Jake

Important If True 46: Cut Your Hair

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Important If True 46:

Important If True 46


Cut Your Hair
This week we discover that no matter how far flung life's questions may seem, there may be a universal key that unlocks them all. For instance: How do you completely collapse the degrees of separation between you and viral HQ winners? Do you actually remember anything that happened on the childhood television shows you hold so dear? What do the multiple robocall personalities who continue to call you at home, make demands of you, get noticeably bored and then hang up on you, actually want? The answer to all of them is, inexplicably, that you should cut your hair. At least, that's what we've been led to believe.

Discussed: "If You're Going to San Francisco (to Return to Your Old Barber But Want to Really Act Up the Fact That You Were In Canada) (Put Flowers In Your Hair)", unconventional Canadian sex/hair desires, HQtie of the year flipping out after winning $11.30 in HQ Trivia, The Elephant Show, Sesame Street, Nick Breckon wax housing Landis the hairdresser, the long arm of "Wax House, Baby", horror film podcast The Rants Macabre, pointlessly but insidiously altering the apparent history of short-lived children's cartoon Street Sharks, the mutual idiocy that is information aggregation on the internet, Street Sharks vandal copycat killer, ruining our own stupid childhoods, inexplicable robocalls, getting good advice over the phone, getting hung up on by a robot, those gross fungus toe ads for mortgage refinancing and stuff, the marketing matrix, The Marketing Matrix, I literally can't even explain the dumb internet shit we made up on this part of the podcast, Mellotron keyboard but instead of violin samples it has a bro telling you to cut your hair, Being John Malkovich but instead of being John Malkovich it has a bro telling you to cut your hair, "laff box" for creating televised laugh tracks live, our fractal gaslight reality, inappropriate diluting and genericizing of the phrase "Wax House, Baby"

Send us your questions at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Jake's Endorsement: The Director's Cut podcast from the Director's Guild of America

Chris' Endorsement: Collecting all your paper-based ephemera and, amidst a nostalgia explosion, organizing it (for instance, into a file box like this with file folders like this)

Nick's Endorsement: Reverse-searing your cheeseburger

 

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I was going to say the weird phone thing you mentioned sounds like this, but I thought they said it had to be a toll free number. So, training an AI must be it.

 

It's an episode of the podcast "Reply All", describing a scam that sounds very similar. Someone calls toll free numbers and tries to keep them on the line as long as possible, by being weird and appealing to curiosity, and there's some way they get money through the toll free system.

 

Could be they use regular numbers to train their AI or recordings to make the calls longer.

 

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/104-case-phantom-caller/

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Wow ok haha. In a desperate hope of ever learning what it was I tweeted a link to this week’s episode to the hosts of Reply All. Crazy (if unsurprising) that they may have already come across it. 

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Hah! Well if this scam is similar but with different goals, maybe they'll do a follow up episode. It sounds like a somewhat different scam but it seems to have a similar thing where an automated system tries to keep you on the line for some reason. 

 

It's a good episode though, I recommend it. 

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Haven't listened to the episode yet (won't be able to until tomorrow), but I'll take any excuse to link to this: 

 

 

 

(And if anyone's jonesing for some more Pavement, these are their two best songs in my opinion: "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" and "Grounded." So god damn good--perfect tunes to relax to at work going into the weekend. Thanks for the reminder!)

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Had to chime in on this one.

 

on fake news and lies: When Princess Diana died I was a senior in high school and for some reason I started telling people that mayim bialik (Blossom) had died the same day but was overshadowed by the Princess.  I started to believe my own lie, meanwhile mayim bialik had bowed out of public life to get a phd. I would tell this story from time to time, the fictive gloss rubbing off each time, until someone told me no, she's on that shitty show the big bang theory. self-hoist?

 

on those robo calls:

Again late 90s or early 2000s, and having trouble tracking this down, but there was a penny stock that blew up and people investigated. It was a phone service (the actual service I can't remember) but they got people to sign up by cold calling and speaking very lowly "would you like to sign up for the service" and trying to get keep to answer in the affirmative. Then you would get a small surcharge on your phone bill that you likely woudn't notice, like under a dollar. 

This is something like a 7 year old would try (in a whisper) "mom, can i have a cookie?"  Ever since I try to never use affirmative words when talking to telemarketers.

 

 

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I've gotten fake robocalls that claim to be from the FBI and IRS before that are very clearly just PII scams. The "hey pick me up" calls are probably more related to this sort of thing: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/27/dont-say-yes-when-robocall-scam-rings/99709634/

 

With Chris getting called three times from the same number, it may be that some other robocall service (or related scam) is spoofing your phone number to call other people. I've gotten calls from other people that seemed to be suggesting that I had called them all the time, and that's the only explanation I can think of for that kind of thing.

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I too had the experience of suddenly getting a ton of robocalls. Fortunately, they have massively declined since downloading the Mr. Number app. I highly recommend getting it or a similar spam-call blocker.
There was also some time between me finding out these calls were likely the scams Kyir posted about and me getting the app, so for some time I would always pick up the phone without saying anything until I knew it was safe. Even now, I typically only say "Hello" for unknown numbers until they identify themselves.

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Wax Houses of Baby:

 

I've got a lot of records, and in the last few years there has been an increasing focus on reissuing unearthed obscurities, and I've started suspecting much of it is fake. There are a few notable instances of this. 

 

Tax Scam Records: For a short window in the late 70s a loophole let labels write off unsold inventory. A bunch of record labels sprung up and generated these extensive catalogs, 10 of labels with hundreds of "releases". They would print up inventory lists, then press SOMETHING (or in some cases not at all? not all have been discovered). They'd only a handful of copies and send them to distributors as samples. Aspiring bands would release multiple records under different names, they would just press bootlegs or unfinished records. Sometimes the artists didn't know. The most notorious is Tiger Lily records, connected to the Genovese crime family. One of their best releases is Stonewall, psych/hard rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h6NehjFvds It's been repressed a few times in recent years, but in the insanely unlikely case you ever stumble across a battered old copy, grab it. There are less than 10 known copies and the only one that was sold went for 5k. There is also a Richard Pryor record on Tiger Lily which was pressed in a regular quantities.

 

 

If you liked the TV show Fringe (side note: stats pretty bad, gets excellent, ends pretty well), one of the main characters is a drug addled scientist who does a lot of hallucinogens and occasionally references his favorite psychedelic record by a band called Velvet Sedan Chair. Long story short, the producers actually made a VSC lp, and hid them randomly in record stores. To my knowledge there have been about 5 copies located and none have hit the open market in the last 5 years or so. I desperately want one: https://www.discogs.com/Violet-Sedan-Chair-Seven-Suns/release/2847380

 

In the world of punk scum there was a long running compilation series called Killed by Death. They exclusively comped songs by increasingly impossibly obscure US bands from the 77-79. This in many cases was done by people to boost the value of something they discovered in an effort to flip their cornered inventory. Of course, by the 11th release it was entirely made up bands: https://www.discogs.com/The-Frothy-Shakes-Killed-By-Death-11/release/2690201

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3 hours ago, HighLearn said:

While robot scams and deep learning are terrifying possibilities, it seems far more likely that was a regular old prank call.

This appears to be the haircut one: https://www.prankdial.com/us/reactions/kr6J43Qlar

 

Hahaha, this is super weird.

 

I think that this episode, with the Landis / Elephant Show story, really cements this idea in my mind of Nick Breckon: The Most Incorrectly Confident Man In America.

 

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