Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I write about a little something up top then (will very shortly in the future) answer a legal question for you down below. This week, search history as personality tests, prepping for a SCOTUS roundup, and a new way to help worthwhile organizations.
In this edition:
Topic of the Week – Curiouser and Curiouser
Legal Question – Returning Soon!
CMDotW: A way we can make small change together
Curiouser and Curiouser
I’m hurtling through space at a couple hundred miles per hour somewhere over Mississippi. I’m in the last row of first class on an airplane not much larger than a Dodge Caravan. Christie and I are flying home from traveling for the podcast. She’s back in steerage, and I’d be sitting right beside her, but the points gods smiled down upon me, and I was selected for a random upgrade.
My idea of first class has always been luxurious. In movies from the ‘70s, you’d see a bar, people standing up sipping cocktails, velvet sofas, flight attendants in little hats. Maybe somewhere that’s still the case, but on this American Airlines go-kart-in-the-sky, I am just happy to have seen the pilot board before take-off and at least he wasn’t wearing a leather helmet and goggles.
I refuse to blow my chance to enjoy first class, so I decide not to sleep. Instead, I just look around at how everyone else is behaving. Guy next to me is watching TV on his phone. The guy on the other side is reading a book about the power of prayer. Hopefully he’s just religious, and he didn’t bust that out knowing something I don’t about the fate of this plane.
My eye keeps getting drawn to the man in the window seat on the row ahead of me. I’m in the aisle, so between the seat crack, I can see his phone crystal clear. Before takeoff, we were given the choice of water or juice as a pre-flight beverage. He barked, “Coffee,” so that tells you a bit about his demeanor.
Now in the air, he has purchased Wi-Fi. They give you free Wi-Fi if you just want to stream movies or TV shows from the AA database, but this man has entered his credit card information and paid real dollars to have unfettered access to the internet. What could be that important? Work? Not from the looks of things. Keeping in contact with family? He doesn’t text the whole time.
Instead, I see him check the delivery status of his new Tesla. I then see him browsing the latest posts in the “Bad Boy Mower Owners Club” private Facebook group. Finally, I see him open Amazon and begin searching for a beer koozie printed with the phrase, “I identify as water.”
Soon, koozie after koozie fill his screen. He’s chuckling to himself. I hate these koozies. They irritate me on two levels. First of all, they are a thinly veiled way to mock pronouns and gender identity. Second of all, it’s hack comedy and simply not funny. Because he is laughing at them, I decide I hate him, too.
Just based on his having searched for those, I have him figured out. Crew cut. Polo shirt. LOL-ing at these stupid ass novelty items. I have seen that for which he searches, therefore I know his soul.
Then I freeze.
I don’t have the cleanest search history myself. I shudder to think what someone would glean about me and my soul if they took a scroll through my recent inquiries.
How much does a giraffe skull cost?
They’d find that and a lot of searches price-checking bones. Who collects bones? A bone collector, that’s who. And that was the name of a movie about a serial killer, so not ideal company to keep. For once, I can’t even blame the podcast for these searches. The blame lies squarely with Jack White.
Yes, that Jack White.
On our tour stop in Nashville, Christie, LeeAnn, and I had the opportunity to tour Third Man Records, the office/recording studio/venue/record store owned by multi-Grammy award winning artist and genius, Jack White.
The place is incredible. Since it’s an operational office space, they don’t let you take photos inside. All I have are my memories and recounting them makes me sound like maybe I fell asleep while simultaneously watching Willy Wonka and listening to The White Stripes. Wait, wait – has anybody tried that yet? I bet they’d line up like Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon.
I am assuming you are familiar with Jack White, but in case you’re not, let me help you. He co-founded the White Stripes. Plays guitar like a fiend. Owns a record label and is reviving vinyl pressing. Singer. Songwriter. Baseball bat company co-owner. Dude does a lot.
He’s also a bit of an odd duck. He’s extraordinarily pale and currently has bright blue hair. All that to say, if I showed you a photo lineup, and one photo was of Jack White, and I asked you which person had an office full of taxidermy animals, you’d pick him. He’s a creative genius – seriously, take a listen to any of his music – and that’s primarily because he does things his own way, which, having seen it in action, seems to be working just fine.
Seeing the extensive collection of bones and taxidermy creatures inside his building is at once both unexpected, given that its an office building, and totally perfect, given that it’s Jack White’s office building. The place houses the first record Elvis ever cut, a 1960s lathe that pressed James Brown records, and a replica of a motel, complete with bullet holes in the walls and peepholes in the doors.
The first and most prominent taxidermy piece we see is in The Blue Room, the in-house music venue with direct-to-acetate recording capabilities. This place has hosted talent from Billie Eilish to Billy Idol. It’s a dreamy space with an infinite blue wall opposite the stage. It’s a lot to take in. Still, you can’t help but train your eyes on the wall beside the bar on which a full-size elephant head is mounted.
“That’s Topsy,” our friend and tour guide, Christina, tells us.
Topsy was obtained via trade – a photo booth and an undisclosed amount of money in exchange for the head. His tusks and ears are replicas, but the rest is real.
Out the Blue Room’s door, we enter the employee lounge. Some very hip looking employees greet us with smiles and waves as we enter and stand beside a bongo.
Not the drum, the animal.
Roughly the size of a gazelle, the bongo sits outside of Jack’s office, a gift that was the result of a miscommunication. When someone says to you, “Let me bring you a bongo,” you may assume they mean the drum. Unless you’re Jack White, in which case the likelihood that it is a drum is equal to the likelihood that it is a full-size taxidermy nocturnal herbivore.
The adjacent coffee table is only good to hold a cup of coffee or two because of the two enormous animal skulls covering the surface.
“Guess what those are,” Christina says.
“A triceratops,” I say.
“A giraffe,” LeeAnn says at the same time.
Turns out, LeeAnn is right. Undeterred, when Christina asks us what we think the second skull may be, I offer, “A saber-toothed tiger?”
“That would be cool,” she tells us. “But it’s a hippo.”
The entire time inside Third Man, we’re all in awe. It is a place that is equally stylized and functional. The staff is so joyful to be there it’s palpable. They’re all part of an organization creating art that at once revolutionizes the industry and revives its once-great dying elements. I love the place. Having walked his carefully cultivated halls, I now love Jack White. I envy his strange menagerie.
Later that evening, we perform our show at Zanies. It goes great, then we head back to the hotel for some late-night post-show pizza. Sitting around waiting for the delivery driver, we can’t stop talking about Third Man and everything we saw there.
Classy until the end, Christina never put a price on any of the items as we walked through. The amount paid, if ever mentioned, was always, “An undisclosed sum.” Ok, but how much of a sum? We didn’t know. It was not disclosed.
Our curiosity had to be satiated. To solve this riddle once and for all, I pull out my phone and punch into the search bar: how much does a giraffe skull cost?
The first result is a company called Skulls Unlimited. Great name because why put limitations on yourself if you’re already online searching for skulls that can be shipped to your door?
The site offers suggestions to their potential customers if you’re not quite sure what kind of skull you’re looking for: wolf, cat skull, human skeleton.
The “About Us” page emphasizes that the company sells “legally and ethically obtained natural bone specimens” as well as replicas. The words “legally” and “ethically” aren’t bolded on the page, but they may as well be. Think whatever you want, the page seems to say, but we did NOT steal these bones.
In case you’ve got some bones of your own you’re looking to offload, they have a page that reads, “I Have a Skull for Sale.” It is surprisingly non-judgmental, if a little shrewd. The bone-selling process has a few steps. First, you have to take photos of the bones. Next, you must come up with an asking price.
This part, I feel, is a little tricky. If you’ve got an old banged up skull, is that worth more or less than a pristine, new-but-no-longer-in-package elbow, for instance? Gemstones have a whole series of quality measurements. Meat is graded like a student’s work. Does the same apply to bones? All bones by virtue of their very nature are used. Who is to say which are more valuable?
Once you settle on a dollar figure, you send that and the pictures via email to a man named Jay. It doesn’t say on the site what his official title is, but I’m going with Bone Daddy.
After Jay the Bone Daddy vets your goods, the team will “let you know” if they’re interested. I don’t know about you, but I’d be real pissed to dust off my bones, take the time to shoot photos of them, put a price on them, then get rejected. Nothing more crushing than having someone look at your skeleton and decide, “These bones are trash.”
Still, reading about this extensive process gives me a lot of faith in their company. It conveys both an organized process and a discerning taste.
I click around more in the search results and find a second company called The Bone Room. Good for them for registering that domain before some perverts got ahold of it. Their “About Us” page focuses on their founder, a man named Ron Cauble. The Bone Room was an outgrowth of Ron’s previous business venture: his in-home reptile emporium. The emporium expanded as they tend to do, and Ron moved operations from his home to a professional store front.
I think you have to tell the landlord what business you run before they’ll lease a commercial space to you. I like to imagine Ron told them the spot was for a reptile emporium, and the broker scoffed. All this space? For a reptile emporium? Then Ron pulled out the Polaroids of his spare bedroom and basement. “Check those babies out,” I imagine he said, showing row after row of monsters behind glass. You don’t say no to a guy like that.
The Bone Room then expanded into a Bone Building, taking up two floors of commercial space in San Francisco. Reading about the place and seeing photos of the interior, I decide there’s nothing more I’d like to do than go to San Francisco and meet Ron Cauble and see his bones.
There’s a photo of Ron on the site, drawing me in more. He’s holding a baboon skull that has only one eye hole, and he’s winking on the same side. With a Seiko watch and a thick mustache, this photo was definitely taken before cell phones were invented.
His official biography paints him as quite a character – a Ph.D. chemist and Army captain with an insatiable curiosity. He moved from rocket science to raising snakes, lizards, and frogs. That evolved into a fascination with bones. Ron created the shop as a place “where he could think about and enjoy and share the myriad wonders of nature.” According to the site, he loved when folks were “amused” by the Bone Room, “thinking that was a perfectly correct and enjoyable reaction to his unusual store.”
Then I get to the next paragraph, and I’m crushed. “Upon the sudden demise of Ron,” I read, the business shrunk but still survived. It’s now a warehouse, open to visitors by appointment only. Ron’s gone. The Bone Room in the photos is gone. I am devastated.
Back to the task at hand, I pull up various listings for giraffe skulls and skeletons. The full-size giraffe skeleton is $42,000 and stands 14-feet, seven-inches tall. Though I could pay for this with a cash out refinance loan against my home equity, it is much higher than my ceilings and probably would upset the dogs.
A giraffe skull is available for the low price of $6,900. Seeing this price, my mind begins calculating. I could take out a loan against my old 401(k) and have it shipped to my door before I even get home.
But then where would I put it? My mantle seems like an obvious choice, but it is already holding Rat Bader Ginsburg, the taxidermy mouse I stuffed in the back room of a neighborhood curiosities shop. The dining room would be an elegant place for a skull of that quality, but I would need a hutch for it. With the two life-size Blues Brothers statues that stand frozen, mid-dance on either side of my dining room wall, there’s just no space.
Maybe I’m not meant to own exotic bones. There are Ron Caubles and Jack Whites – maybe only one of each – and then there is me. Not some oddball, just a normal gal with a curious mind.
The truth doesn’t matter, though. My data is out there. I am marked. Google has begun to ask me, Have you purchased a giraffe skull yet? If so, tell us how it went! My history is now littered with bones – buying, selling, human, animal. It’s not because I was actually going to buy anything, I tell myself. I was simply looking.
Back in first class, the man in front of me is using one had to shove fist-fulls of pretzels into his mouth as he continues to scroll through koozies on his phone. Knowing what secrets my own search history holds, I decide to give him a little grace.
Maybe he’s not truly amused by the koozies. Maybe, like me, he is just curious.
Then I see him click “Add to Cart.” He selects his payment method and clicks “Check Out.” The koozie will be delivered to his home in two-days, free shipping. The grace drains out of my body, and the hate returns. I am all for cutting people some slack, but those koozies? Unforgivable.
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QUESTION FROM YOU
This segment will be back soon! The Sinisterhood tour is almost over, so I’ll have more free time to answer your legal questions starting later in August.
Until then, we’re working on the research for a SCOTUS round-up episode, covering the overturning of Roe v. Wade as well as the Court’s decisions on Miranda rights, claims of actual innocence, prayer on the football field, and more.
If you have a question, we’ll try our best to incorporate it in our coverage. You can submit them here.
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NEW THING: CMDotW
Sunday Morning Hot Tea will always remain free. If you like what you read, you can buy me a cup of coffee. Except please don't because I buy too much for myself already.
Instead, you can join me in my coffee money pledge. Every week, I take however much I spent on coffee (setting myself a minimum of $25) and send it to an organization I support.
You can donate where I do, or choose your own! I'll include my pick at the bottom of each edition of the newsletter. If we all send just $1 or $5, that’ll make an impact. Here's my first pick.
COFFEE MONEY DONATION OF THE WEEK: Artstillery
This week, Paris and I attended "In Spite of History - Part 1," an immersive, community-driven storytelling experience told from the perspective of those who live in Dallas and experienced Fair Park and the South Dallas community from the 1960s to today.
We heard stories adapted from interviews of actual local Fair Park residents on how the development of the site of the State Fair of Texas impacted them, their families, and their way of life. The city leveled the homes of many Black families in order to develop the area surrounding the park, then the park's gates weren't always open to every Dallasite. The program also shared the story of the Caddo and Wichita tribes who once inhabited this land before being forced out.
In addition to stories, the performance offered hopeful ideas on how Dallas can adapt and change to become a better place for all of its residents. As their performance description says, "The future is big enough (or has space enough) for all of us, as long as we acknowledge our history and don’t repeat our failures of the past. That all starts with a conversation and you. Please join us for that conversation."
We were so pleased to attend and get a copy of author Denise Montgomery's book I Want to Go, from which the play gathered some of its details. She even signed our book!
The actors were incredible. The stories they told were impactful. The whole production was immersive and moving. If you can get tickets, I highly recommend checking it out. A few tickets remain for this run, going on through July 23. I am looking forward to seeing other productions they put on in the future, which is why I am choosing Artstillery as the CMDotW - Coffee Money Donation of the Week.
Join me in donating here, learn more about the Artistillery mission here, or get tickets here.
If you're not local to Dallas and you feel more comfortable donating closer to your home, I get it. Look around your neighborhood and find an organization that is using art to empower people or tell untold stories. Here are some tips on vetting a worthwhile place to donate.
Let me know where you donate by tagging me on IG (@heathervstheworld) or Twitter (@mckvstheworld) and including #CMDotW. Or don’t! Plenty of people do good things and nobody ever knows about it. What matters is helping, not people knowing you helped. And if you can’t donate, don’t sweat it. Just keep doing the best you can.
Until next week, that’s the tea, and yes I spend too much money on coffee please don’t judge me.