities and all these municipalities have their own fucking cops.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  So like you have St. Louis police and then imagine if you broke up Philadelphia and like every suburb got their own cops. And, and then just let them go fucking wild with it. That's kind of how St. Louis is set up.

• 12:16Liam McAnderson?

  That sounds like my idea of hell.

• 12:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  It's it's

• 12:19November Kelly?

  Must be a great place to look for mayors if someone

• 12:22Justin Roczniak?

  About mayors.

• 12:23November Kelly?

  Podcast about mayors.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  I am sure because there are, I mean, there's like 90 of these counties and they all have their own little fiefdoms. Actually, our sheriff is in jail right now for witness intimidation.

• 12:37Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:39November Kelly?

  Sheriffs love to be in jail. It's kind of like living at work for them. Also, I noticed that the flag of St. Louis appears to be a kind of crypto French Nazi South African.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  No, that is, we are at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri River. So it is the meeting of the two rivers, the fleur-de-lis, because we're a French town. And it's very, I like, it's a very basic flag.

• 13:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, I like it a lot, too.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  But I also like the Missouri flag, which has like all kinds of like fucked up bears high fiving and like 20 something stars like.

• 13:09November Kelly?

  What the fuck?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I would say that

• 13:14November Kelly?

  This isn't like a, like a scheduled display or anything, if you can still hear this. It's just some guy. I love my city, brackets, European Philadelphia.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  I will say, we do share this in common with you, that we do love to shoot fireworks at each other. The favorite game on Nextdoor, which is the, the local social network for your neighborhood, where all the racist people can be really racist, is the game of gunshots or fireworks. And

• 13:43Justin Roczniak?

  It's fireworks.

• 13:44November Kelly?

  Come on.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  No, no, a lot of times it's gunshots.

• 13:48November Kelly?

  I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pressure the city council into like investing millions in shot spotters so that we can send cops after anyone who does this.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Well, we have them all over the place and the cops don't do shit. So, um, yeah, actually I heard, I heard a couple, like, the thing is, is that

• 14:05Justin Roczniak?

  What do you?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  When you hear gun, when you hear gunshots, like, there's, there's a story being told in those gunshots, right? Like, sometimes it's just like one, and you're like, all right, somebody's probably just testing off the new gun. I got you. Sometimes it's three, and that's kind of a hey, fuck off kind of gunshot. And sometimes there's a mag dump, and you're like, go to the range, because there's no reason for you to be making this much noise.