Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Mike.
And I'm Nate.
Are you talking Mike?
Because I can't hear you.
No, I am not.
I was waiting for you to ask me what we were smoking today.
Oh, okay.
Well, I asked you last time.
Or did you ask me last time?
I asked you.
Yeah.
Sorry.
The second guy asked the first guy what we're smoking.
That's the dealio here.
Okay.
This is all new to me.
This is our 30th episode of season two.
And what are we smoking for episode 30, Mike?
We are smoking the H. Upman, the Banker, which mine, the cigar itself has a lot of veins
and it's a little rough looking.
I'm not a big fan, but the wrapper looks really good.
I mean, the wrapper, the actual packaging looks good.
It's just the cigars looking a little rough.
It might've been my humidor that did it.
I don't know.
Nate's look fine, right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's a little, where you light it at the end, the tip is kind of squished, but
it doesn't look any more rough than any of the other cigars.
I guess they're, maybe it's just the leaf that they did for the wrapper on yours.
I don't know.
Or the case.
Yeah.
It looks a little rugged, if you know what I mean.
Like it's not, yeah.
I didn't look at this and think it was an oversized shrew, if that's what you're getting
at.
I'm getting shrew level veins on mine.
Not like, that's a little exaggerated, but I mean, the band looks good, but not that
that affects how it tastes, but it all matters.
Now, are you burning the foot on these cigars before you light them?
What does that mean?
So I don't always do it, but lately I've been taking my lighter and burning the end and
heating it up and getting it on fire a little bit before I draw through it.
It kind of makes that lighting process where I'm actually sucking air through it faster.
It almost makes it more even when you first start it.
I don't know if I've been fully doing it, but I've been doing kind of like a variation
of that where I'll light and inhale through and then I'll kind of like not inhale through
and kind of torch the end a bit and then inhale and torch.
Sure.
I don't think it really makes a difference, but you know.
No, I mean, you know, I know when we were in episode one, I had a buddy over and we
were several episodes into our first season and he was like giving me shit because my
cigars weren't burning evenly.
And he's like, well, you're not doing this and doing that.
But I think for all the cigars I've been smoking this up this season, the burns have been even.
So whatever whatever I'm doing appears to be fine.
So right.
I haven't had any major issues.
Yeah, I guess.
And I'm pairing this with a founders Centennial IPA.
Oh, nice.
I'm drinking water again.
Water is life, man.
Water is life.
I had a lot of coffee yesterday, so I'm like watering it up.
Yep.
Gotta replenish the fluids.
It's related to our topic today, but I went to the Little Falls Craft Fair, which is a
hundred thousand people go to apparently.
And it was the fiftieth anniversary this year.
And we walked five and a half miles at the Little Falls Craft Fair.
Walking around and seeing the various vendors.
But they have a roaster called Reality Roasters in Little Falls and they have wonderful coffee.
And of course, they don't normally serve coffee.
You can only buy the beans.
But during the Little Falls Craft Fair, they make coffee.
So I was drinking coffee all day there.
Nice.
Yes.
Nice, nice.
Well, our topic for this episode going to be a little more free form, but we thought
it would be fun to talk about bookstores and maybe favorite bookstores or anywhere.
Anytime I'm in a new town or something, or even if the town I'm in and a new bookstore
pops up, I kind of always want to go like I just love bookstores.
Really not a huge fan of bookstores where they want you to pay the full price on the
back of the thing.
So I tend to gravitate more towards the used bookstores or the secondhand bookstores.
But that'll come up more later, I'm sure in the episode.
As do I.
I'm a big fan of the small town used bookstore.
Yes.
So we went to, we did kind of a, we were going up to meet Sarah's parents at the halfway
point and we decided to take kind of a meandering route through Buffalo, Minnesota.
And they've got a bookstore there and they've got a ton of antique stores too.
But the bookstore is fairly small.
They've got a little like cafe, coffee shop type of thing in the back.
And I generally gravitate towards like the sci-fi sections because there's always like
weird oddities of sci-fi authors you can find or the, I've had pretty good luck with the
little short story sci-fi compendiums or whatever they are.
You know, cause you get to try a bunch of different styles of different writers and
the short story.
They have to, you have to be a good writer to do a short story, I guess, I think, right?
Like to make it compelling enough to remember because it's so short.
Yeah, I think so.
And then I do like the nonfiction stuff.
Like I like checking out different biographies of people.
And there's a website called, I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's like best presidential
biographies.
And this guy or whomever runs it has read biographies on all of the presidents and he
will rank them, which one is best.
And he'll do like which one he thinks gives the best overall picture, which one's written
the best, which one is the most interesting, even if it doesn't cover the entirety of the
president's life.
And he'll give you all that kind of feedback.
So that's been really phenomenal for me to kind of somebody's already done the stuff.
So I don't, there's nothing worse than picking up like a nonfiction book about a topic you're
interested in and having it being like boring as hell.
One thing that I found lately is that there will be on a topic that's interesting, but
then the style of the writing will be poppy and 21st century like, and they'll have jokes
like it's a Marvel movie instead of a book about a serious historical topic.
Yeah.
I, that reminds me there was one.
Oh yeah.
I read one.
Let me pull it up here because I didn't like it at all.
It was, I didn't like it.
We'll just say that.
So it was called Indian givers and it's how the Indians of the Americas transformed the
world by Jack Weatherford and people seem to like it.
You know, it's got like an average of four and I gave it a two and because the first
like four chapters were how, well, he was trying to make that the native Americans who
were forced into slavery and mining precious metals out of South American mountains were
somehow contributing.
I mean, not like contributing, like of course they were contributing, but like it was their
idea to do it, right?
It's called Indian givers, not Indian exploitation.
You know what I mean?
So that kind of didn't sit well with me.
And he had a couple of chapters about, you know, there were no tomatoes or potatoes or
corn, corn, maize, anywhere else in the world.
And so all of these different vegetables and produce things like took off.
And can you imagine like the food in Italy without tomatoes?
You know what I mean?
So, right.
And there were no potatoes in Russia.
So thank you, vodka, I guess.
So I mean, that stuff was neat, but then like, so he did a couple of chapters on how bad
the colonizers were.
And then he did a couple of chapters on like vegetables.
And then he started doing like, well, I drove down into this area and it started being like
anecdotal stories of his like research.
And I'm like, this is no dude, like, no, I'm not reading this book to find out what you
did to do your research.
You know?
Sure.
That's crazy.
Well, it's crazy that people liked it.
That's the weird part.
You know, I mean, maybe people like it because he's not like the stuffy historian, but he's
not a terribly interesting fellow in my opinion from how he wrote his books.
So, so there's that.
And then I read there's one like the 1918 great influenza.
It's all about the great influenza of 1918.
And it was interesting because they kind of did masks and stuff and they were trying to
do stuff because I think that was right when they started discovering that like germs were
a thing, you know, and it was moderately interesting, but it was written.
It wasn't written in a way that resonates with me.
I'm not going to say it wasn't well written.
I'm just saying it wasn't a writing style that I, that resonated with me.
So it was very, very tough.
It was a slog to get through.
But then I read, I read one called cattle kingdom, all about cattle industry in America
and how they would ship them up to the Chicago slaughterhouses and all this stuff because
they didn't have refrigerated cars.
And that one was like very fascinating and I loved how it was written.
It was, it was like a, there's a page turner, you know, like all about the cattle and cattle
industry.
So it kind of goes to show that the writing style maybe is sometimes more important than
the subject matter.
Well, and sometimes, so I'm looking at my list here.
I just finished American witches and before that I completed Napoleon's hemorrhoids and
Napoleon's hemorrhoids is like fun little short stories about historical oddities.
And you expect that to be funny and poppy, right?
Yeah.
And it was funny and poppy and it was interesting.
It was like the story behind the guy that invented bingo and he didn't really invent
it, but he found a carnival game and he popularized it, you know, and all these fun little things.
But American witches was supposed to be about the history of like witch burning in the United
States.
Yeah.
And the tone was not great.
It was like, Oh, funny.
Ha ha ha.
Like pop, pop, pop.
This is going to be cool.
And blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, we're talking about witch trials.
People are burning on a stake.
Right.
Exactly.
It's like she's trying to make little jokes about how dumb the colonists were or whatever.
It's like, this is not a topic.
The information was good.
Yeah.
And it got better as it went on and it got more towards the modern era because you can
make fun of people who believe in the Blair Witch.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
And you get to interview with the mayor of the town that the Blair Witch Project was
set in and all this stuff.
Yeah.
But yeah, you don't need to be making funny jokes about women that were burned alive trying
to cross to the new world on a ship.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So the tone, like the same tone, but you don't expect it some places and you do others, you
know?
Yeah.
The thing is, I enjoy humor a lot, but there's, you know, time and a place.
And if it's all humor all the time, it's hard to get any kind of serious thoughts across.
Right.
Hell, yeah.
Like a lot of people like to talk all the time and they don't have much to say.
And so when the quiet person talks, it has a little more, you know, resonates deeper
because it's somebody who doesn't really talk a whole lot.
So it must be important if they're breaking their silence.
Right.
Absolutely.
I'm the one that talks all the time.
So I don't know.
I feel like I get pretty chatty of these, but you know, we are stimulating ourselves.
So right.
Exactly.
Or chatty Kathy's.
Yes.
So, yeah.
So I don't know.
Do you want to talk about like favorite bookstores or I've been to quite a few of the bookstores
here in the Twin Cities area?
Yes.
Well, you've you want to you want to start there?
Do you want to?
You're more of a bookstore guy than I am because I grew up in northern Minnesota, as everybody
knows.
Yeah.
And every hack tourist town has a bookstore and they're the only good stores usually in
the entire town.
And they're usually some of them are gifts or they're like novelty shop slash bookstores
and they have new books and they're really more of a knickknack shop than a bookstore.
And some of those you can find cool stuff there.
Sometimes, sometimes we were down in southeastern Minnesota and I can't remember the town or
the bookstore name, but we happened to stop at it and it was basically just a toy store.
But they had a room, probably a 10 by 10 room on nothing but rubber ducks and the rubber
ducks were all themed.
And you know, you could get the fireman rubber duck or the golfer rubber duck.
And of course, I bought a bowling rubber duck.
BDSM rubber duck.
They might have had that.
They might have had the lipstick lesbian duck.
I think they actually did have a lipstick lesbian because the store was like not necessarily
entirely for children.
You know, I had like stuff for adults in it too.
Like they had board games of one half of the store and they had like Catan and more adult
board games and they had the little kitty board games too.
Yeah.
So some of those some of those stores are kind of like the quasi head shops.
I mean now that weed's legal here.
Like you could just call it what it is.
But sometimes you go into these stores and they have like the books and then there would
be like all the glass pipes and things and you're like, okay.
And then they have like aisles and aisles and aisles of incense, but they were still
like a bookstore.
So, oh yeah, that was more so with music.
But yeah, I was gonna say the record stores.
Yeah.
These like, I don't know, tourist trap bookstores, right?
So the bookstore in Buffalo, it had that cafe in the back and it had a it was probably
you know, again, the size of my garage, like a one car garage and, you know, like a regular
like the one bay thing in a strip mall kind of thing, right?
Like on Main Street, like you go in, they've got the one sometimes they get a bigger store
and they got the two bays, the two storefronts.
This is like a one storefront kind of thing.
And they had a really small like sci fi section.
And that's kind of what I judge most stores on is, you know, I guess the variety of like
genres.
Like if you're in sci fi or if you're in fiction, kind of like how many Kurt Vonnegut books
do you have?
How many Neil Gaiman books do you have?
You know, how many Tolkien books do you have?
If any, you know, of all of those.
So I feel like those kind of like tourist trap shops are kind of like the airport bookstores
where it's got all like the the the Oprah's Club Readers Digest top New York Times, whatever
top 10 books.
And it's these these usually it's these women and they'll go and they'll buy a book and
go, oh, I wanted to read this one because Reese Witherspoon told me about it.
And then they're the ones that sit on the beach and read this book that you could tell
is like brand new.
And it's mostly a fluffy book.
Right.
And I don't want to like if that's your kind of book that you like to read, that's awesome.
I'm not trying to downplay that.
But that's not the kind of bookstores that I like.
You know, I don't mind that bookstores have those books because people like those books.
But it's kind of like the the traveling middle aged woman trying to be hip has a book, you
know, and reads it on the beach for her Instagram.
Yeah, they're selling back in the day.
It was Anne Rice novels that have the Anne Rice novels and whatever the latest Stephen
King was and then the Oprah bestseller.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So so those are not really my favorite.
So the Buffalo Book bookstore, you can skip on that one.
Skip that one.
You know, and then so one of my favorite bookstores in the Twin Cities is Uncle Hugo's.
It's Uncle Hugo and Uncle Edgar.
So it's Uncle Hugo's sci fi and Uncle Edgar's mystery.
So they only do science fiction and mystery books.
Well, their building got burned down and flooded in the George Floyd riots.
And they recently reopened in a bigger space.
I really like that because they it's not full price.
They're kind of like they're kind of like used books.
I think they have some new books, too.
But they've got a good chunk of used books.
And like the guy who runs it knows his stuff like he puts out a newsletter, not very frequently.
But you know, like when he talks about things, you definitely know he knows what he's talking
about, at least in terms of books and authors and and things and stuff like that.
So that's one of my favorite books, bookstores local to me.
And then right across the street is this new bookstore.
I think it's newer and it's called Moon Palace Books.
And one of our friends said that Moon Palace Books was their favorite bookstore in the
Twin Cities.
And I was like, man, I've never been there.
So I went there just this weekend to go check it out.
And I went into the entryway, you know, and so at least here in Minnesota, I'm sure other
places do this, too.
You've got the exterior door, then you're in a little like vestibule, Jill Goodacre.
And then there's another door to get into the actual store, right?
Yeah, that's like a mud room.
Yeah.
And a vapor barrier, a weather barrier, really.
Yeah, it's the cold, the winter cold barrier, snow barrier.
And I on the exterior door said masks required for everybody vaccinated or not.
And I was like, OK, maybe they didn't take this down yet.
And I got into the vestibule and there's a big box of masks, then another sign that said
masks required for everybody.
And I still didn't quite believe it.
And so I peeked into the windows and like, sure enough, everybody in there has a mask
on.
So I'm like, well, I guess I guess like I'm here to check this place out.
So I guess I'll put the mask on.
So I put the mask on and go in.
And it's like, man, they had like such a small section of everything.
Like every section was small.
They did have a used book section, but it was small.
They had a fairly decent sized kids book section.
They had, I think, four Neil Gaiman books.
They had three Frank Herbert books, you know, Dune, Dune Messiah, and I think Children of
Dune.
They had maybe four Kurt Vonnegut books.
They had a whole shelf, top to bottom, dedicated to like George Floyd literature, books and
things.
And every book was full price on the back.
So I guess like if you only want to shop where they agree with your social justice kind of
ideals, then it would be a good place to shop.
But as a bookstore, I have to give it like, I'd rather go to Barnes and Noble, because
at least they have a bigger selection if I'm paying full price for books, which I have
a question, Nate.
Yes.
How can there be a full bookshelf of books about George Floyd?
How is that possible?
You know, nobody likes capitalizing on tragedy like social justice warriors, I guess.
I don't know if they were all George Floyd books, but the you know how bookstores will
do the usually it spines out and then maybe they take like one shelf and do covers out.
So they had apparently found five or six books about George Floyd.
That's crazy that they had facing out.
So I just I say it's a full rack of George Floyd books.
I'm sure it's a full rack of social justice warrior books.
Right.
I'm guessing that they're like you said, they're capitalizing on the George Floyd incident
and they're not really writing about George Floyd.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's kind of well, it's the way the world works.
It's probably like George Floyd and other instances of social injustice.
Right.
Yeah, that I probably would enjoy reading one of them.
One of them is probably.
Yeah, pick pick one that has the best reviews and get that a try.
Right.
Yeah, so I was a little underwhelmed and I was a little like masks required for everybody
still.
Mm hmm.
Dude, that's coming down the pipeline.
Yeah, there's growing evidence that they're going to try to push masks and lockdowns again
this year.
I don't know why.
Well, you know, I think that certain people made a lot of money on that.
I mean, I know why, but I don't know how they could possibly justify it.
Either do I, but they will.
Because you know, like we get this could be a topic for a different episode because I'm
sure you finished the book and I'm still reading the book that that we're talking about.
Mike and I know what we're talking about.
I hope Mike.
Yes.
I'm going to do it again before.
Just tell me when you're halfway or something.
Yeah.
I'll do it again so I can read it again.
But like as soon as they as soon as the vaccine came out and was available for everybody to
go get for free, I was pretty much done.
I was done wearing a mask.
I was like, I'm not doing it.
Like I'm vaccinated.
Like, fuck you guys, you know, and whatever the science of the vaccine and all that stuff,
like that's not the point.
The point is like once people could feel safe about the thing, you know, about COVID, like
I don't need to do the mask anymore, you know, and then all the other stuff that's come out
recently, but that we're talking about bookstores.
Yeah.
I was a little like upset about the whole mask thing in the bookstore.
Because even my doctor's office now doesn't require masks.
So I'm going to the doctor's office.
They don't make me wear a mask.
I go to a, I'm just going to call it what it is, a left wing bookstore.
And it's all like mask up or you can't come look at our overpriced books.
Right.
When I go to a bookstore, I want like Blacks books.
I don't know if you ever saw that TV show.
No.
It's a British TV show with Dylan Moran and TLDR.
It's an alcoholic Irish guy who does not want to sell anybody books, but owns a bookstore.
I want the, the Corianders bookstore from never ending story.
I need to watch that movie.
I watched it when I was a kid and I don't recall anything from it.
If you haven't seen the German cut, you have to watch that too, but you should watch the
American version first.
It's wait, it's, it's not drastically different, but the tone is kind of drastically different.
Okay.
This is a German cut darker.
There's more sauerkraut interestingly enough, but right on.
No.
So just in quick summation, the, the director, I think Wolfgang Peterson made his cut of
the film and it was all done with a composer, true score, everything.
And there's a really nice scene with, not to get super nerdy and have people like eyes
rolled back in their head.
There's an, like the, the black wolf thing that chases the main character.
There's a scene that provides way more into that creature's backstory that really like
threw me for a loop in a good way.
Like and I've read the novel too.
So, but and then when it came over to America, they stripped all of the original score out
of it and they did the, the synth pop score through everything and they cut, cut some
scenes and trim some stuff.
So it's not less fun, like the German version isn't less fun, but it's less like blatantly
in your face, eighties poppy.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
So it's like a 1984 doom without all the eighties magic.
Yeah.
It's like a serious film almost, you know?
Yeah.
Something that could stand up to the test of time.
Yeah.
I mean the original, the American one does too, because it's a great movie, but, but
yeah.
So speaking, so I talked about Moon Palace books, speaking about kind of left-wing bookstores,
there's another bookstore and it's small too.
It's, it's small, but it's called the irreverent, irreverent, irreverent, irreverent bookworm.
And they're, you know, very left-wing, at least on their, you know, social media pages
and stuff, which is fine.
Like I don't really care.
It's not a big deal, but they've got their history.
It's funny because like you go in there and they kind of live up to their name.
So their history section is called like a bunch of boring things written by rich white
men and that's their history section.
You know, so it's tongue in cheek, but they've got, and they curate their books because they've
got a small space.
And so their books, they've got a lot of like staff recommendations and most of the books
in there kind of have kind of like things.
And so I think they only, they only sell things that they kind of like stand behind, I guess.
So and you know, it's, you're still kind of paying full price, but at least it's, it's
a curated like niche bookstore, right?
You're not going to go in there and get the, the rows and rows and rows of romance novels
with the nippily men.
Yeah.
You're getting the book buying experience along with a book potentially.
Yeah.
And it's curated, right?
So they've got limited shelf space.
So the stuff that's in there is stuff they want to sell or they want people to read.
Right.
So that one I kind of like just for the experience.
I don't think I've ever bought anything from them, but it was fun to kind of go in and
look and see kind of their cheeky like section, section titles or section headers or whatever.
So that one's fine.
There's another one and I didn't buy anything from it, but it's called wild rumpus and they
have cats and chickens and stuff in the store.
And the cats that they have are the, they're like these talus, tail-less cats that have
kind of a demeanor of a dog.
So you can like pet them and you can like, but it's a, it's a, it's a bookstore for young
readers is what they build themselves as.
So it's a lot of fun and they've got a big door and like a small door, you know, for
kids and stuff.
So that one's pretty good.
That does not sound chickens to the, uh, it's not, it's not, it's not as, it's not like gross
like you think it is.
Okay.
Like it's fine.
It's good.
Uh, I did, we should, I need to bring, bring, uh, my daughter there.
She would, she would love it.
Oh, I bet.
Yeah.
And then a paperback exchange is pretty good.
It's a used bookstore.
They're, their prices are a little higher than I would like for a used bookstore.
They've got a, they've the interesting thing with paperback exchange is they've got a whole
conspiracy theory wall of conspiracy theory books.
And that's what they call them.
And it's got the UFOs and it's got like the Sam scrunches, the Sasquatches and stuff like
that.
So like, it's the only bookstore I've seen that has like a full on like conspiracy theory
dedicated section.
I probably would like to go there.
I don't think I'd buy a conspiracy theory book, but I like to see all of them.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we can go sometime, dude.
Yeah.
Well, to go.
Yeah.
So I said like, uncle, Hugo's is really good.
There's one that we went to.
I might've been this one, the book house.
It's in Dinkytown and it was, it was good.
It was, it's one of those bookstores where nothing is really laid out.
I mean, it's laid out.
They've got their sections, but their section signs are kind of hard to see.
So it's kind of like, you're kind of just kind of wandering around in this place.
It's like one of those wandering bookstores.
It's not like, okay, I want to go to the fiction or I want to go to the nonfiction or I want
to go to the history or I want to go to, you know, pre-World War II, Middle Eastern politics
or something like you're not going to those sections.
It's kind of more of a wandering one.
And that one was fine.
I don't think I, I might've bought something there, but I don't know that that's kind of
it for the bookstores I've been to.
Oh wait, there's one more, but I actually, I actually like it is majors in Quinn and
it's right in uptown and it's pretty good.
And that's a large, large, large bookstore.
So they've got, they've got a lot, a lot of stuff, but it's, and it's not used stuff.
So I don't know if I bought anything from them either, but it's one of those places
that's fun to look around.
Cause it's so big.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
I, I, I'm so terrible with remembering the names of bookstores.
I know that there's a bookstore that Sarah likes to stop at when we're in the area by
DIR and it's all used books and it's a lot of romance novels, a lot of romance novels.
Okay.
I know the one you're talking about.
I think I've been there.
Yes.
But the one thing that stands out is that on the outside of the building and inside
there's military propaganda posters everywhere.
I don't know if you remember that.
Emily's books.
Yes, it is.
Okay.
And then there's another bookstore farther up the road over by like the junk stores.
You know what I'm talking about?
Like they have like bicycles out in the middle of the yard, but back there, there's a bookstore
as well.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Emily's used books.
Is that second time around?
Yeah, I think so.
Cause that's a, that's a thrift store, but I know there's like, they've got, they've
got books I think too.
Yes.
They have a major book section from what I understand.
I've never been in there.
Sarah was, you know, touring the area.
Yeah.
And she went in there, but I went to Emily's and I was only in Emily's once and it was
like you said, it was all this romance stuff.
So I kind of lost interest pretty quick.
What they have, if you go way into the back corner, they have a sci-fi section and we
actually bought two grocery bags full of books for like 80 bucks.
It was really, really reasonable.
And I got a Dune book there.
It was House of Thorns.
Yeah.
And they were books, but you had to find them, you know?
The the Hennepin County libraries used to do before the pandemic anyway, used to do
these book sales and you go in and the books would be like 25 cents.
You could fill like a grocery bag, a paper grocery bag for like five bucks.
Yeah.
I bought a lot of books from, from that, but I don't know if they still do them off to
check their, their websites, but.
I bet you they do.
Cause my mother goes to those sales.
She'll travel around and go to the quarter bag, like for a quarter, you fill a bag.
Yep.
And yeah.
Yeah.
Those are good.
I don't know how often like you're in the Brainerd area, but that, that Cattails one
is pretty interesting.
I haven't spent much time in there.
Yes, it is interesting.
We talked about that because it's memorable because it's downtown historic Brainerd, which
is not bad anymore.
They have like sidewalks, interesting sidewalk paintings and everything, but it's like some
new books and a huge use section.
And yeah, it's kind of interesting.
I get a lot of Star Trek.
I have in the past got a lot of Star Trek and Star Wars books there.
Okay.
And they have, yeah.
One of, one of my friends I've done some film stuff with, he's a theater person up in, up
in the Brainerd lakes area, a bit north of there.
And he wrote a book with his partner, which I haven't read yet, but he only sold it at
Cattails.
So I ran in there and picked it up.
It was like five bucks for this book or whatever, but yeah, just to support him.
But they do, I think they do that where they do kind of like the, they'll sell local authors,
even if it's like spiral bound.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
I remember there were like crystals and like weird hippie shit in there.
Yeah.
Stuff in there for sure.
Yeah.
There's like weird stuff.
It's very, it's interesting to walk around in.
It's memorable, especially because the Annie's bookstore is like this got right wing propaganda
everywhere.
It's like the polar opposite in the same area.
Yeah.
But it's hilarious.
But yeah, I like, I like buying used books, especially when it's like a Star Trek or Star
Wars story, because they're so quick, you know, and you can read a Star Wars novel in
two hours.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
There's like, some of them are two, some of them are four.
Yeah.
I do enjoy half price books and they've got a lot of locations in the cities and they're
nationwide.
Yeah.
Sarah is a big fan.
Okay.
Sometimes though, like it depends if you're looking for a specific thing, sometimes it's
a little more expensive than you would think it should be.
And so if it's a book that I really want, but I don't really want to pay 15 bucks for
it when I can get it for $3 off of eBay with free shipping, you know, right, then I'll
just get it off of eBay.
I did one of the Dune books that I bought in the main eight series.
I don't know if I told you this, Mike, but it was one of, it wasn't God Emperor of Dune
because that would have been too perfect because of the cover of that book.
But it was one of the later ones and I bought it from eBay.
And so I picked it up to start it and I was like, Oh, is this paperback?
And like, there's something in here.
So I flipped it open and it was like this shitty digital picture that was printed out,
right?
On just like card stock almost.
And you could tell it was kind of like one of the earlier, like not the earliest, but
still like an earlier digital photo.
And it's this old guy laying on this bed with a raging fucking boner.
And I'm like, gross.
But also like you're reading Dune and Dune, like that's where you put your pornography
of like your boyfriend or whatever.
So that was bizarre.
That was a little gift from them to you.
Love it.
Anyway.
So if we move a little bit further outside, my brother lives near Stevens Point, Wisconsin,
where my one brother does.
And in Stevens Point, there is one of the best used bookstores.
It's like every time I go and visit him, I'm like, we got to go, we got to go.
And he loves it too.
And we got to go, we got to go.
It's Blue Moon Books.
And this guy does not work for a union because if you make one wrong move in this store,
you will be crushed by tons of books.
You will die.
You will just die.
I don't know if he doesn't keep up on his electricity bill or if he just can't afford
to put more lights in, but he has like flashlights staged around the thing.
It's like a full on like house.
Like imagine he bought this house and he converted it into a bookstore and it's huge and it's
massive.
There's been times that we've gone in there and like one of the lamps that he had in the
back had like got knocked over and there's like broken glass on the floor and stuff.
And his organization upsets me, but his prices are phenomenal and he has like everything
of everything of everything you could ever possibly hope to have.
That sounds like a story that you could spend a lot of time in.
You can, you can.
So he's got like, it's really weird because he's got two sci-fi sections, which are separated
by like a hallway, one's in a separate room, but the alphabetizing happens in both sections.
So the one section right by the register is like A to Z and then the other sci-fi section
is A to Z, but it could have some of the same books in the other section as the other section,
but they're all used books.
And then some of the stuff he's got like fiction and then like mystery.
So if you want Michael Crichton books, they're in both of those sections.
So you just kind of have to bounce back and forth between those sections to find the book.
So it's a little like frustrating that way.
But if you have the time and if you're not wearing a backpack and you're feeling like
thin that day, you can go and like look at all of these books.
But it's if you have OCD or if you get kind of like thrown by chaos, it's not really a
place for you, but it's one of my favorite bookstores because it's like, it is an experience
to go there because all of his shelves are bowing under the weight of these books and
he's got books in the front and he pull a book out and you're like, oh, there's another
row of books behind this one.
And it's somehow kind of alphabetized and then you pull that book out and there's like
a third row behind that row deep in these shelves.
So it's amazing because of all of the books that he has and you can totally find like
it'll take you some time.
But the other thing is cool is you can ask him, you just pick him looking for this book
and he'll be like, oh yeah, let me check.
So he's got on his computer, he's got all the books that he has and he somehow like
plugs them in so he can go and find it for you.
But if you're trying to find it on your own, it's going to take you a lot longer.
That's awesome.
But yeah, that's one of my favorite ones of all time because it does.
That's memorable.
Yeah.
Well, and I love Uncle Hugo's, but they only do sci-fi and mystery.
And so this one does, they've got a big sci-fi section, but they've got a huge nonfiction
section and they've got all like the car books and whatever books and hobby books and things
like that too.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
We were on vacation up in the Arrowhead and near Grandma Ray, they have these little roadside
shops and they're junk stores.
They sell everything from paddles to tea sets.
Have you ever been up there?
I don't think so.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you drive up highway 61.
That's like a junk shop.
Yeah.
You drive up highway 61 and it'll be like a wide spot in the road.
And there's one, just south of Grandma Ray that has books.
And we were on vacation and we had limited space and we still bought a grocery bag full
of sci-fi books because they had a bunch of Star Trek books that I had not read.
And I bought a grocery bag of Star Trek books at this roadside.
It looks like a junk store because it has like picnic tables lined up with like just
garbage on it.
You know?
And then you go into the building and they have books, used books for nothing.
You know?
I think I spent like, I don't know, 75 cents a book or something like that.
Yeah, that's good.
It was too good of a deal.
So if anybody's ever up in that area, I guess it's worth a stop at these like very shifty
looking roadside businesses that take cash only.
Yep.
But.
Yeah.
And then a bookstore that's, oh, then my other brother lives in Connecticut and it's a couple
hours drive from him.
So I'm not sure if it's in Connecticut or where it's in, but it's called the Book Barn.
And they used to have, I think like I was out there maybe four years, four years ago,
I think.
And they had like five or six different locations.
And the one location is a barn or a series of barns on this property.
And you go there and it's not air conditioned at all, but they've got a barn for like sci-fi.
They've got a barn for history.
They've got a barn for biographies.
They've got a, in the biography section, they've got presidential biographies, other biographies
broken subcategorically.
So I bought it.
Wow.
And it's like a kid's book and modern newer books like downtown.
And you have to go, you have to hop to all these different places.
But my brother said they kind of condensed their locations a little bit since the pandemic.
But.
Oh, sure.
Phenomenal place and dirt cheap prices because they're all used books or whatever.
And I flew out.
So I had to like, I had to take the train back from my brother's and then get into New York
city and then get to the airport with my suitcase full of books and then on a plane and back
and stuff.
But, but that was fine.
And then this last, when we were in New York this last year, I went to the Strand, which
I guess is one of the famous bookstores in New York.
And it was, it was amazing.
Sarah had a bit of a meltdown, like mental crisis in there.
Cause it was like packed with people, but it's all like people you don't have to talk
to, like I'm an introvert.
But you know, like all these book people and they go there and they have a coffee shop
in the back.
Some of their prices were like full price and some of their prices were better than
eBay prices on these books.
And I think they're all like brand new books.
And I bought like a really thick book, which was dumb, but I did because I had never seen
it anywhere else.
And it was one I wanted to read and it was cheaper than the eBay one that I was watching
on eBay.
And I was like, I gotta buy it.
And I bought some stickers and stuff because like it was a cool place, you know, New York
city, but.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
I'm over halfway done with the cigar, by the way.
I'm not sure where you're at.
I'm about half halfway.
Okay.
When I first lit it up, it was a light and I thought, Oh no, is this going to be like
a light flavored cigar?
What?
Not, Oh no.
But typically we, if we do two shows, I try to do the darker cigar first or second and
the lighter cigar first.
Yes.
This is not spicy, but it is a full bodied cigar for sure.
Full bodied the first like the first quarter wasn't, that was, yeah, it was fine.
It's getting better.
I think.
I like it.
I like that middle section.
I like it right now too.
Oh, I like the middle section.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
It's like with you, like the first bit wasn't, I was kind of like, okay, you know.
Yeah.
It's building.
It's come into its own.
Yeah.
Building.
Yeah.
It's building.
I really like it so far.
I feel bad that I poo pooed how it looked.
Mike looks, looks aren't everything.
Don't change a book by its cover or a cigar by its wrapper.
Yeah.
Calling it the banker is definitely appropriate because it's.
Yes.
It's good.
Yeah.
It's good.
I like it.
I could definitely smoke one reading a book.
Yes.
Working on an Excel spreadsheet.
I could read one or eat one.
Oh yes.
Smoke one.
Fuck.
Yeah.
Eat.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
And I've been digging the V cut.
That's two cigars in a row.
I've done V cut because even when I'm with you, I usually only do one cigar V cut and
then I just use my straight cuts.
So yeah.
I cross cut this one and a good choice.
Yeah.
Good choice.
A lot of airflow.
But yeah.
So I don't remember the names of these bookstores like you do.
I remember where they're located.
So and most of them are part bookstore, part junk store.
Like you know what I mean?
All these bookstores like back.
This has one pretty much every tourist town in the northern half of the state has a used
bookstore as a part of their antique shop.
You know?
Yeah.
And the antiques are always three times what they're supposed to be.
And the books are always reasonable because nobody is buying books at these stores for
the most part.
Yeah.
So Sarah loves to go to who Taylor's Falls because there's the Taylor Falls bead store
there.
And the upper level is all like jewelry stuff and beads and stones and gems and clasps and
whatever the charms and stuff.
But if you go in the basement, they have like a full blown antique store in the basement
that has books and vinyl and like other stuff too.
So I knew that store was there and we wanted to go because we hiked the park.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we closed because it was during 2021 winter and nothing was open in Taylor's Falls for
obvious reasons.
Mysterious, I'm sure to some people.
But the park was packed.
We could barely get parking.
So everybody was like obviously out and about and trying to enjoy themselves.
And we walked the whole town.
If you've ever been back there, it's worth a stop.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we'll go back to Taylor's Falls.
It's a lovely place.
And that beat store has a really good selection of incense as well if you're into incense
at all.
Yeah, we have incense occasionally.
We have a, I don't know if I've showed you, but we got a grandfather clock at an antique
store that has a service record, believe it or not.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
And the inside of it is like shelving.
And inside of the shelving, we have all of our smelly stuff, you know, candles and incense
and things.
If there's one thing Mike loves more than bowling, it's a watch.
And if it's one thing Mike likes more than a giant watch, it's a giant watch with a service
record.
Hell yeah.
No, I saw it had a service record and had to come in.
It had to come into the house.
Not only does it work, it has a service record and it was just serviced right before it got
put in the store.
So yeah.
Yep.
Yeah, I kind of wonder about like the service record stuff because I know when you go to
like sell your car, if you have a service record of things, you can maybe get more money
for it or something.
But I feel like ever since the cash for clunkers, like there's not really a used car market
like there used to be.
No, there's not.
It's crazy.
Drive around and not a lot of really bad crappy vehicles on the road anymore.
And if they are, they're real bad.
No one cares on mine to keep a bad crappy car on the road.
Right.
Well, yours wouldn't have qualified anyway.
Gas mileage is too high.
Yeah.
Gas mileage is too high.
My mom wanted to sell her Explorer for that program and it was too new.
She was so mad.
So.
Yeah, I wanted to say a full disclosure, Mike, I pulled up a list on Google of all the bookstores
in the Twin Cities here and then I remembered the names, you know, that way.
You cheating so and so.
I mean, I remember I didn't have to look up Book Barn and I didn't have to look up Blue
Moon Books and Steven's Point.
I didn't have to look up Uncle Uncle Edgar's and Uncle Hugo's like my favorites.
But you know, yeah, one that major and whatever one like that was a pretty decent bookstore,
but I would not have remembered the name.
I know where it is, but I wouldn't have remembered the name.
Right.
And I'm like most of my bookstore experiences are like, oh, we're going to tool around and
cloak.
Okay.
You know, oh, let's stop by this store.
They happen to have used books or Duluth, you know, to it around Duluth and they go
into the antique shop and they have a book section like, oh, that's cool.
Let's wander over there.
And those are then you're it's hit and miss.
Let's put it that way.
Hit and miss.
Yeah, for sure.
And in terms of things that I enjoy about bookstores and any bookstores, I just like
the library look.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's why I like physical media, you know, so like your patio where we go on smoke
and do the podcast sometimes and where you're doing the podcast tonight, you know, like
the bookshelves.
Like, I just love that look of like, here's a whole bunch of books and you can kind of
like look over there and, oh, that looks like an interesting one or, oh yeah, I read that
one or I want to read that one, you know, and kind of the same for me with like DVD
and we've got the big vinyl collection and that's neat too to just have like, you can
kind of browse.
Yep, absolutely.
Versus the streaming.
I mean, you browse on like, you can browse on like Netflix and the other things too,
but there's something about browsing like tactile, you know, like I can flip through
records or I can like scan the spines of the books.
There's something about physical media that you just can't replicate with a screen.
And when people come over here who have never been here, I always, I get weird reactions
sometimes.
I'm not going to mention their name.
I don't even remember who it was.
It was somebody that Sarah and I both knew that hadn't been over and they looked at the
wall and they're like, oh, you guys are readers, huh?
They're like, okay, apparently it's not normal to have a book wall in the house anymore.
Probably not in our, for our generation really.
I guess so.
I mean, our generation are younger.
I mean, I feel like our generation, some people are and some people aren't, but you go younger
and a lot of people are like, I haven't picked up a book since like high school.
Right.
Oh, I have an acquaintance, let's say somebody I spent a lot of time with who is almost proud
of the fact that they have never read a book cover to cover.
It's like, you are almost 50 fucking years old and you have never read a book.
Like really?
And he's a nice person, right?
And all that.
It's like, how can you be proud of the fact that you've never read a book?
How can you make, how can you seriously think that you're making accurate decisions about
things?
Yeah.
Well, I don't even care if it's, you know, fiction or nonfiction, you know, reading expands
your comprehension of things, even if it's not like you can read Dune and still expand
your comprehension of things, you know.
Right.
It increases, well, it's like exercise for your brain.
Yes.
So I know there's a lot of studies about that.
That reading is good for the mind.
Yes, indeed.
And good for the soul if we have one.
Well, something like that, especially if you read things that are both interesting and
insightful, you know?
Yeah.
I think, well, I enjoy, and you know, not all books are created the same and just because
it's a book doesn't mean it's true, you know what I mean?
But I enjoy, so I went, and we've talked about this before, because it was one of our first
season episodes was a period in history that we really enjoy in minds of Lewis and Clark,
you know?
And so I loved being able to research and find the best written books and the most interestingly
written books on Lewis and Clark, and then being able to read those books, you know,
all kind of back to back to back to get kind of a complete picture of the expedition, you
know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff on it because it was not in modern, yeah, it was the modern
era basically.
Yeah, yeah.
We don't have pictures from it, but damn near.
Yeah.
But that's the cool thing about books is like, there are so many different historians and
authors out there who enjoy certain things.
And if you stumble across something in a book or get recommended a book and you discover
a topic you weren't aware of that you're super into, there's a ton of books on that topic.
They're not all going to be good or well written or well researched, but some of them will
be and you can like really expand your knowledge on something to be more than just the cursory,
I know what happened.
Right.
Yeah.
And well, you know this.
The internet does not have everything on it quite yet.
So I have an old.
If you know where to look, it has most things.
I mean, it has the circumcision book, the history of circumcision.
All right.
It has a lot of relevant information, but if you have old machinery, you know, the good
old guidebooks that they used to sell in every auto parts store are still your best resource.
Yeah, the Hayes.
The Hayes.
Yeah.
Because it's like a 99 Polaris 325 Magnum, which is they don't have repair videos on
that four wheeler.
It's too old.
Yeah.
Even though it's a classic, apparently it's worth money because it's in very good condition.
But OK, it just needs to plow as far as I'm concerned.
But yeah, I had to buy a Hayes manual to fix it, which is fine.
Yeah.
And then any sort of I still have a lot of books from trade school and from college too.
Yeah.
And you're certainly not going to find American Jesus on the Internet, you know?
Yeah.
That's a I kept some college books, but I ended up getting rid of a lot of them because
I had, you know, I did film school and architecture, so I kept a couple.
But a lot of them, I was just like, for film filmmaking and stuff, the Internet has more
relevant information than any book ever, because by the time the book is published, the information
is already out of date on some of that stuff.
Just with the way technology is advancing with like digital filmmaking and stuff.
If you're doing like 35 millimeter film or like the old school filmmaking, like, of course,
the books are going to be better.
But you know, something that's kind of like still trending or still advancing technologically,
like the books are very hard pressed.
Like you go to all these bookstores and they have like the C++ coding manual or like the
JavaScript and it's like, but it's from like 1998.
And you're like, dude, no, that's so out of date.
Even if you want to get into JavaScript, that book will not help you because the everything
has changed so much since then.
Well, yeah, anything with technology.
I yeah, anything with technology.
I took a political science course, which granted this is like 15 years ago about politics,
like Internet politics.
And there was no course book.
You know, this was like brand new technology at the time or brand new trends.
And it was all online research and online published research and stuff like that.
So anything that's newer, obviously, it's going to be not in book format and related
to our podcasts, like all the cigar and pipe information you'd ever want to know is on
the Internet.
You know, there's so much access to information now as far as hobby, any hobby that people
are actively doing.
Yeah, I think the biggest difference between books and like Internet articles or blogs
or how to's is that before the Internet, you had to actually get somebody to pay to publish
your book.
So there had to be some level of professionalism or research if it was a nonfiction or whatever.
You know what I mean?
I mean, certainly they could gatekeep people out of there.
Like Andy Weir released The Martian chapter by chapter on his blog and everybody went
crazy for it and he got it published and then a movie was made from it.
So that was, you know, different than the normal path.
But that's the kind of level of writing that you would have to have to get yourself published
pre Internet.
Right.
Yeah.
So like that's why Stephen Ambrose has so many books out because the Internet wasn't a thing
when he was pumping out all that stuff.
You know, no, and once you get your first success, you have access, right?
Yeah.
And Stephen Ambrose is very entertaining, not necessarily the most accurate.
Yeah.
And that was a style of book that I guess is still common, but it's not as common as
it was like the pop history.
Yeah.
Entertainment themed.
Yeah.
And now with the Internet, anyone can publish anything.
Right.
So with books though, you still have to be careful or you still have to be discriminatory,
right?
Curate.
You have to read it.
So I didn't read every single book on Lewis and Clark.
Right.
I did research on which ones were the most accurate, which ones had the most interesting
perspectives, which ones this and that, you know, so you have to get third party input
to see if the book you're about to read is actually accurate or not.
Or if you can't verify it, you have to go in with a little bit of suspension of disbelief
or a little bit of, I don't know what you would call it, criticism or like being, being
willing to critically think.
Right.
And with the easy access to everything on the Internet, you can easily access all this
stuff that sounds really good, but isn't actually true.
Oh, there's a lot of, there's a cognitive bias, right?
Yeah.
It's a lot more stuff you have to cut through on the Internet versus a book.
I mean, you still have to cut through things with books.
Some stuff is just written in as bad or as wrong, like Dr. Spock, but I feel like the
market wasn't as flooded with books because you actually had to print the books.
Somebody had to pay to print the books and then just market the books, sell the books,
be able to read the books and the Internet kind of took that whole process out of it.
Now all you have to do is write something, publish it and people can read it.
Yeah.
Anybody, anybody can say anything they want, you know.
Which is, which is great, but it's also bad, you know.
It is.
It's kind of like the whole hucksterism on steroids.
Like we went to the craft fair and there was a guy selling spices and the claim, you know,
he had like six or seven kinds and they were all good, but the claim of the originals,
this is a hundred year old Norwegian family recipe for this spice blend and you taste
it and it tastes like Lawry's.
It's like, well, I mean, I can put Lawry's in a, yeah, I can put Lawry's in a different
container and tell you a story about that 100 year old Norwegian blah, blah, blah.
Maybe Lawry's is a hundred year old Norwegian recipe.
I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, like I can say whatever I want as long as nobody's verifying.
Nobody's looking too deep into it.
Right.
Like I kept my AC and DC theory textbooks because you know, if I actually need to know
the answer before something explodes, I'm not going to search the internet.
You know, that's-
Well, there's a whole trend now on the internet too of people giving what they know to be
wrong advice just to see people like blow themselves up or-
Big time.
Like mess something up.
And so it's like, I mean, I guess-
Big time.
Well, when you were doing your thermostats and different things, I warned you about that
because that is definitely with the trades, that's definitely a thing.
Like yeah, let's tell this guy to wire it this way and that way he's going to have to
rip his fucking walls out.
Yeah.
It'll never work.
Well, I told you about that one guy when I, because I had to get a lower amperage air
compressor.
Yep.
I had listed mine for sale and I was like, yeah, the max amperage is the same as the
breaker.
And one guy messaged me, he's like, you know, you could just put in a bigger breaker on
that thing, you know, like in your breaker box.
And I didn't even bother like responding to it because you and I already talked about
that.
I have to change all the wires out here, you know, to get the bigger amperage.
So-
Unless you want to burn it down.
That's a good way to do it.
Yeah, which I don't, which I don't.
So-
Yeah, in the state of Minnesota.
You have to have a little bit of discretion.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, it's a lot more discretion with the internet than you do with books sometimes.
Oh yeah.
I'll, this is a total aside, but when I was going to school, there was a guy who dropped
out of the program and he was ancient.
He, I don't know why he thought he was going to do the apprenticeship program.
He was already retired.
He's like in the sixties.
Yeah.
So he got pushed out for obvious reasons, right?
You don't want a 60 year old first year apprentice or whatever.
So he went over to the Home Depot and he was running their electrical department.
And so you go to these stores and the, so you go to the plumbing section on there's
a plumbing expert at Home Depot.
It's like, is that just a failed apprentice?
Like who is that guy?
You know what?
Maybe he was a licensed plumber.
He wouldn't be in the fricking plumbing section giving you advice at Home Depot.
It's just Tim.
Yeah.
Like what?
One of my favorite stores doesn't have, they got like books, but I would never buy a book
there as micro center.
They got all the computer stuff I would need, even though now I mostly buy my computer stuff
online because it's cheaper than there.
But sometimes their stuff is really good and really cheap.
Then if I need it the same day or if I want to go pick it out myself, that's where I go.
And they've got a bunch of 3d printing stuff.
So I go there quite a bit and I just like looking at all the technology.
But one time I was looking for something and they've got the people on the floor, right?
And they're like, Hey, yeah.
Oh, you know, what are you looking for?
And I'm like, well, I'm looking for this.
And he's like, okay, well, you want this one then?
And they put their name sticker right on the thing, right?
So they get the commission for the sale.
Like, Hey, I was helped by so and so.
And I'm like, yeah, but what about this?
He's like, Oh, no, no, that's not even a thing.
Like, this is really what you want.
And trust me, I know because I like I work here and I'm like, dude, I just spent like
six hours researching this thing.
And what you're telling me is false.
And so I will not buy that.
So you know, sometimes you got to realize that the people in the stores are not really
experts on anything other than making a sale.
Oh, for sure.
And I have one of my favorite things to do is to do the research before I go in.
So I know what I want.
And then I'll talk.
They want to talk to you.
So I'll talk to the clerk or whoever.
Like I don't know anything.
And I'm like judging their level of knowledge about what I am specifically looking for.
Yes.
And I do it a lot at the electrical section of the, you know, the stores that you go to
because these guys are, you know, my name is Jim Bob.
And I am running this electrical and I'm the manager for the electrical department
and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm looking for like I was in there looking for a battleship, which is like a little part
that you add to a box for after putting boxes and walls that are already built.
And he had no idea what a battleship was.
I'm like, just show me where it is.
And I described the part and he brought me there.
And it's like, how the fuck is this guy running this electrical department as the manager?
He doesn't know about these parts that you need to do wiring in walls that are already
up.
You know, like, yeah, not that.
I mean, again, they're not going to get like legitimate professionals in the HVAC department
of your Menards, you know, unless they were retiree potentially.
Right.
I saw a good I think you'll appreciate this.
I saw a good meme and it was it was like from a waiter.
And the waiter was like, man, I love it when my table is like, well, this meal was phenomenal.
You please give my compliments to the chef.
And the waiter is like, what the chef doesn't know or what the customer doesn't know is
the chef is just some guy, Chad, who's strung out on Coke and he's in high school.
Like he's not some chef.
He's just the chef.
You know, like he's not, you know, it's just some guy back there strung out on Coke.
It doesn't mean he knows how to, you know, do all the stuff you would do in like a fancy
like New York thing.
But the guy's like, but sure, I'll go tell him.
Yeah, that's some just overworked, underpaid guy back there, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
Like I worked at restaurants, as you know, and it's like, yeah, yeah.
The reason why it tastes so good is number one, you did not make it.
And number two, salt.
It's got more salt and more fat and more sugar than you would ever put in anything that you
made at home because they don't give a fuck.
That's not their job.
Caring is not their job.
Absolutely not.
No.
Yeah.
We put in a whole pack of Costco butter in this dish.
That's like 12 sticks of butter.
Of course it's good.
Yeah.
The refried beans taste so good because they put actual tubs of lard into it.
You know, of course it's wonderful.
And you know, a pound of salt.
Yeah.
It's a good job.
So talking about battleships and stuff, if I wanted to put, and this has nothing to do
with bookstores.
So for the listener, this is just a freebie.
If I wanted to put a ceiling fan in a bedroom that only has a light right now, do I have
to run a whole separate wire or do the ceiling fans have something where I can like just
put a double switch in or something?
Or how does that work?
So you have a light and it runs off a switch, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
You can take the light down.
You have to inspect the box.
If they put a box that is fan rated, you're good to go and you can mount it to that.
If not, you need to take a look and see how the box is mounted because in order to run
a ceiling fan, you have to have a ceiling box that's rated for fan use.
Given the age of your house, probably not going to happen.
But you can modify that.
There's ways you can get aftermarket or not aftermarket, but you can get boxes to where
you can pull out the old one and put in a new one, especially if it's directly mounted
to like a wood joist.
If it's upstairs, you're going to have to potentially deal with insulation and pushing
insulation around and things like that.
It's not impossible by any means, but you're going to want to make darn sure that the box
that you have is going to be rated for it because otherwise your ceiling fan will wobble
and fall on whoever's standing underneath it.
Yeah.
So would you have to run a new secondary wire?
No, no, you shouldn't have to.
No, no, no.
You're going to have to get a fan that's rated.
The motors are going to have to be rated low enough for the circuit, but new fans have
DC motors and they're great.
They're way better than the, you're thinking like the big AC motor fans.
There might even be some fans that are light enough to where you could get by.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Depends on.
I was just thinking about sometimes the fan and the light are on separate switches.
Yeah.
You really would have to.
The fans, you turn the thing on and you pull the chain, right?
And it's either you can turn the light on, you can turn the fan on.
There's that.
The new fans, what I'm thinking of is that they're almost, they're not a smart fan.
They're DC fan and they have a remote.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
They have a remote that runs on battery and they're pretty slick.
They're pretty slick and some of them might be light enough to where, you know, if you
have like a 35 pound rated box, you get away with boning it, you know, potentially.
Yeah.
Does it just say on the box?
Yeah.
You should be able to see it in the box, especially if you have a plastic box, you know, you'd
have to look at it.
And I mean, if you have like a steel box up there and it's like sturdy.
Yeah.
You're probably good to go.
You know, it all depends on what you have.
You'd have to open it up and see because your house has like a mixture of old and new stuff,
you know?
So a modern box would be rated for 50 pounds or higher with like fan rating.
Okay.
Yeah.
At least that's my, you know, my knowledge of house fixtures and house components is
very limited.
Yeah.
Well, a fan would be like a live load.
Yeah.
I would say you'd get like the new DC fans are so efficient.
It's just like LED lights, you know?
You don't even do lighting calculations anymore from what I understand.
Yeah.
The lights are crazy.
I replaced all the lights in the basement because remember it was flickering.
I bought these like superior dim ability ones, but they're pretty cheap still and they're
all LED, you know?
But yeah, it's like, I remember when you would buy the incandescence and you'd have to be
like, okay, okay, okay.
I'm replacing a 60.
So I have to get a 60.
I can't go up to a hundred because it'll blow or it won't light or it won't be brighter.
But with the LEDs, it's like, yeah, you could get a, however many lumens and it draws like
six Watts or something, you know?
Yeah.
LEDs change the game and DC motors and stuff have changed the game.
And a lot of the new houses are not even running AC power for lighting.
They're running them all in DC circuits from the get go.
Okay.
Yeah.
They're using like cat five cable, glorified cat five cable.
So it's pretty cool.
Within the industry, electricians are like, oh, they're going to run us out of business.
Blah, blah, blah.
It's like, nah, dude, you just have to learn how to do this new thing.
That's all, you know?
Not a big deal.
Yeah.
So it's, it's energy.
Well, no matter how easy things get, people still won't do them and we'll want to pay
somebody else to do them for them.
So.
All right.
My cigar went out with like an inch and a half left.
I'm trying to relight it.
I was trying to relight it.
Yeah, I'm just, I think I got about an inch and a half left.
I'm probably right there with you.
Yep.
I can't remember.
Your light fixtures are old, aren't they?
The overheads?
I don't know.
I feel like all the light fixtures of the contractor special because it was bank owned
and then the contractors came in and they put in the, the tan carpet.
That's the contractor special carpet.
Sure.
And they put in the contractor special boob light in every room.
So you might get lucky.
You might've gotten lucky and they may have already put in good boxes.
Yeah.
So they, I know they redid everything outside of that room in the basement with the electrical
box in it, the breaker box in it.
Yep.
And it's the only room of the house that has two prong outlets with no ground, but everything
else is grounded.
So I feel like everything else should be up to code, but I'd have to take one down and
see.
But yeah, we were just talking cause it's been so hot this summer and we have a little
fan in our bedroom, but it'd be nice to have a ceiling fan because it's much more efficient
moving of the air, you know?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Reverse it for winter to get a better heating.
So yep.
Yeah.
Those are the DC fans.
Those are pretty slick.
I'm getting two for my smoking room here.
Oh yeah.
That'd be nice.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of my friends, they have a, there's a fan that you can screw into a light socket
and that's what they put in their garage when the garage was too hot.
Sure.
And it has a light on it, but it also has a fan on it and it just runs off the light
socket.
So I was like, cause you helped me and we capped cause our garage had a one bulb in
it and then I bought the, the two LEDs strips to get more light in here, but that box is
still there so I could put another, I could just convert it back to a light fixture and
put a little fan up there too, if I wanted.
Oh yeah, for sure.
For sure.
So heck yeah.
Yeah.
The sky is the limit.
You just have to work with what you have to an extent and be willing to modify.
Yeah.
And be smart and make sure the power is off and use the tester to make sure the power
is off.
Right.
Absolutely.
With your fan switching and stuff like that, it's pretty easy to tell if it's off.
Oh yeah.
So.
Yes, indeed.
Well, I don't know that I have anything else bookstore related.
No, I don't.
Like I say, I like to use bookstores and if you're in tourist country, these antique shops,
a lot of them have book sections and or the antique stores will have books randomly shoved
in because they'll have like this section is seller 123.
They'll have like.
Yeah, they have the consignment stalls or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They'll have like bookshelves in there.
Some of those are pretty good.
Yeah.
You know, here and there.
Yep.
But I don't get to go to fancy bookstores in New York, Nate.
You could if you would just come with me.
I know I could.
I think one season we should do like nice ashes on the road and we should just go to
different places for every episode.
Well, yeah, you know, when the show takes off after we get our yacht is what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This week, nice ashes in Milan.
Next week, nice ashes in Thailand.
Oh man, Thailand.
The week after that, nice ashes in Jamaica.
Oh, geez.
Live from wherever.
Yeah.
Melbourne.
It would be fun to go talk to some of these cigar lounges and see if they would let us
do a podcast there, you know.
Yeah, it'd be interesting.
They probably would.
They would.
They wouldn't give a shit.
As long as we bought some cigars, you know.
Yeah, we'd have to buy the sticks.
Yeah, give them a shout out.
But that'd be kind of fun on location.
So I'm actually I have like an inch, inch and a quarter left and it's starting to get
sour on me.
Yeah, I was that's why I'm kind of like, I don't have anything else to say.
And it was really good up until about now.
It's still good, but it's got that bitterness that I'm like, that bitterness.
And you know, it was what the Gurkas that we ran into that with almost every stick.
This isn't as bad as a Gurka.
No, I mean, but it's, you know, it's to be expected on some of these sticks.
So yeah, yeah, you can't have that full body flavor and expect it to be like great when
you get to the last inch on a six inch long cigar, you know.
So with the other eight Chapmans, which one has been your favorite so far?
The banker.
I liked this one.
Yeah, I like the banker.
And I think like the Cameroon Reserve is really good.
It was good.
Yeah, I like this one.
Yeah, this is really good.
So nice and round and full bodied.
I was really surprised.
Yep.
Yeah, it was a little like you said, it was a little kind of underwhelming maybe at the
first first couple of puffs, but it didn't waste any time.
No, it definitely showed up.
So definitely a thumbs up for me.
Yes.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening.
Be safe.
I out.