Ep. 267: "Vintage Mops"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Merlin, man.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: How are you going?
Merlin: I'm going pretty good.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, it feels weird to do this on Thursday.
Merlin: Yeah, it's weird, right?
Merlin: What do you normally do on Thursdays?
Merlin: Thursday is usually my admin day.
Merlin: Oh, you do admin?
Merlin: Well, you know, people who have jobs, they use that phrase, I'm working from home.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What does that mean?
Merlin: Oh, you know, well, for men, it usually means masturbation.
Merlin: But Thursday's my day when I usually take care of lots of little things that just kind of keep things running.
John: Do you do that?
John: I mean, do you take care of little things or is it just the day that you set aside to take care of little things and then get distracted?
Yeah.
Merlin: um well you know how it is it's an ongoing it's like painting the golden gate bridge right you're always painting the golden gate bridge you're never done painting the golden gate bridge you know about this like there's always like basically it takes a year the way it's scheduled is supposedly it takes a year to paint the golden gate bridge and so basically you know you're just you're painting it you're painting parts you're painting it you're never not painting the golden gate bridge because it always needs some painting
Merlin: I understand that, and I love that.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like life as boat ownership.
Merlin: So it could be stuff that's as simple as, it could be just like day-to-day stuff, like I want to make sure we're caught up on dishes and pans, because maybe you've got a chicken pan that's been sitting around for a day or two.
Merlin: Chicken pan.
Merlin: You get a chicken pan sometimes.
Merlin: You just don't want to clean a chicken pan, right?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I've never cleaned a chicken pan, but then I don't generate chicken pans.
Merlin: We generate chicken pans.
Merlin: We're a chicken family.
Merlin: We do a lot of things in pans.
Merlin: But then there could be stuff moving up the ladder.
Merlin: You get into the equally boring stuff, like make sure that there is toilet paper in the house and that it has been properly located to the bathroom where needed, deployed, catching up on supplies.
John: I hate to interrupt, but doesn't your toilet paper, isn't that on some kind of Amazon Prime alert system where it's connected to your nest or something?
John: When you get down, it just auto-orders?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It knows that when we drop down to about 68 degrees, it's time for toilet paper.
Merlin: Some of those things you can do, but you've got to be careful, because then you end up with too many paper towels, and then you've got to put that somewhere.
Merlin: Oh, buddy!
Merlin: It's a little bit of an art, but I go through all the pantries.
Merlin: because this is super interesting, but this is what I do on Thursdays.
Merlin: I go through all the pantries to make sure, oh, are we running out of that soy milk drink my daughter likes?
Merlin: All the stuff that nobody but me thinks about, are we running out of half and half?
Merlin: I do all of those things, and I take care of those kinds of things.
Merlin: And I try to fit in on a Thursday, I try to fit in some kind of a nice-to-have.
Merlin: Like, I try to do a nice family thing, surprising family thing on Thursdays.
John: And then Friday, sometimes I go see a movie.
John: Do you ever get a bag of lint balls just for the table?
Merlin: You come in, you say you need a table, just order that pizza right up.
Merlin: But it's my day of power puttering in a lot of ways.
Merlin: But it's nice to talk to you.
Merlin: I feel like it's been a long time.
John: Does anybody in your house use half and half besides you?
Merlin: Honestly, I am mostly off half and half, which makes it difficult because if everybody's doing lots of half and half, it's actually easier to manage.
Merlin: If you have zero people doing half and half, it's not a problem.
John: Right.
Merlin: If you have somebody, two people who are doing lots of half and half, you're getting it regularly enough.
Merlin: The trouble is you get yourself, you get a quart of half and half and it goes a lot faster than you think, especially if you don't remind your husband you need to get more of it.
John: Back in the day, you went through more half and half than any two people I ever saw.
Merlin: I made it.
Merlin: It was more like a Starbucks drink, what I used to make.
Merlin: And now right here, like the thing I just made for our program, that's just black coffee.
Merlin: That's just Black Pete's coffee.
Merlin: Black Pete, we call him.
Merlin: Oh, Black Pete.
Merlin: Berkeley's favorite son.
Merlin: He's a big part of the Dutch culture.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: He had to change his name at Ellis Island.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: That's stupid.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: Also what I do now, I do a very Roderick-ish thing a lot of days, especially if I'm going to do some morning puttering at the house.
Merlin: And so I'm really into those.
Merlin: I like beakers and flasks.
Merlin: I just like the way that they look.
John: Boy, I do too.
Merlin: So I'll take a 1,000-milliliter, a one-liter flask.
Merlin: beaker like a regular old straight up beaker fill it to the top with ice and then i'll cover that with hot coffee and i'll drink that no no half and half oh that's beautiful it's real real good real real good i have i have some giant beakers you still use your steins
John: I'm drinking out of a stein right now.
John: Today's stein is a vintage... Oh, it's a Lowenbrau stein from München in Deutschland.
John: Here's to good friends.
John: Tonight is kind of special.
John: That's right.
John: I think this is a different kind of Lowenbrau, but yeah.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: But in the summertime, I use my giant beakers to make iced tea.
Merlin: It's somewhere between a personal amount and something you'd share with others.
Merlin: It's mostly just a very, very large portion for you.
John: Well, these beakers that I have are...
John: foot tall or 18 inches tall they're like very very you can barely fit them in the refrigerator wow it's like a multi-liter unit yeah right and sometimes i'll make one with iced tea and one with lemonade and that you know and then i just feel like i don't want to drink anything out of them because they're so perfect as they are
Merlin: Looking here, two liter graduated.
Merlin: Oh, look at that.
Merlin: Oh, see, now this is made by Corning, so it's very costly.
Merlin: I don't usually get the Corning brand because they're very, very costly.
John: Do other brands meet your specs?
Merlin: Well, not as much as I'd like, but the truth is you can get a lot of knockoff stuff really cheap.
Merlin: You know what they want?
Merlin: What these animals at Corning want for a two liter...
Merlin: Graduated low-form Griffin beaker?
Merlin: $12.
Merlin: $119.
Merlin: That's outrageous.
Merlin: That's a little more than I'd like to spend.
John: I feel like you can get these at medical and scientific supply auction type situations, like surplus situations, but you don't know what's been in those beakers.
Merlin: I know, I know.
Merlin: It's certainly something to think about.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You see, there's a lot here.
Merlin: But, you know, this is a lot, this is not so dissimilar from our philosophy of making all the bacon.
Merlin: You know, when you're going to make the tea, you might as well make all the tea.
Merlin: The thing is, I make a tea, and this is really bad, but we don't, we haven't for a while had like an iced tea, what would you call it, like a, what do you call it, pitcher?
Merlin: So I just use a blender, I make it in the blender.
Merlin: Isn't that sad?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, it's real sad.
Merlin: What I'll do is I make that Lipton's, that really cheap Lipton's iced tea mix mix.
John: Look, you don't have to tell me.
Merlin: You put in a bag or two of that.
John: That stuff is fantastic.
Merlin: A liter of boiling water, and then you just cover it with ice, and you got iced tea.
Merlin: That's all you got to do.
John: Oh, you put the boiling water.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
John: I mean, you always add an extra step that feels fancy to me.
Merlin: Oh, thank you.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: It's the little things, you know, the little things.
Merlin: And then drinking it, you know, then you put a blender.
Merlin: in your refrigerator that makes your wife happy to come home and see a blender full of tea but you don't you want some of that you don't blend it right you don't you don't use it as a blender you just use it as a function it's not functioning as i should have said no no no no it's the pitcher for the blender device that is water you know resistant what would happen if you blended iced tea
John: Wow.
John: Just with itself.
John: Just with itself.
John: You didn't blend it with anything else.
John: I have to imagine it would be different just because of physics.
John: Yeah, it would aerate it.
John: It would make it light and fluffy, I would think.
Merlin: It would make it foamier.
Merlin: You get a foamy, fluffy, or you get like a Vitamix.
Merlin: You get one of those really serious ones that you can grind up a celery in.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, now take the tea, put in the boiling water, which seems like the fancy step, extra fancy.
John: Put the ice in on the top of it in the blender and then blend it.
John: You take out the bags, right?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: You wouldn't want to have the bags in.
John: Oh, wait.
Merlin: So you're saying let it steep.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What I do is I'm just following the directions on the cheapo Lipton tea.
Merlin: But I think it's I forget if it's one giant bag or two giant bags.
Merlin: I haven't made it in a while.
Merlin: Yeah, and then put it in the boiling water.
Merlin: Now you've got a super strong tea.
Merlin: You could blend that and then add the water.
Merlin: But I'm guessing just because of the accretion of molecules that adding ice to basically bring it up.
Merlin: You could make a slushie.
Merlin: You could make an iced tea slushie.
John: An iced tea slushie.
Merlin: And drink it out with a little baseball cap like from a 7-Eleven.
John: But if your iced tea slushie then melted in the refrigerator over the course of days, would it...
Merlin: It turns into iced tea.
John: It's a Mitch Hedberg thing.
Merlin: It's like Gloria Escalators turn into steps.
John: Would it, though, be indistinguishable from an iced tea made conventionally?
Merlin: There's only one way to find out, and that's science.
Merlin: I'm going to need to buy two blenders, and I'm going to do a side-by-side, a longitudinal study.
John: Oh, you need two blenders because in order for the study to have a control, you'd have the normal tea in the blender that you're not using as a blender.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, how would you do it?
John: Well, you could, instead of buying another blender, you could just buy a pitcher.
John: But that's not science, is it?
John: No, it wouldn't be.
Merlin: You wouldn't have a control.
Merlin: Because then you get leaching.
Merlin: You get molecular leaching off the edges of the other one.
John: Well, and who knows how much psychic reverberation there is inside a blender.
John: Yeah, I mean, can a blender ever really be empty?
John: I mean, really?
John: If you're an ice cube or a teabag and you go in a blender, you've got to be conscious of those blades, even if they're not hooked up to the blender.
Merlin: Treat every firearm like it's loaded.
Merlin: That's exactly it.
Merlin: I can't get my kid to understand that concept.
Merlin: Does she play with a bunch of unloaded firearms and act like they're unloaded?
Merlin: More than I'd like, yeah.
Merlin: No, I got a wrist rocket that I have not put into production yet, and she really likes to play with it, and I'm really trying to persuade her to not play with the wrist rocket.
Merlin: She likes to play with it in the house?
Merlin: Well, it's not loaded, but still.
Merlin: If you imagine, this is a really, really nice wrist rocket.
Merlin: It's got surgical tubing, and it's got a compound crossbow-type component to it, and if memory serves, I think it has a camo grip.
John: What is your...
Merlin: uh imagined use for this high-tech wrist rocket i loved wrist rockets as a kid and i was very destructive with them and that was that was something i uh i think actually somebody got it for me as a gift off my amazon list and i had not put it into production yet i'm imagining my daughter and i will go into the woods and we will we will bond we're not going to hunt for things because nothing's sadder than winging a bird
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's true.
Merlin: Did you get good?
Merlin: Don't point.
Merlin: This is number two.
Merlin: Don't point anything at anyone unless you're trying to kill it.
John: Yeah, unless you're going to send a marble up its ass.
John: Bird's got it coming.
Merlin: Did you get good at Wrist Rocket?
Merlin: It sounds like you did.
Merlin: I got pretty good at Wrist Rocket.
Merlin: I was pretty good...
Merlin: You know, those kinds of peasant weapons.
Merlin: You get the capoeira.
Merlin: You get the bow staff.
Merlin: You get all the stuff like, oh, yeah, you know, the guy who owns all the land says you're not allowed to learn how to fight.
Merlin: So you got to come up with all these like, ah, I got a pitchfork or whatever.
Merlin: I was good with that.
Merlin: I was good at snapping towels.
Merlin: I was great at shooting paperclips from rubber bands.
Merlin: I could shoot.
Merlin: I was really good at shooting McDonald's coffee stirs with a rubber band.
Merlin: Pretty much all of the ad hoc stuff.
Merlin: child weapons, I was pretty good at.
Merlin: I could have been on some kind of the Ocean's Eleven team, I think.
Merlin: So, like, how about spitballs?
John: Pretty good with spitballs.
John: You're talking, like, with a straw?
John: Spitballs with straw spitballs as a weapon any kind of like yeah, it's a weapon of annoyance obviously But yeah, I mean but like when you're lonely everything is fine So I would just sit in a room and just splatter the wall with them Can you imagine an oceans 11 scenario where there's like the peasant peasant weapons kid and there's some button all the way across the room and
John: everybody's like how do we get to the button like the alarm or whatever it can't be anything too sharp and it can't be a bullet what do we have that's hard but soft and can be shot from a distance by somebody who's some kind of a genius with accuracy yeah and we couldn't get in here with anything metal because of the metal detectors and then the kid pulls out the straw and is just like leave it to me his name's steven he never talks and then does it
John: Yeah.
John: How about did you did you have the did you make wooden guns with with like paperclip or like clothes?
John: Right.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Like a Boy Scout kind of thing.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't think I ever did.
Merlin: You like to set things on fire.
John: Is that right?
John: I was a pyro.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was always trying to I was always trying to use household items to make bombs or napalm.
John: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: And I didn't really... You made homemade napalm.
John: I did, yeah.
John: Whoa.
John: And, you know, it's not that hard to make.
John: There are a lot of different recipes for it.
John: It's not safe.
John: No.
John: I mean, it's not... Napalm isn't going to spontaneously explode, but if it does get on you, you're...
John: It's harder to get off.
John: That's why they do it.
John: That's why they called it napalm.
John: That's like a jelly gasoline is the idea?
John: Yeah, it's like gasoline with any kind of laundry detergent.
John: I was making Molotov cocktails all the time and trying to figure out what the best recipe for those was.
John: And I know, I guess partly it's growing up in a rural or semi-rural area where a kid can go out into the, into the acre forested lot in between the two apartment complexes and just start fires all day.
John: And nobody ever, I mean, that was back when nobody ever like went up to a kid and said, what are you doing kid?
John: It was just like, oh yeah, I'm just over here starting fires and
John: There were adults around.
John: They drove by and could see the bonfires I was creating.
John: I just picture what it must have looked like, me, like, stirring a big cauldron of... You would be in a special school so freaking fast today.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: Yeah, I would.
Merlin: I mean, and it wasn't Kufel.
Merlin: Who's the guy who found stuff in your locker room and was disappointed?
John: Jackleford.
Oh, right.
John: He was so disappointed.
John: By that point in time, I was in high school.
John: But this is all stuff that I would I've told you before, right, that being a latchkey kid was its own kind of of like joy and also psychic punishment.
John: none of my friends were latchkey kids.
John: They all came home and their mom was there and she had little sandwiches for them.
John: And then there was TV time and this kids.
John: And, uh, I got home and at my mom's house, you know, I carried a key around my neck on a piece of red, uh, yarn, uh, just a single key.
John: My dad didn't lock his house.
John: So, uh,
John: Depending on whose house I went to after school, I'd go in and then it was like, okay, entertain yourself for the rest of the day.
Merlin: I would do a lot of things that I imagined were scientific.
Merlin: Many of them involved mixing things together, laundry detergents, seeing how much stuff I could flush down the toilet.
Merlin: Did you ever go through a phase like that?
John: No, I was always toilet-averse.
John: That's probably healthy.
John: Did you have a junior science kit?
Merlin: No, my friend John did, and I envied it a little bit.
Merlin: And this was even back in the day when you could make little explosions and stuff, I think.
Merlin: Once again, I liked the beakers, and it came, I think, with some tweezers and a dropper, maybe some reagent, whatever that is.
Merlin: All the science things, did you have stuff like that?
Merlin: Did that appeal to you?
John: The science kit was like the book and devices that tried to teach you how to do magic.
John: People would give me like junior magician kit or junior scientist kit.
John: And like you, I loved the beakers.
John: I loved the little hollow coins and the foam balls and the rings.
John: You could put a microfilm in there.
John: All that stuff.
John: But what I didn't love was reading the instructions.
John: And I didn't love going through a methodical process of learning.
John: It was so hard to do.
Merlin: I think one reason I despise magicians today is because I had such a difficult time trying to make the cup and balls happen.
Merlin: Or the coin where you've got to do the sleight of hand work and all that kind of stuff.
John: You know, being a magician is... I have always felt like it's an example, kind of like being a really good guitar player or really good at anything.
John: All of those things require the...
John: That weird that weird feeling where you envy someone for what must have been a really boring young life and you envy them their anxiety or whatever it was that that that.
John: that drove them to sit and play with cards for six hours a day.
Merlin: Loneliness combined with obsessive nature.
Merlin: The curiosity combined with the willingness and time frame to be able to practice this for hours and hours and hours until it seemed like a normal thing.
John: It's crazy because you look at Ricky J and you go, this guy, I watch him all day.
John: I love him so much.
John: But to get that good at cards and stay that good at cards...
John: You would have to be so different from me.
John: And to do it just seems like murder.
Merlin: I bet he never thinks about toilet paper.
Merlin: The way they make it look in those mini movies I've seen about him is that he just sits in a hotel room and basically just shuffles cards for six hours a day.
Merlin: That's just what he does.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Which is great, considering there are a lot of people that sit in a hotel room and just bite their fingernails.
John: I mean, it'd be great to have a thing that you always did.
John: Just watch Chopped, yeah.
John: But as someone who didn't have that kind of patience or makeup, and I think part of it, and probably as he's doing it, his mind is elsewhere.
John: Yeah.
John: But I always had what I consider to be the advantage of being able to sit for long periods of time and just stare at a spot on the wall.
John: I always felt like in some ways that was my superpower because I never got bored.
John: You could just sit me somewhere and turn my chair facing the corner and I would just drift off into a world of make-believe.
John: ding ding uh was that a mr rogers reference yeah lady elaine and i would stay i would sit in my land of make-believe until something sometimes someone had to come and actually shake me because from across the room they'd been saying john john and i was just a thousand miles away and it used to really worry my dad
John: But my mom was very protective of it, I think because her dad was like that.
John: So I would just sit and stare out the window and I didn't need, couldn't, it was so much more preferable to do that than it would have been to be manipulating cards or reading instruction manuals.
John: But now I see it as kind of like, oh, that was maybe a disadvantage in that all that does is train you to
John: Well, either train you to do that or like it makes your land of make-believe very real to you.
Merlin: is it possible that these are different flavors of a young person dealing with young demon dogs where like you discover like i was not cut out for magic because i don't have the patience or the dexterity or really to be honest the interest but for somebody else like like a ricky jay or like like my friend jamie like somebody who will just sit there and like every spare moment they'll be like there's a coin in their hand or there's a card in their hand and it's it's more like a lifestyle
Merlin: For you, that might be conjuring a fireball or looking out a window or planning World War II again.
Merlin: But I wonder if in some ways, will you find an accommodation for your demon puppies?
John: I think so.
John: I mean, you think about kids that suffer from anxiety.
John: There are a lot of them.
John: And rather than sit and fidget with your thumbnail until you don't have a thumbnail anymore, if you could put cards in that kid's hand and say, like, just do the cards.
Yeah.
John: I think probably people self-soothed a lot like that.
John: And my self-soothing, yeah, there was a lot of World War II.
John: And the fire, the burning, I'm sure there's been plenty of science around pyromaniac kids.
John: I didn't want to hurt anybody.
John: I didn't want to burn out of control fires.
John: I loved keeping a fire under control.
Merlin: There's a lot of angles to it.
Merlin: I don't think it's just as simple as like, oh, you're a psycho bedwetter, like cat killer kid who sets fires.
Merlin: There's like you say, there is the element of control.
Merlin: There's the element of like theatricality.
Merlin: There's a lot to it.
Merlin: I would dig pits.
John: I would.
John: I would schlep down.
John: I mean, I would go through people.
John: I'd find like an open garage and I'd go in there and I would find everything that said flammable on it and I would collect
John: an armload of of different stuff right different kinds of flavors of things and then i would go see what how they burned and what happened if you put them together did they burn differently and the colors that they made and i loved aerosol stuff because you can just get you some right guard and a lighter oh yeah or aquanet aquanet sure oh that's living but i often did it
John: I often would just sit in the house.
John: My dad had one of those fireplaces that was, you could flick a switch and some fire would come.
John: Oh, like a gas?
John: Like a gas fireplace.
John: But you could put logs in it, too.
John: The gas was kind of a fire starter, maybe.
John: You'd put some logs in, turn on the, flip the switch, and it would start a fire for you.
John: Fire starter.
I am no fire starter!
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Merlin: All the great shows.
Merlin: That's also good.
Merlin: That's a controlled environment.
Merlin: You got a pit that you can live with there.
John: It was nice.
John: And I was home alone after school, and I would sit there sometimes with spray paint, which also is a great flamethrower.
John: And I would just light the spray paint and just...
Merlin: blow it into the fireplace just like um and and looking at that now in my imagination it seems a little crazy i think about some i was such a safe undangerous non-threatening good kid but i think just just the toilet alone i'm terrified of what could happen to our toilet
Merlin: Just because I think about, oh, please be careful with what you put down the toilet, because now, you know, I'm an old man, and it's not my obligation to think about what we put in the toilet.
Merlin: I used to ruin the toilet.
Merlin: I would put so many things in the toilet just to literally see, will it accommodate a sponge?
Merlin: Like, I would just do that.
John: Oh, wow, a sponge?
John: Or whatever, or whatever.
Merlin: The mind recoils.
Merlin: You put things in there, and it just goes away.
Merlin: But the nice thing about your dad's gas fire situation is you've already, it's got its own little, not a crucible, but it's a fire-resistant area.
John: So you're in a safe space.
John: But when he came home at night, I can't imagine what residue in terms of smell and other just the polyfluorocarbons in the air, chlorofluorocarbons.
John: He walks in the door and his son's been burning gold spray paint in the fireplace all afternoon.
John: What does that smell like?
John: What are the psychic reverberations in the air of that?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: When I come in the house, I can tell if my daughter's been doing nail stuff.
Merlin: As soon as I open the door, I'm super sensitive.
Merlin: Like, what is that?
Merlin: Is that benzene?
Merlin: We got a leak?
Merlin: What's going on in here?
Merlin: I'm like 50s dad all of a sudden.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, OK, so what's funny is if you were to if one were to say to me, I know you're not, but if one were to say to me, did you ever play with matches?
Merlin: My mind would instantly like do the heads up scan.
Merlin: I would go, no, I didn't play with matches because you say somebody who plays with matches is somebody who goes and sets fires.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's somebody who's, as they say, a pyromaniac in the usual sense.
Merlin: I'll tell you, though, dead honest.
Merlin: I didn't generally play with matches.
Merlin: I very specifically played with matches.
Merlin: If I'm honest, I liked taking a match and then taking another match.
Merlin: You'd like one match, and then you'd like the other match from the first match.
Merlin: Then you could make a little teepee.
Merlin: You could make a little teepee with all the little fiery parts all together at the top.
Merlin: It might be ping pong.
Merlin: You like the bottom of the teepee, and guess what you get?
Poof.
Merlin: Wasn't that satisfying when you get a poof?
Merlin: I did that one time at our restaurant.
Merlin: I was killing time over in the anklet room.
Merlin: And in the side room we used for catered affairs.
Merlin: And yeah, I had a big, big ball of fire and an ashtray shattered.
Merlin: And then everyone came running in.
Merlin: Oh, you created a scene.
Merlin: Yeah, maybe you should be a busboy or something.
Merlin: Because the fire in the restaurant situation is not a direction we want you to go.
John: This was in a time for our younger listeners...
John: There were cigarette machines everywhere.
Merlin: Everywhere.
Merlin: And matches.
Merlin: Matches and toothpicks.
Merlin: Matches and toothpicks.
Merlin: Everywhere you go.
John: All the matches you could ever want.
John: All the matches you could want.
John: And cigarette machines also often, the deluxe ones, had a button on them that if you bought a pack of cigarettes and you pushed the button, it would also give you a pack of matches.
John: Like a little fold-over paper.
John: Yeah.
John: That had the logo of the bar.
Mm-hmm.
John: And most people who bought a pack of cigarettes did not also need a pack of matches because they had fancy lighters from Vietnam.
John: And so as a kid who was in and out of bars a lot because of my father and the fact that he didn't have clear boundaries.
John: Well, he had to do it for his work.
John: Anytime I saw a cigarette machine, I would walk over, find the button and push it.
Merlin: Did you find yourself having to kill time in a bar?
John: Oh, I was constantly killing time in bars.
John: Oh, I got to talk about this.
Merlin: Okay.
John: So you get the free matches that somebody left behind.
John: Yeah, I'd go get the free matches.
John: I would go, you know, I've told you before, right, that I'd go grab a barstool and ask the bartender for a shot of whipped cream.
John: And, you know, 80% of the time the bartender and the person sitting next to me on a barstool thought it was great.
John: And the bartender would bring me a shot of whipped cream.
John: And then, you know, it's kind of like putting peanut butter in a Kong.
John: You can't just get whipped cream out of a shot glass that easily.
John: Further evidence that John might be a golden retriever.
John: With your little tongue.
John: So I'd sit there.
John: And the grownups thought that was great.
John: And then somebody would bring me a basket of peanuts or popcorn.
John: And, uh, but you know, there, that was in an era when nobody felt it was their responsibility to mind somebody else's kids.
John: So after a while I'd get bored, I'd climb down off the bar stool.
John: I'd start wandering around the bar trying doorknobs.
John: Oh, I'm a big, I'm still a big doorknob trier.
Merlin: I always try.
John: I always try a doorknob.
John: Cause who knows where it leads.
John: It may lead into fucking Narnia.
Merlin: It could be Narnia.
Merlin: It could just, it's an invitation to mystery and you'll never know.
Merlin: You lose every doorknob you don't try.
Merlin: I try to get my daughter to understand this.
Merlin: I really like, well, the phrase we use for it, I call it, quote, breaking into things.
Merlin: So we like to, like, places where there's a fence, I'm super into crawling under the fence.
Merlin: Now that she's older, she doesn't like it because she's scared she'll get in trouble.
Merlin: I'm still super into breaking into the local high school and trying every doorknob and seeing what room we can get into because somebody's always, you know what those coaches are making?
Merlin: They leave so many things unlocked.
Merlin: They do.
Merlin: There's so many.
Merlin: You can get in.
Merlin: One day we got in under the stands.
Merlin: One day we got in with the weightlifting equipment.
Merlin: One day we got in where they keep the shot puts.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: I love a doorknob.
Merlin: My eyes are hotels.
Merlin: I'm in a hotel.
Merlin: I'm walking around.
Merlin: We stayed in a hotel over Thanksgiving.
Merlin: That was brand, brand new.
Merlin: It's a hotel in Sacramento.
Merlin: I tried every doorknob.
Merlin: It's amazing how weak the security is on a new hotel.
Merlin: Oh, fuck yeah.
Merlin: You'd go right into a hotel room.
Merlin: You're just walking anywhere.
Merlin: And that area where it says no entry, that's usually not locked.
Merlin: Now, with the keycard thing, it's gotten more complicated.
Merlin: But a lot of times, they just leave that open.
Merlin: And then you see there's sheets in there.
Merlin: Oh, my God, there's an elevator here I didn't know about.
Merlin: That's good to know.
Merlin: Now you know there's an elevator there.
John: When keycards first got introduced, a friend of mine and I were in a hotel that had brand new keycard.
John: you know, locks.
John: We were just trying doorknobs.
John: Door opened.
John: It was into a hotel room.
John: We went in there and started ordering room service and watching cable TV.
John: And they brought us food to the room because I guess the room service, there weren't computers exactly or like not all hooked together.
John: And now when you pick up the phone, they go, Mr. Roderick in 1034, how can I help you today?
John: But then it was like, can we get two pizzas to room, you know, 474?
John: And I mean, we were definitely like sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for
John: We were in a state of mild panic the whole time.
John: Like, when are they going to find us?
John: When are we going to get busted?
John: But we never did.
John: And eventually we finished up.
John: You weren't worried about the house dick?
John: Send up the house dick to come get you?
John: Well, but it was like a Sheraton.
John: I mean, I don't think there was a house dick.
Merlin: They didn't have dicks, probably.
John: The thing that I think it's hard to convey is that in the 70s and the early 80s,
John: There was a lot of stuff left over from the 50s everywhere because the 80s made the 50s look like the 20s.
John: And, you know, there hadn't been a tremendous in downtown areas, especially there hadn't been a tremendous like urban renewal or revitalization, like old buildings were old and
John: If you tried enough doors, like you would find the civil defense bomb shelter door.
John: And you would find the big bins of old flowers that they have.
Merlin: Shit, John, if you just made it into an old storeroom.
Merlin: Nobody cares what's in the storeroom.
Merlin: They just don't want to see it out in the non-storeroom area.
Merlin: You go in there, you know how much shit there could be in a storeroom that you could play with?
Merlin: There were things in there that were...
John: 40 50 years old you would find like just stuff leaning in the corner today even in the early 80s it was still kind of the 50s in a lot of places especially in like places like restaurants and bars it was like a time capsule it really was you'd find you know like you'd go back in some storeroom it's like oh look it's a 48 star flag like they took this flag down in 1950 put it rolled it up and put it in the corner and and uh there's you know space was cheap
John: So, I mean, I got a lot of education by just trying doorknobs because, you know, like storerooms that had office supplies, storerooms that had just mops in buckets, but the mops were old mops.
John: Vintage mops.
John: Yeah, mops that you kind of wanted to be with because they felt like adult stuff.
John: Like, look at these mops.
John: Like, this is what grownups know about.
John: Mops and files.
John: I mean, when Watergate was going on, I was just old enough to be kind of in the room while the TV was on.
John: It was on a lot.
John: That summer boy.
John: It sure was.
John: People were talking about it a lot.
John: And this idea of these burglars, but they weren't like the Pink Panther.
John: They weren't there to steal a diamond.
John: They like went in and
John: And we're going through files.
Merlin: Files.
Merlin: And the enduring image.
Merlin: I saw that movie, I don't know, probably junior high or high school.
Merlin: But the enduring image for me was when the cop rolls up in the beginning to the garage.
Merlin: Not the cop.
Merlin: The security guard notices.
Merlin: What did he notice?
Merlin: They put tape.
Merlin: The tape.
Merlin: The tape on the door.
Merlin: Oh, the tape on the door.
Merlin: It's like, that is so fucking smart.
John: The number of times I've put tape on a door in emulation of G. Gordon Liddy, I can't even tell you.
Oh, my God.
John: And that's, you know, and I learned sometime after that, probably I must have been nine or 10 when someone taught me how to jigger a latch with a credit card card.
John: Yeah.
John: And for a long, long time, you could get into 60% of the doors.
Merlin: I'll tell you, buddy, I don't like to say this.
Merlin: I think the times have changed.
Merlin: It's probably safe to say this now.
Merlin: Something rigid but a little flexible, like a credit card and a paperclip.
Merlin: Almost every house in America, every door in every house in America could be unlocked with a paperclip.
John: Paperclip or in my case, it was we had the season's passes to the ski resort starting when I was seven or eight.
Merlin: And those are slender enough to slide in.
John: Yeah, you had a little laminated card that you could – that you were carrying around all the time.
John: And you could like pop doors.
John: And yeah, I didn't – I never stole anything.
John: I mean I never stole anything that seems –
John: That seemed like anybody was using it.
John: I mean, obviously, like half of a can of old paint and some paper clips or file folders or whatever, empty file folders.
John: I would liberate those sometimes in the process of a game, right?
John: If I was like, if I'd broken into a storage closet...
John: and I was pretending to be the Watergate burglars, and I would steal a couple empty file folders.
John: Let's play Watergate.
John: And then, oh, I was thinking about this the other day.
John: I was driving downtown, and I looked over at a building, and it was one of those office buildings from the 1930s that now you kind of don't see them because when you're in a downtown, the buildings that are most visible are
John: are all these skyscrapers and everybody trying to, you know, have like an arcade in the downstairs.
John: And then there are the iconic buildings, the beautiful ones.
John: But in the 30s and 40s, they built a lot of middle height, 20-story imposing office buildings.
John: And they're made out of stone or brick.
John: They're not metal and glass.
John: And I was driving past one of these and they have very distinctive vibe.
John: And all of a sudden I could just smell it in there.
John: I knew those buildings so well because my dad was in government and we were always going into these buildings.
John: And, you know, those buildings are incredible.
John: Like this, the stairwells are all the step.
John: The stair steps are marble, even even not the formal stairs, but like the back stairs.
John: The railings are brass.
John: The doors are solid oak.
John: Oh, and the restrooms.
John: The build quality of restrooms used to be crazy.
John: So phenomenal.
John: The dividers between stalls were giant slabs of polished marble.
John: I know, I know.
John: And the sound of people walking in the halls in those buildings back when every woman was in high heels and every man had leather-soled shoes.
John: So you'd stand in those places in government buildings and just hear this like clack, clack, clack.
John: You knew that serious adult business was getting done.
John: Yeah, people were snapping their shoes off.
John: I remember when I first had a pair of shoes that made that slap, slap, slap sound on marble.
Merlin: Like a talk, talk, talk with a hard heel?
Merlin: Yeah, I felt so adult.
Merlin: I bought a pair of shoes like that.
Merlin: I call them Tom Waits shoes.
Merlin: I bought those at a Goodwill, probably 1985, and boy, I felt very decisive.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Do you ever, when somebody addresses you...
John: Do you ever click your heels?
Merlin: Oh, I wouldn't.
Merlin: I should I should do that.
Merlin: Is that kind of an Austrian thing?
Merlin: That seems like a Christoph Waltz kind of thing to do.
John: Yeah, I got in the habit.
John: I could see you doing that.
John: I got in the habit of clicking my heels sometimes when when someone addressed me with like, hey, can you help me over here?
John: Or, you know, like.
John: When there was an air of authority or finality to what somebody was saying, I would kind of like, if the expected reply from me was yes.
John: Or at your service.
John: Or at your service or something.
John: If I'm holding a door for somebody, I'll often click my ears.
John: It's not a thing that people do anymore.
John: And I feel like it has a little, there's a militaristic aspect to it.
Merlin: There's a long arc of history that bends toward you eventually being called Commodore.
Yeah.
Merlin: I think you're not far off from just wearing a captain's hat all the time.
John: The thing about a Commodore, you know, that's... Is that L. Ron Hubbard?
John: Well, it's a kind of weird rank.
John: I'm looking it up.
John: Because it's not a rank.
John: It's an office.
John: Oh, look at that.
Merlin: Okay, it says a naval officer of high rank.
Merlin: In particular, an officer in the U.S.
Merlin: Navy or Coast Guard ranking above captain and below rear admiral.
Merlin: uh the president also uh bullet one the president of a yacht club or the senior captain of a shipping line oh wow dress for the job you want john so even in the navy senior captain of a ship how fucking choice would it be for you to be the senior captain of a shipping line well i think that's what what hazelwood was or uh like uh the senior captain of a shipping line but you've got to be good at the sea
John: Oh, you could probably get pretty good at the sea.
John: I feel like getting good at the sea is like getting good at cards.
John: You have to have been getting good at the sea for a long time.
John: You've been on a lot of cruises.
John: Yeah, but I don't think that has anything to do with getting good at the sea.
John: I mean, I love to sit and look at the sea, but when I get close to the sea...
John: The C has a very low hum.
Merlin: Yeah, the C is tough.
Merlin: That's a tough opponent.
Merlin: It is.
John: It is.
Merlin: The C...
Merlin: Does not care about you.
Merlin: Throw a gallon of water at somebody really hard.
Merlin: It kind of hurts.
Merlin: And that's just one gallon.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Think about how many gallons are in the sea, like hundreds.
Merlin: There's got to be at least 60 or 80.
Merlin: There's so many gallons in there.
Merlin: Commodore.
Merlin: But see, Commodore, I like Commodore also because Commodore strikes me is the kind of thing where like, you know, you can get like a, what is it when they give you an honorary doctorate?
Merlin: Commodore seems like a rank that somebody could convey on you.
Merlin: It's exactly right.
John: It's exactly right.
John: I mean, are you familiar with the Kentucky Colonels?
John: Yes.
John: I've known some Kentucky Colonels.
John: Have you?
Merlin: I don't know a ton about it, but yeah, I mean, we're from the part of Cincinnati that's basically Kentucky.
Merlin: But yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: My dad knew a lot of Kentucky colonels.
Merlin: Now, what's the process for that?
Merlin: That's an honorary thing.
John: How does that work?
John: As far as I understand, you have to have done some measurable service to the state of Kentucky.
John: You probably have to be in Kiwanis or similar.
John: Well, Jason Isbell, the singer-guitarist, is a Kentucky colonel, and he said that he would recommend me as a Kentucky colonel because my people are from Kentucky.
John: But I do not feel like I have really done that much in the service of the state of Kentucky.
John: And so it would feel like a Pyrrhic honor.
John: I don't think I would wear Kentucky Colonel.
John: It's like you would ring hollow.
John: But this is the thing.
John: I don't want it.
John: I don't want like like false honor.
John: No, you're not going to steal valor.
John: No.
John: And and and I don't want like I don't want a bunch of appendages.
John: You don't need another white ribbon.
John: No, thank you.
John: You do not prefer it.
John: This is the thing about King Neptune.
John: They can never take that away from me.
John: The Trident?
John: Oh, yeah, of course.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: I'm not going to show up to things in a sash, but I do have a lapel pin.
John: That's true.
John: I have a lapel pin that says I was a King Neptune.
John: And a couple of times during my King Neptune reign this past summer, little old men would...
John: Kind of toddle up to me with their ear horn.
John: And they would say, I was King Neptune in 1961.
John: And we would have this wonderful little bonding moment.
John: Because you realize, oh, well, for you to have been King Neptune in 1961, you must have been like a...
John: a prominent citizen oh well i was you know oh i would never say that but anyway and you know of course they were sure uh and it was a nice little thing so i mean i'm there's some future king neptune the king neptune of 2060 is going to get an ear are you expected to be grooming that person should you be out there seeking out the next neptune is that part of your is that part of your uh duty as a king i had this conversation last night and
John: I went to dinner with Peter Sagal, America's sweetheart, Peter Sagal.
Merlin: He does the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me program.
John: That's correct.
John: They're on tour.
John: And so when people come through on tour, of course, I'll go have dinner with them.
Merlin: Was it just the two of you or was it like Paul Poundstone, Mo Rocca, anybody else come along?
John: None of those people, no.
John: Bill Curtis didn't come?
John: Bill Curtis was not there.
John: I think all those guys have sex abuse accusations now.
John: They've all lost their jobs.
Merlin: So you had dinner with Peter Sagal.
Merlin: and with uh with ken jennings my little pal that's right from your new program uh millennium your new program your new program no no no it's another show old show omnibus there it is oh and you remember that as being an old show the cbs show oh god yes yeah one of my podcast co-hosts the other day had heard a podcast about martha mitchell and they said oh you know martha mitchell and i was like shit dog do i know about martha mitchell you're adorable
John: When you say one of your other podcast hosts, I know these people.
John: You can name them by name.
John: That's unseemly, John.
Merlin: Don't do that.
Merlin: So you went to dinner with Peter Sagal, who's in the clear so far.
John: I was explaining King Neptune, and then the question came up, do I have a hand in picking the next Neptune?
John: And I thought about it.
John: It hadn't occurred to me, right?
John: It had not occurred to me that that would be some authority that I should wield because toward the end of the summer, some of the people from Seafair started sidling up to me and saying, we've never done this before, but would you be willing to be Neptune again next year?
John: Well, you don't get termed out.
John: Well, you do.
John: That's the thing.
John: They've never done that before.
John: There's never been a King Neptune two years in a row.
Merlin: So you're like the Franklin D. Roosevelt of Neptunes.
John: The first King Neptune to ever... Well, I don't know.
John: Maybe they say that every year, and then when it comes time to pick a new Neptune... Oh, sure.
Merlin: Shining you on a little bit.
John: Oh, you're so good.
John: Maybe you should do this next year, and then you never hear about that again.
John: I get that a lot.
John: But I did figure... I did get a little... I was flattered by that, and I would do it again.
John: And so I think that probably clouded my sense of duty.
John: What I should do, I should be the George Washington of King Neptune.
Merlin: You hold the country together by not continuing in the job.
John: That's right.
John: They ask you to be president for life and you say that's not how a democracy works and then you retire to Mount Vernon.
John: You've got to teach them how to say goodbye.
Merlin: Um, so I do feel like I'm going to, I'm going to start thinking about who the next King Neptune should be and start a kind of clear to me that if you lead, they will follow by which I mean, if you get out in front of this and you start, you make this the new Kentucky Colonel, maybe you're out there.
Merlin: And like I say, grooming, well, that's the word with the problematic word, but you, you, you get out there and you figure out, you try to find some new talent for this, some new Neptune material.
Merlin: Well, there's never been Neptune yet.
Merlin: Well, there is a Queen Alcyon.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, has there been a King Neptune that's a woman?
Merlin: You could really destroy the patriarchy with this.
John: You could destroy the patriarchy.
John: There was, for many, many years within the Seafarer organization, there was a King Neptune, and then there was a Miss Seafarer.
John: And King Neptune was some Rotary Club doofus, like myself.
John: And Miss Seafair was a glamour.
John: It was a glamour position, like a Miss America.
Merlin: Did she at any point, did Miss Seafair, which really sounds like Scientology to me, did Miss Seafair at any point ever appear in a bathing suit?
John: No, I don't think so.
John: I think it was a ball gown style pageant.
John: Okay.
John: But she did have like her attendant princesses.
John: So she had a whole court of people and then the king and they appeared together but it wasn't like they were always sitting next to each other.
John: Miss Seafair was off doing these things.
John: The king was off doing these things.
John: Like the king was drinking Boilermakers somewhere with a bunch of cigar chompers and Miss Seafair was doing
John: charity work for the blind okay okay that's nice and then at a certain point in the 80s i'm gonna say they introduced queen alcyon who was like separate from miss seafair and it freed miss seafair up to become kind of like a it's like a scholarship position
John: Whoever Miss Seafair is, there's still a pageant aspect to it.
John: She still has her her attendance, but they're very they're very directed at at charity work.
John: They're there.
John: They work with young girls there.
John: You know, it's there's a lot of the work in the community.
John: And typically Miss Seafair, at least in recent years, has been from.
John: um one of seattle's immigrant communities oh that's cool yeah and often am i am i am i being weird that seems like a kind of a cool thing to do it's often asian pacific island communities oh i approve of that that seems kind of kind of like a cool thing to do it's great and what it means is that this year miss seafarer is from the philippines next year miss seafarer is from samoa and so so forth and so on so it it like it really brings um
John: It sort of illuminates Seattle's diversity and connection to the Pacific Rim and so forth.
John: And then Queen Alcyon is a businesswoman, somebody that is prominent in the community.
John: The expectation is that she's prominent in the same way that King Neptune is.
John: And the two of them are expected to be sort of, yeah, right, chamber of commerce types, business booster types.
John: Yeah.
John: Until me, the closest thing that Seattle had to a hipster King Neptune was Tom Skerritt.
John: Tom Skerritt was King Neptune.
John: Tom Skerritt was, was he Trapper John?
John: He was Trapper John in M.A.S.H., yeah.
John: He was in Top Gun.
John: Tom Skerritt.
John: Oh, how he did the Danger Zone.
John: Yeah.
John: Tom Skerritt is Seattle.
Merlin: Is he a favorite son?
John: He is, yeah.
John: Everybody loves Tom Skerritt.
John: He's not problematic, is he?
John: He's not.
John: Tom Skerritt is, and I don't think I'm giving away too much here.
John: Tom Skerritt is pro marijuana.
John: Oh, he likes the marijuana.
John: And has been for a long time.
Merlin: He's 84 years old.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Holy shit.
John: Always stoned, like profoundly stoned.
John: Really?
John: So he's so delightful to have around because he's got a beautiful face.
John: He's very charming.
John: He looks very amiable.
John: He's so amiable.
John: He's so wonderful.
John: Oh, he was in the Up and Smoke movie with Cheech and Chong.
John: He's had quite a career, Tom Skerritt.
John: And he's got a nice little drawl.
John: He's just very gentle.
John: He's in Harold and Maude.
Merlin: Up in Smoke.
Merlin: Oh, he was in Ice Castles.
Merlin: Oh, of course he was.
Merlin: He was an alien.
Merlin: He was Dallas in Alien.
Merlin: That's what we know him from.
Merlin: Oh, he's so good in that.
Merlin: He was also King Neptune.
John: Really a kind of career capper.
John: So you feel like he was the first hipster King Neptune.
John: Yeah, but he's also like, he's an actor.
John: He's a Hollywood star.
John: It's the type of thing that the people at Seafair would say, here's a good idea.
John: We have a Hollywood person that we could ask.
John: I'm kind of the first one that's just like...
John: Yeah, like whatever, however you would use the term hipster to denigrate someone.
John: That's me, basically.
John: His pants are pretty tight.
John: Tom Skerris?
Merlin: Yours.
John: Oh, my.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: He has a pretty tight pants.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, he's 50 years old, but he still cuffs his jeans.
Merlin: That's a good look.
Merlin: Get a nice cuff.
Merlin: He lives in Lake Washington in suburban Seattle.
Merlin: He lives in Lake Washington.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: He's truly a King Neptune.
John: Oh, dude, where's my trident?
John: I feel like now that it's happened, for them to pick their next King Neptune out of just that, you know, whatever that...
John: burbling cauldron of local dimwits that are like weathermen and restaurateurs.
Merlin: Or like bands that sound like the Lumineers.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Stomp, stomp, stomp, yay!
John: Stomp, stomp, yay!
Merlin: Stomp, stomp.
Merlin: Ukulele, ukulele.
John: I've got to figure out
John: Who exactly is right for the job?
John: Because they have to care about Seattle.
John: They have to be civic minded.
John: You should plunge yourself into this.
John: You could help define this for the next generation.
John: I think that 20 years from now, it's going to be Macklemore.
John: Like it's the type of thing that he will graduate into one day because he loves Seattle.
John: Anyway, I'm going to think about this.
John: I'm going to appoint myself part of this search.
John: See what we can do.
Merlin: They say lead follower, get out of the way.
Merlin: You're the fucking king, man.
Merlin: Fucking A. I'm looking at the page.
Merlin: This is at KYKernels.
Merlin: That's unfortunate.
Merlin: KYKernels.org.
Merlin: KYKernels.
Merlin: I sent this to you accidentally.
Merlin: Twice.
Merlin: Famous Kentucky Kernels.
Merlin: I don't want to go through all of these.
Merlin: Walt Disney.
Merlin: John Depp.
Merlin: You got Mae West, Betty White, Zach Wilde, the fiddly guitar guy.
Merlin: I know him well.
Merlin: Dwight Yoakam.
Merlin: But you know what's kind of strange about this?
Merlin: I don't know why this bothers me so much.
Merlin: Peter Kinder, the lieutenant governor of Missouri.
Merlin: Many people who are president.
Merlin: And you notice here, though, for each person who is president, they always say former U.S.
Merlin: president.
Merlin: You're never a former president.
Merlin: That's like a Marine.
John: Yeah, you're always a president.
Merlin: Henry Cuellar, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Merlin: He was never a president.
Merlin: It says U.S.
Merlin: representative of Texas.
Merlin: Now, John S. Cooper, they do say former U.S.
Merlin: representative.
Merlin: I don't think you should refer to people as a former president.
Merlin: I think you say they were a U.S.
Merlin: president.
Merlin: So Lee Majors, it doesn't say former TV actor.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: Although that's true of him, right?
Merlin: He passed, didn't he?
John: I don't know.
John: I wasn't going to say former in that sense.
John: I was going to say, like, what has Lee Majors done lately?
Merlin: Yeah, that's true.
Merlin: Colonel Harlan Sanders, he's referred to here as a businessman.
John: But like a former president, if someone says President George Bush...
John: You had better know that he's not president anymore.
John: The former is superfluous.
Merlin: I think when you do one of those events where you get three, four, five, it's like a Doctor Who situation.
Merlin: When you get three, four, five of them together in a room, I think then you could refer to them as the former presidents.
Merlin: I might be doing a Robert Smigel joke at this point.
Merlin: I don't mean to.
Merlin: But I think former presidents is useful to say that however many it is.
Merlin: I think it's the longest, largest number current.
Merlin: The current number of living presidents is the greatest in history, I believe.
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's true.
Merlin: You got Carter, H.W., Clinton, W.,
Merlin: Who am I missing?
John: Anybody?
John: It's at least four.
John: No, that's it.
John: Ford is gone.
John: Reagan is gone.
John: Nixon's gone.
John: Yeah.
John: So Carter is Carter is the oldest.
John: And then or wait a minute, Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush.
John: They're contemporary.
John: Very similar in age.
John: They were both in the Navy in World War Two, I believe.
John: Yeah.
John: And maybe Herbert Walker is actually older than than Jimmy Carter.
Merlin: Have you seen those videos of Jimmy Carter just walking around doing stuff?
Merlin: He's really something, isn't he?
Merlin: Did you see him on the plane?
Merlin: Did you see that?
Merlin: Somebody shot a video of him on a plane.
Merlin: Jimmy Carter.
Merlin: Fucking love this guy.
Merlin: Jimmy Carter.
Merlin: He's got to be 90.
Merlin: Jimmy Carter just walking down.
Merlin: First of all, to have the presence of mind, to walk through Coach.
Merlin: He's got a very low-key Secret Service person with him.
Merlin: Literally walking through Coach and shaking the hand in the seat of any person who wants to shake his hand.
Merlin: And you know who wants to shake Jimmy Carter's hand?
Merlin: fucking everybody the entire everybody is thrilled this sweet gentle kind old man with a fucking bolo tie is spending taking his time he could go be sitting in first class you know probably having a beverage he's walking through coach smiling broad smile shaking hands and a kind word to every person who wants to greet him that's graciousness that is a gracious man
Merlin: He's always had a lot of class.
Merlin: Will you be like that as king?
Merlin: Will you keep that in mind?
Merlin: How important it is, first of all, obviously, to reach out to young people and to groom them, but also how important it is that you be out there putting a good face on the Neptune kingdom.
John: Let me just throw this out there.
John: Jimmy Carter was born October 1st of 1924, and George Herbert Walker Bush was born in June of 1924.
John: So they are three months apart in age.
John: I'll be damned.
Merlin: Or four months apart.
Merlin: And H.W.
Merlin: was ahead of CIA under, what, probably Ford?
John: Under Nixon.
John: Was Nixon.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
John: Wow.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Now, wait a minute.
John: Let's make sure of that.
John: George...
Merlin: H.W.
Merlin: Bush.
Merlin: And wasn't he like the ambassador to China, I want to say?
Merlin: Let's see here.
Merlin: Looking on the Internet Science site for George H.W.
Merlin: Bush.
John: Internet science, science.
Merlin: Okay, so under Ford.
Merlin: 76 to 77.
John: He was under Ford.
Merlin: Oh, okay, it was that late.
Merlin: The second chief of the 49th Chair of the Republican National Committee, second chief of the U.S.
Merlin: Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China.
Merlin: That's 74 to 75 under Ford.
Merlin: Oh, he was the 10th United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President Richard Nixon.
John: George Herbert Walker Bush.
John: Yes.
Merlin: So he was the 10th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from March of 1971 to January of 1973.
John: Isn't that wonderful?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: You know, he and my Uncle Jack were in college together.
John: Yale?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: No kidding.
John: Uncle Jack.
John: Yeah, Uncle Jack and he went to school together, and...
John: and were contemporaries and knew each other.
John: Uncle Jack... Have I ever told you about the time that Uncle Jack was tapped for skull and bones?
Merlin: I don't care.
Merlin: Tell me again.
Merlin: No, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: No, I don't care in the sense that I don't care how many times you've told the story.
Merlin: I would like to hear it again, please.
Merlin: I love any story you have that includes an uncle.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Uncle Jack was a football star.
John: And in the Navy...
John: He was a football star here at Seattle's Broadway High School.
John: And then he joined the Navy toward the end of the war.
John: And he was down in Olathe, Kansas, getting his flight training.
John: And he was playing on some intramural football team.
John: And it was very much like the plot of the movie MASH.
John: Some...
John: Flight instructor, some major in the Navy, saw him running in touchdowns on this field and said, we've got to transfer you to this other unit because we've got a very competitive football team over there.
John: Little by little, he got in front of somebody who said, after the war,
John: We'd like to help you use the GI Bill to go to Yale because we are Yale alumnus, alumnis.
John: And we're trying to, you know, and we want we want Yale to beat Harvard in the big football game.
John: And so Uncle Jack ended up at Yale on the GI Bill after the war as their star end.
John: And during that immediate after the war period, he was he was a big shot there.
John: And his there there there's a copy of The New York Times with the big headline, like top of the fold, you know, Yale beats Harvard or whatever.
John: And big picture of my uncle running in the winning touchdown.
John: He was an All-American.
John: Damn.
John: And and so was BMOC.
John: there during that period and so and this was the period immediately after the war where all these guys that had fought in the navy were coming back to college so like george hubert walker poppy uh was a navy pilot also and uh and actually like a war hero uh and they were all returning returning to the college so they weren't a bunch of 18 year olds right they were 24 year olds and some of them had had uh had some hard times out there um
John: But they're back in college now and they're just like, you know, college men.
John: So my uncle's take on it as a Seattleite and as a Northwesterner from a time when the Northwest was still pretty isolated from the rest of the country and the world.
John: And also because he was a Roderick.
John: He had what you could describe as a very strong reverse snobbery against institutions and institutional wealth and what even then would have been called privilege.
John: And so he kept this chip on his shoulder, this sort of flannel and cedar chip on his shoulder.
John: whenever he encountered any kind of East Coast money or East Coast attitude, which, of course, then there was a lot of.
John: So Poppy, as he calls him, was an example of this sort of very blue blood East Coast, Maine, you know, summer house in Maine kind of elitism.
John: And George Bush was dating
John: um, his wife, uh, whose name I was just on the tip of my tongue, Barbara.
John: Oh yeah.
John: He was dating Barbara Bush even then.
John: And I think they married at Yale and had George Walker Bush at Yale because they were, this was, you know, they were college people, which was, which meant full grown people.
John: But anyway, so the night of the big, uh, the night where all of the
John: Secret societies all tapped their new members.
John: I think you're out on the quad or something, and there's torchlight.
John: I mean, it's all the old scary rituals that date back to Egypt.
John: Uncle Jack felt a tap on his shoulder and a whisper in his ear, skull and bones.
John: Yes or no?
John: He got the tap.
John: He got the tap for skull and bones.
John: Yes or no?
John: And Jack said, no.
John: Because Skull and Bones was elitist.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: And he was a man of the people.
John: He was a lumberjack from out west.
John: He was a man of the people.
John: Now, he and I have talked about this 100,000 million times.
John: And even back in the 80s, when
John: When men of his age were not at all self-reflective and he was not at all self-reflective.
John: My father was not.
John: They did not engage.
John: They did not indulge themselves in a lot of where did I go wrong?
John: Yeah.
John: What could I have done better?
John: But I said to him, of course, vulnerable.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: What if I'd talk to people more nicely?
John: I wish I'd listened more.
John: I said to him, of course, like, oh, my God.
John: like that's dumb did did you do you regret it and he said yes very much i was an idiot i should have joined skull and bones are you kidding me everything would have been different i was like oh fuck come on i was wondering i was also wondering if like when you get the tap and you say no is it kind of like a mafia type situation where now you know now it's you're not only not in but now you're out like you're way out like you're gonna you're gonna have some problems now
John: I can't imagine that they get a lot of no's.
John: Now, maybe they did before.
John: I'm sure there are still reverse snobs.
John: I'm sure there are still people who are like, I'm too good for skull and bones.
John: But I bet you they make a short list.
John: I don't think that they go out and say, let's get 500 names and we'll pick the first 15.
John: But it's a small list and probably was then, too.
John: Yeah.
John: But, you know, you never see a Roderick coming.
John: Am I right?
Merlin: You guys are slippery.
Merlin: You got your own thing going on.
John: Really got your own thing going on.
John: Oh, infuriating.
John: And the thing is, you know, that butterfly flaps its wings problem.
John: Spooky action at a distance.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Everything lines up this one way, pointing to Germany.
Merlin: Can you imagine that?
Merlin: Can you imagine they're so used to everybody begging to get in, right?
Merlin: You say, no, no, no.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: First of all, no.
Merlin: But also, there's a tap.
Merlin: If this were you, there'd be a tap.
Merlin: You get no tap.
Merlin: But then on top of it, you, they probably vetted.
Merlin: They vetted your uncle.
Merlin: They've gone through all the steps.
Merlin: They even might feel like, oh, we're pretty sure he's going to say yes, because obviously the man's not an idiot.
Merlin: He knows this is going to change his game.
John: Right.
John: And he just says, no, thank you, no.
John: And he was, like, the contextualizing, the important context is that he was a huge star.
John: He was not just a star at Yale, but he was like a national star.
John: He was one of these college football guys that was that rose up to the point that people in the country knew him by name because he was that he was the guy from Yale that kept scoring touchdowns.
John: And so he had, I think, at that moment a feeling of.
John: A feeling that he was too good for skull and bones.
John: Wow.
John: And it was during a time when the idea of being a student athlete had much more of a kind of Greek association.
Merlin: Sounds like being a soldier scholar.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, the idea you come back from the war and you get the GI Bill, right?
John: similar kind of thing like that was a hyphenate that mattered student scholar it was and he so he didn't feel like he was just there on a football scholarship he felt like I mean I think there was a part of him that felt pretty justified in in his feeling that he wasn't here because of old money he wasn't here because of who his dad was he had earned this place by virtue of being an athlete and
John: If you talk to him now, and he is self-reflective now, after being forced to become self-reflective by his daughters, he will say that he felt very insecure there.
John: Coming from the Northwest, everybody was friends.
John: Everybody there knew what the rules were.
John: They did have money.
John: They had etiquette.
John: They had class.
John: They had connections.
Right.
John: And he was a hayseed or worse.
John: He wasn't a hayseed.
John: We didn't even have hay out here.
John: He just, you know, he smelled like pines and owl poop.
John: So he was insecure.
John: And he says, like, part of that attitude, part of saying no to them was because I was totally insecure and didn't feel like I would, if I got in there, I would just be a rube.
John: Right.
Yeah.
John: But I can't know because, of course, this is a long, long time before I was born, before my dad and my mom even met.
John: Is there a world in which Uncle Jack could have been in Skull and Bones and also that not affect the timeline where my dad meets my mom and I am both?
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: Yep, yep.
John: Because I think if Jack was in Skull and Bones, then when Jack graduated...
John: he wouldn't have gone out to Alaska and gotten into the oil business.
John: I think he probably would have gone into the CIA or some other kind of thing, gone to work, gone to run General Motors.
John: And my dad would not have let that little thing not affect the course of his life as well.
John: So it may be that, you know, that the Polaroid picture of me starts to fade.
Yeah.
Merlin: Or, in a certain kind of timeline, what if, for the sake of argument, Uncle Jack had accepted the tap, realized it was wrong...
Merlin: that it would lead to all kinds of problems, which it did in this one timeline, and he went back and changed it.
Merlin: What if you're leaving out a timeline where Uncle Jack definitely made the right decision?
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: People are always saying, you think about what you do in time travel, be careful, butterflies wings.
Merlin: Who's to say that time travel wasn't available or will be available at some point, and Uncle Jack goes back and fixes everything?
John: There's so much that could have been different if Uncle Jack had been in the CIA through the 50s.
Merlin: He probably at a point would have worked for a fellow veteran, George H.W.
Merlin: Bush.
John: He would have been a Commodore by that point, probably.
John: He might have been George Herbert Walker Bush for that matter.
John: Maybe Bush wasn't the director of the CIA under Ford.
John: Maybe it was Uncle Jack.
John: It's a dupleganger.
John: It did a face-off or something, maybe.
John: A little bit of a face-off.
John: I wonder if, I wonder, you know, these days on the internet, you can go find things.
John: I wonder, I've never gone and looked at Uncle Jack's Yale career, but I'm sure some intrepid person will.
John: No, no, don't do that.
John: Don't do that.
John: Let's not dredge up the past.
John: I won't talk about time travel.
Merlin: All right, good.
Merlin: i think there's something to be said though well first of all on the one hand yeah there is this certain thing if you figure you got a guy here a little bit uh you know uh seed without the hay he's come up he's been and you know he's served he's he's done adult things and um that might have been a great honor of his life to say fuck you to skull and bones well for a time for a time this is the thing for both my dad and my uncle uh which is that they made a lot of decisions like that both of them did
John: a lot of like, ah, go fuck yourself.
John: And later in life, they did both reflect on it and say, well, I fucked up there.
John: And in the case of my dad, I, you know, I would grab him by the shirt and say like, no, no, everything you did was consistent with the, with the plan, with a worldview.
John: Like you didn't fuck up.
John: That was just what you did.
John: This is part of what made you.
John: Um, um,
John: And I think my uncle is much more sanguine about that than my dad ever was.
John: I think my Uncle Jack does believe that.
John: And he's like, yeah, well, what can you say?
John: Like, wheel in the sky keeps on turning.
John: Whereas my dad didn't 100% reconcile himself to the idea that there's no such thing as a mistake.
John: And I think part of it is that
John: Sometime in the 1950s, my uncle went down in his little Piper Cub and hammered some stakes in the ground in the Kenai Peninsula and went and filed with the state surveying board that he was claiming the oil rights to this 100 acres on the Kenai.
John: And it was 100 acres where oil was discovered.
John: When did he do this?
John: In the 50s?
John: In the 50s, there was a kind of... You could just do that?
John: There was a kind of gold rush of oil.
John: Whoa.
John: Where you could... A gold rush of oil.
John: Okay.
John: Yeah.
John: Just like staking a claim for a gold...
John: claim you could just go down you they had all these maps the land you claim the land and improve it and that's yours nope nope no no you just claim you just made the claim uh like the the land was divided up into grids and you could kind of go down there and you could speculate based on the geology like huh i think this looks like there might be oil under here and this looks like better whatever and every citizen had as much a right to do it as a company and
John: Because it wasn't a bidding process.
John: It was.
John: Just first come first serve?
John: Yeah.
John: You just go file a claim.
John: It costs $15 to process the paperwork.
John: Wow.
John: It was a little more complicated than that.
John: Yeah.
John: But so he got some.
John: He claimed some.
John: He had some oil claims.
John: Well, he wrote a book about this called Crude Dreams.
John: Crude Dreams by Jack Roderick.
John: You're kidding.
John: Because Uncle Jack was front and center for the big oil rush in Alaska of the 50s and 60s.
John: And when they discovered oil on the North Slope at Prudhoe Bay, there was a real tussle within the state that the oil claims for that property be...
John: apportioned out by the same process file a claim file and you know pay your $500 fee and everybody gets their shot at which would have produced multiple billionaires of just regular Alaskan even with a fairly small amount of land
John: Because there's so much oil up there.
John: I mean, like when I was living in Alaska in the 1980s, they passed one billion barrels of oil.
John: I don't know how many barrels of oil they've taken out of Prudhoe Bay, but it's a lot of oil.
John: And so all you would need is to have a small, you know, like 0.001% of any of that would be an enormous amount of money.
John: And there was this argument.
John: That we should open this up to Alaskans.
John: This is the... Like their birthright.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It's in the spirit of the state, of the new state.
John: And the counter-argument...
John: was if we put these up for auction, then the oil companies will pay a lot of money for them.
John: And that money will go into the state coffers and... Coffers love money.
John: Yeah, and they will pay for schools or whatever.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And so they held like a big Congress up there where these ideas were argued...
John: And then eventually it did become a system where those leases were auctioned.
John: But Uncle Jack's little claim, his oil claim down on the Kenai Peninsula predated that process.
John: And it's not like he sank a well on his land and had a gusher.
John: But
John: as the years went by and the oil companies consolidated their land down there and, you know, they had offshore drilling rigs and they, they pumped a lot of oil out of, out of, uh, Turnigan arm.
John: Um,
John: They bought his claim and gave him a small, a tiny fractional percentage.
John: But it was a steady.
John: Did they put the arm on him?
John: No, it was just like, what are you going to do?
John: What are you going to do, Jack Roderick?
John: You can go out there with a shovel and a bucket.
Merlin: This comes up a lot.
Merlin: This comes up in the Daniel Day-Lewis movie.
Merlin: It comes up in that show Godless.
Merlin: You say like, oh, you got all the oil.
Merlin: What are you going to do with it?
Merlin: How are you going to get it out?
John: You know, smart guy.
John: Yeah, what are you going to do?
John: You're going to refine it there and fill up your fucking car?
Merlin: Yeah, we're giving you the tap.
John: So, yeah, they say, like, there is a little bit of take it or leave it, but at the time, there are good deals and bad.
John: I think you've got a fine deal.
John: So Uncle Jack reflects on his life from a position of a little bit of,
John: I mean, he still lives in the same house he lived in in 1956.
John: But he had...
John: the luxury of not having to scramble because he did have this guaranteed constant kind of income.
John: And I don't think it was a, I don't think it's a fortune, right?
John: It was just like, but it's nice to have a little base.
John: Just cover the rent.
John: That'd be nice.
John: That's right.
John: It's nice to have a little base.
John: And my dad, as he got older, had not made any, he didn't have any plan like that.
John: He didn't, he never for a second in the course of his life thought, well, what happens one day
John: Kind of like me, right?
John: Neither of us really think about the future that much.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: But then at the end, he's kind of like, oh, shit.
John: It's a little bit harder for him to say, I don't give a shit about skull and bones.
John: Because...
John: He, I think that little cushion makes a big difference in how you, how you evaluate the phone for the timeshare.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: That sucks.
Merlin: Push.
Merlin: We get the tap.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Could you use a tap right now?
Merlin: I feel like I could use a tap.
Merlin: I'm all, I've been waiting for the tap for a long time.
Merlin: You're ready for the tap.
Merlin: You're the anchor man at, at Gonzaga.
Mm hmm.
John: When I went to Gonzaga, they had eliminated fraternities and sororities because of all the problems that they had with those organizations in the 70s.
John: Their solution, Gonzaga's solution, I think some colleges tried this.
John: They just eliminated fraternities and sororities.
John: But they had one group, which they called a service organization, which was called the Knights and Spurs organization.
John: And the knights were the boys and the spurs were the girls.
John: And they had matching polo shirts, the boys, and the girls had matching, I don't know what, blouses, blouses, chemises.
John: Blouseye.
John: And they would supposedly go out and do service.
John: And I don't know what that meant.
John: You know, they would like do beautification of something or I don't.
John: They were not by as far as I could tell any kind of service organization.
John: They were a fraternity and sorority.
John: And there was a night early on in the year when the Knights and Spurs would go out and tap.
John: their members for the coming year.
John: And once you were a knight in a spur, you were always a knight in a spur, right?
John: I mean, you got tapped in just like you were tapped for Skull and Bones.
John: Or the presidency or a Marine.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: You get tapped for the presidency.
John: And I remember the night that the Knights and Spurs went out to tap all their people.
John: And I was sitting in my dorm room reading something really hard to read, something super deep.
John: And you could hear them out.
John: You could hear the shrieks.
John: You could hear the tapping.
John: You could hear the tapping.
John: The shrieks of girls when they realized they'd been tapped by the Spurs.
John: You could hear dudes going like, all this kind of stuff.
John: There's a lot of noise, a lot of energy on the campus.
John: And you could also feel the energy of a handful of thousands of people who were not going to get tapped by the Knights and Spurs sitting and either...
John: feeling small and isolated or seething or or just putting earplugs in and trying to ignore it and uh and i remember that feeling of sitting in my room
John: In the full breadth of knowledge that there is no way in a billion trillion years that I was going to get tapped by the Knights and Spurs.
John: Unless there was like a clerical error.
John: I was the opposite, the absolute opposite of it.
John: And also, I would have hated being in the Knights and Spurs.
John: And yet...
John: I've never been tapped for anything.
John: And I wanted to get that.
John: I wanted to get that tap.
John: I think it's still coming, John.
John: I think it's still coming.
Merlin: Just so I could have said no.
Merlin: You could be the anchorman.
Merlin: I mean, you got tapped to be king.
Merlin: There's nothing wrong with that.
John: You know what?
John: You're right.
John: I did get tapped to be king.
John: Now you go tap somebody else.
John: But nobody came up behind me and like tapped me on the shoulder.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, they kind of did.
John: They just came up from the front.
John: They're probably afraid you'd punch them or something, you know?
John: Yeah, right.
John: You're just going around tapping people.
John: Elbow to the nose.
John: I like this idea.
John: Maybe I start the tradition.
John: You're the tapper.
John: You're the one who taps.
John: I'm the tapper.
John: I tap the next king.
John: You're the tapper.
Merlin: You're king tapper.
Merlin: You just start tapping people.
Merlin: I'm Tapper John.
Merlin: Go to RoderickOnTheLine.com.
Merlin: Limited amount of time.
Merlin: Please go buy a T-shirt.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: If you don't have a T-shirt yet, you've got to get one, man.
John: These T-shirts are great.
John: Yeah.
John: RoderickOnTheLine.com.
John: RoderickOnTheLine.com.
John: Get a T-shirt.
John: Get one for your...
John: Get one for your significant other.
John: Get one for your dog or your kids.
John: There are lots available.
John: Tapper John.
John: Great, incredible Christmas presents.
John: Am I right, Merlin?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I totally agree.
Merlin: These could totally be given as gifts.
Merlin: These are really good.
Merlin: I wish they'd given us a better URL.
Merlin: Christmas is coming.
John: Coming so hard.
John: Winter is coming.
Merlin: Get these shirts because they're warm.
Merlin: You know nothing, John Roderick.
Merlin: Tapper John.
Merlin: Merry Christmas, everybody.