RL111 - The Handjob-Industrial Complex

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: It’s like the City of Rome, referring to the metaphor that explains that there is never going to be a good day to just start over on a problematic system, but you are always just going to patch it and try to keep it running.

The show title refers to John wondering why nobody has built a handjob-robot yet.

Merlin is impressed that John leaves his house in a vehicle and does things the whole morning and afternoon and then he shows up early for their podcast recording.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

The insane transportation system by people who have only ever solved the most immediate problem (RL111)

There was a truck fire on the Interstate. There are a lot of trucks on the Interstate at 2pm, that seems to be high truck hour! A dump truck rolled over and spilled Diesel fuel all over the Interstate and burned itself up completely. That would have never happened if it had been on a train (see RL110), although trains do sometimes crash and burn, although they crash at scale! It is like dying on Christmas, you just jam it all into one thing. Usually when a train crashes it also has some tanks of liquid sulfuric acid and you have to evacuate an entire town.

John went Downtown today right at noon and parked in a parking garage, two things he never does, and by the time he reached the 7th floor of the parking garage and had not found an empty spot he realized the dirty secret of cities: They are hiding all these tens of thousands of cars that are on the roads in the mornings and afternoons in these car hives, and it is astonishing that we think this is a good system because each one of these cars represents one person making it from their house to their job, every one of those people is probably paying $30 a day to park there, and it is an extraordinary waste of resources and people’s time and energy and space to hold those cars. Every aspect of it is a colossal, hilarious waste!

Why is this the system? Because every time there was a problem somebody fixed the immediate problem by building a new on-ramp or a new parking garage. You have to get to work Downtown and your wife has to get to work 4 blocks from there? You have to get two cars! Everybody is solving the problem right in front of themselves, but there is no collective problem solving and there is no collective thinking in the system at all.

Merlin thinks it is like They Live: You put on the glasses and all of a sudden you can see what is going on. Most jobs you could probably do mostly from your house, most people’s job is to move this file into that file. It is all typing, we are all just typing different things. This was the promise of industrialization and of technology, that we would be freed from all this meaningless labor. 100 years ago they always thought that technology was going to provide leisure and we were going to be living in an environmental ecotopia where we would have to work 1-2 hours a day and the rest of the time we would be in pedal-powered dirigibles, flying around from park to park, learning languages and writing classical music.

It would be like Spain under the Moors: Everybody would speak 6 different languages, the Jews would be getting along with the Zoroastrians, it was a perfect system. Instead, just because of ad-hoc individualism, with all the technology all we have done is create more and more anxiety and more and more busy work! Now you have to send an email about how you can’t drive to some place on time, and John was driving with one hand, texting with another, and he had to post a Facebook video of the burning truck, and now he is the problem. Where is his parade?

The City of Rome: There is never going to be a good day to start over (RL111)

There is an idiom called The City of Rome that is for example used to refer to old computer code: There is never going to be a great day to just start over. Manhattan is like this in a lot of ways: You have some system that barely works at doing something you needed 50-100 years ago and you update it a little bit and put some patches on it and you hack on it and add a new lane, but it is still the same, completely screwed-up system and there is never a good day to start over and install pneumatic tubes.

In 1999 John’s mom started getting phone calls from companies who were still running the software she wrote in 1968 and nobody knows how to fix it and they would pay her any amount of money to come back and figure out how to insert a 4-digit date code because all of the banks were going to start working, but there was no amount of money that would entice her back. It turned out that it didn’t all come to a screeching halt, but it gave John the awareness that a big part of American industry was still running on patched-up 40-year old Cobol and machine language code.

Merlin heart The City of Rome metaphor most often applied to the air traffic control system. He also sees it at his bank, when where he is trying to get a cashier’s cheque the system looks like DOS. John wonders how this is a metaphor for his personal life. He is ad-hoc solving problems in his own life at every turn, and looking at the way he lives and his goals and his dreams, what if he stripped away all the infrastructure he has built and imagines what he would do with his day if he had no a-priori premise about how a day had to look?

Spending our technology-enabled leisure time on frivolous things (RL111)

This is the lie of modernity: The idea that we are all philosopher kings, but the more leisure time people have the more it is revealed that we do not have boundless imaginations, and we do not know what to do with leisure because we are beasts of burden by construction, we are meant to live nasty brutish and short lives because we are pig monkeys. All the leisure in the world produces reality television or a culture of gaming that at the surface of it…

John hates to ever go on the record in any way criticizing gaming! He got some angry letters about an episode they did a couple of weeks ago (see RL109) where he said one charitable thing about China and it inflamed the anuses of so many people for whom China is a trigger word. But if you say a bad word about gaming? The gamers have spent 40 years defending themselves against the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) or their moms and dads. Everybody had a hard-on for gaming for so long that the gamers really have their hackles up, but also have their 25 lines of defense about how valuable gaming is.

Adult gaming is like playing Twister, and maybe it is in a virtual environment like a holo deck, but that is what we are doing with our acquired leisure? That is how we are spending our savings? We are mining the Earth, stripping it bare and filling the skies full of smoke in order that we not have to do the difficult work of farming for ourselves, we don’t have to pull a hoe anymore, but we spend that leisure to put our headphones on and stare at a virtual space and hop around it with our virtual little man?

The other day Merlin was talking to someone about Facebook, and he is always in danger of sounding like a nut because he has to remind people that he is one of the hill people who is not on Facebook. He doesn’t have that strong of an opinion about it, but it is just something he doesn’t do. All that stuff creates a real anxiety, and nowadays you can find anxiety or social pressure in almost anything, which makes the work of Rowdy Roddy Piper so poignant even today, it is a hell of a movie (They Live), and Robin Goldwasser’s father (Peter Jason) plays a starring role in that film (see RL416).

Anxiety is the glue that holds us all together now, it is the thing that Don Draper figured out sold us toothpaste (probably some reference to Mad Men), it is the thing that the military industrial complex figured out kept us pouring money into their black projects, anxiety is the thing that keeps us getting married to one another, it is the glue that holds us together as a society and every one of those things was a solution to a problem that was right in front of us.

The conspiracists want us to think that there is a group of people with a big plan, but to whatever degree there is a system it is a patchwork quilt of small individuated rubber patches where the tire kept blowing out and now we are living in this world and the degree to which things work in concert with one another is largely either happenstance, or this thing was right next to that thing, so we made the gears the same ratio. We get 5 things working together and think that we are really building something, but does that little ball fit into the giant ball pit of other little fiefdoms? None of it does, really!

When Merlin first heard that John Lennon had a record player in his Rolls Royce it seemed the coolest thing in the world, but in retrospect it seems strange, certainly luxurious. All the novels and films and popular media about what computers were going to mean to people: People have for many years wondered and worried what parts of our lives computers were going to replace and what happens when they become too intelligent, but what resonates with Merlin is that as more things get automated it starts to feel like a Woody Allen movie from the 1970s.

Anxiety of having to interact with a broken system (RL111)

Merlin had a charge on his mobile phone bill that was only removable by calling them and sit through a pitch for getting home Internet. He got a good person to talk to, but what still carries over from the fear of depersonalization and dehumanization that computers and AI were going to bring is the sense that there is not really an effective place to turn for almost anything. He had a $100 charge every month on his phone bill and he had to call and persuade them that this was something he didn’t want to have anymore even though he hadn’t been out of the country in a year.

Why didn’t he just call them months ago? It is the anxiety, the dreading of having to call and sit and find how many minutes it is until the call will be important to them, and that is still very real, there is still a lot of self-editing and self-censorship along the lines of creating all the anxiety you need by your fear of having to interact with that system and call about something broken. You enter into a virtual world where you cannot see the horizon where you are walking and hear your voice echoing: ”Hello? Hello?”, there is some distant music playing, it is foggy, you are navigating around some minor obstacles, there is no exit door.

There was surely not any brain trust that envisioned that as a solution to their customer service issues, but they just happened upon it. They had 5 operators and 50 people waiting to be helped, and 45 of them are just going to sit there waiting forever. It is like a video game and Merlin knows he is not that good at video games and when he gets into that system there is a chance that he will hit the wrong button and he will end up somewhere where he can’t get out and the call will disconnect and he will have to start over. He might be the only lunatic in the world who sits around in fear of having to make that call, but he is in fear of that call and he hates getting to the point where he can hit 2 or do nothing.

Blade Runner and Star Wars set design (RL111)

This was what was so brilliant of the set design of both Blade Runner and Star Wars: The Millennium Falcon is built in such a way that you see it has evolved from earlier ships to solve problems. It is not an elegant design, it is an ad-hoc design, and over time you can imagine the evolution of a freighter and this is what they came up with. The Death Star, when you get close to it, reveals that it is 1000 little town houses and condos and bullshit little towers because every single minor administrator in the Imperial system had his own requirements for what the building standard for his own little quadrant was, so at the distance the Death Star looks like a globe, but up close it is this pimply little ball.

The same is true with Blade Runner: Those floating police cars is just what happened when you are married to the idea of what a car looked like, but then you have minor hovercraft technology, and rather than build a completely new thing you just build a car-looking thing that also could hover. Those set designs were so convincing and they still resonate with us because that is how it would go in reality. We are not ever going to build something new, we just keep building… why does the Tesla look like a Lotus? Because it is a Lotus and the new Tesla is a fat Lotus and the next one will be something globbed on to the last thing.

It is not that our imaginations are constrained, but you walk into the room: ”I have got it!” and the first five people you talk to are going to go: ”Well, to build that would be a real investment! Shouldn’t we just… What if we just took the old trains and painted them grey and we called it Amtrak? That would be a lot cheaper than doing the thing you are talking about! Redesigning the system? Let’s just keep the old thing!” (see RL110)

Merlin rewatched Blade Runner last week, and why wouldn’t he? It is extraordinary! It is Merlin’s snap-to-grid movie, it is what he just ends up watching sometimes. There are little things like that the video phone has graffiti on it: That is exactly what it would look like! Then of course the call was really expensive. They were so ahead of their time and that is what makes so much of that stuff so relatable: From Star Wars on that stuff has a brokenness all the way to the Death Star vulnerability.

Why is there no robot hand-job machine? (RL111)

What astonishes John is that we still have not normalized the concept of a robot hand-job machine. How much further do we have to progress in society before a robot hand-job machine is just a normal thing that you buy at the Sears? It should be like a toaster oven: For $40 you can get a pretty serviceable robot hand-job machine. A lot of the other countries still have a lot of catching-up to do technologically, they are still burning peat to heat their homes, but in America and France and Germany and England? Think about the wasted man-hours going into either administering hand-jobs to other people or all the self-hand-jobbing that could be automated!

People all around the world right now are making very questionable decisions in order to secure for themselves or their loved ones a hand-job, and those decisions could be completely ameliorated by… part of the problem is that we always imagine that the technology we are striving for is a perfect robot sex partner that does not have an uncanny valley, so to speak, but there have to be a lot of cylinders firing in sync to build a perfect sex partner robot, but a hand-job?

A Madam Butterfly is already available that you can wear under your garment, but where is John’s Madam Butterfly, and he is not talking about a Fleshlight, that is so undignified. He is not some guy in a white van parked in front of Rick’s with a Fleshlight going, he wants it to be normalized so that it is a household appliance like a vacuum cleaner. What do I get dad for Christmas? A tie? No! You get him a Whirlpool handjob machine!

Has anyone really thought about the multi-uses of spooge? Is it a good plant food? Nobody has tested it! We know that plants love electrolytes! Think about the nutrients in jizz! Right now it is just going down the toilet, putting our lantern under a bushel basket, and we are asking our sewage treatment plants to process what is probably 80 gallons of jizz a day and we don’t even recognize it as what it is because it is just in there with all the poo and stuff. That is potentially high-protein nutrient that we could be feeding to our ferrets! If you put a bowl of jizz in front your ferret, he would gobble it down! We need to start to think systemically! A robot-handjob machine and jizz-reprocessor is a really compelling idea!

Most of the sex stuff is obviously designed with pervy porno guys in mind, but what is the robot hand-job machine for the gentleman who is not ashamed to have one? Nobody locks their bong up at night, they are not ashamed, they have it sitting on the God-damn coffee table! It is a little bit outside of the current norm, but that is changing every day. People are much more acceptable now to have a bong and it is much more acceptable for people to talk ad nauseam about their sexual proclivities if they identify those as part of their political identity.

What is shared more than masturbation? It is the thing that unites us as a people. That and anxiety, and masturbation anxiety is a dubious engine of progress. Merlin wonders if the theoretical hand-job economy has a lot to do with why things are the way they are and why there is so much busy work: The alcohol industry would surely not be super into the idea of wide-scale adoption of a robot hand-job machine because somebody is going to be buying desert because you never know what is in the future. Why would you even go to a bar if you didn’t have to? The only reason to go to a bar is that maybe you are going to get or give a hand-job at some point. You are going to get a little drunk and it is going to seem like a good idea.

You wouldn’t want to get into a situation where people could have satisfying hand-jobs anytime they wanted because a big part of us trying to solve the Climate Change problem that we have created is the promise of a certain number of hand-jobs as a result of the work we are doing. It ends up being one of our prime motivators and what if we solve that problem and happen to short-circuit the motor of progress?

We will have created for example the problem of the pollution economy and if we now can give ourselves all the hand-jobs we want, why solve it? We are going to choke on our own smog while our ferrets grow larger and stronger on a diet of pure jizz. We need to figure out a way to portion out the hand-jobs and then it becomes in question who is in charge of who gets access to a hand-job machine. Maybe there should be a thing like the breathalyzer to start your car? You just have to make sure you breathe into the right end. Maybe some of your hot breath is collected to add to somebody else’s hand-job.

If you drive through town, especially around 6pm in the winter time, and you look up through big plate-glass windows you can see hundreds of people on exercise bikes, all with headphones on, all plowing away, burning energy, and we bio-engineered the corn that went into their high-fructose corn-syrup lunches and now they are on their bikes, screwling (?) away the energy. Those are electric machines that are drawing electricity in order to have people generate electricity that goes nowhere. We identified this problem a long time ago, but no innovator has come along and said that every exercise bike from here on out has to add energy to the grid rather than take it. It is just a no-brainer!

These human agents, these automatons, these human beings that we have paid to sit in front of a computer all day and move virtual paper around, now in order to even feel alive and feel like human beings they need to pretend they are pulling a plow. Why are we not trying to harvest all that energy? Why do we not go the whole hog and recognize that it is essentially a kind of Matrix where human beings are an extremely inefficient way of converting corn energy into electricity? You could just burn corn and harvest more energy than you are going to get from feeding corn to pig monkeys and then having them sit in an Aeron chair all day and then at the end of the day tell them to climb virtual stairs while they are watching Fox News?

In this whole process we should also have a tube connected to their penis to harvest their jizz, collect their sweat, and feed it to some other helpful rodents! Why is this not a symbiosis! There is a lot of corn being raised for dicey reasons, Jesus H Christ there is! It is just like a self-winding watch or a Toyota Prius with regenerative brakes.

Force equals mass times acceleration! If a feather hits you at 50 mph it doesn’t hurt, but if a train hits you at 50 mph it really does. That is one of the basic understandings we have as people, but we are not seeing the other side of that equation. Think about what it takes to stop a fully loaded freight train, the amount of energy it took to get that train going and now we have to burn off that energy to stop that train. There is no locomotive in America that has just an extra car in a 100 car train whose job it is to collect that energy as we are braking the train every freaking day as they are coming down out of the mountains.

John is no engineer, he is a computer science professor, but it would not be that big of a leap to design the next gen of trains where as they brake they are converting that energy into electricity. Then what do you do with that electricity? Powering the hand-job machines! That will end up being an increment of economic thinking! In Merlin’s post-college years every time he would be thinking about spending money on something he would go: ”$40, that is like 4 movies!”

The Homeowner monetary unit (RL111)

It is like $5000 is one homeowner monetary unit (HMU). When John moved into his house he needed to replace the roof on the barn and somebody told him it will cost about $5000. Then he needed to fixe the furnace and that cost $5000 and after he had lived there a year he realized that everything costs $5000 and you end up looking at home improvement projects in terms of how many HMU’s it is going to be. Remodeling the guest room is 4 HMUs, redoing the kitchen is 5-6 HMU’s, putting a new roof on the house is probably only going to be 1-2 HMU’s.

You have to factor in those HMU’s into owning a home. After you bought your house you can probably live in it for 5-10 years and then shit is going to start breaking and when it does you are going to learn that the man with the clipboard comes to the house and you might get your gutters replaced for 0.5 HMU’s, but forget about anybody coming to look at your pipes or your basic infrastructure of the house for less than 0.5-1 HMU.

Redeveloping a city and tearing down inefficient old Victorian housing, introversion setting the standard for housing (RL111)

Merlin asked if John has any thoughts on high density housing. He received some bummer news last week that his art supply store FLAX of 23.000 sqft with incredibly helpful people has to move because they have to put some condos in there. The city really and truly needs the space that is now taken up by little wood human models, but where else is Merlin going to go for precisely the pen that he wants?

John has seen the same in King County and Seattle: If you don’t want all the surrounding farms to be turned into tract housing you have to submit to the fact that they are going to redevelop the city in such a way that they will tear down nice old churches and what the conventional wisdom considers inefficient old Victorian housing or 1-story retail and they construct new ”green” buildings where half of the construction material is blown in with a hose, where they have some galvanized thin superstructure to hold their blown-in newspaper after they tear out 150 year old solid boards.

Homes made out of old-growth fur are just ripped down and shipped to a landfill so they can build this green housing and then you are living in a Habitrail. The condos they are going to put in Merlin’s art supply store are probably going to be home-of-the-future type condos that are like living in an RV because in the paper they have talked a lot lately about San Francisco having more and more 300 sqft apartments.

Their ideal situation is that every new housing is like something from the Tokyo airport where you put 400 Yen ($4) into a slot, a little torpedo tube opens, you climb in there, face down, your penis just naturally goes into the handjob machine slot, and there is a screen that is playing you Manga videos of rabbits with vaginas and all your functions are naturally there, a tube goes right up your butt to collect all the corn effluvient.

In an inefficient old Victorian housing unit there is the prospect of shared housing where each room would be someone’s apartment, the classic college shared house, which is the old way of living how that house was designed originally and the reason why it has so many bedrooms is that grandma lived with you and your spinster aunt lived there and your tetched brother in law and all these people were living together in the house.

Then for many years it turned into a hippie flop house where people were sharing these rooms, but now the prospect of sharing a kitchen or even a common area with strangers fills us with anxiety and we would much rather have a smaller and more antiseptic living environment where we can go close our door and be away from other people. In a way we are becoming a culture where introversion is setting the standard for the way we build and think about our space.

20 years ago, not just because you were young, what were you doing on a Saturday night? If you weren’t going to a Rock show you were going to some alternative theater, your options were all social, even if you were very solitary, you could stay alone in your apartment, but even the most solitary person needs some kind of interaction and you had to get that in the public sphere, go to an event, or at least go out and wander around. In the last 20 years all of our innovation has happened in the sphere of allowing people to interact with other people without going out.

Why would you have an 8-room house, if you are going to be working at Twitter for 16 hours a day, pop in the dock’s clock (?) for two hours and then ride back to your pod, why would you need all that stuff? What do you need in your house? You need a sink, you need a shower, lots of power outlets, nobody takes a bath anymore, you don’t even need a shower, it can all just be compressed air that blows the dirt off of you, and you have a microwave and one heating element to boil some water for your Ramen and you need a poop chute and for now at least you need a box of Kleenex for your jizz because nobody has figured out a way to recycle that yet.

John doesn’t necessarily think that housing people in pods is the wrong direction and he will be the last guy to reference the Matrix movies over and over, but those little gel-filled pods where you are unaware of the outside world, you are even unaware that the world around you isn’t the world you perceive it to be, it is just a little soap dish that keeps you alive as you generate energy for the robots, it is amazingly prescient when you start to imagine that the next iteration of our modern world is a lot close to the first step toward that eventuality than it is a step in a different direction.

Sure, put me in a smaller apartment, put my virtual headset on, and give me a sex friend and these super-ferrets that have become self-aware because they are eating high-nutrition food and are now performing the role of helper monkeys: ”Hey ferret buddy, if you don’t bring me my Cocoa Krispies I am not going to give you your little nutritive pearl jam!” The band claims that they are named after Grandma Pearl’s jam, Merlin has heard that it was a drawing from John Lennon’s son with Lucy in the sky. You got 10cc, Steely Dan, Superferrets (?), a lot of Rock/Sex crossovers.

John is feeling it all the time in his own life: As you arrive at a certain station in life…

Red Dawn, The Day After, Cold War fears of the nuclear war (RL111)

The other day John was watching the extraordinary John Milius documentary (Milius) where George Hamilton appears and although John and Merlin knew he was a bit unusual they did not know how many photos he had taken of himself in uniforms with guns and what happened to him with getting a stroke. John was not aware he made Red Dawn or Conan The Barbarian. He was making a Red Dawn reference the other day because the logic of that movie made so much sense to him as a teenager and in the documentary they tried to explain what Red Dawn means to America in the 1980s and they said that only a dumb teenager would watch that movie. John was that teenager!

The plot of Red Dawn had occurred to them all for 15 years. You couldn’t have grown up during the Cold War without imagining that because we all saw The Day After and even that was pandering to an idea that they had already had a million times. If nuclear war is inevitable, then you are either vaporized in the first instance and have no awareness of it, or you are chemically poisoned and die a gruesome death in a burned-out apocalypse or somehow you survive it either because you live way out in Montana or because you are a mutant and you are immune to radiation or the radiation only makes you stronger or something.

Of the three options which idea are you going to spend more time thinking about as a 13-year old? Realizing now that the logic of Red Dawn is powering our whole generation, we no longer have a Soviet thread, people are able to insert whatever the thread du jour is into your Red Dawn function machine, you don’t care what the reason is that you will end up having to move out into the grid and defend your land and you put a new thing in there as suits, but your fantasy is that some new world order, some big overarching power comes after you and you are king of the country people and you fight a war of resistance. John wonders how much his own fantasy life is still locked in a Red Dawn scenario.

Saying that Red Dawn makes kids want to go fight the Cold War is like saying that Caddyshack makes people want to play golf. It misses what is so compelling about the movie. Red Dawn is a little like Lord of the Flies, but it is really about wanting to be an important part of something important, not just be a cog, but for them to really need you to save the day and your special High School skills might actually be useful for some reason. That is what makes it great to Merlin, it is certainly timely and was done that way for a reason, but it was not primarily about politics. It is about wanting to blow shit up.

It is about the desire of every kid to have your parents all die. You don’t want to kill them, you don’t want to be responsible for them dying, but you would secretly love it if they just all died somehow and you were forced to remake the world with your teenage wisdom as it should be and could be. The amazing thing about Red Dawn to John is that Jennifer fucking Grey was in that movie, classic Jennifer Grey, not Jennifer Grey 2.0, and there is no kissing in it. At one point somebody makes a gesture to her that she immediately rebuffs it as a tough girl who takes no shit off of anybody.

Here are these teenagers, boys and girls together, and it comported with John’s understanding with sexual politics, even in the 1980s: A lot of young people today think that they are the first ones to think about feminism or gay rights, but in the 1980s we were soaking in it! It was the atmosphere John has been raised in, too, and although the idea of what was to come was less codified, they were wrestling with all those same ideas, which was what John imagine would happen:

If all the adults were killed and we were living in a post-apocalyptic world, it was clear that the system we were going to build out of the ashes was not going to be the old patriarchal system, but we were going to make a new world with an equality that was impossible and that at the time we couldn’t imagine how they would get from where we were to where we were going. It seemed like all the adults would have to die for us to build the world we imagined. It was a much more egalitarian future, the Red Dawn future, we all knew that the Cold War was bananas and it was evidence that adults were bananas.

But like all teenagers we could not possible imagine that all it would take was two years, and 20 years from now we would be the adults and most of us would have survived to adulthood with some of those new ideas intact. That would be an interesting reading for a thesis paper: The ultimately feminist-egalitarian undermessage of Red Dawn, but John is not going to write that paper because he is not going to try to graduate from college.

It was so wonderful to see George Hamilton and old Hollywood for a second completely unchecked. He was sucking on a cigar and said: ”How many hookers can we get out to Palm Springs before the end of the day?” Nobody goes on record talking that way anymore.

Ubiquitous Satanism in 1980s movies (RL111)

You can’t tell people today about the 1980s anymore because it is so unbelievable and everybody sloughs it off as if it wasn’t a real thing, but the absolute obsession that everything was about Satanism for a while was everywhere, whether that was D&D or Judas Priest, and there were people on TV shows that Merlin’s grandmother watched and played records backwards because they thought it was really telling.

For a time every daycare in the country was a Satanist sex ring and little old ladies were raping our babies. It is another one of those hysterias where every once in a while the whole village has to completely freak out about the Other. Whatever happened to Satanists? Just going on the number of people wearing pentagram necklaces at ComicCon? Merlin thinks that irony has been hard on Satanists. Satanism is not very hip. It was one thing to be an Anton LaVey guy in the 1960s and 1970s, to be into the magics back then, but today it seems ludicrous.

In the movie The Golden Child, Eddie Murphy went to Tibet and he was trying to escort the new Lama who was just a little boy, but then Satan was involved somehow. John highly recommends everybody watch it again, it is a great Eddie Murphy vehicle. Somewhere along the line in the film, probably when the first run of cocaine had run out and the screenwriters were seven pizza-boxes deep, they came up with the idea that these bad guys were actually Satan and daemons. John was watching this movie as a teenager and was wondering if the devil was part of the cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism.

It also got into Big Trouble in Little China territory where there are some supernatural powers that maybe hint at Satan, that whole 1980s thing where there is an eternal really bad guy here with enormous power, but the stakes of the film are pretty small. This eternal Chinese daemon needs to marry a girl with green eyes?

John did not see the original Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby because he does not like scary movies. Merlin has watched it in the last 3-4 months and it is awfully good and so chilling. A lot about it is great, especially once you have a kid. If there was a guy with a pitch fork and horns running around, it would be silly, but it is all these people who are doing creepy stuff. First there is pregnancy, there are people who appear to be involved with some business with Satan, and finally there is no guy with horns in it, which makes it work even today because you don’t need the devil to be real in order for Satanists to be scary.

Evel Knievel (RL111)

The early Evel Knievel movie from 1971, the one that John Milius wrote on, is starring George Hamilton, and Merlin loves any kind of 1970s promo reel where somebody is fully decked out as the character, but then comes out and talks to the people in the theater. There is another one called Viva Knievel! starring Evel Knievel and the dancer Gene Kelly about an orphanage run by nuns. Merlin was obsessed with him, and John kind of was too. Later Merlin was obsessed with Jay J. Armes. Merlin had an 8-inch scar on his left leg from jumping his dirt bike over a drainage culvert.

John built a rocket cart out of a wagon and some plywood and they had open culverts in their neighborhood and they started down the hill and couldn’t steer the thing because the steering controls broke instantly and this thing went down into the ditch and slammed into the cement culvert at a high rate of speed and there was blood everywhere, it was pretty bad, it was basically like Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump on a smaller scale. Merlin loves to watch those movies of him crashing like Ceasars Palace. He did a jump on Kings Island right by Merlin’s house.

He did all that with Harley Davidsons, it is like trying to jump something in a Cadillac! It is a 2500 pound welded steel bike with pumped-up shocks, but he was not going to use a Kawasaki or a Yamaha because it was USA and his fucking costume was a sparkly American flag. It is right there in the fucking name Evel Knievel: America! It is an anagram of America with a ”v” instead of a ”w”. Then of course he moved to Florida and was arrested at a Bennigan’s near Merlin’s house for beating a guy up with a baseball bat. George Hamilton never did that! They don’t make them like that anymore, and John hopes they will say that about him one day.

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