Ep. 195: "Cowboy Handsome"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: hi merlin how's it going good it's very loud in my headphones here i'm uh i'm turn it down for you yeah please i'm at a uh i'm at a uh outside studio yeah hi it's it's judge john hodgman engineer there's a volume knob okay hi john hodgman hi merlin says hi other than uh the manager of my apartment bill or a manager of my office who one time knocked on the door and yeah
John: maybe was audible in the background and some seagulls.
John: You are the first guest voice on Roderick on the line.
Merlin: I'm just here to make sure it sounds good, everybody.
Merlin: It sounds fantastic.
Merlin: John, please thank John for me.
Merlin: Merlin says thanks.
John: Yeah, could you put the baffles there?
John: It's just like my... You know, I miss the seagulls.
Merlin: John, does he have anything to adjudicate?
Merlin: Would he like to join us for the program?
John: John, Merlin's asking whether you would like to join us for Roderick on the Line to adjudicate some issues, maybe some dad issues.
Merlin: I just want to make sure it sounds good.
Merlin: Thanks.
Merlin: Tell John thanks.
Merlin: I'd love to, but we're not set up for that right now.
Merlin: Maybe another time.
Merlin: And I've got to just make sure that the knobs and dials work and then I've got to go do my work.
John: Okay.
John: Thank you, John.
John: Merlin wants to say thank you again.
John: Of all the people in my life.
Merlin: How would it even work?
Merlin: I can't even hear him.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: Well, I could just translate everything he says to you.
John: All right.
John: Give me one.
John: All right.
John: Here he goes.
John: Merlin.
John: Go ahead.
John: He wants something to adjudicate.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: I found a note to my daughter, a love note to my daughter in her backpack.
Merlin: Should I acknowledge that, ignore it, or something else?
John: Merlin found a love note to his daughter in her backpack.
John: Should he acknowledge it, or should he leave it alone, or some third option?
John: She is not...
John: old enough to be receiving love letters in my opinion.
Merlin: What is her age?
Merlin: John, please tell John she's eight years of age and it is reciprocated.
John: She's eight years of age and it seems like the love feelings are reciprocated.
Merlin: Is it clear that the letter is from a 45-year-old man on the internet?
Merlin: John, could you please tell John it's written in a nearly indecipherable scrawl?
John: It's nearly indecipherably scrawled, but I think that's unclear about the age.
John: Because if I had written her a love letter, it would also be incomprehensible.
Merlin: Take a picture of it if you ever need it for evidence.
Merlin: But otherwise, let your daughter begin to cultivate her own inner life.
Merlin: John, could you please thank Judge John Hodgman for me?
Merlin: Of course.
John: Merlin sends his thanks, his gratitude and appreciation.
John: All right.
John: He's got to do his work.
Merlin: Yeah, he has to do his work.
Merlin: I have a story that I could tell you about one of my own children, but it's their private life.
Merlin: That's right.
John: Private lives.
John: I'm working on it.
John: I'm working on it.
John: Let him do his work.
John: Let him do his work.
John: You go.
John: Thank you so much for the top shelf engineering.
John: Do you need any water?
John: I would like a water.
John: Do you have a hot tea?
John: I would like a hot tea.
Okay.
John: Well, can you bring me some kind of refreshment?
John: Room temp?
John: Yeah, room temp.
John: Thank you.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: You're not a man who'll turn down a beverage.
Merlin: No, I like a room temperature beverage.
Merlin: I sent you a picture of the note.
Merlin: Don't share it with the audience, but you can look at it.
Merlin: Did you send it here to my John Hodgman address?
Merlin: My John Roderick address.
Merlin: I sent it to, I texted it to you and I sent John a picture of my dick.
Merlin: This is weird.
Merlin: Wrong window.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Wrong window.
Merlin: No, he can't hear you.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: You know, I used to, I used to be, I still am to some extent a multi-beverage man.
Merlin: I think I've told you this at some point.
Merlin: Around the time I discovered Scotch.
Merlin: They are Foghorn Leghorn.
John: So, Merlin, I'm sorry to interrupt.
John: Yes.
John: I'm being given two options.
John: One is a Pepsi pint glass from 1973 Warner Brothers branding.
John: Arby's.
John: That's an Arby's glass.
John: It's an Arby's glass, and it has the character Foghorn Leghorn on it.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: And the other one appears to be a hand-thrown ceramic mug with a screen-printed face of a very serious-looking Lyndon Baines Johnson.
John: Oh, God.
John: And I'm going to say it's LBJ...
John: Uh, pre Kennedy administration, he appears to be, well, wait a minute.
John: It might be, it might be vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson.
John: It's before he was president for sure.
Merlin: See, I'm trying to adjudicate this in a reasonable and fair way.
Merlin: I know he has to get back to his work.
Merlin: If it were me and it was room-temperature water, I would absolutely take vodka and my wine.
Merlin: No, but I'll just leave them both here.
John: Oh, okay.
John: All right, thanks.
John: Could you thank John for me?
John: Yeah, Merlin would like to reiterate his thanks for all your support.
John: I can't do my work.
John: We're going to cut all this out.
John: No, no, we never cut anything out.
Merlin: This is a cameo.
Merlin: Are you kidding me?
Merlin: You know what this would cost?
No.
John: Check in with me when you're done.
John: Okay.
John: Thank you, Dad.
John: All right.
John: So, you know, I've been recording a lot of podcasts lately remotely.
John: That includes your bathtub?
John: The bath and in the streets.
John: And now I'm here at the famous...
Merlin: judge john hodgman chambers yeah velvet curtains and the enormous desk do you feel like you're out of material are you resorting to stunts or is this a happenstance thing is it experimenting are you having a crisis it's just it's just the way it worked out what's leading you to all of these novel locations i don't know i'm not really somebody that that does stunts i uh i got i got you know i got sick and then you got re-sick i got re-sick
John: But I think what happened was I received as a gift that pretty neat Bcaster microphone.
John: Yeah, that thing's weird looking.
John: It's weird looking, but it plugs into my laptop.
John: And I had done the thing where I moved my computer to the office.
John: I eliminated the possibility of podcasting from my home, partly or almost entirely, to get me out of the house and into another location where my work could conceivably happen.
John: But then I got this microphone and when I was on the RV trip, I podcasted from California.
John: And then I realized how easy it was to just plug and play.
John: I was plugging and playing.
Merlin: And then I said... And see, those kinds of mics tend to be very forgiving.
Merlin: Even when I became a nominally professional podcaster, I still used the same mic I'd used since 2004, 2005, because you just plug it in and it goes.
Merlin: Plug and play.
Merlin: It's idiot-proof.
John: And the one I'm using right now is Hodgman's Rode Rode.
John: And it's a USB mic.
John: Is it a white mic?
John: No, it's sort of black.
John: It looks like a, I mean, in all honesty, it looks like a butt plug.
Merlin: I was going to say, does it look a little bit like Coit Tower combined with a sex toy?
John: It's like a short Coit.
John: Okay.
John: Short coit.
Merlin: Because a road is what I use.
Merlin: This is very interesting stuff for our listeners.
Merlin: That's what I used for years until like the last couple, three years.
Merlin: That's always what I used.
John: What's interesting is he has one of those like radio station articulated mic booms.
Merlin: Oh, the articulated boom.
Merlin: I'm looking from his Skype profile photo, which is actually one of the less creepy pictures I've seen of him in the last five years.
Merlin: He's doing like a kind of a computer selfie talking into a hanging mic.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, right now his beard is sort of in the – do you remember the movie Big Trouble in Little China?
Merlin: Never saw it, but I know the film.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, he's got a beard that sort of would not be out of place in that film.
John: But my podcast's mic holding setup is just a – it's a desk stand.
John: which is to say a normal mic stand that's only eight inches high.
Merlin: Oh, is this the character played by James Hong?
John: That's right.
John: Oh, I love that guy.
John: Yeah, James Hong, very good.
John: He plays Kung Fu Panda's dad.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: He's also the Chinese restaurant guy on Seinfeld.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Five, ten minutes.
John: And he is looking for a girl with green eyes.
John: Aren't we all?
John: Aren't we all, John?
John: Yeah.
John: And so – but Hodgman's beard now has definitely become a little bit – how do you say it?
John: How do you say it?
John: Scraggly?
John: Scraggly?
John: Anyway, so he's got this boom mic, which makes me feel like I'm doing a radio interview in a radio station.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Many of those I have done.
John: But yeah, so I keep my microphone in my hand, in my lap when we normally record.
John: My goodness.
John: And that's why when I started recording in my bed and then also in my bathtub...
John: I wasn't sure what to do with that mic.
John: And so that picture of me recording in my bed, it's actually on my chest, but I couldn't do that in the bath anyway.
John: So I don't, I'm not, this isn't a, it's not a series of, of gags.
Merlin: The stunt is not a value judgment.
Merlin: You got to keep things fresh.
John: I feel like Merlin, our show is evergreen.
John: We never run out of... It's always been green.
Merlin: I agree.
Merlin: I think there will always be something here.
John: There's always something there to remind us.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't like Burt Bacharach.
Merlin: You do or don't?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I had a Burt Bacharach box set that I got in 1998 that I adored.
Merlin: That's back when we had compact disc records.
John: That's right.
John: Compact discs, which used to, until very recently, seemed like they were going to be the way that I earned a living.
John: Who, brother?
John: You remember that?
John: Somebody said to me the other day, they were like, do you want to buy compact discs?
John: They were being kind of smug, snide, pro streaming.
John: Was it a millennial, John?
John: It was a millennial.
John: And they said, do you want to buy a compact disc?
John: And I said, I never wanted to buy a compact disc.
John: What I wanted to do was sell them to people.
John: I had no personal interest in them.
John: But I wanted to sell them, and I cannot sell whatever.
John: Stream.
John: You can't sell Stream.
John: No, that doesn't belong to me.
John: I'm not the owner of Stream.
Merlin: I don't know how up-to-date you are on this, John, but the streaming model is not earning artists a lot of money.
John: I don't know if you're aware of this.
John: And now what I further understand is it's not really earning money for anybody.
John: Is that true?
John: Didn't somebody just report some –
Merlin: fewer earnings than they expected some there might be there might be fewer earnings i mean you know there's a lot of infrastructure to that uh it's a you know it's an ecosystem uh i think it's very challenging to people and uh you know what's his name uh dean uh dean werheim dean warmer for a second there let's all jump in the pool
John: I thought you said it was a Nico system, and I was like, the new pornographers?
Merlin: Oh, no, no.
Merlin: I was thinking of the one from the Velvet Underground who died on the bike.
John: Right.
Merlin: She died on a bike?
Merlin: An exercise bike?
Merlin: No, I think she was a French bike.
Merlin: Nico bike.
Merlin: I think she died on a bike, but I'm not.
Merlin: No, that might have been.
Merlin: What about the lady from Radiolab, from Stereolab?
Merlin: She had a bike accident, too.
John: The Radiolab lady had a bike accident?
Merlin: I think that was a long time ago.
Merlin: Didn't they have a Stereolab bike accident?
Merlin: You know, Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident.
John: Yeah.
John: And also that Kennedy.
John: There was a Kennedy that died in a skiing accident.
Merlin: I don't know, buddy.
Merlin: When I hear something happen with skiing, the alarm bells go off for me.
Merlin: Well, this is the thing.
Merlin: That sounds like a jam up, John.
John: I've skied my whole life and I've had a lot of accidents, some of them horrific.
John: Accidents that we used to call the yard sale accident.
John: Because from the point where you initially contact the snow to the point where you finally come to rest, you leave little bits of yourself, all your garments, all of your equipment, just in a long, long sort of skid mark.
John: Oh my God, like a Wile E. Coyote accident?
John: Yeah, because you're going so fast that when you lose it, and there's that pregnant moment, you're skiing, and then you realize that you are...
John: going to go down like something happens you catch an edge or something is awful and there's that moment you're flying through the air and you're like oh shit and then when you hit when you contact and you start to i mean that first contact and then you are just flying through the air tumbling
John: And the first thing you lose are your skis and then your hat and goggles and then inexplicably your gloves just – your gloves just come off for some reason and your poles and then snow is being stuffed into your nose and mouth.
John: Because you're still going 40 miles an hour.
John: And then all this other stuff comes off.
John: Your jacket somehow.
John: Your boots.
John: Not actually your boots.
John: That would be really hard.
John: But by the time you come to a rest, yeah, you can be really fucked up.
John: But to die...
John: And usually I think it's that they hit a tree.
Merlin: I think Sonny Bono hit a tree, but I'm not sure.
John: Even that, like, hit a tree?
John: Yeah.
John: He's Sonny Bono.
John: How fast is he fucking going?
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, I'm trying to picture Sonny Bono at a speed where...
John: he would go out of control and hit a tree hard enough to die.
Merlin: Oh, this is just nearby.
Merlin: This is out at Heavenly.
John: I've been thinking about this for years.
John: How did this go down?
John: And I really wish there were some crime scene photos of Sonny wrapped around a tree so I could get a mental picture of it.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: It says here his, I don't mean to, you know, I got you babe on his grave, but after his death, Mary Bono told an interview, Sonny had been addicted to Vicodin and Valium.
John: Oh, dear.
Merlin: Do you think he was skiing under the influence?
Merlin: This is a thing.
Merlin: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Merlin: Douglas County coroner said no indication of substances or alcohol.
Merlin: That seems like a careless wording, but... That's good.
Merlin: No substances of any kind.
John: There's no chemicals.
John: It happened completely in a vacuum.
Merlin: That does sound very suspicious.
John: It was, you know, there was always a divide between skiers who would ski drunk and skiers who...
John: wouldn't.
John: And then there were, you know, like I loved just to ski stoned.
John: It's one of the great feelings because you really, you recognize like, wow, I'm hurtling down a mountain.
John: It's, this is amazing.
John: This is, this is like, um, singular, right?
John: To be when you're, when, when you're, when you ski all the time, you just feel like, oh yeah, this is my normal thing.
John: But when you really realize what you're doing,
John: You're way, way high up on a mountain in the middle of winter, which is a condition you would not otherwise be in, right?
John: It's kind of a fantastical position to be in.
John: If you had to climb there in the winter, it would be amazing.
John: But you ride a chair up there and then you're just flying down it.
John: And so when you're stoned, you're aware of all that in a different way and you're just like, this is incredible.
John: But a lot of my friends would get drunk on wine, right?
John: ski and that always seemed insane like all it does is is deprive you of coordination and
John: It doesn't give you any feeling of like, whoa.
John: It just makes you floppy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I used to be kind of a connoisseur, even before my days of discovering whiskey.
Merlin: I used to be kind of a connoisseur of picking the right substance for a given situation.
Merlin: Because getting that wrong, you don't want to do that.
Merlin: And I can see that skiing and weed sounds like a match made in, you know, Heavenly.
Merlin: Skiing and weed.
John: I don't mean to cross paths.
John: to cross-pollinate podcasts, but skiing, weed, and mountain dew.
Merlin: What could be better?
Merlin: Section 3.1, religion, of Sonny Bono's profile.
Merlin: We'll probably have to cut this out.
Merlin: He became interested in Scientology and took Scientology courses.
John: Uh-oh.
John: We have new listeners to our podcast.
Merlin: Yeah, welcome.
Merlin: Partly because of the influence of Mimi Rogers, he stated he was Roman Catholic on all official documents.
Merlin: His wife, Mary, also took Scientology courses.
Merlin: However,
Merlin: However, after his death, Mary Bono stated that, quote, Sonny did try to break away at one point, and they made it very difficult for him, unquote.
Merlin: And, you know, the church denied any estrangement from Bono.
Merlin: He tried to get out, but they pulled him back in.
Merlin: Maybe with the help of a Scientologist tree.
John: So is it, do you think they took him down to the desert outside of Palm Springs and put him in a shipping container and
John: whacked him with the sagebrush or whatever it is they do down there?
Merlin: It could be that he checked his mail someday and got one of the special offers you get, right?
Merlin: Like you, when you get a cruise or a vacation.
Merlin: Maybe he thought, oh, worst case, it's a timeshare, but I get to go skiing at Heavenly.
Merlin: It's a Heavenly timeshare.
John: It turned out to be a special offer to not leave the Church of Scientology.
Ha!
Merlin: Mr. Bono, I'm not going to lie to you.
Merlin: This is an offer we make exactly once.
Merlin: Listen, we have a one-time offer to not leave the Church of Scientology.
Merlin: Heavenly is a nice name for a place.
John: I've never skied there, and I'm embarrassed to say – I really am embarrassed to say it.
John: I think I may say things on this podcast that –
John: would embarrass other people to say.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm not worried about them.
John: But I'm not embarrassed to say those things, but I'm genuinely embarrassed to say what I'm about to say.
John: Okay.
John: Which is that I have not skied that many places.
John: Well, why would you be embarrassed to say that?
John: Well, because skiing was a big part of my identity when I was growing up.
John: Right.
John: And I've been to Europe many times, but I've never skied there.
John: I've been to all 50 states, but I have only skied in Alaska, Washington, and Idaho.
John: I've never skied in Colorado.
John: Oh, no.
John: Yeah, no.
John: I've never skied in Colorado.
John: I've never skied in Utah.
John: I've never even skied in Wyoming.
John: I've skied in Idaho, Washington, and Alaska.
John: I've never even been to Mount Hood.
John: And it just feels like for all of the adventuring that I supposedly do, that just, I don't know, I feel like it reflects poorly on me.
John: That I should have been to Andorra.
John: I stood at the foot of the ski mountain.
John: I've played rock music at the Sundance Film Festival.
John: Stood at the foot of the ski mountain, but I just never – I didn't – because going skiing in a strange mountain is such a pain in the ass, right?
John: You have to go rent all your stuff.
John: You have to dedicate a whole day to it.
John: You wake up early.
John: Find a set of gloves somewhere.
John: It's not a sport that you can just spontaneously –
John: But people do it all the time.
John: They spontaneously go skiing all the time.
Merlin: Spontaneous skiing is a thing, yeah.
John: I'm just not a spontaneous skier and that – and the result of that is that I've never – I've just – I've skied in these three states.
John: God, I'm embarrassed to say it.
John: I just – I feel like a coat of shame.
John: I feel like there are going to be people that write me and say – and just basically like go, na, na, na, na, na, ha, ha.
Merlin: Oh, you're going to lose cred in the promiscuous skiing community.
John: All these people that have skied at Zermatt or have skied at Garmisch, Partonkirchen.
John: Squaw Valley Snowbird, Park City.
Merlin: Squaw Valley Heavenly.
Merlin: Grindelwald, Aspen, Monte San Lorenzo, Beaver Creek.
Merlin: These are all places listed on the Wikipedia page for a list of skiing deaths.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, skiing deaths.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I'm trying to cross references with people who may or may not be Scientologists.
Merlin: How many?
Merlin: What about Natasha Richardson?
Merlin: Was she a Scientologist?
John: Was she the one that was in that James Bond movie where it seemed implausible that she was a nuclear physicist?
Merlin: Oh, no, that's probably Denise Richards.
John: Oh, Denise Richards, not Natasha Richardson.
John: Which one dated the guy with the drug problem?
John: Oh.
Merlin: Oh, which one dated the guy with the drug problem?
Merlin: Was that?
Merlin: Oh, oh, that's you know what?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: That's also, I think, Denise Richards.
John: OK.
John: All right.
Merlin: She was that pretty girl in magazines in the 90s.
Merlin: I didn't find her.
John: Didn't find her pretty.
John: I thought not your type.
John: Not your type.
John: Those was very unusual.
Merlin: It got in the way for you, huh?
John: Do you not?
John: Well, that's no, this is the thing.
John: I like a nose that kind of gets in the way.
John: And her nose seemed like it had been whittled down.
John: So there wasn't anything to get in the way.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: It seemed like it seemed like a small nose.
John: Basically, if your nose is capable of getting nectar from a flower.
Merlin: If your nose is capable of getting nectar from a flower, you might be a hummingbird.
Merlin: You might be a hummingbird.
Merlin: You have a prominent proboscis and like to ski.
Merlin: I'm so glad that our Southern lawyer made an appearance.
Merlin: That's kind of my Jeff Foxworthy.
Merlin: That's how you get her done.
Merlin: Epidural hematoma.
Merlin: That's a shame.
Merlin: That'd be a pretty name for a girl.
Merlin: And then, yeah, so the woman, Mary Hansen, from Stereolab, died in a bike accident.
Merlin: I wonder if there's a list of famous bike deaths.
John: Bike accident.
John: You know, a good friend of mine who plays drums in the band Keen, Richard, he is a real advocate for bike safety in London.
John: Wow.
John: Yeah, so he's talking all the time.
John: I see a lot of helmet cam videos.
John: from the streets around London where bicyclists are on like these kind of ridiculously narrow bike paths and then some angry lorry driver will intentionally run them off the road because there's a lot apparently a lot of hatred of bicycle culture in the UK.
John: Oh man.
John: Which sort of you know it just is a it's a it's a corollary to just the general hatred that's in the UK.
John: but it's directed at bicyclists.
John: But it's a civil kind of hatred.
John: No, I think if you're running someone off the road, the question of civility has already been answered.
Merlin: All right.
John: I agree to disagree.
John: Oh, you think you can run a bicyclist?
Merlin: I think it's a little bit Americocentric for you to not be sensitive to the subtleties of the class distinctions in the United Kingdom.
Merlin: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: I'm not here to judge.
Merlin: I mean, some people eat dogs.
John: I
John: I've spent a lot of time over there and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of how deeply, deeply sublimated they're.
John: British people seem, seem angry.
John: Yeah.
John: They're, well, you know, they used to have an empire that spanned the globe.
John: The sun never sat.
John: Sun never sat on the British empire.
John: And now it sits on the British Empire every morning.
John: Just as long as it wants.
John: It just sits there.
John: And the British Empire is trying to get out from under the sun's butt.
John: Yep.
John: And it cannot.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: Then you get Venezuela.
Merlin: You know, you get the changes in oil prices.
Merlin: It's a complicated time for everyone.
Merlin: They're not making any money from streaming.
Merlin: It's a tough time.
John: And that's affecting Cuba, right?
John: Venezuela used to fund Cuba with their extra oil money.
John: It's like a big game of diplomacy and nobody's winning.
John: Yeah, it's like the game of Clue, right?
John: Where your country acquires a bunch of wheat and then trades the wheat for the candlestick.
John: Right, you sank my battleship.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: Same thing.
John: Exactly.
John: I feel like, are we troping ourselves?
Hmm?
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Merlin: Do you ever get that feeling?
Merlin: That we're trooping ourselves.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Where, you know, for a long time, people tried to trope you.
John: How would they go about that?
John: Oh, you know, they trope you.
John: Oh, like online troping.
Merlin: It's kind of like almost like online bullying.
John: Yeah, you say like, oh, that person's a trope or whatever.
Merlin: Oh, troping ourselves.
Merlin: You mean like we're descending into self-parody?
John: Well, yeah.
John: I mean, you and I have never really said hashtag super trained to each other.
John: Right.
John: Other people say hashtag super train to us.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: If we start super training one another.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: We're then we're in trouble.
Merlin: You're flying too close to the sun's butt right now, my friend.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I'll back off.
Merlin: Wax Wings.
Merlin: Mary Hanson.
Merlin: She died.
Merlin: This is not funny.
Merlin: She died.
Merlin: Now I'm on the Wikipedia page for cycling road accident deaths.
Merlin: And yeah, Nico, Nico from the Velvet Underground.
Merlin: She went that way.
Merlin: A lot of people I don't recognize.
John: You know, you want your famous people to die of drugs, right?
John: You don't want them to die.
Merlin: It's like, you know, if you're a soldier, there's nothing more honorable, you know, than going down in the Ardennes or whatever, right?
John: Oh, I see.
John: Not to die of drugs.
Merlin: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I don't want to be, you know, I don't know that much about the military.
Merlin: But, you know, I mean, it makes sense that if you're in, I don't know.
Merlin: See, again, I don't want to be culturally insensitive.
Merlin: But yeah, that's how you want people to die.
John: You want them to die of a drug overdose or like a sex overdose, although I don't know anybody that's ever happened to him.
John: Except for Goldie Hawn's husband in Private Benjamin.
John: right oh and that was that the precipitating that was the event that led her to want to join the active military i don't think she wanted to join i feel like she her her husband was going to afford her a very comfortable life yeah and then he died on the bathroom floor on their wedding night is that true yeah well that's that's so sad what a horrible what a horrible way to begin a comedy
John: Yeah, go to the Wikipedia page for private Benjamin deaths.
John: And then for some reason, I'm not sure why, right?
John: Because she would have inherited his – maybe he didn't have any money or maybe his family fought her for the inheritance or something.
John: It seems like if it was on her wedding night, she already would have been able to –
John: Well, for whatever reason, she's forced.
Merlin: Oh my gosh, her husband was Albert Brooks, John.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: That's what it says here on Wikipedia, Albert Brooks.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Died on their wedding night during sex, or as you say, intercourse.
Merlin: Coitus.
Merlin: Coitus.
John: And then she was forced to become a private in the army.
Oh.
Merlin: She's recruited by a sneaky recruiting sergeant played by, wait for it, Harry Dean Stanton.
John: No, come on.
Merlin: Since you're on Wikipedia, Jim Ballard played by Harry Dean Stanton.
Merlin: This can't be that much of an all-star cast.
Merlin: This is amazing.
Merlin: I bet you Emmett Walsh is in here somewhere.
John: I remember feeling like Private Benjamin was, it really acquitted itself well to my, what, 12-year-old mind?
John: What year was it?
John: 1982?
John: 1980.
John: See, so I was 12 years old.
John: You're 12 years old.
John: And I thought Private Benjamin was just the jam.
John: But wait a minute.
John: What year was Stripes?
Merlin: Stripes, I'm going to call that one 81, but I'll check.
John: All right.
John: So, I mean, one of these things presaged the other, right?
John: One of them...
Merlin: Yeah, there was definitely some Reitman in the air.
Merlin: 1981, you got the movie Stripes.
Merlin: I see.
John: So Private Benjamin inspired.
John: Can you say that?
John: Private Benjamin inspired Stripes?
John: Is that too risky?
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: I think I see where you're going with this.
John: Is some film major going to say, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: See, I'm thinking the pivot I'm thinking of is Private Benjamin seems to me maybe inspired a little bit by something along the lines of an Alice doesn't live here anymore.
John: See, now that's a reference I don't get.
John: What happened in Alice?
Merlin: Well, you love the TV program Alice with Linda Lavin and Vic Tabak.
John: Oh, is that a movie from the TV show or a TV show from the movie?
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: In the early-ish 70s, the great Martin Scorsese, I call him Marty, had a film called Atlas Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and that's the movie upon which the TV show is based.
John: So the titular character had to leave a failing marriage, and she took her...
John: She took her, like, preteen son and... Yeah, early to rise, early to bed.
Merlin: In between, she cooked and cleaned one out of her head.
Merlin: She went to Phoenix.
John: Well, by the time she got to Phoenix... Yeah.
John: And then she met Mel and Flo...
John: Was it a comedy?
John: It didn't seem like Scorsese did a lot of comedies.
Merlin: It was a comedy.
Merlin: I think also that's the first time I ever heard the Mata Hoopla song All the Way from Memphis, I think was the song.
Merlin: It was either that or maybe an Elton John song.
Merlin: But I remember having a good soundtrack.
Merlin: Marty's always done good soundtracks.
Merlin: True enough.
Merlin: It might have been that one from his cowboy concept album I'm thinking of.
John: I feel like during that period, I feel like I was pretty traumatized by Kramer versus Kramer.
John: Oh, boy.
John: And it was hard for me to watch any kind of divorce, like late 70s divorce porn.
John: Sure, sure, sure.
John: Divorce porn, yeah.
John: That's a good way to put it.
John: That's what it was.
John: Except Goodbye Girl was one of the great examples.
John: I mean, Goodbye Girl, if every movie could be like Goodbye Girl.
John: Am I right?
Merlin: Do you feel that way?
Merlin: See, now this is my ski shame.
Merlin: I don't think I've ever seen that play.
Merlin: No, that can't be true.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Are you serious?
Merlin: I just realized something, by the way.
Merlin: Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan are different people.
Merlin: Did you know that?
Merlin: Which one died in a bike accident?
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: Ellen Burstyn was the one and Alice doesn't live here anymore.
Merlin: Eileen Brennan was the one in Private Benjamin.
John: Eileen Burstyn, she was a comedian, right?
John: No, you might be thinking of Ellen Barkin.
John: Oh, I'm thinking of Ellen Barkin.
Merlin: Who's also not a comedian.
John: Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Barkin and what was the last one?
Merlin: Eileen Brennan.
John: Brennan.
John: Eileen Brennan.
John: Eileen Barkin, and Ellen Burstyn.
John: Degeneres, yeah.
Merlin: All are different people.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Ellen Burstyn was born Edna Rae Galluli, which is an awesome name.
Merlin: Edna Rae Galluli.
Merlin: She was born in Detroit.
Merlin: She's 83 years old now.
John: If I were David Letterman, I would now say Galluli 40 times during the show.
Merlin: I don't have a joke here.
Merlin: I just like saying Galluli.
Merlin: Oh, she was in Same Time Next Year.
Merlin: I remember seeing that.
Merlin: That was with Alan Alda, the guy from MASH.
Merlin: Everyone knows who Alan Alda is.
Merlin: Well, that's not true.
Merlin: Mesh went off the air 33 years ago.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: I want to get back to Goodbye Girl.
Merlin: Yeah, I still didn't get to talk about my beverages, but that's okay.
John: Let's go back.
Merlin: Goodbye Girl is referenced by many, many people.
Merlin: It's one of those things where, like, it's weird that I miss that, but I feel like Goodbye Girl, what's the joke?
Merlin: Was it Seinfeld?
Merlin: Was there some show where they kept referencing Goodbye Girl and not wanting the other person to realize it?
Merlin: Oh, my gosh, did you know Ellen Burstyn's a Sufi?
Merlin: That's interesting.
Merlin: Been married three times.
John: I would never have known that.
John: I'm still not able to picture Eileen Burstyn.
Merlin: Eileen DeGeneres?
Merlin: Now, Ellen Burstyn has been married three times.
Merlin: She hasn't been married since 1972.
John: The thing is, I would be following along here, but I can't get the hyper corners on John Hodgman's enormous Mac computer to activate.
Merlin: Oh, so he's still using a Mac?
John: Oh, here they are.
John: Here's the hyper corners.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Are you using expose, John?
Merlin: What's going on?
John: You know, I've noticed that a lot of people use Chrome.
John: I use Chrome.
John: That comports with what I was just saying about a lot of people.
John: I'm one of them.
John: But I always, I just go to Safari.
Merlin: People like Safari.
Merlin: It comes on the Mac.
John: I'm not sure that I like it.
John: You know what?
John: I don't like any of the map programs anymore.
Merlin: Oh, you're giving up, huh?
John: I used to like Google Maps.
John: I never liked Apple Maps.
Merlin: You used to love Google Earth.
Merlin: Google Earth, you would just sit there for hours looking at forests in Czechoslovakia.
John: Yeah, now, well, believe me, I zoomed in on so many forests in Czechoslovakia.
John: looking for specific details on the ground.
John: Right.
John: Where was that obelisk or whatever?
John: Sure.
John: Hours and hours.
John: But now, every time I load one of those map programs, I'll be standing on the street, right?
John: And there's like a truck bearing down on me.
John: And I'm like, which way do I go?
John: And I load a map.
John: I load Google Maps.
John: And the program has become stupider and stupider over time.
John: So now it can never figure out where I am.
John: It can't intuit what I'm asking it, which is show me a map, right?
John: It wants to think that I want something that I don't.
John: It's got too much, like it has just enough agency to not realize that I just want a map, but not enough agency to really divine what I'm asking it to do, which is generally show me a map.
John: It's very frustrating.
John: All right, hang on.
Merlin: I'm putting in Eileen Burstyn.
Merlin: Ellen Burstyn.
Merlin: Also, yes, it was All the Way from Memphis by Mott the Hoople was the song that I was thinking of from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Merlin: Also, Jodie Foster was in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Merlin: Also, Harvey Keitel.
Merlin: How did I miss this film?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Diane Ladd was in it.
Merlin: Now, Diane Ladd, I could easily confuse her with Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan.
John: Ellen Burstyn.
John: Ellen Burstyn.
John: Right.
John: She was in lots of things.
John: She was.
John: She was.
Merlin: She's a Sufi.
John: So I was watching, so the other night I watched the television show Girls for the first time.
John: I don't know if you've seen this TV show.
Merlin: I've seen the show Girls, yeah.
John: And I enjoyed it.
Merlin: It's got Ryla Kiley in it, the guy that played Ryla Kiley.
Merlin: Yeah, the guy that's Darth Vader's grandson, he's the guy who never has a shirt on on girls.
John: That's right, that's right.
Merlin: Got the ears, yeah.
John: Who was in that super annoying movie where he was playing the fun millennial character that the two middle-aged people wanted to be friends with.
John: Oh, okay.
John: It was sort of like a movie based on the idea of girls, but seen from the perspective of some middle-aged people that wanted to stay relevant.
John: It was pretty hard to watch.
John: But anyway, watching the show.
John: Did you start at the beginning?
John: No, I started in the middle.
John: But I don't normally do that, but it was just like, this is too much to figure out how to watch this show.
John: I don't know if I want to watch it figure itself out.
John: I'm just going to start in the middle of season two.
John: But a couple of things happened.
John: One, I liked it quite a bit.
John: Two, I realized that the music was by Michael Penn and the music was spectacular.
John: He's pretty good.
John: And also, a lot of the bit characters, the moms and dads in the show, like the moms and dads of the characters, of the main characters, are all played by sitcom stars from the 80s that were like the mom...
John: One of the characters was the was the cute girl from the new heart show.
John: When he moved up to Vermont and had the lodge.
John: Oh.
John: The blonde girl that was kind of cute.
Merlin: She was kind of perky and a little, she was kind of the Diane of that show a little bit.
John: Yeah, she was the Diane.
John: And her husband on the Newhart show was the guy from Bosom Buddies.
Merlin: The old Peter Scolari, the guy who wasn't Tom Hanks.
John: And Peter Scolari also appears in Girls.
Merlin: I love Peter Scolari.
John: But not married to the...
John: To the gal from Newhart, but he's a different dad.
John: A little bit of a switch-em-up.
John: A little switch-em-up.
John: And I'm watching the show and I'm just like, oh my goodness, like all these...
John: all these stars that were like the young, beautiful stars.
Merlin: I'm a, I'm such a, I have to admit I am such a sucker for that.
Merlin: Oh yeah.
Merlin: I mean, you know, when it's done well, the, the good, the good eighties cameo, there's an, I watched an episode the other night of parks and rec with John Larroquette playing a completely unhinged, like very insecure man in his like sixties or seventies.
Merlin: And it was great.
Merlin: You get to play against type.
Merlin: It's fun.
Merlin: Peter Scolari.
Merlin: I'm glad he's out there.
John: I always, you know, this is the confusing thing there.
John: There's not going to be a lot of people listening to this program that have ever seen Bosom Buddies.
John: But Bosom Buddies was a very influential show.
John: Oh, I had strong feelings about that show.
John: Yeah, I did too.
Merlin: That was like a show that was made for me.
Merlin: That was right in the pocket for me.
Merlin: That was my humor.
Merlin: Oh, that was funny.
John: Me too.
John: And the premise was that Tom Hanks, before he was famous, and Peter Scolari were like Tootsie.
John: It's a pre-Tootsie show.
John: Was it pre-Tootsie?
John: I think it was pre-Tootsie.
John: I think it influenced Tootsie.
John: I think when Tootsie came out, I was like, this is just the plot of Bosom Buddies.
Merlin: Oh my God, I think you're right.
Merlin: It came out like two years after Bosom Buddies.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Bosom Buddies is kind of Private Benjamin era, right?
Merlin: No, no, you're right.
Merlin: It came out in 1980.
Merlin: No, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Merlin: I take it back.
Merlin: So wait, Bosom Buddies canceled in 1982, already canceled by 1982.
Merlin: Cancelled by 82.
John: So this show, right, they were trying to live in New York.
Merlin: They're two young maverick guys who wanted to break into advertising.
Merlin: And there's no way they could afford the rents of Manhattan.
John: Which seems crazy considering that in 1980 it was not expensive to live in Manhattan.
John: Not anywhere near as expensive as it is now.
John: Anyway, so they lived in an all-girl, like a YWCA basically.
John: Like an apartment building for single women.
John: And oh, the hijinks that ensued.
John: But what was confusing to me was that at the time, watching the show, I preferred the Peter Scolari character.
John: He was the one I liked, right?
Merlin: He was the Luke to Tom Hanks as Tom Solo, Han Solo a little bit.
Merlin: It was easier to relate to Peter Scolari, who was kind of the sidekick.
Merlin: He was the second banana.
John: Yeah, but Tom Hanks seemed kind of gangly and Peter Scolari was, you know, like everybody liked Starsky.
John: Nobody wanted to be Hutch.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: In the same way that everybody wanted to be Luke Duke instead of Bo Duke.
John: You think so?
John: Did you want to be Bo Duke?
Merlin: I think Bo Duke is Rick from The Walking Dead.
Merlin: Let me get this right.
Merlin: Luke Duke is, you know what?
Merlin: It doesn't matter.
Merlin: You're not watching the show.
Merlin: Yes, maybe.
Merlin: But I also, I often wanted to be the person who was the person I wasn't supposed to want to be.
Merlin: I liked Luke more than Han in the first movie when I was a little kid.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No, it's cool to say you want to be Han Solo, but I was totally a Luke person as a kid.
John: That can't be true.
John: He was so whiny.
Merlin: Well.
Merlin: All right.
John: Yeah.
John: And I don't want to... I'm not trying to... No, it's okay.
John: It's fine.
Merlin: It's fine.
Merlin: It's a little wall on the nose.
Merlin: I don't want to Luke shame you.
Merlin: Well, look at the way they would dress up on that show.
Merlin: On Bosom Buddies?
Merlin: So they had to... This is not a word we use anymore, but they had to dress in what used to be called drag.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Can we not say drag anymore?
Merlin: I'm steering clear of the whole thing.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: But they would have to wear makeup and wigs, and a lot of the humor, initial humor, was derived out of the, so I'm like it, hotness of these two living in this lady's hotel.
Merlin: And, of course, then you got Sunny, I think her name was.
Merlin: This is Dan Aykroyd's wife.
John: Yeah, that knew their shtick, right?
Merlin: Well, no, wasn't that Amy Jo Sperber?
John: That seems like a fake name.
John: That totally seems fake.
John: Amy Jo Sperber would be my drag name.
Merlin: But Tom Hanks' character, whose name I don't remember, was infatuated by Dan Aykroyd's wife, Donna Dixon.
John: Right.
John: And she met Dan Aykroyd during the filming of Doctor Detroit, one of the all-time great films.
Merlin: I'm going to rip off your head and shit down your neck.
Merlin: Well, Dan Aykroyd has had two really inexplicable movies.
Merlin: That and...
Merlin: Nothing But Trouble.
Merlin: Two movies that are very hard to understand.
Merlin: Who, Dr. Detroit and Nothing But Trouble?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I was watching, what's that movie?
John: Oh, Burn After Reading.
John: Burn After Reading.
Merlin: Is that a movie?
John: It's a Coen Brothers movie.
John: Oh.
John: And I was thinking a lot about this.
John: Like the Coen Brothers make some movies that are very serious.
John: And they also make some movies that are very funny.
John: And then they make those movies in between that are neither serious nor funny.
John: And those are the ones that really baffle me.
John: And Burn After Reading is in that category.
Merlin: Burn After Reading.
Merlin: I think A Serious Man probably counts on that a little bit.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Boy, I love their movies.
John: Well, normally I do too, but this is a movie that has all-star cast, right?
John: John Malkovich and Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
John: I feel like maybe what it is is that if George Clooney is in a Coen Brothers movie, the chances are it's not going to be one of their good ones.
John: Oh, really?
John: I feel like that may be true.
John: I mean, everybody likes Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's, you know, it's a great exercise.
Merlin: It's not something I return to like I would return to The Big Lebowski.
John: Huh?
John: It's an exercise.
John: Right.
John: That's exactly right.
Merlin: Or like, you know, like Hail Caesar.
Merlin: I'm anxious to see Hail Caesar when it gets to where I can watch it.
Merlin: I saw it.
Merlin: And it's got George Clooney.
Merlin: Verdict?
Merlin: How do you adjudicate?
John: That's what I'm saying.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
John: Let me put it this way.
Yeah.
John: Picture George Clooney in The Big Lebowski.
John: Do you want him there?
John: I don't know.
John: I think you do.
Merlin: Are you saying you don't like The Big Lebowski?
John: I love The Big Lebowski.
John: I just don't want George Clooney there.
John: I think if George Clooney was there, The Big Lebowski would be a lesser film.
John: And I say that as a George Clooney.
John: I like George Clooney.
John: I do too.
Merlin: Big fan.
John: I like him.
John: I thought he was really good in the one about the one.
Merlin: Oh, the torture one?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: The one where he puts Jennifer Lopez in a trunk?
John: No, that was good, though.
John: That was a good movie.
John: Oh, that was a good movie.
John: Oh, boy, the chemistry they had.
Merlin: That was a good movie.
John: You know what I mean?
John: No, I'm talking about the one about the Gong Show guy.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: The Sam, what's his name?
Merlin: Sam Elliott.
Merlin: Sam Rockwell.
Merlin: Sam Rockwell.
Merlin: Is Sam Elliott in that one too?
Merlin: Sam Elliott's in The Big Lebowski.
John: That's right.
Merlin: He's also on Parks and Rec.
John: No, he's not on Parks and Rec.
Merlin: Yeah, he plays the other Ron.
Merlin: He plays Ron Dunn.
Merlin: Two Ron Swanson's Ron Swanson.
John: How come I've never seen a picture of him in that?
John: It seems like I see pictures of Ron Swanson all the time.
Merlin: Oh, he is awfully, awfully good in that.
Merlin: It starts out seeming like he's going to be exactly like Ron Swanson, and then it turns out he's like a hippie guy who wears sandals, and he's really, really good.
John: Mustache or no mustache?
John: Mustache.
Yeah.
John: I'll find a picture for you.
John: It's mustache casting is what that is.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, stache casting.
Merlin: He's a handsome guy.
Merlin: You look at some pictures of that guy when he was a little younger.
Merlin: I mean, he's still a very handsome guy.
Merlin: Is he very conservative?
Merlin: He seems like he would be very conservative.
John: I think that maybe he's not.
John: Tom Selleck gave a bad name to signature mustaches.
Merlin: Just because you have a large aperture for your mustache does not mean that you have to be a conservative.
Merlin: That's old thinking.
John: I don't know about Sam Elliott.
John: I feel like he's cowboy handsome in a way that, oh, my God, I wanted to be cowboy handsome so badly.
Merlin: Oh, that's a type, and I don't think you really – you don't get to pick that out.
Merlin: Like that's – you have it or you don't.
John: Chris Christopherson, cowboy handsome.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely cowboy handsome.
John: Right?
John: And Chris Christopherson, not a cowboy.
John: He was an Air Force, like, officer.
John: He was an officer in the U.S.
John: Air Force in the 60s.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: No, Chris Christopherson, he's lived one of those George Plimpton lives.
John: Yeah, that makes sense.
John: And then became like a songwriter.
Merlin: He was a songwriter before he was well known as a performer.
John: Uh, that's right.
John: And then, and I, you know, him, he dated Janis Joplin.
John: He lived in the, he lived in the Chelsea hotel, you know, all these things.
John: And, uh, but yeah, there's something, uh, you know, and then he was in that Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash band.
John: He was a military brat.
John: And now I'm on his Wikipedia page.
John: He was a Rhodes Scholar.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: He was a Rhodes Scholar.
John: He went to Oxford.
John: Cowboy handsome and a Rhodes Scholar.
John: Can you imagine that?
John: Master's degree in English in 1960.
John: Wow.
John: So pre-everything, right?
John: I always think of 1960 as a year that is sort of pre-all culture.
Merlin: It's kind of one of those years like 1997 that exists out of time.
Merlin: It's neither fish nor fowl.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, all of the cars from the 50s all have wings and look like pregnant porpoises.
John: And then in 1960, we started to get the flat cars, the square cars.
John: The cars that drive themselves.
John: Not the shifter cars.
John: But the 1960 cars, for the most part, were not the good square cars, right?
John: They were the test case.
Merlin: Okay.
John: And also pre... I mean, it's post-rock and roll, but all the rock and roll up to then was pompadour rock.
John: And then after, you know, 62, then it became a bowl haircut rock.
John: Right.
John: And so here he is, already has a master's degree, and it's pre...
John: It's pre-bull haircut rock.
Merlin: You got a lot of jazz is still around.
Merlin: Elvis is still hanging on.
Merlin: You got a lot of like a lot of jazz.
Merlin: You got Ricky Nelson.
Merlin: You got Frank Sinatra.
Merlin: Kingston Trio.
Merlin: You got the folk stuff happening.
Merlin: And I think the girl group stuff hadn't.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right about starting.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, like when one of the Ronettes like when's that?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: 62.
John: Yeah, I think.
John: But I mean, where's Dylan in 60?
Merlin: He's he's still he's still taking 15 showers a day in Minnesota.
John: But so anyway, then Christopherson joins the army, becomes a captain.
John: That's a that is a big that's a that's a big rank.
John: Yes, it certainly is.
John: And became a helicopter pilot.
John: And then in 1965.
John: He went and taught English literature at West Point.
John: Or was, you know, was almost did and then decided to leave the army to pursue songwriting in 65.
John: His family disowned him because of this decision and they never reconciled with him.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: That's terrible to hear.
John: Isn't that incredible?
John: He left the army in 65 and moved to Nashville.
John: And when you think about Chris Christopherson, you think about him in the 70s.
John: By then, he's an actor.
Merlin: I think of that noise you make.
Merlin: When I think of Chris Christopherson, I think of...
John: Right, because of that movie with Barbra Streisand.
Merlin: No, I think you're thinking that's Nick Fury.
Merlin: What's that guy's name?
John: The guy from 48 Hours.
John: Down and out in Beverly Hills, right, where he eats the salmon that he finds in his Santa suit.
John: Uh, well, so anyway, Chris Christopherson's life has always astonished me so, so much that I can't, I can't even really like the only thing missing is that at a certain point he became a government assassin or like a retired director of the CIA.
John: Like he, if anybody was going to be that, it was him.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: I guess I'm glad I learned that.
Merlin: That's another thing to be depressed about.
John: Well, and think about this.
John: Willie Nelson was born in 1933.
John: What does Willie Nelson look like now?
John: He looks like a dried apple.
Merlin: He looks like a vacation Bible school art project.
Merlin: Yeah, he looks like a shrunken head.
Merlin: He might be held together with popsicle sticks.
Yeah.
Merlin: But he's looked like that since like 1968.
John: Well, that's what I'm saying.
John: Chris Gustaferson's only three years younger than Willie Nelson.
John: He was born in 1936.
John: He's my mom's age.
John: That's insane.
John: And he still just looks as, you know, he's still as cowboy handsome as he ever was.
John: Cowboy handsome.
John: I wanted to be cowboy handsome.
Merlin: You and me both, buddy.
John: I used to sit, I used to imagine, this is one of those weird things.
John: I never actually pursued being a bush pilot.
John: Like I never, after I got my pilot's license as a kid, I never did anything else to be a bush pilot.
John: But I continued to fantasize about being a bush pilot for several years after.
John: Like when I pictured myself as a grown up, one of the ways I imagined myself was as a bush pilot.
John: And I'm not sure why, right?
John: That was a job that was accessible to me.
John: I could have become a bush pilot.
John: And what I would have done was during high school or the summer after high school, I would have gone down to the airport and gotten a job pumping gas for the airplanes and immersed myself in that life.
John: I knew a lot of bush pilots.
John: I could have been a bush pilot.
John: But I didn't do anything like that.
John: But to be a bush pilot seemed to me to be the gateway to a kind of cowboy handsome.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Right?
John: Where you kind of –
John: Your clothes were always a little bit stained.
Merlin: How are you not going to find adventure if you're a bush pilot?
Merlin: You're the guy who drives Indy away while they're shooting arrows, right?
Merlin: You've got one of those little water planes maybe.
Merlin: I don't know what you do as a bush pilot, but that's a ticket to adventure.
John: That's the guy.
John: An Alaska bush pilot is one of the jobs, one of the very few jobs where carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster does not seem crazy.
John: Right.
John: Like, oh, right.
John: Sure.
John: Sure.
John: I mean, how many jobs like there's there's could be a Marvel Comics artist.
John: Right.
Merlin: Was that Ed Brubaker?
John: Was he the guy who carried a pistol?
John: Well, Ed Brubaker claims.
John: I don't know what he claims.
John: Maybe he maybe he claims that he never did or maybe he claims that I at one point I told that story and Ed contacted me and he said, I never wore a vest.
John: Because I said he was wearing a gun and a shoulder holster under a vest.
John: Yeah.
John: And he wrote and said, I never wore a vest.
John: Well, that's not denying the gun.
John: That's a non-denial denial.
John: It's just denying the vest, right?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But so how many, you know, if you're a double O, you can carry a gun and a shoulder holster.
John: Oh, you mean like a James Bond?
John: Yeah.
John: But she said it like it rhymes with juggalo, so it made me really happy.
John: Well, if you're a double O juggalo.
John: If you're a double O. And I think if you're a juggalo, you can carry a four loco in a shoulder holster.
Yeah.
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John: It's Faygo!
John: No, well, yeah, sure.
John: It's Faygo now.
John: Sure.
John: It was Faygo then, but it's only because the good four locos aren't made anymore.
John: Aren't brewed.
John: But if you're a gritty San Francisco detective, you can carry a gun in a shoulder holster.
John: And then what else?
John: Like a crocodile hunter?
John: Yeah.
John: But if you're a bush pilot, and I say this because I've known a handful of bush pilots that do carry guns in a shoulder holster.
John: It's not required.
John: I know a lot of bush pilots that don't.
John: But if you show up somewhere and you get out of your plane and you've got a gun in the shoulder, because you don't know if a bear is going to come out of the woods.
Merlin: That kind of a holster, that sounds like that's a person who could be very reasonable and reasoned with.
Merlin: That's a business person.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Versus somebody who's got a big gun on their belt and there's a real showy about it.
John: That's right.
John: And a shoulder hold.
John: I mean, that's what that's how my dad was carrying that gun when he shot the zero out of the sky.
Merlin: He just he just opened the window on his plane, just shot it out of the sky.
John: And so that's kind of a bush pilot move, right?
John: You don't want a gun on your hip.
John: You want to be able to get it and still be controlling your airplane.
John: It's gonna be covered up by your seatbelt and your go pills.
John: That's right.
John: You know about the go pills.
John: I know about go pills.
John: Anyway, anyway.
John: So being a bush pilot, and I'm not sure how much it still maybe weighs on me that I didn't become a bush pilot.
Merlin: Could happen.
Merlin: It could still happen.
John: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: You just got to focus your assets and your resources.
Merlin: You got to say no to more things.
Merlin: You got to say, no, I can't.
Merlin: I got to go to bush pilot class tonight.
John: But this is the thing about so many of those job paths where the decision to be a bush pilot is somewhat predicated on you not realizing yet how many different ways there are to die.
Merlin: That's a young man's game.
John: Right?
John: Yeah.
John: And once you get in it, then by the time you get to be my age, you're the old guard.
Right.
John: But it's not a thing in your mid-40s to say like, oh, now I'm going to go get the riskiest job you can have.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: With your property, it seems to me you could become a freelance helicopter adventurer.
Merlin: It would be pretty easy for you to have a small helicopter, like a mini bell.
Merlin: I'm going to guess that's a thing.
Merlin: That you could just have adventures.
Merlin: It could be like a costly Uber involving helicopters where you could have missions.
Merlin: You could definitely carry a gun, I think, if you had a helicopter adventurer.
John: Like CJ, TJ.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: From CJ and the Bear.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: The guy on Magnum, right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: CJ and the Bear.
John: See, but I think you have to learn.
John: I think you can carry a gun in a shoulder holster if you are a helicopter adventurist.
John: But I think you have to learn to fly the helicopter in the Army.
John: I think that's just the only way.
John: That is where you learn to fly helicopters.
Merlin: You know, I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're being awfully negative about all these things.
Merlin: I think you just need to pick one.
Merlin: You could be Cowboy Handsome in no time.
John: What about Warzone Reporter?
John: Did you see that movie WTF?
Merlin: Mm-mm.
John: uh, starring, uh, the girl from, from.
Merlin: Oh no, that, that, uh, I don't, I think she shouldn't make as many movies.
Merlin: I think she's really TV is her medium.
Merlin: I like her so much on TV and her movies don't do that much for me.
John: And this movie has that problem, that additional problem.
John: We're like, is this a comedy?
John: I mean, there are some people getting blown up and killed in this movie and that's not fun.
John: Me, but,
John: But there's also some hot lols in it.
John: It's like, I'm not sure how much I want my lols leavened with suicide bombing.
John: But I didn't mind the film, but it also relit that fuse.
John: It was like, why didn't you go to the war zone and become a war zone robot?
Merlin: You know, in the same way that you can get away with a shoulder holster for being a bush pilot, I think you definitely, people are going to give you a pass on epaulettes when you're a war zone reporter.
John: Right.
John: Or a jacket that has a belt.
Merlin: Oh, a jacket with a belt with some pockets in it.
Merlin: But like, you take a Christiane Amanpour, I mean, that's a strong look.
Merlin: You get a belted jacket with some epaulettes, you would look terrific in that.
John: I think that there's a kind of sunglasses that you can only wear if you're a war reporter.
John: So the sunglasses I'm wearing right now,
John: because I often wear sunglasses to record our podcast.
Merlin: But you wear them over your eyes, right?
Merlin: You don't put them on the back of your neck or anything like that?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: Lots of people in our neighborhood own sunglasses, but they don't actually ever have them over their eyes.
Merlin: They're either on their forehead, around the front of their neck, on a croaky, or on the back of their neck, like they have vision problems with the back of their neck.
John: I feel like if you have the glasses on the back of your neck, you had better be a bass fisherman.
John: Hmm.
John: Or selling RVs.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Like Todd.
John: Like Todd.
John: Like Todd.
John: That's not a look that I think is good at all.
John: The sunglasses on the back of the neck.
John: That's a douche flag for me.
John: Yeah, that's not good.
John: But no, I wear them on my eyes.
John: But now that I'm realizing it, I'm wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators, and they actually are beautiful.
John: Bush pilot glasses slash war reporter glasses.
Merlin: Okay, well, people say, don't dress for the job that you have, dress for the job that you want.
Merlin: It seems to me you're already wearing the sunglasses of a man with a different career.
John: Yeah, I'm wondering if it's not aspirational.
John: If I don't put these sunglasses on and think...
John: Maybe I'm going to get swept up in some kind of situation where I'm landing a de Havilland beaver somewhere under fire.
John: Combine the two.
John: Combine the two.
John: Bush pilot slash war reporter.
John: So much better than my current job.
Merlin: I'm on the Wikipedia page for people who were born in 1936.
Merlin: And there's a lot of cowboy handsome on this page.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You got Pope Francis.
Merlin: You got David Carradine.
Merlin: He's very cowboy handsome.
John: Right?
John: You got Robert Redford.
John: Super.
John: He defines cowboy handsome.
John: Chris Christopherson.
John: Wait a minute.
John: He was born in 36, Robert Redford?
Mm-hmm.
Whew.
Merlin: Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: Then, of course, you have a little bit of right.
Merlin: You've got Seth Blatter, that soccer guy.
Merlin: You've got F.W.
Merlin: DeClerk from South Africa.
Merlin: You've got Ursula Andress.
Merlin: You've got Roy Orbison, love wearing glasses.
John: Ursula Andress, also very cowboy handsome.
John: But don't you think of Roy Orbison as being a lot older than, say, Robert Redford?
Merlin: Or John McCain or Silvio Berlusconi or Jim Henson, yes.
Merlin: Berlusconi?
Merlin: 1936.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: The great actor Brian Blessed, Vaclav Havel,
John: Vaclav Havel.
John: Vaclav Havel.
John: You know, Berlusconi fools you because his hair is so black still.
John: And it seems implausible when you think about it that he's almost 80 years old.
John: That his hair would be so black.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The thing is, if I had the eyeball and also Burt Reynolds.
John: He was cowboy handsome.
John: He was so cowboy handsome.
John: I really, and you know, he's got a big area.
John: He's got a big mustache area.
John: Yep.
John: He has a big area.
John: I, I, I, I really, really want to know what Burt Reynolds looks like without his rug.
John: I bet he could look really good.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: If you just capitulate to what your head is shaped like and what your hair area should be and how you accommodate that, there's a lot you can do today.
Merlin: There's so much that's acceptable.
Merlin: The times have changed.
John: Well, it's like God gives you the beard you deserve.
John: He also gives you the hair you deserve.
Merlin: I think the trouble is a lot of men actually do believe that.
John: that he gives you the hair that you deserve.
Merlin: And so they feel like... They feel like the world sees them, like we have some kind of a medieval affliction, like their sins are born upon their pate.
John: Well, what about the guy who's on the TV show Capital Hijinks, Death of the President?
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: My wife used to have a crush on him, Kevin Spacey.
John: No, not Kevin Spacey, but the guy that plays the young congressman in that show.
Merlin: Oh, that guy, the guy who, no spoilers, but that guy?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, that guy.
Merlin: He's great.
Merlin: And what else has he been?
Merlin: Oh, he's the bad guy in Ant-Man.
John: And he was in Girls.
John: He appeared in Girls at one point.
Merlin: Oh, I like that actor.
Merlin: I like him a lot.
Merlin: He's like an old school bad guy.
Merlin: He's good.
Merlin: Yeah, and he's proudly bald.
Merlin: He's bald.
Merlin: He's like Corddry.
Merlin: He's like a good looking guy with no hair.
John: See, Corddry is another one.
Merlin: I mean, Corddry looks good.
Merlin: You know, if he looks, you go back and look at pictures of people when they're still trying to like go with the, like, I still have hair thing.
Merlin: And like, you're like, oh my God, you look so much better now, you know?
John: Have you ever thought about just taking a razor to your head and giving yourself a male pattern baldness and seeing how it is?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: For a long time, I used to think it would be kind of a fun thing if you could get 150 people in Brooklyn to do that and make it like a hip thing.
Merlin: Like if Beck started doing it, it would kind of be fun if you could convince people that the faking male pattern baldness was a thing.
Merlin: I always thought that would be kind of a fun thing.
John: Or to do like a monk.
John: Like a tonsure?
John: Like a tonsure.
Merlin: I feel like you don't see that pattern of male pattern baldness.
Merlin: I feel like you see more receding hair.
Merlin: When I was a kid, all men over the age of 35 looked like my grandfather, which means they had a monk's tonsure.
Merlin: Shorter in front, sure, but they always had the big part in the back.
Merlin: I don't think you see that anymore.
Merlin: Is that technology, John?
Merlin: How do men not have the spot on the back of their head anymore?
Merlin: Do you remember?
Merlin: Did your dad have that?
Merlin: Your dad had pretty good hair, right?
John: No, my dad's hair went away on the top.
John: Okay.
John: I think what it is is that in the intervening 20 years now, men that are bald can shave their heads and they look amazing.
John: Yep.
John: But when we were kids, it wasn't an option to shave your head.
John: And so you just had to go out there.
John: And it wasn't even an option really to cut it short unless you were in the army.
John: Right.
John: Remember the actor from Simon and Simon who was in the movie about being a bad dad to his kids back in the 70s?
John: Or was it Robert Duvall?
John: Are you thinking of American Beauty?
John: No, this was from the 70s where he was a military dad and he was abusive to his kids.
John: And it was called like, I don't know, American Dad or something.
John: Iron Eagle.
John: Tough Dad.
John: Pre that, it was, yeah, it was, what is that actor's name?
John: It's George McClellan.
Merlin: Oh, you're thinking of Gerald McRaney?
John: Gerald McRaney.
Merlin: From Major Dad?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You might be thinking of Major Dad, because Gerald McRaney was in Simon & Simon, and I think he was also the titular Major Dad.
Merlin: No, you know what?
John: I'm thinking of Robert Duvall.
Merlin: Oh, you're thinking of the Great Santini.
Merlin: The Great Santini.
John: The Great Santini.
John: Thank you.
John: Tom's not a wartime consigliere.
John: The Great Santini loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: He threw cards.
Merlin: He threw cards on the bodies and liked to surf.
John: He only threw cards on the bodies in Red Yeu.
John: He did not throw cards on the bodies in the original film.
John: Oh, it was only in Régieux?
John: It was only in Régieux.
Merlin: Wow, that's the one I really think of.
Merlin: That's so interesting.
John: Yeah, I can't believe that you think that Régieux is the canonical.
Merlin: Oh, you mean like you're saying leave out the French colony?
John: The French colony doesn't belong?
John: I don't think that all the extended scenes with the bunnies belong?
Merlin: No, I know, I know.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: I'm not married to that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think if I were to go back and diagnose, I think Robert Altman in Apocalypse Now had a pretty bad case of ADHD.
Merlin: If you go back and watch that today, I'm saying as a sufferer, I go back and I watch that movie and all I see is a guy who has trouble focusing.
John: uh altman you're saying the director did i say robert altman sapocalypse now oh robert yeah yeah yeah the guy who did nashville yeah right he was the star he played he played the uh the the general he played the general in apocalypse now so if you look at robert duvall robert duvall in the great santini yeah in 1979 he was a balding guy that had his haircut real short
John: And that was the one look you could have.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Look at that.
Merlin: They call it a high and tight?
Merlin: What do you call it?
Merlin: That's a high and tight.
Merlin: But he looks so different.
Merlin: Look how he looks.
Merlin: Oh, that was by Pat Conroy.
Merlin: Oh, look at that.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Great Santini.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Yeah, but otherwise you had to just wear your hair any old way, right?
John: However it came out, it just had to float around.
Merlin: Well, everybody in the 70s, it was weird because you kind of, even my dad grew his hair out a little bit.
Merlin: Like everybody had to get longer hair and sharper collars.
Merlin: But like so many men, even in rock bands, go back and look at like the zombies.
Merlin: Like half of the zombies are obviously totally going bald, even in like 1968.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But you look at all these guys and guys had this hippie hair.
Merlin: Everybody looked like Fredo in Dog Day Afternoon.
John: You got long hair, but then you got this whole thing where you're swooping it over.
John: He looks like he's a member of the Monks.
Merlin: Oh, the rock band.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I never understood how you could have that, how that movie could be called, what was it called?
John: Wait Until Spring Santini?
Merlin: Which one is that?
Merlin: Is that Robert Altman?
John: I think that was the one that came later, right?
Merlin: See You Next Tuesday?
John: See you next.
Merlin: I literally, I literally got that joke last year.
Merlin: I've been seeing John Landis movies for years that constantly reference a fictional film called See You Next Tuesday.
Merlin: And I finally only got the job.
Merlin: I only got that joke like last year.
John: That kind of long con or shaggy dog story, that type of stuff makes me really happy.
John: Wouldn't you like to be somebody that had been running some sort of long gag for years?
John: Just hiding in plain sight the whole time.
John: That's right.
John: I've always wished that I had had the foresight to lay something in wait for
John: Decades ago that was still laying in wait for some, you know, some some Manchurian candidate style gag.
John: Right.
John: That comes out that something I don't know what it would be.
Merlin: So I mean, a crazy example would be like a like a medieval monk doing an acrostic.
Merlin: where nobody would think to look for an acrostic in a medieval text.
Merlin: And then later on you go, oh, you know, oh, it actually says, you know, go Chicago Bears or whatever.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's the plot of some Tom Hanks movie where he's in a pyramid.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: And he's got Nicholas Cage has to get the Declaration of Independence signed.
Merlin: He finds the blue glasses and then he looks up at the Masonic.
Merlin: Then he's able to solve the Rubik's Cube.
John: But like, so years and years ago,
John: When I was still in high school, it was still possible to get a fake ID by the following process or two processes as I understood them.
John: And maybe I learned this in the anarchist cookbook and maybe this was just conventional wisdom on the streets.
John: But one of them was you would –
John: Go to a graveyard and find a gravestone of a child that had died in – In the year you wanted to fake?
John: Yeah.
John: Or no, a kid that was born in the year you wanted to be born in but then died at two years old.
John: And then you would go to the public records and get their birth certificate.
John: You're kidding me.
John: That had no reference of their death and then get an adult ID –
John: Based on their birth certificate.
John: And from that, you could then get a social security number and actually build an entire actual identity.
John: People would do this in order to buy beer?
John: Well, initially, right, you buy beer.
John: But then if you have successfully done this.
John: You get a mortgage.
John: It can be a second ID, right?
John: I mean, you have a passport.
John: You assume this identity.
Merlin: Oh, that is attractive.
Merlin: I got to be honest with you.
John: And you could do it even – I mean you could do it even at 40 years old.
John: All you had to do was go find somebody that was born the year you were born and then died at a young age and you could just assume their identity and disappear.
John: This was a – this was supposedly a method.
John: And it seemed just too complicated and risky to do just in order to buy beer.
John: That is a boil the ocean beer buying model.
John: Right, but it seemed even at the time like do this now and spend these many years building that identity and then when you need it, you never use it, right?
John: It's there, but you do all the stuff, right?
John: You get a bank account, you get a social security number, you get a passport, you make payments, you get a credit card, you maintain it, but you never utilize it.
John: But it's there when you need it.
John: It's like your own private sleeper cell.
John: It's your little – it's just a doorway to another world that you could decide at any day to just –
John: And the only risk of it, there's really no risk of it because the parents of this kid aren't, you know, it's not like a birth certificate has a serial.
John: The last thing you would do is remember all of that.
John: Right.
John: The other way to do it, this again, suppose it, was there were many instances where a birth certificate wasn't available, the courthouse had burned down, something, something, something.
John: And you could get a baptismal certificate from a priest where you were baptized and your date of birth was on the baptismal certificate.
John: And in certain jurisdictions, that was considered as good as a birth certificate because who do you trust more than the church?
John: And so in high school, I actually got a hold of a baptismal certificate.
John: And I went to great lengths to forge it where I wrote the information in in what I at the time thought was old-timey writing, 60s writing.
John: And I think I might have even spilled some coffee on it and maybe touched the edges of the thing with the lighter.
John: With a match.
John: Yeah, just to kind of make it look old.
John: Like you're making a pirate map.
John: A pirate map.
John: That's exactly right.
John: And I had this thing, which I felt pretty confident about.
John: It looked pretty good.
John: And I kept it in the bottom of my sock drawer.
John: And it was like this loaded pistol of possibility.
John: This is your Jason Bourn box.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was 16.
John: I had this thing.
John: I had no independent confirmation that this would work.
John: But I was building up the cojones, the chutzpah, to walk in to the DMV, lay this thing down and say, my birth certificate was lost in a fire and this is all I have.
John: And see, like roll the dice.
John: And I figured it was a pretty big roll of the dice because if this wasn't going to work,
John: there was 50% chance that the person would just say, no, we don't accept that as an ID and chase you out.
John: there was also a 50% chance that they would say, why don't you come over here and sit in this room for a minute?
Merlin: Let me go call in my manager, Mr. White.
John: Yeah.
John: And then all of a sudden, you know, there are three detectives there.
John: What's all this thing?
John: Yeah.
John: So I never did it.
John: I never did it.
John: And then pretty soon after that, it no longer was an option, right?
John: It became...
John: Like now I don't think you would be able to go in with a birth certificate and establish an identity.
John: No.
John: That had never existed before.
John: And then all of a sudden a 40 year old person gets his first name.
John: social security number, right?
John: That's, you can't just, you can't invent.
Merlin: Also, I mean, there's all kinds of things.
Merlin: Like obviously there's all, you know, what computer systems and cross-matching stuff, however that works.
Merlin: That's one thing.
Merlin: But also I think there probably used to be more fires and floods.
Merlin: I think there were times when like there was just a whole bunch of documents that went back to the 1700s and they got lost because there was a fire or a flood.
Merlin: A fire or a flood.
Merlin: There's a fire or flood.
Merlin: It was not unusual at all.
Merlin: Plus also more kids died.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things that would create an environment where you could buy beer with a, with a scheme like this.
John: Yeah, well, and also like not just buy beer, but like... You could get a mortgage.
John: Think about all of the cars that I bought and then broke down and I left parked on the side of the road.
John: Yeah, you got places to go.
John: And never saw them again, right?
John: And in every case, the reason that I was able to do that is I never switched the registration over to my name, which is why when you sell a car to somebody...
John: immediately go and register that you have sold it.
John: Sounds like you're doing a talk in schools.
John: I used to do this all the time.
John: Listen, this is a thing that everybody should know because multiple times I bought a car for $500 for somebody and I drove it until it broke down and I parked it in a parking meter on a Saturday night.
Merlin: And they get a call a week later.
John: Yeah, they get a call and they're like, you know, your car was towed and you owe $750.
John: They're like, what?
John: I sold that thing to some guy.
John: Um, but if you, you know, if you had a fake ID where you could actually like register, you can, it could be your like parking ticket ID or your, yeah, you're like your Welsh, your Welsher ID.
John: Not to, not to.
Merlin: No, nothing against the Welsh.
Merlin: No, that's, that's such a good idea.
John: But too late.
John: I missed my chance.
John: And that's the kind of like, sow the seeds when you're young of a gag, of a bit, of a,
John: Of a, of a, like a hidey hole where, you know, where, uh, where one day Amelie is going to drop some marble and it's going to knock a piece of tile out of the bathroom wall.
John: And there's your little box full of toys.
John: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: I think I do.
Merlin: But now it's too late for us.
Merlin: You can't be bush pilot.
Merlin: It's going to be hard to be cowboy handsome.
Merlin: And Amelie's probably never going to discover our box at this point.
John: I might.
John: I still hold out hope that Amelie will discover my box.
John: But I also feel like maybe I am becoming cowboy handsome.
John: There was a...
John: When I was in high school, there was a guy that had dimples, right?
John: Magnum P.I.
John: scale dimples.
John: Because Magnum didn't just have a big mustache area.
John: He had a whole lot going on.
John: Killer dimples.
John: And I had a buddy who had these dimples and it was incredible to watch the dimples cast spells on people.
John: It was nothing else.
John: I mean, it wasn't like, well, he had really good hair too.
John: But it was the dimples that were doing the work.
John: And I didn't have dimples because my face was just made out of putty, right?
John: Or it was made out of, what was it made out of?
John: Raw chicken.
John: You were basically a canvas for a beard, just waiting for a beard to come along.
John: It was a beard canvas.
John: I had a beard-shaped face that was made out of raw chicken.
John: And certain parts of my complexion were uncooked scallop.
John: Raw chicken and uncooked scallop covered with hair.
John: But now I'm starting to develop dimples.
John: And I'm not sure whether they're fencing scars or whether... You should probably get that looked at.
John: You know, whether it's cancer, whether I'm just falling apart and one of the side effects is dimples.
John: You have the cutest cancer.
Merlin: Oh, your scallops got face cancer, but now you're so much cuter.
John: It's causing the inside of your cheek to adhere to your jaw, but it's cute.
John: So I feel like there's a little bit of scarring and weathering that's happening to me that almost looks like cowboy, cowboy handsome.
John: I think it might still be Cowboy Cute.
John: I'm not sure Cowboy Cute is what I want.
Merlin: Cowboy Cute.
Merlin: Cowboy Cute sounds like somebody who dies near the end of the second act.
John: Yeah, that's James Dean.
John: James Dean is Cowboy Cute.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Like Sal Mineo.
John: Sal Mineo.
John: Cowboy Cute.
John: I always think of Sal Mineo as being one of the guys standing behind...
John: uh, the guy that was the dad of the girl that won the Oscar in the Woody Allen movie?
John: Uh, Sorvino, Paul Sorvino.
John: Paul Sorvino.
John: Right.
John: And his daughter, Mira Sorvino.
John: Mira Sorvino.
John: He's very protective of her.
John: Yeah.
John: She won an Oscar in the Woody Allen movie, right?
John: Playing the, uh, uh, that was back in the era where if you were an actress and wanted to win an Oscar and were young, you had to play a prostitute.
Merlin: Especially in a Woody Allen movie.
Merlin: Yeah.
Right.
John: But Paul Sorvino was always in the foreground of the scene where I always imagined Sal Mineo was one of the guys in the background.
John: Okay.
John: Sal Mineo was a different kind of actor, right?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: He was handsome or something.
Merlin: Well, I think he had problems.
Merlin: I think he's like Alfalfa from our gang.
Merlin: I think he ran into problems.
John: He's very cute.
John: You know what he looks like?
John: He looks like that guy in the band who had the very conspicuous British drug problem and he dated Kate Moss.
John: La Bamba?
John: La Bamba?
John: La Bamba?
John: No, the guy that was in the band where he and his bandmate had matching tattoos of the band name.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And there's that cover of that record album where they're both showing their tattoos of their own band.
Merlin: It's either Nelson or Oasis.
John: It's the type of thing.
John: Oasis is a good guess.
John: It's the type of thing that you could only get away with if you were a British rock musician.
Merlin: Matching tattoos.
John: I mean, maybe if you're in Guns N' Roses, you can have a Guns N' Roses tattoo.
Merlin: You might not even remember.
Merlin: You got it, right?
Merlin: You might have forgotten.
Merlin: Maybe that's your Amelie box.
Merlin: You wake up one day, you realize you're Duff McKagan.
Merlin: You're investing in things, and you remember you got a tattoo.
John: Well, I definitely saw Duff in a couple of situations where I could have given him a tattoo.
Yeah.