RL214 - Tinder for the Google Man

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: There are no totem poles in Anchorage, referring to the Anchorage East High logo looking like it came from a totem pole although there are no Native American tribes around the area.

The show title refers to John imagining that Sergey Brin, the CEO of Google, personally reviews all of his search history, and after searching for topics related to scandals by Chuck Berry he has given enough tinder to the Google Man.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

John’s 30th High School reunion in Anchorage (RL214)

John sounds very tired when he answers the call. He was on a plane all night, he arrived in Seattle at 5:15am, he woke up with a sore throat, and if he was their podcast partner pal Dan Benjamin he would already be at the doctor’s office and he would have cancelled this episode of the show for sure because he would have needed some medical attention. But John is not Dan Benjamin, he is here in the chair, although he sounds he is about to blow up. He does not want to miss his chance to blow because that opportunity comes only once in your lifetime!

John sounds like Uncle Remus when he tells the story that he was booked for a flight at 2am and got in at 6:55am, but with Alaska Airlines you can change your flight right there at the kiosk and he changed it to an earlier flight, but that meant he was in a middle seat in the middle of the plane and it was going to be awful. 45 minutes before the flight takes off they ”close” the flight and a few minutes before that John went to the counter and said that he couldn’t be in that seat for a variety of reasons.

He had his service horse tap his hoofs to communicate how desperately he needed this chair, and very casually she just put him in an exit row that didn’t have a person in the middle seat, although the woman prior had told him that there were no seats available. John was flying from Anchorage Alaska, his home town, because he was there to attend his 30th High School reunion.

There is the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, an 1980s film where Kathleen Turner went back in time to her Senior year in High School. It came out when John was in High School and Kathleen Turner was enviably thought of as an actress who could go back and play herself in High School. She was the Michael J. Fox of the story!

She attends her 25-year high school reunion, accompanied by her daughter, Beth. She is just separated from her High School sweetheart and now husband Charlie and is weary of attending the reunion because of everyone questioning her about his absence as they have been married since Peggy became pregnant right after graduation. John had this very conversation just last night with one of his High School classmates. Someone getting divorced just now after having been married since High School, that is heavy!

Merlin recently reconnected with a pal from college. She had been following him and responding to him and they had the name of a person he was pretty good friends with in college, and he asked her about it and it was indeed her, and she is still with the guy that Merlin was mostly closer friends with in college. That feels like the exception!

John asked a guy: ”Still seeing Natasha Rasmussen?” - ”Not since 1994!” - ”What has been happening since then!” - ”Well, I have 3 kids, one of them is 22 years old!” - ”I haven’t talked to you in a long time!” - ”It has been about 22 years!” - ”It still feel very close to you. We went to High School together!”

When Merlin googles somebody from High School and finds a picture of them, he will sometimes think: ”Shit dog, he looks like he is pushing 50!” It is weird, because he knows they were mostly his age in 1986 and that means they are still mostly his age today, although in his head they will always be 19 or 20. Holy shit! You are older now than your dad was when I met you!

The classmates John met at the reunion were in fine shape. A lot of them did look the same or better than they did in High School. When he went to the 20-year reunion everyone had thickened up and it seemed to bode that by the time you got to the 30-year reunion they are all just going to be flesh mountains, but people were in good shape, they looked sharp, they had sparkle in their eyes. Many of them their third kid just graduated from High School and they were ready to start a new adventure in life, while John was standing there in his Banana Republic blazer from The Salvation Army for $1.

Times have changed and expectations went up! John went immediately to a drug store and bought Just For Men Mustache Dye and now he looks like Tom Selleck.

John is glad he went. A lot of people didn’t go, and there was a lot of feedback online that indicated a smug consensus of: ”Why would you go to your reunion? Herp Derp!” and some of that attitude comes from people still not realizing that life is short and doesn’t last forever. Your reunions are a demarkation of life and time progressing. When John walked in the door of this ski chalet he had a natural apprehension because he hadn’t seen these people in years and he wondered if he even had anything in common with them, but then you get there and you know them all for decades, even if you haven’t seen them. ”Holy shit, John Lindsey! Holy shit, it is Chili Cookoochy (?)” He is a real person who lives in Denver.

They had an excellent High School class, but at the time John didn’t think so. It was excellent people who are still thriving. Those little dumb flags: ”Your High School reunions? Aren’t you too sophisticated for that now? You have moved to San Francisco!”, that is true for a lot of people: ”I don’t go back to my home town! I got out of there and now I have 700 channels of televisions in my town! I am not going back to that!”, but you go back to that and it turns out that you thought you were a nerd, but none of your classmates did, they all thought you were great, or you remember everybody hating your guts, but in fact everybody liked you, and they are all nice people now, no longer High School jerks. Everybody says that and it makes Merlin feel terrible that he doesn’t go to those things. John thinks everybody should go!

There was only guy who was still working out the whole problem of cool. Online he is very nice to John, but every time he sees him in person he lurks over on the other side of the room because he is not going to come say ”Hi!” to John first who is still worried about that level of thing, but he is otherwise a super-interesting guy. John is talking to people who are coming up to him to talk to him, but he is looking at that guy across the room and he is just looking at his fingernails. When he gets done talking to the people who were brave enough to come over and say ”Hello!” then he will go over and say: ”Hey, man!” because he wants to relieve him of this stress.

This reunion was put together on Facebook. There were no emails, it all happened on Facebook including the threads where people were saying: ”Nah, maybe I can come, maybe I can’t. How much is it? When is it? Oh, my daughter has a dance recital that day!” - ”Yeah, this is your 30th reunion. Reschedule the dance recital!” There was a lot of that chatter.

John made his reservations to go to the reunion, he was getting on the plane, and he got a text from one of his friends saying: ”Alright, see you in a couple of hours!” - ”What are you talking about?” - ”The reunion is tonight!” - ”Friday night?” John had naturally assumed it was Saturday night because he never read the invite. He had made a plane reservation that landed in Anchorage one hour after the event starts. He rented a car, ran through the airport like a disgraced football star, jumping over suitcases, some little old lady says: ”Go, J-Rod!”, he makes into his rental 4x4, and he careens across the city, a city he knows intimately, all the way over to the mountains where the reunion is being held in a ski chalet and he wasn’t even late!

They were just getting started and John had the whole reunion with all of his pals, and then got back in his 4x4 and raced back to the airport because his lady friend was flying in on a later flight, he did all of this in one night. He didn’t need to have flown in a day early and he could have driven back to the airport after the reunion and flown home, he could have left a pot on the stove. How many years of his life has he thought: ”Oh boy, I better get these plane tickets, it is only 6 months till I have to fly!”, going on trips was a big deal, changing flights was an enormous deal, and you could as well just stay home.

The age of Hollywood actresses (RL214)

Merlin says that the standards have changed and you can judge the health of what it means to be an actress in Hollywood by how old you have to be to play Peter Parker’s aunt, which was originally Mrs. Cunningham (from Happy Days, played by Marion Ross, she was considered, but didn’t get the role!) and more recently Marisa Tomei (in Spider-man: Homecoming). Marisa Tomei is such a good actor and John really admires her!

Scarlett Johansson plays the sexually unappealing matron in the film because she is pushing 35. Merlin felt uncomfortable finding her attractive in that Steve Buscemi movie with the other girl (Ghost World) because she was playing a teenager there, but a lot of things make Merlin uncomfortable and he loves movies.

Chuck Berry scandals, Sergey Brin personally reviewing John’s search history (RL214)

How about songs from the 1950s/60s/70s that reference younger women? It is a big topic and Merlin thinks about this a lot, the coded language of men over time. The other day Merlin was sitting around as he was urinating, and it occurred to him that there has always been code, like: ”There are going to be girls there!” and for a long time Merlin thought that meant: ”I can get a date!”, but as he got a little older he realized that meant there were some girls he could kiss on, and later he was pretty sure that meant: ”We are going to have intercourse!” and Merlin wondered how many times that meant they could force a girl to do something with them.

And as for chasing around teenage girls, Chuck Berry ran into a little trouble with that. He was hiding in toilets. It was around the time of The Day The Music Died (a plane crash on 1959-02-03) and Chuck Berry violated the Mann Act (he was arrested on 1959-12-23 for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines for allegedly “immoral purposes”). He might have had some prototypical Russian spy camera in the bus station bathroom, because that is really his thing, he is a dookie man.

John decided to figure out what the real story of the character was that was hiding inside a Porta-Potty, because they wanted to watch people go to the potty. He had a partial ownership in a restaurant and had cameras installed where he could watch ladies go to the bathroom.

John thinks someone was actually hiding in the toilet and he now googled ”hiding in toilet”, which is going on his permanent record and he is going to get ads for that now. He imagines Sergey Brin in a black turtleneck sitting at a big desk with Google Glass on with a heads-up display in front of him in virtual space and his desk completely clean. A secretary walks in and puts a piece of paper on his desk face-down, and he picks it up and it says: ”Hiding in toilet” because he is monitoring John in a different way and he doesn’t want the record on his Google Glass, so he only gets it on paper and then he burns it.

John accidentally wrote ”hiding in turlet”, which a little bit of encoded language, and Sergey, who is not a native English speaker, gets that on a piece of paper and it is hard to parse for him and he could probably google it, but he wants no record and he can make no sense out of it. John found an article on the Huffington Post, which is never wrong, about the Porta-Potty peeper from Boulder, Colorado, but when he clicked on it the article that came up was The Inspiring Way New Orleans Youth Persevered 11 Years Post-Katrina, which means another piece of paper is slid on Sergey Brin’s desk.

Further down the page it says Toilet terror as python bites man’s penis while he sits on the loo, but that is not Huffington Post because they call it ”Loo”, which turns out is called like that because the toilet in a public building in England was often room 100. John should stop searching at this point because he has given plenty of tinder to the Google-man, which is one of Merlin’s favorite Cat Stevens albums Tider For The Google-Man. Sergey Brin has other work to do, he is up there in his Google Glass, moving billions of dollars around.

The number of situations in John’s current life where people send him an email where they want him to use some secure app to sign the email and send it back… John got some of these programs and he is trying to navigate them and sign his document virtually and send it back and he is often kind enough to include Merlin in the thread for this, saying that he is on his phone and he doesn’t understand why he needs to virtually sign this form and this application is not loading properly on his telephone.

People wanting John to digitally sign contracts, busy vs time-constrained (RL214)

John often wonders why they can’t just accept an email authorization of this contract for $5. Merlin is not Boeing, they want him to come a and do a puppet show for 42 minutes, talking about what they spend on light bulbs in an afternoon in this one building, we are talking about rounding error levels of money that Merlin won’t see for 6 months, and yet he has to fill out the Boeing form. No, he doesn’t have a $1 million in insurance, nobody has that. Who are you?

John has now spent more time trying to sign this form than he did during the presentation they hired him to give. His show is not this long, and he is 2 hours in to try to sign their fucking contract. It is a professional eel, and there are a bunch of people who just sit around all day doing nothing but making those little gears turn just a tiny little bit, and Merlin is over here, he got stuff to do, he got no soup, he is not an important man, he is not busy, but he is time-constrained and has built his life for 49 years getting to where he can be time-constrained without being busy.

There are people who are getting work-credit for sending emails, but John does not get work-credit for receiving their emails. It costs them nothing to send him 5 emails a day to make sure he is going to be there at load-in-time, it is their job, they are being rewarded for it, but every one of those emails John has to use his eyes to look at and all these forms he has to sign. Even if he wants to ignore it, it still take a minute to decide to ignore it, and John is not getting paid for that either and then he will get 14 more emails, just checking to make sure he got their email.

John was getting phone calls to make sure he had seen the email that was making sure that he had seen the text that was telling him what time to be at a place, that had already been carefully stated in 5-6 emails he had already received. Those people have a job where they get paid the same amount of money every month, their kids get to go to college, and they get to retire, while John is sitting there, answering emails if he got the phone call about the email. They are telling John: ”Just send me the signed contract so I can send you the money I owe you for a thing you did already that I said I would pay you to do!”

There is an outstanding one right now where John is owed money by a music company in England for some work John did on an album. It is like becoming a Microsoft vendor! Somebody send him an email that said: ”Just click here and sign up as a vendor for MCA.co.uk!” and then we will be able to pay you, and John went online and he filled out the whole fucking form and then he clicked on SEND and it asked an inscrutable question that John tried to answer, but it did not accept his answer and it would not accept the form, and he hurt no-one but himself when he says: ”Go guck yourself! I have now gone to a third location with a hippie and I don’t want to be here anymore. Go fuck yourself!”

John had to wipe all the work he had done on that form so far because he couldn’t get back to that screen, and email the person back and ask what that question meant where they asked him for who his reference was and John had put the name of the person who had sent him the email. John wants it all to die and he wants to go back to triplicate. Merlin also remembers the golden rod, which was usually his copy.

Merlin can’t stop thinking about those jobs where you circle back with people about how the forms are going. They make money in their job when he is not doing his, which is vexing and has really changed a lot of what he does. It could be a personality flaw, but he doesn’t have the patience to in the worst case have a series of phone calls with different people for six months about whether something will happen, and then you go through the engagement process where they figure out if the money for the thing that they took six months deciding they definitely want to do exists and who could potentially pay for it, even though they spent that entire amount of money months ago on the amount of time those guys were in meetings about whether or not they wanted to do this. When you are a loser like Merlin who is never going to retire, that is the way you think, but they are on a different level!

Merlin remembers the smell of Mimeograph paper. He smelled all the things and he passed it on to his daughter who also is a huffer and will enjoy a sharpie. John misses the time when you could sit at a gas station and there were no things that kept chlorofluorocarbons from pouring into the atmosphere and you could be huffing that leaded gas. He also misses that Mimeograph paper.

John’s High School East High, and the first High School of Anchorage West High, colors and logos (RL214)

John did go to the other High School, not the one that got Ozzy Osbourne (see RL13), they were High School number 2 and High School number 1 was the only High School for many years and it was also the one with the 2000 person auditorium, so when there was an event in 1960 in Anchorage everybody in the city went and sat in the West High auditorium, and on the side of it is a giant bald eagle shrieking through the sky with his talons stretched out to catch a giant befouled anchor. It is a truly bad-ass logo. Their colors were black and orange

Then it was determined that the city was growing and it needed a second High School and they built East High School, but they did not give it a 2000-seat auditorium and the mascot was the Thunderbird, a mythical animal, represented in general vague Native American iconography, but a Thunderbird is not part of the Eskimo mythology. There are the Tlingit & Haida. The Tlingit are from a bit further north up the coast and the Haida are from right around there, but there are a lot of sub-tribes. One thing the Thunderbird is not is either an Eskimo icon, nor is it really a Central Alaskan Athabascan image, and Anchorage is not the turf of the Tlingit either, their turf ends down there in the Wrangells somewhere.

There are no totem poles in Anchorage, but the East High logo looks like it came from a totem pole. To make matters worse, their colors were red, white, and powder-blue, which means that the body of their leather-jackets were powder-blue. John’s lady friend was there at the reunion and she found those very attractive colors. That might be the case, but the question is if they are butch sports colors. The powder-blue Thunderbirds were fighting against the Eagles of West High, and it was tough!

Were there no other fierce animals in Alaska that could have been the mascot of the second High School? How about a bear or a wolf? These are there! The third High School, which was either Bartlett or Dimond, they are the bears (actually Dimond have the lynx and Bartlett has the bear). Just going to East High was a fight, they were the scrappy upstarts.

A couple of years ago John went to a Denny’s and the server came over, he was about John’s age, and his name-tag said: ”Denny’s employee since 1986”, which was the year John graduated from High School and probably the year the server had graduated from High School. John ordered a pancake and had a real moment of feeling like all that time he felt like he was just throwing time down a toilet… Merlin’s version of this is: What if each of us had to wear a name-tag about the thing we had mostly done since High School. Merlin’s would say: ”Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory since 1986! No working up to his potential since 1986!”

John was young for his grade, Merlin was old for his grade, and he graduated in 1985, just a year apart. John always thought that 1985 was a good year, but Merlin says it was a terrible year. He is the bottom of the barrel for every part of his generation. Also their school colors were green and yellow and not a nice green or a nice yellow. John always thought that when a High School had green and yellow, then by that time all the other color schemes had been taken by better High Schools and somebody was just looking at a palette wheel. Who picks green and yellow?

When Merlin was in 10th grade they made painter’s hats for School Spirit and sold them and they misspelled the name of the mascot on the back, so 670 people had painter’s hat that said ”Bucaneers” on it (instead of Buccaneers from Tampa Bay). The football team from Tampa came around in the 1970s and Merlin’s High School predated that, so maybe they did a pivot to become Buccaneers. They might have been the New Jersey Retirees up till then.

In Anchorage in the 1970s John was in a Little League Baseball team called The Padres, like The San Diego Padres, which makes sense in San Diego because there is some historical padre, but there were no padres in Anchorage. Merlin didn’t have any fucking Buccaneers (a type of pirate) in New Port Richey either. John was very confused because they also kept the colors of The Padres, a South-Western orange and brown.

The Anchorage should have been the East High Oil Profiteers or the East High Genocidists, the East High Assimilationists, or the East High Cevy Stepsides because it was the early 1980s and there were all the Chevy Step-side pickups, which sounds a little fancy, like a gang from the movie The Warriors. They wear baseball shirts and top hats and their weapon of choice is the feather duster and they put it right in your face and you start sneezing and they kick you in the balls!

Flying is not a big deal anymore, everything costs $100 (RL214)

Now John is realizing that everything you do vis-a-vis an airline costs $100, but it is only $100 and John has some $100 bills already earmarked for this purpose. It allows you to be on an airplane in one hour rather than get a $250 hotel room and wait until tomorrow until your originally scheduled flight. You can leave whenever! A couple of weeks he was in Los Angeles and he said: ”I am leaving Los Angeles right now, this trip did not work out, I am leaving!”, and for $100 he was on an airplane an hour later. It has really stripped away the feeling that getting on an airplane is a big deal and you have to plan everything in advance.

John flew up to Anchorage on a Friday and he left Sunday night, which is ludicrous to fly to Alaska for a weekend, except it is not. John bought his tickets with miles, he rented a car, that was $200, and he threw $100 at somebody because he was 2 hours late to drop the car off and it was an extra day, but John decided not to get heated up about this, he used to demand satisfaction in a situation like this (see RL14), but now the satisfaction comes from flipping another $100 through the window and the problem is gone.

How many dinners has he bought for Jason Finn that have cost $100? You go into a place, Jason orders some Negroni, you get some appetizers, maybe a little blanched spinach, pizza for the table, and then the thing comes and it is $97 and you wonder how many Negroni he got, but he is already under the table.

Some of their listeners might say that it is nice if you can afford to throw $100 at things, it is fine for John Roderick, but the problem is that everybody is budgeting to do things and they are spending those $100, too, just in different categories. They don’t see it as ”Peel off $100, throw it at a thing, and the problem is solved!”, but ”Well, there is $100 budgeted for this and for that…” If you buy those tickets 6 months ahead of time they are not any cheaper, it doesn’t give you any relief from anxiety to have all that stuff in a folder sitting on your desk, but it is cheaper to just spend that $100 for the TSA pre-check and just get her done. John is budgeting his money toward living this life rather than toward living a different life.

Merlin going to Disneyland (RL214)

A few weeks ago Merlin went to Disneyland for the first time. His friend John Siracusa had taught him to be a rational person all the time and when it is time to go on vacation be prepared and plan for everything to cost way more than you expected and build that into the budget. Don’t go on the trip until you know that you can spend way more than you think you should. Even if you don’t just buy a bunch of shit, you still have the $100 problem everywhere you go. Merlin had a wonderful trip because he got used to the fact that the meal costs $100, even though they had Macaroni again.

Recording videos for Hey Seattle, behind the scenes (RL214)

When John did the little television talk show thing (see RL209) he arrived for wardrobe and they were fitting him, he had interacted with 5 people at this point, the producer, the writer, the producer’s assistant, the representative from the agency, the representative from the other agency, and someone came out and said: ”They are all having a meeting right here and they really like to meet you! They will be ready for you shortly!” John had other stuff to do, the wardrobe person was putting shoes on him, and he was not being paid for this day because they had contracted him for 2 days worth of work, but then it turned out there was going to be a fitting day that they were not paying him for.

John got shoes and a tie put on him, he was having a fine time, somebody came and asked him if he wanted a wrap, which he gladly accepted, there was a tray in the kitchen that hadn’t been eaten by all those people, but John will take one of their old wraps. While John was sitting there with new shoes on, eating an old wrap, finally somebody came out and said: ”It is going to be a minute! They are not sure if they are ready to see you yet!” John’s assumption in those situations is that he is the talent, the one they want to meet, and he doesn’t care who they are, they could be the President of the God-damn world, they could be Sergey Brin sitting Indian style on a floating magic carpet. He is going to want to meet John because John is the talent.

John was out there: ”Hey, I am not getting paid for today already, whoever’s timeline we are working on is fine with me. Part of my brand is that I don’t give a fuck. I got a used wrap here and a pair of new shoes and I am already negotiating with the costume lady that I am going to keep these shoes at the end of the shoot!” (see RW43) John leaned in and said: ”I am going to keep these shoes, right?”, although he knew that wasn’t her decision and he didn’t want to put her in an awkward position, but he was just sowing the seeds, so that the first person he talks to already thinks that he is going to keep these shoes.

Eventually John figured out who the person in charge of this process is later on in the production a day and a half in, and he said: ”I love these shoes! How about me keep these shoes?” and that person at that point in time is so focused on keeping John happy because they were bringing him waters the whole time although it is below their pay grade and they are doing it because John is the talent, and then that person goes: ”What? You want the shoes? Oh yeah, done!” and then the wardrobe lady and the production people were all standing there and heard the person say it and John just walked out in the shoes, there was no form to sign at that point.

Finally someone came out and said: ”They are ready to see you now!” and it was ostensibly that John was going to show them the costume and they were going to decide that the suit was right. This is a situation where they wanted to meet him and be entertained by him, but they justified it as that John is walking in there like a monkey talent, a mannequin, to show them his clothes, which seemed a bit like a status move. When John walked in he saw a U-shaped table with 20 people sitting there, and he was quite taken aback by that.

John went: ”Hey, it is Dave Roderick! How are you? You want to see my costume? Let me turn around! Do these pants look good on my ass?” and everybody is immediately disarmed and charmed because the talent is fun. Then John said: ”I am keeping the shoes!” and then they went around the table and every one of those 20 people had something to say. As John was standing there in front of them, doing this little dance, not getting paid for this day, he looked around the room and thought that the top-person in this room is probably making $700.000 a year, the bottom-person in this room is making $220.000 a year, and John is not getting $750 for today because it is a fitting day, which is why he felt no shame about taking these shoes and about asserting the fact that even though everybody in this room has a 401K and is going to retire one day, John walks in and says: ”Look at my ass, you dummies!” What are they going to do? He is the talent!

Outro

John was thinking the other day: What happened to the Step-side Pickup? It is the one where the wheel wells in the back stick out because the bed is made smaller, it is the classic pickup look. The thing about clearance is that you are constrained by axles, and that is the Guns N’ Roses story.

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