What The Frock

The universe is an astonishingly complicated place. It contains somewhere in the neighborhood of two trillion galaxies, an untold number of stars, at least one species that voluntarily watches reality television, and, for reasons no cosmologist has yet explained, social media.

This week’s episode of What The Frock? begins with one of the more curious phenomena ever to emerge from that digital wasteland.

A television reporter cheerfully admitted she did not know where Bosnia-Herzegovina was. Or, technically, is, as it has not moved since 1993. This should have been about as consequential as admitting you cannot locate the Large Magellanic Cloud or the nearest decent parking space. Instead, it blossomed into a full-scale internet incident requiring apologies, counter-apologies, geopolitical nitpicking, and eventually the entirely serious question of whether apologizing to “Bosnia” had unfairly excluded Herzegovina.

Faced with this sort of thing, sensible people usually put the kettle on.

We made a list.

You will discover the previously classified facts that every Bosnian household maintains an emergency accordion, that bears politely wait until hikers have finished lunch before stealing their sandwiches, and that Bosnian coffee is sufficiently powerful to remember your childhood even if you cannot. These facts have undergone absolutely no verification whatsoever, which places them comfortably within modern internet standards.

Having successfully solved Balkan diplomacy, we then wandered into professional basketball, where the laws of economics continue their losing battle against the laws of human nature. Caitlin Clark has become simultaneously the biggest attraction in women’s basketball and the person least likely to receive a warm welcome from some of the people who ought to be delighted she exists. We consider whether an NBA franchise might eventually decide that selling tickets is, in fact, a worthwhile business strategy.

Naturally, this leads directly to kung fu. There is no obvious reason why it should. There rarely is.

Here it is… the new HIT song from The Frockers, Kung Fu – vs – Love!

One innocent social media question about why history produced only a single song devoted to kung fu fighting sends Dave tumbling down one of those intellectual rabbit holes from which escape is impossible. Along the way we uncover the improbable history of Carl Douglas’s disco classic, the forgotten art of the B-side, and the realization that humanity has been operating with a dangerously inadequate supply of kung fu songs for the last half century.

The episode then takes another entirely predictable detour into Hallmark Christmas movies, because once you have discussed Balkan geopolitics, professional basketball, and 1970s disco, holiday romance is the next logical destination.

The result is a film pitch involving nonprofit executives, neo-Nazis, Christmas lights, investigative journalism, romantic misunderstandings, and enough ethical complications to make a philosophy professor ask for another cup of coffee.

Finally, we return to Earth by examining Washington’s astonishing gasoline prices, the growing pilgrimage to Idaho in search of fuel that does not require a second mortgage, and the peculiar ability of government to create expensive solutions for problems it enthusiastically manufactured in the first place.

In short, this episode behaves much like the universe itself. It begins with one perfectly ordinary question, veers wildly off course without warning, somehow arrives exactly where it intended to go, and leaves everyone slightly wiser, considerably more confused, and wondering whether perhaps they should keep a towel nearby.

After all, you never know when you’ll need one.