Title: Car Porn

acast Time: 1:10:35
Youtube Time: 1:09:58

Original Record Date: Unknown
acast Publication Date: December 11, 2019
Youtube Publication Date: December 10, 2019

Please Welcome a Man
Who is worried that he might have let down a squirrel.

Acronym Modification
Richard Herring’s Lofty Singing Tenderly Podcast

Cool Kids
I was hanging out at Roly’s Fudge Pantry, which I was disappointed to discover actually sells fudge. And Roly said…

Guest Best Known
For his portrayal of Richard Richard in The Way It Is.

Audience

Better or Worse than Last Week: Better
Like or Unlike Wikipedia: N/A

Member Member Note
Unnamed has had an enema
described it as “good” and gave further description of the enema process

Emergency Questions

If you could take one item from any museum or art gallery – and you’re allowed to take it home with you – in the world, what would you take?

Well, my favourite painting at the moment is one I encountered randomly and unexpectedly at the Prado in Madrid recently. We went there because my wife is a big fan of Velázquez and had just read a book about Velázquez’s painting that went missing for maybe a couple of hundred years and then was recently discovered. And she thought this book was amazing and so we had to go and see the painting. And tucked away, just unexpectedly, there was a painting called Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God – the lamb being sort of tied up and ready for slaughter – that had been on the front cover of a cd I have of Bach’s Matthew Passion. And I love the cd over but I’d ever known  where the painting was or anything, and then there it was and it was absolutely breathtaking. And it wasn’t very big; it was about that big *makes foot-long measurements with hands* and bathed in a gold light. It’s a really beautiful painting, so I might have that. Or I might have the mermaid from the Booth Museum on Dyke Road, which is a very impressive fake artifact from the South India Seas, I believe.

What’s your favourite type of dinosaur? Would you like one as a pet? What would be the potential drawbacks?

Is that a foreskin joke? Favourite dinosaur. Yeah, I mean, I keep anticipating the questions. I think the thing with dinosaurs is you wouldn’t necessarily want your favourite one as a pet, ’cause the thing that makes them your favourite when you’re young is their fearsome nature, isn’t it? Which also rules them out. *RH notes that as they were pets you would be able to command them.* Oh, okay, they show sort of loyalty to you and you alone. Imprinting, I think it’s called, isn’t it? Well, I was never that fond of T-Rex; I always thought he looked ridiculously disproportioned. He was like a, you know, made up by some sort of sadomasochist. I don’t know. I quite like the larger sort of veggie ones, really. I think quite a gentle, placid – a stegosaurus possibly. I quite like the fact that they have two brains; that always fascinated me. Apparently they have a tail brain; although that, no doubt, is one of those things that has been since disproved. All the good stuff about dinosaurs gets, “No, actually that’s not true. That didn’t happen.” But, yeah, stegosaurus. Who apparently – this is the top dinosaur fact – you might have heard this one but it gets shared quite often on social media – the time difference between us and the T-Rex is less than the time difference between the T-Rex and the stegosaurus. Did you know that? Does anyone want to whistle appreciatively at that? […] I’m not a huge fan of dinosaurs anymore. Obviously I was when I was a kid. But I think at some point it’s like a lot of things. You realize it’s just thick. And I’m not that interested anymore in things that are just thick, you know?

Do you think that the voice in your head that you perceive as yourself is the one making the actual decisions, or is there a shadowy other you for whom the you voice is just a toadying spokesperson who never speaks but makes all the actual choices that the you voice then has to justify to you?

Confabulation. I mean, normally that would sound quite neutral, but off the back of the right-wing politics [conversation] it sounds like an accusation, doesn’t it? The separate hemispheres and the, “Oh, you guys are hilarious” and all that stuff, yeah. Yeah, I worked on a sitcom once where a man – he was a scientist – he had the hemispheres of his brain deliberately separated so he could play himself at chess. And you just have to have – apparently you can do that and then you don’t tell what the other one is doing and thinking and planning. Um, but there was a famous experiment, wasn’t there, that demonstrated that, um, people were making decisions – thinking they’d made decisions – half a second after they had. And this very week, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, it’s been refuted. It’s part of the reproducibility crisis that has conflicted the whole of psychological and social investigations for the last fifty years. None of these experiments worked. And that one turned out to be bollocks as well. So free will is back on the agenda. I do think though, that as David Hume said, that the passions are king and reason can only ever and should only ever aspire to be the slave of the passions. Your passions determine your course of action and reason, your rational mind, your intelligence, is there to justify it afterwards. Essentially, the more intelligent you are, the more capable of hypocrisy you are. That’s all it is.

Have you ever seen a ghost?

Oh, that is quite a good one. Didn’t see that coming. Uh, no pun intended. No, I don’t believe I have. But it’s quite a divisive issue in my family. My aunt Margaret, who is also Christian, which is supposed to eliminate the use of ghosts, I thought. But yeah, church ghosts, really fierce. And if this conversation comes up at Christmas, as it usually does, you know, there’s no laughing or joking around about ghosts. She saw them and she saw the ghost of her father sitting on the end of her bed on the night he died apparently, to tell her he was going. ‘Cause she’s the daughter, I guess. Yeah, no, so I’ve never seen, I’ve never really felt paranormal activity. But I have been with a dog that seemed to react to something like that. A lot of ectoplasm on the dog. Yeah, it wouldn’t go into a certain room. *RH ponders whether dogs see dog ghosts.* That’s a good question. Well, the Hound of the Baskervilles was the ghost of a dog, wasn’t it? It turned out not to be, but maybe that was the ingenious [unclear]. No, I mean that whole thing – that’s the first time when things get complicated in heaven, isn’t it, when dogs go to heaven. But you get all your dogs at once, ’cause they might not all get on. *RH states that this is the same for spouses.* Yeah, well you know which one, isn’t there, if you’re honest. We’d all be able to pick out the heaven squad.

Notes

Recorded at the Brighton Theatre Royal.

RH notes that he interviewed SE once before in Edinburgh.