I'm telling you right now.

I'm telling you at the outset of this.

This is probably not a good idea. I've had, I've had, I would say many bad ideas in my career maybe mostly bad ideas but generally

when I have a bad idea I'll say to somebody here's my idea and they will say well that's a bad idea and then I will say yeah you're right forget it but the thing about podcast is the barrier to entry is so low that if you have a terrible idea,

then you can just make the thing and maybe somebody will think to themselves upon

listening to it even having been warned that it is perhaps a terrible idea.

They will think to themselves, oh, well, this was a terrible idea.

And then they never come back.

Or, and this is my hope, they will think to themselves,

oh, I was warned that this was a terrible idea, but I'm actually

quite enjoying this and I will come back.

From the Jill Schwartz Memorial Library in the wild of of Connecticut. My name is Michael Ian Black. This is

obscure. Jude the obscure. So let me explain the premise and this is where I may lose all of you. Some of you

you may recognize that Jude the obscure is the title of a novel by Thomas Hardy. This novel was

published in 1896. It has been in continuous publication ever since then. It is considered a classic in the Western

canon, although I suspect it's kind of a minor classic because it's not the kind of book that I got taught in

school and I feel like most people didn't get taught Jude the obscure. Hence I have

never read Jude the obscure. My wife to whom I I have been married, lo! these many days, was a

comparative literature major at American University, and so she still has all her books

from then, and one of these books is Thomas Hardy Jude the

obscure paperback edition that it's a Penguin Classic. Penguin Classic Jude the

obscuring has been sitting on our bookshelves for as long as I've known her which is

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