Cleancast: Are Your Party Messes Worse Than These Party Disasters? 

My guest this week on the official Ask a Clean Person podcast is James Del, Gawker Media’s former VP of programming & events, who joined me to talk about party messes and how to manage a shared vacation home, though he also spilled some dirt on me and my origins at Gawker Media. It involved lemon squares.

That lemon square recipe we talked about, should you want it, is here.

James also spilled some dirt on you guys: my dudes! You’re old. Which is cool, because so am I. In fact, we talked a bit about the dark hole of karaoke and how ruinous a night of warbling in a private room can be, as I was reminded after a recent work-related social outing. The lead-in for that was an observation I made when grabbing questions for us to discuss—damn, guys, the ladies of The Hairpin asked waaaay more party-disaster questions of me than you have! Because, as it turns out, you’re too ancient to make party messes anymore. Or are you? (Tell me about your messes, this is what I’m saying.)

From time to time, though, you all do ask some good party-disaster questions, and so we talked about the poor fellers who threw a party during which a guest stuck a plastic cutting board in their oven, resulting in a next-day “why the fuck does it smell like burning plastic in here?” moment.

We also took on a reader question about a stray green Jell-O shot (St. Patrick’s Day, you see) that went unnoticed during a post-party clean-up effort and subsequently hardened on a windowsill. I know, so weird. It was, however, not nearly as weird as the solution to the problem that James discovered! But, because I’m a tease, you’ll have to listen to find out what it is! You can do that here, or over at iTunes, where you can also subscribe.

Do you have something you’d like to hear discussed on Ask a Clean Person: The Podcast? Email me at [email protected] with the subject line CLEANCAST. Do you like what you heard? Please consider leaving a rating in the iTunes store when you head over there to subscribe!

Jolie Kerr is Deadspin’s resident cleaning expert and the author of the book My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag … And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha (Plume). Follow her on Twitter, or contact her via email at [email protected].

Illustration by Sam Woolley.

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