Ask A Genius 1276: Bathwater Ode, “I Like it hot”
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/02/26
Rick Rosner: All right. People think it’s weird and gross, but I’ll reuse my wife’s bathwater. She gets in the tub and makes it hot. She likes it hot and is not in there long—she doesn’t clean herself there. She soaks to get warm in the winter. By the time she gets out, it’s still plenty hot for me.
I told them this when I was at Kimmel, and people thought it was disgusting. But people have done this for thousands of years. They didn’t have the luxury of not using the same bathwater.
Who cares? Reusing her water—I don’t know, it’s ecological.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You described an earlier time. I pointed it out, and then you gave a word for it. It was an old-man thing called “fumfering.” Again, describe to the readers what fumfering is.
Rosner: That’s when you struggle to find a word or concept, and you go, “Uhh,” and you get hung up in the middle of a sentence, making vague noises like I’m making now—before you actually reach the right word or phrase.
Jacobsen: So, fumfering—older man fumbling to fumfering. It’s a weird thing. A weird nuance of old-guy dumb. Maybe the old Jewish guy dumb, I don’t know.
But back to the bath—you said she likes it hot, then she gets out. The phrase that cued me into recording this was when you said, “It’s hot enough for me.” First, you said, “It’s hot,” and then corrected yourself: “It’s hot enough for me.”
Rosner: All right. I don’t like it scalding hot. I don’t think it’s particularly good for you to regularly plunge yourself into scalding water.
I’ve heard from longevity lunatics that you shouldn’t do that. I do not know if they know what they’re talking about, but it makes sense.
When you have diabetes, your blood sugar constantly runs hot—you’re essentially cooking yourself with the sugar in your blood. So if that’s bad for you—and we know it is—then it probably makes sense that cooking yourself with hot water isn’t great either.
It’s nice to get into hot water occasionally. Still, I don’t need to bathe in water that’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is, what, 50 degrees Celsius? That’s a lot. It’s hot. It might be more than 60 degrees Fahrenheit when my wife gets in. Celsius, centigrade—whatever the fuck you guys use.
Jacobsen: All of it. We use all the measurements we can.
Rosner: So, you said you got—what’s the—? Did you email me?
Jacobsen: There was a book titled Revolt of the Rich. It came up in one of the transcripts. I reached out and did the interview with the guy. It’s basically about the 1970s, when fiscal austerity was being implemented and deregulation was expanding massively.
Rosner: I made this recommendation a while ago. I don’t remember exactly when.
Jacobsen: Probably a few weeks ago. And we go through so much material.
Rosner: I’ve recommended one person to you multiple times—she’d be a hard get—Justine Bateman. I don’t know her politics, but she’d be a great interview. She’s gotten increasingly frustrated with the Democrats. And when you’re pissed at the Democrats, I guess that means you shift into…
Jacobsen: She’s married to Jason Bateman?
Rosner: No, they’re brother and sister. She was a child star, and now she’s an author.
She went back to school and earned a degree in computer science. She was super vocal during the strikes because, among the strikers, she probably understood the threat of technology better than anyone else.
We’re talking about actors and writers, and she had the gumption to go back and train in it—not just to prepare for a strike but because she saw how technology could be used to screw people over.
And she’s always pissed off about everything.
I saw her once, and she was pissy. She spends a lot of time being pissy.
I was at our local Wells Fargo, and we weren’t getting waited on. It had been a long wait, and I was getting annoyed—there was no reason we couldn’t have been helped. Then she walked in with her mom. She waited about five minutes, realized she wasn’t getting served either, got pissed off, and walked out.
She looked familiar, but it took me a while to place her.
That was her. And yeah—she’s always pissy. But that’s a reasonable way to be, depending on your situation. I read an article on bigorexia, but I don’t think it’s worth discussing.
Jacobsen: What’s bigorexia?
Rosner: Bigorexia is the male—well, it’s usually the male…
Jacobsen: Right, so what is bigorexia?
Rosner: It’s a male version, generally, of anorexia, where you don’t think you’re big and muscular enough. It mostly affects young males, typically high school, who feel this way.
Then, they take measures to address it—lifting weights, eating excessively, and, if possible, taking steroids. But they’re never satisfied with their size. It’s been acknowledged for decades now. I just happened to run into an article explaining it for people who hadn’t encountered it before.
I’ve got a little bit of it myself because I’m skinny now—much skinnier than my younger years—and I don’t love it.
At the same time, I accept it because it’s probably better for my longevity not to carry around an extra 30 pounds of muscle that I don’t need.
But it’s nice to have that size—to fill out your clothes and all that.
I once saw Ben Affleck after he had worked on a movie. He showed up to speak to the crowd and answer questions and was still Batman-sized.
When you train to play a movie superhero, they get you trainers, and you work out for hours a day.
You probably eat 5,000 calories a day, and who knows what else?
If you’re Hugh Jackman, for example, he admitted to taking diuretics before filming certain scenes to look even more ripped.
They push you to such extremes that it’s uncomfortable.
Affleck is probably 6’2”, and when he showed up, he was in a suit but still bulging out of it.
I’d estimate he was about 6’2”, 225 pounds, and likely 10% body fat.
You couldn’t gauge his body fat exactly since he was in a suit, but if he was in Batman shape, he’d have to be around 10%.
He looked physically uncomfortable—too big to be at ease—and his blood pressure was elevated.
But I’m sure he’d have looked ridiculously great if he took his shirt off. Kumail Nanjiani went through the same thing for a Marvel movie.
Then, shortly afterward, he starred in Welcome to Chippendales, about the guy who co-founded Chippendales.
One of the founders had a breakdown and murdered the other founder—the male stripper scene was huge in the ’80s when this happened.
But Nanjiani’s Marvel physique put a weird spin on the role.
It hurt his performance because he played a desperate hustler and striver, yet he was still built like a superhero.
They kept him in a suit for most of the film, trying to hide how jacked he still was. But you could tell, especially if you knew he had played a superhero.
It stiffened his movements, which didn’t fit the character’s desperation. Someone muscular should have been more confident and less desperate in all his endeavors.
And if you looked up the real guy Nanjiani was playing, he had a spare tire—he was not a physical specimen.
So, it was an odd aftereffect of having been a superhero.
That being said, I’m too old for it now, but I would have loved to be a superhero.
The first time I was sent to a shrink—when I was six years old—I told them I wanted to be Superman.
And I carried that desire throughout my life, trying to get jacked enough to look like a superhero.
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