Breakfast of Champions – Featuring MoreInteresting

Let me tell you about my friend Jaley, AKA MoreInteresting. She read a book this month, and for the sake of being more interesting, we decided to make a whole book club out of it that I would love for you to join. After she finished reading it, I decided to get her thoughts on it via podcast, and so we discussed some other things too. We broke down the perils of phone etiquette, drinking cheap wine out of newspaper stands, repressing horrible memories of Rats AND Natalie Portman, and the bad words we use while driving. Jaley and I discovered our mutual love of photography, and we took a minute to discuss that as well, which somehow led to a brief conversation about interpretive dance for untalented children and the terrible, TERRIBLE people of Santa Barbara, CA.

Part two starts off with our mutual love and confusion surrounding Banksy's "Exit Through The Gift Shop," the proper pronunciation and spelling of some new fancy slang, and of course, the Inaugaral Smooth Lou Book Club Book, "Breakfast of Champions."

Join us this month as we read March's Selection "The Beautiful and The Damned" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (free ebook download here), okay? We'll have on some other people in April to talk about it. Will they be somehow even MORE interesting than MoreInteresting? Only time will tell.

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Welcome To Love

 So Valentine's Day, a day we use to celebrate loved ones, was this past Monday, and what better way to celebrate than by gathering one of my favorite couples and two of my favorite singles into one kitchen to talk about love? I asked the lovely MizChartreuse how she manages to put up with the terrifying Sean Keen day after day, and she surprised me by giving a good and loving answer. We also get to find out what happened when Carrianne actually got a response from her Missed Connections ad that we discussed a few weeks ago, and thanked almighty Atheismo that she was neither stuffed into a freezer nor sold into sex slavery.

One of the nicest guys I've met in a while, Trevor Green, breaks down a story for us in the second act of the show that literally made my jaw drop, and gave me the perfect opportunity to discuss my favorite Chicago festival food, Ćevapčići. (I'm still not sure how we got so far off track).

My favorite part of the show by far is when we realize that Sean revved up from "kinda drunk" to "totally fucking hammered" somewhere around an hour and 5 minutes and I guess this is the part where I tell you that A) this is the longest episode of The Smoothcast we've ever done, even after I shaved off 20 minutes and B) It's easily my favorite episode too. Give it a listen friends, and let me know if you agree. After the end of the show, when Carrianne asked me to answer my own question, "What is love?", I got a fantastic hug from MizChartreuse, so I guess my response was better than I thought it was when it came out of my drunken face. Woo, love. Woo.

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Tinky & Smooth Lou(ie)?

This is Bob Krawiec, who often goes by the name Tinky. He’s a traffic reporter, he’s a fellow podcaster, and he’s a personal hero of mine. In the span of difficult things a man can do, he’s accomplished a lot, including but limited to drinking out of (a) Stanley Cup, keeping a girlfriend while amassing a wall of 620 beers, and LOSING LARGE CHUNKS OF HIS BODY (through rigorous diet & exercise). We’re all proud of you Bob. We spend some time talking about the snowstorm from hell and the implications of being the traffic guy getting stuck in traffic, the complications of being funny-looking in the video age, the awkwardness of catching up with people you only kinda remember, and then we finally get to the point of it all; how the hell Bob managed to lose that weight.

Bob is a professional radio guy whereas I’m a guy with a mixer I bought from a crackhead and some microphones I stole from a newsvan in 1993. He was expecting some kind of format to my format-free show, and I instead just brought him into Chaostown, aka the Smoothcast studio. After the recording, he sent me a message with lengthy shownotes that I’d recommend you read after watching the show (edited for clarity).

“I forgot to mention, don’t lose a massive amount of weight unless you have the money to buy new clothes. I failed. I bought a pair of pants here and there but not enough to fill out a week. I also forgot to use my "tapeworm diet" joke. And here is a topic I got into on our 11/14/2010 show...my drinking has suffered. At the point of that show i was 255-260. Sober to buzzed then buzzed to drunk required about the same amount of booze. However, 260 Bob went directly to wasted then passed out where 310 bob was still drunk. I had some incidents where I woke up in weird places. I realized I cant drink that way anymore.

Also in my facebook photos section, I have a whole beer section. Take any picture you feel like having of the beer wall. One thing I forgot to mention [re: the beer wall], I have made plans to pass it along. I have a friend in Kansas who may take it or I can find a place to store them for my 1 year-old nephew as a keepsake. My floor is uneven so i would have to anchor it into the wall which isn’t easy. It belongs to a person in their 20's. I will always have the memories.”

Smoothcast Tinky & Smooth Lou(ie)