RL435 - Comedy Knives

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John was not thinking about kissing stopped-time girls, referring to John in 8th grade fantasizing to be able to stop time, but not in order to be able to kiss the girls, but to sleep and get chocolate chip cookies.

The show title refers to John using weird knives like letter openers made out of a rhino horn that his uncle got from his travels to open Amazon boxes.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 only having a mono headphone adapter, recording industry lingo (RL435)

John is listening to Merlin in one ear, his good one, because last week before he recorded with Dan (see RW230) he had lost his 1/8”-1/4” stereo adapter that his cans require. Merlin’s downside is that he is organized, but with things like that they are always in a place where he can’t find them. Jay Z always says: ”Turn me up in my headphones” and they leave that in, like those Beatles joking around moments. The guy on the other side of the glass would then say: ”Just adjust it in your cans!”

Other examples of industry lingo is that the drummer’s seat is called the throne. How is stool harder to say than throne. John probably has 30 of those adapters and in different phases of his life he put them all in one ZipLOC bag or one in each bag that he owns. With scissors he collects them all in a place and then he Johnny Appleseeds them around the house, one in every bathroom. Merlin uses the term ”deploying”, but the proper deployment of a scissor is not honored by certain members of the family, they just take it and now it is gone.

Fancy knives and weird letter openers (RL435)

Merlin can’t find his nice poultry shears. The kitchen scissor was the innovation that John never saw coming. He had never heard of that term until maybe 5 years ago. Merlin spatchcocks his chickens and he bought his lady nice shears for a holiday gift that are improbably sharp and now they are probably used for crafts. John uses them to cut up Italian sausage, they are the perfect junkifier and John likes his food in junks. His daughter also uses them to cut a piece of cardboard and he is not so sure if that is good.

Merlin can’t keep anything around, but all of the things go wherever they are going to go. At one point the fire extinguisher was put away because it was regarded as not being aesthetic and when there is a fire you really want to start hunting for the fire extinguisher. 90% of this problem has nothing to do with Merlin, the extremely responsible Chief Operating Officer (COO). He keeps buying more pairs of scissors, he likes the Oxo kitchen scissors that you can take apart to clean them. He also likes his Gerber Gear 22-41830N EAB Pocket Knife Stainless Steel utility knife to be deployed, which is basically a tiny carpet knife and you can never go back from that.

John also has one of those knives, it was given to him by friend of the show Jessie Uyeda who is a knife person and is using those things as tools. She might even have palmed it to him like a challenge coin and he uses it around the house, he has just never thought of it as a knife to cut up Amazon boxes, but he uses it to dissect frogs. John is still using comedy knives to do a lot of these jobs.

When he was a young person his father’s side always considered themselves fancier than his mother’s side and they never accepted his mother into the family because she wasn’t fancy enough, which was always a source of rye laughter between John and his mother because his father and his family were always getting in kerfuffles, sinking the family car, while she was practical and honest and didn’t put on heirs for anybody.

In going back to the family towns on his recent road trip it became clear that his father’s family was fancy and his mother’s family was not fancy and that was true even 200 years back. They were making their own furniture back then and his dad’s family probably had 6 knives on the table at dinner with each knife being responsible for a different thing. (John lost his train of thought here, but Merlin brought him back). They all had letter openers on their desk, which was an opportunity for someone to demonstrate that they had been around the world because the letter opener was clearly from India or Japan, often made out of ivory or some hard wood you can’t find anymore.

None of them ripped into letters like John does, but his mom could open the letter along the top of the seam by just looking at it hard. His father’s family had all those non-knives and one of them had one with a rhino horn as a handle. Now John has all these mannerisms and affectations that date back to Victorian times and he doesn’t even know where they came from and he has knives that are relics or talismans and some of them are even talismans of something he doesn’t know where it came from. Uncle Jack had a letter opener that was made out of a Yak horn that was a spiral like an Ibex horn.

Merlin compiling a knowledge base, his research process (RL435)

Merlin’s Gerber knife sounds very practical, but John is not sure exactly how many Yak-horned letter openers he is prepared to replace with a Gerber knife, but there are other things that you need a knife for that you can’t use a Yak horn. Merlin started compiling a document with everything he knows in it, it is up on Github right now, but he is going to make a website eventually for everything he has learned in life that is good. There are a lot of good things in there that spun out of this show, for example to buy the nicest screwdrivers that you can afford. Merlin also has a magnetizer that he can use on the tip, and those things together change the game. You are not going to believe the difference!

Merlin researches everything endlessly and he has whole levels to how he does it because Google is mostly useless, he has a 3-step process. Wirecutter is where you go to find out the second-cheapest one, it is not like it used to be, and it is just one of the stages. If you google for ”best screwdrivers” you are going to get a lot of garbage. You will often find thin affiliate sites, like Merlin has done before, where you can put the Amazon store on your site with a skin. John searched for ”best hairbrush” yesterday and he ended up with 5 different sites and all of them have 5 different number one brushes. There was a hair brush made out of boar hair that was $207.

Merlin’s third step is that once you found like what looks like pretty good things on Amazon you are going to go to Fakespot and Review Meta, two sites that use science to determine which of those reviews are sketchy or not. There are extensions for Firefox and when he finally gets to the third stage, the vetting, he will paste his Amazon search results into Firefox and the extension sorts everything by how likely the review is to be useful.

The problem with screwdrivers now is that metallurgy has changed as part of the global desire to make things as cheaply as possible and screws themselves are such garbage that John needs the best screwdriver possible in order not to immediately strip every screw. In the past you could go with Craftsman and Dan is all gaybones for Snap-On Tools, but you can’t buy those at a store. It is emblematic of a bigger pattern, like so much of Merlin’s wisdom: Understand what kind of stuff it is totally okay to cheap out on, and when it comes to buying something important the phrase Merlin always used is that he wants the good one, the one everybody gets who uses it for their work.

For example the Shure family of microphones: There is a reason SM57’s are how the drum sound got on a bunch of your favorite records. You only say 57 or 87 or 86. John got the 7B as his podcast mic. Merlin has an Electrovox, but the RE20 and the SM-7B are synonymous in a lot of applications, and John is one of the fortunate few who has been able to A/B them.

One of the last steps in Merlin’s flow is that he tends to buy things from the Amazon company and he will run it through Review Meta and Fakespot. They are using science and algorithms to look at all kinds of things that tend to happen with suspicious reviews. Merlin had sponsors on his podcast that were doing things like this and he didn’t want to have them as his sponsor anymore. ”Never give the Internet a puzzle!”, that is also on Merlin’s list.

John randomly picked the book Modern Learning - Der Neue Ratgeber Für Führungskräfte: Wie Sie Mitarbeiter Führen und Motivieren that has an Amazon.de-rating of 4.1, but Review Meta adjusted it to 2.1.

One of Merlin’s many guiding philosophies that he talked about with friend of the show John Siracusa is a concept called ”One hand and in the dark”

John doing research on the Ashley Madison adult dating site (RL435)

A lot of times John is doing Omnibus research late at night because he starts to look at something and notices that it is interesting and the whole premise of Omnibus was that they would do the things they were already looking at and were already interested in and then at a certain point in the research notice that this is a thing you could do a show about, they weren’t looking for shows, but shows would find them. The other day he did a show on Merkins and after 20 minutes he realized it was an Omnibus, one of the ones that he likes to do because it makes Ken very uncomfortable. He surely knows what the word means because that is how he wins Jeopardy!, but he probably hasn’t put much thought into pubic wigs.

Last night John started to do research on adult dating sites because it had crossed a threshold of interest, some Pete Townshend research, and he wanted to know whether Ashley Madison, the website where married people go to publicly cheat on their spouses, which had a huge data breach that ruined a lot of lives and John was trying to figure out if it has ruined the site forever and if it is full of bots etc. He was googling around if it is authentic and if people are successfully cheating on one another, or if it is a bot factory and a dangerous, scary place that is also milking you for money with no results, you could call it monetizing your desperation, it might even be the title of the ultimate episode.

There are all these reviews that are: ”Is Ashley Madison real?” and two or three pages down the titles seem to be written by a real person who tried it out. Are those people actually trying to go on dates with people? Did they actually end up cheating on their spouses? There are all these review sites with the fellow that goes and eats nothing but McDonalds for a month or the guy that goes around the country to all the Starbucks. People are prepared to go the distance for their dumb idea. Merlin knows of the one who went to Chili’s or Applebee’s, trying how long they could spend there for the all-you-can-eat thing.

When John first moved to Seattle he didn’t have a place to live and he would stay up all night, walking around in the rain, sucking his thumb because he was very dramatic, and during the day there was a certain moment where they would open the Godfather’s Pizza because they had all-you-can-eat lunch pizza, which was terrible, and John would wait until the person came with the key and unlocked the front door of the Godfather’s and John would come in, shake off the rain, pay the $5 for the all-you-can-eat pizza, get a little tray of pizza, get in the furthest back corner booth, put his head against the window and sleep. That was not his highest point. As his mom used to say that if you are 45 and have a missing tooth it is not a sign that you are thriving, and if you are sleeping at noon in a pizza place… there were people his age that already had started software companies and were already driving around in Lamborghinis, while John was sleeping in a Godfather’s.

Later on John had a friend who worked in an old-fashioned porno-theater where they showed 35mm movies and he said that about 50% of his clientele on the 11pm-4am shift are just guys who have figured out that you could pay $5 to get into a movie theater and you have a warm place to sleep, they were just a hotel, basically, and anybody who was in there for the porn were the weird ones. Merlin wonders what those guys do who came in loaded for bear and after 15-20 minutes they are done. There were also the ones who were looking to engage with someone else, and you take someone there or meet them out in the town, like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and you end up at the Apple Theater (see RL103).

John could not find a single website that purported to be reviewing the actual success or failure rate of Ashley Madison because every one of them ended up having the exact same text which was: ”Here is how you sign up and these are the features and we really did this and looked into this!”, but none of this has anything to do with whether or not you ended up cheating on your wife on this site. Where is the deep dive?

John knows a guy named Gregor, who in the very early days of one of the early dating sites was living in New York City, he had a motorcycle and a leather jacket and he was also a fashion photographer who lived in a giant loft, and he was maybe the first one to write a comedy bio for himself on an early dating site and he got a lot of people who are like: ”Haha, that is great. Thumbs up!” and that made him go up the rankings and for a whole period in the early 2000s he was the top profile in New York City on whatever the dating site was, maybe on match.com. It was easier to get famous back then.

He had a different date every night, he would roll up on his motorcycle, and he was a handsome guy, and he was good at motorcycling, he could turn his motorcycle sideways, going 60 mph around the corner, he had BMW Café Racer that he had built himself with Racing Fairings hand-hammered out of stainless steel from the suit of armor of a French prince, and all he had to do was roll down broadway and people were throwing buckets of flowers at him. Even today he is still very handsome and he is still making motorcycles and he has a beautiful wife and family now. Some men become better-looking over time!

Men becoming more handsome with age (RL435)

John mom told him last night that she didn’t really come into her looks until she was in his 20s, just like John who was very handsome in his mid-20s, it took him a bit of time to get there from 16-24 from when he did look like a scallop, and then she doubled down and said that he is even more handsome now than he has ever been. He has a gray beard now and a waitress in Omaha asked him if he was his daughter’s grandfather and he has been licking his would from that thorn in his paw and everybody around him is trying to tell him that he is very handsome.

John thinks Merlin was gorgeous when he was 25 with his blonde mustache. He looked like Prince Westley, and he walked around with his cool jacket with epaulettes that had somebody else’s name on it, he was on fire! At that point in his life John would spontaneously shave his head and look like he was in a Japanese prison camp, he would sleep in a pizza parlor and he thought about starting a band, he had no plan and he wasn’t capitalizing on being young and pretty.

Also Eric Spurlock, the guy with the water fountain, which is in everybody’s head. John Siracusa got it from Merlin and it is an infliction that has affected dozens of people (see RL135). His mother was the one who had said to them as a couple of guys who were 17 years old: ”Girls are not going to like you at this age, but when you grow up you are going to be considered very attractive men!” and they both didn’t take that as a compliment, but as a tire thumper to the knee. Merlin can’t say anything to his daughter who is in 8th grade that is not either horrible or bullshit.

John daydreaming in 8th grade about being able to stop time (RL435)

John spent most of 8th grade sitting in class, daydreaming about two things (see RL66): 1) the ability to stop time, and if he could stop time he would immediately go back to sleep because he was so tired because he had stayed up all night, then he would find the world’s best chocolate chip cookies, this was around the time when he was trying to conjure an orb and when he had his flight suit and orange pants. He was having puberty, but most of his stopped-time behavior was not going around kissing stopped-time girls, but it was: ”Where do I find the best chocolate chip cookies?”

The other fantasy was that he would be sitting in class and there would be a nuclear war and he was the only one in the school who knew what to do because he had read all the civil defense manuals at that point in time and he could identify any Russian aircraft by silhouette, and he would become very important in his Junior High, this was pre-The Wolverine and pre-Red Dawn, which was why Red Dawn resonated with him because he had been living it for 4 years. The siren goes off, everyone is running around in a panic, including the teachers, and John is there in his orange flight suit, going: ”Remain calm, all is well, follow me!” and he would take them to the bomb shelter and he would begin rebuilding society from there, in his own image.

The problem was that John was not learning Algebra in 8th grade, and he is not sure how much that story is going to help any current 8th-grader because it is made out of very different source material. Like Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy): Every 8th grade is terrible in a different way.

Merlin using Safari and Firefox as his browsers (RL435)

Firefox is Merlin’s second browser. He will not have Chrome on his machine anymore. Sometimes you need your other browser if something is not working in your main browser in order to isolate where the problem lies. Merlin’s first browser is Safari because it is secure, it syncs up, it has tons of great features and it works with all his devices. A lot of people snark at John for using Safari and they tell him to use Chrome because that is what real people do, but John just uses Safari. He will toggle between Safari Maps and Google Maps and the story isn’t very good about either one of those.

The problem with map programs not easily allowing you to add intermediate stops (RL435)

99% of the time with maps John wants to put a location in between his current location and the other location, he wants data, and you find a lot of useful data in those maps, but you need to be able to put not just one, but 4 locations in between your location and another location because John and his mom can’t every day leave one place and drive different routes to another place, and there are so many routes. Every time they are in the same location and have two cars they immediately look at each other, nod, and it is understood that one person turns left and the other person turns right.

John also looks for things like if you were in Helsinki and you needed to get to Jerusalem, let’s try a couple of different ways! Neither one of those map programs is really calibrated to make that easy for him. He figured out the way to do it on both, but he wants to be able to save that and have a whole file of different routes. It should be a lot easier than it is and they got probably 50 people on the team, trying to tell you where the nearest 7-Eleven is.

Fast Food Restaurants (RL435)

Merlin would like to see along his route a list of Popeyes that have a rating of at least 2 and are easy to get to from the Highway. There was a time when it was reputed that the Popeyes in the Atlanta Airport was a good one and everybody was going there. John went there one time because he had never been to a Popeyes. Merlin had Popeyes at his baccalaureate defense, but John wasn’t invited to that, it was mostly locals from Sarasota. They didn’t have them in the Northwest, it is a Southern thing like a Bojangles or Whataburger.

John did a record release party in Los Angeles for Pretend to Fall where Barsuk rented a small venue and invited all the music supervisors, reporters, and publicists, and they enticed them to come by offering Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles and they got a big crowd and they played a short set and everybody was very appreciative, but that was back in the heyday when Indie Rock labels had $1200 to throw at things.

When John went to the Popeyes at the Atlanta Airport it did not look like a clean environment, but like a very haphazard thing with things hanging off the lights and wet-wipes on the floor. Merlin’s Popeyes experience in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago was very strange. As Marquez would say: ”Popeyes in the time of COVID is a very strange thing”, the way everything is arranged and nothing is allowed to be out, it is not as fun as it used to be. Like McDonalds, you want to get it when it is just coming off the line and it is really good. John had the advantage as a kid that all he wanted was a plain hamburger and they had to grill it to order and he had to wait a little extra, but they were always so fresh, it was peak hamburger!

One hand and in the dark (RL435)

Almost everything in his life Merlin should be able to do with one hand and in the dark. A big example is getting a dish out of the cabinet, but you can’t do that if people have been stacking things on top of the dishes because there is room there. Just because there is room somewhere doesn’t mean it is free space! Merlin has 6 garbage buckets in his office at every spot where his right hand wants to drop a piece of garbage and he uses 5-gallon buckets with a handle from Home Depot. Don’t put things on other things! Merlin wants to be able to find his Gerber Utility Knife with one hand and in the dark and they are deployed in the places where he will want them.

Merlin got everyone to buy his wife on the Gerber utility plate. She still uses a cute Japanese knife that they learned about from Matt Haughey that is supposedly for opening Amazon packages, but it is like a serrated letter opener and it is garbage. It is important to have things deployed, and that doesn’t mean you can just start collecting knives, this is not a treasure hunt. Don’t go collecting all of Merlin’s deployed blades to put into service somewhere in your room, Emma!

People who fortify their home and put signs on their driveway (RL435)

When John thinks about one hand in the dark he pictures Merlin using a butterfly knife in the middle of the night. About a month ago Merlin got the most costly knife he ever bought, it is way too long, huge, heavy, it has carbon fiber and the sharpest blade he has ever experienced. If he had a home defense weapon it would be a bludgeoned instrument because it is a slightly ranged weapon compared to a knife, and Merlin would like to just bonk somebody and make them think twice whereas with the stabbing it is like with the chicken and the pig: Now he is committed and now he is stabbing somebody.

Survivalist Magazines have things where Daddy can hit the headboard of the bed with one hand and a thing pops open with an AK-47 inside, but that is mostly something they like to show their neighbors when they give them a tour of the house. If John were going to be a gun person he would have two pearl-handled silver-plated revolvers in a holster because if you show up to a gun fight with a Tom Mix setup or a George Patton setup, that is going to run a lot of people off your lawn. You are not trying to have a tactical camouflage gun, but the sun is going to glint off your gun and blind half of your opponents before you even have to pull the trigger. The best gun is the one you never have to use.

Haven driven recently across the country he noticed that in many states, particularly Western / South Western, there are a lot of long driveways where it is clear that the person whose mobile home is at the end of the driveway want you to know that right where the driveway hits the street that you shouldn’t come up this driveway, don’t you dare! Out in Nevada some of those driveways are 40 miles long. The collective sense impression of seeing those long drive ways many times all across America John couldn’t help but ask himself over and over what exact amount of civil unrest or even spade of burglaries it would take before a person would arrive at the end of this particular driveway, in the middle of BFE, and think twice about going up that driveway, how bad would the zombie apocalypse have to be.

The only people who are going to rob you are your neighbors and friends, there is no stranger danger out there where your sign that says ”You are being watched!”… It is crazy how much fear there is and how much is masquerading as strength. Whatever happened to being a dignified Gary Cooper type. Imagine John was a visitor from a different country, your first impression would be that this country is full of tough hombres, they are all such badasses, but then you realize they are not that tuff and everybody is kind of a puss. What does it take to be tuff? You walk in in your regular shoes, you don’t have shoes that are designed for something you are not doing that day.

John used to walk around with sabres in his yard, but that was mostly for hedge trimming. He was trying to project to his neighbors that he was bonkers, but not in a ”I am a crazy murderer!” way. As many times as he had his saber he had his jingle stick, he was walking around, jingling it at the raccoons, they got to know that this was a sign of friendship, but the neighbors would be like: ”He is there with the jingle stick again! What does that symbolize? Is that a new robe?”

Merlin mentions the documentary The Act of Killing about Indonesia.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License