Ep. 193: "Oklahoma the Sex Cat"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: How's your settings?
John: My settings are good.
John: Now that I've gone in and fixed them all, there was no reason that they should have changed.
John: But, of course, that's no explanation.
John: I mean, it's not that they shouldn't have changed.
John: It's that the computer decided...
John: And it has more information than I do probably.
Merlin: It's drawing from a lot of sources in real time.
Merlin: It's showing you things you didn't know you needed.
John: Yeah, so it determined that everything needed to be reset and I needed to log in again using my secret password.
John: log in.
John: It wanted me to log in.
John: To the whole computer or just the Skype?
John: Oh, just everything.
John: It just wants me to log into everything all the time.
John: You might have been hacked.
John: But you know what?
John: 25% of what I do is logging in.
John: And this morning, I'm checking my emails and I realized that in a very short amount of time, how long have we had emails?
John: How long have you been getting emails?
Merlin: I've been getting emails for 23 years.
John: 23 years.
Merlin: Okay.
John: I've been getting emails for... At least six that I can recall.
Merlin: Let's call it 16.
Merlin: You've been answering them for two.
John: Well... You didn't want to put yourself out there too much.
John: I'll explain why.
John: You know, you answer them and then your information's in the clode.
John: But yeah, I was checking my email this morning and I realized now I have the exact same relationship to email that I have to real mail.
John: Right.
John: I'm sitting there in my but I'm sitting in my virtual front yard and I'm virtually sorting through a bunch of flyers for grocery stores and stuff from the like six colleges that mistakenly think I want to go get a degree in IT.
John: And, you know, it's just like I throw 90% of the email I get immediately in the garbage.
John: And that is after spending probably 10,000 man hours meticulously adjusting my spam filters and sending, oh, my God, Merlin, I'm sure you're going to roll your eyes at me.
John: But I send unsubscribes.
John: Every time the University of San Francisco decides that I'm an alum again.
John: Oh, are you a Jesuit?
John: You're on the Gonzaga list.
John: No, it's not that.
John: It's not University of San Francisco.
John: It's the University of California, San Francisco.
John: It's one of the universities in San Francisco.
John: Sure.
John: Decided eight years ago that I had gone there and they cannot be put off the scent.
John: And so I spend all this time unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.
John: Please unsubscribe me to the thing that I didn't subscribe to.
John: I've done all that and still 80 to 90% of the emails I get, I just throw in the virtual recycling bin.
John: Without even going through the gate into my house, I just stand by the mailbox.
John: It's like, wow, the new technology has really, it's only taken it 23 years to become a completely obsolete technology.
John: Email.
John: Email.
John: How many emails do you answer every day?
Merlin: You don't want to know.
John: Three?
John: 13?
John: You don't want to know.
John: Zero?
John: 300?
John: Between three and 300.
Merlin: I just want to clarify.
Merlin: I look at my email.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know?
John: Oh, that's right.
John: No, this is a different thing.
Merlin: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: Yeah, well, okay.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to be a productivity guy.
Merlin: I'm just telling you what a terrible person I am.
Merlin: I, a lot of days I answer less than one email a day.
John: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: Yeah.
John: And your productivity through the roof.
Yeah.
John: I have so many thoughts about this.
John: I really need my productivity to go through the roof.
Merlin: I was getting ready for the day, getting ready for the things I needed to do today and thinking about the things I need to do today.
John: Now, what do you need on a day when you and I are recording?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: isn't it isn't the recording of this podcast sort of uh such a bright sun that you can't even see the other stars probably four out of five of them yeah but there's that one there's venus or whatever that you can see there's the ones we can't put out there's the ones that you know no we don't actually we put out almost all of them now haven't we we haven't we haven't not put one out in a long time remember remember the remember when it seemed like every other one we weren't putting out
Merlin: Yeah, when you get to minute 80 and you start going, oh, no, oh, no.
Merlin: Because something special happens at minute 80 because that's where somewhere in your mind you, I assume, have some unconscious gateway where you're like, I can't either start winding this down or I can triple down.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, okay.
John: The thing in those moments is you are saying, in every tone in your voice, you're just saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John: Just wind it up.
John: We're at minute 80.
John: This is already a good episode.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's a good point, John.
John: Any kind of bell.
John: Any kind of bell.
Merlin: Give me something funny.
Merlin: Something funny I can end on.
John: Did I ever tell you about Hitler's sex dungeons?
Merlin: And you're like, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: I would love to hear about that.
Merlin: Here's how my day goes.
Merlin: I've been working on sleep again.
Merlin: And so I've been kind of a bad dad where I sleep in later than I should in the mornings.
Merlin: And my wife ends up doing a lot of heavy lifting in the morning.
Merlin: And I'm trying to work on that.
Merlin: So I'm trying to adjust to going to bed earlier, which is difficult because
Merlin: Because, as I've said numerous places, including here, I've fallen back into a pattern of really enjoying the time after my kid goes to bed where I can watch movies.
Merlin: And I'm very selfishly watching movies and TV shows.
Merlin: And if I don't keep an eye on that, I will do that.
Merlin: Very easily until 1 a.m.
Merlin: And I'm trying to get to where like I want to go to bed before midnight, ideally 1030.
Merlin: Long story short, got up today.
Merlin: I slack my way through the morning with the family.
Merlin: I didn't really do anything of consequence.
Merlin: So I got to get ready for the day.
Merlin: What do I have to do?
Merlin: I have to record two podcasts today.
John: Wait, what's your other podcast?
Merlin: You don't care.
Merlin: I got two podcasts I have to record today.
Merlin: And I have to get the sponsors ready for our show.
Merlin: I have to do the reads for that.
Merlin: I have to do the sponsor reads for another program, the third program that I do.
Merlin: I do five.
Merlin: And it's nothing difficult, but it's all stuff that has to be done.
Merlin: It's like the television program Lost.
Merlin: We think about I don't know if you ever watched that program, but but there's a point when the show still made a modicum of sense where there's a guy who sits in an underground cavern in like an underground, like, you know, lair.
Merlin: And every few minutes he has to type a sequence of numbers into a computer.
Merlin: And for a while, all we know is, boy, he's really got to get those numbers punched in or there's going to be problems.
John: And then my understanding is it all turned out to just be that every episode was totally just had no connective tissue.
Merlin: Really, really complicated.
John: Now, let me ask you, this is an argument that Sean Nelson and I used to have a lot.
John: We would go to the movie.
John: You and Sean would argue sometimes.
John: We used to have arguments.
Merlin: A little disagreements, a little gentleman's disagreements.
John: But we never took it all the way to having a podcast, which is what you should do when you have disagreements with somebody.
Mm-hmm.
John: But we would go to see the movies and, you know, Sean was a cinephile and studied movies or whatever.
John: And we would go see a film and I would come out of the film and I would say, that movie had no redeeming qualities.
John: It was a garbage movie.
John: Would he sigh?
John: He would sigh.
John: And he would say, and then we'd start arguing.
John: And he would say, no, no, no, it was a great movie.
John: And I would say, not only can you not defend the statement it's a great movie, you can't even defend my assertion that that movie should be burned in the public square.
John: And he would say, this is what he would say, what about that one tracking shot?
John: In one long view, they took in the whole army marching through the valley, and then it's panned over here, and then it settled on an eagle in its area, and then there were some clouds and a rainbow.
John: And I'd be like, seriously?
John: You're going to defend this movie based on the technicality of one long tracking shot?
John: But he was seeing...
John: the trees for the forest or whatever.
John: You know, it didn't matter to him that the plot was garbage, the dialogue was garbage, the acting was garbage.
John: They had this tracking shot.
John: He was seeing all these other elements that he was appreciating.
Merlin: It's almost like he's watching a different movie in some ways.
John: He's very much watching a different movie.
John: Because, I mean, it's not that he doesn't also know that dialogue matters and script matters or whatever.
John: But he decides at a certain point in the film that that's not what he's looking for anymore.
John: Or that this movie stands, this is a valid enough movie on some technical basis.
John: That it's in the category of like good movies.
John: And I've had a lot of people say about Lost to me...
John: Even now knowing that it's gibberish,
John: they still recommend that I watch it because it's such a fun watch.
John: And I pull my hair out.
John: I almost shout at them.
Merlin: It's a very different way of thinking about at least media and possibly the world.
John: Yeah, I feel like it is a worldview because my feeling is life is short enough.
John: If you are only queuing up to watch just the things that everyone agrees are brilliant,
John: Why would you subject yourself to hours upon hours of watching a thing that makes no sense, that has no point other than that some people had a lot of money and didn't think a thing through?
John: And so it feels like a worldview difference where maybe I don't understand.
John: But the idea, I mean, if someone put me in a room that just had blank, it was one of those silent rooms that makes you insane.
John: You're familiar with this, right?
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: It's one of those things that sounds like it would be relaxing, but it's actually a cause of insanity.
Merlin: If your brain, it's like people like William Hurt freaking out in the relaxation box.
John: The relaxation, it's not a box.
John: It wasn't a box.
John: It was a tub.
John: A tub.
John: Yeah, I've been in those.
John: It's pretty weird.
John: Seems to me like one of those isolation tubs is that ticks like six out of seven boxes for me.
Merlin: It's little, it's dark, it's wet.
Merlin: It's a lot of things you don't like.
John: Well, I don't like little.
Merlin: You don't mind being wet if it's an open tub.
Merlin: In fact, that's something you look forward to and possibly bring a sandwich and a desk.
Merlin: And, you know, I don't mind it being dark.
Merlin: But anyway... You don't mind it being dark even if you can't really exactly, like, control the dark?
Merlin: Well, no, I want to control the dark.
Merlin: This is a Lockean problem.
Merlin: I think when you know you can't change the dark, I think it makes the dark worse.
John: Yeah, no, I want to be able to banish the dark and let in the light on my terms.
John: But yeah, all by way of saying that it feels to me like if I was in an isolation cube and I was going crazy from lack of stimulus and someone said, here's some relief.
Merlin: You should watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
John: Well, now, you know, people in my circle, and I'm talking about my inner circle.
John: Okay.
John: are proponents, loud proponents of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Merlin: This is a worldview.
Merlin: All of the spinoffs.
Merlin: Oh, the spinoffs.
John: The one of the vampire guy and the one of the other vampire guy.
John: I mean, I don't know anything about it, but I guess they all have vampires in them.
John: It's right in the title.
John: Yeah.
John: So you're saying that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is also a worldview?
Yeah.
Merlin: I'm not sure what this has to do with my morning, but I carry around a certain amount of background baseline guilt that a lot of my friends... So there's also the thing with age, where if you missed your window for something, you're going to have to go back and mop up.
Merlin: It's hard to tell an 80-year-old man you should listen to ELO.
Merlin: Even though ELO is an unimpeachably great band with at least a dozen terrific classic rock songs, he missed his ELO window.
John: How did you feel about Dukes of Hazzard?
Merlin: I was a massive fan.
Merlin: I dressed like Bo Duke to the extent that my budget would allow.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah, I adopted a certain... Yeah, I did.
Merlin: I dressed like Bo Duke.
Merlin: I feel like I dressed like Bo Duke.
Merlin: It was super gay.
Merlin: I looked really stupid.
Merlin: I was a fat kid wearing a turtleneck with a flannel shirt over it.
Merlin: I looked like I was producing something off Off-Broadway.
John: The statement, I looked like Bo Duke to the extent that my budget would allow.
John: Yes.
John: That line actually would fit into the Waylon Jennings Dukes of Hazzard thing.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: At the end of the verse.
John: Dressed just as well as he could as the budget would allow.
John: Yeah.
John: Take a turtleneck.
John: Drap a filson on.
John: Did I ever tell you that I was in a bar in Belgium one time, a
John: Country bar, and the band was playing, and they played the Dukes of Hazzard theme.
Merlin: The Ballad of the Dukes of Hazzard?
John: Yeah, and I went up after the show, and I was like, that was great.
John: You guys did a great job of the Dukes of Hazzard theme, and none of them spoke English.
John: They were just singing it phonetically.
Merlin: Like Abba.
John: Yeah, like ABBA.
Merlin: So you're mourning.
Merlin: Oh, no, it's okay.
Merlin: I'll get back to it.
Merlin: I want to get back to Desmond.
Merlin: So it doesn't really matter.
Merlin: No, okay, but here's part of the problem, I think, what you're saying.
Merlin: Let's try and pop the stack here.
Merlin: We're talking about something that's very difficult, and it's something I have actually discussed at length in other places, which most people haven't heard because nobody can listen to all the media.
Merlin: There's too much media.
Merlin: So part of the media problem is that you end up having to find –
Merlin: rabbis and sherpa i don't know what the plural of sherpa is sherpa you've got to find sherpa who are able to guide you with taste and interest and to give you see like i personally i increasingly find it not that helpful when someone says something like and i'm just picking this randomly oh my god you should totally watch how to get away with murder and then i say what i say what is that there's 70 of the conversations i have in the world
Merlin: Or any of the other Shonda Rhimes properties, none of which I have ever seen because I don't watch that kind of television.
Merlin: But no, I'm not racist.
Merlin: I just mean I don't watch network television as a thing.
Merlin: I don't have appointment viewing.
Merlin: I don't have cable.
Merlin: So like anyway, that's again, that's part of my ELO window.
Merlin: Like I missed that window.
Merlin: Did you watch Making a Murderer?
Merlin: making a murderer oh yeah i i i watched all with the last episode oh you got all the way to the last episode i couldn't it was i couldn't do it yeah it made me genuinely very very sad to watch that show and i know i understand that like a lot of it was probably a little bit doctored but it was it's one of those things where like again it's kind of thing people will point out you
Merlin: Maybe the justice system doesn't work so much like a Swiss clock and so much like a Swiss cheese.
Merlin: Write that down.
Merlin: And that's pretty good, huh?
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John: I'm still churning on popping the stack.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We'll get back to that before I talk about my morning.
Merlin: So the problem is I missed my window because it's like a lot of things.
Merlin: We're like, you know, like you and you watch Star Trek New Generation.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so like for me, that came on almost precisely as I was starting college where even if I did have a TV that I could watch,
Merlin: it would be very extremely low on my list to set aside time in the evening to watch a Star Trek.
Merlin: Okay?
Merlin: And there's nothing against the Star Trek properties.
John: Oh, you're telling me that you skipped Star Trek next gen?
Merlin: I kid about this, but I'm here to tell you that I can honestly tell you, I can tell you from memory, I've seen three full episodes of the original series, possibly maybe ten.
Merlin: I have seen, I think, maybe two or three of the new generation, which is what it's called.
John: So you don't know about the sexism of the Ferengis?
Merlin: Oh, no, but I know there's four lights.
Merlin: Oh, four lights.
Merlin: Now, you don't cop to this, but you enjoyed Star Trek.
Merlin: You've mentioned it in your songs.
Merlin: I have not mentioned it in my songs.
Merlin: You've referenced the Star Tracks in a song.
John: What song did I reference a Star Trek?
Merlin: didn't you do you know you do those really those those those those terrible awesome like puns in your song it's great it starts with an earthquake birds snakes in star trek star trek ferengi sexism problem uh what puns do i have in songs like you do you do bullshit like angels russians oh all right you do things like that that's one example but that's not my point you know i enjoy that in your songs you piece of shit
Merlin: I was a fan of you before anybody knew who you were.
John: Sean Nelson yelled at me about that line.
Merlin: I love that line.
Merlin: He said, that's corny.
Merlin: That whole song, someday I will get the guts to ask you what the fuck that song is about.
Merlin: But for now, I enjoy thinking about the tall chickens or whatever.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Okay, so that wasn't a pun.
Merlin: I was a fan of your music before anyone cared about you.
Merlin: I know.
John: You don't have to tell me.
Merlin: God damn it.
John: You slept in my house in your underwear so many times.
John: I remember sitting in the other room and listening to you listen to my second record, which I should.
John: Oh yeah.
John: We listened to the first minute of it.
John: I should describe to everybody what it's like to have Merlin listen to your brand new record.
Merlin: You took me into the dining room.
Merlin: You took me into the dining room with like probably a Walkman.
Merlin: And you're like, this is something extremely special.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I know record.
Merlin: It's not out yet.
Merlin: This is, these are demos of our next record and it's going to, it's, it's a really big deal.
Merlin: These are like rough.
Merlin: They were rough, not demos, but they were rough cuts.
Merlin: of the early songs, some of which made it on, some of which didn't, some of which became the theme song for our program, which I happen to love.
Merlin: Josh is Wrong.
Merlin: It's a fantastic song.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, my God, this is great.
Merlin: And I sat there with your Walkman.
Merlin: And you want to describe what I did?
Merlin: Here's what he does.
John: Here's what he do's.
John: Thanks, John.
John: You listen to the first 20 seconds of a song.
John: Yeah.
John: And then you fast forward to the next song.
Merlin: Here are the first 20 seconds of the next one.
John: You hear the first 20 seconds of the next one, and then you go to the third song, and then you go back to the first song.
John: You listen to 20 seconds of them at a time.
John: And I was so incredulous and horrified.
John: And I was like, Merlin, these songs are meant to be listened to all the way through.
John: You don't skip around.
John: And you were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John: And Madeline grabbed me by the arm and took me into the kitchen and she said, listen, this is how he does it.
John: Just don't.
John: You don't.
John: I'm sorry.
John: I'm sorry.
John: I mean, like so many, many apologies she's made on your behalf.
John: Yeah.
John: And I had to leave you alone.
John: I think I may have had to have gone and stood on the back porch and smoked cigarettes because I could not, A, fathom, or B, endure this process by which you consumed my baby, my new child.
John: The streaming age must be tough on you, John.
John: I have no idea how to use it.
John: It's all in the clode.
Merlin: It was a line in which song?
Merlin: I've only had one cup of coffee, so I may not get this.
Merlin: It was the one you make, you talk about, don't you talk about an alien race on one of the songs?
Merlin: Don't you mention like, what's the ones that they're not Vulcans and they're not.
Merlin: Oh, wait a minute.
Merlin: You mentioned.
Merlin: Yes, I do.
Merlin: Which song is that?
John: It's Romulans.
John: I do talk about Romulans.
John: Let me see what Romulan looks like.
John: I talk about Romulans one time.
John: I mentioned Romulans one time.
John: Oh, look at the Romulans.
John: Yeah, they look like a Vulcan kind of.
John: They're related to Vulcans.
John: Are they?
John: Okay.
John: Yeah, they're like Vulcan cousins.
Merlin: Okay, all right, all right.
John: They're like bad Vulcans.
John: Bad Vulcans.
John: Yeah.
John: Are they creatures of logic, John?
John: I believe that they are, yes.
John: I was using Romulans in that moment to describe a certain kind of hipster of the time.
Merlin: Oh, in a Hobbesian sense.
John: Yeah, the hipsters that are gradually sinking into the mire, chewing on one another's shin bones.
John: No, the hipsters that looked like Romulans.
John: I mean, there was a whole era there, early emo days.
John: Oh, you know you're right.
John: You are really right.
John: It was like Romulan fashion was what...
John: what the uber-hip kids were into.
John: So when I said Romulans, I was just making a dig, and you know there are none of those in my songs.
John: I'm never making any digs at anybody.
Merlin: Oh, no, no.
Merlin: You're just the all-seeing eye.
Merlin: You're the musical panopticon.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: I'm the Bentham of indie rock.
Merlin: You're stuffed and sitting in a box somewhere?
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: Let's trot out Bentham.
John: I'm the head of St.
John: John.
Merlin: My goodness, your songs are so interesting.
Merlin: New morning you lazy eye, two Romulans over, cruel laughter when Katie died, duel over my cold shoulder.
John: That's right.
Merlin: And that's not even a long winter song.
John: Oh, no, it is.
John: It is.
Merlin: It became one.
John: It became one.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Chris Walla played the drum machine on that.
Merlin: Two Romulans over.
Merlin: You got Sean Nelson doing Yamaha keyboard and harmony.
Merlin: And someone called Robbie Luttermeyer is playing drums.
Merlin: That's a great drum part on that.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, so it was a thing where we had the drum machine and then Robbie played to the drum machine, which is I think the first time that happened on one of our records and I was very interested in it.
Merlin: Can I pay you a compliment?
Merlin: I think that's a terrific song.
Merlin: It's a terrific album.
Merlin: People who enjoy The Worst You Can Do Is Harm, which is one of the greatest indie rock song albums of the last 20 years, should also go and check out The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
Merlin: I'll cut this out.
Merlin: But that one strikes me as a particularly wonderfully manic Chris Walla-produced song.
Merlin: I think it worked on that one.
Merlin: The Chris Walla sound really worked on that one.
Merlin: It did, although we had a lot of disagreements about it.
Merlin: It's a weird, like, I'm thinking about, doesn't it have some weird, like, kind of Eno-esque, like, gaity things going on?
Merlin: It's got a really weird sound to it.
John: Am I remembering right?
John: I played the bass on it, too, which is additionally weird.
John: Oh, look at that.
John: You did.
John: But, you know, there's some flanging that happens in that song that was a result of a very old Ibanez flanger pedal called the frying pan.
Oh.
John: Which is a super vintage – You wouldn't see that on the market today probably.
John: Well, not affordably.
John: It was like – I have these Ibanez pedals like a black finger and a frying pan.
Merlin: Did they make the tube screamer?
Merlin: Was that Ibanez?
John: Yeah, but these pedals are pre-tube screamer.
John: So they're the size of a box of chocolates.
Merlin: Oh, look at this thing.
Merlin: This looks like Soviet technology.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And they were gorgeous.
John: And the thing about this flanger is that it had a sweep that even modern digital flangers, all these flangers that have a thousand parameters you can change.
John: I've still never heard of a flanger that had the sound of this frying pan.
John: The sweep was like from all the way...
Merlin: Not where it sounds like a new wave song, but where it's atmospheric.
John: And just really analog.
John: And it was this beautiful piece of gear.
John: And I used it on that song.
John: And then there's nothing, you can't replace it, right?
John: You can't go buy some modded line six thing to accomplish this sweep.
John: And I sold that pedal, because even at the time, in 2001, it was worth $350.
Merlin: Really?
John: And now I'm like, I mean, it's a dumb thing to have kept in a closet all these years, but...
John: When you find a piece of something that can actually do something that nothing else can do, those are the ones that you don't sell.
John: But, I mean, I'm priced out of the frying pan market now.
Merlin: So Buffy the Vampire Slayer came on at a time when I was very into music on many levels and spending a lot of time on music.
Merlin: The TV that I was into, I'm going to say, was probably what?
Merlin: Probably still The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Mr. Show.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But the idea of being at that time, well, when did that come out, late 90s?
Merlin: So the idea of being like a 30-something-year-old man and watching a show about a teenager who kills vampires was very unappealing to me.
John: Did you like the movie?
John: I didn't see the movie.
John: Oh, see, the movie was good.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I saw the movie.
John: I don't know whether I saw it ironically or whether I saw it.
John: It must have been somewhat ironically.
John: I think everything we did in the 90s was ironic.
John: That's the thing.
John: You've got it right.
John: It was ironic, but it was also, that's the only way I consumed things.
John: That was a good movie.
John: Right?
John: Oh, let's go see Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
John: But it was actually really good.
John: I liked it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: It's a different Buffy, though.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know if that has all the original vampires in it.
John: Well, so I didn't watch the show, but I know a lot of people who did.
Merlin: Anyway, I should move on.
Merlin: All I'm saying is, like, I feel like I should watch it, but then I also get this vibe from people that's like, oh, it gets a lot better, you know, in later seasons.
Merlin: You got to kind of go through.
Merlin: And it's like, today, that's difficult.
Merlin: That's difficult because there's so much stuff where, like...
Merlin: you know, like stuff will drop on Netflix where like every episode is so good.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And it's like, and so setting aside the time, like say, Oh, I'm going to go find an hour to go watch an episode of daredevil or whatever.
Merlin: But it's like, you know, no, you're like, you're in for a diamond for a dollar.
Merlin: Like you're probably going to watch that whole thing.
Merlin: In fact, Netflix, I think has gotten rather canny about being able to determine how successful something will be based on what other people watched, how much of it they watched, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: So you're using science on our television.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Oh, I know they are.
John: They are peeping at you.
John: And then they're using that to sell things to you.
John: This is a thing I've just been realizing.
Merlin: What are they selling to you on Netflix?
John: Oh, the internet.
Merlin: The internet.
Merlin: Oh, it's just the whole idea of that.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: You know, somebody asked me the other day what I thought about the grand sweep of madmen.
John: And I was obviously not embarrassed, but I was chagrined.
John: to say that at the end of the first season of Mad Men, I found it to be so nihilistic that I never watched it again.
John: So I've only watched one season of Mad Men because nihilism is not the thing that I'm consuming media for.
Merlin: I have enough of it.
Merlin: But you're also, in that case, it's one thing to say you're going to go watch...
Merlin: Like you're going to read a Cormac McCarthy book or something and say, you know what?
Merlin: I'm in for the nihilism on this one.
Merlin: And when I'm done, I close the book and I go look at another thing.
Merlin: With this, you're going like, wow.
Merlin: I mean, you're going to watch an hour of this.
Merlin: No, you're going to watch whatever, 20 of these.
Merlin: And then you're going to watch that for five, six seasons.
Merlin: You know, that was me in The Walking Dead, which is now one of my favorite, improbably is one of my favorite shows.
Merlin: I really look forward to it.
Merlin: My Hand of Christ, I could not watch it.
Merlin: My wife's been into it from the beginning.
Merlin: I can't watch it.
Merlin: It was too much.
Merlin: It's zombies.
Merlin: It's zombies.
Merlin: yeah yeah but it's it's really surprisingly realistic very grim and like all these great things it's kind of about zombies but it's really about the people and how they react in the aftermath but that took me a long time because it was impossibly as you say nihilistic yeah um the problem for me is that i'm i'm so disinterested in zombies the only thing i'm less interested than zombies is people
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Oh, no, you should not put this on your Netflix.
John: In my queue?
Merlin: No, you shouldn't queue that up.
Merlin: You should watch the Predestination movie.
Merlin: It's got some good scenes in it.
Merlin: A lot of sweeping tracking shots.
Merlin: Sweeping tracking shots and all the cinematography.
Merlin: Magnifique.
John: So Desmond had a volley in the market store?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, and bought a 20-carat diamond ring.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Merlin: No, what about Desmond?
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: I just thought I was going to say I'm Desmond.
Merlin: Because Desmond's job is on this island, he has to go sit in this hole, and every 108 minutes has to retype this series of numbers.
Merlin: Otherwise, something bad happens.
John: Otherwise, yeah, something bad happens.
John: Sounds like a story that some kids are making in a cardboard box that they cut windows in.
John: It was a night just like this.
John: Okay, you're Desmond, and you have to type a million types, and then I will be a ghost monster who lives with a lion.
Merlin: I won't come in here unless you stop typing.
Merlin: But that's basically, I'm trying to say that that's an analogy, because that's how I feel like my life is.
Merlin: My life is not difficult at all.
Merlin: Basically, I just have to type something every 108 minutes, but if I don't type it every 108 minutes, there's going to be problems.
Merlin: So this is why I tend to say in other places that I don't think of myself as busy.
Merlin: I think of myself as time constrained because I've got to be at the keyboard to type every 108 minutes.
Merlin: So like, you know, you know what I'm saying though?
Merlin: I'm not trying to be overly cute or clever here.
Merlin: I think that's a condition of a lot of people today is like, there's, it isn't like you have to, what are some of the things people always pull out of their ass?
Merlin: You don't have to like go mine coal, right?
Merlin: You get to go be seated and do stuff.
Merlin: I'm not saying what I do is difficult, but it is, there is a certain schedule and regularity to it.
John: And what you're saying is that, like, I think that most of my time crunch problems could be solved if I could stop time.
John: Because if I just stopped, or not if I stopped time, if there were four extra hours in a day, right?
John: Because I want to sleep for eight hours, but I also want to stay up until four in the morning.
John: But I also want to get up at 8 a.m.
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: You've got like two or three problems.
John: Yeah.
John: So, I mean, I don't want to go to sleep before 4 a.m.
John: for some reason, because that is what my body says.
John: Your body's telling you.
John: I also want to get eight hours of sleep, but I want to get up at eight in the morning so I can join the world and be with other people.
John: Yeah.
John: And so what I need is just four extra hours that are just completely reserved for the additional four hours of sleep I need.
Merlin: That's the modern condition, though, is you kind of – I mean not saying you are expressly saying this, but in a similar dilemma, I feel like I – in that similar situation, I actually want to be three different people because there's – certainly let's take it as red.
Merlin: There is the person who just for whatever reason likes to stay up late.
Merlin: I have for most of my life with –
Merlin: occasional needs to do otherwise been somebody who likes staying up late let's take that as its own thing if i go to bed at three i would go to the three because three is when i want to go to bed but then you also want to be the person let's say then you want to be the person who gets up early being the person who gets up early and the person who goes to bed early they're related but different people yes because the the get up early in the morning person is the ultimate aspirational personality
Merlin: Yep, here we go.
Merlin: Charge the day.
Merlin: Let's do it.
Merlin: I'm done.
Merlin: I've had half a cup of coffee and a scone.
Merlin: I don't need any more because I'm going to the gym.
Merlin: I'm doing Pilates before I go to work.
Merlin: You got to.
Merlin: You got to work on your core.
Merlin: But then the going to bed early person, that's in some ways the real monk.
Merlin: That's the personality who sets all those things aside and says, well, I just go to bed at 945 because that's what I do.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Tucking myself in here.
Merlin: Got my PJs on.
Merlin: Pulling that sheet up under my chin.
Merlin: Do you think your mom suffers from this at all?
Merlin: It seems like she's got this all pretty much on lock.
John: Well, no, I mean, she's a person that only needs four hours of sleep because that's what happens apparently when you get to be an elderly person.
John: Right.
John: But also when the sun goes down, she starts to wind it down because it's like farm people, right?
John: When the sun gets up, you've got to get out and make a, you know, you're burning daylight, right?
John: But as soon as the sun goes down, I think that she thinks like, well,
John: You know, the oil in these lamps isn't free.
John: Right.
Merlin: Keep burning this oil and especially burn the midnight oil.
Merlin: That's an interesting way to look at it because if you think about it, and not to put too fine a point on it, but if you think about it in terms of let's say you are somebody like living on a farm in Ohio and you do have limited resources and you do have stuff you need to do, you start to feel maybe a little bit like you're taking debt.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: taking on a certain amount of debt.
Merlin: You're burning these resources to do what?
Merlin: Were you burning those resources so you can watch season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Merlin: Well, you've got to be making biscuits at 3.30, so you maybe want to think twice about that.
Merlin: You're kind of hurting yourself two or three different ways.
John: Yeah, I mean, all of the work that this is, and I think it's probably true, it might even be true of people that listen to our program, but if your work
John: If your work is done outside, it is completely daylight dependent.
John: And so, yeah, your interaction with the world is so much different than mine, which nothing I do is daylight dependent.
John: In fact, it's much better done cloaked in darkness.
John: So, but it sounds to me like your time management thing, this idea that every 120 minutes you have to type into a computer, you wouldn't benefit from four extra hours that happen in the middle of the night because you're tethered.
Merlin: No, that's not strictly true.
Merlin: I mean, I'm stretching the analogy here, but all I meant to say was that, like, on a Monday morning, I know there's stuff that's got to happen.
Merlin: We have an orthodontist appointment today, so I have to remember to put the retainers in my backpack because I'm going to take her to their after school.
Merlin: I need that with me.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: My whole thing I do is kind of walking through the day.
Merlin: I'm thinking about, do I have the ad spots?
Merlin: None of these things are difficult, but, like, it doesn't take that.
Merlin: It's kind of fault intolerant.
Merlin: Or like if I do something as simple as forget to put the retainers in the backpack, like that really screws up this one part of the day.
Merlin: Not irretrievably bad, but, you know, even when everything runs perfectly, it's still kind of a pain in the ass.
Merlin: But, you know, I'm on my way.
Merlin: I'm doing my thing.
Merlin: This is all getting me back to a really dumb point I didn't even really need to make, which is my phone rings.
Merlin: How do you feel about your phone ringing in the morning?
Yeah.
Merlin: I hate it when my phone rings.
John: It can only be bad news.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: That's how they get you.
Merlin: So I'm sitting there, and of course, it used to be when you got...
Merlin: let's just say nuisance calls or unwanted calls.
Merlin: It was almost always from unknown or from blocked or from whatever, which I felt perfectly fine to just ignore and let go to voicemail.
Merlin: The new technology, I don't know if you get this with a 206, I get this with a 415, where I'll get one coming in that's actually shockingly close to my own phone number, and I'm like, oh, God.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I can't not pick this up.
Merlin: And then I start fighting myself because I'm going, you know, this is Lucy and the football all over again.
Merlin: I know it's going to be a robocall about credit cards or mortgages or whatever.
Merlin: And I fight myself on it.
Merlin: I fight myself.
Merlin: But now my heart starts beating because I'm like, what am I going to do?
Merlin: What am I going to do?
Merlin: So I let it go to voicemail.
Merlin: I go and Google the phone number, which is always the first thing I do before I pick up any call.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Makes sense.
Merlin: I've done it.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a credit card thing.
Merlin: It's a fake credit card scam thing.
Merlin: But now I'm already a little bit off my game because now I've had to stop what I'm doing, stare at the phone, get anxious, and then go search Google.
Merlin: I realize this very clearly illustrates what a fragile person I am.
Merlin: But that's already throwing me off my game now.
Merlin: That's the kind of thing, though, where it's not dissimilar from the mail or the email.
Merlin: And this does shade into my former profession as a retired productivity guru.
Merlin: It's like as long as there is anything anywhere that you might need to know about, you've got to fret about it a little bit.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So amidst – so you know what we do, buddy?
Merlin: Every afternoon, early evening, I go down and there's a giant pile of Safeway flyers by our mail slot.
Merlin: And you know what I got to do?
Merlin: I got to pick up and look through every Safeway flyer to be sure there was not a piece – There's not a check in there.
Merlin: Or whatever.
Merlin: Like make sure there's not a piece of real mail that got fanned into the Safeway flyer.
John: I feel like every year –
John: The degree to which I am just slightly over my budget, my yearly budget, is down to the fact that I threw away a couple of really big checks that were tucked into a Safeway flyer.
Merlin: I think about it a lot.
John: You know, where it's like, well, if I just had $10,000 more, and I bet you I did.
John: Yep.
John: I bet you it was just in there with the cheap steaks.
John: Right in the garbage.
Merlin: Grilling season's coming.
John: For a long time, I didn't ever put my phone number and address in any kind of... If I was at the doctor or if I was at the pharmacy or if I was at the airline and they said, put your name and address and phone number, I would always try to not.
John: And then increasingly websites were like, that's required.
John: It's required.
John: We need your phone number because what if the reservation changes?
John: We need your phone number because I know exactly what you're saying.
Merlin: And then you say to them, it's required for what?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like I like to say sometimes when I'm being a pill is I'll say, OK, is that a law, a rule, a policy or a suggestion?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because those mean very different things to me.
Merlin: I don't think that's actually a law.
Merlin: I think that's a request that you're going to try and play off legit that you're actually going to use to fuck me.
John: But if you're doing it online and you don't fill out their things, it won't let you go to the next page, right?
John: It bounces you up and it's like, there's a little arrow there pointing at where your phone number needs to go.
John: And so you get pushed into this posture of like, okay, I guess, you know, listen, I would rather drive to the airport and find that my flight had been canceled and turn around and go home than I would give you my phone number, airline.
John: But they require it.
John: So you put it in.
John: And so eventually I stopped being such a stickler about it because I started to feel like this is just a new thing that you have to do, put your phone number in.
Merlin: It used to be social security numbers.
Merlin: Remember?
Merlin: Like when that was your student ID or that's what you would just use for anything, log in using your social security number.
John: Well, I prefer not to, but if that's the system, I guess I better use it.
John: Well, and I haven't, funny, we used to use our social security numbers all the time.
John: I haven't put my social security number in anything for years.
Merlin: It was on my student ID and it was on every, when I had to clean out some stuff from my mom's house a few years back, it was on pretty much every sheet of paper that my college gave me.
Merlin: Yeah, it was how you proved who you were.
Merlin: It was your student.
Merlin: It was like this equals equals you.
John: But so I got a prescription filled in New York or in Baltimore or something like that at a Walgreens.
John: And they wanted my phone number.
John: And now I swear to you, every month I get a robocall from a New York...
John: area code and generally anybody anybody that's calling me from new york on the phone is somebody that's i presume calling to say hey we've got an opportunity here for us to use one of your songs in buffy the vampire slayer spinoff and we just need your approval right now because it's going to be 150 000 and please call me back and so i get these new york
John: Is that 212?
John: What is that?
John: Yeah, 212 and 764 Hero or whatever it is.
John: I don't remember.
John: But I recognize them in the moment.
John: And it's gotten me like six times.
John: I pick it up and it's like, hi, it's time to refill your prescription at the Brooklyn Walgreens.
John: Die a thousand deaths.
John: I don't know who to, I don't know who now, what or how or who I could ever do to get this to stop doing this, right?
John: It's just, who do I, who do I, how do I unsubscribe?
John: You can't.
Merlin: Well, and it's also that feeling of helplessness where you're like, well, if, you know, back in the day when we used to think like somebody would tell a marketer to call, you'd say, I'm on the do not call list.
Merlin: Please remove me from the list.
Merlin: But in the case of your phone number, I guess like your social security number, it's gotten into so many places where you're like, how would you even know where to begin?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like you got a robocall.
Merlin: So what do you do?
Merlin: You got mash on numbers for several minutes, let them know that you let them know how heavily you'll engage with a random phone call.
Merlin: Because, you know, that's data.
Merlin: That's data.
Merlin: That is data.
Merlin: When they call you up, and the one I get frequently is, this is an important call about your current credit card.
Merlin: There's not a problem with your card, but this is their last opportunity to beat-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, and it's the same one every time.
Merlin: And they're like, you've got to press 2 or whatever to continue.
Merlin: And, of course, there's, I guess, some kind of button that's not hooked up to anything, too.
Merlin: say you went off it.
Merlin: But like all that does, it's how Publishers Clearinghouse works, right?
Merlin: I mean, I knew this 20 years ago.
Merlin: Like the way Publishers Clearinghouse works is you get on increasingly more execrable lists, depending on how many pictures of the Buick you pasted into the Publishers Clearinghouse.
John: Oh, we got a live one here.
John: This one will fill out a form.
John: Now you're pre-qualified.
John: Yeah, no, I'm pre-qualified for everything, Merlin.
John: If I wanted to, I could buy a Gulfstream jet because I've been pre-qualified up to $100 million.
John: Huh.
John: But...
John: But it's 29% APR financing.
John: First year is free.
John: It's all standard.
John: It's all pretty standard.
John: Yeah, it's just boilerplate stuff.
John: It's not boilerplate.
John: Just sign.
John: Just sign right here.
John: I've been getting a thing lately in the actual mail, heavy bond, beautiful photographs of a thing where – what is it from?
John: It's not the Hilton Hotel because I'm on their permanent blacklist.
Yeah.
John: But it might be the Sheraton or something.
John: Maybe Starwood?
John: It's not Starwood because I know enough to throw everything that has the word Starwood on it right into the shredder.
John: Is that right?
John: But it's a legitimate enterprise, right?
John: It's something nice, genuinely nice.
John: Like...
John: I don't know if I would call Sheraton that, but something like that where you're like, this is, I'm looking, I'm flipping this around.
John: I'm reading the fine print very carefully to see where it says that I'm going to have to sit for an hour in a timeshare meeting.
John: I don't see any of that.
John: And I'm looking at this thing and basically what it is is like, uh, airfare and hotel, uh,
John: to Maui for seven days, seven nights, I guess, and eight days, all in for, you know, for a low, low price of $795.
John: And I'm like, this is insane.
John: This seems like a really good deal.
John: And I'm turning it over and over, looking at it like, what's the catch?
John: What's the catch?
John: And at every point, even the little micro wording of things where a catch could be hidden.
John: The microwording of this thing is worded in such a way that there's no catch there, right?
John: Either they are just bald-ass lying on this, and you show up, and when you are standing at the front desk, they do that thing where they're like, oh, I'm sorry, there are no double rooms available.
John: And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Merlin: I know, you're just bracing.
Merlin: You're just like, you're just one big knot of anxiety waiting to find out how they get you.
John: Yeah, like, oh, sorry, the only rooms that apply to this plan are one full-size bed or whatever.
John: And I'm like, I'm here with three people.
John: So I'm reading this thing and I'm like, I cannot figure out the catch.
John: This is driving me crazy.
John: This seems like a good deal.
John: But I don't want to be the 75-year-old who's like, sounds like a great deal.
John: And you buy it and then they're taking $400 a month out of your account.
John: And then when I really looked at it, I was like, oh, wait a minute.
John: This is still like $120 a day.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I've gotten that deal.
Merlin: I got that deal one time where there's a semi-popular, sort of like in the days before we knew about things like MaxFun Cruise, Joko Cruise.
Merlin: uh this guy was was really active i'm gonna get in trouble for this this guy was very actively trying to get me to go on this cruise for people uh who are somewhat uh notable with regard to a certain computer platform product and he was really he's like this is your whole family's gonna get to go and it's gonna be amazing and i did when i did the math on it so it was like an nec cruise you mean is that a star trek thing
John: Wasn't NEC your first computer platform?
Merlin: Oh, or the deck in the neck.
Merlin: NES, I think that's the Nintendo.
John: Oh, NES.
Merlin: It would have cost me about $10,000 to go on the cruise.
Merlin: Once I figured it all out, I mean, you know, it's like nobody is going to send you something on nice bond paper that's actually good for you.
John: Right.
John: The thicker the bond, the harder the screw.
John: Finger the bond.
John: You'll find out.
John: NEC Computers.
John: Am I crazy here?
Merlin: No, I think that's a thing.
John: National Electronic Computer Company or something.
John: NEC Global.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, look at that.
Merlin: Oh, NEC.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: I've seen it.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Story checks out.
Merlin: There's some computers.
John: Yeah.
John: I have to say, I still have this brochure on my table, even though it expired on March 15th.
John: Because I'm still just I'm turning it over and over in my hands like, did I miss an opportunity here?
John: Or is this is this like such a great con job, such a total screw job?
John: Like what you what you don't want.
John: You don't want a situation where here's this big hotel in Maui and they're just under capacity and they're just trying to do this to get rid of this, these excess rooms.
John: Right, right.
John: And the rooms are just as beautiful as they are on, as they're shown to be on this, on this, uh,
Merlin: And not to interrupt you, but we're very much aware that this is a real phenomenon when it comes to flight, where we've all read the articles about how every person on that plane paid something different.
Merlin: One person on that plane paid one-tenth of the price for a coach ticket that somebody else did.
Merlin: That's a real thing involving capacity supply and demand, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So it doesn't seem out of the imagination that this would be a real thing.
John: When I was flying back from the Joko cruise,
John: There were some people there in the economy comfort area, and I'm not above saying that I fly economy comfort when I can.
Merlin: That's like economy plus, like a slightly bigger chair?
Merlin: Yeah, slightly bigger chair.
John: And there was a couple there coming back from the cruise.
John: And they in their loudest voices were like, oh, my God, we had no seat assignment until we got here at the airport.
John: And then they just put us here in these in these chairs in the front row, like their economy comfort seats were even better than mine.
John: And they were like, we only paid $125 for this whole flight from Expedia.com.org.
John: And everyone else in the plane had those Tom and Jerry knives coming out of their eyes at them.
John: Like, okay, great for you.
John: Shut up.
John: Sit down.
John: Stop it.
John: You're making me feel awful.
John: And they were like, whee, I got $120.
John: And they just put us right here in seats 1A and 2A.
Merlin: Not cool.
Merlin: Not cool.
Merlin: It's like, ugh.
Merlin: Tom and Jerry Knives.
Merlin: Tom and Jerry Knives.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's going to make it in.
John: Don't worry.
John: What about the Big Bad Wolf?
John: How do you feel about the Big Bad Wolf?
Merlin: Just the whole post-Red Riding Hood idea?
John: Yeah, where the big bad wolf became like a trope, where all of a sudden there were big bad wolves everywhere.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Separated from Red Robin Hood.
Merlin: Well, yeah, you got, I mean, I think about Red Riding Hood as being important because, like, that's a story, lots of kids hear, you get a little older, you think about it, you realize it's probably about sexual assault.
Merlin: And then you get cartoons where there's a lot of wolves.
Merlin: You got a certain kind of wolf in a zoot suit who's checking out ladies.
Merlin: See, right, whose tongue and eyeballs come out of his head.
Merlin: Yeah, like a Chuck Jones wolf.
Merlin: Or the same kind of wolf that might think you look like a pork chop, right?
Merlin: Right, right, that'll happen.
Merlin: A wolf that goes through a wall and leaves a wolf-shaped hole.
Merlin: That'll happen.
Merlin: What do I think about the wolf?
Merlin: I don't have a super strong feeling about it.
Merlin: We have not been a big fairy tale family.
Merlin: I feel like it's been a little bit of a failing.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: No, I've tried.
Merlin: I tried because there's a beloved Reader's Digest book of fairy tales that I grew up with.
Merlin: Little pencil check marks next to each one that we'd read.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And my daughter wasn't into it.
John: So I feel the same obligation because between my mom and me, she's just close enough to the generation, and my dad obviously was, for all intents and purposes, a Victorian, where that was the only entertainment you had was reading Rudyard Kipling and Grimm's Fairy Tales because it was still plausible that, A, that nobody knew how the rhinoceros got his scales.
John: But also that there were still women who would bake you into a cake.
John: And like just in your neighborhood.
John: And so I've started to read some of that stuff to my daughter.
John: And the other day I read her – I mean I was explaining like the boy who cried wolf.
John: And very quickly she became known as the girl who cried ow.
Yeah.
John: Because there is a we have had a real escalation lately in the word owl.
Merlin: Oh, we went through this where it's not exactly a fake injury, but it's more like the reaction precedes the actual feeling.
John: Yeah.
John: Somebody pulls out a hairbrush and she's like, oh, falls to the floor, you know.
John: And it's like, are you being the girl that cried ow?
John: And her eyes light up because she understands the boy who cried wolf.
John: She got that.
John: And now she realizes, you know, we've changed it.
John: Now it's a metaphor.
John: And she's the girl that cried ow.
John: And I've actually found it to be very effective in diffusing these, like, ow storms.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: I know it makes a lot of sense.
Merlin: I've heard people say similar things in a contemporary context with the movie Inside Out.
Merlin: I think it's probably very frequently exaggerated.
Merlin: That's okay.
Merlin: But no, I know exactly what you mean, where you have a way to see, like, that's the beauty of a fable.
Merlin: You know, the scorpion and the frog.
Merlin: It's like one of the greatest stories of all time.
Merlin: Nothing describes that situation better than the scorpion and the frog.
John: Oh, the scorpion and the frog.
John: What a mismatched pair.
John: You remember that story?
John: I have no idea.
John: I thought you were making it up.
John: There's a real scorpion and frog story?
Merlin: Oh, wait, the scorpion rides the frog.
Merlin: I'll make it as quick as I can.
Merlin: The scorpion says, hey, look, I need to get across the river.
John: I won't sting you.
Merlin: Yeah, so just give me a ride on your back.
Merlin: The frog says, look, if I put you on my back,
Merlin: You know, you're going to sting me.
Merlin: Flash forward, they get halfway through.
Merlin: The scorpion stings the frog.
Merlin: They're going to die.
Merlin: He says, what did you do?
Merlin: You said you weren't going to sting me.
Merlin: He said, what do you expect?
Merlin: I'm a scorpion.
John: Yeah, I think in Alaska, that was the moose and the peregrine falcon or something.
John: We didn't have scorpions or frogs.
John: It didn't make any sense to us.
Merlin: It seemed a little exotic.
John: Yeah, it was something more normal, like the muskox and the wolverine.
Merlin: What do you expect?
Merlin: I'm a Wolverine.
Merlin: Why did you tear me up?
Merlin: Does she ask you to – like when she asks you to read stuff, if you're comfortable saying, what kind of stuff does she ask you to read?
Merlin: Does she like fables and fairy tales?
John: So we go to – we buy most of our books at the thrift store.
John: And so we go over to the children's book area.
John: And she plops herself down and immediately starts pulling out every book that has a huge alien-eyed garbage princess.
John: And she's like, look, it's Dora.
John: Look, it's Cinderella.
John: Look, it's all this stuff.
Merlin: Dan and I refer to Dora simply as the yelling show.
John: Yeah, the yelling show.
John: Like here's a girl with a wedge haircut that's going to yell at you and then stare at you.
John: I hate it so much.
John: And she pulls this stuff out of the shelves because it's exotic to her, right?
John: This isn't stuff that she's allowed to have.
John: So she's just like, oh my God, look at this.
John: It's so amazing.
John: It's like a comic book where Barbie talks about products that you can buy.
Merlin: And you feel like it really feels sometimes like you're buying an ad.
Merlin: Yeah, that's what you are.
Merlin: Like you're basically purchasing a pamphlet that's an ad.
John: Those Barbie books where it's like, oh, I didn't know what to do about a computer.
John: So then Ken came and I was busy repairing my broken fingernail while Ken solved my problem.
John: It's like I would rather put her in an isolation tank and play her the first episode of Lost than I would buy any one of these garbage books.
John: But she's down on the floor pulling this stuff out and just like she's been lost in the desert her whole life and someone's given her a glass of cold water.
John: Like she's just – she's consuming this as fast as she can because she knows that it's not going to last.
John: And I'm up still in the children's book section thumbing through them looking for titles I recognize from my own childhood.
John: So I'm like, oh, look here.
John: You know, look here, Marlo.
John: It's the book about You're Not My Mother where the little bird loses its mother and decides that maybe a steam tractor, which by this drawing we can clearly tell that this book was made in 1940.
John: And it was already an anachronism when I was reading it.
John: Like, look at this.
John: And I show it to her.
John: And she's just like, no princesses.
John: There's nothing fun about this book.
John: It has no, as they say with automobiles, it has no curb appeal.
John: There's no curb appeal.
John: But which book goes into the shopping cart?
John: Daddy's book about, I mean, I bought a book for her the other day, which is a comic.
John: I mean, it's a cartoon book.
John: But it's a story of a little girl whose rabbi in Poland gives his ticket to her to put her on the boat to go to America.
John: And she goes to America and works as a seamstress in order to save up enough money to buy a ticket for her aging grandmother who is still living in Poland and who's like milking a horse.
Yeah.
John: In order to survive.
John: This is right up your alley.
John: And I'm reading this story to her and like tears are streaming down my cheeks because it's a beautiful book.
John: Yeah.
John: And it's the story of America.
John: Sure.
John: And the, you know, the illustrations are good, but it's, it's very, it's touching.
John: And she loves the book now because, you know, it's a book that every time daddy reads it, he starts crying about the, about the great, you know, the diaspora.
John: But there's obviously no magic in it, no princess.
John: Not a lot of pink and purple.
John: Well, the princess is basically in a Lower East Side sweatshop sewing wedding dresses in order to get the 40 shekels to go buy a trip on the Lusitania for her grandmother so she doesn't have to drink horse's milk anymore.
Yeah.
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Merlin: And there's no Nickelodeon show for that right now.
John: No, there's not a single song in it.
John: Except, you know, except dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, dreidel.
John: And so anyway, this is the culture that I'm inflicting on her.
John: And we went to a pho restaurant last night, and they had a big screen TV on the wall, and it was playing the latest iteration of the TV bloopers show.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I don't think that's ever really gone away.
Merlin: Between the home videos and the bloopers, there's always something there.
John: And this is, I think, the home videos.
John: It's just basically a show of people getting kicked in the crotch or, you know, balls getting shot into their crotch.
John: And the host of it is the smarmy guy from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the, like, rich son.
John: Oh, the other guy.
John: The other guy from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, who, I have to say, has not aged a day.
John: Like, he looks incredible.
John: He's like a smaller guy with a mustache.
John: Yeah.
John: That's right.
John: Smaller guy with a mustache.
John: Yeah, but he's nice.
John: And he seems nice.
John: And he comes out and he's like, all right, another, here's another bunch of people getting hit in the crotch.
John: All right, let's go.
John: This parrot is crazy.
John: It drinks milk and it swears like a sailor.
John: And so this is on the TV.
John: And you could have put firecrackers in her ears and you wouldn't have gotten any response from her.
John: She was just completely in the world of bloopers.
John: And a lot of them didn't even get the blooper.
John: Right?
John: Like somebody just got hit in the crotch.
Merlin: She's like, I don't get it, but this is incredible.
Merlin: We have exactly the same experience.
Merlin: I have a thought on this.
Merlin: So, you know, so like as with the princess properties, it is an overused analogy, but it's not precisely crack, but it's extremely attractive to kids because science –
Merlin: They're using all of the means, all the same way that they would try and make Don Corleone's son look better for the funeral.
Merlin: They're using all of their powers, calling upon all their powers to make this as appealing as possible to little kids.
Merlin: So when we go out to eat, you know that little diner by our house, and of course it's usually like Premier League soccer or golf or whatever on, and she is, or an infomercial.
Merlin: They might have an infomercial channel on, because there are channels for infomercials.
Merlin: She is wrapped the entire time.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Here's my thought on this.
Merlin: I think it's basically...
Merlin: Headline news for children.
Merlin: It's the same concept.
Merlin: Why do adults stare slack-jawed at that screen in the airport?
Merlin: I think it's the transitions, it's the music, it's the noise, it's all the little motion graphics.
Merlin: The stock market crawl at the bottom that no one knows what it means.
Merlin: Right, and I think that's all extreme.
Merlin: They know that that is extremely attractive to a certain kind of feeble mind, and I think that's what they do with children with these programs.
John: Yeah, I...
John: I asked her one time, because we go to an Irish restaurant every once in a while because daddy likes corned beef and cabbage.
John: And let me tell you, an Irish restaurant has very little appeal to children.
John: Because, I mean, everyone else in there is red-faced drunk.
John: And I know that's racist.
Merlin: Who goes?
John: I don't think you can be racist against the Irish.
John: Well, you used to be able to.
John: It was one of the big kinds.
John: That's true.
John: That's true.
John: It's a different time.
John: Irish need not apply.
John: Yeah, that's the whole premise behind Demolay and the Knights of Columbus.
John: You know, my mom was a rainbow girl.
John: Oh, really?
John: And her quote-unquote boyfriend was in Demolay.
John: Yeah, all of that stuff was just to keep the Catholics out.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I think Knights of Columbus was like the Ku Klux Klan of Catholics.
John: Even though the Ku Klux Klan was the Ku Klux Klan of Catholics.
John: That's like having the YouTube of dance videos.
John: Yeah, it's the YouTube of dance videos.
Merlin: KFC always had a hell of a baseball team.
Merlin: They were always the toughest opponents for everybody.
Merlin: KFC.
John: Because baseball is how you defeat the Catholics.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: How far back does that go?
Merlin: That's the invention of baseball.
Merlin: That's why they invented it.
Merlin: So that's so interesting to me.
Merlin: So it starts in England.
Merlin: They got cricket and not many Catholics.
Merlin: You come up with this idea of baseball, and that's going to be a way to finally put the Catholics in their place.
John: The ball is the pope.
Merlin: There's only one.
Merlin: Think about it.
Merlin: It's white.
Merlin: Let me ask you a question.
Merlin: Does the ball ever get thrown out of a game?
Merlin: No, the ball is infallible.
John: The ball is infallible.
John: The ball just keeps going around and around and around.
John: And every once in a while, the umpire, who is the College of Cardinals, takes a dirty ball out of play.
John: It puts it in a different parish.
John: Yep.
John: And then all you do – so this is the thing.
John: When you're watching a baseball game, look for the white smoke.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: If it's gray smoke, you still have time to go to the bathroom and get a hot dog.
Merlin: They stop selling usually like seventh inning.
Merlin: You can't get a beer anymore.
Merlin: And also most people aren't doing anything hardly at all.
Merlin: And then sometimes one person moves a little bit.
Merlin: yep right that's right there are a lot of kids at the game too oh tradition and family tradition and family tradition and family this is crack for catholics john well so and if it is it's catholic crack and that's how they get them in and then that's how ultimately how they'll be defeated uh that's still unclear yeah it's a long game john it's a very long game i'm not sure how pete rose factors into it either but i met him twice i met him twice you met pete rose
Merlin: Twice.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Did he sign anything for you?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He signs anything.
Merlin: He's kind of famous for that.
Merlin: Two times before the disgrace.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: This is circa 1976.
Merlin: This is the Big Red Machine era.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Both because you were an Ohio kid.
Merlin: You would just see the Reds around town.
Merlin: You would just go.
Merlin: One of the times I saw and briefly met Pete Rose was at a restaurant called Johnny Bench's Home Plate.
Merlin: Right over there at the Northgate Mall on Colerain Avenue.
Merlin: I know about it.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: I know I've told you my Pete Rose story before.
John: You have, but I wanted everybody else to enjoy it, too.
Merlin: Well, we should probably stay focused on the Catholics.
Merlin: It's a good story, though.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: All I'll tell you is the punchline of the story is when Pete Rose says, oh, yeah, he's the one with the daughter that don't got no arm.
Merlin: The don't got no arm.
Merlin: That's right.
John: Remember that story?
John: I do remember that.
Merlin: But when I go to get corned beef and cabbage... Of all the things you could say in your restaurant that you own called Pete Rose's, that you would be sitting there at a table, a little boy would come up of all the things that would come out of your mouth.
Merlin: He's the one who's...
Merlin: His file card on that scout for the A's was that his daughter had a birth defect.
John: His daughter ain't got no harm.
Merlin: He's the one with the daughter that ain't got no harm.
Merlin: Yeah, well, it was a different time.
Merlin: Yeah, different time, simple man.
Merlin: Also, you get a lot of baseball players.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I was just going to say, just to close it out, a lot of the baseball players we get, let's just be honest, they come from Central and South America.
Merlin: Very Catholic country.
John: Nowadays.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Everything's changing.
Merlin: Everything's changing.
John: It's a Catholic game.
John: It used to be a game against the Catholics.
John: Yeah, they're taking it back.
Merlin: That's our term.
Merlin: Don't say queer.
Merlin: That's our term now.
Merlin: We're taking it back.
John: That's right.
John: Baseball now, it's a Catholic game.
John: What are you going to do about it, Demolet?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: What are you going to do, have a dance?
John: Yeah, right.
John: Are you going to go sit in your secret club, plot against the Catholics?
John: Too late.
John: Too late.
John: Taking over.
John: Taking over the USA.
John: Oh, doctor.
John: Boy, no, we still haven't had a Catholic president, though.
John: Oh, no, we did.
John: Just the one.
John: Just the one.
John: Just the one.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Famously.
John: Famously.
John: In retrospect, that is an incredibly big deal.
John: It was at the time.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, like when you really think about it now, like what an incredibly big deal.
John: Well, and think about when was the last time you heard of the Knights of Columbus?
Merlin: Not since 1978 when they would paste our ass every Saturday in baseball.
John: Paste our ass?
John: What a nice Ohio phrase that is.
John: That's how we would measure it.
John: Paste our ass.
John: Wow.
Merlin: How pasted is your ass?
Merlin: Pretty pasted.
Merlin: So pasted.
Merlin: White as paste.
John: We would go into this Irish restaurant.
John: Corned beef and cabbage restaurant and they have TVs all around.
John: Everyone, this, I support this actually.
John: TVs, each one tuned to a different sport.
John: So there's a basketball TV.
John: There's a curling TV.
John: There's something to distract everyone.
John: That's right.
John: You pick where you want to sit in this restaurant based on what sport you want to be assaulted by.
John: And so we go and sit in this place, and she's just looking around, just her head spinning.
John: All these sports, none of which has daddy made any attempt to explain.
John: And at one point I was like, you're watching these games so intently.
John: What's your favorite sport?
John: And without even moments of hesitation, she was like, hockey.
John: No kidding.
John: I said, hockey?
John: Huh.
John: Whoa, I'm raising a hockey fan?
John: Like, I can't think of a thing that would have surprised me more.
John: And I think I leaned in and was like, are you sure you don't like curling?
Merlin: I'll be hornswoggle.
Merlin: How did she even know what it is and what it's called?
John: I think that at one point I went around the room and I was like, baseball, football, hockey, basketball.
John: You know, the other one's self-explanatory.
John: Skiing, obviously, and curling.
John: Who doesn't know what that is?
John: Sure.
John: But she watches and I think the pace and the fact that hockey players are...
John: are so elegantly skating i mean i think it has an appeal to her i'm not sure if she's if she's aware of the of the violence maybe i mean you know i bought it for her birthday i bought her a full suit of armor oh nice yeah because uh because she keeps she keeps picking up swords at thrift stores and saying my sword is ready to kill well whose fault is that well
Merlin: I feel like it's... Did you get her chain mail or did you get her like full plate armor?
John: Yeah, breastplate and a shield and a helmet.
Merlin: Don't you feel like that's something she should have to earn on her own through campaigns?
John: I feel like that she has campaigned an awful lot.
John: She's, you know, the big takeaway for her of Kung Fu Panda 3, which is one of four movies she's seen, was that you use Kung Fu on Daddy.
Merlin: Oh, God, yes.
John: And so a lot of kung fu happening.
John: Every takeaway of a story where there's magic involved is that this now is magic that you can use on daddy.
John: And so between using magic on me and kung fu-ing me and killing me as every single dragon or baddie...
John: I just realized that she had a bloodlust, and I want her to start killing people that aren't daddy, by which I mean orcs.
Merlin: Orcs.
Merlin: That's the first thing that came to mind.
Merlin: Bugbears would be a good place to start, too.
John: Bugbears are, that's a, I mean, a bugbear has a lot of hit points.
Merlin: Isn't a bugbear like a first-level dungeon kind of thing?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, I guess so.
John: Who's tougher, a bugbear or an orc?
John: I think bugbears are more unusual than orcs.
Merlin: Is that racist?
John: To say a bugbear is more unusual than an orc?
Merlin: Are you saying all orcs are the same?
Merlin: No, obviously there are the Uruk-hai, who are big, tough orcs.
Merlin: I don't know what that is.
Merlin: You got me on that one.
Merlin: Come on, Uruk-hai?
Merlin: Uruk-hai, I don't know that.
John: Well, they're the Sauron orcs.
John: That's Lord of the Rings.
John: Yeah, the orcs that Saruman makes in his orc family.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: And they're kind of like Tolkien stormtroopers.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Did they give any of the rings to the orcs, John?
Merlin: Did orcs get rings?
No.
No, no.
Merlin: Who got rings?
Merlin: You got elves got rings, humans got rings, the dwarves got rings.
Merlin: Some people got rings, some people didn't get rings, right?
Merlin: Right.
John: You wouldn't give a ring to an orc.
John: That's throwing good money after bad.
John: But I think the thing about the rings is a lot of different elves got rings.
Right.
Merlin: Oh.
John: They're elvish rings, right?
John: So they didn't make a ring.
John: I think the ring they gave the humans and the ring they gave the dwarves were just like courtesy rings.
Merlin: Oh, they're just like promotional rings.
Merlin: Or like maybe the first ones they made that weren't all that good.
Merlin: It was like the first pancake.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You have to give the first ring to the humans.
John: It's just like, oh, yeah, we should give the humans a ring.
John: It cuts a little bit.
John: It's not finished very well.
John: But the dwarves probably provided the gold.
John: Give them a little bit of a kickback ring.
John: Dwarves are miners, right?
Merlin: I'm sorry, now I'm being racist again, aren't I?
John: I mean, there are a lot of dwarves that do a lot of different things.
Merlin: You could be a paralegal.
Merlin: You could be a veterinary assistant dwarf.
Merlin: You know, there's work at the post office.
Merlin: We got to work at the post office dwarf.
Merlin: Mail's got to get somewhere.
Merlin: You need a dwarf postal system.
John: There are dwarves that are working as emissaries.
John: I'm sure there are diplomatic corps dwarves.
Merlin: How do you think you're going to get flyers from the dwarf Safeway at your house?
John: Exactly.
John: There are dwarves that are great-grandsons of Thorin Oakenshield who are sort of just living off of their inheritance.
John: They're like waste droid.
John: Thorin, right.
John: Right.
John: So yeah, I think some big white-bearded dwarf got a ring, but it was limited power ring.
Merlin: Oh, it's like a demo.
John: Yeah, but I think plenty of elves got like some high-powered stuff.
John: I haven't read this similarly and all the way through.
Merlin: There are three people in my household, two of which have read The Hobbit.
Merlin: There are two people in my house that have read a Tolkien book, and I'm not one of them.
John: Wait a minute.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I like to bring this up with you every year or so, just to remind you.
Merlin: I've never read anything by Tolkien, and I like one of the movies.
Come on.
Merlin: No, see, you know I'm not that guy, usually.
Merlin: I'm normally not that guy.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: It's just this is a fun outlier for me.
Merlin: My two big outliers are I'm not super familiar with Star Trek, and I actually... I've tried a little bit of Hobbit, but the language stuff throws me off a little bit, but...
Merlin: I might try the actual Hobbit book.
Merlin: The Hobbit book is easier, right?
Merlin: We'll start with the Cimmerillion.
Merlin: That's their metal machine music.
John: Frankly, you don't ever want to read the Cimmerillion.
John: You just want to have Ted Leo read it to you aloud.
John: That sounds so good.
John: No, The Hobbit is a children's book.
John: The Lord of the Rings is a masterwork, but you have read Dune.
John: You've read all 40 Dune books.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I read Slaughterhouse-Five a couple times.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Catch-22.
John: Did you read Catch-22?
Merlin: Oh, I think I started that.
Merlin: Maybe the first half of that.
John: You didn't read Catch-22 all the way through.
Merlin: I skipped a lot of books.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: Then there's some things I've read many, many times.
Merlin: Because of my interest in short fiction, there are many short stories that are kind of my version of famous novels because I've read them so many times.
John: Did you read the short Happy Life of Francis Macomber?
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: I've also read the abortion one.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: How about the one where they throw the rocks?
Merlin: Throw the rocks.
Merlin: I've read the one with the rocks.
Merlin: Have you read the one with the misfit where they kill the family at the end?
Merlin: That's how my daughter got named.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: My daughter's middle name comes from that.
Merlin: She'd have been a good woman if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life.
Merlin: What about the rat that gets really smart?
Merlin: Oh, that's that movie with Michael Jackson song in it?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Oh, the rat that gets smart.
Merlin: You're talking about the cockroach man.
Merlin: Yeah, the rescuers.
Merlin: I've read the rescuers.
John: They fly on the back of a seagull.
Merlin: The great mouse detective.
Merlin: I've read so many of those, so many classics that today it's so difficult to even put your hand to these books because you've got to stream it.
Merlin: It's hard to find.
Merlin: Yeah, you have to stream it.
John: You have to get it on your Kindle, and that requires that you upgrade the amount of storage you have on your Dropbox.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Also, John, make sure you're still signed in.
Merlin: You still signed in?
John: No, no.
John: It logged me out, and now I forget which one of the three passwords I use is the one that I use for that.
Yeah.
John: You know what?
John: What's my prompt?
John: What was your first pet?
John: What was your mother's maiden name?
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: That stuff's hard to find out.
Merlin: Yeah, it really is.
Merlin: Super hard to find out.
Merlin: What's your social security number?
Merlin: It's right there on your college application.
Merlin: You know, our friend John Circuso, he gives me a little bit of jazz because I don't actually help you with these things.
Merlin: There's an application I can introduce you to that would save you a lot of aggravation with these things.
John: Oh, the thing, what I have found is that in situations like that, what I need is to download another app.
Merlin: Oh, you're missing the point.
Merlin: Those security questions are going to bite you in the ask.
Merlin: They're going to bite me in the ask?
Merlin: They're going to bite me in the ask.
Merlin: Ask me a security question.
John: Okay, what was the first time you masturbated?
Merlin: Lovingly.
Merlin: Ask me another one.
John: Let's see.
John: What was the... Who is your least favorite relative?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Gleefully.
Merlin: Pick a part of speech and use that for your security questions.
Merlin: And then record them in this secure app.
Merlin: Never use an actual noun.
Merlin: Never answer with a noun.
Merlin: Answer with a different part of speech.
Merlin: Gleefully.
Merlin: I go with adverbs.
Merlin: I try to minimize my use of adverbs.
Merlin: Totally avoid adverbs wherever I can.
Merlin: And then you can use that for security questions.
Merlin: You know what the other trick is?
Merlin: That's not my actual security answer.
Merlin: Boom.
Boom.
Merlin: You see what I just did right there?
Merlin: I took you in two directions at once.
Merlin: I took you on two different vacations.
John: But here's my understanding of the problem, which is that no one is actually sitting down and trying to figure out your security question.
John: It's just some computer algorithm that's going through every conversation.
Merlin: No, you just call Apple and say, hello, I'm definitely John Roderick's whatever, and I'm having trouble getting into his thing.
John: Yes, I'm the executor of his estate.
Yes.
Merlin: That's not funny, man.
Merlin: John's dead.
John: But nobody's doing that.
John: Nobody's fishing actually like what was Merlin's home childhood address.
Merlin: I will not talk about this online.
Merlin: I will discuss it with you offline.
Merlin: It's a harrowing problem.
Merlin: Is it a harrowing problem?
Yeah.
Merlin: Harrowing is a kind of fish, right?
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, harrowing.
Merlin: You also can get that comedy duo Stuart Lee and Richard harrowing.
Merlin: You can have all kinds of different fish.
Merlin: Fish and pin, pin and cushion.
Merlin: So this is actually a real problem.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: So I learned about bugbears and orcs.
Merlin: through advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
John: That's right.
John: Gary Gygax's masterwork.
John: Yep.
John: Which is, he stole a lot from the Lord of the Rings, so much so that they filed an injunction against him.
Merlin: Oh, that would not surprise me at all.
Merlin: But what's funny is, I mean, there is stuff I did recognize, but no, I'm like the worst kind of weirdo because when I hear something like, I don't know, I imagine a lot of it comes Vorpal Blade.
Merlin: I imagine that comes from someplace else.
Merlin: I got all the Arthurian stuff, not all of it, but I understood there was Arthurian stuff.
Merlin: I was more familiar, I mean, even though I'm not a big Lovecraft reader, I was more familiar with the concept of, like, Cthulhu.
Merlin: So, like, a lot of my friends played Call of Cthulhu.
Merlin: I realized that was from the books.
Merlin: But I didn't realize how much of D&D, like, maybe even near the majority of D&D, comes from Lord of the Rings, right?
Merlin: John?
John: Oh, sorry, I had my cough button on.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I thought I had hopelessly offended you with Tolkien Talk.
John: No, no.
John: I was hoisted by my own petard.
John: What kind of armor class is that?
John: Let's see.
John: That's plus five charisma.
John: Plus five petard.
John: I feel like just like all Led Zeppelin lyrics are derived from Lord of the Rings, so too is all Dungeons and Dragons.
John: And honestly, like 80% of post-Tolkien fantasy is just like, what would happen if we met?
John: What would happen?
John: I mean, I think a lot of people read...
John: Lord of the Rings.
John: And what they really wanted was fanfic of elves having sex and being naked.
John: Sure.
John: And so I think that that's basically all of all fantasy writing is just like the desire to have to watch elves have sex.
Merlin: Why do you think that's as widespread as it is?
John: Well, you know, elves are unattainable and also willowy, and a certain type of people like willowy, think that that's a beauty, like a high beauty standard, willowy.
John: Talking about like slender-hipped?
John: Slender-hipped, sort of androgynous, unattainable, and also never-die.
John: And boy, there's a lot of people that want to be that, right?
John: Unattainable, slender-hipped, never die.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: That's pretty much L.A.
John: right there.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Right?
John: I mean, it's – Los Angeles is basically about people who want to be elves.
John: Sure.
John: If you look at Amy Mann, you're like, right.
John: It's basically she's an elf and she's only here with us.
Merlin: She is absolutely – I thought she looked like – I was describing to her friend as being like a gorgeous bird.
Merlin: But I think elf might be better.
John: Right.
John: No, she's an elf, and she's here to retrieve some ring that was given to the dwarves.
John: Oh, man.
John: But she can't reveal it.
John: No.
John: So, yeah, I feel like the fanfic of elves, it's like, do you remember, what was his name?
John: Oklahoma the sex cat?
Merlin: Oklahoma the sex cat?
John: Right, or his name was Dakota or Omaha.
John: Omaha the sex cat.
Yeah.
John: You did it.
Merlin: You did it.
Merlin: You left me in the dust.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I thought I was going to get you this episode, but you got me.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: Omaha the sex cat.
Merlin: Omaha the cat dancer?
John: Omaha.
Merlin: Is it Omaha the cat dancer?
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, oh, it's a furry thing.
Merlin: It's a Fritz the Cat spinoff.
John: Okay.
John: Except Fritz the Cat was like, bah, you know, it's like Howard the Duck.
John: But Omaha the Sex Cat was a furry thing, but like...
John: But real early, before furries had been identified.
Merlin: 1978.
Merlin: 78.
John: And it's just like anthropomorphic cats who had good haunches.
John: And there was, I think, probably for centuries, there have been people who were sitting there in their comfortable chair that had been made out of antlers or whatever it was that people used to sit in.
John: Yeah.
John: And a cat would walk by all proud, tail in the air.
John: And the person would say, the prehistoric person would say, I wonder how hard it would be to fuck a cat.
John: It would probably be pretty hard.
Merlin: You keep it to yourself.
Merlin: You keep it to yourself, but you turn it over in your mind a little bit.
Merlin: Yeah, it's hard to even pick up a cat and pet it.
Merlin: You're out hunting and gathering.
Merlin: And then maybe it comes a little bit of an intrusive thought.
Merlin: You realize you're thinking about how hard it would be to fuck a cat.
Merlin: That comes up more and more in your mind.
John: Yeah, you're out there.
John: You've got a spear in hand.
John: Here comes a musk ox.
John: And you're like, but your mind is somewhere else.
John: Your mind is thinking, how hard would it be to fuck a cat?
John: And then you miss the shot, right?
John: You're like, this is disadvantageous.
John: So over the course of time, how do you, what do you deal with?
John: How do you deal with that problem?
John: It's like, if you want to, if you want to try and fuck a horse, you can probably get away with it.
John: Horse, horse will take it.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Cats are not going to take it.
John: Anyway, we arrived at a place in 1978 where all these things had converged and it was finally possible for somebody to draw pictures of cats that you could fuck.
John: Okay.
John: And it was like a, it was a transformative moment.
John: A lot of people were liberated.
Yeah.
John: And there were Comic Cons then.
John: And they went and they passed this stuff around.
John: George R.R.
John: Martin was there.
John: And they were like, look at this.
John: You can fuck a cat.
John: What do you think about this?
John: What about that, huh?
John: And then a whole world exploded.
John: And then pretty soon you've got these Syrian kids in a hotel in Vancouver.
John: Yeah.
John: And they're dancing.
John: They're dancing with a bunch of people dressed like fuckable cats.
John: Who could have predicted that?
John: Is that in the Bible?
Merlin: No.
John: Is that a video?
No.
John: You didn't see this?
John: I think you get a different internet than I do.
John: A whole bunch of refugee families from Syria arrived.
Merlin: Oh, they went to the furry festival and the furries came out and danced with the children in the lobby.
John: Yeah, they were put in the same hotel.
John: It's like, oh, we're putting you up in this great hotel.
John: Welcome to North America.
John: You know what?
John: I did see a photo of that.
John: Yes.
John: Nobody's going to be bombing you anymore.
John: The Russians aren't going to be bombing you anymore.
John: Oh, and also your hotel is full of furries.
John: Yes.
John: Like, what a magical adventure.
John: None of that would have been possible without Omaha the sex cat.
Merlin: Do they make the outfits in a way that accommodates the idea that they might want to have intercourse with each other?
John: Some do.
Merlin: I mean, is it, because you think about like an underwear thing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And like there's some people who want to have sex with people in underwear.
Merlin: Some people want the people to wear underwear, then take the underwear off, and then they have sex with a person with no underwear.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Does, I mean, like, you know what?
Merlin: I'm not going to go any further with this because if I ask, people will tell me.
John: I believe that a greater percentage of people
John: want to have their cake and eat it too in the sense that they want the other person to keep their underwear on but also be able to have sex.
John: Yeah.
John: That's why all of this complicated underwear.
John: That's true.
John: Right?
Merlin: Yes.
John: If you just took the underwear off, then all underwear would just be sort of bloomers.
John: Right.
John: But you get the complicated underwear and then you get this cake and eat it too situation.
Right.
Merlin: Yeah, but if you want to be a cake that somebody could eat, so to speak, you're going to have to come up with some kind of a cleft or something.
Merlin: You're going to have to come up with some way to have a slice cut out of the cake where somebody could get to you in a way that they could eat you.
John: You're talking about a workaround.
John: Sure, sure.
John: Well, think about all of the ways that increasingly modern underwear is just a workaround.
Right.
Merlin: Well, because the thing is you get something as clunky as what has been called crotchless panties.
Merlin: I don't know who wants these things.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: That's a terrible idea.
Merlin: But you can also just look at the idea of – I'm going to say the garter belt.
Merlin: The garter belt is a way to have fancy underwear that's only kind of really underwear.
John: It's not like you're wearing a swimsuit or something.
John: Well, the garter belt has a way of keeping your weird pantyhose that was invented before elastic –
Merlin: Yeah.
John: That was the sort of functional thing that became increasingly fetishized.
John: You know, it went from being a girdle to being this weird set of ropes.
John: And now who wears a freaking garter belt except as a sex device?
John: Right.
John: And garter belts are very confusing for people because.
Merlin: They don't look good on many people.
John: Well, and they're very confusing to wear.
John: Like I have seen people.
John: This is just, I mean, I've known a lot of people.
John: Sure.
John: Who believe that the garter belt is meant to be fastened sort of above the belly button somewhere at the narrowest part of the waist.
John: That's an unusual look.
John: Which is not where they belong.
John: And they look very much more like a girdle or bloomers.
Merlin: It would look more like a bra that fell down.
Merlin: If you weren't that high.
John: Yeah, they look like tripods from the book Tripods.
Merlin: Is that a sex thing?
John: Yeah, it is.
John: What do you think those things were?
John: Tripods?
John: Tripods from White Mountain.
John: Is that a big penis joke?
John: No.
John: Okay.
John: That's like a – I mean basically all of contemporary science fiction comes from the movie Tripods or the book Tripods.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I'll look that up.
Merlin: Tripods, White Mountains.
John: Okay.
John: But so garter belts in my estimation are meant to be worn down on the hip.
John: Yes.
John: This is just a little advice I'm giving to our listeners.
John: Yes.
John: You can save people a lot of frustration.
John: Who are in New Zealand and all of their underwear is made out of sheepskin.
John: But, I'm sorry, sheep fur.
John: Not sheepskin.
John: We're not animals.
Merlin: Gross.
Merlin: There should be a mnemonic for that, for remembering which one's for underwear and which one's for condoms.
John: Yeah, right.
John: The underwear, yeah, red skies at night, sheepskin underwear.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Red skies at morning.
Merlin: She breaks up with you because you gave her garter ball for Christmas.
Merlin: That's the mnemonic.
Merlin: I gave a garter belt once.
John: Did you really?
Merlin: Yeah, she was a real good sport about it.
Merlin: But it was before I learned about people and women in particular.
Merlin: And I don't know what.
Merlin: I might as well have gotten her a penis pump.
Merlin: Like, you know, happy Valentine's Day.
John: Yeah.
John: It's like going into a store and buying your girlfriend Spanx.
Oh.
John: Oh, right.
John: I was in a store not very long ago.
John: Just get her a broom and some diet pills.
John: Yeah, it's like Christmas time.
John: What about these Spanx?
John: And every woman in the store, like six different people, two of them working in the store and four of them just customers, they all turned around at once and they were like, do not buy anyone Spanx.
John: I was like, really?
John: I keep hearing about it.
John: They're on TV.
John: Yeah.
John: And they all said, they all agreed, listen, Spanx are things that a woman buys herself.
Merlin: She wants them.
Merlin: She gets it for, the same way you wouldn't give her tampons.
Merlin: Not the same way, but a similar way of like, you know what?
Merlin: That's something I might need that I can do on my own.
Merlin: And it feels a little weird for you to give me that.
Merlin: My wife one time, a mother of a boyfriend of hers gave her towels and soap for Christmas.
Merlin: And to this day, we continue to argue about whether that was a passive aggressive gift.
John: Yeah, that feels pretty mean, right?
Merlin: You know, my wife is very clean.
Merlin: You would only do that to be cruel.
John: Right.
Merlin: Why would you give someone's?
Merlin: Why would you?
Merlin: I mean, she's like, no, they were really nice soaps.
Merlin: I'm like, still, I would never give anybody soap in a towel for Christmas.
John: I mean, I think it's the towel that turns it into an insult because I've been buying the last several years.
John: I've been buying like twenty four dollar bottle or bars of soap that smell like France.
Merlin: If you know what people like, that can be a nice gift.
Merlin: Yeah, you buy them a nice... Like a candle.
Merlin: A candle can be a real fuck-up gift if you don't know what you're doing.
Merlin: But if you know that person... Like me, I enjoy the smell of lemon verbena.
Merlin: If you give me something that smells like lemon verbena, I'm a happy camper.
John: But don't give me a towel.
John: The thing about lemon verbena is it makes it seem like you're camping because it smells like mosquito ripens.
John: I know, it's so nice.
John: Now put on this garter belt.
John: But so the thing about... The number one confusion about garter belts, I think, is do you wear the panties on the inside or do you wear the panties on the outside?
John: Is that even a question?
No.
John: It is.
John: It's a big question.
John: Because panties on the outside looks dumb.
John: But you can take your panties down to go to the potty.
John: Panties on the inside look better.
John: But in order to get the panties off, you have to have a master's degree in engineering.
John: Yeah, that's like an Escher thing.
Merlin: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
John: So there are lots and lots of people in the garter belt community.
John: that say you got to wear the panties on the outside.
John: Otherwise, it's not functional.
John: Otherwise, it's just like some kind of thing.
Merlin: Well, if you're a person who is wearing the garter belt because it makes you feel sexy and it makes you want to do sexy things while you're wearing it, then you could choose to have the panties on the outside.
Merlin: And that's a very forward-thinking sort of decision.
Merlin: I think giving somebody too many notes, especially as your partner, on the order in which they should put on their underwear, you can run into trouble.
Right.
John: Well, sure, because if you are seeing sexy undergarments for the first time and the first thing out of your mouth is, how do you go to the potty?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's always my first question.
John: Yeah, that's not going to be, that's not a mood enhancer.
John: Right.
Merlin: Unless you're from Germany.
Merlin: I've been avoiding it this entire time.
Merlin: I've been utterly avoiding it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: Because everything we're saying here goes triple for Germany.
John: It's low-hanging fruit, which is another thing in Germany they're very interested in.
John: Oh, like nice and long.
John: They call it a lemon party.
John: They call it a lemon verbena.
John: But they say it with a German accent.
John: Verbena scheisse.
John: Verbena scheisse.
John: Uh, so this is all very, it's all for many, many years.
John: So let me tell you one time when I was, uh, when I was very grungy, I, uh, back in the day when all of my genes were over dyed.
John: Do you remember that time?
John: There was a, there was a time in the 90s.
John: Super dark?
John: No, you'd take a pair of jeans, like a normal pair of jeans.
John: Yeah.
John: But then you'd put them in the washing machine with a canister of Rit dye.
John: So they were like green or blue.
John: Oh yeah.
John: I think I do remember this.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Like you'd put, you put some green Rit dye in with your Levi's and then you're somehow you had green Levi's and that was really, that was a cool thing.
John: And I had a lot of over dyed clothes and
John: Like a jean jacket that had a bottle of brown Rit dye.
John: I'm seeing this.
John: And you can get yourself some Hige from it.
John: Oh, you get killer Hige.
John: And I had a pair of Levi's that lasted me 20 years because they had been overdyed.
John: And even though the dye made no difference, right?
John: It's not like it added a layer of fabric.
John: But I was convinced that the fact that these had been over-dyed somehow had some effect on them so that they lasted for 20 years, which a pair of jeans should not.
John: But so I was schlepping around in my over-dyed jeans and my big...
John: Carhartt jacket and my, you know, my hoodie on top of a hoodie.
John: And at that point, you know, my soul patch was down on, dragging on the ground like Thorne Oakenship.
John: You had an oaken beard.
John: And I'm walking up a hill in Seattle and there's a gal in front of me who's my age, right?
John: She's 25.
John: And she's dressed impeccably like downtown business.
John: And her pencil skirt, which is like gray flannel pinstripe, is just – it's business, right?
John: But it's just, I would say, one quarter of a millimeter –
John: short short too short for business not too short for me just right in the zone she's wearing a little business outfit and she's and she just looks just amazing and she's walking ahead of me up this hill and i'm like what in what world does a person like this exist because i'm down here shamalama hay
John: And I'm thinking that I'm at the top of the game of being 25.
John: How much more top of the game of being 25 is there?
John: Right.
John: And, but she's in this other world and we're walking up the hill and then, you know, and she's in high heels obviously.
John: And she increases her pace just a little bit.
John: She's completely unaware of me.
John: And I catch a glimpse of the fact that she is not wearing pantyhose.
John: She's wearing stockings And they are there's a time in my life that would have that were taking me down for a couple weeks Well, and this is the thing they had little clips on them Yeah, and and it's just you know, and it's not like her skirt hiked up or anything It was just like just the slightest glimpse you see that the dark band of the top of the stocking and then just for a second
John: And I had to stop.
John: I stopped, I stopped walking.
John: I took a knee and here it is now, uh, 20 years later, I'm still talking about it.
John: Not to everybody.
Merlin: I'm talking about it in my own head.
Merlin: Oh, I've had those.
Merlin: I've, I still have some of those in my mind right now.
John: Like whether, who was she?
John: What other, what other world was she living in that?
John: Uh, that, and all of a sudden I looked down and my over dyed jeans just turned to ashes.
John: She's Conrad Lawrence and you're the duck.
John: I'm the freaking duck.
John: You're the duck.
John: You imprinted on her.
John: So, and I have no idea, one time in the same era, I was standing on a street corner and a guy walks by me, you know, handsome guy, about my size, walks past me and he was wearing some sort of parfum of some sort.
John: And as he walked past and I caught a whiff of his parfum,
John: I was like, I want to fuck that guy.
John: And I didn't know how to process it, so I started following him.
John: And I was like, all right, I don't know what to do now.
John: I really want to have sex with this guy, which isn't typically my sex pointer, but something about his parfum.
Merlin: Something – this is, you know, it's Equus.
Merlin: Moments snap together like magnets.
Merlin: So I followed him until – You're much less interested in trying to explain it to yourself than you are in going like, where do I get the fellow with the parfum?
John: Yeah, I had no interest in explaining it to myself.
John: I had every interest in following him until some sort of rendezvous could be arranged.
Merlin: Yes.
John: But then it was obvious that now I'm just following him.
John: And that seems weird.
John: But I have wondered and so I broke off.
John: I veered.
John: I was like disengaged is what I did.
John: He flew back over Libya and I had to avoid the airspace.
John: And I went back and I did a flyover and spilled the coffee of the guy that's driving the boat.
John: He said, damn that Maverick.
Merlin: Oh.