ROX #29: Our Drinking Problem

B: The title of this episode still cracks me up. “Our Drinking Problem.” We'd made enough of these shows now that we were making fun of our own image. In-jokes are always the best.

The joke here, of course, is that our real drinking problem was not liquor but coffee.

Midway through the episode, J opens a packet from Tom Flynn that makes reference to “that stunt at the mall.” Oops, J decides it's not wise to discuss that on the air. But I suppose that now it can be revealed. Back in 1992, we attended several meetings of a group called the Have Fun Club, as did Tom Flynn. Among the activities discussed by these neo-Situationists was the idea of staging a faux disaster at the local shopping mall. Imagine people in lab coats or biohazard suits with wildly clicking Geiger counters and you begin to get the idea. This was years before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I'm sure you could be arrested for even thinking about such a stunt today. In any event, we never staged the event.

There's another in-joke buried at the very end of this bloated monster of a show. I'd observed that J's favorite coffee mug had a number of codes written on the bottom by the artist who made it, presumably serial numbers or glazes or something technical. I copied these codes onto the bottom of my mass-manufactured mug. I don't know what J made of this, but I thought it was hilarious.