TANcast began as a dream of three strange child-men in October 2007…

Really, it was Tim’s dream, quickly passed to Noah, and then to Andy: a dream in serial, if you will.  Tim’s soul knew the name before he even dreamt the thing into being.

After some less awesome alternatives were considered and rejected, including “One and Two Halves White Guys”, “iTAN”, and, God bless them, “TANblog”, Andy bought the domain in January 2008.

Noah smiled down upon all and declared it “Delicious”.

But its roots go deeper, and the tale of its life is incomplete without full recounting…

Once upon a time there was a house, a tan house to be specific, and in it lived three strange child-men.

I know what you are thinking. “It is now obvious that Tim, Andy, and Noah must have lived together and fallen in love and this website is the virtual expression of that ardor,” you cry.  Not so, Mr./Ms. Smartypants.  Shut the fuck up and listen to the story: It has a twist ending.

As I was saying before you interrupted, there once was a tan house, and it was called by its residents The T.A.N. House since those residents were Tim, Andy, and Noah and they demonstrably lacked any imagination and love things named for them.  Also, The T.A.N. House sounds a little important, like The White House, and this helped stroke their egos and provide some small solace in their small, small lives that maybe they would be the ones to declare war on Russia or, more likely, the cockroaches in the garage.

Happy they were, in their small, expensive, tan house, leading their small, cash-strapped, off-white lives.  Tim was “the funny one nobody dated”, Noah was “the black one who spilled drinks”, and Andy was “the fat one who killed jokes”.  Everyone had their roles.

Visitors never understood why the three tried so hard to entertain them.  They couldn’t grasp that Tim, Andy, and Noah, while unremarkable idiots seperately, were somehow transformed into living, breathing cartoons by the simple virtue of their proximity to each other.

Maybe it was the lead in the water, or the garlic in the air, or the chronic lack of pants on the asses that fueled the insanity.  Maybe it was the fact that none of them have working brain/mouth filters, and three unfiltered personalities in close quarters quickly degenerate to a lowest-common-denominator festival of abuse and irresponsibility.  Maybe it was the simple fact that three young men will always seek low-brow merriment when and where they can find it.

Maybe it was the kryptonite from which they carved their “BFF” tiaras.

Whatever the cause, the visitors never grasped that they weren’t an audience to be amused; they were intruders observing the rites and ceremonies of a primitive tribe, wholly uninvolved in that which they witnessed.

And so it went, all mirth and mom jokes from morning ’til morning as the pizza boxes stacked high in the fireplace.  They were a stupid tribe, yes, but they were happy and they were funny and all the woodland critters loved them for it.

And then came the women…

Scattered by the four winds, the child-men have settled in separate houses, none of which are tan, to have families and adult lives and mortgages, except Tim who is a stand-up comic in Los Angeles and thus functionally unemployed.  Somehow Andy ended up in the South, which confuses his sense of direction and vaguely disturbs his in-born sense that California is the Greatest Place on Earth.  Noah fluttered gently to earth as any great ninja would, landing a relatively short distance from the tan house.  The tan house itself is no longer tan, to say nothing of no longer being T.A.N.

But have heart, children, for herein lies the twist…

Tim’s dream was to resurrect The T.A.N. House using a series of tubes (note: not a big truck), bringing these Erstwhile Roommates, these Ersatz Three Amigos back together, if only virtually.

Thus was born TANcast.

It is less a collection of bits living in a MySQL database, managed by WordPress, and served by Apache than it is a hope for a better tomorrow; a shining future built on the wishes of fairies and the kisses of angels, fueled by a million jokes at your mother’s expense.

Like the Phoenix (the mythological beast, not the city full of discarded elderly), The T.A.N. House is risen anew.  The deformed chick crawling from the egg amidst the ashes is the site you are subjecting yourself to.

On June 3, 2008 the site grew a podcast, and now soars as an eagle across the golden belly of Æther himself.

And on that day the earth cried out for the sorrow of it.

Thirsting for more? Listen to the TANcast PREPisode