Ep. 237: "Tape Loop Confusion Party"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Shucky darn and slop the chicken.
Merlin: Wait, wait, wait.
John: I know that.
John: Is that Garfield?
John: Whoa.
John: Good grab.
John: Have we talked about that before?
John: No.
John: You just pulled shucky darn and slop the chickens right out of the back of your head somewhere?
John: How did I do that?
John: How did I do that?
John: That's amazing.
John: That's some sorcery.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: I can tell you, I kind of just freak myself out.
Merlin: That is freaky.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's a deep cut.
Merlin: That's the deepest cut.
Merlin: I'm having a pretty good morning, but just to give you some context here, I just realized that a poet I like a lot, yesterday would have been his 100th birthday, I was pretty sure, and I went to Google to do a quick math calculation, and just to check myself, I put in 2017 minus 1917, just to check my math.
Ha!
Merlin: And then I thought, I almost hit enter.
Merlin: And then I went, you know what?
Merlin: You can do that in your head, buddy.
John: Yeah, you almost hit enter, and then Google would know that about you forever.
John: Google would be like, hmm, when was the War of 1812?
John: He doesn't understand arithmetic.
John: People who ask this question also ask.
Merlin: Oh, shucky darn and slop the chickens.
Merlin: Shucky darn and slop the chickens.
Merlin: I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: Was it John?
Merlin: Who said it?
Merlin: Did John say that?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Oh, yes, he did.
Merlin: Or was it Odie?
Merlin: No, it was John.
Merlin: That was before Odie talked.
Merlin: I've tried to get my daughter into Garfield, and it hasn't quite taken.
Merlin: My daughter loves it.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: You keep it in your bathroom, right?
Merlin: Don't you have a Garfield in your bathroom?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I got all the old Garfields.
Merlin: She loves it.
Merlin: She doesn't understand a word of it.
John: Yeah.
John: But she just is just like, read me these Garfields.
John: Nice.
John: And then she learned to read, and I was like, read them yourself.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm done with this.
John: I already read them.
John: Yeah, I read them a lot.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
John: Chuckie Darn and Slob the Chickens.
John: John goes back to visit the farm.
Oh, right.
John: Right?
John: And he's talking to his weird brother.
John: Remember John's weird brother?
John: I don't.
John: I don't remember.
John: I got to go look this up.
John: Balding guy with the wearing overalls.
John: And I think it actually might have been Garfield leaning on a fence.
John: Leaning on a fence.
Merlin: They're talking about life on the farm.
Merlin: Hi, Dad.
Merlin: Welcome home, city boy.
Merlin: Hi, Mom.
Merlin: And Mom brings out a turkey and says, eat, eat, eat, eat.
Merlin: And Garfield's thinking, well, shucky darn and slap the chickens.
Merlin: I think I'm going to like it here.
Merlin: That's an old one.
Merlin: It's old Garfield.
John: Do you have a date on that?
Merlin: Let me see if I can zoom in.
Merlin: I can't.
Merlin: Let me see.
Merlin: It looks like it's probably... Is it 1980?
Merlin: I can't tell.
Merlin: You know, remember when he was more kind of bulbous?
Merlin: It's before Jim Davis had streamlined Garfield.
John: It's not streamlined.
John: He's...
John: That's when Garfield was a principality.
John: Am I right?
John: He's a principality.
Merlin: You lost me on that one.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: Is that another one?
John: Your mom is so fat, she's a principality.
Merlin: Oh, when she sits around the house.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: That sounds like a terrible, terrible weight problem.
Merlin: That must be really debilitating.
Merlin: I just thought of that today.
John: I was coming down the stairs, and I was like, that guy's a principality.
Merlin: And I just laughed.
Merlin: And then immediately I found a way to work it in.
Merlin: You sure did.
Merlin: I think we've reached peak dad joke.
Merlin: No, that's street talk.
Merlin: More than 50% of the dad jokes that can be mined.
Merlin: All the easy stuff we've already gotten from now on, it's going to be dad jokes all the way down.
Merlin: I feel that is some real play in the dozen stuff.
John: That's some, like, street corner doo-wop.
John: Oh.
John: For the longest time.
Yeah.
Merlin: i had the same image i had the same image when i said street runner duo every time i hear that song i in my head i imagine this multiplicity i don't i don't even remember the original uh video for longest time but in my head it's some like early cgi of billy five billy joels in blackface that's how i like to think
John: No, no, they're all wearing pompadours and... Oh, and a mint called Sen Sen.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: That's the Italian street culture.
John: Italian street doo-wop culture.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, more like you get your Frankie Valli type situation.
Merlin: Frankie Vallis, yeah.
Merlin: Your Frankie's Valley.
Merlin: Your Frankie's Valley.
Merlin: It's like Attorney's General.
John: I, um, what was I going to say?
John: The only other person that's ever, cause I've been saying it's lucky.
John: It's lucky.
John: Darn a sloppy chicken since 1980.
John: Okay.
John: That comic cracked with that particular comic cracked me up so hard.
Merlin: It's very compressed.
Merlin: I just sent it to you in the Skype.
Merlin: If you go and look at it, it is very, very compressed humor.
Merlin: He jams a lot of funny into three panels.
Merlin: He does.
John: Here comes Mom.
John: She's got a turkey in her hand.
John: Yep.
John: And Garfield is excited.
John: That's all moms do, right?
John: Yeah.
John: And then so shuck you darn and slap the chickens, right?
John: And I got it.
John: I got all the levels of humor of it.
John: And I just, I rolled, I rolled on the floor, tears streaming down my face, shucky darn and slop the chickens.
John: I'm going to like it here.
John: And so it immediately entered into my, uh, my lexicon.
John: I never stopped saying it.
John: I've said it for what now is 40 years.
John: And there's only one other time that I said, shuck your darn sloth of chickens.
John: And somebody went, whoa, is that Garfield?
John: And I married her.
John: And it was Sean Nelson.
Merlin: Oh, Sean Nelson.
John: Yeah, there it is.
John: So you and he, I mean, there's a reason that we're all together.
John: I know.
John: We deserve each other.
John: No, we're not.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: Chuckie Darn.
John: Yep.
John: Now the secret's out.
John: Now we've given it to everybody.
John: Go and spread it.
John: This is going to go viral, as they say, John.
John: There it is.
John: I was online last night, and I don't know why, as you do, and I was looking at
John: vintage one-piece ski suits.
Merlin: And this may surprise me.
Merlin: It's like a zip-up jumpsuit?
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: That sounds like a Wes Anderson kind of outfit.
John: Well, so surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, I considered that era of ski wear to be the most hideous, right?
John: But of course, since...
John: Since the millenniums are all about norm core and dad core and plain core and core core.
John: That was a dad joke.
John: That wasn't even deep.
John: The worst era of ski wear is now very fashionable among certain segments of the population.
John: And so all these terrible neon pink purple ski suits are all like fetching top dollar.
John: Fetching top dollar.
John: And I'm just picturing all these young people who are wearing these like multicolored ski suits and kind of like we saw Blade Runner and we were like, oh my God, it's how the future is going to be like, wow, it's so intense.
John: but what we didn't anticipate is that it wasn't going to be just dirty and decaying it was also going to be dirty decaying and totally gaudy like it's going to have gold spray paint on it and people are going to be wearing neon ski suits that's the thing that we didn't predict
Merlin: I'm looking here at frankiac.com.
Merlin: I'm remembering a moment from The Simpsons.
Merlin: It's from the star-studded Lollapalooza episode where Homer becomes the guy who gets shot in the stomach by a cannon at Lollapalooza and becomes kind of a hipster sensation.
Merlin: And there's a shot of these two guys in the audience.
Merlin: One guy's shirtless, wearing some kind of...
Merlin: Hippie necklace with a nose ring and his baseball cap on sideways.
Merlin: The other guy's hair shaved on the sides.
Merlin: One kid said, oh, here comes that cannonball guy.
Merlin: He's cool.
Merlin: And the other kid goes, are you being sarcastic, dude?
Merlin: And he says, I can't even tell anymore.
Merlin: There it is.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: Hey, I got an ironic hat.
Merlin: Yay.
Merlin: Oh, what a blight.
Merlin: What a blight.
Merlin: And see, this is the problem.
Merlin: This is why we have so much to learn from The Simpsons.
Merlin: I don't think people can even tell if they're being ironic anymore.
John: No, they don't know.
John: They don't know.
John: We don't know.
John: We don't know.
John: Is he a great man?
John: Is he a great man?
John: You can't land on a fraction.
Merlin: It's like rain on your wedding day.
Merlin: I'm a small man.
Merlin: Yeah, and the thing is, he's in a cage.
Merlin: He can't get away, right?
Merlin: Isn't that that situation?
Merlin: Dennis Hopper's explaining the great man to him, and isn't he in a tiger cage?
John: Yeah, well, yeah, he's in a tiger cage.
John: Not Dennis Hopper.
Merlin: No, Dennis Hopper, man, he's outside.
John: He's the photographer.
John: He's got all the cameras.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: He's got all the cameras, and he drank the Kool-Aid.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I know what you mean.
John: Yeah, he drank the Kool-Aid, and that's where that comes from.
Merlin: Kurtz is a charismatic leader.
Merlin: Now, here's the thing you learn from Dungeons & Dragons.
Merlin: This is why I think all my kids should be taught Dungeons & Dragons.
Merlin: You learn about the idea of you got these qualities, right?
Merlin: You got strength.
Merlin: You got wisdom.
Merlin: Wisdom is differentiated from intelligence, right?
Merlin: And that's differentiated from charisma.
Merlin: Now, charisma, it can mean like you need to be charisma-ish enough if you're going to be like a monk.
Merlin: You got to be a little handsome, right?
Merlin: Charisma is ultimately not about how good looking you are, although that factors into it.
Merlin: It has more to do with how likely people are to follow your lead and trust you because reasons.
Merlin: I think Colonel Kurtz, I'd like to see what his character, his player character sheet looks like.
Merlin: I'd roll a Kurtz.
Merlin: What do you think he'd be?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I think he'd be a fighter magic user.
Merlin: uh let's see i think it's i think he's like a i think he would be like a paladin mage like a like an anti-paladin and yeah right now can you be a paladin and uh i'm trying to remember because you get you don't don't you can paladin's a baller role because you're definitely a fighter you got to be if memory serves you have to be lawful good
Merlin: Don't you get some clarity?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And anti-paladin, I think, has to be chaotic evil.
Merlin: Yeah, you've got to be lawful good.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: What is it?
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: No meat on Fridays.
John: So the thing about a mage, though, is that you're not necessarily magic.
John: You can just be sage.
Merlin: Well, and again now in the classes, this is back in old school now.
Merlin: I have not kept up with the trades on this.
Merlin: But if memory serves, you have a distinction between, and we've talked about this, distinction between a magic user and an illusionist.
Merlin: Those are different character classes, and I don't remember what the difference is, although I bet it's a little bit like Penn and Teller versus David Copperfield.
John: Hmm.
John: Well, some magic user is actually using real magic, whereas an illusionist is just making you think.
John: Well, there it is.
Merlin: That's all I need to know.
John: There's so much to go on here.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Did you know... So, Dennis Hopper's rant in... I was thinking about this the other day.
John: Dennis Hopper's rant in Apocalypse Now.
John: It's another one of our great film roles, great film quotes.
Merlin: Yeah, you're thinking to yourself, wow, this guy's really good.
Merlin: He's really inhabiting this character.
Merlin: He's quite an actor.
Merlin: And then you learn more.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Basically, when they weren't shooting, it was Dennis Hopper that had to be kept in a tiger cage.
John: Well, and so, but there's a key thing about that, because I looked this quote up the other day, you know, his long rant there.
John: And a lot of it is just what you remember, right?
John: Like, hey, man, you don't talk to the colonel, you listen to him, man, that type of thing, right?
John: I'm trying to look it up right now.
John: There's a great one right there in the middle where he says...
John: I've got it now.
John: You'll say hello to him, and he'll just walk right by you.
John: He won't even notice you.
John: And then suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, do you know that if is the middle word in life?
John: If you can keep your head about you when all around you they're losing yours, you know, like blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: But then right at the end, right after, I'm a little man.
John: I'm a little man.
John: He's a great man.
John: I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas.
John: That's Prufrock.
Merlin: That's the last thing he says as he... As he's randomly accessing information in his head, he pulls out some Prufrock.
Merlin: Isn't that Prufrock?
John: Yeah, that's what that is, right?
John: I had never heard it before.
John: You know what I mean?
John: In the air.
John: I just never heard it.
John: I know that whole quote pretty well, but never heard the random T.S.
John: Eliot plopping out of his going bananas.
Merlin: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
Merlin: You can't travel in space.
Merlin: You can't go out into space with fractions.
Merlin: What are you going to land on?
Merlin: One quarter, three eighths?
Merlin: What are you going to do when you get from here to Venus or something?
Merlin: That's dialectic physics.
Yeah.
Merlin: Okay, so help me out.
Merlin: How much of that was written, and how much of that did he just come up with?
John: Lord knows.
John: Lord knows.
John: I mean, he's absolutely not in character, as we learn.
Merlin: Wasn't he pretty... That was very much into his acid-casualty phase, right?
John: Yeah, and I feel like somebody...
John: Somebody along the line actually took him to Vietnam, told him the war was still happening, gave him some cameras and told him he was a photojournalist.
John: That's how he prepared for that role.
Merlin: uh he thought it was he thought he thought it was all happening he also says here i might be getting my quotes wrong says here when he's babbling about the religious fervor of curse he babbles out portions of the poem if by rudyard kipling hmm i might be getting this wrong is that the if is the middle word in life i didn't realize
Merlin: There's layers to this, John.
Merlin: We've got to return to this movie.
Merlin: Oh, here we go.
Merlin: The poem quoted.
Merlin: The line about a pair of regular claws.
Merlin: Love song of J. Alfred Prufoff.
Merlin: Somebody needs to get into this IMDB and vet these things.
Merlin: We need extreme vetting of these things.
Merlin: Because I'm on a very popular American podcast.
Merlin: And I do not want to be spreading misinformation.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: And IMDB, whew, boy, I don't want to go down that.
John: I don't want to go down that wormhole.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: Substance abuse was rampant across the cast and crew.
Merlin: Dennis Hopper got a teenaged Lawrence Fishburne addicted to heroin?
Merlin: Jiminy, Christmas.
Merlin: John, we need extreme vetting on this page.
Merlin: I'm going to call upon Roderick Nation.
Merlin: I want all you people to go out there.
Merlin: I want you to vet these quotes.
John: Find me some detailed evidence that Lawrence Fishburne got addicted to heroin at the hand of Dennis Hopper during the filming of Apocalypse Now.
Merlin: Some of this is coming back to me now.
Merlin: Now I'm remembering some of the things I think I remember or learned definitely comes from his wife's documentary.
John: You're talking about Apocalypse, the other movie.
Merlin: I think it's called Heart of Darkness.
Merlin: The one where... It's a documentary of the making where you see everybody just losing their... All the shit that goes wrong and basically everybody, including Coppola, losing their mind while making this movie.
John: But she is like in the hotel room, drunk, crying, waving a gun around.
Merlin: That was apparently real.
Merlin: And also, they had rented, this is all very well known, but they had these incredibly complicated, blocked scenes where there's going to be all these explosions.
Merlin: And they basically rented helicopters from, I want to say, the Philippine Army.
Merlin: I think it was the Thai Army.
Merlin: who like came in with their own dudes and like just like they had to go I don't know get a donut or something they just took off in the middle of shooting oh no I think there was some kind of like rebel incursion in northern Thailand and they were like oh gotta go fight a war for a second oh man they still in Saigon now see now I listened the other night much to my wife's frustration I think I talked to the lady in the tube and the first thing I said was play Goodnight Saigon by Billy Joel Alexa
Merlin: Don't do that.
Merlin: Please don't do that.
Merlin: Alexa!
Merlin: Stop that!
Merlin: You know I don't like editing things.
Merlin: And then the other one was asking to play the song Allentown.
Merlin: I'm here to tell you, I think those are both really good songs.
John: Allentown's amazing.
John: Allentown's, first of all, the greatest Billy Joel song.
John: And it's so tuneful.
John: And everything about it, the production is great.
John: It's his peak.
John: It's truly his peak.
John: Peak Joel.
John: But nothing else is any good.
Merlin: Oh, you include Night Saigon in that?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
John: It's a little bit cute.
John: That's his treacle.
John: That's his, like, what does he have to write about Saigon?
John: He's got nothing.
Merlin: What is the term?
Merlin: There's a Greek term for this.
Merlin: Maybe it's sucking.
Merlin: But there's a term for this.
Merlin: It's not antithesis.
Merlin: Is it antithesis?
Merlin: But there's this term in Greek rhetoric for like, this thing, that thing.
Merlin: I'm going to call it thesis antithesis.
Merlin: But there's so much of this.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: We came in spastic like tameless horses.
Merlin: We left in plastic as numbered corpses.
Merlin: Little on the nose.
Merlin: But he does this.
Merlin: Remember Charlie.
Merlin: Remember Baker.
Merlin: They left their childhood on every acre.
Merlin: You know, this is a little on the nose.
Merlin: It's a little.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Pretty definitely deeply on the nose.
Merlin: We held the coastline.
Merlin: They held the highlands.
Merlin: And they were sharp.
Merlin: As sharp as knives.
Merlin: Knives.
Merlin: Knives.
Merlin: Knives.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No, it's terrible.
Merlin: It's literally terrible.
Merlin: Do you like that though?
Merlin: They ruled the night, night, night.
John: With the echo on it.
John: It's like when you're in the studio for the first time and you realize that a pan knob can make the sound go from left to right.
Merlin: Look at me, I'm Jimmy Edwards.
Merlin: Let's do that on every tune.
Merlin: Look at me, I'm acts as bold as love.
Merlin: You can just imagine rows of guys wearing their hats with pins on them with their prosthetic arms going, really?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: They counted the rotors and waited for us to arrive.
Merlin: And we'll all go down together.
Merlin: So really, okay, so no Goodnight Saigon for you.
Merlin: Allentown is the one that you will allow.
Merlin: Allentown is a tremendous song.
John: It's a tremendous song.
John: He gets to do all that super literal nail on the heading that he loves to do.
John: He gets to lay out his whole America used to be great.
John: He's doing his whole Chevy ad thing that everybody was doing then.
Merlin: You know my beef with Allentown, and I feel like this could have been fixed pretty easily.
Merlin: I know I've told you this before, but the line that still just takes me totally out of the song because I'm a dick.
Merlin: So the graduations hang on the wall.
Merlin: No, that's not a graduation.
Merlin: That's a diploma.
Merlin: If it were a graduation, that would be a bunch of 17 and 18 year old kids.
Merlin: Well, I'll even let him.
John: You know what?
John: Because maybe it's dialectic.
Merlin: They never taught us what was real.
Merlin: Iron and coal and chromium steel.
Merlin: And we're waiting here in Allentown.
John: Yeah, maybe up there in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
John: It's like in the Sopranos, they call spaghetti sauce gravy.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: Maybe up there they call them graduations.
John: Speaking of gravy.
John: Because none of them have it, right?
John: They're like, hey, this guy's even got graduations on the wall.
Merlin: I got needled by a pal of mine yesterday who is going to be on the cruise, and he needled me about how much gravy he's going to have at the jammer.
John: Is this some kind of Lawrence Fishburne?
John: Is he getting you addicted to heroin?
John: Is that what you mean?
Merlin: I'm chasing the dragon.
Merlin: I just can't get enough white gravy.
Merlin: Fucking Max Temkin.
Merlin: What an asshole.
Merlin: He's like, oh yeah, I'm going to go hang out with John Roderick and eat gravy.
Merlin: I was like, I hate you so much.
Merlin: Here's Max Temkin for you in a nutshell.
John: I'll do my Max Temkin impression.
John: I hate cruises.
John: I'm never going on another cruise.
John: I hate cruises.
John: I'm Max Temkin.
Merlin: I like to look at my phone.
Merlin: I don't even want to go on a cruise.
Merlin: He says he's not taking the pledge.
Merlin: He's not taking the pledge.
Merlin: Well, you know, nobody takes the pledge.
Merlin: I mean, you can take the pledge.
Merlin: You know, it's like anyone can take a reservation, but you have to hold the reservation.
Merlin: That's really the important part.
John: The thing about the pledge is that I'm sure that all the Joko tech dorks have been working their ass off for a year to get really, really good internet, which has always been a problem on the cruise.
John: Because the cruise ship is like, we don't need to get internet.
John: Everybody else on here is just going on there checking their Kino numbers.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You don't need to record.
Merlin: Max is going to try and record an episode of our show from the show.
Merlin: No chance.
Merlin: No chance.
Merlin: No chance.
Merlin: Not a chance.
Merlin: It's an experiment.
Merlin: Yeah, I agree.
Merlin: But they work hard.
Merlin: You get the Pauls and Storms, and they put a lot of work into that so that you can check your keynote numbers.
John: Yeah, they do, but we're going to be out in BYE, so there's no, like, there's not going to be a, you know what I'm saying?
John: So the other day, speaking of this Billy Joel problem, of the nose awning,
John: uh i was listening i i decided wait a minute what about the fix i haven't listened to the fix in a while oh i am super interested to hear your thought on this and i went and i listened to uh the the incredible song one thing leads to another that yeah i mean that's how do you ever top that just uh just an awesome work all the way around even the music video which is bad is good is everybody's like running around in a hallway
John: Yeah, he's in like a tube.
John: And he's got his kind of suit is like falling off of him.
John: And it's just like, what?
John: And the guitar part is crazy.
Merlin: Cy Kernan was his name.
Merlin: Is that Cy?
Merlin: Cy?
Merlin: That I remember.
Merlin: That and Slopping the Chickens.
Merlin: That I can remember.
Merlin: Cy with a C-Y.
John: So then I go down the list, right?
Merlin: Saved by Zero.
John: I thought Saved by Zero was great.
John: Red Skies at Night was not as good as I remember it.
Merlin: That one's a little pleased with its Billy Joel style production.
Merlin: Red Skies at Night, Red Skies at Night, Red Skies at Night.
Merlin: Too much production.
Merlin: You can just hear it from the beginning.
Merlin: I'm glad to hear you say it.
Merlin: I'm tired of being the only one who says that.
Merlin: I'm glad to hear you say that.
John: But then, here comes Stand or Fall.
John: And I was like, you know, I've always wondered about this song, Stand or Fall.
John: State your case tonight.
John: State your beast tonight.
Merlin: State your beast tonight.
Merlin: It's the Euro Theater.
Merlin: Oh, it's State Your Peace tonight?
Merlin: Who is betting these things?
Merlin: We need extreme peace with like a peace symbol piece?
Merlin: That can't be right.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: So then I go on and I read the lyrics of Stand or Fall, and it is Billy Joel level...
John: Not very good.
John: Oh, no.
John: Like Berlin Wall era Cold War.
John: We're all going to die in the apocalypse.
Merlin: Crying parents tell their children, if you survive, don't do as we did.
Merlin: A son exclaims, there'll be nothing to do.
Merlin: Her daughter says she'll be dead with you.
Merlin: Foreign affairs are screwing us rotten.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: My morale has hit rock bottom.
Merlin: Dying embers stand forgotten.
Merlin: Talks of peace were being trodden.
Merlin: I mean, it's so bad.
Merlin: It's like Sting.
Merlin: Oh, this is Sting level.
John: Sting got off a subway and some papers fell out of his briefcase.
John: And Cy was walking along.
John: He's like, what's this?
John: Holy shit.
John: Are these for anyone?
It's a hit song.
John: And Sting was like, oh man, I was working on something amazing.
Merlin: Oh, he nicked me rhyming dictionary.
Merlin: You know Sting does use... I remember one of the first interviews I ever read with Sting.
Merlin: They remarked on the fact that he had a copy of Lolita and a rhyming dictionary at hand all the time.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: For synchronicity, you know what?
Merlin: We can't get into it.
Merlin: Synchronicity?
Merlin: We can't get into the Synchronicity album because I think we have very differing opinions on that.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Where do you stand them?
Merlin: I think it's trash.
Merlin: you do not like the synchronicity album no no i think it is i think it's ambitious uh but very dated and not their best material by a long shot i'm a uh i'm a uh you know i like the big three i like the big three in the middle we don't often i'm just as you're saying this i i'm just realizing we do not often have a situation where
John: you are saying a record is garbage and I am defending it.
Merlin: It's usually the other way around, right?
Merlin: Okay, let me temper this a little bit.
Merlin: I have not sat down and listened to all of Synchronicity in a few years.
Merlin: I did listen to it a few years ago.
Merlin: My feeling at that time was, this is better than I remember, but it is pretty pale in comparison to what they were doing with something like Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.
Merlin: But you...
Merlin: You didn't like it at the time.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: I liked Synchronicity 2.
Merlin: Is that the one, the really upbeat one?
John: Synchronicity 2 is the scary one where the monster, it's about Loch Ness Monster.
Merlin: Oh, then maybe it's the one breath one.
Merlin: You will know Synchronicity.
Merlin: I like that one, I think.
Merlin: I just, you know what it is?
Merlin: It's high bar.
Merlin: It's a high bar situation.
Merlin: It's like, you know, is Magical Mystery Tour a bad album?
Merlin: It is not a bad album.
Merlin: But for any variety of reasons, it's, it's, it was from a bad time for them.
Merlin: I think that was when, that was, I don't want to say the beginning of the end, but don't you think, I mean, like Magical Mystery Tour, it's some singles and some other stuff.
Merlin: It's got great stuff on it, but it doesn't, it's not an, it's not a great album.
Merlin: I'm going to say Magical Mystery Tour is not a good album.
Merlin: Well, I think like Yellow Submarine, which is just a bald marketing move, if you take the singles off of it, it's not a good album.
John: No.
Merlin: It's like, it's just, you know, George Martin jacking off on a fiddle.
Merlin: I'd listen to that.
John: You know, but I'm just very, it's very unusual to me.
Merlin: It is unusual.
Merlin: I'm usually the positive one.
John: Yeah, to be in a position where I'm like, this album, which is basically all singles, and I have to be honest, when I say Synchronicity is a great album, I have never listened to Synchronicity.
Merlin: Did you see the quote from... I'm sorry to interrupt you, but there was a great quote.
Merlin: Somebody was quoting something.
Merlin: There was a woman interviewed on NPR.
Merlin: A woman interviewed on NPR said she loved Trump's speech because it reminded her of the movie La La Land, which she had not seen.
Merlin: And the remark from the woman retweeting it was, we have reached peak America.
John: Well, as you know, I never have any compunction about commenting on everything that I haven't seen or read.
John: But Synchronicity's got like five singles, and a couple of them I liked in the time.
Merlin: It's got some good songs.
Merlin: It's got good songs on it.
John: Yeah, for sure.
John: Let me just quote the top line from the Wikipedia page entry under the title songs.
John: Synchronicity One starts the album off with a sequencer line that repeats throughout the song.
John: Its lyrics, which is like, okay, good first sentence, its lyrics include a term from the second coming, Spiritus Mundi, literally Spirit of the World, which William Butler Yeats used to refer to the collective unconscious, another of Jung's theories.
John: Walking in Your Footsteps features lyrics concerning the relation between extinct dinosaurs and humans, and is followed by the jazzy Oh My God,
John: The song recycles some lyrics from two earlier police songs, Three O'Clock Shit, which was never recorded on an album, but was widely bootlegged from live performances.
John: So it's just like right away, whoa, nope, nope, none of that.
John: Nope, I'm not having it.
John: Sting is the only person that would describe in an interview...
John: How Jung is affecting his songwriting.
John: Can we think of another songwriter in history who would say both Yeats and Jung within one sentence in describing their own work?
John: Is there someone else that, I mean, even Bono?
Merlin: Colin Malloy.
Merlin: Oh, hello.
Merlin: I'm going to have to edit that out.
Merlin: No, it's not a criticism.
Merlin: I could very much see him name-checking Yates.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Keith and Yates are on your side, but Wilde is on mine.
Merlin: It's a dreaded sunny day, so I'll meet you at the cemetery gates.
Merlin: Wow, he'll just do it right in a song.
Merlin: He will.
Merlin: They say, thrice the sun's done, salutation to the dawn.
John: There's a lot going on over here at my house right now because here's what happened.
John: Yeah.
John: You've been busy.
John: You've been moving around.
John: No, it's not me, though.
John: Yesterday, a moving truck showed up across the street.
John: Oh, they're coming.
John: They've arrived?
John: Well, the moving truck showed up.
John: No, Gary et al.
John: were still over there in their full flower.
John: The moving truck pulled up really close to the fence such that it blocked the gate.
John: And then the moving truck stayed there for two days.
John: And I'd never seen that before, right?
Merlin: Usually a moving truck comes, they load it up.
Merlin: No, the moving trucks are like a printing press.
Merlin: Like they're only making money when they're moving.
John: Yeah, but this was just parked over there.
John: Like how do you get, it's a full moving truck.
John: Like how do you get that?
John: It just sits there.
John: At one point, I got in my truck.
John: At one point, it was time for me to leave, and I could hear Gary out in the street.
John: And I was like, I don't want to go out there.
John: There's a moving truck.
John: Gary's in the street.
John: I don't want to deal with it.
John: So this hardly ever happens, but I went out my back door and snuck around the perimeter and got in my truck, started it up.
John: And then as I was pulling out and driving away, I could see Gary in my rearview mirror walking down this kind of walking toward the truck.
John: Kind of like, hey, whoa, John's truck.
John: It's moving or whatever.
John: I mean, it was like he was trying to maybe trying to communicate with me.
John: Maybe he was just talking to my truck.
John: But then.
John: But then yesterday, I'm upstairs.
John: I hear some banging.
John: I look out the window just in time for the moving truck to drive away.
John: And the gate is wide open.
John: And the front door of the house is wide open.
John: And I'm standing there like, what just happened?
John: And then...
John: Three cars pull up, like, right in through the fence, like the end of Road Warrior.
John: Oh.
John: Where, you know, the, like, finally the Humongous and his gang have access to the oil refinery.
John: They're all like, woohoo!
John: And it's the Washington State Cougars Repossession League.
John: The house flippers.
John: Oh, right.
John: They all pile out of their cars, and they're standing there looking at the thing, and I waited for it to blow up.
John: Was that the name you've given them?
John: Washington State Cougars house flippers?
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I mean, I don't have a name for them yet.
John: I'm sure.
John: They should get satin jackets.
John: I'm sure it's Brandywine or something.
John: I don't know.
John: What do people go?
John: No, people that go to Washington State University are all named like Brendan.
John: So...
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John: So now I'm listening to them through the wall and they're over there throwing stuff in it.
John: I mean, I'm hearing clanks and bonks and throwing stuff in dumpsters.
John: I don't know what's going on.
Merlin: But just to clarify for folks who haven't caught up, are we talking about the couple who bought the house and let the lady continue to live there and presumably Gary?
Merlin: And they were kind of putting the arm on you to provide intel on what was happening over there.
John: Well, right, and they weren't letting her do it.
John: They were going and throwing, you know, they were pounding on the door.
John: They were leaving notes on various colored paper.
John: They were... What, like to say, like, hey, you've got to move?
Merlin: Yeah, not only that, but like legal... Oh, like putting stickers on the door kind of stuff.
Merlin: Yeah, vacate these premises.
Merlin: Oh, no, I hate seeing that.
John: And, you know, the first... I told you the first day they came over was like,
John: Two days before Christmas, something like that.
John: Oh, God.
John: And, you know, I got no particular dog in the race.
John: But I'm sitting here today thinking, now, wait a minute.
John: Was that the last I'll ever see Gary?
John: It can't be.
John: Like, looking in my rearview mirror with Gary going like, truck!
John: Truck!
Merlin: Is that the end?
Merlin: Maybe he's like a dinosaur.
Merlin: Like, as long as you stand still, he can't see you.
John: I think so.
John: Well, you know, I started the truck and it was the truck takes a while to warm up and it has a very distinctive exhaust note.
John: And so and it's only at that point, 20 feet from Gary.
John: And it's like, Gary has no doesn't notice it does not notice I've climbed in and started my truck didn't pick up on any of that.
John: Because he was standing by the moving van giving the movers some advice.
John: He's a really helpful guy.
John: He was.
John: He was like, one dollar for moving company.
John: And so I just sat there warming up my truck.
John: And my truck takes 12 minutes to warm up.
John: And so I was just waiting for him to come over and knock on the window and say, rawr.
John: But he didn't notice it right until it was in motion.
John: He has special eyes.
John: His tongue could feel the heat.
John: Right.
John: Okay.
John: But is that the last time?
John: Are they gone now?
John: You're never really ready for these things.
John: No, I didn't.
John: I kept waiting for them to come over and knock on the door and either ask me for a screwdriver or, more likely, say, can we store 50 boxes in your barn?
John: Right.
John: Like one or the other thing was going to happen.
John: But no, they're just gone.
John: And all of a sudden I have these new neighbors.
Merlin: So it's really it's all done.
John: As far as I can tell, there would never be a situation where the two parties were in the house at the same time.
John: Right.
John: The Washington State Cougar House Flippers House Flipping Guild who are over there now are, you know, you can see by their body language that the former tenants left some stuff.
Mm hmm.
John: that they that the new owners don't want in the house they're kind of walking around like right this uh but but i don't know you know am i gonna get a am i gonna get a call at some point to say like oh by the way we moved out i mean you know what there was at least one person in that house that i liked a lot yeah phone number so anyway it's a lot it's a lot going on and um
John: You know, I'm leaving, and so... You were just out of town.
Merlin: Are you... I mean, so you're at your house right now?
John: No, no, no, no.
John: I'm at my deluxe office.
Merlin: Okay, okay.
John: With you in quadraphonic, hydroponics.
Merlin: You still got hydroponics.
Merlin: And you still got your internet running, which is nice.
Merlin: Yeah, it's nice to have internet.
Merlin: Nice to have internet.
Merlin: And so, but then you're... When is the cruise?
Merlin: It's pretty soon, right?
Merlin: Isn't it, like, coming up?
John: Yeah, the cruise is coming up.
Mm-hmm.
John: Cruises coming up, and like in all things that you wait for all year, then when it arrives, you're like, oh, God, do I have to do this?
John: But that's how I feel about everything.
Merlin: Oh, God, believe me, I understand.
Merlin: I have become such a creature of habit.
Merlin: The idea of even doing fun things is like, nope, hard pass.
Merlin: Thanks, I'm good.
Merlin: Yep, yep, hard pass.
Merlin: I'm going to go watch the OA again.
Merlin: I'm just going to have another night in, I believe.
Merlin: What is the OA?
Merlin: The OA is a Netflix series starring Britt Marling, who's a very interesting actress and producer.
Merlin: There's something mysterious that has happened with this woman.
Merlin: She gathers a group of people together.
Merlin: It's kind of a sci-fi-ish thriller.
Merlin: Supernatural thriller?
Merlin: Kind of supernatural.
Merlin: What I would say, I'll tell you what Syracuse told me.
Merlin: Go and watch the first episode, and you'll get a pretty good feel for it.
John: Isn't that interesting how some shows the advice is you have to watch a few episodes.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: And some of the shows the advice is just go watch the first episode and you'll and that'll explain it to you.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, there's some times where, and I, you know, we can all agree on cheese.
Merlin: We can all agree or disagree about these things, but I think there are definitely some kinds of media properties where there's a good starting place where you could say to somebody, okay, and I do this a lot and I feel free to disagree with me people, but I'll frequently say like, okay, before you get real into this or get real invested or buy lots of things, go and watch this episode.
Merlin: It's not
Merlin: What I'll frequently think or say is it's not the best episode.
Merlin: It's not my favorite episode, necessarily.
Merlin: But it's a really representative episode.
Merlin: It's a good representative episode.
Merlin: So, in other words, what I'm trying to give people is the opportunity to say, if I hate this episode, it's a really interesting TV, or I hate this particular comic, that's a pretty good indication you're not going to...
Merlin: warm up to it suddenly after watching Seventeen.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Well, I know that you do that.
John: You're often saying, like, this, you know, here's the song that you should, this song is the door to this band.
John: This episode is the door to the TV show.
John: I, of course, would always be somebody that was like, must start at the beginning, must watch the credits from the beginning.
Merlin: I'm definitely not like that.
Merlin: And I appreciate why people are.
Merlin: But, like, for example, with Bandariam,
Merlin: For example, something like... I'm not going to come up with a good example.
Merlin: Even though Reckoning is my favorite album, I could not tell you that that's the best place to start.
Merlin: I would be very open to someone saying even something like Life's Rich Pageant.
Merlin: That might be a better place to start.
John: Well, if you listen to the Long Winters catalog in the order that we presented them, the first song of the first album, we intentionally made it totally not representative of the sound.
John: We were a pop hit.
John: um it's one of the great pop songs oh no i'm sorry give me a moment is how it starts in my head it always starts with car parts but well right i think that's how it that's probably how it should have started that's how a normal album that's i mean it's how it feels it starts because the first song is a six minute long like tape loop uh like confusion party two pianos down the stairs
Merlin: Tape loop confusion part.
Merlin: That's what it is.
Merlin: Yeah, it's kind of, it reminds me, in my head, I haven't listened to it in a few months, but in my head, it caused my Neil Young just a little bit.
Merlin: Not nothing that's aping it, but it's got that kind of like, kind of sound.
Merlin: You know what I mean by that noise?
John: I do.
Yeah.
John: I did not intentionally do that, but Neil Young is, you know, major influence on me and that kind of feeling.
John: That's the feeling I was going for.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Good way to put it.
John: And I think when you think about my influences as a fan of music, none of them are present in my own recorded music, but the feelings are, I hope.
John: That provides a lot of clarity.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: So, uh, so yeah, but that, you know, that song was the one that we literally cut the two inch tape into, into pretty tiny pieces and threw them up in the air and reassembled them.
John: Wow.
John: Really?
John: I never told you how we made that song.
John: That's very European.
John: If you, if you look, if you listen to the first minute of that tune, uh, Chris Wall and I sat with the two inch tape machine and we made a chalk mark on
John: on every kick and snare as the tape went over the head you know you go oh my gosh and then find the little find the hit that is some old world craftsmanship yeah it was this was back back before computers my friend that's right that's right we'd make a little chalk mark there and then we took razor blade and cut the tape into all these sections and
John: which was between every kick and snare section.
John: And those sections of tape are two feet long, probably, because the tape is moving so fast across the head.
John: But then we had this whole pile, this spaghetti pile of tape that represented all these drum parts.
John: And it had piano and everything on it.
John: We threw them up in the air, arranged them completely chaotically, and then taped them all back together.
John: And had no idea what it was going to sound like until we...
John: We press play, right?
John: You put it all together and it was like, I hope this is cool.
John: And then it ran through and it's that whole... I kind of can't believe it was that chaotic because it...
Merlin: it's really it really works yeah and it doesn't work as like you know stockhausen or something it doesn't work as like craziness like it works as like slightly menacing opening sort of like a little bit like uh berlin david bowie kind of feeling well of course it's chris wallow why did i even say that that was a dumb thing to say
Merlin: Well, and what's interesting is that... Isn't he a giant fan of that?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like the stuff with the mics with the delay and stuff like that.
John: Yeah, you put the mic in the toilet.
John: You got this guy over here.
John: You put the rat in the toilet.
John: See which one survives.
Merlin: Is that a James Bond reference?
John: No.
John: You fill the drum with rats.
John: Fill the drum with rats.
John: Put the drum inside the mic.
John: Try that.
Merlin: I thought he meant an oil drum.
Merlin: I didn't know he meant a snare.
Merlin: No, I expect you to die.
Merlin: I would like to see what Javier Bardem would do producing your album.
Merlin: I think that would be a very interesting choice for you.
Merlin: I would like it.
John: I would like Javier Bardem to do it, but I would like him to do it while he was learning a new language.
John: Right.
John: So I would like to go to Iceland.
John: And have an entire Icelandic studio where we find the five people in Iceland who are recording engineers but also don't speak very good English.
Merlin: Okay, this is going to take – you're going to need some kind of producers, some second units to probably work out a lot of this.
John: Yeah, because there are only 300,000 people in Iceland, and my sense is that 299,000 of them all speak English pretty well.
Merlin: Is it gnomes that they believe in?
Yeah.
John: I believe they do believe in gnomes.
John: Okay.
John: Yes.
John: We're not gnomes.
John: So we'll get them there, and then Javier Bardem will be there, but he'll be learning Icelandic.
John: Oh, this is so good.
John: Right?
John: So he'll be doing all of the production work.
Merlin: This is like Kubrick throwing tennis balls at Arlie Ermey.
John: Like, let's really see what you can do here.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: Let's put the drum inside the mic.
John: Let's not put the maggots on the drum.
John: Mind blown.
Merlin: And he's going to be sitting there just like... He's sitting there with Google Translate going, why is there no Icelandic in here?
Merlin: Yeah, going, okay, friendo.
Merlin: And I'm there trying to get my vision across, right?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah, but you're all performing and you're interacting on a much more pure level, unhindered by languages.
Merlin: They call it the Sapir-Whorf effect.
John: This is really early to mid-2000s indie rock talk right here.
John: Nobody does this anymore.
John: No.
John: Everything's changed.
Merlin: Everything's computers now.
Merlin: You get an app.
Merlin: Okay, so what was the phrase?
Merlin: Put...
Merlin: The drum inside the microphone.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Is that how it's in Icelandic?
Merlin: Let me have the robot read it to you.
Merlin: Hang on a second.
Merlin: Alexa.
John: Do that again.
Merlin: Okay, hang on.
Merlin: Sorry, I'm doing it through my headphone.
Merlin: Now, imagine Javier Bardem saying that.
Merlin: Sure, saying that.
Merlin: Then he takes out his teeth.
John: And then they look at each other from underneath their little gnome hats.
Merlin: Is that like a big red dunce cap?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And then they run into their little earthen mound.
John: And I'm like, okay, here we go.
John: Ready?
John: One, two, three.
John: Would Bjork be involved?
John: Bjork?
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: She's the governor general of Iceland.
Merlin: She lives in a house over there.
Merlin: God, I love that.
Merlin: I love that song so much.
Merlin: See, now I need to equate myself with more Bjork.
Merlin: I've been informed that it's Bjork, not Bjork.
Merlin: I always said Bjork, and I'm told that that's wrong.
Merlin: Do you have a thought on this?
Merlin: Is it Bjork or Bjork?
John: Well, whenever I'm in Paris, I like to think that I will take a trip to Deutschland.
John: Yes.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Nicaragua.
John: I will meet with my friend Helmut
John: And we will go to Roma.
John: Roma.
John: Take a train to Roma.
John: So, yeah.
Merlin: They had to change the capital.
Merlin: It used to be called Gypsies, but it was considered offensive.
Merlin: They had to change it to Roma.
John: Healy Hanson.
Merlin: Healy Hanson.
John: Healy Hanson.
John: Healy Hanson.
John: It's a Moog synthesizer, not a Moog.
John: It looks like it says Moog because two O's together...
John: Is ooh in a lot of languages, let's be honest.
Merlin: Well, it's like one of the canonical double vowel sounds.
John: Right.
John: But if you want to say it's I'm not.
John: You know what?
John: I was about to say I'm not going to argue with you.
John: But in fact, I will argue with you because I have been trying to figure out the right way to pronounce that for 25 years.
John: And it isn't a question of the right way to pronounce it because it's been established.
John: That it's Moog.
John: The question is, what is the correct way to pronounce it in any given social situation?
Merlin: I think this is super interesting because it's really easy to find yourself looking like an asshole.
Merlin: And I think in this day and age, it's important to make...
Merlin: To pick your sides, make your decisions about when you want to be an asshole.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And you know what I mean by an asshole.
Merlin: I mean somebody who's frequently pointing out to you that you're pronouncing Nicaragua wrong or something like that.
John: You know, the world in which we grew up, our educational world, like at what point did you start pronouncing Goethe?
John: Like, correctly slash with a lot of backspin.
Merlin: Well, see, that's a great example of the internet pronunciation problem, which we all are very familiar with, where you could have somebody, you run across something many, many, many times, and you've never had to actually say it out loud.
Merlin: Right.
John: We never would have thought this the internet pronunciation problem.
Merlin: I would have said ghost.
Merlin: This was the dictionary.
Merlin: I would have said it's ghost.
Merlin: I would have thought it was ghost.
John: But then I went to college, and they said Goethe.
John: Right.
John: But that was long before the Internet.
John: That was your encyclopedia pronunciation.
John: That's true.
John: Right.
John: Goathe.
John: The first time you're in college and you say, well, so are we reading Goathe this quarter?
John: And then they're just this pile on.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Now you're the other kind of asshole.
John: Right.
John: But there's Goethe, and then there's Goethe.
John: Then you put the real... If your professor has written a book in German... You want to put some mustard on that sausage.
Merlin: Goethe.
Merlin: Goethe.
Merlin: But you know the umlaut trick.
Merlin: I told you the umlaut trick, right?
Merlin: You pronounce the vowel like you normally would.
Merlin: Goethe.
Merlin: Let's say you want to say...
Merlin: You make an O, you say an O, but you make your mouth in the shape of an E while you're pronouncing the O. Try this and see if your mind's blown.
Merlin: You can't do it.
Merlin: You can't do it.
Merlin: You got the wrong shape.
Merlin: Mouth.
John: That's a nice trick.
John: Yeah.
John: Not on the asshole.
John: My mouth is just made to say for the longest time.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: That's where it is.
John: They're doing the umlaut.
Merlin: Oh, you're right.
John: No, they're not.
John: So Moog Moog, it's a question of, if I'm standing in a room with a bunch of Icelandic music producers, of course I'm saying Moog.
John: And Javier Bardem.
John: Yeah, I'm not going to get chased out of there.
Mm-mm.
John: But if I'm standing in a group of lay people who will have no idea what I'm talking about because everyone in the world says Moog when they look at a thing that says Moog.
John: you know, where's the balance?
John: You don't want to say, like, okay, it's, well, so I was playing a Moog, and then the one person in the room who took class at the Art Institute is like, I think it's called Moog.
Merlin: This is the problem with becoming an asshole.
Merlin: First of all, the person who is really, really excited to learn, this is a total interpersonal turns out.
Merlin: Like, when you discover that something is pronounced a certain way, okay, there's a really good
Merlin: I think extremely good time travel movie called Primer.
Merlin: And it's this very low budget film that this guy put out.
Merlin: It's fantastic.
Merlin: But the thing is, you might not even have recognized what I just said because everybody in the world calls it Primer.
Merlin: When it was put out, the director called the movie Primer.
Merlin: But guess what happened?
Merlin: Everybody in the world pronounced a primer, so now even he has to pronounce a primer, or he's going to look like an asshole.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's not primer, it's primer.
Merlin: Now, the people in the interpersonal turns out culture who are so excited to have a new way to correct strangers, they are going to be the last person on the fucking planet to realize that they're the asshole.
Merlin: And so sometimes, so then what do you do?
Merlin: You're in a room with a bunch of little kids with a synthesizer, and you go, oh, have you checked out the Moog?
Merlin: And the little kids go, I know how to read.
Merlin: That says Moog.
Merlin: And you say, well, actually, it's pronounced Moog.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: It was a guy's name.
Merlin: It was a guy's name.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Say his name.
Merlin: Say his name.
Merlin: Say my name!
Merlin: And so then, here's the thing.
Merlin: Maybe, here's the problem.
Merlin: You know music teachers, right?
Merlin: This is going to be the worst.
Merlin: So if you did try to say, oh, that's right, that's a Moog synthesizer, guess what's going to happen?
Merlin: Well, actually, now the music teacher is going to be an asshole and say it's pronounced Moog, and you just got double turns out.
John: Because the problem is, right, that there's another thing in play here, which is we're back to that guy in Ithaca who said, I never try to speak to people in their own dialect.
John: I just talk the way that I talk, and they come to me.
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: The guy you met, and he was... Oh, God, this goes back to maybe the Super Train episode.
Merlin: This is the guy...
Merlin: And you had a little patois where you would meet somebody from New Orleans and you start talking about guarantee, right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Shuck and jive in a patois.
John: I was thinking that I was blending in, that I was getting along better.
Merlin: You're going to help these simple people be more comfortable with their provincialisms.
John: I did not have a lot of I didn't have a lot of firsthand experience with with with with like dialect.
John: Right.
John: Or like, you know, you grew up in Alaska and everybody speaks like they're from Oklahoma.
John: But I have to ask you, please tell me that's coffee.
John: Yes.
John: Okay, good.
John: Did you think that after 300 episodes of this show that I had finally gotten to a point where I was just going to pee in the show?
John: Oh, well, I do it all the time, but I mute.
John: But now I'm going to open my seltzer, too.
John: You know, I do have a mute button.
John: I keep forgetting that I have it.
John: Yes, you do.
John: Um, no, I'm making coffee and, uh, and I'm making, oh my God, it's this terrible, terrible stuff.
John: I, uh, my, my, my, my world is all upside down and I'm actually using these weird little Nescafe packets.
Merlin: Oh no, did you run out of free coffee again?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, it's not that I ran out of it.
John: It's that I don't want to deal with it.
John: You have to grind it?
John: Oh no, it's not that.
John: It's just that I don't want to, I don't want to clean up, clean up after it.
Merlin: Oh, I hear that.
Merlin: We got a new grinder.
Merlin: I'm very happy with it.
Merlin: You'll have to tell me about it.
Merlin: Is it a burr grinder?
John: Shit dog.
Merlin: Is it a fucking monster?
John: Of course it's a burr grinder.
John: The problem with the Moog problem is if you say Moog because you think that you're helping people that you don't want to sit and have a lengthy explanation.
John: It's the poverty of diminished expectations.
John: Yeah, and then somebody's like, actually, it's Moog.
John: Then you are put in a very awkward position of saying, oh, well, I was saying it dumb because I thought you were dumb.
Yeah.
John: And then you really are like, then the crosshairs are on you because, huh, that actually doesn't, that's not as good sounding as you thought it sounded at first.
John: You're not helping anybody.
John: You're just, you're just an asshole.
John: Yeah.
John: You're just, you're maybe you're still not confident that it's Moog.
John: Somebody asked me the other day, is it Porsche or Porsche?
John: And I was like, Oh fuck.
John: You know, you're now I'm 10 years old again.
John: And I'm trying to say like, I think it's Porsche.
John: Yeah.
John: But I'm pretty sure it's Porsche.
John: I've been saying Porsche for a long time, but I did once upon a time say Porsche, and now you've sowed that tiny bit of doubt in my head again.
John: Oh, no.
John: Obviously, the Germans say Porsche.
John: E.B.
Merlin: White would say, try to rewrite the sentence without using the word.
Merlin: If you don't know what it means, if you have to look it up, use a different word.
Merlin: Yeah, use a different word.
Merlin: You know, I was a fan of... Like Frankenreich, too.
Merlin: I was a fan of the athletic wear and shoe company from Portland with the swoosh.
Merlin: Well, I was a fan.
Merlin: I was a wearer.
Merlin: You called them Nike, didn't you?
Merlin: I called them Nikes until ninth grade.
Merlin: I called them Nikes.
Merlin: So, you know, you had to figure out what side you were on.
Merlin: Which side are you on, boy?
Merlin: Which side are you on?
Merlin: Are you going to be a Nike person?
Merlin: Are you going to be an Adidas person?
Merlin: Are you going to be an OP person?
Merlin: Or are you going to be a Lightning Bolt person?
Merlin: I was a Lightning Bolt person, and I was a Nike person.
Merlin: I don't even know what a Lightning Bolt is.
Merlin: Lightning Bolt shirts, OP shirts?
Merlin: Lightning Bolt shirts.
Merlin: Lightning Bolt shirts.
Merlin: Am I having a stroke?
Merlin: It's a surfy shirt.
Merlin: It's a surfy shirt that was popular in the early 80s.
Merlin: Lightning Bolt?
Merlin: Is that the name of the brand?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: You've never heard of this.
John: Interesting.
John: Because I'm from the West, right?
John: Is this some kind of East Coast surfwear?
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't.
Merlin: Lightning Bolt.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, look at that.
Merlin: And the big bolt.
Oh, look at that.
John: There are a lot of things growing up in the West that I was very surprised to discover there was an East Coast version of.
John: Hellman's and Best.
John: Well, that, for sure.
Merlin: Was it Carl's Jr.
Merlin: and Hardy's?
John: Well, no, it wasn't so much that stuff.
John: The two things that really surprised me were East Coast surf culture, because my brain...
John: just couldn't wrap around the idea that there was any kind of surfing on the East Coast, and I still don't really believe it.
John: I mean, I've seen people do it, but it just feels like
John: I don't know.
Merlin: It seems a little cute.
John: It seems like something you're doing to prove a point.
John: It's a little Jamaican bobsled team.
John: I'm feeling very Olympic today.
John: What the hell are you guys doing?
John: These aren't surfable waves.
John: And I'm not even a surfer.
John: I'm not saying it...
John: I'm not saying it from a place of, like, dude, bro, that's not even a wave.
John: I'm saying, like, that's just not, this isn't your culture at all.
John: It was invented a long way from here.
John: And it does, yeah, it feels like, I remember.
Merlin: I'm trying to avoid using the word Western because Western seems a little bit America-centric.
Merlin: I would say surfing feels like what I will call a Pacific thing.
John: A Pacific thing.
John: That's precisely right.
John: I went back to Anchorage in 1991 or something and went to a bar and there were a bunch of guys standing around with chain wallets and loser shirts, you know, like beanie hats.
John: And I was like, you guys, this isn't from here.
John: Don't do that.
John: You're not grunge.
John: It didn't import like that.
John: But of course, at that point, that was happening all around the world, right?
John: There were people in Miami that were walking around with that look.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I remember when it first arrived in Florida, a friend of mine started wearing what I would then call a trucker wallet.
Merlin: And I was like, I think he maybe lived in, been to New York or lived in New York.
Merlin: And I was like, it seemed so peculiar to me.
Merlin: It seemed like one of those affectations, like suddenly getting into macrame, where you're like, you sure that's where you want to go with this?
John: The first time I saw a trucker wallet, though, it was absolutely the province, and I'm talking about in the 70s.
John: Yeah.
John: It totally represented Smokey and the Bandit land.
Merlin: Oh, there's a reason it's called a trucker.
Merlin: Every trucker had that wallet.
John: That's right.
John: But then by the time the 90s came around, it was pure ironic trucker wallet.
Merlin: What are you keeping in there?
Merlin: Earplugs and your vape pen?
Merlin: What are you doing with that?
Merlin: You did it because you would carry a huge amount of cash plus the currencies of the world.
John: Currencies of the world, that's right.
John: And every ticket stub for every show that I ever went to.
John: But my first trucker wallet, in fact, the trucker wallet that was with me for 95% of my trucker wallet years was a trucker wallet that I'd been given by my brother Bartley.
John: Um, in about 1980, it had been his and it had hand tooled leather and it was, it had already been really like, um, like broken in really broken in.
John: And the leather was that color of kind of like, uh, almost caramel.
John: It wasn't like a light leather, but the tanning had been worn off of it for so long that it was this shade of like a pair of well-worn boots.
John: And he gave it to me in 1980.
John: And even then, I was only 12 and I looked at it and was like, are you kidding me?
John: I'm like going to college.
John: and stuff so why would i want this piece of white trash ephemera right like this is just what is this it's like giving somebody one of your coal mining tools exactly exactly like oh was this the pulley that you used to get the donkeys to pull the stumps out of the out of the zone i get the feeling you're going to be a lifetime renter i don't i don't want to
John: Here's my pick.
John: Yeah, I don't have a CDL.
John: Like, I don't need this.
John: I'm going to go to college.
John: I'm taking French 101 in college.
John: He's like, son, I wanted you to have my old bridal.
John: So this is my father's buggy whip case.
John: I never.
John: Yeah.
John: Or worse.
John: It wasn't even like a practical thing.
John: It was like he handed me his Shriners fez.
John: Right.
John: Something that was just like a denoted subculture.
John: I was never going to join.
Merlin: Another one of those baffling male rituals where you're like, what is this?
Merlin: You know, this is my penis pump.
Merlin: It was my grandfather's penis pump.
John: But it's like, yeah, here you go, son.
John: It's a Western-style, you know, like cowboy Western-style purse on a chain.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And here you go.
Merlin: I mean, if somebody was just seeing them for the first time in probably the 70s, you'd think like, well, that's a really big checkbook.
Merlin: It kind of looked like a checkbook.
John: Yeah, like a purse checkbook.
John: Or what a lady might call a clutch.
John: A clutch, that's right.
John: Except it's on a chain.
John: And Bart had carried this thing through all of his trucker years, gave it to me, and it sat in a drawer for...
John: I guess what seemed like an eternity, but it was really only 10 years because I got it like in early 80s and by the early 90s.
John: Oh, right.
John: Very, very, very, very early, early on in grunge times.
John: I was like, huh, I have one of those.
John: And
John: I went and dug it out of a drawer and was like, look at that.
John: Doesn't look so stupid to me now.
John: And all of a sudden, I had not a trucker wallet that I had just recently purchased.
John: I had a trucker wallet that looked like it had been with me forever.
John: Boy, talk about a score.
John: Right?
John: And then it continued to be with me.
John: I mean, that thing lasted all the way through my trucker wallet years, way past when everybody else was like, well, that's not what we're wearing anymore.
John: Do you remember there was a period where trucker wallets turned into giant chains that people were...
John: Wearing all the way around there, like, Ken Stringfellow on one of our tours wore a chain that, like, connected to his vest like a watch fob.
Merlin: He's like a walking F.W.
Merlin: Murnau movie.
John: So, like, not exactly.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Right, right, right.
John: But it was the width of one of those old chains that you would use to chain your bicycle to the student union.
John: Oh, like the big heavy gauge links.
John: Heavy gauge thing, but it's running from the center of his belt buckle all the way around.
Merlin: It looks like he made it at home, like the time I tried to make clove cigarettes by taking apart my mom's Winstons and putting clove dust in it.
Merlin: Putting cloves in them?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Doesn't work.
Merlin: Doesn't work.
Merlin: Yeah, it was.
John: And it hung down around his knee.
John: And I was like, first of all, Ken, it's 2002.
John: Like nobody's I mean, the only people that are rocking this now are the people with really big leg jeans and like and who have pacifiers around their necks.
John: Like this is not a look that's that's rock that you're rocking.
John: But even then, I still had my chain wallet.
John: I mean, it didn't have a big, long chain.
John: It had a short chain.
John: But that chain wallet saved my ass.
John: A dignified chain.
John: Saved my ass a couple of times.
John: It also fucked me up a couple of times.
Merlin: Oh, yeah?
Merlin: Give me one of each.
Merlin: What do you really remember?
Merlin: When you go back, you and the wallet go back, what do you think of as your highlights, real?
John: Well, the two big problems were that the wallet had so much stuff in it, so much money and so many ticket stubs and so many currencies of the world, that driving for eight hours a day in the van across this great nation of ours, I started to develop back problems.
Merlin: Because I was sitting on I'm avoiding the George Costanza joke here, but this is really true.
Merlin: You actually.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: I was sitting on a giant, super hard leather pillow on one butt cheek.
John: And my spine was compensating for it.
Merlin: And I was always like, ah.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: That's a chiropractic nightmare.
Merlin: You're making yourself be off kilter.
Merlin: It's like developing a limp on purpose.
John: It was awful.
John: And so then I started, when I realized it, I started driving and I would pull my wallet out and kind of sit it.
John: on the back of the van seat while I drove.
John: But invariably, I would forget that I had done it.
John: So we'd pull up into a gas station.
John: I'd put it in park.
John: I'd say, all right, guys, you know, 20 minutes, get your hot case, and I'm going to fill it up.
John: And I'd step out of the van, and this wallet would swing on its chain like a cannonball.
John: It must have weighed like a pound.
John: And it did.
John: And so I'm at some...
John: one of those heavy-duty truck stops that's out there somewhere in West Texas or whatever, like a truck stop where the degree of truckerness is high.
John: I don't know if you've ever heard of the truck stop that has a bunch of white tigers, like literally living tigers in very small cages just on a cement slab right behind the gas station.
John: And it's like, Tiger Gas Station!
John: And you go around there and there's like
John: Five live Tigers just in cages just with the Sun beating down on them and you're like, how is this legal?
John: How is this possible and you like it's like you walk you walk away from that truck stop like Something's deeply wrong with the world something.
John: How did this?
John: How did this awful awful awful person out here in the middle of nowhere get five Tigers?
John: How do you do that?
John: And if you wanted five Tigers wouldn't you want it wouldn't it be because you love Tigers and
John: Is it just that the guy got five tigers in order to get people to come to his gas?
Merlin: It's probably a real pain in the ass to get some tigers, and it seems like it's costly and it's difficult, and it seems like you'd want to maybe take care of them.
Merlin: Yeah, what are you feeding them Alpo?
Merlin: Yeah, no, that's no good.
John: And also, you're not trying to derive traffic to this truck stop.
John: There's no other place to get gas for 400 miles.
John: This doesn't have to be an attraction.
John: But so I would pull up to these type of truck stops where everybody else there was like cutting speed on the dashboard of their truck.
John: They all they all had killed the prostitute at least once in their lives.
John: And I jump out of the van and my wallet swings.
John: And half the time, by that point, the snaps didn't always work.
John: And so my wallet swings out on the biggest, like, sort of swinging on a vine that it could do and throws all of my ID and all of my money just out across the pavement into the wind.
John: And I'm just like, howdy, fellas.
John: Hey, just me old guy over here with my long-haired.
John: And Sean steps out in a top hat.
John: And I'm like, oh, dead.
John: Hello, guys.
John: But so that was – those were a couple of times when it really like screwed me over.
John: But there was one particular time where it truly, truly, truly – all the years that I wore that wallet on a chain, it really paid for itself.
John: And it was – I was on my walk across Europe.
John: And I was in southern Romania.
John: I had made it across the Carpathians.
John: I felt like I was on the downhill slope.
John: I was headed to Cryova.
John: I was almost to the Danube.
John: And I had this – because I did not understand anything about the geography of Bulgaria, I did not understand that there were also –
John: mountains in bulgaria that i was not i wasn't just coming down to the danube and get on a huck finn raft and be in istanbul i was gonna go across this river and then i had a whole other crazy country to go across before i got to the the next crazy country but i'm in romania and i'm like you know romania had been such a challenge for me it was like so hard uh to travel in this
John: This fantastic country, but just like it had thrown me for a loop every single day, threw me for a new loop.
John: And I was out.
John: It was super hot.
John: I was down in that sort of southern mountain runoff country, and I found a little bench on the side of the road.
John: And I sat on this bench in the middle of the day, and I was eating a hard-boiled egg and just resting my feet for a little bit.
John: And these two little girls come along the road and one of them is eight and one of them is six.
John: And they see me on the bench and they're,
John: They're very curious and not at all shy.
John: And there's nobody in that country that I met that was especially shy.
John: But they're not shy and they come over and they're standing a respectful distance from me.
John: But they're like, hi, who are you?
John: What are you doing?
John: And I'm like, hi, I'm an American and I'm walking.
John: Uh, down the road and they're like, interesting, interesting.
John: And they're, you know, and, and we're flirting and they're, you know, and they're asking me questions about my bag and about my boots and they're in their little, um, you know, um, sort of chintz fabric skirts with pants.
John: You know, kind of knees torn leggings and some, you know, they're like they're pretty picturesque as like almost costumed, almost costumed.
John: And I'm talking to them, and I'm like, oh, would you like a little bit of – I had some kind of little – I mean there wasn't a lot of like snack food or stuff, and I don't think I held out my egg.
John: But I was like, oh, do you want some peanuts or something?
John: I had some little nuts or something that I could give them.
John: And they were like, yeah, sure, you know, take the nuts.
John: And then all of a sudden the six-year-old, the smaller one – oh, because I was sitting there and I had my wallet sitting on the bench next to me because I'd been going through.
John: The six-year-old grabs it and runs.
John: For a minute.
John: For exactly two feet.
John: And then it –
John: It yanks back out of her hand, and just because of the angle of her arm or whatever, it yanks back and just lands right back where it was on the bench.
John: Oh, wow.
John: You couldn't ask for that to go better.
John: And they both – and the big one was also like as soon as the little one had her hand on the wallet, they both sprinted.
John: And so now they're standing – So it sounds like they've done this before.
John: This is not a new trick.
John: Right.
John: Now they're standing 10 feet away from me and I'm still sitting on the bench, still with the hard boiled egg, still with the wallet next to me there.
John: And they're both looking at me like I had, like I had done a kind of sorcery that they had, you know, because they are, you're like a Hong Kong, like, like a Kung Fu movie guy, just like stroking your mustache.
Merlin: Like, that's right.
Merlin: I did that.
Merlin: That's right.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, like this is their this is their normal game, like their little burglars.
John: And for all I know, their brother or their dad was like right around the corner or or watching from the weeds or something.
John: But this was this was not their first rodeo.
John: And they both got these huge smiles on their face.
John: And these, you know, like whenever you see a six year old girl with a really knowing look.
John: Yeah.
John: Where she was just like, well played.
John: This time.
John: And I was like, yeah.