Wayne comes back from Europe with a souvenir that isn’t cheese or herring, though there’s plenty of that too. It’s a phrase he lifted from retired Giants announcer Mike Krukow, and it has a comma in it that does nobody any favors. Greg and Wayne spend a good chunk of the episode trying to figure out what it means, where the comma goes, and whether it was ever supposed to mean anything at all. They snicker like immature 8th graders at the vaguely naughty insinuations of the phrase.

From there it’s a tour of Wayne’s trip to the Netherlands and Norway, which turns out to be mostly about brown cheese. Don’t ask Wayne to explain it. He’ll try anyway. We also dig into the Van Halen brothers’ Dutch and Indonesian roots, because that’s where the trip led us. Friend of the show Peter comes up, and yes, we pick on him a little. He had it coming, and we have receipts. Suriname makes a brief podcast debut as a topic.

Along the way: Greg’s niece and Wayne’s nephew make appearances, Greg’s phone problems remind everyone to be grateful for working technology, and Wayne has a series of deeply awkward conversations with elderly Europeans. Also, you, dear listener, get a nickname. You don’t get a vote.

It’s a themeless romp with very little to do with the Bay Area. Consider it a vacation from our usual programming, which is itself a vacation from programming.

Some stories you tell because you're proud of them. These are not those stories. This week, Wayne talks Greg into confessing two tales he'd otherwise take to the grave — one involving a pony, one involving Wayne's own wedding reception — and both come with an unmistakable whiff of something gone wrong.

First up: Greg and a retired pony have a reckoning, which somehow opens onto carnie ethics, the real differences between ponies and horses, and what it means to finally make peace with an equine. Then it's off to the old Transbay Terminal, where Greg's quest to reach Wayne's wedding reception runs headlong into the limits of what the human body can endure, plus a side trip into mens room etiquette rules pushed well past their breaking point. Also, Wayne discusses his physical challenges regarding alcohol.

Along the way: getting your name in the paper as a young man, the strange fatalism of parents, whether you actually need a church to get married, the quiet trauma of depressing children's books, sour apples, the Apple II, Wayne's first foray into branding, silver anniversaries, and — because every episode should have one — a man with a cat on his shoulder.

It's mildly disgusting. It's mostly true. It's Hella Shocking.

With the sort of hubris that only two guys with microphones can muster, we spend an episode putting San Francisco on trial against many cities, foreign and domestic. Pretty presumptuous, we know.

But first, a first: an actual guest. Monte, dot-com era veteran, joins Wayne from his porch in Breezy Point, Queens, to relitigate the strange, beer-soaked boomtown SF once was. Rugby, free dot-com beer, burritos as a food group, the tyranny of hills on a bicycle, the slow surrender to SF's chill, the correct way to pronounce our street names, and a gentle but firm note to Raiders fans that it's time to move on. Monte also confesses he never quite made peace with the moody climate. Honestly, same.

Back in the virtual studio, we widen the lens to answer the question nobody asked: what even is LA? Tokyo has Japanese food, London's got a lot of old Roman stuff lying around, and Wayne loves his Hong Kong. Eventually we decide international comparisons are a fool's errand and stay domestic. Seattle earns hill-respect. Detroit is flat in a way that feels wrong, but redeems itself with genuinely great pizza. Chicago is crowned Most American City, while Philadelphia is like a sadder Boston. New York is wonderful, of course.

Also covered: Is Evening Magazine some how punk?, the shockingly low bar for 1980s hotel safety, and — stated with the full force of conviction — the Jets suck.