I don't demand courtesy, but I do demand rigor!

#1567; In which the Road is shared

  — May 15th, 2025

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LAST TWO: Real True Actual Stories of America

Here are Episodes Five and Six of my animated series ‘Real True Actual Stories of America’, sponsored by Audible.co.uk and Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America 1927.

Episode Five features volatile newspaper magnate and obscure cult leader Bernarr Macfadden! WARNING: Might be saucy; viewer discretion is advised.

Episode Six features America’s most memorable hero of all time, Gutzon Borglum!

VOICES: Jeff Feazell as Bernarr Macfadden! Nikki Rice Malki as his nanny! Narrated by Matt Hopper! And Gutzon Borglum was played by himself.

PREVIOUS EPISODES: ONE AND TWO / THREE AND FOUR

MORE of: Real True Actual Stories of America

Here are two more of my “Real True Actual Stories of America” animations, sponsored by Audible.co.uk and Bill Bryson’s new book One Summer: America 1927.

EPISODE THREE is about Al Capone! The notorious Chicago thug! Ol’ Scarface himself! Whatta rascal!

EPISODE FOUR is about Charles Lindbergh & Charles Nungesser, racing to be the first to cross the Atlantic and claim the Orteig Prize.

These feature the voices of Mike Betette (as Al Capone, Charles Lindbergh, and in last week’s episodes, Babe Ruth and the construction worker); Sean Casey (the newsboy, Charles Nungesser, and last week, Henry Ford); and Jeff Feazell (the newspaper owner). Calvin Coolidge and the manhole lady were played by me! And the narrator is Matt Hopper.

Enjoy!

ANIMATION: Real True Actual Stories of America

Here’s something neat! I was contacted by Audible.co.uk and asked if I’d like to help promote the new book by historian and memoirist Bill Bryson, One Summer: America 1927. TURNS OUT it’s a really interesting book filled with factoids and stories about the personalities and social movements of the 1920s — Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Al Jolson, and many others whose names are less familiar to us now.

Audible allowed me to, uh, loosely interpret some of the moments in the book to create a series of six animated videos! The first casts Babe Ruth & Calvin Coolidge as odd-couple roommates. The second is about good ol’ Henry Ford.

I’ll post the others in the coming days. Check out the videos, I hope you like them! We had a lot of fun making them.

INTRODUCING A NEW WORD: /stemp/ (n)


Flickr photo by Kiana Wilson

I want to share an email that I received last week, from Marksman Geoff S., regarding Panel 3 from Comic #978:

Dearest Mr. Malki !,

Oh my, I thought I read the word, “STEMP” and I had this epiphany that that was the real name for a pumpkin stem (or perhaps that of any gourd), all woody and cut to look like a tree stump, and that somehow I had lived over 40 years of my life without knowing that piece of trivia and I was MAD at life for not knowing it sooner because it made SO MUCH FRICKIN SENSE HOW DID I NEVER KNOW THAT A PUMPKIN STEM WAS CALLED A STEMP?

Anyway, then my eyes caught up with the pixels and I saw the question mark.

Thought you’d like to know. Please keep up the terrific work.

Well, Geoff, this is the best email I’ve received in at least a week. I posted it on Twitter and received this reply:


I immediately agreed, and knew at once that I should enlist the aid of my friend Erin McKean at Wordnik, which is a site that tracks definitions, unusual words, neologisms, and the ongoing march of language.

Not an hour later, this existed.

It has no citations or formal definitions yet, because as descriptive linguists know, a word isn’t real until people use it. So go out and “stemp!” (Also: stemp is not a verb.)


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