Strange Bedfellows

Will Sunny and Dawn ever be friends again? Will there ever be a singer as handsome as Belgian heartthrob Pierre X from Jax? Will the mysterious publishing entity known only as ORIM ever get THEIR KNIVES OUT OF OUR BACKS? That’s right, this week Sunny and Dawn are at war with each other, Jax is at war with the notoriously finicky American music market, and we’re at war with ORIM. It’s not going to...

YNAW, Poundmasters! Ann gave us a sensitive and heavy topic to chew on this week, so we stepped up to the plate like we always do in these situations and did a really deep dive into some other stuff entirely! Look for an extremely detailed conspiracy theory involving Freddy Prinze Jr., some powerful new insights into what’s going on with Ducky, and a surprisingly lengthy discussion of the marginal...

Which of us would not sacrifice the very world for just one glimpse of his baggy jeans; his suave super-gelled Brian Austin Green hair; his shy, bluish-green eyes; his edgy but approachable Operation Ivy T-shirt? His name is Brendan Jones, formerly of Short Hills, New Jersey. And he gave Amalia a single rose at the Homecoming Bash during that one Vanish song. You know the one. “Bliss it was in [th...

The boys settle in for a pleasant and relaxing evening babysitting a gaggle of grumpy teens. Truth Translation: We’re pretty out of our depth here! Things are totally going off the rails with Maggie, and Dawn’s not helping, and Sunny is MIA, and there’s no more box wine in the cabinet because we already drank it all to calm our nerves THIS MORNING!!! OK, deep breath. Everything’s fine. We’re fine....

Dawn’s stepmother Carol is in the hospital getting ready to bring new life into the world. Sunny’s mother is in the very same hospital looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. Her intentions fall to the floor. It is at this point that the angel closes her eyes, and the confusion that was hers belongs now to the baby down the hall. I can feel it. Not to belabor the point, but in this one, lig...

Sunny is in a bad mood because of circumstances beyond her control and she’s being a glum plum and bringing everybody down, which is fine, it happens, but that doesn’t mean that it’s OK for her to lash out and take it out on her friends who are just trying to help her. But I don’t know what to do and like I said it’s not my fault and I’m sorry but I’m not really sorry I’m just feeling out of sorts...

The Cro-Mags are whispering to each other and snickering, as if you’re too dumb or too INVISIBLE to figure out that they’re laughing at YOU. So you do the only thing you can do: You grab your Discman and put on your headphones and lose yourself in the latest episode of the California Diaries, where the boys are talking about The Purge and Resident Evil and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t make...

It took four books, but we finally get a taste of that Good Clean Baby-Sitting Fun we’ve been so desperately craving this week, from the unlikely direction of Amalia Vargas. She isn’t even in the We Heart Kids Club, but she took pity on us and stopped by a women’s shelter to look after some kids on the way to break up with her toxic boyfriend. A truly scintillating novel, made even more so by the...

When you have a choice between watching the star-studded world premiere of “Fatal Judgment” or being in the crowd at the Battle of the Bands for the first-ever performance by Vanish featuring Maggie Blume on keyboards and backup vocals, there’s only one choice you can make: Go to both of them. That’s right, the boys have front-row seats at both of the hottest tickets in Palo City this week, and yo...

Everything is still very, very late '90s out here in California and we're all pretty worked up about it. But we're grown adults, so we're going to do the only responsible thing we can in the situation: Throw a copy of "On the Road" into our Jansports, strap on our blades, and blow off class for a day at the beach with a handsome and slightly suspicious drifter named Carson. Hope is a disease. Musi...

Edgier, more grownup, full of alcohol and angst and bad decisions. Cool. Sullen. Sarcastic. Mad at the whole world and ready to explode. These are just a few words to describe podcast hosts Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring. And this week, they’re embarking on an exciting new journey as they follow the BSC’s Dawn Schafer across the country to sunny California for fun, frolicking, and friendship!...

A wonderfully surreal and slightly scary world awaits all those who are brave enough to crawl through the looking glass, speak their own secret names aloud, and become new initiates of the legendary Baby-Sitters Club. But this is just the beginning of the quest, and danger awaits: Will the boys be confounded by the deadly Puzzle Box, disoriented by the mysterious Map Game, or debilitated by the in...

Trained from a young age by an elite academy for assassins, Associate Baby-Sitter Shannon Kilbourne is ready for the biggest mission of her life when she runs into resistance from the place she least expects it: Her own mother. The boys travel back in time from the dystopian wasteland they’ve been trapped in to learn more about Shannon’s Story in a last, desperate attempt to save the future before...

The boys head back in time to get frisky with some whales and check up on what Logan Bruno’s up to, which, WOW! He’s fallen in with a group of ‘50s greasers called The Badd Boyz and led by a cigarette-smoking, shoplifting, leather-jacket-wearing rude dude called T-Jam who makes Stacey’s well-documented Wine Crimes look like a walk in the park. And that’s all real! That’s what this wonderful book i...

The boys are both canceled this week, sadly, along with Pete Black, Logan, and everybody else on the SMS Gladiators track team except Austin Bentley. And this is their YouTube Apology video. But despite the setback (and another more extreme one that has trapped one of them in 18th Century Glasgow), they valiantly make their way through this fascinating Readers’ Request about Logan Bruno. ‘Cuz Ann...

Jack takes a seat on the bench so that Regular Tanner and Future Tanner can solve the maddening puzzle that Jeanne Betancourt has created this week in the form of “Abby’s Book.” This mostly involves being incredibly sad about the fate of the surprisingly handsome Jonathan Stevenson, who — as fans of the BSC know all too well — went to ride the Rainbow Road far too soon. Music credits: “Epic Cinema...

The war on Lerangismas is over! The era of Pete has begun! The boys gather on a snowy night to share some Lerangismas cheer and talk about their very favorite Lerangismas hymns. Music credits: “Magic Christmas Night,” by Musical Smile “Christmas Day,” by Russell Frederick “Christmas Magic Opener,” by Leto “Christmas Curiosities: Top 12 Oddest, Most Baffling, Absolute Worst, Never-to-Be-Classic Hol...

With a little bit of help from their best friend Doctor Who, the boys take a magic phone box into the past and hang out with some of history’s most excellent people as they attempt to decipher the sacred text known as Kristy’s Book. Is Patrick Thomas really as unpleasant as he seems? Can we finally get to the bottom of what’s going on with Kristy and Bart? And how on Earth do you pronounce “Jeanne...

Our adorable Time Babies run into an impenetrable temporal anomaly inside a beautiful and possibly slightly magical Lake House as they navigate their way deep into Mary Anne’s past to find out what happened to Alma, why Kristy and Claudia have been acting so strange lately, and what it is exactly that farmers do when they’re standing out in their fields. And with a little help from their very best...

The boys invent a nifty little machine in their garage that creates a time loop which will allow them to go all the way back to 1995 and attempt to foil a nefarious plot by Baby-Sitters Club ghostwriter Jeanne Betancourt to make it seem like she came up with all of the BSC lore before anyone else did. And it all goes horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. Music credits: “Hush,” by Ohm Lab “Teenage Fr...

Our intrepid Time Babies take another trip back to save the future, this time into Claudia Kishi’s past, where the Great One (She Who Lurks in the Darkness and Devours the Innocent) lurks. It’s all pretty scary and this is a scare warning! Music credits: “Falling Skies,” by Allen Grey “Peaceful Magic,” by Silver Hoof “Brahms Lullaby Music Box,” by Rob Fehily “Terminator OST 8 Bit Remix,” by Artur...

Lobstrosities, Clone People, a malevolent Cloud AI ... and they’re all converging on the sweet, sweet feet of the sweetest Baby-Sitters Club Ghostwriter we know. But that’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that there’s only two guys who can stop it, and they’re Time Babies. This godforsaken mess (and more!) is what you get when the boys attempt to read about the ancient past of the BSC...

Daddy and Tanner get some expert help as they navigate the sparse and unforgiving terrain they seem to have navigated themselves into after finishing the Baby-Sitters Club Mysteries. With no birds interested in taking them, and no more guidance from the ethereal voices of Ann M. Martin and Elle Fanning, desperation has set in as the boys wander, naked and bewildered, in the desert. And to make mat...

OK, so someone called “Elle Fanning” went back and changed a bunch of things in this one, but you know what she couldn’t hide? THE TRUTH. This week, on a very special episode of the Baby-Sitters Club Audio Club, the boys are going back to where it all started, except this time they’re actually LISTENING. And guess what they find out? That every single thing they ever suspected about these books wa...

Well, it was always going to end in cat burglars, but if any of us had even begun to suspect who those cats and who those burglars were, let alone what horrible things they had in store for the dreamy Sergeant Johnson, we might never have embarked on this dangerous and mysterious quest in the first place. The Grey Man is here of course, and Tanner uses the dark arts of “Numberology” to solve the U...