I’ve got it! Invent a light bulb that prints money!

For the past month, Floor 12’s R&D department has been s quietly festering with creative energy. We’ve been putting our minds together for big plans, and for once not dedicated to building another deathray. We’re not saying these are get-rich-quick schemes. They’re really more aquire-wealth-expediently schemes. Wait, not schemes. Ideas. Plans!

This episode we foolishly reveal all of our Million Dollar Ideas.

To make up for this, we are currently seeking out the oldest living humans to harness their innovation. Our grandparents kept telling us how they used to get a soda for a nickel in their day. A million dollar idea from 1920’s would be worth its weight in saffron today (figurative weight)! We should smuggle whisky across the border! Invest in some silent films! These ideas have aged like a fine bottle of wine.

In the mean time, you can get in on the ground floor. Our pasta-trough restaurant “Marinara’s Trench”. Our advent calendar of organic waffles from the local waffle farms. Our…idea to marry a nice Jawa doctor or lawyer. Yes, Floor 12 is an enterprising, innovizing, incentivizing – synergizing – polarizing, notarizing company on the grow. The LLP with the EXP, the INC with the Fly MC’s, the LTD with the LSD. Oh yeah, guess we’re selling that, too.

Yet another Million Dollar Idea!

Download: Episode 26: Million Dollar Ideas

Answer the riddle incorrectly, and you will be sealed within the tomb for eternity with a Blu-Ray of “The Mummy”. It’s not that bad, the film is an enjoyable romp and there are tons of great new bloopers on the disc.

What defines ant “personhood”? If you are free in your mind, how can you truly be a prisoner? When I talk about the colour red, are we describing the same thing? We are so deep, man.

Some say we have no free will, that our paths are all pre-determinted. That may be true, but there is one thing you can choose your own of: adventures! This week, our heroes venture off of Floor 12 for not one but TWO adventures:  “Prisoner of the Ant People” and “The Mummy’s Tomb” in an hour-long spectacular.

Ryan reprises his role as Diesel: a half-halfling, half-elf with a crippling addiction to dragonsweed and newly-awakened interest in tiny ant bondage. He uses his minstrel skills in taverns across the land to clear out rooms and find himself the best seat.

BJ takes on the role of D. Lawson. David? Dweezil? Derek? We can’t remember. He is a forensic accountant, brought in my Floor 12’s mysterious parent corporation to perform some forensic auditing. Hopefully with his help we’ll have to spend less money on coffins, or at least find a way to use them as tax writeoffs.

Spencer remains the omniscient narrator whose sagacity is only eclipsed by his capriciousness. He continues to play himself for this episode. He paints word pictures, he plays word music, he writes word words – he is the one who holds this entire adventure together. Spencer, stop napping, you’re destroying the world again!

There Will Be Blood, There Will Be Bickering, and There Will Be…the Choosing of [Our] Own Adventure!

2!

Download: Episode 25: Choose Your Own Adventure 2

Unfortunately, Utopia doesn’t have rent-control. Also, we have to share it with bedbugs. There’s nothing we can do, they’re sleeping with some pretty important people.

Congratulations Ground-Dweller! For your family’s exceedingly law-abiding behavior, you have been chosen to ride social elevator up to the utopian Floor 12. No longer are bands of raiders swooping in with their hoverbikes to steal fabrics from Fabricland. No longer do mutants congeal from the leaking sewer goop oozing from your sinks, stealing away your siblings and sandwiches. No longer will the radioactive dust dance around your skeletal frame, whispering half-truths about the Great War and the Council that lives on the roof. Ignore that dust!

Yes, you have been selected to ride the elevator up all the way to Floor 12. Grab a bottle of Fruitopia, you see it cleverly rhymes with the utopian condition of your new home. You’ll find a lot of cleverness around here like that.  Here you will find our residents happy and healthy – no one around here is using their family member’s dismembered fingers to lance their own boils! Would you like some caviar pizza? Care to watch a secret season of Breaking Bad? Care for a complimentary elbow massage? What, you’ve never had your elbows massaged? Your poor dear!

The only condition of living in this paradise is that you have to listen to Episode 24: Utopia.

Wait, you won’t?

You’d rather see your spouse eaten by the Ground-Floor frogmen? You’d rather have internet pop-up ads invade your real life? You’d rather have the radioactive dust whisper rumours about your spouse and that ooze that comes in through while you’re at work?

But it’s a really good episode!

This happens every time.

Download: Episode 24: Utopia

We’ll be sending out copies of this on Laserdisc to all of our iTunes subscribers who don’t yet own a copy. Joke’s on us – of course you all already do.

It’s been so long, loyal listeners. As the world turns, we have been resting in our trusty cryogenic chambers to wait out of the long winter.  Spencer brought some audiobooks on Heidegger with him – it helps put him to sleep. BJ brought some meticulously-highlighted law school notes – he takes naps when he thinks he has a lot to do. Pretty sure Ryan was hotboxing his cryo-chamber, which is actually what he thought the whole thing was about. He slept well too.

But We’re Back (aDinosaursStory) and better than ever. Like Abraham Lincoln after he lost his election (plus another seven – crazy, right?), we’ve gotten the band back together. Lincoln is on sax, he insists on playing ska.  Ryan is on lead rhythm guitar, Spencer is on lead bass, and BJ is on lead paint, which still makes him more useful than Sid Vicious.

Floor 12 is back, babies! Like Lazarus, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, season 2 of Floor 12 has arrived. Who will hook up whom? Whom will fight who? With whom will we find someone to teach us how to use “whom”? Stay tuned!

Download Episode 23: Comeback!

the more it looks like a spaceship, the better the party limo

Put the kids to bed, put away your sundials, be wary of vampires – you guessed it: it is night-time at Floor 12: After Dark.  We’re going to the club, so get in the Stretch Armstrong of limousines as we head off for the Greatest Night of Our Lives, just like every weekend.

Nice ride, huh? Don’t want to party on an empty stomach, so look back a few seats into the limo’s kitchen where Kevin, our authentic Vietnamese chef is making authentic pho – hope there’s no speed bumps!

Don’t want the energy to wane before we party, let’s put Finding Nemo on the Blu-Ray! Keep those feet relaxed for the dancefloor, put on these party slippers. They’re lil’ bunnies because that’s how we gonna get laaaaaaid tonight!

Actually, come to think of it, it was strange that once we went into that limo door we followed a long hallway and went up a set of stairs. At first we thought limos were getting bigger, but…this is Floor 12. We’re back at home!

Kevin, you prankster! Now we’re on the couch in our jammies watching Pixar films, eating pho.

This is the Greatest Night of Our Lives!

Download Episode 22: A Night on the Town

typical pyramid of hate. they should be imprisoned for all the ills they cause. then we should paint slogans on them then bring out the wrecking balls! we hate pyramids of hate!

Welcome to the dark lair of Floor 12 – where evil magicks flow from our marrow, where hatred lies in our very sinews. On the walls of the antechamber lie portraits of what we despise – a picture of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a photo the tape player that chewed up our mixtape for Julia, the receipt from Best Buy from when they wouldn’t let us return the tape player. Come back to us, Julia!

We have let the dark side overcome the better angels of our nature. We have become servants to our rage, thrashing impotently against the world’s weighty indignities. Now our only joy is in our hatred, which means we’re finally enjoying reruns of Two and a Half Men, finally eating dill pickle chips, finally renewing our subscription to the Conservitute. God we hate those guys!

That guy at the bar with the tribal arm-band tattoo trying to pick fights with the strangers next to him because they support an opposing sports team? He’s our best friend now. We love that drunken, boorish oaf! Without him to despise, our lives would have no center, no meaning. Thanks Greg!

The podcast that you love to hate finally loves to hate. We’ve turned into gnarled husks of humanity, seething with a blind antipathy to all perceived injustices.

Julia, listen to our mixtape!

Download Episode 21: Haters

Blast! 6 tons of aluminum, 3 miles of reel-to-reel magnetic tape, 80 000 transistors – and all it can do is love!?

This week, Floor 12 rolls about in the dustbin of history. Laying down with the obsolete, we surround ourselves with HD-DVD players, flip  phones, antibiotics and castaways from North American manufacturing sector. We’ve installed sundial apps on our phones and abacuses on our tablets. We got a fresh pair of bell-bottoms, which we found under a pile of phone books behind the disused Blockbuster.

• Spencer opens up an artisanal VCR recording business. Hand-cut, that late night recording of The Fugitive has almost no commercials
• BJ plays old computer games, attempting to find that most obsolete of emotions in his adult life: joy
• Ryan rails against the archaic recitation of The Lord’s Prayer in Ontario Legislature. Why not something more current, like The Datacloud’s Twerk, or District Supervisor’s Sext? Something that speaks to the modern man!

Yes, Floor 12 has an uneasy marriage with modernity. Maybe because marriage is an outmoded institution, or maybe because we’re old-fashioned dudes who simply cannot process their emotions. Strong, silent types are the perfect podcasters. They don’t make them like us anymore.

Download Episode 20: Obsolete

Tied up in a spiked box as a woman from the 80’s stands overhead with a mysterious white liquid? Usually we pay good money to do that, why would we want to escape!?

Your straightjackets will never contain us, your three-year phone plans will never bind us, a long-term and lucrative career will never trap us! This week, Floor 12 escapes!

• BJ has tunnels his way out of his room with a whittled-down spoon. He grabs extra blankets from the laundry wing and found a crawlspace between the walls. He is going to take a long nap, which is really the ultimate escape.
• Spencer becomes a “Rockstar for a Day!” leaving his dreary life to experience his dream of being on the stage. He stuffed a cucumber down his pants (which has been doing for years), flirted with a groupie (his girlfriend), taken drugs (Dayquil, don’t want to get too groggy!) and learned leave this world and enter the world of the song. That song is “Man, I feel Like a Woman”, so he’s escaping his gender too.
• Ryan moves to England today, so that’s neat.

This will be an episode to remember. Like a catchy song, it will act as an earworm, burrowing into your skull. Soon, it too will escape by eating its way out of your brain, which hopefully will allow you to escape the shackles of life.

Don’t say we never did anything for you!

Download Episode 19: Escape

pictured: French-Algerian intellectual Albert Camus. BJ thinks he looks like a sailor

At Floor 12, we love to spend our sunny Sunday afternoons BBQing while gazing into the black, gaping maw of existence and reveling in the chaos that envelops us all. Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say – veggie burgers, anyone? This grey, meaningless existence floats along with seconds, minutes and eternities dancing together in the slow fandango of mortality – so Charlene brought sangria pitchers!

Look, we know you came here for laughter. We both know that that rattling cackle that echoes through your bones seems like the only real thing that can stave off the cold indifference of the universe.

Well you’re out of luck, because this week we are looking unflinchingly at the absurdity of modern man through the lens of French literary figure Albert Camus – all while cooking up bratwursts on the grill.

You will be left feeling queasy, uneasy, unfulfilled, and uncertain about your place in an uncaring world. Blame the food – we probably shouldn’t have been so cheap with the meat.  Ah, but life is suffering!

Download Episode 18: Absurdism

somehow this wasn’t photoshopped

We’re salt of the earth people. Even though we’re called “Floor 12”, don’t think of us as being in some ivory tower, lording over the common people with our sophistication. No, come in, take a look – we’re just like the common folk. Here have a seat – in one of loungy bean bag chairs. Like in the den of the contented proletariat, this Tibetan School artisanal stitching is made with the leather of cows who spent their entire lives sitting on leather bean bag chairs.

Ah, your ears are perking. That’s the music of the America’s Beating Heart – Kid Rock. Of course, this was is the song cycle adaptation collaboration between Phillip Glass playing echoing his training from the Tibetan School, joined by the Ladies Throat Singing Auxiliary. The post-modern dissonance when they bellow “bawitdaba da bang a dang diggy diggy diggy said the boogy said up jump the boogy” is simply haunting.

And now that you’re comfortable, please try some of our hors d’oeuvres – uh, we mean, finger foods.  Try these corndogs, made from the finest-picked selection of whatever goes inside a corndog. Have a sip of Organic Faygo, which uses real cane sugar from the sap of a Brazilian mahogany tree. We genetically modified it so it could do that.

Problem is – our desk is always so sticky.

Download Episode 17: Low Brow