The grinch who hacked Christmas.

Cindy Lou Who: Santa, what's Christmas really about?

The Grinch: Vengeance!

Dave Bittner: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special edition of the Hacking Humans podcast, an occasional show we call Hacking Humans goes to the movies. I'm Dave Bittner. And joining me as my CyberWire colleague, Rick Howard. Hey, Rick.

Rick Howard: Hey, Dave. Happy Holidays.

Dave Bittner: To you as well. On this show, Rick and I look at some of our favorite clips from cinema and television, clips which demonstrates some of the scams and schemes that Joe Carrigan and I talk about on Hacking Humans. We've got some fun clips to share so stay tuned. We'll be right back after this message from our show sponsor. Well, Rick, as you pointed out at the outset, the holiday season is upon us here.

Rick Howard: It is.

Dave Bittner: And I have to start out by asking, where the heck did this year go? Do you -- you concur?

Rick Howard: I concur. The clock is winding faster and faster as we get older, Dave. And I don't know how to handle it.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. No, that's true. It absolutely does. So, as you and I record this, it is, oh, about mid -- mid December or so. I'd say the holidays are bearing down on us.

Rick Howard: Yeah. We're not ready. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. We -- we just -- in my house, we celebrate both holidays of Hanukkah and Christmas. So we just wrapped up Hanukkah, and now we're gearing up for Christmas. We'll be decorating the Christmas tree this coming weekend. So you and I put our heads together, and we thought of what better scammer con artist out there than the Grinch.

Rick Howard: Yes. The Grinch. It is a family movie, okay, all of them, the cartoon, the movie. We watch them every year. How about you guys?

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And the book as well.

Rick Howard: And the book, of course.

Dave Bittner: Big Dr. Seuss fan. I'm curious, did you do much reading of Dr. Seuss books to your kids when they were coming up?

Rick Howard: I think that -- if you put me on the spot, I could absolutely say out loud from memory, Oh, the Places You'll Go! Right?

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Rick Howard: All right. Because I must have read that a bazillion times to my kids when they were young.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: And so yeah. So that's a great Dr. Seuss classic at the Howard house.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. The ones that were in heavy rotation at our house were the Cat in the Hat, The Lorax.

Rick Howard: The Lorax.

Dave Bittner: And Green Eggs and Ham.

Rick Howard: Uh-huh.

Dave Bittner: And --

Rick Howard: One fish, two fish made a few appearances. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Occasionally, my son, my youngest son would ask for the Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

Rick Howard: Oh, yeah.

Dave Bittner: Which, like most sequels, is not as good as the original, but it was actually --

Rick Howard: But he was a connoisseur and a completist.

Dave Bittner: I didn't like it because it was hard to read. It was actually like -- the other ones really flow, and they're fun to read, especially like the Lorax and Cat in the Hat. You know, they're just fun. But Cat in the Hat Comes Back is a little more challenging and not as compelling a story. But, you know, these are -- these are nits that I'm picking. They're all -- they're all great. It's hard to go wrong with Dr. Seuss. So let's dig into the Grinch here. And --

Rick Howard: And, by the way, Dave, our -- my -- our nickname for this movie is Ocean's 11 on Ice, right, because that's what this is. If the Grinch isn't anything, it's a heist movie. All right. So let's keep that straight.

Dave Bittner: Very nice, very nice. Yeah. And for those of us who grew up and were watching TV during the 70s, I guess in particular, we learned that everything's better on ice, you know?

Rick Howard: Absolutely.

Dave Bittner: If Donnie and Marie are good, then Donnie and Marie on ice is even better.

Rick Howard: Makes it even better.

Dave Bittner: If Brady Bunch is good, then Brady Bunch on ice, even better. So let's dig into some of the history here of the Grinch. Rick, how familiar are you with the backstory here of the Grinch himself?

Rick Howard: Well, the Grinch maybe not so much. But how they made the cartoon, okay, I'm a big fan of the guy that behind the creative genius behind it. His name is Chuck Jones, these --

Dave Bittner: Oh, yeah.

Rick Howard: -- the visionary animator. All right. And since you already mentioned it, Dave, we used to watch a lot of cartoons in our day. Okay.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: And Chuck Jones is best known for the Warner Brothers and the iconic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons with characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote and Marvin the Martian. And, Dave, do you want to hear my Marvin the Martian impersonation? You ready?

Dave Bittner: Do I have a choice?

Rick Howard: No. I've been --

Dave Bittner: Go for it.

Rick Howard: I've been rehearsing. Okay. All right. Here we go. Ooh! You make me very angry. Okay. That is my one talent that I have.

Dave Bittner: That's solid. That's solid. All right. I'll give you points for that. That's a solid Marvin the Martian. Sure.

Rick Howard: And the other thing I loved about this, the cartoon part is the narrator is that classic character actor Boris Karloff, right.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: And, you know, and -- you know, he appeared -- I was looking up his IMDB page, 206 movies and TV programs from 1919 to 1971. That is a prolific actor, okay?

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Does that mean he predated the talkies, 1919? Was he in silent film?

Rick Howard: He must -- had to be in silent films, right?

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Huh.

Rick Howard: So -- but everybody knows him, okay, from the famous monster movie, the 1931 movie Frankenstein. All right.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: He also played the mummy, and he reprised his role in The Bride of Frankenstein. Right. But, you know, he's just this guy that I didn't really know until after I watched the cartoon, and then I figured out he was one of those guys.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Well, I mean, looking at the history of the Grinch himself, I did a little bit of digging here.

Rick Howard: Sure.

Dave Bittner: And Brian Jay Jones, literally wrote the book on Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel. Brian Jay Jones is a biographer. He wrote the great biography on Jim Henson, which, of course, I devoured.

Rick Howard: Oh, sure.

Dave Bittner: He wrote a biography on George Lucas, as well, and a book on Washington Irving. And I've actually had the pleasure back when Twitter was a thing of having a little bit of a friendly relationship with Brian Jay Jones, just mostly through his --

Rick Howard: Oh. How nice is that.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Really -- it really was nice. Just a delightful guy. As you might imagine, if you are a biographer, all sorts of people come out of the woodwork or let me -- how do I say this? You find yourself correcting a lot of people online who say things, you know, about the folks that you've written books about. And they will often respond to you as a biographer, not knowing your a biographer and say, Well, who the heck are you. And then you send them a link to the book that you wrote about the -- best-selling book.

Rick Howard: I literally, literally wrote the book on this guy.

Dave Bittner: So Brian has suffered through a lot of that. But I was looking at his book on -- on Dr. Seuss, and he actually wrote up a little -- little thing about the Grinch. And he said -- he said, Quick Christmas pop quiz on the Grinch. What color is the Grinch in Dr. Seuss' 1957 Classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

Rick Howard: I -- I bet I'm wrong on this because, in the cartoon, he's green. But I bet he's some other color like gray or something. What is it?

Dave Bittner: Well, let's go through the history of the Grinch. So the word Grinch first shows up in a book in 1953, which was a book called Scrambled Eggs Super. And the Grinch was a bird who had had its eggs pilfered, and it was called the beagle-beaked bald-headed Grinch. And that was the first time he used the word. But the character that we know as the Grinch first showed up or at least a character that led to the Grinch that we all know and love was in a 1955 issue of Redbook magazine. And it was a -- it was a poem titled the Hoobub and the Grinch.

Rick Howard: Okay.

Dave Bittner: And the Grinch --

Rick Howard: What is this -- what is this magazine thing that you mentioned?

Dave Bittner: Well, before there were iPods, or iPads, I should say, there were these things printed on paper.

Rick Howard: Paper. You're kidding me.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. I saw a thing said to a -- to a toddler, a magazine is just a broken iPad. Have you seen videos of toddlers like trying to -- try to stretch and zoom pictures and, you know, double tap a magazine? It's a real thing.

Rick Howard: Yeah. That's awesome. That's great.

Dave Bittner: So this -- Jones describes this Grinch as a cat-like snake-oil salesman, which fits our show perfectly. He was trying to sell a short length of string to a sunbathing Hoobub who has no use for it, but he convinces the Hoobub to buy the string. And so, eventually, How the Grinch Stole Christmas was kind of a continuing story of this Grinch character. But, of course, that's where he became famous.

Rick Howard: I didn't know that. Yeah,

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: Well, I did not -- I just thought he just manifested, you know, in full at the top of Mount Crumpet or whatever it is.

Dave Bittner: Right, right.

Rick Howard: No. He has a real backstory.

Dave Bittner: Also, I learned -- No! I learned in this article that the Grinch also was originally published in the December 1957 issue of Redbook, the magazine, before it was printed as a book. It came out in this magazine, and the Grinch, you were right. The Grinch was gray. He was not green.

Rick Howard: Gray. I guessed it. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And he's gray in the book as well. He's -- he's not -- he's not green until the Chuck Jones animated series, and then he's green. And, evidently, Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss, Geisel met many times over the development of this. And they both agreed that green was the appropriate color for the Grinch.

Rick Howard: Have a color to pop off the screen, I guess.

Dave Bittner: Well, I mean, think about this. What was it, 1966 when that show came out. And what was the new thing that all the networks wanted to promote?

Rick Howard: That's right. Color TV.

Dave Bittner: Color television.

Rick Howard: We're old enough to remember that.

Dave Bittner: That's right, that's right. It's hard to imagine -- I try to explain to my kids that we -- when I was -- we had televisions in our house that had no color. And that was a common thing because they were cheap.

Rick Howard: Yeah. I remember an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where the -- Calvin asked his dad a question about what color some historical event. And the dad said, Well, we didn't invent color until the 1960s so.

Dave Bittner: Yes, yes. That's one of my all time favorite Calvin and Hobbes, the idea that there simply was no color. Love it. All right. Well, let's -- we've delayed here enough, and we've covered the history of our hero in the story or I guess, ultimately, who becomes our hero. So let's dig in here, Rick. How do you want to start?

Rick Howard: Well, I -- the clip I brought here is -- this is from the cartoon. And the Grinch has decided that he's had it with Christmas and all the celebrations by the Whos down in Whoville. And apparently it's been going on for 50 years, and he's just done with it. And, as Dr. Seuss says in the book, the Grinch hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season. Please don't ask why. No one knows the reason. I just think he was in a bad mood, Dave. That's all I'm thinking. So the Grinch decides to steal Christmas, and his disguise is the canny Santa Claus red coat and red hat that he made out of an old curtain in the back room of his cave and the stuffing from an old pillow. And I've got to say, Dave, the Grinch is quite the seamstress. I mean, you know, he can sew some stuff.

Dave Bittner: That's true.

Rick Howard: I would not have been able to do that. And he dressed his dog Max up as a reindeer by tying an old antler on his head. So, as we play the clip, the Grinch is stealing Christmas from the first house in Whoville.

Narrator: All dreaming sweet dreams without care when he came to the first little house of the square.

Rick Howard: The Grinch's hauling his bags, and Max is --

The Grinch: This is stop number one.

Narrator: The old Grinchy clause hissed as he climbed to the roof --

Dave Bittner: I always felt bad for Max.

Rick Howard: Yeah, Max. Tough life.

Dave Bittner: He's not in the book.

Rick Howard: Oh, yeah. No. That's interesting.

Narrator: -- rather tight pinch. But if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch. He got stuck only once for a minute or two. Then he stuck his head --

Rick Howard: That's the Grinch in the chimney being stuck in the chimney, and I -- absolutely would have happened to me.

Narrator: -- hung all in a row.

The Grinch: These stockings, he grinched, are the first things to go.

Rick Howard: So there's the Grinch stealing the stockings off the chimney.

Narrator: Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant, Around the whole room, and he took every present! Pop guns, pampoogas, pantookas, and drums! Checkerboards, bizilbigs, popcorn, and plums! And he stuffed them in bags. Then the Grinch, very nimbly, Stuffed all the bags, one by one, up the chimbly.

Rick Howard: And all the bags come floating on the roof. He dropped them on Max in the snowbank.

Narrator: You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch. You really are a heel.

Dave Bittner: The great Thurl Ravenscroft singing.

Rick Howard: Best song ever.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Narrator: As charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.

Dave Bittner: Deepest voice ever.

Rick Howard: Yeah. The Grinch is doing a pool ball with the Christmas tree balls. Fantastic shot, I might say. Gets all of them to roll right into the bag.

Narrator: You're a monster, Mr. Grinch. Your heart's an empty hole.

Dave Bittner: Max.

Narrator: Your brain is full of spiders --

Rick Howard: I think we could stop it there.

Narrator: -- you've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch.

Rick Howard: So what do you think, Dave? Did that make your heart grow three sizes today?

Dave Bittner: Not yet. Yeah. So you're setting this up perfectly here because, obviously, you know, the Grinch is a bad guy. But let me ask you this because, before I dug into all of this history of the Grinch and learned about his backstory, I wondered -- and I think part of this comes from the Jim Carrey movie, which we're going to look at a clip from in a second here. But I wondered if the Grinch was a Who from Whoville in the same way that Gollum was a Hobbit.

Rick Howard: Wow.

Dave Bittner: Before everything went bad for Gollum, you know. Like, so was the Grinch -- had the Grinch started out a Who, but he was so angry and so mad and so lonely up on the mountain by himself that that's how he became the Grinch.

Rick Howard: So he -- you're -- the Dave theory on the Grinch is that some precipitating event caused him to grow taller than all the other Whos and to be very angry for 50 years. And something like the ring from Lord of the Rings caused this transformation. I love this theory, okay.

Dave Bittner: I mean, I don't know about all those details, but just basically pimping -- I mean, maybe he was ostracized for being tall. Who knows?

Rick Howard: Who knows.

Dave Bittner: But somehow he --

Rick Howard: Yeah. I think you're right about that.

Dave Bittner: He lived by himself. In this cartoon, he had Max. But he lived by himself. I just, yeah. I mean, otherwise, what is he? He's not like a Yeti. I mean --

Rick Howard: Yeah. No. That's true.

Dave Bittner: He got stuck on a mountain by himself.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: The whole mountain.

Rick Howard: The movie with -- the movie we're going to watch a clip for in a minute, they do try to explain all that, right. He was an ostracized Who, right. Maybe one of the adopted Who or something, and he ended up there by himself, right. But I like your theory better, right. It matches better.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. So I want to move on to a different clip here from the animated one with Chuck Jones. And what I want to do is sort of contrast this in the animated one and then the Jim Carrey live action movie one.

Rick Howard: All right. But, hey --

Dave Bittner: This is where -- go ahead.

Rick Howard: Before you do that, you were talking about Thurl Ravenscroft, right.

Dave Bittner: Yes.

Rick Howard: I feel like we're remiss if we didn't talk about how famous this guy is, right?

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: Best known, okay, probably for the Tony the Tiger voiceover and Frosted Flakes TV commercials, right?

Dave Bittner: Right. Yeah. They're great!

Rick Howard: They're great! Yeah. But he was also used by Disney in lots of stuff. He was in 101 Dalmatians. He was the horse. He was in Brave Little Toaster, which one of our -- the Howard's favorites. And he was also in the Aristocats, okay. He was the Russian cat in 1970. But --

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: The -- my favorite role for him, right, is on the Disneyland's Haunted Mansion Ride, he is the deep voice singing one of the busts in the graveyard scene, right.

Dave Bittner: Yes, yes.

Rick Howard: So -- and he -- once you hear his voice, you cannot unhear it. You hear him wherever he pops up in popular culture.

Dave Bittner: I believe and I'm not going to do it justice because I do not have the basso profundo that he has, but I believe his line is, Grizzly ghosts materialize.

Rick Howard: Oh, that's it! Yeah! Very good. Almost as good as my Marvin the Martian.

Dave Bittner: Yes. My voice, he has a good octave on me down in the lower register. Must have been -- you talk -- you talk -- you know, those old voiceover guys like that, and they all say it was, like, you know, cigarettes, cigars, and whiskey.

Rick Howard: And whiskey. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Got the voices all that low from way back when. Also worth noting, the other famous voiceover person in this is June Foray who, of course --

Rick Howard: Oh. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: -- she -- she's the voice of Cindy Lou Who and probably best known as Rocky the squirrel in Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: I mean, her voice was all over everything back then as well. She's probably certainly in the top five of voiceover artists of that era. So, yeah. It's an all-star thing.

Rick Howard: So real, real Hollywood royalty in this one little 1966 animated cartoon.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. So I want to jump into this next clip. And this is where Cindy Lou Who confronts the Grinch. She wakes. She hears him banging around the living room, and she wakes up and comes out to see him. And the Grinch just switches into social engineering mode. And this is smooth as butter with her, so let's check this out. We see Cindy Lou waking up.

Narrator: The Grinch took the tree, as he started to shove, he heard a small sound like the coo of a dove. He turned around fast, and he saw a small Who, little Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than 2. She stared at the Grinch and said:

Cindy Lou Who: Santie Clause, why? Why are you taking our Christmas tree? Why?

Rick Howard: She's adorable.

Narrator: You know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick, he thought up a lie and he thought it up quick.

The Grinch: Why, my sweet little tot.

Narrator: The fake Santie Clause lied.

The Grinch: There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side. So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear. I'll fix it up there, and I'll bring it back here.

Narrator: And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head. And he got her a drink, and he sent her to bed. And when Cindy Lou Who was in bed with her cup, he crawled to the chimney and stuffed the tree up. Then he went up the chimney --

Rick Howard: Okay. It -- you have to say -- you have to make a point here about the animation from Chuck Jones, right? That is -- that face that he puts on when he's panic that he doesn't have an answer for Cindy Lou, and then he comes up with the lie, and his whole face transforms. The evil, it's fantastic.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. It really is. I mean, I think this is one of Chuck Jones's masterpieces. He's so good. And it's so Chuck Jones. What's amazing to me is how it is -- it's still Dr. Seuss. Like, you look at the characters, and you know that's where they came from. But, at the same time, those little flourishes are so signature Chuck Jones and the way --

Rick Howard: So Chuck Jones. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: -- the backgrounds are drawn, just amazing. I -- just quickly talking about some of the history here, in the research, I read that this special had four times the budget of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special --

Rick Howard: Wow!

Dave Bittner: -- because the Charlie Brown Christmas Special was an unexpected hit. And so that made it easier for the people who followed to get more money to make their animated Christmas specials because now the network's saw dollar signs.

Rick Howard: Wow. I did not know that. Right. And I will tell you that, because I'm a collector of nerd stuff, we have -- the Howard's have an original cell of Bugs Bunny, okay, signed by Chuck Jones, he made. And what's interesting about that is that original cell from the cartoon meaning, you know, they had to make up a bunch of cells to make the animation go.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: And they sold them in art galleries later in Chuck Jones' life. So I have one of them. So --

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: And nobody likes it except for me because it's nothing special. Doesn't even look that fantastic. But I know that Chuck Jones signed it.

Dave Bittner: Wow. That's cool. I have a book called Chuck Amuck, which is Chuck Jones's book that he wrote. And it's sort of a memoir and autobiography. Highly recommend it if you're a Chuck Jones fan. One of the things that's in that book that you'll see reprinted quite often are kind of the rules of the road for the coyote and the roadrunner.

Rick Howard: Oh, yeah.

Dave Bittner: They had a very specific set of rules for what they could and could not do. And that comes straight out of that book. All right. Let's look at the same clip.

Rick Howard: Same scene.

Dave Bittner: This is from -- same scene, yes. Thank you. Same scene from the animated -- or the live action version starring Jim Carrey. Now, Rick, have you seen this version? When -- what do you -- what do you think of it?

Rick Howard: I -- we love Jim Carrey in this, right. It's one of the -- you know, you have movie lines that you just throw out to your family members. Many of them come from this movie, and the one I think is most -- mostly throw at each other is, I can't miss that one again when I go to dinner, when myself and -- five o'clock I need to stare into the abyss. Okay. So those are --

Dave Bittner: Yeah. What's interesting about this and how it affects how they play out this scene is that, in this film, the townspeople know about the Grinch ahead of time. And so part of what Jim Carrey's character, what Jim Carrey's Grinch does in this scene is hides himself from Cindy Lou Who behind the tree so that she can't see that it's him, the Grinch, which is just an interesting contrast. So let's here's the clip.

Narrator: And the Grinch grabbed the tree, and he started to shout, when he heard a small sound like the coo of a dove.

Cindy Lou Who: Excuse me.

Narrator: The Grinch had been caught by this tiny Who daughter, who got out of bed for a cup of cold water.

Cindy Lou Who: Santa Clause, what are you doing with our tree?

Narrator: But you know that old Grinch was so smart and so slick, he thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick.

The Grinch: My sweet little tot.

Narrator: The fake Santa Claus lied.

The Grinch: There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side. So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear. I'll fix it up there, and I'll bring it back here.

Cindy Lou Who: Santa, what's Christmas really about?

The Grinch: Vengeance! Er, I mean presents, I suppose.

Cindy Lou Who: I was afraid of that.

Narrator: And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head. And he got her a drink, and he sent her to bed.

Cindy Lou Who: Santa.

The Grinch: What?

Cindy Lou Who: Don't forget the Grinch. I know he's mean and hairy and smelly. His hands might be cold and clammy. But I think he's actually kind of sweet.

The Grinch: Sweet. You think he's sweet.

Cindy Lou Who: Merry Christmas, Santa.

Dave Bittner: So fleshed out here, right, I mean, there's a lot more --

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: -- a lot more detail.

Rick Howard: I like -- I appreciate what you said at the beginning. He's hiding himself behind the Christmas tree --

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: -- and acting like Santa Claus because Cindy Lou Who does know who the Grinch is, right. So that's a detail that's very interesting. And I love that he is broken by her when she says that he is sweet. And he was not expecting that, right, so.

Dave Bittner: No, no.

Rick Howard: But, still, his social engineering skills gets him out the door with the Christmas tree, right? Let's bring it back to Hacking Humans, right?

Dave Bittner: Right, right. Yes. The Grinch, despite his drawing attention to himself with his appearance, his guile gets him what he wants.

Rick Howard: Exactly right.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. You know, I have to say that, for me, probably the old animated version is number one in our house. We probably watch that every year. And then the book is probably second and then the Jim Carrey movie. I think the Jim Carrey movie is -- is very good and worth watching just, for nothing else, Jim Carrey's performance, which is amazing. You know, that -- he's unworldly, his ability to transform himself. And the plasticity in his face is just unreal.

Rick Howard: That's how the Howards would rate it too. The cartoon definitely play it every year while we're putting the Christmas tree up, right. And we may get around to the movie version, only because it's Mr. Carrey because he is so good in it. Everything else is it's okay. It's fun, you know. But --

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: It's when he's on the screen, you know, mugging it up, it is really funny and a true master at his craft.

Dave Bittner: Think it's one of those films for us where, if we happen upon it when it's on and the season is right, then we may leave it on. But we probably don't really go searching it out --

Rick Howard: Yeah --

Dave Bittner: -- quite often.

Rick Howard: Yeah. Let's watch Jim Carrey Grinch tonight. Yeah, no. We don't, either.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: But, if it's on, we might watch it. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: I was surprised how far back this film goes. This movie was from 2000.

Rick Howard: Wow. Is that right?

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Twenty-three years.

Rick Howard: Doesn't seem right. Man.

Dave Bittner: Of course, directed by the great Ron Howard.

Rick Howard: Yeah. He even makes fun of Ron Howard in the movie, right, so it's --

Dave Bittner: Yeah. All right. Well, I think we have done what we can here of entertaining ourselves. And hopefully our audience will find this entertaining as well.

Rick Howard: Like Dave, you know, some of these shows we do for us, and some we do for the audience. And I think we did this one for us.

Dave Bittner: I think you're right. I think you're right. Well -- well, Merry Christmas to you, Rick, and to the entire Howard family.

Rick Howard: Merry Christmas to you, sir. This is so much fun. And thanks for being my partner on these shows and especially for this Christmas show. It's so much fun to do.

Dave Bittner: No. It really is. And, folks, if this is a show that you enjoy listening to, please let us know. You can email us. It's hackinghumans@n2k.com. It really helps us know what sorts of things you're interested in. It helps us make the case with some of the folks who sponsor these types of shows that people are out there and listening to them and that they enjoy them. So let us know one way or another. And Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody out there, and we will see you all in the New Year. On behalf of my cohost, Rick Howard, and everyone here at N2K, a quick note that our senior producer is Jennifer Eiben. This show is edited by Elliott Pelzman. Our executive editor is Peter Kilpe. I'm Dave Bittner.

Rick Howard: And I'm Rick Howard.

Dave Bittner: Thanks for listening.