A Quick Scratched-Out Smashburger of a Post

Hey Everyone, Jon Here

Just posting to say that we’re not going to have a ‘real’ post today, because I ended up not passing my kidney stone until around midnight last night, meaning I have spent Tuesday and Wednesday in the same national stress ball as everyone else…with an added layer of alternating physical kidney pain and opioid haze.

Things were particularly fraught from 6 PM to 12 AM last night, since 6 PM is when my pain meds officially ran out. I will not go into the grisly details of how I endured. But, obviously, all of that destroyed my ability to work on a normal post for you all.

BUT IT ALSO WORKS AS A GREAT METAPHOR FOR A YOUTUBE SERIES I CAN DISCUSS.

That’s right, here’s like, 1,000ish words talking about a YouTube show so I haven’t completely abandoned you, like SOME states I could name. We’re talking about “The Burger Scholar Sessions” (And because I’m still pulling myself together, I completely failed to note that all the pictures for today’s post come the video linked in the last paragraph, and YES, writing this out IS faster than editing all of them, I hate picture editing, the only fun part of it you can’t even see.)

Fanfare plays, growing louder to drown out Jon’s parenthetical whining.

So, the Burger Scholar Sessions are an off-shoot of The Burger Show that they made for COVID. You may recall that I reviewed The Burger Show back in 2018. Well, it kept going, and I’m happy to report that Alvin did become a better host than he was in the first season, which was my biggest complaint with the show! I legitimately feel like seasons 2 onward of The Burger Show are a lot better, and then spent months debating how to cover a show I’ve already reviewed in order to figure out if/when I could talk about it, since I felt it was important to add to the conversation. (I have since settled on “Just mark the new reviews as SEASON X”, but I by the time I made that call, The Burger Show was on like, Season 4.

However, I will also confess that my increased affection for the show is probably in part because the show has also included more and more George Motz.

A very normal dude, who we once referred to as “Retired Wolverine”.

George Motz is, as our first review noted, a Burger Historian. And as he does more episodes/appearances, you really start to grasp how truly impressive that title is. You think to yourself “well, how complicated can the history of the burger be?” …forgetting that, you know, they’ve been around for over 100 years, in a country that prides itself on regional freedom and variation. Do you know that technically, the first reports of a Chili burger predate those of Cheeseburgers? And that both were supposedly invented in California? Have you ever heard of the Nut Burger, a Butte Montana burger topped with specifically Miracle Whip and Crushed Peanuts, which is completely different from a Gooberburger, a missouri Burger with Peanut butter? George does. He’s written books, and made movies about it.

So in later seasons of The Burger Show, George appeared in at least 1-2 episodes a season (which, for a 6 episode per season show, is quite a bit), where one episode was almost always “Alvin, and a random Celebrity, show up at George’s house, he makes them some weird regional burgers, and they eat them.” And they’re always pretty fun episodes.

Then, of course, COVID hits, and a show about “our host meets a person and then eats with them, typically at some kind of famous landmark restaurant” becomes very hard to pull-off, given social distancing, and the whole “restaurants shut down” thing. BUT, there’s an alternative. George Motz has a family (or, as we call in the business: a built-in crew), we KNOW they can shoot episodes in his kitchen, and they don’t need anyone else to come, keeping it all COVID safe.

Thus “The Burger Scholar Sessions” were born: running for the last 6-7 months, they’re just George making burgers in his house, telling us about their history and how they taste.

In general, he loves them. George BECAME a Burger Historian because he loves burgers, and he has kept that joy intact.

He covers a couple burgers that he handled in previous seasons, but that’s perfectly fine: there’s always going to be some revisiting and restructuring, especially in chaotic times. And personally, I think it’s a nice thing to watch if you want something cozy, energetic, and celebrating America’s sometimes-quite-weird diversity. Do I, personally, think “a burger with a mayo and cocktail olive topping” sounds like a great idea? No. But I’m not from Central Michigan.

Look, it LOOKS great. I just don’t know if “creamy green olives” is a flavor profile I agree with.

And…that’s all I really want to say at the moment. I’d like to save a more thorough discussion until a time when I can, you know, MAKE a burger. I just watched a “speed round” episode at some point in the stress-drugs-cycle, and I don’t know if it was subtle pre-planning, or a lucky coincidence, but the fact that Wisconsin and Michigan were both prominently featured while people were waiting with clenched kidneys for those states’ results to come in.

And hey, the episodes are short, punchy, and fun. Check it out. Or don’t, This is essentially vamping.

BYE.