boy scout

While traveling to attend a wedding, we meet a poet and a boy scout in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Today I had the privilege to sitting down with Nicholas Leitch who is this year’s winner of the Southwest Region Eagle Scout Project of the year, and was 1 of 8 national finalists for Eagle Scout Project of the year.  

Nico is a Type 1 diabetic - diagnosed at age 10- and we talked about his diagnosis and how that became the inspiration behind his project. Nico’s Eagle Scout project also led to the beginning of a new nonprofit organization called Diabetic Wellness Initiative.  Visit diabeticwellnessinitiative.org for more information or to donate and get involved! 

Radioactive Boy Scout & Mad Mike.  I feel like we’ve come a long way, and for the most part kept our dangerous activities to areas where they were atleast monitored by professionals. Today we’re talking about the people who missed those lessons. Backyard Scientists who took it upon themselves to do the unthinkable.

There's fashionably late and then there's being rude. The boys tackle a question on group dining etiquette before moving on to a question directed at Eagle Scout Matt Shea...one that spawns Eric's long-awaited line of Boy Scout-related inquiries for Matt. That's right folks...the Boy Scout episode has arrived.

Got a question for the show? Submit your least-pressing questions at youdidntaskforthis@gmail.com or @udidntaskpod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Will and Matt discuss why Rocky Balboa might punch some cows, disgrace, and the Bruce Willis mythos.

DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!

THE LAST BOY SCOUT
dir. Tony Scott
starring: Damon Wayans, Bruce Willis, Chelsea Field

In this episode, David talks about researching the formative years of his father, Elliott Maraniss, whose ordeal before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and time in the crucible of the Red Scare are the subject of his latest book, A Good American Family. In Elliott’s old Boy Scout newsletter, high school yearbooks and articles in the University of Michigan student paper, David found the paper trail that revealed the shaping of his father’s life and political beliefs during the great depression and run-up to World War II.  In the New York Public Library and the digital archive of the Michigan Daily, David came upon influential moments and people: the brilliant Jewish teachers at Abraham Lincoln High, kept from university jobs by quotas, who told Elliott’s class ‘they could not afford to be another lost generation,” as well as  Elliott’s cohort at the Michigan Daily that included a young Arthur Miller and the poet John Malcom Brinnin. The newspaper  was first-class, cultivating, as all good student newspaper do, a generation of writers and space for questioning authority. But the biggest revelation was the article he found confirming a family tale about how his parents met:  A banquet on campus for Bob Cummins, home from the Spanish Civil War; his younger sister, Mary Cummins in attendance. And covering the event for The Michigan Daily was Elliott Maraniss.