What a Pickle! feat. Abi Thorn

If you enjoyed the Berlin dentists losing half their pensions, you might also enjoy that bavarian lawyers and doctors lost a lot of their pension, because their fund literally invested in a pyramid. The Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.

I cannot believe how happy I am that I've been lucky enough to have a community of friends to help me with transistion when we live under an NHS that refuses to help us. The fact that I've only got a shot at living because I just so happened to find a community is beyond fucked up and as Abi said, the NHS can shove that report up their asses.

It's ok Riley as podcasts are an audio medium (at least for podcasts not about engineering disasters... with slides) we won't even be seeing you at all!

Mid 20s? I thought Abi was 19

Having been stuck in a ridiculous loop with the GIC in the last 10 years in part because their ‘version’ of informed consent demands a document that I have reasons that I don’t want to have, I can absolutely confirm the point is not to give healthcare. It’s so stupidly inefficient and bureaucratic and cruel for the sake of it. The irony being the ‘women’s healthcare’ part that I’ve done recently has been by far the easiest part of the my transition and yet for most cis women is way too hard to access. 🙃 (purely the result of my area being basically the only one in the uk that has sensible healthcare policy and my current gp doing a reasonable amount of paperwork on my behalf even if I still find her very gatekeeping the other 50% of the time). I think the point about finding and caring for community is really important.

The loafer mentioned in the second half is awfully similar to the one used on people with disabilities in the US.

The German dentists convinced me, we live in a Pynchon novel

wrt trans healthcare, ty for doing this episode, but its a shame u werent able to get a trans guy on too as i wish our experience was represented more . if u ever want a case study id make a good one tbh lol, i was first referred to a GIC in 2012 in my teens, didnt get top surgery til age 30, & am likely to be waiting til im 40 or older to get lower surgery. happy to talk abt my experience if ur interested

The subscription to my interiority glasses lapsed. I woke up naked in a hotel room with a hangover. There's a hanged man in the backyard and I'm told I'm a detective. A union leader is helping me find my gun

In these trying times, do not forget the value of rage as a watch fire against apathy

AC grayling mention, I actually went to his uni lol

Well this episode sure depressed my pickle

A fun Vernon fact that I could have emailed to the mayor show instead of posting: California used to have a professional baseball league before the Dodgers and Giants moved west and destroyed it (as a major league). Because it was very regional, it could accommodate fun municipal hijinks. As a result, Vernon had a professional baseball team for a couple of seasons because you could buy alcohol there. (This was before nationwide Prohibition.)

that doctor in Fife has easily saved lives or made them much more livable as a result of her work. by contrast, Sandy Peggy's greatest life achievement is probably swabbing a particularly large amount of diarrhea off the floor with a mop. who's more valuable in the long run to the health service and the world as a whole?

but WHICH warhammer 40k genreslop fiction is riley reading on the tf lounge couch. riley did you read ashes of the imperium & if so what did you think of it

oh hey it's a guest Kill 10,000 James Mayors episode

Pynchonesque investment caper, dangerously close to the plot of Inherent Vice

"Everybody knows what resisting this in a meaningful sense looks like" I really don't think this is the case

Why do I feel so weird eating this madeline dipped in tea? Pickle: It reminds you of the madeline dipped in lime-flower tea your aunt Léonie gave you before church in the summers you spent as child in the town of Combray, the Square where you were sent before luncheon, the streets along which you used to run errands and the country roads you took when it was fine. Because you not only have an amazing memory but you're also a theme superstar, it makes you reflect on the fragility, power and irregularity of memory, the nature of beauty, found in light reflecting off a church steeple and the tortured struggles of love, desire, revulsion and jealously you saw play out between Mme Swann and Odette and your own struggle with homosexuality glimpsed through a window on Swann’s way. So good that's resolved, no need to work this out in writing.

That was some entertaining horrifying emotional whiplash.

As a point- referring to child abuse images as ‘pornography’ can help downplay what the images are, which is child sex abuse. It’s important to remind people what child abuse images are- not pornography but abuse.

You'd think an organization of German dentists would have an easier time finding their own Cronenberg

“I want your humiliation. And the coterie of rapists and degenerate gamblers that I've surrounded myself with are all going to oink and honk and clap in appreciation, because ultimately that is the orgy.” I could not have better characterized the experience of just watching his press conferences now.

Taking extra care not to make any ill-judged comments on financial matters before my root canal.

the emotional whiplash between ‘there is no compromise on trans existence on either side’ and ‘but as you told me when i came out, it’s a war worth fighting’ 😭😭😭😭😭

X if truly the everything app. Now Grok image editing is behind a pay wall, they have their own Little St James Island

Oh, it's Abi!... oh no... it's England...

“It’s not a personality, it’s a tone” is exactly how you could describe Musk

Patrick O'Donovan's statement make a lot more sense when you bear in mind that he has spent his entire career imitating the old men of Fine Gael: he tries to avoid saying anything that will commit him to one position or another; he approaches foreign direct investment in a 'Parcels From Amerikay' manner, with US multinationals as a benevolent uncle who must be shown deference and gratitude lest they stop sending presents home at Christmas; and he doesn't seem to properly understand anything invented after 1990.

its also very prescient that the (fake)product being advertised at you in december of 2025 is the idea that the thing that'd holding you back is you feeling regrets for the things that you've done, just as IDF-style death squads are being unleashed on US cities to kill anyone that looks like their mom did when they were 12

There's a kind of mid episode of Strange New Worlds called Among The Lotus Eaters where the aliens have a society stratified between workers who forget everything every day, and guards/kings who get to remember. HK talking about how, for these tech guys, interiority and memory are things that get in the way of being a good worker reminded me of it. It's why they're so horny for AI, because they think it's will give them a worker who only ever remembers what they want it too remember.

The villain in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is a dentist who runs his spectre-style criminal network/pension fund from a yacht. I don’t know if it’s life imitating art or if reality is just folding back over itself again.

that’s horrible that your only recourse to escape assignment to an abusive GP is to move to a different area

They had to end the episode before it got really juicy, and also would have gotten them hauled into court. I love the U.K. and our loved ones there, but the “freedom of speech” thing is kind of nice. It has its downsides, like the “racist hotline,” which was, for a long time answered by a guy whose voice sounded like that of Elmer Fudd. But what makes this freedom particularly warm and comfy is that you can talk trash about the people you really want to in the moment you really want to. You don’t have to wait for all that messy stuff like “proof,” “prudence,” and “ hindsight” to get sorted.

it rules that as the New Colossus is rising and people are dying in the streets my favourite news podcasts are doing feature-length audio dramas about politics in the year 2066, riff-heavy ep recaps of a forgotten procedural drama, and news hits about idiosyncratic regional financial mismanagement

Abi didn’t get nearly enough credit for her “coming back to bite him” comment about the Lead Dentist in Charge

Dentistry is also a hot bed in many countries - of Scientologists.

Eternal sunshine of the groked mind

Thanks for shouting out the Roosevelt High raid — i think it was targeted due to it being the high school of the Minneapolis teacher’s union president, and that it’s so close to George Floyd Square

🥒