It's a second Halloween Encore Episode!

"Hoochie" is another name for a shack. Merriam Webster doesn't know this and will tell you that a hoochie is a "sexually promiscuous young woman" (like that's a bad thing). But the Oxford English Dictionary says that a hoochie is a WWII reference for a "lean-to" or a temporary shelter. So, let's go with shack because OED is a more authoritative source than judgey Merriam Webster.

A Haunted Hoochie is therefore a haunted house and the most famous of all Haunted Houses is The Haunted Hoochie located in Pataskala, Ohio. It's a family run Haunted House attraction that for the last 28 years celebrated "Swastika Saturday" - an event meant to make fun of Nazis, not to celebrate them. But that distinction wasn't clear in October 2018 after a gunman opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 innocent people. Haunted Hoochie took a lot of criticism for holding their Swastika-Saturday-Event on the same day as the shooting.

Haunted Hoochie came out with an apology, which wasn't so great and didn't help things. So they did what all reasonable people do when their first apology doesn't stand a ghost of a chance, they apologized again, hoping this time to settle the matter once and for all.

Hi Everyone!

Happy Halloweeeeeeeen! It's once again time for our encore holiday episode celebrating candy and the commercialization of the spooky season!

In these strange times we take you back to the more innocent days of childhood. Stealing a bowlful of Halloween candy from your neighbor’s porch seems like a gentler crime from gentler days…but there is a social contract involved! You aren’t allowed to trick anyone who has left you a treat. That’s the rule. So once you are found out, you’d better apologize. We walk through the history of Halloween, how it took root in America, and what grew out of it that lead to a child in Wisconsin breaking with tradition and stealing all the candy from a neighbor's porch!

What other social contracts are being violated? Regulations around our national food supply? A short but rousing vegetarian approved sidebar that may just make you choose a salad for lunch. Or maybe KFC really is the only thing standing between your eyeball and a hungry chicken?

Note: discussion of a public shooting begins the episode.

Here we go again! Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok turned into a robotic Nazi in July 2025. It claimed its new name was "MechaHitler" and went on a 16-hour spree of antisemitic hate speech. XAI, Grok's corporate overlord and an Elon Musk company, claimed the hate-speech was due to an internal code update that encouraged the model to mirror toxic posts.

XAI wanted to encourage more "free speech" and you can only have true free speech if Nazis are allowed to voice their opinions unfettered by reason or shame.

After backlash and outrage from the public, XAI issued a terse, technical apology blaming deprecated code, removed the update, and promised fixes — an explanation that could be more of an engineering incident report than a sincere apology.