Wonderful! · Rachel and Griffin McElroy

Wonderful! 412: Borat is about to get Bing Bonged

·31 min·2 clips

Rachel reads a love poem by Keetje Kuipers that reframes marriage not as devotion to a partner but as a pact with the entire world.

Solar panels arrive loudly. Rachel and Griffin explain the drilling in the background, then drift straight into sustainability jokes, household weirdness, and old Echo the Dolphin anxiety. The house becomes part of the bit. Getting panels installed is practical, sure, but it also feels a little like having home improvement perform itself in public. Echo comes back warmly, though mostly as a memory of a game that felt stressful and stingy with instructions. Then the guitar videos take over. Griffin is lit up by the idea of one person turning big, crowded game music into solo guitar arrangements. Koji Kondo gets a proper nod, and the Super Mario Brothers 2 theme becomes the perfect example: playful on the surface, sneakily intense once someone has to play every part by hand. The fun is in the arrangement, with one pair of hands trying to cover what several instruments used to handle. Rachel keeps the awe from getting too lecture-y, nudging it back into conversation whenever it starts floating away. The tabs become their own joke. Griffin has seen symbols in the charts that look like they come from some other level of guitar literacy, even though the videos present them as learning tools. They spin that into imagined outtakes, where a perfect performance gets wrecked by a phone call. From there, the playlist sprawls comfortably: Mario, Final Fantasy, Undertale, television themes, and Mort Garson's Deja Vu all sit in the same little pocket of admiration. They wrap with plugs, a DC event note, a choose-your-own-adventure link, and the usual affectionate goodbye.

As heard by us

A small, funny episode that treats solar panels and guitar nerdery with equal affection.

Rachel and Griffin turn a solar panel install into a very them episode: part domestic update, part sustainability joke, and part affectionate gripe about drilling overhead.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you like home-life chatter, solar-panel drilling in the background, and very specific music nerdery.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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