The comedy4cast Network. Let's dog-ear that for now.
It's time once again for the Dog Days of Podcasting, a call for podcasters to
try to put out a podcast every day in August.
For more information, go to dogdaysofpodcasting.com.
We always take this month to provide you with some interesting,
yet totally useless, odd news.
And this year, to celebrate the platinum anniversary of comedy4cast,
or PAC for short, we'll end each Dog Day episode with part of a classic comedy4cast episode.
So, let's get started with Odd News PAC.
It's always important to make a packing list before you take a trip.
And an itinerary. And a detailed spreadsheet.
And a to-do list. And a checklist of all the lists you need to create.
But all of that is of no use if you forget to look at your lists,
which is something a Parisian man should have done on a recent family car trip
between Paris and Morocco, a distance of about 2,000 kilometers or just a little over 1,200 miles.
Traveling with his wife and 22-year-old daughter, the man was making good time
on his trip, aside from several stops at service stations along the way.
Sometimes the stops were even to get gasoline.
However, about three and a half hours after one of the stops,
he had a sudden realization.
His daughter was in the car, but his wife was not. It was then that he realized
what had happened. She had been abducted by aliens.
Oh, sorry, that's my headcanon. He realized that he had accidentally left her
behind at one of the service station stops.
But which one? Which one? Son, how many stops did this guy make?
Apparently enough to know he was going to need some help. He called the authorities
around 8.30 a.m. to explain the situation.
The gendarmerie were sympathetic to his story and also a little suspicious.
The man said he no longer remembered where he had stopped.
Or when. But did mention that he recalled stopping for a break near Orleans, France.
Local authorities were dispatched, but they could find no indication of the
wife at any of the rest areas.
They widened their search to multiple locations along the motorway,
but still, no sign of the missing woman.
Police were growing increasingly suspicious that the 62-year-old man had forgotten his wife on purpose.
By now you might be thinking, wait, what about the daughter?
She was in the car. She must know when they stopped, and you would be right.
Except she had been asleep, possibly dreaming of taking a motor trip somewhere without her parents.
Regardless, she had no idea where her mother might have been left behind.
Luckily, the police were able to locate the missing woman with the help of a
mobile network operator by tracking her phone.
She was at a service station near Deux-Sèvres, about 300 miles from where her husband
had realized she was missing. That had happened at 4.30 a.m.,
and the woman hadn't moved from the spot in over five hours,
waiting for her family to return.
And now I know you're wondering, wait, if the woman had a phone,
why didn't she just call her husband or her daughter? I don't know for sure.
But I think that after she was mistakenly left behind at a service station at 4.30 a.m.,
with nothing to do but sit and wait, Her mind was preoccupied with what she
was going to say to her husband when he came back.
Meanwhile, their daughter was probably thinking, Next summer, I'm going solo.
And now, let's celebrate 20 years of comedy forecast with this classic clip.
In this clip from February of 2011, Derek is downloading an app on his new Android phone.
And Rory has questions. We join the confusion already in progress.
Now, the newest version of Android is Honeycomb.
Uh, that means either it's full of holes or it stays crispy in milk. Neither.
Neither. It's optimized for use on tablets.
That's funny. I pronounce it tableau. No, I mean tablet computers.
And? A tablet computer is a device that falls somewhere between a laptop computer and a smartphone.
Well, what falls between a smartphone and a tablet computer?
I don't know. Ooh, I think I found a niche, and it needs to be scratched.
Looks like my app has finished downloading it. And what is this app of which
you speak? Is it short for Appetite?
For FroYo? No, that's short for application.
So they're applications that fall a bit short? They're small applications.
Like widgets? Sort of, but bigger. So they fall between widgets and applications, huh?
Boy, there sure are a lot of high-tech things that fall between other things.
It's like the space between the cushions on the big comfy couch of consumerism. Loose change!
Dust bunnies! It doesn't sound like you're too thrilled with Android phones.
Well, that depends. I mean, do they obey Asimov's three laws of robotics?
I don't know. Well, there you go. I'm not going to wake up dead one morning
in the middle of the night because my phone thought its self-preservation was
more important than mine.
Well, that's too bad. They were having a two-for-one sale, so I picked one up for you.
Oh, cool. But what about all that talk? Well, listen, if worse comes to worse
and this thing attacks me, at least I know I have a smartphone right there so I can dial for help.
As always, your logic is impeccable, Captain.
That about wraps it up for today's Odd News Pack.
But first, a shout out to the comedy4cast Patreon patrons,
including our producer-level patrons, Paul Barrie from the A Window to the Magic
podcast and Kirby Bartlett-Sloan from the 20-megabyte Doctor Who podcast.
You too can support comedy4cast
and get episodes before everyone else for as little as $2 a month.
Just search for comedy4cast, all one word with the number 4, on Patreon.com.
Script, voices, and original music by me, Clinton Alvord. Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.
Talk to you again next time. But for now, that's it. We're done,
done, done, done, done. Bye-bye.
Music.