This week, Merlin and John talk about:
- Merlin changing his Skype avatar (Merlin Mann)
- John taking a picture holding a bag of Pirate’s Booty (Stories)
- John’s friend Peter taking pictures with a can of Schmidt beer at locations all around the world (Stories)
- LiveJournal, Indie bands selling their songs to commercials for the first time, The Shin, Superchunk, Fugazi (Music)
- John dreaming about a minor social dispute, Merlin dreaming of having extra rooms in his house (Dreams and Fantasies)
- Guys from the city moving John’s gas line, discovering a septic field underground (House)
- Thinking about having a network of tunnels and getting a surplus portable room from the elementary school (Dreams and Fantasies)
- How does nobody hear what is going on when serial killers keep hostages in their house? (Humanities)
- John’s Vietnamese neighbors playing terrible karaoke (Neighborhood)
- John cutting down an offensive fruit tree on his neighbor’s property when the house was for sale (Neighborhood)
- Gary living in his van across the street (Gary and Skeeter)
- Little girls shrieking in John’s neighborhood (Neighborhood)
The Problem: John has measured the portables, referring to John thinking to get a surplus portable container from their elementary school and putting it over his swimming pool. He has measured and it would fit perfectly.
The show title refers to John’s name for the last dream of the night, the one that you remember when you wake up.
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.
Merlin changing his Skype avatar (RL112)
Merlin puts his avatar in his Skype profile, which is jarring because there had never been an avatar there, but it was whatever Merlin threw into Skype in order to have an image in probably 2003. It was a selfie before we called it that, a placeholder image that was there for a long time, and now he has cleaned up his metadata. John’s image could use a refresh. He has Nabil glasses, he looks like he is blowing out an imaginary birthday candle, and it looks like it is being presented to Merlin at around 12 times the intended image size.
John taking a picture holding a bag of Pirate’s Booty (RL112)
Not very long ago John saw a picture of him holding some Pirate’s Booty when he was really early young. It was before Merlin had met him, when he merely knew one of his songs. It was a thing in the early days of memes. Some kid came up to him in Boston on his first Long Winters tour, John had little short hair and was wearing little clothes, he was so little, and he handed him a bag of snack food and asked if he could take a picture with him holding this snack food.
At the time any kind of communication with people was important, so he held up the bag of Pirate’s Booty, a snack food that he had never seen before and didn’t know what it was, and he made a playful face like he was thrilled about it. Later it turned out that Merlin was collecting photos of people around the world through an army of minions, holding Pirate’s Booty, and that was part of his early Flickr (see RL260). There is a lot about this that feels like a different era.
It started out as a thing that Merlin and his friends were doing on LiveJournal. It was probably Merlin’s friend Dan who was 19 and going to Emerson College in Boston, and he got pictures of John, The Dismemberment Plan, Nada Surf, They Might be Giants, Ben Folds, all the classic bands of the era. It became a thing because it was funny and stupid. Every time somebody came to Merlin’s house he would make them take pictures with a bunch of snack food. This preceded Merlin’s Flickr time, but he went to SourceForge and downloaded some open source content management system and installed it on a server and created a gallery of images and thus was born bootyshotz with a ”z” (see archived copy here).
John’s friend Peter taking pictures with a can of Schmidt beer at locations all around the world (RL112)
In the 1980s John’s friend Peter was doing a considerable amount of traveling, as some of them did in their younger days when they had nothing else to do. They used to drink a lot of Schmidt that was the cheap Rock’n’Roll beer in the Northwest. Merlin down in Florida would probably go for a Bush. Schmidt was often called animal beer because the cans had 1950s graphic art of salmon or moose, it looked like animal illustrations from Scout Life (John said Boy’s Life) and from a distance they look almost like a can of soup. You could get a half rack (12 cans) of those for $4.
It was good for the money and like a lot of beer culture it became a cult and people who drank Schmidt insisted on it. John would turn down any top-shelf beer for a Schmidt at the time (see OM293). His friend Peter went so far as to carry a can of Schmidt in his backpack as he travelled around the world so that he could get a picture of himself holding a Schmidt in front of the Taj Mahal and with the Dalai Lama, and he still has a photo album of yellowing 25-year old photos of him holding a Schmidt beer at the temple mount in Jerusalem and other places, in a lot of cases borderline offensive.
John was with him at the steps of the Vatican one day and he pulled out his Schmidt can to ready himself to take his Schmidt picture and he set the beer down on the steps of the Vatican, and while they were standing there with their plastic disposable cameras, one of the Swiss guards with a long pike and a big feathered hat saw this kid put a can down on the steps of the Vatican and he walked over, picked up the can, turned it to face him and looked at it, probably he just wanted to make sure it was not a bomb.
There was this moment that is burned in their minds of this Swiss guard in full regalia holding a Schmidt beer and looking at it with a quizzical look of the apes looking at the obelisk of 2001, and none of them got their cameras up because they were so dumbfounded. When he realized what it was he got a smirk on his face and put the beer down and it all happened in a split second and they asked him to hold the beer again, but he went back to completely ignoring them stone-faced. This fantastic photograph that didn’t happen is more impressed in John’s mind.
LiveJournal, Indie bands selling their songs to commercials for the first time, The Shin, Superchunk, Fugazi (RL112)
John was not on LiveJournal, but he was widely discussed on there and was ver upset that he couldn’t see what people were saying. He asked Merlin and Merlin just said that what happens on LiveJournal stays on LiveJournal. It was a very simple site where it was very easy to post and share stuff with a small group of people. You could share things on the Internet around 2000/01 that not everybody saw, and Merlin found himself more and more writing what he would then think of as a blog, and that led him to start his first actual According to Hoyle blog.
Merlin wrote a lot about music, things he was outraged about, how angry he was at The Shins and the McDonalds commercial and what sellouts they were. The person who changed his mind about that was Dan. Like Superchunk and the British Knights commercial it was a really big deal. It was around the time their album No Pocky for Kitty came out and there was an article about it in Spin magazine in a great issue with Nirvana, Superchunk and a whole bunch of the new bands. In the late 1980s Spin was really nailing it and Merlin never missed an issue.
The story went that British Knights made an offer on a song for their commercial and Superchunk declined and said that this is not something they do, they just sell records and go on tour. British Knights then made it abundantly clear that by next week they could have a song that is legally just different enough from their song, but would still be confused by most of their fans, or they could just let them give them a few thousand dollars to let them use the song and they did it and were able to buy a van.
As the classic Todd Barry routine from about 10 years ago goes: The bass player in Fugazi said: ”Hey guys, maybe we should charge $6 a show so I don’t have a roommate when I am 40!” They are so easy to admire from afar!
John dreaming about a minor social dispute, Merlin dreaming of having extra rooms in his house (RL112)
John woke up this morning having had one of these dreams as the last dream of the night, the takeaway dream, the one you remember. In his dream he was having a minor dispute with the shitty gal at a Rock show, somebody had pushed him from behind, he bumped into her, and she turned around and was mad. Then John woke up and thought: It was like having a dream about being at work, dreaming you are working at a cash register and then it is time to get up and go to work, to have a dream where he is in a minor social dispute? Really? You are sending me into the day with that feeling?
If the event had happened in real life John would be sitting in his car 20 minutes later and still be thinking about what he should have said to her and even two days later he would still be thinking about it, but it didn’t even happen, it was a dream, and now he is mad at an imaginary person who said something to him at an imaginary Rock show. Merlin introduces the term L’esprit de l’escalier, which means thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Merlin hates when people tell him their dreams and consequently he doesn’t tell them his dreams, but last night he had an interesting dream for regional reasons. He had the Manhattan person’s dream, a very intense, super-clear dream that he found extra rooms in his house, which apparently happens a lot to people who live in Manhattan, like you take something out of your closet and you see a little door to a whole other house inside your house. Merlin’s dream involved a coin-operated laundry and it was apparent based on the expiration date of the yoghurt in the refrigerator that somebody was using it and the yoghurt had only expired a couple of weeks ago which led Merlin to believe that people were coming in there.
Merlin has had this particular flavor of dream half a dozen times in his life and when he woke up he thought that there have to be hidden rooms somewhere, either outside or there has to be a panel leading to an Amityville Horror room he doesn’t know about, and that would be so sweet! John has a couple of rooms like that in his house, but their utility is somewhat diminished by the knowledge that all you have to do is smoke him out. There is no panic room, no monkhole, because all you have to do is set the house on fire and he would be sitting in his secret room like a toad in a hole and be roasted no matter where he is. It is a wooden house and it needs a monkhole, a tunnel, and John doesn’t think there is one.
Guys from the city moving John’s gas line, discovering a septic field underground (RL112)
At one point some guys from the city came with an underground submarine, moving his gas line. He went out to intervene, telling them that he wanted them to move it over here instead of where they were planning to move it, because he wanted to excavate here where they wanted to put the gas line, and after a while of talking they agreed that they could do it as John wanted. They pulled out a 2-foot long torpedo that was connected to a pneumatic hose of some kind, they dug a trench, stuck the torpedo in the ground like a spike going sideways and they turned it on and the thing vibrated and started to travel through the Earth like a robot mole pulling his little tube behind him.
It was very interesting, they set him in motion and on the other side a guy dug a hole waiting for him to come out, and he had made a perfectly sized hole to run a gas line through. After he got halfway across the yard he stopped moving, they tried to pull him back but couldn’t do it, which is of course exactly what John didn’t want to have happen. All of a sudden they go into emergency mode, primarily because they really love their little mole and they didn’t want to lose him and they were super-worried about him, probably because he was expensive, but he also seemed like their friend.
All of a sudden there were 4 guys from the city in flat hard hats, jumping in the center of John’s yard with their shovels out and John was like: ”Whoa, everybody, hold on, let’s slow down!”, but it was too late and they were completely in a chain gang mode of digging and now there is a 6-foot deep pit in the center of John’s yard and they discovered that this whole part of his yard was a septic field for the old farm and it had hit a cistern full of poo and managed to penetrate one wall and fell into the muck and just kept on working, but there was nowhere for him to go.
John’s house has been hooked up to the local sewer system at least for 50 years, probably longer, so now Moley is in the poo hole and these guys with their hard hats were standing around, having uncovered that septic cistern with a lid on and they opened the lid, looking down to it, and they were all really disappointed because they love their mole, but none of them wanted to be the first one down the hole. John was standing there, really upset that his yard is all trashed and the foreman told him that this was his fault because he had told them to move the line.
When John bough the house they pulled two huge 500 gallon (1900 liters) oil tanks out of the yard, one for the house and one over by the barn that might have been Diesel for the tractors. All of a sudden John was looking at this yard and was wondering what else was buried under there. Maybe there is a tunnel? Maybe there is a network of tunnels all the way to Hanoi.
The foreman went over to their big truck with the multitude of flashing lights and pulled out some elaborate hookmajigger that was specifically designed to retrieve Moley from shit holes and he manages to pull him up. They were all standing around this hole and there was no smell because whatever poo and pee is in there has been sitting in there for 60 years. It is just dirt and water by now, but the foreman turned to John and said: ”Oh, it is poo! Let me tell you!” They retrieved Moley, unhooked him, and decided to go in a different direction and ended up putting the line where John didn’t want it.
They filled the hole back in, but they had trenched across the roots of a big tree that John was really worried about, suffice to say there is still an enormous scar in his yard from this boulder dash, and now John has the awareness that there is a poo system in the yard, which is not a thing he can forget, and it is somebody else’s poo and pee, not even his. People long dead!
Thinking about having a network of tunnels and getting a surplus portable room from the elementary school (RL112)
The problem with digging a network of tunnels is that everybody would see it and John would have to cloak his yard, which would seem suspicious. The way to do it is to do a capital project where you do a lot of improvements all over the place and the yard is just a hustle bustle of activity, one of the things involving a back hoe and a large trench and it could be sewer or electrical, a lot of things could be happening, and you are focusing people’s attention on the fact that you are also replacing the roof or building a windmill.
Then you finish off the escape trench and let the fog of memory happen. People are not expecting you to be thinking that far in advance. If John could just have a tunnel that would get him out in the barn, that would still give him a nice head-start. That would be one possible direction.
The local elementary school are using the portable method of increasing capacity for their kids, they cover the playground with portables, and some of them are old, the oldest ones might date to the 1920s with hardwood floors and woodwork inside, they are beautiful, like living in a boat except the boat had 15-foot ceilings. Merlin went to 1st grade in one of those and they had the most wonderful euphemism for them: They called them the colonies, it was like a cabin.
John wants to go around the school districts because nobody appreciates nice things and they surplus these things all the time and some of them just go to the landfills, and he wants to grab one of those, truck it over here, put it over the swimming pool, which would fit perfectly because John has already measured it, and then the swimming pool goes away and becomes like a bunker under his cabin/dance studio in the backyard, and it would not be much extra work to dig a network of tunnels. John calls his house the farm, but if he had one more building he would start calling it the colony.
How does nobody hear what is going on when serial killers keep hostages in their house? (RL112)
There would be at least one 17-year old girl called sunshine, like at The Yellow Deli in Boulder Colorado where all the girls have long braids and they all have old-testament names and they are making roast-beef sandwiches. Merlin always had mixed feelings about stories of a child being kidnapped and kept in a hole underground. It is not a good idea to do that, let’s take that as read, but there is something about seeing a cross-section of an underground living space, partly because he loves cross-sections, but also the idea of having a place where you could go and nobody could find you as very appealing.
In every one of those stories there is always someone else living in the house with the bad man who believably purports to not have realized that there were people living in a hole under there. Even Gacy, they found over 20 bodies on his property, did it never seem weird how few young handymen came back out of the house? One of the searchers went down into the basement and stepped into the dirt floor of the basement and sank up to his waist because the dirt and decaying bodies and lie had become a liquified mess. There was no ventilation and the smell was overpowering and that was how they caught him because the neighbors were starting to wonder about the smell.
There was a guy in Austria who kidnapped his own daughter, fathered two children with her while she was in the hole, and her mother was living in the house and never wondered if there were rats in the walls? There was never a scratching? The fact that John’s Vietnamese neighbors can be making music that by any estimation is a crime against humanity and John can hear them breathing through their noses into those microphones through three double walls and 20 feet across the yard, yet the mother of that Austrian girl couldn’t hear her own daughter in her own home?
Only being able to listen to music from foreign cultures for a short while (RL112)
There is a place in Merlin’s neighborhood where he can pay his PG&E bill, a place where they butcher pigs and they have lots of vegetables, and they have always super-loud Chinese Pop music playing, and Merlin and his daughter love it, but what he really loves is that he gets to leave. He really enjoys the Cantonese version of I Want to Hold Your Hand really loud for a couple of minutes, but he cannot imagine being in his home and having to hear that like John has with his Vietnamese neighbors.
There is a little two-string violin banjo thing (Erhu) that is very beautiful for a minute, but it is very reedy and loud and John can only imagine when they are played fantastically it is an amazing instrument like any instrument, although still a pretty reedy and not a warm instrument.
Neighborhood (RL112)
All neighborhood stories see on the Neighborhood page!