00:00My dad was given a ham as a Christmas gift sometime in the late 80s,
00:05and it was a Smithfield ham, and you're supposed to hang him
00:07in a dry smokehouse for, like, six months.
00:10My dad hung his in a damp Ohio basement for 20 years.
00:16My sister and I inherited the ham,
00:18and I had to talk her out of lighting it on fire and having a Viking funeral.
00:23Can't stop thinking about the ham, Ellen, I gotta tell you.
00:26I asked you if anybody ever tried to eat the ham, and you said, not really.
00:29Well, my father kept threatening that he would take it out to his golf club,
00:33and the chef there would prepare a feast for his friends,
00:35and I kept pointing out his friends were in their 80s and that they would die.
00:41And before we had the ham funeral, I actually tried to cut into it,
00:45and I broke three knives.
00:46Oh, wow, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.
00:48Yeah, it was a scary ham.
00:49Was the ham funeral a burial, a burial at sea?
00:52No, it was a... We threw it into a creek, but beforehand, we...
00:57For some reason, my mother had saved a shoebox full of used birthday candles,
01:01so we doused those with lighter fluid and set that on fire in front of the ham,
01:05and we had some stuffed monkeys surrounding it that we'd found in the attic.
01:08Well, of course.
01:09It was a good funeral.
01:10That all makes perfect sense.
01:12That's what I'd do if I had a very large mildewy...
01:14But I would not let my sister light it on fire.
01:16So if America wants to know more about the scary ham,
01:19Google the scary ham, and there's a long, long story about it.
