#Found a really cool music podcast which led me to this quote

[wipeawaythosetearsofbloodagain]

"There are only three kinds of pianists: Jewish, homosexual, and bad"

Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989)

[goodticklebrain]

Q&A August: Kevin Condardo and Dan Beaulieu

It’s the final installment of Q&A August! I hope you’ve had fun meeting some of my Shakespeare friends. I know I’ve had a lot of fun asking them these questions, and I’m definitely going to do this again some time, as I have SO MANY MORE cool Shakespeare friends for you to meet. But for now, let’s turn to my closers, my last and least, Kevin Condardo and Dan Beaulieu, the bros behind one of my favorite Shakespeare podcasts: No Holds Bard!

I was skeptical about No Holds Bard at first. Launched in 2015, it appeared to be two white dudes yelling about Shakespeare at each other, which did not particularly appeal to me. I didn’t even start listening to it until I met Dan and his partner in crime, Christine Penney, in person at the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in 2016. Tousled and bewhiskered like a pirate, Dan was overwhelmingly brash, loud, unruly, obnoxious, insufferable… and somehow inexplicably charming. After meeting him, I finally started listening to No Holds Bard and found that the podcast was also brash, loud, unruly, obnoxious, insufferable… and somehow inexplicably charming.

Two things are immediately apparent upon listening to No Holds Bard: Dan and Kevin (his slightly less unruly and obnoxious co-host and the brains of the operation) both know their Shakespeare and love their Shakespeare. Their highly entertaining arguments and bro-y banter are backed up with serious knowledge of Shakespearean text and performance, and, in spite of their best efforts to contrary, you can actually learn a lot from them. Also (and this is important) they regularly make me laugh out loud.

In 2017 Kevin and Dan invited me to be their first ever guest on No Holds Bard. With some trepidation, I agreed and discovered that Kevin and Dan in real life are EXACTLY THE SAME as they are on the podcast. Recording with them was a blast, and since then I have thoroughly enjoyed keeping up with the podcast (occasionally falling months behind and then frantically trying to catch up) and interacting with them and other No Holds Bard listeners (a.k.a. Bardflies) on Twitter.

And so, it gives me great pleasure to present that charmingly insufferable duo, the joint top bananas of No Holds Bard, Kevin and Dan!

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

KEVIN: I’m Kevin Condardo: host of the NO HOLDS BARD podcast (The Shakespeare Podcast Shakespeare Would Have Listened To*), performing arts administrator, Boston sports fan, and lover of all things theater. I’m the managing director of the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company based out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I work on the business end of the Off-Broadway theater industry in New York City.

My first introduction to Shakespeare was a terrible production of Romeo and Juliet that I saw on a school field trip in eighth grade, most notable for everyone being in Elizabethan costumes and having Mercutio thrusting himself seemingly on every other word in a failing effort at convincing school kids that Shakespeare was making dirty jokes and is therefore relatable. I loathed Shx until my sophomore year of college, when I auditioned for Cymbeline in college because it was a shared audition for the play I really wanted to be in (Twelve Angry Men). I was required to prepare a Shakespearian monologue and so I memorized and performed it with a British accent (as a sophomore in college!!), and about ten seconds in my professor Deb Kinghorn stopped me and asked me what the hell I was doing, and I said Shakespeare, and she said no I wasn’t. Somehow I was cast as a boorish, fratty Cloten, and over the course of that production I fell in love with Shakespeare and never looked back.

DAN: Hey! I’m Dan Beaulieu: I’m an avid Shakespeare lover, performer, director, student of the game. I am CO-host and top banana on the aforementioned No Holds Bard podcast with my fellow CO-host Kevin. I am the co-founder and Artistic Director of Seven Stages Shakespeare Company, a former Ambassador for the Shakespeare Society in NYC, member of the internationally renowned Passion in Practice and The Shakespeare Ensemble (both helmed by the incomparable Ben Crystal), and frequent collaborator with the New York City based company Rude Grooms (led by the always lovely Montgomery Sutton).

Why Shagspeare? I deeply admire his sprawling exploration of the human condition, his probing of Magick and Witches, his Timelessness, and perhaps most importantly the fact that it IS in fact for everybody, if you let it be.

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

KEVIN: It’s more of an incredulous cackle than a laugh, but...after the Richard / Lady Anne scene, after we think we’ve seen the bunch-back’d toad bare his soul in expressing his love for his lady, he tells us “I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long” - cueing the audience to hopefully boo and hiss - after which Shakespeare gives him “What?” to respond to the disgusted audience. What a joy for an actor! (And if you have a Richard that doesn’t elicit at least one gasp on that line and thus has no audience members to give that “What?” to, you know you’re in for a long evening of theater.)

DAN: I think Petruchio’s entrance to the wedding, when costumed properly, is pretty hilarious. I also get a good chuckle out of “That’s a shelled peascod” from King Lear. Something about the phrase “Shelled Peascod” just gets me. Hamlet’s sardonic humor in the scene leading up to The Mousetrap is also stacked up with great laugh lines.

KEVIN: Do you mean country matters?

3. What's a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

DAN: As a raging egoist, I’ll share my favorite anecdote from a performance I was in. I was playing Titus and in the scene where I lose my hand I was given a messenger bag to carry around with me. They actually had me carry it for the whole first half of the play so it wouldn’t be weird when I had it in this scene. The dummy hand was stored in there so when the “theater magic” moment happened I’d dip the hand out of the bag and TADA! I’m handless! Well, one night the hand fell out of the bag several moments before it was supposed to be cut off. I jumped on the hand like a fumbled football and took my rant from the floor of the stage. (It was a three quarter thrust, 70 seat black box so there wasn’t anywhere to hide.) After the show, several members of the cast commented on how I was “really feeling that scene”, not realizing I was not feeling it at all...I was simply scattering to figure out a way to justify a random hand lying on the ground moments before the audience would see it again.

KEVIN: When I was a company manager at Shakespeare in the Park in NYC, it was my responsibility to cancel or hold the show in case of inclement weather - which meant my “job” all summer was to sit in the back of the house and watch every performance while refreshing about five different weather apps and calculate if we were going to be able to get the show in. During The Merchant of Venice, we were flirting with a rainstorm all night - the sky looked very ominous from the start but nothing had fallen, even though I and the entire audience knew it was coming. The weather held all evening, up until Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…” at which point, the gentlest rain you ever felt began to droppeth from heaven, allowing Portia to turn her palm up to feel the rain fall and the entire crowd to “ooh” in unison. Goosebump city.

4. What's one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you've either seen or would like to see?

KEVIN: I’m no director, but I’d love to see an As You Like It set around 1910, where the music at the court is all Sousa marches and barber shop (basically The Music Man), and then when they go to the country you have the same musicians and instrumentations playing Jelly Roll Morton and the jazz and dixieland that was exploding at the same moment. (Artistic directors: I’ll be waiting by the phone for my call.)

DAN: I called you to do this several years ago, but...musicians.

I’d like to direct a production of Twelfth Night in a very large warehouse immersive experience where the central design conceit is a House of Mirrors….possibly around Halloween or in Coney Island during the winter. Full creep zone. Similarly, I think it’d be fun to do an As You Like It in a corn maze or a Jacobean influenced pageant production of Midsummer Night’s Dream as a haunted hayride that starts around 6pm and goes til midnight, getting scarier and scarier as the night goes on. Bring the little kids early for fun fairies and come back at 11pm for the weird ones.

5. What's one of your favorite Shakespearean "hidden gems"?

DAN: I’m a sucker for the fact that when Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time their exchange is a shared sonnet. It’s not necessarily “hidden” but I love when I see a production that is clearly “going there” with that moment.

KEVIN: I talk about it all the time on the podcast but I LOVE the King of France in All’s Well that Ends Well. So deferential, kind, funny, but also strong and forceful when required - along with some endlessly quotable lines. Perhaps more “underrated” than “hidden gem?”

DAN: I like that we both just couched our answers in “this isn’t exactly what you asked, but it’s the answer we’re going to give anyway”. If you enjoy this kind of response to questions, you’ll love our podcast!

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

KEVIN: Ironically and annoyingly, the Shakespeare quote I use the most is actually a misquote that got locked into my brain during my only professional gig - a production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Theater at Monmouth. There’s a sequence where Antony is waiting for an update from the field, and when the messenger arrives the actor playing Antony would turn violently to him and spew out “The news from Sicyon, ho!”. I loved the way he delivered the line and started incorporating it into my life every time someone entered a room with information that the rest of us were waiting on. Unfortunately, that line doesn’t exist - either the actor learned it wrong, or the director inverted it - and the actual line, “From Sicyon, ho, the news!”, doesn’t quite have the same allure.

DAN: I suppose I have to go with the two I have tattooed on my body, as they literally stay with me. They are “To Be” and “This above all, to thine own self be true”. I’m grateful that the verb in both lines is Be, which is deceptively simple. As an actor, it’s really what we’re asked to do---just be.

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

DAN: I used to make Pericles the butt of all of my “Shakespeare made mistakes too you know?!” jokes. Admittedly that was before I ever read it or worked on it. Now it is easily one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and one that I expect to see more and more of in the future. Disney is sleeping on a gold mine, though I hope Pixar beats them to it.

KEVIN: I have to ask: which play is the punchline to that joke now?

DAN: Henry VIII or Measure (come at me Measure lovers!)

KEVIN: For me, it’s the histories. A few summers ago, Seven Stages Shakespeare Company (helmed by Dan, Christine Penney, and myself) did a one-day, fourteen-hour reading of all eight of the linked history plays one after the other. After seeing the way the storylines feed so deeply one into the other (most particularly Margaret’s arc), I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see any one of them individually the same way again.

Mya interjects: The Seven Stages history day is definitely on my list of “productions I’m kicking myself for missing”. If you do it again, boys, let me know. I am available for any bit parts that don’t require replicating actual human emotions.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

KEVIN: I feel the deepest connection to the seconds-in-command, but to choose the one that encapsulates that the most I’ll say Gloucester from King Lear. Ever since childhood I’ve always considered myself a second rather than a first - I took pride in Little League being the catcher that served as the psychologist for the pitchers, I relate much more to Tom Hagen than to Michael Corleone, and in Shakespeare I’m much more connected to the person who holds the ear of the person everyone is looking at rather than being the center of attention myself.

DAN: I feel a deep connection to Jaques- especially his description of melancholy and the cynical way he sees the world around him, as witnessed in the Seven Ages speech. I fancy myself a fool and appreciate Jaques function in the play, both as a countervoice to the romanticized experience of Arden so many have, his dismay at the murder of the deer, and his departure from the rest of the group at the end.

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

KEVIN: I bare my soul weekly* on the NO HOLDS BARD podcast, which Dan frequently appears on as co-host / second banana. The show is available for download on iTunes and Stitcher, and also the full* archive is available on our website at noholdsbard.com. You should also follow us on Twitter @NoHoldsBardCast and on Facebook at Facebook.com SLAAAASSHHHH NoHoldsBardCast!

DAN: If you are the market for stuff about the top banana specifically check out my website at www.danbeauknows.com. Seven Stages has a ton of exciting projects coming up including season eight of ShakesBEERiences in NH and a full production of MacBeth this autumn near Halloween. If you want more luscious No Holds Bard Content, check out our Patreon at www.patreon.com slash noholdsbard. Also, I’ll be touring Japan with several dear friends, including Dylan Kammerer, Tim Jacobs, Andrew Codispoti, Ben Crystal and The Shakespeare Ensemble this September playing Hamlet in Hamlet, Banquo in MacBeth, and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. It’s a dream track with an incredible ensemble so if you are in Japan, come check it out!

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Kevin and Dan for answering my questions and helping me out this month! Confession: when I was scheduling my guests for this month, I deliberately penciled Kevin and Dan in for the last slot, not because I thought they’d be a particularly boffo ending (although, obviously, they are) but because I was sure they wouldn’t get their answers in until the very last second. To my shock, they send them in well over a week early, which, I can only assume, involved a great deal of personal sacrifice and discipline on their part. For that, and for constantly entertaining me as I drive around town, I am very grateful to them.

You can listen to me banter with Kevin and Dan on the following episodes of No Holds Bard:

#86 - Holy Sh*t It’s Mya Gosling

#138: The Fantasy Shakespeare Season Draft II

Also, do consider chucking a couple bucks their way each month on Patreon, as I do.

Thanks once again to EVERYONE who helped me out this month: Austin Tichenor, Kate Powers, Sam White, David Prosser, Kate Pitt, Christy Burgess, Kevin Condardo and Dan Beaulieu! I am so lucky in my friends and in my Shakespeare community. My life is still kind of crazy at the moment so I’m taking next week off, but I’ll be back after that (hopefully, and at last) with some new comics!

[idiottantrum-blog]

RV's Are The Fu$*ing Worst.

I was having some trouble deciding how I was going to start this post; a bit of writers block if you will. The introduction for a post really sets the tone for how the rest of it will read, you know? I tried a couple of different variations on opening paragraphs and ended up scrapping them as they just didn’t really capture the essence, the feel of what I’m going for. It got to the point where I even considered starting this post the same way a class president begins his graduation speech, before waxing poetic about the monumental accomplishment of passing 12th grade without getting pregnant or maid of honor opens her toast, before proceeding to ugly crying through a story about the summer she and the bride spent discovering themselves in Spain; by quoting Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.

Yes. I know. I’m the worst.

However, as I wallowed in a puddle of my own self loathing whilst typing ‘Recreational Vehicle’ into the search bar at the top of merriam-webster.com and considered throwing myself into a reservoir, I was saved at the last moment. I was saved, not because Messrs. George and Charles Merriam and Noah Webster had anything particularly enlightening to provide on the matter; they define recreational vehicle simply as “a vehicle designed for recreational use (as in camping)”, which is exactly as boring and shitty as expected.

No, the gem proffered up by merriam-webster.com came not in the form of their definition, but from the ‘Recent Examples on the Web’ section by way of this headline:

There it is. That’s what I was struggling to capture in my introductory paragraphs. The thing that exactly captures the true essence of RVs and sets the proper tone that I want this post to follow; A news article from Texas about a drug felon stabbing a police dog in the face.

If you were somehow unclear on my feelings about RV’s up to this point we aught to be on the same page by now.

But just to be really, totally sure I’ve been clear enough: RV’s are stupid and suck, there is literally no reason you should ever consider taking a trip in one. If you are thinking about renting an RV to take a road trip in. Don’t. You would be much better served doing an activity that has at least an outside possibility of a positive or enjoyable outcome; such as performing unnecessary abdominal surgery on yourself with dirty kitchen utensils.

I didn’t have a benevolent and wise blog writer to warn me before I made the mistake of taking an RV trip, but you do. Listen to my tale and live a fulfilled remainder of your life not going in an RV.

My tale begins in the long ago year of 2018. A simpler time. A time of innocent wonder and unspoiled joy. My wife and I decided we- actually hold on.

This is bothering me so lets sort something out here; I went back and read that article. The police dog that the drug lady stabbed is fine. Turns out the stabbing was done with some sort of a plastic handled eyebrow trimmer. Officer McBarker (my name for him, not theirs) was treated for minor injuries and returned to duty the following day. Frankly I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate for the rest of this story without knowing if the dog was alright.

Right, now that we’ve covered that, back to my story.

For our summer vacation in 2018, my wife was fretting a lot about spending too much money on a trip plus having to make arrangements for our dogs while we were away. My cousin who lives in Florida was going to be getting married in July, so we figured we would combine our vacation with that. Originally we were looking at Universal Studios in Orlando, since they’ve got that Harry Potter world and f*#k you if you don’t think waving wands at stuff and going to Diagon Alley the best way to spend your week off if you are a 30 year old man. Because of the aforementioned cost and dog separation anxiety however, we were getting nowhere fast with making any firm plans.

That is, until I had the idea that will haunt me to my grave. Fresh off our previous year’s camping extravaganza which you can read about in I Pooped in the Woods, I thought perhaps we could do something new and different for our vacation this year. It is at this point that I would really have appreciated the sage advice of some a#@hole on the internet to tell me and my ideas to f*#k right off. I didn’t get that though, which is why I proposed the idea of renting an RV and road tripping it down the east coast and back for our vacation.

It’ll be more inexpensive than dealing with airfare, hotels, resorts and boarding the dogs I thought. It’ll be a cool opportunity to see some of the country I thought. It won’t be the living embodiment of my worst nightmare set to the score of five hundred podcasts in a row, all while a tiny horned devil stabs me over and over again in the bank account, I thought.

As clearly neither of us is a sane person who can recognize a sh*t-turd of an idea when it’s dancing in front of us in an unbuttoned trench coat with it’s shriveled d*ck waving in the breeze, my wife was all about the RV idea.

We found a site that works kind of like Air BnB for Recreational vehicles in that people that own them can rent them out to vacationers. You pay a security deposit, then you pay a cost per-night to rent the RV and take it around camping and whatnot. Seemed simple enough, and most of the ones available were pet friendly, which meant we could take the dogs with us no problem.

Enter the harbinger of my doom. The 2009 Coachman Prism.

This is the RV we ended up renting from a private owner, lets call him Charles. We’ll call him that because that’s his name. Things started out innocuously enough, all of the preliminary things you might expect went without incident. We had a meetup with Charles to do a walkthrough of the RV so we’d know how everything worked and so he could explain the various ins-and outs of our rental agreement with us. Nothing out of the orinary: (x) amount of miles per rental day are included and anything over that is a few cents per mile, bring it back clean, bring it back with the sewage and grey water tanks empty to avoid extra fees, you have comprehensive insurance through the rental agreement and complimentary roadside assistance, so on and so forth.

Before the appointed trip we plotted a course that looked roughly like this, booking stays in RV campgrounds down the East Coast:

We rented the RV near our home, but we would start the actual road-trip out in York PA after attending a wedding we had out that way on the front end of the vacation. Two weddings, one on either end of our vacation? Yep. we’re at that annoying age where everyone we f&ing know is getting married and for some reason expects anyone else to give a sh!t about it.

(If you are one of the people who’s wedding I attended at some point in the recent past I of course don’t mean you. Your wedding was magical and unique and is the exception to the rule. It wasn’t a huge inconvenient chore and I didn’t hate every second of having to shout over the f*#^ing music in order to make small talk with a table full of strangers for three hours. Your wedding was a treasure.)

Our first official stop was Shenandoah National Forest, then we would make our way south visiting Virginia Beach, followed by a place in the middle of some insignificant woods in a town called Moncure North Carolina because it split the travel time up on the way to the next stop and North Carolina contains nothing of value to society. Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Another State Park near the Georgia/Florida border, and then the gulf coast of Florida for the wedding to finish the trip south and a straight shot back home to round out the vacation.

Guess where we made it to on that blue trip outline before things turned to sh*t?

The first day of our trip just happened to be the hottest day of the summer and apparently in all of recorded spacetime history because it was 110 degrees outside from about 9:30 am on.

By the time we pulled in to our campsite around 4:30 in the afternoon we had been out of range of any cell service for at least 40 minutes and it was so hot we were concerned there was a real possibility of the dogs getting heat stroke. We plugged in, hooked up and connected all of the do-dads for the RV and tried to get the AC going to cool it off. After about an hour of the AC running full tilt the inside of the RV had gotten down to about a cool and comfortable 185 degrees Fahrenheit which led us to become become convinced that in our infinite stupidity we must have been doing something wrong that the vehicle wouldn’t cool down. Since it was just as hot outside as it was in the vehicle, our concern for the dogs continued to grow until we packed all the sh!t back into the RV and drove towards civilization until we could get cell reception to call Charles to figure out what we were doing wrong.

Charles’ response was to comfort us with the fact that “it’s just like that” and to get the RV to cool down all you have to do is wait for it to not be so hot outside. Well f*#$ing thanks, Charles. Glad we' drove an additional hour and a half for the sage advice that we should just stew in our own taint sweat until the sun goes away so it won’t be quite so hot.

Maybe my expectations for the level of comfort in an RV were not set appropriately, and that’s on me. Maybe I was expecting to hang out in a comfy 71 degrees indoors even if it was roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface outside and that was unreasonable; but the casual nature with which Charles informed me that if it was hot outside it was just going to be sh!tty and hot in the RV when my wife was fretting over a pair of dogs so overheated they looked like partly deflated beach balls sort of pisses me off.

By the time we got finished with traveling, setting up and then disassembling the RV, driving back to cell service and turning around to go back to the campground we had exactly enough time to cook dinner in the fire pit and turn in for the night. In other words, day one of the RV road trip and things were shaping up to be a real party.

We had just enough time the following morning explore the campground and take a roughly 30 minute hike along the river. The campsite was nice, if sunburnt older folks with their shirts off, unleashed dogs and combination clothesline/satellite-dish/barbecue grill with underpants hanging all over them is your aesthetic. We lasted that 30 minutes before the heat and approximately 1,294,234,121,853,000.2 bug bites from mosquitoes forced us to pack it up and head on to the the next campsite.

On day two we traveled to our second stop, a state park near Virginia Beach. Upon arrival at the campground while I was going to check in to our spot at the ranger station, another couple of RVers checking in informed me the muffler on our vehicle was hanging kind of low. After we parked I called Charles and sent him a picture of the muffler and he confirmed that it didn’t look right and that I should call the roadside assistance that comes with our rental.

It was at this point I discovered that what they mean in all the information they give you about your “total coverage” and “free roadside assistance” is that you are totally covered and completely free to call their hotline and have a lovely conversation with someone about your broken down RV. If you want someone to actually f*#@ing DO something about it you are responsible for covering that out of pocket.

After about an hour on the phone convincing the people that, no, I could not make a service appointment at a local garage and bring it in to look at because I was on vacation in a rented RV and was supposed to be travelling five hours to North Carolina the following morning they agreed to send a service truck out to deal with the issue. We made an appointment for 10 A.M the the next day for them to come out since we were scheduled to be out of the campsite by 11 sharp and on our way.

At 11:30 the next day the service person called me to tell me they were fifteen minutes away. I told them I’d meet them in the parking lot outside the visitors center since we needed to vacate our campsite. This was when we started the RV up and one of the tire pressure gauges informed us one of our tires was mostly flat… F*#k. At least we already had a service truck on the way.

One hour and 80 dollars later we pulled out of that parking lot with both issues solved. Sort of.

First, apparently the muffler had been replaced fairly recently, but not done properly. Basically, it was suspended from the bottom of the vehicle by nothing more than a metal peg, rubber grommet and wishful thinking. the peg didn’t even fit all the way into the rubber grommet anyway so it was double sh*t. Here is a diagram:

Since he couldn’t actually do anything to properly fix a muffler installed by an incompetent donkey while in the parking lot of a campground, he just took a bunch of mechanic’s wire and strapped it on there to keep it in place for the duration of our trip.

As for the tire, he was pretty sure it was probably not punctured anywhere. He pointed out to me that there is a cover called a wheel simulator that goes over where the lug nuts are on the wheel. Its just a hubcap looking thing that protects the wheel. The one on the tire that was low on air was missing. This, he said, allowed the stem valve to wobble a bit and the cap to come loose, letting air out of the tire. He put air in it and sent us on our way.

Remember the bit here about this mechanic telling me that the wheel simulator was missing. Remember it forever. Burn it into your memory so that when you close your eyes and lay down to sleep tonight the last thought you have before drifting into the sweet embrace of unconsciousness is that in the summer of 2018 in the parking lot of a national park near Virginia Beach a mechanic pointed out that the cover was missing from one of the wheels of the RV that I rented from a man named Charles.

Here’s that map again, just so we’re all on the same page about the progress we’ve made on our adventure so far:

Any wild guesses as to how far we made it before we had problems again?

Go on, guess. I’ll wait.

By the time we got to our next campsite and gave the tires a chance to cool down, the tire pressure had dropped by about 10 lb from where it had been that morning after the mechanic inflated it.

So now we’ve confirmed for sure there is for sure something wrong with one of the tires and I’ve got to start the process over of making the 100% Free™ phone call for our comprehensive coverage roadside assistance team so that they can do us the huge favor of calling a local mechanic for us who we are then responsible for paying to fix someone else’s RV. I don’t know what portion of the fee that this RV rental site takes goes towards paying the salary of a person who’s job is to type “roadside mechanic” followed by a zip code into google maps; but it’s too f*@#ing much, I can tell you that.

Oh, and did I mention that on this, our second breakdown in two days, by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9 pm on July goddamn 3rd? Because by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9pm on July goddamn 3rd.

A mechanic got there at about 10:30 and determined that the stem valve for that tire was old and dry rotted, causing it to crack which was letting air out of the tire.

He then proceeded to fire up an air compressor that was roughly the same decibel volume as a medium sized aircraft taking off and use the worlds loudest pneumatic impact drill to remove our tire, take everything apart, install a new stem valve and replace everything over the course of about an hour during which time apparently every other resident of the RV park called management to complain that someone was doing their best impression of constructing a fly by night carnival in the dark.

Despite the fact that the entire process disturbed an entire campground of people by being so loud that we had to peel out of there at 6 am the next morning rather than face any of the other residents, that mechanic deserves a f@&ing medal for coming out that late on the eve of the Holiday, being super cool and then proceeding to charge me $35 for the whole thing. 30 bucks for the trip out, 5 bucks for the valve he replaced. In addition to his fee, I gave him a 6 pack of beer because I couldn’t risk giving him any more actual cash in case I needed it to keep paying mechanics for fixing this six wheeled recreational sh$t wagon.

I did some extensive googleing to weight the pros and cons of a few options we had at this point. It turned out to be too cost ineffective to just turn around and drive home, then buy a plane ticket to fly to my cousin’s wedding. The other option was to put a brick on the accelerator and drive the RV into a ravine. I figured it would at least be cathartic to see how well the comprehensive full total insurance policy that came with our rental handled the RV being destroyed and in a ravine. It seemed risky though; the available data suggested they would likely just call a place that sells RVs and offer to give them my credit card and social security number to help me out in purchasing the replacement.

It seemed the only option was forward.

The next four days passed without incident, and I mean that in both the sense that the f*#@ing RV at least didn’t break down again for those four days, but also in the sense that as it turns out an RV road trip just consists of Driving an RV for several hours a day and then being in a place with nothing to do except be in an RV for the rest of them

We made it to Florida and attended my cousin’s wedding, spending one night in a a pet friendly hotel since we couldn’t leave the dogs in the RV while we were at the event. It was, perhaps the single bright spot amidst the otherwise desolate hellscape of sh*t that was the rest of the trip.

Our return trip was to be a single shot straight up the coast and back home, with the option of breaking somewhere for the night if we determined it was too much to do all together. It should have taken us 17 hours to make the trip. It took 25.

Apparently when you’re in a turd bus that gets 12 miles to the gallon and have to fill up every fifteen minutes you don’t make great time.

By about hour 16 it was one in the morning and we were somewhere in one of the Carolinas. I had sent Emily to bed, insisting I would settle in for the long haul through the better part of the night. Fueled by rage, energy drinks and downloaded podcast episodes I was plugging my way north when a car comes speeding up behind us, pulls up alongside me and starts flashing their lights and honking.

Guess what didn’t hold up until we made it home? If your guess was THE F*$#ING MUFFLER AGAIN, YOU WIN!

I was not waiting at one in the morning on the side of a highway for someone to come a deal with this godforsaken disappointment on wheels one more time. I drove that f*$#ing RV five miles an hour in the shoulder for 1/4 of a mile to the nearest exit dragging the muffler on the ground until I could get into the parking lot of a closed down gas station where I proceeded to crawl around under the RV on my back and reattach the stupid mechanics wire to get the muffler back in place. I then drove in silence through the night and into the day for another nine hours listening for the sound of a muffler falling off and hitting the ground.

By that point, If I had seen even a slightly steep wash out on the side of the road that had aspirations of being ravine-like I’d have driven that b#tch right into it and ended it all. I did not though, so we arrived back at our house at about 10:30 the day after we left un-ravined.

One would have thought that the endless nightmare of the RV trip would be over once we finally got it home. Not so. We had to bring the vehicle back to Charles to fill out all the paperwork and do an inspection.

Charles, who not only did not show the slightest sign of empathy, or acknowledgement that he rented us an RV with bits literally falling off it. Charles, who agreed to deduct the costs of the roadside repairs I had to make to his improperly maintained vehicle from our bill as if he were doing us a huge favor. Charles, who hit us with every additional fee possible, several of which were incurred exclusively because we had to alter our itinerary because of the breakdowns.

Charles. Charles, who walked around to the tire that I’d had to have looked at twice and replaced at 11 at night on July 3rd and asked what happened to the wheel simulator and then insisted one of the mechanics had removed it and forgotten to put it back on and I had not corrected this mistake. The stupid cap that the first guy had specifically told me was missing. The cap that was pretty clearly missing in a picture we took of that side of the vehicle before the trip. The cap that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my natural life. That cap. He held our security deposit and then billed us $200 for a new one.

So yea. Charles.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself “We’ll, alright. You rented an RV that turned out to have a bunch of problems. Thats not indicative of the RV experience in general.”

Fair point, reader. Here are the other highlights of our RV trip with the breakdowns excluded:

Stopping for gas every 2 hours

Not being able to use any of the appliances because they trip the breakers in the RV.

Eating 80% uncooked potatoes for diner because you spent one of the nights in a place that doesn’t allow fires and as previously mentioned, the electrical system can’t run any of the appliances.

Hitting your elbows 400 times a day when trying to shower in a coffin with the water pressure of a dehydrated pervert trying to spit on you.

Sweating even while indoors.

Silence because your wife is asleep, since being unconscious is better than the living hell that is driving this f*@#ing RV and you can’t both sleep, so at least someone should get some reprieve from the suffering.

Camping, except shitty because instead of actually camping your in shitty RV surrounded by 400 other people who are either late middle aged couples with an aversion to shirts and a love of turquoise jewlery and not showering or families with twelve children under the age of 6 forcing you to question whether or not its biologically possible for a woman to have two euteri.

Road-tripping except shitty because your driving a bus sized living room that runs on diesel and tops out at about 60 and instead of something cool your destination is an RV park.

Touching a literal sh*t tube every day or so so that you can insert it into a hole in the ground that 1,235,243,676 other people’s sh*t tubes have touched since the last time anything resembling sanitation was conducted.

Sleeping on a pull out bed so bad it’t literally convex at a 45 degree angle in the center

Being ten feet from a toilet which is little more than a plastic covering over an open pipe to a sewage tank that you can smell from anywhere in the vehicle at any point in time.

Campfires

Even if the RV hadn’t broken down a bunch of times on us. An RV is nothing more than a combination of camping and staying in a hotel where you make a big pro and con list of both things, throw out all the pros, mash all the cons together and then take a sh*tty trip where everything is a worse version of the regular version.

Camp or don’t. There is no acceptable inbetween and anyone who tells you differently is wrong and should feel bad about their dumb incorrect opinion.

If you were ever considering taking an RV trip, you’ve now been adequately educated. You’re Welcome.

P.S

Charles came after us for a 4 dollar toll that apparently the EZ pass had missed about a month after we had settled all of our bills. And then just charged our credit card without waiting for me to respond to his message about the toll.

That’s how I found out from the review section of his rental page that a person who had rented the RV the weekend after us posted a low star review and commented, warning people to take pictures of everything on the outside of the vehicle before their rental, and wishing they had thought to do so.

Now, I’m not saying that’s proof that Charles knew full well about that wheel cover and is scamming people, who don’t notice it’s missing ahead of time and keeping party of their security deposit. But he’s definitely doing that and I hope someone drives his RV into a Ravine.

[ergohacks]

Today I looked like Iron Man. I walked to school to pick up Cass with a glowing LED circle in the middle of my chest. Not something that most people do every day but a red letter for me. The Woojer Strap had arrived. The Woojer are two very low-frequency speakers with an adjustable elastic belt that aim to add some physical feedback to recorded sounds. Put the belt around your waist or chest, hook it up to your phone and a headset, start playing music and it provides physical feedback. If you’ve ever been to a concert or a club and felt the music, you know what the Woojer aims to produce.

I tested it with music, podcasts, watching TV and films as well as gaming. Unsurprisingly it works best with music with larger amounts of bass, but it works quite well for anything with reasonable rhythm and variation. If you turn the strength up just right it added to almost all music.

It’s less impressive with spoken word. I tried listening to podcasts with it for a day but quickly abandoned it due to the lack of adequate feedback.  It does produce vibrations to the voice but it doesn’t really add to the experience. Watching TV or movies with it worked better, but it was a mixed bag depending on the content. Predator gets a big thumbs up, whilst sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory get a thumbs down. It was great for adding suspense to loud special effects, but canned laughter was pretty bad.

The final obvious and most promising use is gaming. The Strap isn’t precise enough and indeed isn’t designed to provide any sort of directionality but it does provide feedback that your body interprets surprisingly well. I found it worked best in game where I could turn the sound effects up high and keep the music low or off. Playing Overwatch and other first person shooters whilst wearing it made the experience more immersive. I would have liked a longer cable for this use, but sitting quite close I to the PC I could just about make it work.

It’s not an obviously useful gadget and most of us will not be interested in wearing it outdoors whilst listening to music, however, it does have some great potential for adding immersion to multimedia experiences. We’re expanding virtual reality experiences and 3D cinemas are very popular. Adding more sensory information to visual-audio content, whatever form it may come in, remains something we all want and enjoy. The Woojer packages a slice of this multi-sensory experience into a personal package.

It currently doesn’t add directionality, but the company seems to know that this is a market with lots of room to grow and are working on a Vest that can provide directionality for some time in 2018.

The Woojer isn’t for everyone. It’s not a household product, but it is a pretty cool gadget. It has the capacity to enhance atmospheric music, games, epic films and series. It brings the cinema a little closer to home and when paired with a high-quality headset, music comes along with added depth and dimension.  Recommended for audiophiles, hardcore gamers and movie buffs interested in creating the most immersive experience current technology can create.

Buy it from Woojer   + 

Price: ± $150 plus shipping – around £110 Included: Woojer Strap, Audio cable with 3.5mm jacks, Micro USB charging cable Instruction manual, Carrying pouch

Features

The Woojer is two boxes with an elastic belt. The front unit is a black oval with a LED circle. There is volume up and down buttons and sensation up and down and a central power button. On the base of this is the microUSB port to charge and an (unfortunately unlabeled) 3.5mm headset in and out. Following the belt along there’s a piece of rigid plastic, followed by an elastic belt with a spiral cable. Next is another square speaker unit which sits directly opposite the first unit. After that, there’s another elastic section with two side adjusters and a buckle.

Wearing positions

The belt is recommended to be being worn in three positions. Over the hips with one unit on the right and one on the left, over the chest with one in the middle of the chest and one in the middle of the back or over the shoulder like a bandoleer with one in the middle of the chest and one in the back.

Of the three I found that having it on my hips was most comfortable and required the least adjustment but it also gave me the slightly less sensation. It was also the only comfortable way to wear it while sitting. Around my chest gave me decent sensation but I had to adjust it every half hour or so as if I made it tight enough not to gradually slip down it was too tight. The final bandoleer position gave less contact and less sensation and managed to be the least comfortable.

Adjustment

When you first hook it up the instinct is to turn the sensations up to maximum. The instructions even say to turn the audio source up as high as it will go. Turning up the source makes sense but you then have to adjust the levels on the belt to a reasonable level. What you want is to enhance the sensation rather than overpowering it. Turning everything to max is impressive for five minutes until you realise you’re not really listening to the music but instead being vibrated.

Battery

The battery life is quoted at about 15 hours and I’ve found that to be realistic at mid levels of sensation. Turn everything up to the max and use the Bluetooth and it’s a bit less. Use the cable and have background sensations that are quite muted and it’ll do a bit more

Colour: Orange and black Materials: Plastic, elastic Connectivity: Bluetooth and 3.5mm Battery: Integrated non-removable rechargeable battery. Recharges via microUSB. 4.2V; 3.5Ah

Requirements

The Woojer needs an audio source which can be Bluetooth or via a 3.5mm line. I’ve had it hooked up to my phone and laptop via Bluetooth and via the 3.5mm line. I’ve also used it with an iPad and after a little experimentation with the Oculus Rift.

About Woojer

Woojer Inc. is an Israeli/American privately held company based in Herzliya, Israel and San Jose, California. They produce a range of haptic feedback devices and their first device in 2013 was a technological and reasonable commercial success.

We based our Ergohacks Verdict on six weeks of use. It was provided by Woojer in January 2018.  This article was first published on 21 February 2018.

The Woojer Strap Today I looked like Iron Man. I walked to school to pick up Cass with a glowing LED circle in the middle of my chest.