Episode 17: Hella Questions

Episode 17: Hella Questions

Greg and Wayne put each other on the hot seat with a Bay Area-adapted version of Stephen Colbert's famous Questionert — and things get weird fast. A regular listener gets lovingly roasted, a hippie named Manny makes an appearance, and the sandwich discourse gets contentious (Greg says something about Philly cheesesteaks that will not go over well with certain people). Wayne recalls a youthful stint in detention, Greg wears a carpet and nearly passes out, and somewhere in there a pony may or may not have been won. There are sharks. There are Africanized bees. A Monty Python figure stands alone.  The guys also tackle the deep questions: Is The Rock actually a good movie? What's the deal with that smell on BART? What 49er was also in Duran Duran? Is Colma the world’s more charming necropolis? They pay tribute to Willie Mays and the strange loneliness of celebrity, Chris Mullin's flattop, the redemptive power of Journey, and the very specific childhood betrayal of discovering that sparkling water from Calistoga is not what you hoped it would be. Plus: Wayne's cousins, Mrs. Doubtfire, Star Wars, 3D movies, Godzilla, and the eternal fog-shrouded pursuit of likes and subscribes. Happy to have you listen! Have fun.

Episode 16: Hella Trivial

It's trivia night at Hella Foggy, and it goes exactly as well as it needs to. Two people wander into a forest of anecdotes and find, against the odds, there is content to be found there. Huzzah! Wayne brings the questions. Greg brings the answers—some of them correct. From this modest premise, Episode 16 expands to encompass Information Theory, Bay Area geology, the actual crookedest street in San Francisco (not Lombard), apple pie with cheddar discourse, a sports legend encounter no one comes out of cleanly, Czech witch-related vocabulary, the full Mrs. Doubtfire extended universe, and a camping trip that is—yes—Bay Area content. Haight Street gets its moment. Xerox PARC gets its moment. A Star Wars reference lands, and is appreciated for exactly what it is. A listener writes in to say the hosts are clever. The hosts dispute this. The hosts may be right. Greg's past romantic partners are mentioned briefly, and with the appropriate level of discretion. There is bickering, mostly about the apple pie with cheddar thing. The bickering is minor, genuine, but it ends with no hard feelings.  Is anything truly trivial? Unclear. But very little here stays small for long. Enjoy the show.

Episode 15: Hella Spooky!

Ghosts! The Bay Area Has Got 'Em! Apparently! It's May. And yet here are Wayne and Greg, elbows-deep in Bay Area ghost lore — which, it turns out, is extensive, varied, and deeply weird. Is this an October episode that got lost? Did it slip through some kind of dimensional rift? The uncanniness is noted. The episode proceeds anyway. The haunted inventory is impressively broad: ghosts in lakes, ghosts in pubs, a ghost cop (constitutionally questionable), ghosts in toy stores, ghosts on the highway, and entire ghost armies of Native Americans. Wayne, heroically, tries to keep the spooky vibes alive. Greg, reliably, is a party-pooper. The ghosts, for their part, remain unimpressed. Other territory covered: sex cults, theoretically haunted Teddy Ruxpins, the Real People vs. That's Incredible! debate no one knew they needed, sports superstitions, witches, rubber chicken sacrifices, dumb ghosts, arguing constitutional issues with a ghost cop, Carol Burnett, a suburban pizza house that was apparently also a brothel, and whispered-about sightings of an earless deer. So very spooky. We hope you enjoy it.

Episode 14: Hella ‘90s

This one circles the ‘90s in San Francisco, when the ground felt loose and everything seemed briefly possible. Wayne and Greg move through the early dot-com years, back when the job market felt strangely overripe, like it might split open on its own. Companies appeared fully funded and half-formed, stocked with free beer and vague intent, then vanished 18 months later, leaving behind dead stock options and stories that don’t quite cohere. There’s talk of the texture of the time. Mouse balls gumming up. Offices that didn’t feel like offices. A kind of corporate nudity, equal parts liberation and farce. The City filling with arrivals, each carrying their own version of what San Francisco might be. Weird art scenes brushing up against startup culture. Burning Man before it calcified into something else. Somewhere in there, a small mystery. Herb Caen. A missing letter. The kind of detail that shouldn’t matter but refuses to disappear. It’s less a history than a pursuit. Half-remembered fragments, chased down alleyways that may or may not still exist. A couple of people trying to get their arms around a moment that was already slipping away while they were living it. If you were there, it might feel familiar. If you weren’t, it might feel like something you almost remember anyway.

Episode 13: Hella Gluttonous

Restaurants, or the long, dimly lit theater of appetite, status, memory, and mild gastrointestinal regret. We settle into the cracked vinyl booths and low-stakes grandeur of old man restaurants, where time slows, portions don’t, and a chilled fork arrives like a small, unnecessary miracle. Is it luxury, or just a habit that refuses to die. Either way, it becomes a kind of thesis. Wayne, sensing an opening, drags in Star Wars with the confidence of a man who knows the bit will land whether it belongs or not.  There’s a prolonged, faintly adversarial inquiry into whether a prime rib house is meaningfully distinct from a steakhouse, or just a specialized dialect of the same language. Greg recounts a self-inflicted Christmas lunch disappointment, a slow-motion collapse that could have been avoided with even minimal foresight. Wayne offers a poignant glimpse into a life without proper toys, featuring one of his many cousins. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Greg gets punched in the head. The story is told with the clarity of someone still slightly surprised it happened. Wayne, undeterred, drifts into a near-religious meditation on the best fried chicken in the city, as if describing a place that may or may not exist anymore. There’s ice cream. There’s a bar in the Lower Haight that feels like it was designed after someone misremembered *Alien* during a fever dream. Tiki bars surface, as they always do, equal parts escapism and residue. No reservations. No conclusions. Just the check, eventually.