The Great Garbage Disposal Story

5 Comments

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  Brendan

  March 27, 2013 at 12:05 pm

  Speaking of little things in movies that stay in your memory. This is a scene in one of those dance movies that women like and men hate. It doesn’t matter what its called because they’re all the same and one comes out every year or so. But my wife was watching this movie on tv, and I of course was doing something else and making fun of her for watching silly movies. And this scene came along and there was a contrived conflict where this character was thinking about giving up dancing for some such reason. The girl isw trying to talk him out of it and so on. Then before you know it, they’re doing a Fred Astaire routine down the street – which I’ll admit is pretty good. Now, you have to watch this clip all the way through, because at the end something happens that made me laugh so hard that I will never forget it. Its a very small thing and its pretty stupid. But it stuck out in my mind and still does.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO2IdqDOyPI

  enjoy.

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  Barry Bowman

  March 28, 2013 at 12:59 pm

  Larry!!! Can’t get enough of your podcast. I listen on the treadmill at my gym and people watch me chuckling like an idiot while I work out. Enjoy the Poetry Corner. Can you spout some Robert Service? Cremation of Dan McGee?

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  Muriel G

  March 29, 2013 at 9:50 pm

  On behalf of my dancing troupe, thank you for mentioning our name. We will all listen to your podcasts forever. By the way, have you cashed that check yet? ;>)

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  Nik Kordic

  April 23, 2013 at 11:03 am

  I wanted to share a story that this podcast reminded me of. When I was in college at UC Santa Barbara, I too worked in the dining commons in the back washing dishes and dealing with people’s left overs. In this case the “back” was underground and the sink area was surrounded by shelves that the regular staff would stack the used dishes on.

  Because we dishwashers were students, the staff was not the same from day to day, and we got to know each other in different shifts. My favorite shift was Fridays because the group of guys was the largest and the most fun. We would wash dishes like an assembly line for efficency, but instead of just laboring silently we would bang the pots, pans, plates, forks and knives like instruments and the guy with the best voice would belt out a tune. And this went on for weeks.

  Eventually, like you, we began to use the garbage disposal in a way that maybe it wasn’t meant to be used. At first it started out being used as another “instrument”, the gurgling sound marking the end of a song, but eventually we started just piling the food in, in greater and greater amounts. The sink was a giant inverse cone that lead down to the garbage hole and we started filling it up more and more every week, holding off until later and later in the shift to turn it on.

  On one of our last shifts the food was piled up over the edge of the sink and we turned it on and egarly awaited the massive suck that pull down the food quickly, but on this day something caught deep down in the belly of the disposal and shot back up, creating an eruption of food like a giant, reverse, garbage volcano! In my opinion, there couldn’t have been a better end to my time working that shift.

  I wrote in because I thought you’d appreciate that even in 2006 (when I was last in school) guys still do the same things. I’d never heard of anyone else doing what we were doing until I listened to your podcast and I thought I just had to share it. Anyway, thank you for creating such an intimate space on the internet every week.

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  Grant Young

  April 29, 2013 at 3:30 pm

  Let’s not forget Descarte’s brother Phillip.