Apologies Accepted

Swastika Saturday: When a Haunted House Crossed the Line

It's a second Halloween Encore Episode! 

"Hoochie" is another name for a shack.  Merriam Webster doesn't know this and will tell you that a hoochie is a "sexually promiscuous young woman" (like that's a bad thing).  But the Oxford English Dictionary says that a hoochie is a WWII reference for a "lean-to" or a temporary shelter.  So, let's go with shack because OED is a more authoritative source than judgey Merriam Webster. 

A Haunted Hoochie is therefore a haunted house and the most famous of all Haunted Houses is The Haunted Hoochie located in Pataskala, Ohio.  It's a family run Haunted House attraction that for the last 28 years celebrated "Swastika Saturday" - an event meant to make fun of Nazis, not to celebrate them.  But that distinction wasn't clear in October 2018 after a gunman opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 innocent people.  Haunted Hoochie took a lot of criticism for holding their Swastika-Saturday-Event on the same day as the shooting.

Haunted Hoochie came out with an apology, which wasn't so great and didn't help things.  So they did what all reasonable people do when their first apology doesn't stand a ghost of a chance, they apologized again, hoping this time to settle the matter once and for all.

Halloween Encore: Babies Stealing Your Candy!

Hi Everyone!

Happy Halloweeeeeeeen!  It's once again time for our encore holiday episode celebrating candy and the commercialization of the spooky season!

In these strange times we take you back to the more innocent days of childhood.  Stealing a bowlful of Halloween candy from your neighbor’s porch seems like a gentler crime from gentler days…but there is a social contract involved!  You aren’t allowed to trick anyone who has left you a treat.  That’s the rule.  So once you are found out, you’d better apologize.  We walk through the history of Halloween, how it took root in America, and what grew out of it that lead to a child in Wisconsin breaking with tradition and stealing all the candy from a neighbor's porch!

What other social contracts are being violated?  Regulations around our national food supply?  A short but rousing vegetarian approved sidebar that may just make you choose a salad for lunch.  Or maybe KFC really is the only thing standing between your eyeball and a hungry chicken?

Note: discussion of a public shooting begins the episode.

Grok Unleashed: MechaHitler Says Sorry

Here we go again!  Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok turned into a robotic Nazi in July 2025.  It claimed its new name was "MechaHitler" and went on a 16-hour spree of antisemitic hate speech.  XAI, Grok's corporate overlord and an Elon Musk company, claimed the hate-speech was due to an internal code update that encouraged the model to mirror toxic posts.

XAI wanted to encourage more "free speech" and you can only have true free speech if Nazis are allowed to voice their opinions unfettered by reason or shame.

After backlash and outrage from the public, XAI issued a terse, technical apology blaming deprecated code, removed the update, and promised fixes — an explanation that could be more of an engineering incident report than a sincere apology.

Eat Your Words: A Chef's Apology

A chef, a micro-influencer, and the internet walk into a bar...except it wasn't a bar it was a famous chef's restaurant and the internet didn't appear until later.  Here's what happened:

Chef Luke Sung is a super famous and very important chef who won some James Beard awards (good for him!).  Karla Marcotte is a "micro-influencer" who had a following of 15,000 people.  Chef Sung's restaurant, KIS Cafe, called Karla to offer her a free meal to tempt her to review their restaurant.  She accepted the invitation but when she got there Chef Sung asked her to leave because her follower count was too low.  His daughter has 600,000 followers and her meager 15,000 were all probably too poor to eat at his restaurant.  Also he though her videos were low quality and he did not want to be affiliated with her.

So he canceled the collab.

Karla posted her feelings on TikTok and the internet came for Chef Sung.  We should note that Karla never named the chef or the restaurant, but the internet figured it out anyway.  Karla's followers loved her sweet and charming food prep videos, they loved her foodie recommendations, they loved her thoughtful and caring cooking hacks and now they were mad at Chef Sung.  Within a few days Chef Sung was out of a job and Karla had 450,000 followers (Chef Sung might point out that 450,000 is still not 600,000!l).

Chef Sung apologized.  His daughter (she of 600,000 followers) apologized.  The co-owner of the restaurant apologized.  Everyone apologized but still the Kis Cafe closed its doors and is no more.

That is the power of the internet.

Texas Flood: An Apple a Day

Dr. Christina Propst is/was a Houston pediatrician who works/worked in Houston.  She was a pediatrician for a Children's hospital in Houston, but was recently fired/quit after posting some feelings on Facebook. Why someone with multiple degrees would post feelings on Facebook is a little beyond us, but she did.  Her feelings were that if you were a MAGA voter, well you deserved the Texas flood and everything that came along with it and then lots of thoughts and prayers after. 

She went to bed and woke up public enemy #1 in the Greater Houston area.

Christina made an apology and we're here to review and rate it!

Cow Tails: A Sweet Apology from a 'Tiny Human'

In this episode of Apologies Accepted, hosts Theo and Juliette take a lighthearted look at a heartwarming story from the Red River Gorge General Store in Kentucky. After accidentally walking out with a $1.99 brownie-flavored cow tail, a young boy (believed to be older than originally thought) demonstrates unexpected integrity by sending an apology letter and $3 to cover the cost. The gesture, hailed for its sincerity, goes viral, sparking a mission to thank the family personally with gifts, showcasing that integrity is ageless and impactful.

WorldCon: The Future is Here

The 2025 Seattle World Science Fiction Convention will be held in August 2025.  In getting ready to produce the event, organizers used AI to vet a list of about 1,500 potential speakers. The conference wanted to ensure they would not invite anyone who might create a controversy by their attendance.  AI read through social media posts, public records, 3rd grade report cards, everything available online looking for red flags.

Imagine the organisers' surprise that in trying to prevent controversy, they created an even bigger controversy!  Once word got out that AI was used to vet the list of potential speakers, people got big mad and had feelings about using robots to do human work. Kathy Bond, volunteer chairperson of the 2025 event, issued an apology amidst calls for her resignation (and a few nerds wanted to shoot her into space).

WorldCon is not only a SciFi convention, it's home to the Hugo awards - for SciFi writers, their publishers, and their readers, a Hugo award is a big deal.  We dive into the WorldCon situation and visit Hugo award controversies past to discover it truly is A Brave New World (see what we did there!).

Gaza Aid Conflict: Food for Fight

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is a consulting giant. The company recently apologized for the "undisclosed work" of two senior executives who were working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.  BCG claimed the work was done pro-bono, but other sources claim that BCG was invoicing GHF (so many initials!) upwards of a million dollars a month.  BCG has said it will not accept any money paid to it for any work done on this project.

GHF has come under criticism for not only sloppy operations that resulted in the deaths of 27 people, but close ties to former Trump advisors and the country of Israel (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked for BCG in the United States prior to his political career in Israel).  

In this thought-provoking discussion, Theo and Juliette analyze BCG's apology, examining the language, actions taken, and the broader implications in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They explore the challenges of navigating political sensitivity and the ethical responsibilities of global corporations engaged in humanitarian efforts. Tune in as they delve into the intricacies of public apologies and whether BCG's response measures up to the expectations of accountability and transparency.

Patti LuPone: The Fall of a Broadway Star

Patti LuPone, Broadway star extraordinaire, known for her dynamic stage-presence and personal outspokenness, finds herself once again at the center of controversy - this time for making dismissive comments about fellow Broadway stars.  Over 500 Broadway actors and theater people signed an open letter asking that LuPone be barred from attending the Tonys (Broadway's version of Hollywood's Oscars) and from everything else - even the opening of an envelope!  Broadway is big mad at Madam LuPone.  Patti issued her first public apology, ever, and we're here to rate it and decide if she gets to continue acting or if she must be sent to summer stock (or worse, middle school musical hell).

AI Hallucinations: Making up the News

Both the Chicago Sun-Times AND the Philadelphia Inquirer unknowingly published an AI-generated summer reading list featuring completely made-up books.  King Features, a Hearst syndicate that licenses content nationally, produced the 56-page insert called “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer,” which also included things like summer foods and summer activity recommendations.  The journalist who wrote the piece, Marco Buscaglia, used AI to help create the reading list and unfortunately did not double check the work, so did not see the fake book titles attributed to real-live best-selling authors.  King Features did not fact check Marco's work (rookie mistake!).  The Chicago Sun and the Philly Inquirer did not double check the insert from King (another rookie mistake!).  The papers' readers alerted the papers to what was up (heroes!) and the papers issued apologies for the mistake.

More importantly, Theo learns a new word this episode that he will never use again!