RL200 - There’s No Anything

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: A kid is an angle-working machine, referring to John’s daughter always working an angle and wanting John to move to New York because she thinks that will improve life as the other caregivers will never tell her: ”No!”

The show title refers to there being no defined fashion anymore, but people are wearing everything at the same time. There is no ”now”, there is no anything!

Merlin cracked the encryption and jacked into the matrix. John can see into the Internet now and it is raining code. Merlin has a headset-microphone on, he is playing video games with it, he has a very large satellite phone and some synthetic meth and some EDM, which keeps him up all night, hacking this, hacking that.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 weather in Seattle (RL200)

Two days ago it was 80 degrees (27°C) in Seattle and plants and birds were dying, but now it is 50 degrees (10 °C) and raining again. Spiders don’t come now, they will come in early autumn, big as cats. Merlin doesn’t get as many ants as they used to and he things that something is going on. John is having an ant invasion, so the ants must have migrated. They could be Syrian ants, they are at The Mission (?) in Seattle and are going the opposite way.

John only sleeping for 2 hours after spending the whole night reading articles on the Internet (RL200)

John slept for 2 hours last night and he is feeling a bit wackadoodle. He was just staying up a little bit late, looking at eBay or Bring a Trailer. The smart phone is a curse. He was just reading The New York Times, telling him that circumcision isn’t that bad, but there were 4000 comments after the article saying that it was genital mutilation and John went through the comments, which he shouldn’t have done, he re-posted it to his Facebook, and then there are people on Facebook, who presumably know him better, and they also have comments, some of them are actual medical professionals.

If you could be in that hospital room and see what those 1-year old boys go through, you would think twice! You can say that about any medical procedure, though! The article was written by a Jewish author who said: ”Full disclosure: This is part of my culture!” and the comments called the article antisemitic and some said that all religion is bunk. ”Yeah, but if you rub it, it turns into a suitcase!” (reference to a joke about a rabbi asking a tailor to make a bunch of foreskins into something and he could only get a wallet out of it, see here)

Follow-up: John’s sebaceous cyst (RL200)

Today they took the stitches out of John’s sebaceous cyst hole (see RL199) and John feels like a whole man again. After last week’s show many listeners have told them that they used to eat while they are listening to the program, but you have to be crazy to do that! It is like with swimming: You should probably not eat for 30 minutes before you listen to the show, but that is a Mussolini’s train (the trains actually didn’t run on time). You can be waist-deep in a lake, eating a chili dog, and after you take that last bite you can go right under water and you are still going to be fine.

Getting a chili dog for the table (RL200)

The other day John was at a Hamburger restaurant. Everybody was getting hamburgers, he wanted a hamburger, but he also thought about getting two chili dogs for the table. Merlin loves that John does this! Whenever he goes to a pizza place, he will walk in the door and as they are seating them John will lean over to the waitress and say: ”A large pepperoni for the table as fast as you can!” It is not even an appetizer, it is first dinner. But then John thought about how to eat chili dogs as a communal food, it is like splitting a Sloppy Joe 4-ways. If it is a pretty good-sized beef dog you neatly cut it into thirds and then everybody can enjoy it like a slider, but that presumes that the chili is added like an elaborate ketchup rather than being a bowl of chili that probably has a hot dog in it somewhere, which is how it is supposed to be. They have talked about that a lot (see RL13).

TV-shows and commercials (RL200)

At a certain point Merlin got The Benny Hill Show on PBS, which seems really fucking weird. You definitely got Monty Python on PBS on Saturday night because it was British and it was cultural in America. Merlin often says Benny Hinn when he means Benny Hill, but Benny Hinn was the televangelist with the comb-over that looked like an anvil. In Anchorage they didn’t get Benny Hill on MTV, but on some proto-WGN. WGN was not PBS, but that was Chicago, who didn’t have PBS. It was not Boston, that is the one with the weird streets. ”Boston, Mass 0-2-1-3-4: send it to Zoom!” (reference to the 1972 TV Series Zoom by WGBH-TV, aired on PBS). 1-800-588-2300 Empire (reference to an ad for a Carpet company). ”I will stand upon my head to beat all deals” (reference to used-car dealership commercial Cal Worthington, see RL27).

Every day someone is born who has never seen The Flintstones. For John is has got to be a decade since he last saw them. Merlin can’t even tell when he did see them. If he is at a hotel room he is flipping around because you can only watch so much Chopped. You might get Heckle and Jeckle, but there are not as many cartoons on TV anymore, they are isolated into the ghetto of cartoon networks and even then it is ironic shows. They also mention Dr. Theopolis of Buck Rogers. Twiki is just a conveyance for a Doctor-robot, a penis-headed little person robot whose job is just to carry Dr. Theopolis around. It might be 35 years since Merlin saw an episode of Buck Rogers.

John never understood how the technology of the 25th century didn’t allow them to combine the brain of Dr. Theopolis with the body of Twiki. It is lot like The Greys, not Aaron Gray, in that they give us as much as they think we can handle. Skynet has gone live already, thinking of it!

The Matrix (RL200)

Skynet becomes self-aware, and that automatically translates to a Matrix-y situation where human beings end up in goo in pods in an infinitely large warehouse and somehow they become energy-creators, like a battery, and you can plug a cord into their spine and somehow humans create more energy than they use. John didn’t know that of humans and it seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics. That whole facility doesn’t seem particularly efficient because it has a lot of space in between. Lite a start-up they might have built out for a lot more people than they have recruited.

Like with your fat: They say that you make a certain amount of fat globs in yourself that look like grapes made out of hummus and if you lose weight, the fat grapes get small and if you gain weight the fat grapes get big, but there is nothing that changes the number of fat grapes you have. If you have created all these fat grape clusters, you can lose all the weight you want, but those grapes are just waiting there! In the Matrix warehouse there is room for a lot more fat grapes in there or room for the grapes that are there to grow. You can feed those humans growth hormone and create mondo humans!

The change of time, fashion (RL200)

Merlin misremembers a lot about The Matrix, he keeps forgetting how important landline telephones are in that movie. It was the year where everybody started getting mobile phones, the last year where Indie bands released cassette tape demos, and the year Napster started. A young person right now who is 15 and was born in 2001 would watch that movie and wonder what those things are and why would there be a phone on the street like that? John and Merlin have to make a concerted effort to go gracefully into middle age.

John was talking to Dan on Road Work (see probably RW27) that he is going to go gentle into that good-night, fuck that good-night, he is going to walk into it and quit complaining about his problems, embrace them! Somebody told John the other day that they thought bell-bottoms were ridiculous-looking and John remembers the last time people thought that. All fashion has become timeless now, there are people wearing bell-bottoms, people wearing tight pants, people wearing Utilikilts, there is no ”Now!”, there is no anything! The only thing that is now is that somehow the cult of men’s wear has agreed - which is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled - that short-armed suit jackets that end at your belt are really handsome and that is the contemporary style.

Merlin getting a new suit (RL200)

A month ago Merlin had to conduct a wedding and he had to get a big boy suit, so his wife stopped by Banana Republic on the way home from Trader Joe’s and got him a new suit. John started laughing like his dad. It is an amazing wife. John is surprised Merlin didn’t get it from Amazon Prime, but if he could he would. Merlin’s wife knows mostly how he is shaped and she got it right and brought a suit home that was great. He just had to go to the little tailor guy around the corner to hem up his pants and then he insisted in fixing the length of his sleeves which Merlin thought were already fine. $45 out the door!

Merlin needed a suit, a tie, shoes, and a belt, which is the thing you always forget. His wife did all the heavy lifting and got him a suit and a cool tie with sharks and fishbones on it. He also bought probably the most expensive fancy shoes he has ever bought in his life, some Brogues, those cool-looking brown shoes with the holes in them, by Allen Edmonds. Those are hand-made in America and they smell gorgeous, Merlin wants his whole house to smell like them! Then he went to Amazon Prime Now and got a belt delivered within 2 hours.

John is very impressed by Amazon. His mom periodically gets texts that say there is a truck at the corner of 14th and Madison and it has steaks in it for $15. Do you want them? Merlin says that this is a well-known scam where a guy who comes to your door and asks you to get him out of a jam: He has a big order cancel at the last minute and he got 10 pounds of prime steaks out there, like ”My kid is in the car, I got a job interview” You buy steaks in bulk. It is like buying a pound of pot and cutting it up into grams and making profit on the margin.

Chicken sandwiches at Arby’s being the best thing on the menu (RL200)

If you go to the new Arby’s, America’s Roast Beef Yes Sir, and if Merlin ever went his wife wouldn’t know, they don’t talk about Arby’s, the best thing there is the chicken sandwich, primarily because the chicken has been dredged in flour and then french-fried, very much like a Chick Fil-A, and then some lettuce and mayonnaise goes on it. When Merlin goes to Arby’s he gets three sandwiches and two potato cakes. Instead of potatoes John will get Swiss cheese put on the sandwiches. In addition you can get a chicken sandwich as a taste sensation.

You are sitting in your car with your three Arby’s sandwiches and a chicken sandwich and you gobble the roast beef sandwiches because the last thing you want is for those to get cold and then all of a sudden the beef takes on the consistency and mouth feel of the labia of a dead raccoon, like a rodent labia Steak-umm. John doesn’t remember Steak-umm, but Merlin told him about them before. He also hasn’t tried a Fluffernutter (reference to Road Work where Dan is trying to get John to eat a Fluffernutter, for example in RW24).

John finds the chicken sandwich to be the best food at Arby’s and with the rest of the food you are taking your life into your own hands. You know what you did and you are a bad boy! You are not going to tell your wife about it! When John was sitting in his car, following up his three Arby’s roast beef sandwiches with his delicious chicken sandwich, he had a terrible moment of clarity and thought of all the articles he has read about chickens, but that is the worst time to think about that because there is no good story about American chickens and if there is, it is not at any point going to touch an Arby’s. They are getting their chicken right from Purdue University and it is coming to them probably literally in a pipeline.

There was the pink slime problem a couple years ago. Think about how many chicken breasts get sold every year vs how many breasts are on a typical chicken. Merlin thought about this, also about baby carrots, which are a fucking scam: They are basically big carrots that have been milled down to be small carrots, they put them on a carrot lathe, and they are not even trying anymore, but they are just basically cut off the ends, and they are still fat and they break open and Merlin hates it. What do they do with the rest of the carrot? It is like what Michael Stipe says: ”When you throw it away, where is away?” - ”Soy bomb!” (reference to someone who interrupted the Bob Dylan Grammy Performance in 1998).

Typically John wants eat quality food that has never been in a hose. He wants to be so boojee that he goes to the Public Market in Seattle where people are in butcher smocks and he will look like D-Day from Animal House with a handlebar mustache and a helmet, asking all kinds of questions like what the name of this chicken was. John will pay $1100 a pound for this chicken, he wants to get that person who feeds his children only food that was grown by peasants on a mountain side.

What John doesn’t want to do is driving down the street, see an Arby’s, and without any control of his limbs pull into the drive through and before he can think about it order three roast beef sandwiches and a chicken sandwich, and then he is sitting in the parking lot or he rejoins traffic. He doesn’t want to go in and sit at a table with a connected chair, he doesn’t want any Horsey Sauce, but he is back on the road at 70 mph and he got a roast beef sandwich in his hand and a chicken sandwich in his lap and he is not thinking about it, eating this hose food.

He might even be on the way to a dinner where people are going to serve him blanched kale. Merlin always eats before he goes to dinner, he has been disappointed by too many ”dinners” where dinner is two hours after they said it was going to be and he was getting weird and getting a headache. Getting Arby’s before you go to a dinner is like doing your business before you go on a date, like laying down some covering fire before you send your platoon into the fucking jungle.

Now John had this terrible thought about these chickens where their little talents are growing into the cages and they are pecking each other to death and every once in a while someone opens the garage door and hits them with a fire hose that is hosing out antibiotics. Is there a lower place? A McDonalds McNugget is probably lower down, it is the stuff that comes out of the chicken hose at the end of the day. The innovation was that these other parts that they had previously just wasted could be turned into something that you can give your kids with a prize.

Merlin has been eating pure garbage in some cases, but he is still hale and hearty. He is just trying to cut down on the bread because if he eats a lot more protein and a lot less of almost everything else except vegetables he feels markedly better within 2 days. Yesterday morning he had 2 cooked hamburger patties for breakfast and he had a great day.

John seeing a new doctor (RL200)

John started seeing a doctor and at the first visit the doctor asked if John was a musician. After three times he was in a Fugees song, but what he wants (reference to The Godfather) is some reassurance, that is why you go to the doctor, and he said: ”You don’t have prostate cancer, you are just getting old!” All you want to hear is that you are mostly okay.

At the doctor’s office there was a little bodyboard in the shape of an infant made out of molded plastic on the wall and he had never seen one of these, like when you were going to marinate a baby, and the doctor explained that it was a circumcision board (like this) You put the baby in the baby-shaped bucket and then you can snip him. There was a yellow stain in the pipi-area, which looked gross, but the doctor ensured him that they use a yellow antiseptic. Hangs that think on a special place on the wall like it was a clock!

John told the doctor about his attempt to reduce gluten and sugar and the doctor got the doubter look and said: ”You know what? All that is baloney!” - ”Really?” but John knew he was going to say that because doctors don’t know everything. He told John to eat what his body wants. if it wants a bread, then eat it! The number of people who are truly sensitive to gluten is just a tiny fraction. Merlin heard that is totally true. If you feel better not eating bread, then don’t eat it, but you don’t have to make a thing out of it. You don’t have to bring your comfort animal on the plane just because you don’t like being on airplanes.

Comfort animals (RL200)

There was a woman who brought a full-grown comfort turkey on an airplane that got its own seat and there are some lovely pictures of the turkey uncomprehendingly looking out the window: ”I thought I couldn’t fly!” (see RL221). A turkey’s brain can distinguish a worm from a rock about 60% of the time and it is made to periodically eat rocks. God knew that he didn’t make a contingency within the turkey to periodically eat a rock, it is going to accidentally eat a rock and he needed to make it very easy for it.

This turkey was looking out the window of the airplane at 30.000 feet and John was just trying to picture what went through his fucking turkey mind. Maybe the women gets comfort from comforting the turkey. John is trying to teach his kid that you can get comfort from giving comfort, but she doesn’t get it. it is hard to be depressed when you are helping another person, Merlin told his daughter.

John’s daughter asking him to move to New York (RL200)

John’s daughter has just recently started to say: ”Daddy, why don’t you move?” - ”Move to a different house?” - ”No, move to New York!” - ”With you?” - ”No, I will stay here with Mama!” - ”But Sweety, I wouldn’t be around then!” - ”Yeah, I know!” - ”Are you running this by me to see what I do?” - ”Well, you know, you don’t have to be here!” - ”Would you want me to send you videos?” - ”You could send Nanna videos!” - ”Right, so my mom does want a video from me more often than my kid does!”

Maybe she just realized how superfluous daddies are and she just wants to get down to brass tax. Maybe it is because she gets away with more with her other caregivers. Everybody else in the clan is female except a step-grandpa who is a wonderful step-grandpa, who is so doting that he will go down on the floor with her and plays cars for 4 hours, which is a pretty great effort for a 75 year old. They have toy cars up there, but no little figures, so they use marbles as people and drive around with marbles in the cars. How do they coax the kid into being that creative? Merlin’s daughter wouldn’t even play with figures if they are not the same scale.

She has thought it through that if Daddy is out of the picture then life is improved somehow because nobody will ever say ”No!” again, but that is pretty sophisticated. She has a vision board that is covered with pictures of Miley Cyrus, but no pictures of One Direction. If she had a Pinterest, it would have one photo of John on a plane with his arm around a comfort turkey and an Arby’s sandwich in his mouth, going Elsewhere. ”See you later! Don’t let the door knob hit you in the ass!”

John feels a little disconcerted about that because up until that point they had a good arrangement, which was that every time she did something bad he said: ”No!”, but she has is all figured out and she is going to start planting this seed in other people in the family’s minds: ”Wouldn’t it be good if Daddy moved?” The way her other caregivers treat her is not necessarily permissive, as much as there are no consequences. A lot of people are saying ”Tisk tisk!” when she throws a pudding, there is even some sitting on the hard chair, and the chair is not even hard, there is a cushion on it, but John is calling it the hard chair to reinforce that this is hard times.

But if she is on the hard chair and says: ”My butt hurts!”, which John it is: ”We are sitting on the hard chair!” With the other people she knows that she also can’t do this in the first 5 minutes, but when it comes to minute 6… she is working an angle at all times, she is a negotiator, a kid is an angle-working machine. Daddy is like: ”I am not negotiating how many jelly beans you are going to get after dinner before we even sit down to dinner!” We are not talking about what is happening after the thing that we are still struggling to accomplish!

She has got moxy and she is going to moxy her way into moving Daddy out! John asked her what about his house, but she finds it fine. Honky and Ribbon are already at Nanna’s, her dolls, and Ruby, Dolly and Pooh-bear would go there, too. She would lock the door if she knew how, she would toss the key in the bushes, she might take some oil-soaked rags and stuff them in the fireplace flue if she could get up there. Merlin recommends John to hide one of her dolls in the barn and tell her that she left for New York.

One time John was late to a restaurant and she was sitting there with John’s mom already and she had already managed to order macaroni and cheese and goldfish crackers. John didn’t know that restaurants had goldfish crackers. He told her: ”Marlo, those cost $0.01 for a grocery bag full of goldfish crackers, it is not a thing we get at a restaurant, we get a broccoli side at a restaurant!” Normally the kids menu says that she can pick an entré, an aside and a drink, but before John even arrived at the table, she was like: ”macaroni and cheese, goldfish crackers, lemonade!” and John’s mom allowed that. How about a milkshake?

For Merlin’s daughter, going out to dinner is getting one thing she really enjoys, one thing she can tolerate, and one thing she hates, and she has to sit still with her hands in her lap like a gentleman. If John’s daughter has brought a little talisman, a little tiny doll the size of a lady finger, she can keep it in her lap and quietly interact with it while John and his mom talk about the different routes they took across town to get there, which is John’s social intercourse with his mom. She should listen to the route talk because if you don’t learn how to talk about routes, what are you going to talk about when you grow up?

Merlin is not sure people still learn small talk as they used to. There is the fucking cashier at Safeway that Merlin wants to strangle who always wants to talk to him about his groceries and it makes him insane. Yesterday she had questions about his shirt with a pizza dog, which is about a comic. Merlin always just responds with a chuckle. She got completely untreated ADD which is the wrong kind of thing to have as a cashier. She is a dumpsterfire as a cashier and they surely tell them at Safeway to ask people about their items and congratulate them on their selections.

For Merlin there always has to be some frisson, a little bit of resistance. He is not great at this because he is a very indulgent father, but even if things go perfectly there will always still be a breaking point and it always ends in tears. Knowing that, you are not going to forestall any child on happiness and you are not going to create any child growth by creating an entirely conducive environment.

Somebody got into John’s daughter’s mind that lemonade was some kind of health drink. Merlin’s daughter had lemonade maybe thrice and she still never had a Coke or similar beverage, he almost got her to try iced tea once. She will drink milk or water and a fair amount of hot chocolate, which has become a staple in the house, but that was probably not a good move. John’s daughter also never had a Coke. Merlin and John had a Coke every day at her age.

She is 5 years old and once she got it going… whatever her humor is on the spectrum, she understands if John says that they are going to move and live in a garbage can that he is joking that it is somewhat funny, but she is probably not joking when she is saying: ”Daddy, why don’t you move to New York?” She has thought it through and it not only seems resonable to her, but reasonable enough that she would suggest that and he would go: ”Huh, yeah!” It is not a situation where she wants to collect the insurance, but she is getting the stickler out of the equation.

Anywhere where there is more than one person who deals with the child, the child is on hot and cold with different people in their life. Within a given week there are three different piranha’s at Merlin’s kid’s school, sometimes it is her. Merlin’s daughter mostly runs fairly warm with both of them, but there will be a period where even starting over the afternoon there will be a flip and over the next two days to two weeks she is way more about this person than the other person, but it does change. It is not that Merlin is always the goat, but sometimes she is really not into mom and Merlin can do no wrong. There is no telling when it happens and why it happens.

John’s daughter is trying to establish that she likes mom and she is going the whole hog, she prefers her enough that John can get out, he is just taking up space in mom’s imagination! John is going to work this out with her. He is going to get down in her crate and say: ”This is my crate! You live here because I let you!”

John taking the Pepsi challenge on a hovercraft, cracking a raw egg on hot food in Europe (RL200)

John once took the Pepsi challenge when he was on a hovercraft, he was drinking at the time and he did pass out on ferry boats, but not on this hovercraft in a different country. Someone offered him the Pepsi challenge. They are made differently regionally everywhere and the Coke and Pepsi are not the same in different places. If your Pepsi is made out of Coke water it will taste like it has been filtered through a dead raccoon. Is Dasani owned by Coke or was it Bacardi? Merlin just learned on John Oliver that Belgium owns America.

A girl asked him in a British accent if he would like to take the Pepsi challenge and he said: ”Listen, toots, I am an USA American, born and bread. I can tell a Pepsi from a Coke!” - ”Is that right? You can tell a Pepsi from a Coke? Why don’t you step up and do the Pepsi challenge then, USA American?” John was feeling pretty confident, he took a little bit of the Pepsi and without even taking a drink of the Coke he said: ”Boom, that is Pepsi!” Merlin can tell from the smell, and he can tell Diet Coke from Coke from the smell of the effervescence. The girl was impressed, her accent was Bob Odenkirk doing a British accent, and she still wanted him to taste the other one.

John was right, he basically took his nickel-plated pistol out, dropped it on the floor because he didn’t have a microphone, and he said: ”USA America!” - Bang bang cheeseburger (actually Hamburger hamburger bang bang). When he stepped off that hovercraft he felt pretty confident until he ordered spaghetti in a restaurant and they cracked a raw egg on it and John was right back to square one. He was not prepared for that at the time, but they crack a raw egg on anything in Calais.

After he got accustomed to it, he started to practice this technique. Crack a raw egg on a steaming hot lasagna and it will flourish. John just ordered a pepperoni pizza for the table, it arrived, and before anything else happened - boom - crack a raw egg right on it! They will do that all across Europe, except in Germany where they will throw a hard-boiled egg on it because it is much more efficient. In the Mediterranean countries if you got an Arby’s chicken sandwich, they will take the bun off and crack a raw egg right on it.

John’s music used in commercials (RL200)

Merlin is really deep on Gilmore Girls right now, it is a really good 10-12 year old show, and circumcision came up and Merlin had to explain to his daughter what circumcision was. The Long Winters had a song on Gilmore Girls. On the last one there were some Pernice Brothers, Grant Lee Buffalo appeared as a character on the show, and Death Cab for Cutie were on The OC. The Long Winters were the Cheap Trick of Livejournal, they were everybody’s second favorite band. They were in a car commercial and in a beer commercial. It was post-Indie Rock consensus that it was okay to take filthy lucre, but not all the way to beer, it is like taking money from right-to-lifers.

Fire Island was in the Fiat commercial. John’s first car was a Fiat. For the beer commercial they went the whole hog, they paid John all the money and then they decided to go a different direction. The Crown Royal company reached out to John to write a song for them, their advertising idea being that Crown Royal is the high-class drink for lower middle-class working dudes because it comes in a bag. At one point Crown Royal was the fancy one and if you showed up at an afterparty at a Junior prom… There was even a time when Bushmills was the good stuff.

Their motto was: ”For every king a Crown!” and they wanted a song that says that. John went ahead and wrote a song without spending too much effort on it and he thought it was really on the nose, but he was pretty proud of it and was hoping that they would back up the money truck. He never heard back from them. It reminds Merlin of the Löwenbräu song: ”Here is to good friends, tonight is kind of special…” (song called Tonight, Let It Be Löwenbräu). John didn’t even get a ”Thanks!” or any kind of reply.

They went ahead with the ad and Merlin is speculating whom they went with, but it was probably not Death Cab for Cutie because the premise that a working guy is a king in his own house is not a Death Cab premise. They would go like: ”I looked inside the cupboard… someone else’s Crown… was there” Merlin liked their Coca Cola ads and every time they went to the movies he would hear Ben Gibbard singing a Coca Cola ad. He told his daughter that she had met that man, he came to their house that day, and she looked at him like he was nuts. He was very talkative that day, and he is a tall good-looking guy. John thinks that seeing a tall Rock musician is always shocking because so many Rock musicians are small. Was the other person the guy whose house Merlin insulted? No, the other person was Showbox Chad, and Merlin never insulted Chad’s house (see RL255).

AMC safety instruction pre-rolls with the red balls (RL200)

Now there is a pre-roll in AMC movie theaters with the little red balls that is sticking the straw in the giant Coke (see here). All the balls represent all the different kinds of movies, and there is only one girl ball while all the other balls are either clearly boy balls or somewhat genderless balls, the Smurfette of movie balls. John finds that girl ball very attractive, she is cute as hell with a bit of a high-maintenance hair. Merlin almost always finds the single-girl-anything very attractive. She has become the Tinker Bell for John and when he goes to the movies he is waiting to see her.

Merlin finds it super-annoying that they give you safety information in a cute way, but it is not quite at the level of the Virgin airlines safety videos. John is wondering if you can Rule 34 her and John would like to see it now that he thinks about it. You would have to capture her essence, you can’t screw it up. She is ball-shaped and she doesn’t have any eyes, so how do you capture her sexiness with no body and no eyes? John is probably responding to the hoop earrings. If you put a hoop earring on somebody he immediately thinks that he is watching Rita Moreno in West Side Story. She is in a Target commercial right now with 3 Latinas singing and she looks terrific. Merlin loves her, he heard her on an episode of Latino USA on KQED not that long ago, and she is still a pistol.

John wonders what the number one sex thing is that you do with a ball and Merlin mentions ball gags and that there are balloon people. Some people like it when ladies pop balloons, some people want people inside of balloons, and some people are just very into balloons being rubbed on their body. John was thinking that Merlin was going to say that they are going to put an uninflated balloon inside their rectum and then inflate it, a butt balloon.

Bunch-O-Baloons water-balloons (RL200)

Merlin got some Bunch-O-Balloons and he recommends John to buy those today. They are like fatcore (?) puzzles, but made of balloons. It looks like a multi-tendrilled beast and it is 33 tubes at the end of which is a little balloon with a rubber band on it. You hook this thing up to a hose or your tab, you turn it on, and in less than a minute you have about 30 water-balloons. They pop off and seal themselves, it is incredible, Merlin blew through 60 of those yesterday. Merlin got it for $10 at Walgreens and it is the greatest thing he has ever seen in his life.

So many things you could do differently if you could know that you are always a minute away from having 30 water balloons. Think about if you are 8 years old and you are stuck in a hotel room on 14th floor. You could set 100 paper airplanes on fire, but would that be better or worse than 100 water balloons. You could wait until a whole group of business men were coming down the sidewalk and then just dump the whole lot of them and they would achieve terminal velocity and hit these guys with a lot of prejudice. John wonders if he could fire these out of a T-shirt cannon. You would have to find the exact amount of water to put into these that would enable it to survive a T-shirt cannon. Merlin says they are about the size of a toddler heart, and John knows exactly how big those are.

Texting with John (RL200)

It is the best thing Merlin ever bought at Walgreens, even better than John’s cape, but John bought that, not Merlin, and he still has it. He can send Merlin a sext wearing it. Merlin never got a sext and he only knows about it from jokes. Because of his married status he doesn’t need a sext and John thinks it could be considered cheating if he would be sending sext. They spend some time talking about what constitutes a sext.

Merlin sent John 4 text messages about their show yesterday, but he accidentally sent them to his wife first, he thought she was one of the Johns, the other one being John Siracusa. Merlin communicates about 2-4 times as much with John Siracusa than with John Roderick because he is one of Merlin’s relatively few friends. John is a fucking minefield to text with and he gets mad if Merlin does it wrong. Lately if you send Scott Simpson a text it is the same as sending a text to 000-000 because he never replies. Merlin sometimes gets texts from him out of the blue where he says: ”Bro, I watched that thing that you suggested and it was really good, bro!” He doesn’t bro John anymore, but he would do that all the time.

Merlin texts with John, occasionally with Dan, a fair amount with John Siracusa, his friends Max and Alex, they are great guys. John is the soup nazi of texting and Merlin doesn’t want to do it wrong or fluster him. Sometimes John comes in with a very passionate thing to talk about and Merlin doesn’t want to provoke him unintentionally about something by texting wrong and John would think it is about a thing and not about a thing.

Does John have a sense of humor about himself? (RL200)

The other day John was walking down the street with someone and said: ”Do you think I have a sense of humor about myself?” and there was a long pause. The reason he was asking this question is because he had som doubts. If you are going to pause in a moment like that you know that the other person can handle it, you are not jumping in to fill up the space with talk while you think about it, but you are giving a considered answer and you are letting the other person stew in it for a second. They came back with something similar to what Merlin just said: ”I don’t want to get this answer wrong!”

It was John’s version of the question: ”Do these pants make my butt look big?” There is napalm in the trees now, basically confirming their fear, and John was: ”Go on!” - ”You are a little scary and you really like to be right about what everybody else’s deal is and you are 94% right about what other people’s deal is, which is amazing, but then you are very reluctant to not also be 94% right about yourself!” - ”Aha” Now there was the smell of burned plastic.

”You have a sense of humor about yourself, and you know yourself very well and say very knowledgable things about yourself and laugh and we are all meant to laugh with you because we all have Stockholm syndrome, but if someone else makes and observation about you that doesn’t match up with what you think you already know, there is a long and cold period that no-one wants to be inside of!” - ”Mhmmm” - ”I am starting to feel that cold feeling right now as we walk down the street” - ”Well, interesting observation!”

John was thinking to himself if this was one of the definitions of a sense of humor about oneself when somebody else says: ”Here is a flaw in you!” and you go: ”Haha, wohooo!” because there are other definitions. John is certainly capable of saying: ”Boy, am I a dummy!”, but an element of that is diffusing other people’s criticism because he gets to set the terms of how he is a dummy and by saying it before anyone else can say it he retains control over it.

John wants to be someone of whom other people think that he has a great sense of humor about himself, what a light-hearted carefree guy. The reason he brought it up was that no-one ever does him the favor of dropping some science on him about him, like: ”You know what your problem is…”, but he always hears the word ”scary” in the first 2-7 words. Scary isn’t a thing he is trying to be, maybe a little. John has been chewing on that quite a bit. If they had texted it to him and included a picture of their boobs he would have glanced right over the criticism - Steamin’ John (see RL85) - and he would have put a balloon full of hot pudding.

Outro

They are selling T-shirts for one more week! They are talking about their T-shirt campaign for a few minutes, urging people to buy one before it is too late. This is also their 200th episode, happy anniversary!

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