I want to make sure your podcast feed is full for all the time off and travel you’ve got coming up. So this week, we have an extra episode for you — a Happy Hour with a few of our friends.
VOSD Podcast hosts Scott Lewis, Andrea Lopez-Villafaña and Jakob McWhinney brought in USA Today reporter (and Voice alum) Will Carless and local entrepreneur, brewer and podcaster, Steve Garcia.
In this episode, we have true crime, inflation, frozen rodents and more. Crack open your favorite bubbly drink and let’s get to it.
For the Snakes
McWhinney opened the show with a harrowing tale about vermin.
Earlier this year The San Diego Humane Society could no longer house a collection of rodents, including guinea pigs, rabbits and rats. So, a partnership was made. San Diego’s Humane Society connected with the Humane Society of Southern Arizona to transport the pets elsewhere to find new owners.
But a duplicitous interloper got ahold of the animals. The Humane Society of Southern Arizona was in charge of the transport. And, as discovered by a Tucson reporter, the fuzzy buddies did not find the warm embrace of new owners — but a freezer. They were dehydrated, frozen and fed to snakes. Whoops.
V-Bucks Say it All
Garcia has a bunch of kids and a bunch of businesses. In addition to hosting the Emo Brown Podcast, he leads the Emo Brown Foundation, manages a two breweries under the brand 3 Punk Ales and he slings packages for UPS. Dude is a machine.
Recently his son identified a low-key inflation indicator: v-bucks, a video game currency. These days, V-bucks cost more U.S. dollars but carry the same value in-game. Messed up, right?
As a business owner, homeowner and lifelong San Diegan, Gracia shares with the group all the ways he’s seeing the region become less affordable for all — even bar flies.
Without Fail
As a kid, Lewis sucked a pitching.
For his Happy Hour tale, Lewis relived his teen years playing baseball for a crappy coach. He used that experience to drive his current passion: leading a fast-pitch softball team.
Now a coach himself, he vows to never be like the one who mocked him — using failure as a means of self-improvement. And while it’s definitely something of a tech bro meme, perhaps learning from failure is a mindset the San Diego community should embrace.
Front Row Tix to Jan. 6
Carless covers extremism for USA Today. He flew out to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Before the insurrection, he got a call from Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. While on the phone, Tarrio was arrested. Throughout his coverage of the most infamous day in modern U.S. history — and the week leading to it — Carless recounted to us the surreal nature of it all.
With limited cell service and few resources, he stood witness as rioters stormed the Capitol. The crowd, he says, were some of the most hostile he’s encountered in his global travels as a journalist.
He called his wife as the day devolved. He told her to stock up and hunker down. He thought for sure a violent revolution was coming.
As chaos receded in the night, he learned about the San Diego woman who died in the Capitol that day. It was the woman he sat next to on the plane to get there.
Murder, She Podcasted
Lopez-Villafaña is a crime junkie.
To close out our show, she reviewed a local story from one of her favorite true crime podcasts. An El Cajon woman was murdered in 1994 — a classic murder mystery tale with twists and turns, dogged detectives and a confusing confession by the would-be murderer who’s now dead herself.
An oddity of the story is how some law enforcement agencies use playing cards with victims’ faces to get leads from prisoners. And the catch is that, even though current DNA evidence could help close the case, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department faces a backlog of DNA tests that will likely keep the investigation on ice.
Explicit language note: In this episode, our hosts used swear words and I did not censor them as I normally do.
Correction: This post has been updated to correct that the Humane Society of Southern Arizona was in charge of the transport.