109. Bee. Wasp. Hornet.
2018Show notes
Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesAlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, solve a mystery.
MerlinHello. Turn me up in the headphones.
AlexGood morning, Merlin.
MerlinWait a minute, you're here?
AlexYeah, yeah.
MerlinWhat the fuck is this?
AlexIt's not like I put in the calendar for next week. Alex is gone. I flew back to make sure.
MerlinWait a minute. Hang on. You're in the studio. Aren't you supposed to be gambling?
AlexYes, I'm in the studio. No, the gambling has happened. I lost $40. Maddie won $20. So I guess, yes.
MaxMatchy brings the heat.
AlexMatchy does.
MaxI just want to apologize for being late this week. Things have not been the same for me since the death of former president George H.W. Bush. You know what, Max? Take all the time you need. Thank you, Merlin. Big week for wheelchairs. You know, they can cancel the mail, but I can't be 20 minutes late for the podcast. Wait, did they really cancel the mail?
MerlinThey canceled the mail.
MaxTo honor the president. Oh.
MerlinA lot of honor.
MaxNow, I read that Ronald Reagan's funeral cost the United States government $800 million.
MerlinOkay.
MaxThat seems like a lot for a funeral. I mean, I just bought a coffin. It wasn't that much. Did you get a dog to lay next to it? honor now Merlin I think you and I are in agreement here that that the dog should have to be buried with the president like an Egyptian pharaoh
Merlinright yeah like a pharaoh you put all his favorite stuff in there you put his you put his PlayStation 4 and his vape pen and his dog and then you go to the other side you wrap you could wrap the dog in toilet paper too and all his servants I think and also your dog should be named after you um yeah it's it's a really I'm not gonna get into this I'm not gonna go I'm not going to talk about this. You know what?
AlexYou know what? I was like, you know what? This is a terrible, terrible thing. This poor dog sitting at this casket.
MerlinThe dog? We're talking about the dog?
AlexYes.
MerlinI'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going to talk about it. Fuck all. I'm not going to talk about any of this. None of this.
AlexYou know what? I'm going to take the bold, brave stance and say that if this dog was maybe had the, the, you know what? Let's just say there was a cute dog that some people liked, some assholes liked, and he just happened to be responsible for war crimes and millions of people dying.
MerlinYour friends dying.
AlexYeah. I wouldn't be really happy about that dog on Twitter. I would not celebrate that dog on Twitter.
MerlinWhen they assign you a dog, they should give you a dog and a burner dog. Right? You should get your primary dog, which does whatever it was instructed to do. And then you get a sweet, sweet dog that they bury with you because nobody really. Maybe it's only partially trained. Maybe it's trained away very still until the air runs out. So you don't disrupt the first responder.
MaxI did enjoy that there was like a New York Times profile of George H.W. Bush. And someone did control F for the word AIDS. And the only reference was the word maids. And it was in the context of saying he was like well-liked by his maids.
Merlinum boy he sure was well liked by other powerful white people yep he was so nice to them and he was never he was never mean to other powerful white people hang on i'm gonna get out of my
Alexchair very slowly and shoot him wrong hand i i was thinking about this i'm thinking a lot about
Maxthis i'm not gonna talk about it i refuse to talk about this i don't want necktie twitter all over me for this. Now, there might be some listeners who are a little bit offended that maybe we're making some jokes. No. We're being a little edgy, right? I'm just talking about a dog. Like the Joker. Like maybe we're a little twisted and we're doing some edgy humor about George W. Bush. And let me just tell you, this is Dubai Friday being respectful to a fallen president. And I also want to go on the record saying that when George W. Bush dies, we will not even pretend to be respectful.
MerlinNo, I want to cover him with honor. Buckets of honor. he's done so much he went to Yale spray that honor everywhere if you could get all of the first responders to spray their honor at the same time
Maxwell I think that they should spray the honor into the coffin and it might remind them of the skulls and bones rituals that they did in common
Merlinwhat do they call it a limp biscuit yeah you know it's a different time today and we really should show honor
Alexoh boy You know what? In this volatile town
MaxIn these times of extreme partisan divisiveness I'm proud to say that Dubai Friday will be ookie-cookying for the president Thank you Thank you
MerlinWell, I mean, you gotta respect the troops
Alexwho sends a service dog back to work after they did they did a homecoming on him i'm genuinely
Maxlike really upset by this they probably wiped him the service dog i saw a story where the dog was sort of sitting in front of the coffin and then it just captioned mission accomplished yep yep now does that not imply that the dog killed him?
AlexThe first thing I thought was like, uh,
MaxOh, maybe he's like, uh, it's like a sin eater. Yeah. It's a Manchurian, a Manchurian pupper.
MerlinManchurian doggo.
MaxThank you for your service. That's a, that is one hacking brainwashed doggo. I'm not going to talk about this.
AlexIt's okay.
MaxYou just start whistling American pie and the dog flips out and kills the president. the winter doggo 10 out of 10
MerlinI'm not going to talk about this Lawboy Esquire tweets George H.W. Bush is a relic of a simpler time in American history where a president would say like our strength is our togetherness and then install a dictator in another country because the CEO of a raisin company told him to
MaxNow, I think he was either the last, I mean, he was really the last president that was like destroyed by like a comedy impersonation.
MerlinOh, but then he became such good friends and he embraced him.
MaxOh. Yeah, that was weird. I do remember that. That was weird. But boy, that Dana Carvey, George H.W. Bush impression. Yeah. Like, I only sort of have memories of the actual George H.W. Bush as president. But when I think of him, I'm really thinking of the Dana Carvey character.
MerlinPeople always distinguish impressions versus imitations. And I never remember which is which. But it's like the difference between a comedian and a comic. Like, there are some people who do a mimetic exact, like, duplicate. And then there are other people who exaggerate certain qualities. And what's funny is the latter kind, maybe you don't look like them. Maybe you don't exactly sound like them. But, yeah, it wouldn't be prudent. Not going to do it. Like, that's just, that's imprinted on my brain now.
But I think he did it out of, I think he did it out of respect and he did it out of honor.
MaxNow, the other, the other story this week that I've been following that I'm very excited about is how Rudy Giuliani's Twitter got hacked. Oh, yeah. By the liberal Twitter elite.
AlexOh, I didn't know this happened.
MerlinOh, this is, this is very, very good. This is also, this is the week that I learned the term sundowning, which is what happens when you have, which is what happens when you have dementia. And as the day goes by, you get more and more confused.
AlexYep. Yep.
MerlinHe's a sundowner.
AlexYep.
MerlinHe's a sundowner, Jerry. No sundown. No sundown. No sundown. I don't know. I sometimes wonder if he treats himself to a beverage.
MaxOh, no, no, no. I think the president, listen, I've been looking at photos of the president at this G20 thing. Oh, Max.
MerlinHave you seen any side views?
MaxOh, yeah. Now, let me tell you, there are certain medications, you know, steroids and some sort of some some some like I think those like prednisone serotonin pills and prednisone. And they make your face puffy. You get puffy. And I really think that Trump is taking a variety of Hitler pills. I think he's taking uppers and downers and and like serotonin pills and all kinds of mood regulators and things like that. I don't know how it works.
MerlinSerotonin pills.
MaxYou know, I'm talking about this. Yeah. You go to CVS to give you that long receipt.
MerlinYeah. Serotonin pills.
MaxAnd then your face gets puffy. Now, I think that the president is taking some Hitler pills and his face looks very puffy. And I do think the later in the day it gets, have you ever noticed that you rarely see him in the evening talking?
MerlinYou think he's getting puffier and he'd rather just be in his underpants in bed?
MaxIt's pretty much just his rallies. But he's rarely doing dignified public—I mean, at least I can't think of a lot of prominent examples. I really think he struggles at the end of the day. I think he's taking—he's probably getting administered uppers during the day, downers at night. And that just even if you're even if you have a good brain, it turns your brain into mush. But now you add that you're eating nine pieces of McDonald's sandwich bread every day for lunch.
MerlinHe's probably got like a dish of Starlight mints and a dish of Hitler pills. And then he deploys those through the afternoon and evening as he needs to. I think he has Adderall. I think he probably has Adderall around three in the morning when he starts tweeting.
AlexDo you think he knows if he were to be drugged? Do you think he's willingly let this happen? I just.
MerlinIf his, as they say on Choppa, if his syphilitic brain is melting down as badly as it seems, how would he know if he's medicated?
AlexYeah, yeah.
MerlinPeople take things off his desk, Alex.
MaxCan I get a Coke? Yeah, you grind up just a little bit of meth in his filet of fish. You sit him on stage to do one of those rallies, pounding the podium on Hitler. Now you give him a little shot on the way home. He goes right to sleep.
MerlinThat side view is getting pretty dramatic. Like he still looks mostly the same from the front. But if you get a side or three quarter view, he's rocking some serious Alfred Hitchcock at this point.
MaxI think that there's a team of people who are, you know, airbrushing him and doing his hair. You know, like that. What's that makeup show? The skin off. Top skin. Oh, right.
MerlinThey're doing a Peter Jackson thing.
MaxYeah. Top skin. I think he's got a top skin team who's sort of putting on his like his like like appliances every day.
MerlinMake the thing under my eyes whiter.
MaxAnd now on camera with the right lens, it looks good face on. But boy, when you get a weird angle, he really starts looking like some sort of, you know, some sort of one of those like movie puppets. And it's not really designed to be seen from that angle.
MerlinOh, yeah. Well, you notice on The Simpsons, they mostly stop doing straight on front views of the characters because it's so disturbing. The only character that you see straight on is Moe. And it's the opposite in non-animated life, which is in his case. Don't show the man from the side. Don't show him walking off stage.
Get me out of here. Get me out of here. Get me out of here. But, you know, he is definitely, we know he's moist. He could be moist. He could be very moist. He's highly wet. He's so moist. If you think about what it looks like under that giant, giant, giant suit, he's probably so wet under there. He's had all the Hitler pills. He's probably perspiring heavily.
AlexYou can get rid of that with plastic surgery. They're just injecting him with some sort of collagen replacement.
MerlinAnd just giving him dress shields?
AlexYeah.
MaxNow, Merlin, could you explain the Rudy Giuliani tweet?
MerlinOh, yeah. So he's had a couple of dingers the last couple of days. He, like a lot of our men of honor, he eschews typing normally. And so he has adopted his master style of erratic capitalizations and punctuations. And sometimes, like a lot of us may be, he leaves off spaces and proper punctuation, which normally doesn't cause anything to happen at all. What some cyber experts know at this point is that if you type anything that could be a TLD, if it could be a top-level domain, if you type foo.com into Twitter with no spaces, it creates a link to the page foo.com.
And so what he did was, so this is November 30th. He said, Mueller indicted an indictment just as the president left for G20. In July, he indicted the Russians who will never come here just before he left for Helsinki. He's a very good writer. Either that could have been done earlier or later. Out of control! Exclamation point, no space. Supervision, please! Now, when he typed G20, he didn't, and period, he did not have the customary space to begin the next sentence.
So it created G-20.in, which I think is probably this TLD for India. Yeah, it's G20.India. Right. So like I say, most cyber experts know that when you do that, you create a link. And so some scoundrel who has no respect for first responders went in and bought g-20.in and had it remapped to a page that said something that said Donald Trump is a traitor to our country. So now you can pick up here. Now, as you know, part of his – he has several consultancies.
He has several consultancies. I didn't realize how many consultancies Rudy Giuliani has. He has his public speaking stuff. He has his front-facing stuff. But he's also got several Giuliani-related properties. Some of them are about financial investments. One of them is about cybersecurity. So before he became our cybersecurity czar, he had his own cybersecurity company. So he knows how this stuff works. And he knows the only way this could have been done was the liberals at Twitter went in and changed his text, as he called it.
MaxAnd the cybersecurity expert, Rudy Giuliani, who's consulting for the United States government and the Trump administration on cybersecurity.
MerlinOn cyber. On cyber.
MaxOn cyber. Now, this is not actually even the first time he's done that. So he said in September, on September 15th, he said, Woodward says no evidence of collusion dot so does Mueller's or so does Manafort's team. Mueller can investigate endlessly and so on and so forth. But he did collusion dot so. And if you go to that, someone linked it to the lawfare blog to Benjamin Witt's blog.
MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah.
MaxSo this has actually happened before to Giuliani. It's not even the first time he's inadvertently typed in a URL into Twitter and then someone has like redirected it to an anti-Trump thing. Do you want to read his tweet from 17 hours ago? If you have it, go for it.
MerlinTwitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-president message. This is a sound legal mind.
MaxMy text was invaded by a disgusting anti-president message.
MerlinThe same thing, short dash period. No space occurred, short dash occurred later and it didn't happen. Don't tell me they are not committed card carrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. All caps, fairness, please. So he lays out a case here. He's a former prosecutor, so he's used to having to use his deep lucidity to pull together a lot of disparate facts in order to make a case for something compelling and persuasive, which he does here. Fairness, please. His text was invaded. His text was invaded.
That's day one cyber. You can't invade a text. Did you see his tweet to Politico last night? No, now what?
MaxGive me a minute. He, he, these guys, they're all going senile. He's sundowning.
MerlinHe's sundowning.
MaxIt is so funny to me that these guys, that there's this huge contention of the, of the, you know, I don't know, I guess like the, the like, um, uh, what are they? They're the like bourgeois, like, like Florida, like boat owner class. But they're these like tough guys in Hawaiian shirts who are like the, the MAGA voters. And they really hold up Trump and Giuliani as these like tough alpha males. But these guys, they just have like doddering brains that are withering away. And they're like, my text was invaded. on Twitter.
MerlinThis is why my grandkids don't write me on Facebook. So this is from Darren Samuelson last night after the heavily redacted Flint filing came out. This is Rudy, quoting here, Rudy Giuliani via text to Politico on tonight's Flint filing. Wow, big crime for a special whatever may be a group of angry, bitter Hillary supporters who are justifying themselves by the goal justifies the means. Four dot ellipsis over the top in ethical behavior.
Speaker BWhat the fuck? Who?
MaxHey, you know, he's working for free and he's earning every dollar. If anyone in our building communicated like that, I don't see how they could have a job here. You know what? That's a one-strike situation. That's a one-strike situation. Maybe tone it down on the pills. A few less Hitler pills. Don't let it happen again.
MerlinRight. Maybe get a little bit of exercise. I read about sundowning last night, and they say it's an issue. It's a known issue. You might want to turn on some lights so you're not confused by the dark, one of them. No, this isn't when a lot of hip injuries happen. It's when you're sundowning.
AlexI can imagine.
MerlinYeah. Should we learn about sundowning?
Challenge.
AlexThe challenge? Challenge. Challenge. This week's challenge, solve a mystery. So I made a little Google form and gave it to our Patreon members, and it was up to me to choose it. And I chose a mystery and sent it to the two of you multiple times without any acknowledgment.
MaxYeah, we kept asking, hey, what's the mystery? What's the challenge this week? She was gambling.
AlexNo, okay. Should I read what the mystery? That would be great. Okay.
MaxAnd could you also just say, how did you ask people for this?
AlexIt was intentionally vague. People were like, this is not written well. I'm like, I'm aware. All right. This is the Dubai Friday Mystery Challenge. Challenge, solve a mystery. Do you have a mystery that needs solving? We're here to help. Give Alex the details of your mystery, and she'll choose one. And then it was just the email address. Are you a Dubai Friday patron?
What mystery do you need solved? And what's your Discord name?
MaxAnd tell us about the one that you picked.
AlexI picked one from Michael. That is, when I was a kid, I vaguely remember my parents watching a movie, possibly but not likely a TV show, where one of the main characters, a bad guy, question mark, was, quote, treating people with bee or wasp hornets. It stinks. From what I remember, this was not a positive thing. The only scene I sort of remember was the bad guy. I think he was dressed in dark clothing, was speaking to someone outside, maybe near a hill, when he is interrupted by a person asking for another treatment.
I believe they stuck their hands in a box filled with bees to get stung. I think they became addicted to the treatments. I've looked a few times to see if I could find this, but my Google foo has come up short. Any chance you could figure out what the hell my parents were watching before they told me to go outside? Extra information. I was born in 1983. I'm assuming I was at least seven when this happened. possibly older but not likely a teen yet so i'm assuming this was made in late 80s or early 90s i'm not sure if it was on tv or if they had rented the movie i've asked them about this and
they have no recollection of ever watching this now alex did you were traveling this week so i
Maxfeel like you get a buy but no i totally did you did you try to solve this i absolutely tried to
Alexsolve this and what did you find i i also could not find this however there is a vibrant culture of folks who are themselves actually addicted to getting stung.
MerlinThat's all I found. Did you find the English lady? Margaret?
AlexMargaret.
MerlinOh, sorry. She's from Kentucky. I was going to say.
AlexAre we talking?
MerlinDugga, dugga, dugga. A woman addicted to bee stings gets stung 15 times a day.
AlexYep. Oh, she was the top. Yep, she was the top. And.
MerlinYeah.
AlexOh, boy.
MerlinI went straight to the addiction. Yeah. Because I thought that's got to be, it's kind of got a little house feeling to it. But I spent some time on this and came up with nothing. She was on that show called, is it called My Strange Addiction? Yes.
AlexAnd that was way in like the mid-2000s.
MerlinOn what used to be called the Learning Channel.
AlexYes, yes.
MerlinAnd this woman in Kentucky, she, let's see here. She's 53-year-old. The most I've ever given myself is between 15 and 20 on my left hip. She has some very scientific looking tweezers. She holds a bee and makes it sting her. I really love stinging myself with bees.
She has the arthritis. And that's, I mean, I feel like we should turn this over to Max. I did not get much traction. And Max, it seems to me you really, as Marissa Meyer, who says it, you leaned into it. Sheryl Sandberg, you leaned into the B-ish.
MaxI was a fellow graduate of the Sociopath Academy at Harvard Business School. I did, in fact, lean into this project. I launched a full investigation. And not only, did anyone have any other of their findings to share before I get into this?
AlexSo I had a hunch and I could not find it off the back of a truck. I actually signed up for Netflix's disc service. That still exists. And I've ordered the DVD The Addiction from 1995. And it's a vampire thing, I guess. And it seems similar to sort of like it was like an accidental, like this guy was turning people into vampires and then this lady ends up really liking it. and I did not
Merlinwell it's got Lily Taylor's in it I love her and Christopher Walken and Annabella Sciorra it's a Edie Falco it's a Michael Imperioli call the cops this is a rat king of 90 stars
Alexwell and that's the thing I felt like if this was I think it's probably not right because it seems too well known I had never heard of it but it feels like this is something that too many people have seen so my I did not reach out to Michael because I felt like this would be cheating or rather not cheating. I don't think I could have learned anything else because I think he just thought something else was a bee sting. And it was either maybe vampires or maybe it was like heroin or something.
MerlinYeah, the closest I didn't contact Michael either, but my closest guess was that, oh God, what's that wonderful, they might be giant song, Purple Toupee, where it's basically Linnell is doing this, you know, I remember the year I went to camp, I heard about a lady named Selma Anselm Blacks. And, you know, and it's, you know, it's all about like being a little kid and how you confuse, conflate and concatenate different things, you know, about, you know, Lyndon Johnson wasn't too much later, they came out with Johnson's wax. It's like the way your
brain is still not grokking, which thing it is. And in your memory, you concatenate two different things. My prediction is that this person is remembering two different things and concatenating. Oh, interesting. Now let's hear the real answer from Cards Against Humanity's own breakout star,
MaxMax Temkin. Well, I did reach out to Michael and I did launch an investigation into this mystery. And not only did I launch an investigation, but I also produced a serial style radio documentary documenting my findings. May I play it for you now? Please. Yes. You know, you never know what you're going to get on Dubai Friday. Some weeks we're learning a magic trick and some weeks we're washing our hands and then some weeks we're trying a ball banger from Amazon. And this week was a doozy. We had to solve a mystery from one of our fans. At first I'll be honest with you I didn't really want to do it but then I remembered that we actually get paid five thousand dollars a month
to do this show. So if there was a mystery to be solved I was going to have to solve the shit out of it. From Dubai Friday and WBEZ Chicago it's the solve a mystery challenge. One mystery solved on a podcast. I'm Max Temkin. I heard from Alex that our mystery involved a memory that one of our listeners couldn't shake. When Mike was a kid, about seven years old, he walked in on his parents watching a scary movie. I called him up to get the story.
So set the scene for me. So you're young, you're at your parents' house, obviously, and they're watching a movie or a TV show?
Speaker BI walked in. I started watching it with them. I think it might have been a more mature thing, so it probably was rented. It could have been a made-for-TV movie, though, so I don't know. And after I was watching this scene for just long enough to start to get an idea of what was going on, they told me to go outside, and that was the last I ever heard of this movie or TV show.
MaxI know from the mystery that you submitted that there was a particular scene that really stuck in your memory.
Speaker BThere was a guy outside. I only saw one scene. an older man or an older lady, I think, walks up to him and asks him for another treatment. I think he might have been a bad dude. I don't recall. It's been a long time. And the treatment they were looking for, I'm not sure if it cured them or made them younger. I don't remember what that was. It was getting stung by a bunch of bees or hornets. And I believe they put their hands in these little white boxes to have that happen. But again, I only saw a little bit of the thing. And the only scene I remember. Mike, have you asked your parents about this?
Yes. And I've done it a couple of times throughout the years and they have no idea what I'm talking about. They give me blank looks, which is fine because it was some probably one off movie they watched one time and completely forgot about. But I think the reason it stuck with me so long is because I'm deathly allergic to bee stings. So it kind of scarred me mentally.
MaxWell, Mike, I'm going to find this for you.
Speaker BGood luck because these are super vague terms.
MaxI knew that Mike had already spent years searching for this movie, but I wanted to do my due diligence by starting with Google. I immediately discovered that searching for B-movies had basically been destroyed by Jerry Seinfeld's 2007 comedy B-movie, and terms like venom treatment had been ruined by wackos selling powders and pills on the internet. One thing I found right away was an episode of King of the Hill with almost exactly the same premise as Mike's memory. Dale is at some kind of fair, and he starts a business where he's selling a venom therapy.
MerlinCome and get your freshly secreted honey. Don't be put off by Irwin Allen's The Swarm or the tedious Peter Fonda film Uli's Gold.
Speaker ALook, Allison, bees. I heard Jenna Elfman on Access Hollywood talking about how you can cure anything with the venom from bee stings. Bee stings? Yeah, bee stings.
MaxBut I checked with Mike, and Mike was adamant. the scene he saw was in a movie that was creepy, not a cartoon, not funny. And it was at this point that I realized I would need some professional help.
Hi, friend of the show, Todd Vaziri.
Speaker AHey, how's it going?
MaxI think Illinois state law requires me to inform you that this conversation is being recorded. Yes. Is it true that prior to this call you were editing laser blasts into a TIE fighter?
Speaker AThat may be true, yes.
MaxWell, Todd, as you know, I'm trying to solve a mystery on behalf of listener Mike, and he has a memory of seeing this film about a guy being treated with bees. And I've been Googling it all day and I can't find anything. What do you do in this situation? Is there some kind of service or website that I can use?
Speaker AYeah, it is tough. And, you know, that's the one wonderful thing or one of the wonderful things about social media is that you can actually try to crowdsource this. internet movie database, for all that it is good and bad about it, one of the secret weapons that it has is remarkably deep tagging of movies. I think they actually call it keywords on IMDb.
MaxOkay, here we go. So I've found 470 movies with the keyword B.
Speaker AYou know what? I mean, if it's a feature film, and that is a scene in the movie, and it's a prominent scene, there's a chance you could show up there.
MaxIs there a guy who knows all the movies? Is there some sort of, you know, savant? I was hoping there would be like an easy answer here.
Speaker AYeah, it would be some weirdo like me, like a like-minded.
MaxThat's why I called you.
Speaker AAwful person. Yeah, because I got to say, I'm usually the person that helps somebody out. Like, I was just at a party yesterday, and my wife tapped me on the shoulder. Todd, what year was Top Gun? And I just turned around. It said, 1986. And, you know, that's the service I can provide.
It's rattled. This has shattered me to my core. I'm a little sad right now.
MaxI really want to find it for the guy. 1995, Deadly Invasion, The Killer Bee Nightmare. When bees attack an isolated country house, a family must stick together to survive.
Speaker ARight. I don't think it's going to be a monster movie. I don't think it's going to be a when bees attack kind of film. This is a tough challenge. I'm sorry.
MaxI spent several hours browsing IMDb, and a few things became clear to me. One, people getting stung by bees in a film is definitely somebody's fetish because it's meticulously cataloged online every time it happens. And two, there are a lot of people getting stung by bees in movies. Using bee stings as a medicine or a punishment was a surprisingly common trope in the 80s and 90s. So Todd was right about one thing. If I was going to find Mike's video, there was no way to review over 700 movies on IMDb on my own.
I was going to have to turn to the internet and crowdsource my way to the solution. All of that, and the results of my investigation, coming up after this message from Dubai Friday.
Listeners of the Mystery Challenge might also enjoy the Dubai Friday Patreon. How does that work? Well, you have money, and we want your money. And you can go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com right now to become a supporter of the Dubai Friday podcast. Use the offer code BALLBANGERS for 20% off Dubai Friday's exclusive premium episodes.
Welcome back to the Mystery Challenge. I'm Max Temkin. When we left off, I was preparing to turn to the internet for help in finding the movie that listener Mike couldn't get out of his memory. I started by posting on Twitter, and I offered a $100 bounty to the charity of the winner's choice for anyone who could find the right film or a lead that helped me find the right film. The comments started pouring in immediately. Was it Wicker Man? I double-checked with Mike. No. Was it My Girl? No. Was it the 1995 horror film Wasp Woman? No.
Was it Candyman? No. Was it Guillermo del Toro's Kronos? No, but that movie had the right creepy vibe. Are we sure it wasn't Wicker Man? Still no. After a few hours of chasing down these leads, I started to feel like I was in Mike's movie, and my treatment was everyone quoting the goddamn Wicker Man at me, or suggesting comedies that had nothing to do with the movie Mike was describing. You know, Mike, I'm sure you've noticed, but because of the B movie and the film Venom, it's so hard to search for these.
Speaker BAnd that's the reason I've never been able to solve this one. That's why when you said we're going to try and solve this, I felt bad because I'm like, oh, no, I hope I don't lead them down this very vague road.
MaxA lot of these are like comedies, and then they have a bit where someone gets stung by a bee and they get puffy.
Speaker BSo I very much remember this being either a scary movie or a serious movie where the person requesting the treatment was doing so somewhat reluctantly. I don't remember what the cost was. There was some sort of deal with the devil or monetary cost. But I'm pretty certain this was a very serious thing happening, and it wasn't a good thing.
MaxSo one of the ones we watched, I sent you this movie My Girl from 1991.
Speaker BI can't believe you've never seen that.
MaxBut does the guy, does he die of bee stings, you said?
Speaker BThe little boy does, yes.
MaxSo it just occurs to me that watching all these movies where people and children get killed by bees must be pretty traumatic for you.
Speaker BWell, it's one of the reasons I remember it so well.
MaxAs I spent the night searching through every movie catalogued by a bee sting fetishist and asking Mike if it was the one he was thinking of, a disturbing thought started to occur to me. What if this movie didn't exist at all and it was just a product of Mike's imagination? He's allergic to bees, he was scared of them as a kid, maybe it's just something he came up with. Something similar had happened to my friend Benedict.
Speaker AYeah, so I have this very distinct memory of this episode of Thomas the Tank Engine where there is a doppelganger Sir Topham Hats, which are Sir Topham Hats kind of like the guy running the show. Yeah, so I have this memory of this episode where this second Sir Topham Hats shows up and everyone's like, what do we do? Who's in charge? Who do we listen to? They eventually resolve it by pouring honey onto one of the Sir Topham Hats, the one that they have deemed to be the doppelganger or the illegitimate Sir Topham Hats.
And that kind of fixes things and everything goes back to normal and, you know, the train yard's running smoothly again. And this happened when I was maybe like 12, 13. And since then, like literally like the last 15 years, every once in a while I will kind of Google around. I'll like remember some detail and be like, I don't know, maybe it is real and maybe this does exist. Maybe it wasn't honey. Maybe it was something else.
MaxSo do you think my bad guy stinging people with bees for therapeutic purposes movie might be, you know, this guy's fever dream?
Speaker AReading the tweets, it sounds like it was like a situation where they were a kid and maybe seeing a movie that they weren't supposed to see. you know, when you're a kid and you see, like, a movie and something happens in the movie, you kind of contextualize it in the language and the way that you understand the world. So, you know, putting a hand in a box to get some bee stings, it's like, of course, kids have no concept of, like, syringes or drugs. I'm very concerned now, Benedict. That it might actually be real, just distant enough that you'll never find it?
MaxYeah, maybe we'll never find it. Right. It's a little tragic. Do you think that it's possible that this is a fever dream?
Speaker BI sincerely doubt it because, like I said, this has been tested twice before where I asked about what I thought was a movie about being a TV show and again where I was describing a song that no one else could remember. And I found both of those with no problems. This is the third and last one I can't find my own.
So as I recall it, I saw one scene of the movie or TV show it was outside i don't remember if they were near a farm or near a hill i'm just ad-libbing that near because i'm remembering that um there was i believe a somewhat older man who i think might have been a bad dude uh talking to another person i don't remember if they were male or female uh when he was interrupted by another person that just walked up on them i don't remember if that was male or female but the new person was asking for the treatment which was putting your hands in uh i think a white box with maybe some screen there and being stung multiple times by either
bees or hornets sorry i'm going off script here a little bit uh i don't know if they referred to it as a treatment um i don't know if it was for like anti-aging or some other disease they were treating i don't recall exactly what was going on there um but the maybe bad dude the older dude said something to the effect of are you sure you want this or there might be repercussions for this treatment or maybe he was just annoyed that they were asking him about it in public where he was annoyed that they were letting it out of the bag that this treatment existed. But that's as much as
I can recall. And then my parents told me to leave the room there so I couldn't get any more of the
Maxserious or scary movie. We talked for a while longer and Mike wanted to know how I would end my story if I wasn't able to find his movie, which was looking increasingly likely. The leads from my crowdsourcing had slowed down and every so often I'd call up Mike. What about this episode of Roald Doll's 1998 Tales of the Unexpected. It has a man putting his hand into a white box, and the box turns out to be a beehive, and there's even a medical treatment involved. And then Mike would reply back, that's definitely not it, smiley face. Mike and I looked through the TV tropes page for
bees as a trope used in popular culture. We considered about a dozen X-Files episodes involving bees. Maybe it was an amalgamation of two Twilight Zone episodes, the one where a woman gets $200,000 as she presses a button that kills a random stranger, and the one where the guy gets a tapeworm that cures him of alcoholism. I checked with Mike. Nope. But right before I was about to go to sleep, I got a message from Dubai Friday listener Gareth in Poland. He had something.
Speaker ATo start with, I started kind of doing what I think a lot of people did, which was, I think you'd mentioned bees and wasps, and I think you mentioned hornets. So I started kind of of cycling through some search terms just sort of looking for films and uh with b or hornet and box and i got to dune quite quickly and then you mentioned the x-files and i started to think well hang on yeah so you had like the kind of the horror episodes in the x-files which were kind of like monster of the week shows and i thought well maybe it was something which was in like a kind of
Outer Limits type anthology show. So then I just basically found the wiki page for, I've got it in front of me, for anthology series and just started scanning through that for kind of American anthology shows. And then you mentioned the kind of late 80s, early 90s. So I started kind of filtering. I think I had the Twilight Zone, the remake. I had the Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Dark Side.
I had Tales from the Crypt. And then finally, I had Friday the 13th. And I just started going through the episode lists. And I was thinking, the success of this relies on whether or not the episode synopses are good enough. And so I started kind of keyword searching inside the wiki pages for kind of B, Wasp, Hornet, B, Wasp, Hornet, and Sting sometimes.
MaxIt turns out that after we spoke, Todd had put the word out to his Baker Street Irregulars of movie savants that I was trying to find this thing. And it reminded his friend Sonny of something similar.
AlexSo I worked with Todd. I know he's a big movie buff, but I was also at Industrial Light and Magic with him for about three years. And I'd worked a couple shows with him.
MaxAnd how did you go about looking for the movie?
AlexWell, the thing is, I've seen it sort of before. You know, I watch a lot of 90s trash. You know, everybody does. um but more specifically i watched a lot of 90s trash and my friend corinne also watched a lot of 90s trash so sometimes we'll just go back and forth and be like did you remember that thing or was it like a fever dream i seem to remember an episode of like a horror show and i knew it wasn't like tales from the crypt um and so i was like well then it's got to be friday the 13th and so
i basically googled friday the 13th and then bees um and then that's what that's what happened
MaxAfter engaging in a little YouTube piracy, I was able to locate the episode of the Friday the 13th anthology series that Gareth and Sonny had described.
I think I might have found it.
Speaker BIf you sent me the link, I'm watching through it. It looks like this might be it.
MaxThis is very exciting. Okay, so check this out. So go to the time code. Let's watch it together. Go to the time code at about 20 minutes and 30 seconds.
Speaker BOkay, give me a second here. 20 minutes and 30 seconds.
MaxSo this is a video. This is something that one of my Twitter followers found. It's in the Friday the 13th Anthology series. So it doesn't have Jason, I guess, but it's like sort of horror stories. stories okay i remember this series it's from you know what's crazy it's from 1989 and you said when we were talking you said i would have been about seven when this came out and this dead nuts you would have been seven when this came out yeah now you've got two guys on the farm the creepy bee
Speaker Bkeeper oh man all right should i play out this thing yeah yeah let's watch it all right you're I'm looking to sell this thing. The two guys are talking. Well, if you do happen to cross the street. After he does his bee thing.
Speaker AHe is an old fashioned pie.
Speaker BYou've got to help me. I need that honey. Sure thing, Bob. There's the guy interrupting him. Your order's all boxed up.
Speaker ANice meeting you, Mr. Marshak. What the hell do you think you're playing at? Look what's happening to me.
Speaker BI need that honey. Why don't you just go blab it all over the couch? I did what you said. Now just give it to me. I gave you this body and I can take it away just as easily. Holy dude, this is it.
Oh my God. I'm so, oh, you have no idea how freaked out I was. I'm like, I know I'm not making this up. I know I've seen this. That's it. That is definitely it. Oh man. Awesome.
MaxI'm so excited that my, my, like my heart is racing. It's not even my mystery. I'm so excited.
Speaker BI'm just happy it truly exists because I was starting to question my, question my sanity. I had a couple of people asking me, are you sure you didn't just make this up? No, I'm, I'm almost positive. I've seen this.
MaxSo you feel like, you feel pretty vindicated that this is almost exactly as you remember it.
Speaker BYes, yes. Like I said, I couldn't remember if it was a hill or a farm or a field or whatever, but this is awesome.
MaxYou know, all along, I was worried that Mike had a bad memory. Maybe he mixed up the details of this movie or he made the whole thing up in his head. But it turns out the mystery here was actually caused by Mike having an excellent memory. He remembered the specific details of something that the rest of us would have forgotten a long time ago. So what did I learn? First, that the bee sting fetishist community is highly organized. And second, that if you pay me $5,000 a month, I will find the name of a TV show that you remember from your childhood. But mostly I learned that even when you think
there's nowhere left to look, you gotta keep searching that Wikipedia list. Bee, wasp, hornet, bee, wasp, hornet, bee, wasp, hornet.
Oh yeah, and I learned that in season 13 of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, there's a storyline where Sir Topham Hatt is replaced by his mischievous twin brother, Sir Loham Hatt, and chaos ensues. I'm looking into it.
Speaker AWell, that's my documentary.
MaxWell. Oh, my God.
MerlinI think we're done here.
AlexOkay.
MerlinLet's go to the keychain.