Ep. 43: "Waiting for Our Duck"
Hello.
Hi John.
Hi Merlin.
How are you?
Merlin man.
I worry about the Freddie Mercury estate coming after me.
Yeah, I understand that.
He has powerful lawyers.
You know, sometimes the family can be pretty tightly wound about the intellectual property of dead people.
You know this, right?
You're talking about the family of a dead creative person who is now living off of the creative person's creative works.
The fat of the dead.
Yeah.
oh the fat of the dead i can think of two uh the elvis presley family god love them they will license his name and likeness to be on pretty much everything that's one but the one that really gets me is uh boy this guy's such a cocksucker james joyce's grandson you know about him i have heard about the uh the difficulty in dealing with james joyce's grandson
It's one thing to be a businessman, and it's another thing to deliberately be a dick.
Wait a minute.
Are you implying that you have tried to license or creatively use the works of James Joyce and have been thwarted by his grandson?
Yeah, I had a whole hip-hop opera, or as I like to call it, a hip-hoppera, called MC Ulysses, I guess.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
And then they put the kibosh on it.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
That's just not right.
You know, a person should be able to reincorporate another artist's work in an additional work and not have to deal with a bunch of upset grandsons.
Yeah.
I'm sorry for that, Merlin.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, like, thank you very much.
Well, you know, there's the whole thing.
I don't want to get into copyright and stuff because it's boring.
Boy, it's so boring.
Well, I mean, it can be boring.
But, you know, there's the whole thing that appears to be true, which is that the Disney Corporation, right about the time Mickey Mouse is about to run out, they find some way to extend copyright.
And whatever, they're made out of filthy lucre.
Sure.
But, you know, James Joyce, come on.
Those are pretty old books.
Yeah, and who has even ever heard of him?
Yeah, I mean, let alone read it.
He's not like Mickey Mouse.
Yeah.
You know, Mickey Mouse, that's like the American flag.
You know, I've started Steamboat Willie probably five times and never made it past the first chapter.
Well, the problem is there are so many biblical references.
If you haven't read the Bible all the way through, you're not going to get a lot of the subtext of Steamboat Willie.
Especially the non-canonical gospels.
You got St.
Jackie.
You got St.
Willie, obviously.
You know, I'm still catching up.
The reason I'm late is I had to make coffee, so I'm still kind of waking up a little bit.
Yeah, well, I understand that a lot of people assume that I am doing this podcast mostly nude most of the time.
I didn't until now.
But today, it's actually true.
I am completely naked.
Oh, God.
And I would like to be known as Steamboat Willie for the rest of the podcast.
Not a problem.
Steamboat Willie.
I think... Now, here's the other thing about Disney that's crazy-making is how much... I mean, again, this is every nerd on the internet knows this shit backwards and forwards, but they get so much of their stuff from, like, free...
like content from the culture like they didn't write snow white they didn't write sleeping beauty they didn't they didn't write much anything right you know the stuff those are a bunch of german fairy tales yeah we know what happens yeah with the germans once again with the germans and and hmm boy i like the way we can make that happen every time but yeah i haven't mentioned hitler yet oh there we go here comes godwin i'm pretty sure steamboat willie is a parody a parody but you know it's a of a buster keaton right
Oh, interesting.
Does Buster Keaton do that Steamboat Willie dance?
You know the one where he's doing a little bit of a... He's got the Steamboat Willie dance.
I think you're going to have to claim that now that you're Steamboat Willie.
I think for a long time, all they knew how to do in animation was slow-moving dinosaurs, mice moving their hips, and people whistling.
Also, flowers.
Flowers...
Doing this kind of arm-waving dance, I'm pretty sure.
Flowers doing an arm-waving dance, I'm 100% behind.
I really wish mice moving their hips was still a more popular meme in video culture.
I could see that being big at Comic-Con.
I saw last night I was standing out in front of a bar.
I don't know why I was there, but there I was.
And you didn't know for different reasons than you wouldn't have known, say, a couple decades ago.
Yeah, I'm standing outside of a bar.
It's not that I don't know why I'm there because I'm insensibly intoxicated.
It's that I was riding my Vespa and I saw a person that I knew and I pulled over.
I'm talking to them.
And a rat comes out from underneath a car that's right next to us.
And the street is kind of, you know, half... It's not full of people, but it's half full of people.
And the rat comes out of this car.
It's a big rat.
And he sees that there are a bunch of people on the sidewalk.
And he knows he needs to go a different direction.
So he cuts across the street kind of diagonally.
And, of course, we all notice this guy.
He's a big guy.
And he's moving...
He's moving fast and he's doing that thing where he's moving so fast that his tail is kind of... It's like the key on a wind-up toy.
It's kind of spinning around like a motorboat propeller.
And he heads across the street and somebody comes out of a doorway.
And he's like, oh, course change.
And he changes course and runs right into...
This guy coming out of the next door down, walking his little wiener dog in the middle of the night.
The guy walks out the door and the little wiener dog basically steps out the door and the rat runs into his mouth.
And the wiener dog absolutely loses his mind and chases this rat.
Like, into the bushes.
You're saying that hasn't been bred out of him yet?
No.
He's still a badger hound.
He was so excited that... Finally.
And I had this picture of this wiener dog living in a studio apartment in this apartment building in the middle of Seattle's Capitol Hill.
He probably sleeps all day on a pink sheepskin rug...
People probably feed him little niblets and shampoo his hair, this little guy.
And he walked out in the middle of the night to go on his once-around-the-block poop run.
But tonight was different.
Tonight, a five-pound rat ran right into his face, basically.
And this dog went into the bushes, and everybody's cheering at this point on the street like, Yay!
Woo!
Woo!
And the dog goes into the bushes and I was there for 45 minutes.
I never saw the dog again.
The dog went, he, that thing in his little heart, his little wiener dog desire to go down a hole after a rat.
It all came back to him.
Isn't that amazing?
He's probably down in the sewers right now.
He got a taste of blood.
His little pink ribbons all covered with... Rat blood.
With rat blood and gross.
And he's just down there like, I'm the hunter.
Oh, my God.
That is so cool.
Now, was he off-leash?
He was off-leash because it was one of those like...
The guy that was taking him for a walk was kind of like in his pajamas almost.
It was clearly a, okay, I know you have to go pee or whatever.
Let's go downstairs.
It was the middle of the night, but it was a perfect storm for this little wiener dog.
If you think about that, you think about that dog.
I mean, I imagine in time, like most of us, he gets used to his environment.
Now, you've spoken at length and I think you've helped a lot of people with helping them to understand that there's a basic animal nature in us that we are squashing or allowing to be squashed down.
What I'm telling you is I think it sounds like this is the dachshund version of a slightly nicer supermax prison.
He gets to come out and shoot baskets for like an hour a day.
Right.
He's, he's, you know, like that, uh, that place where they send the super criminals.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a, he's living, he's living a life where he can do nothing, but it's not that bad at the same time.
Yeah.
It's like the way we shield puts all the really bad supervillains way underground.
This guy's living upstairs.
Do the supervillains get to play basketball for an hour a day?
That depends on what their skills are.
By and large, they're kept in some kind of a state in which their powers are kept in check.
So if your power was to turn rubber balls into ballistic missiles, they probably wouldn't let you out to play basketball.
Or slam dunking, because that would just be too fun.
But in this case, if I understand correctly, Dachshund...
I don't have to look this up.
I believe that is indeed German for badger hound.
And it was their job.
They bred them to be those hideous little creatures that they are so that their bodies could go down a hole to chase a badger.
Is that your understanding?
That is my understanding.
But all those dogs are little ratters.
Every dog with a – all of the dogs that people are carrying in their purses –
were originally designed to chase rats into holes.
And it's the craziest psychic disconnect in our culture that these creatures that are being treated like ersatz children are actually... Their only reason for existence is to grab rats by the face and chew until the rat is dead.
There's nothing cuddly about these things.
They are monsters.
If you think we've gotten email before about – and I don't even know if you can find my email.
I don't look at it.
So have fun.
If you can get away from your dog for a minute.
Here's the thing.
You think we've heard about bronies?
We've heard about bronies, boy.
We've gotten some emails.
I saw a guy walking down the street the other night in an ironic T-shirt that I think was not ironic.
It was a big T-shirt that said Brony on it in my neighborhood.
I think it's a thing, John.
My increasing understanding of brony culture is that there is no ironic use of brony by straight culture.
If your t-shirt says brony, you are a brony.
You're not kidding around.
I think there are even sarcastic juggalos.
I knew a girl in Wisconsin who had a juggalo tattoo.
Like the hatchet-wielding dude, which I'm sure he has a name.
The hatchet-wielding dude.
She had a juggalo tattoo, and I...
I remarked upon it because it was in a place that you wouldn't... It's not like you're going to see it in normal encounters with her.
It was on like a steady job.
It's the kind of place you wouldn't normally see a juggalo tattoo.
She was like a perfectly... Well, I'm not going to say perfectly normal, but she was a... She passed.
Yeah, she passed.
And I said, so... And this was a long time ago.
I was like, so what's the...
juggalo thing and she was like oh I think those guys are so hilarious and I just really I just think they're awesome and I just got this because and it was very much a hipster ironic juggalo tattoo
How fucking deep in the stack do you have to be for that to make anything like sense?
Well, but this is the thing about tattoos, and I see this all the time.
There is a subset of the rationale for getting tattoos that are really just... People get tattoos that are responses to other tattoos or in jokes.
Like, there are the tattoo cliches, like the girl with the dolphin jumping over a rainbow tattooed on the small of her back.
But then there are the guys who get a killer whale jumping over a rainbow that's eating a dolphin.
And it really only makes sense if you understand that there's a dolphin jumping over a rainbow cliché.
That's not even amusing as a shirt.
It's not amusing at all, but it's a whole part of the tattoo culture.
People show you their tattoos and it's like, oh, and this one is...
Like, do you get this one?
I mean, they're like little puzzles that if you don't understand tattoo culture, then you're not going to understand this referential tattoo.
But as far as bronyism goes, I don't think that there are people living in the straight world who get ironic brony tattoos because it's already so confusing about...
like whether bronies are i see this partly there isn't an audience yet for brony ironism no although bronyism is expanding by leaps and bounds you mean geographically or in terms of the scope of their non-irony i think that like just culturally it is becoming a thing faster than anybody can faster than we can build the the the monitoring stations to keep tabs on all these people
Okay, so in time, you could move out in concentric circles to a strawberry shortcake or a gem being truly outrageous.
I think you can – but I think as time goes on, we will start to see non-bronies adopting brony culture unknowingly.
Just like with the blues.
That's exactly right.
There will be appropriation upon appropriation, and then pretty soon –
People will be using sparkle power to just go about their normal day.
And it's like, do you even know what sparkle power is?
It's derived from a thing that, that, you know, that actually means something to people.
I was astonished when we started talking about bronies initially, thinking that your and my cultural envelope was only going to include maybe one or two bronies.
But in fact, my inbox was full of letters.
Letters from very articulate and respectful young men.
They had no truck with anything we said.
They did not want to argue.
They just wanted to say, I am here.
I am here, and I am listening.
I'm here.
I'm brony.
Get used to it.
That's right.
But please, please get used to it.
Or don't, but we're all going to meet up at the convention center later.
I got two things on my to-do list.
First of all, I need a better song to sing you at the beginning.
And number two, I need to do a deep dive on Bronies.
You seem a little tired today.
No, no, I'm fine.
I'm subdued.
I'm trying to be calmer.
I like that.
Well, I mean, just because it's not that I like you calmer, it's that I like any attempt that a person makes to try a different thing.
Not strictly self-improvement.
It's just a matter of mixing it up.
You wear a different hat.
Exactly.
Today I wake up, I have a pink bow in my hair.
Tomorrow I'm going down a hole chasing rats.
That's how life is.
Most of the incontinent dogs I've known have been Dachshunds.
I don't know if that's an availability heuristic or the attribution error or the category error, but it seems like most of the incontinent dogs... I think for one thing, dogs that live longer...
Small dogs, I believe, tend to live longer than large dogs, turns out.
I believe that that is the case.
Their little hearts have less work to do.
Maybe, but also the breeding, you get the bigger dogs and they start getting the hip dysplasia and whatnot.
And the little dogs, do you think they bred their bladders to be too small?
Maybe that could be an adaptation.
But here's the thing.
I mean, like you say, the kind of work that they do, you think about the hideous freak dogs.
And this is, like I say, this is where the email is going to start pouring in because you don't want to talk about pit bulls because people who have pit bulls are sensitive about pit bulls.
They're nice people.
I'm just saying, like if you breed one of these dogs, a Mastiff, how is a Mastiff not going to have hip dysplasia?
Yeah, right.
It's like you're trying to make a lion out of a boxer.
It's weird.
Do you know how big a Mastiff is?
It was called a Grand Mastiff.
Have you ever seen like a big Mastiff?
Have I?
Oh, they've chased me across so many hedgerows.
Yeah.
But, you know, one thing, they can't climb trees.
Yet.
I have nothing, you know, I have, I've had a lot of experience with pit bulls, first-hand experience, with them being just delightful little people.
Yes, and that's the problem.
This is the problem.
They also have jaws that can, like, crush iron.
Yeah.
Yeah, but okay, here's the thing.
Tommy Toon comes down the stairs with his dog and he's wearing his jammies.
If you were to give him a pop quiz right there on the street in front of the place where you weren't drinking and you said, excuse me, sir, do you think it's possible that your little doggy, Ginger or Marianne or whatever, do you think Marianne's probably upstairs sleeping?
Because you know they've got to have two dogs.
In San Francisco, you can have two dogs and one kid or two kids and one dog, but there's got to be – you've got to do something.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, no.
It's a thing.
It's a thing.
They check you at the gate.
Two dogs or one kid.
Two kids or one dog, but you've got to do something.
Did this look more like a ginger or a Marianne?
Probably a ginger, I'm guessing.
Mm-hmm.
And so this guy comes downstairs and you say – You give him a pop quiz.
You say, let me ask you this.
Do you think – Excuse me, sir.
Excuse me.
Pop quiz.
Man on the street.
Let me give you – I'm going to give you a quick question.
Don't overthink it.
Is there a chance that your dog, Ginger or –
or or marilyn monroe or judy garland or whatever is there a chance that your little dog would tear ass after a fucking cat-sized rat and run away from you to go eat it until there was nothing more to eat to tear it apart just for fun get it in its little mouth oh you brush its teeth i know there's no little yellow spots on the it goes and it fucking bites a rat and shakes it and then it's mad that there isn't more rat to kill sir yes or no do you think that's likely to happen
And he'd say, excuse me.
Uh-oh.
No, no.
Now we're going to get letters from – Yeah, you're getting ping pong now.
And so here's the problem.
You breed a dog.
You know what?
You understand what breeding is.
You understand canine eugenics.
I know all about breeding.
Canine eugenics is you do something really fucked up with two dogs and say, which one of these turned out more of the really crazy dog we were trying to make out of two different dogs, right?
It's a form of forced evolution.
Right.
And then you put the other one in a sack full of rocks and throw it over a bridge.
As you do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm just saying, I got nothing against pit bulls.
My sister-in-law, who threw my glasses away, not that I'm angry, she has a pit bull.
They were told that it was a pit bull and then some kind of like a sweet bird dog, one of the sweet, dumb bird dogs, like a retriever.
Yeah, like a sweet, dumb bird dog.
Sweet, dumb bird dogs.
I think Josh knows.
But you get one of those sweet dogs like a retriever.
Retrievers are not the sharpest dog in the drawer, right?
And when they brought it home, they're like, oh, this is so sweet.
It's a retriever-pit bull mix.
And in the fullness of time, it became clearer and clearer that a pit bull had fucked a little bit of retriever, and this little gal came out.
The thing about retrievers is they don't seem smart, but it might just be that they have not been called into action yet.
Oh.
You know what I mean?
Oh, so if you've thrown the rat into some water.
Well, it could just be that the retriever, let's say the retrievers, we think of them as like, oh, go get the duck, bring the duck back.
But it may be that a million retrievers over the course of a thousand years keep coming down those metaphorical apartment steps and they keep walking out the door and there is no, in this case...
metaphorical rat that activates what retrievers are there ultimately to do a duck has never been provided whatever the whatever the duck is in this situation clearly it is a duck is not just a duck here whatever a duck is we just all we think of them as is duck chasers but they were not
They were not put on this planet, perhaps, just to bring ducks back.
They might be waiting.
They might be waiting.
They are a Manchurian candidate.
I don't know.
It's so hard to know what our audience is interested in, and I think on some level it shouldn't matter because help comes from places.
Sometimes help is a duck that falls out of the sky.
As I think you've shown.
But I think our relationship with animals is something that is worth pursuing and penetrating and sticking a finger in because it's clear to me that we talked about this with raccoons.
We've talked about this with raccoons.
We've talked about this with nutria.
We've certainly talked about this with birds.
Horses.
I like your Manchurian Canada thing.
I think we're facing a world where we have taken these animals out of their natural, unnatural environment.
Right?
Their natural environment would be walking around just eating shit they find.
But we want to make them into things that bite bulls on the nose.
Yes.
Do you know how hard it is to make a dog bite a bull on the nose?
If you create a dog...
whose sole purpose is to bite a bull on the nose in the same way that when you create a rat chaser, the side effect is that it is incontinent.
If you create a bull nose biter, what are the side effects?
It's a canine game of whack-a-mole.
There's something else in that dog.
There's some other higher purpose.
Because biting a bull on the nose, sure.
But how many times is that going to happen to a guy?
Yeah.
How many times is a bull going to come in and be like – This is super interesting and you have to wonder with these little genetic freaks that we keep in our home.
You have to wonder like at what point will that sleeper cell be activated by something – a rat is closer to a badger than most things in the world, right?
True.
Closer to a badger than say a shovel.
Yes, exactly.
It's a hole using device.
But no, absolutely.
And so, okay, so here's what I'm thinking.
Now, I'm thinking of dogs I've known.
A hole using a device.
I've had a pointer that was really stupid, and I had a beagle that was really stupid.
But both of them – How are you measuring their intelligence?
Stupid relative to your friends?
Stupid relative to like –
A lot of it has to do with me.
A lot of it has to do with me.
You can judge a dog by and large, apart from its genetic freak nature, by the person who is the animal companion of that dog.
You don't say owner.
You know that?
You say animal companion?
Mm-hmm.
Or we're going to get some letters.
Yeah, we're going to get letters from the companions.
But OK, for example, I had this point.
You're just shepherding the animal through life.
You're not its owner.
My pointer would point like he'd never been around anything to point at.
But still, there was something inside of him that when he smelled, he smelled everything.
He had an amazing sense of smell.
And I never knew what he was pointing at.
It could have been the metaphorical duck.
My beagle, which could have been seeing dead people.
Whoa.
Hmm.
But then my Beagle, I'm just saying, my Beagle, like, every time we turned around, he killed a rabbit.
I didn't even know there were rabbits somewhere, and he'd find a rabbit and kill it.
The same way as with this goddamn rat.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Is there a way we could have a dog that would, like, bring us coffee?
Or, I mean, if we're gonna... The thing is, we know so much more about genetics today.
If you had a Bernese Mountain dog that had a... I think it's Myanmar now.
Yeah.
It's called a Mianmaranian.
Bernese Mountain Dog who had a barrel around his neck and you could adapt some.
I'm sure if you went to your local Starbucks and said, listen, I'm trying to build a wood barrel that I'm going to hang around my dog's neck and I want it to carry coffee.
Do you have a nozzle?
Do you have a nipple or something that I can put on this barrel that can interact with your espresso drip?
coffee maker thing.
Somewhere in Seattle, there's a guy, if you went up to the counter, he'd probably be wearing one of those knee-length aprons, and he would have a handlebar mustache, and he would say, I'm trying to make a barrel that my Bernese Mountain Dog can bring coffee to me in the morning.
Do you have the nipple?
And before you even said nipple, he'd be like, ah,
I have exactly what you're looking for.
It's $49.
And he would go, he would go back behind the counter and he would come out with an array of tubes.
And then he would say this, this all hooks of course to your Italian, uh, like single press coffee device.
Right.
Right.
Okay, here's the other thing, though.
There's all this bullshit going on now where people are trying to make all these computer things that do stuff and don't really do it.
There's an app you can get now where you can call ahead to order coffee, and then you go there and pick it up, which, whatever.
I'm not sure how much time that saves.
The point is, these places, their biggest cost, you know, the coffee, that's a license to print money.
It's paying the guy in the apron that's costly.
I'm thinking, you get a dog collar with a smart card in it, and a nozzle, you get the Bernays, or the Bernays?
I don't know how to pronounce it.
It's a Bernays, yeah.
It's a Bernays Mountain Dog.
There's no reason – if you can teach a sweet little animal to bite a bull's nose or chase a rat down a hole, there's no fucking reason that you cannot teach an average to above-average intelligence dog to fill a wooden barrel with coffee.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
And once we've done that, I don't even care what that dog's real purpose in life is.
I'm going to get one, and he's going to come upstairs into my room every morning with a barrel of coffee around his neck.
And I'll pat him on the head, and that will be all he needs, because all they want to do is please.
Well, and you know what you're doing, John?
You're using the same frank honesty and candor, which I think all means the same thing, that you bring to all of your transactions in life, which is you have made the barrel into the duck.
He's not going to want to go chase other stuff.
He's going to want to fucking bring you coffee.
Exactly.
He didn't even know what the duck was until it was a barrel.
And the thing about this is that I believe that this is true of human beings, too.
You think everybody's got a duck?
That's what I was just thinking.
Yes, we are more complicated, obviously, than Bernie's Mountain Dogs or Wiener Dogs.
But I think that we are waiting, each of us, for our duck.
And when that duck appears, sometimes you're not thinking about it.
You're not ready for it.
You're at a bookstore.
You're looking for a housewarming gift.
You are on your way to meet your fiancé, and your duck appears.
Mm-hmm.
And are you going to, I mean, are you going to chase that rat into the bushes and down the hole and get your pink ribbons dirty?
Or are you going to fight the fact that every fiber of your being says, holy shit, I never knew it, but there's my duck.
There's my duck and I'm going to look away because I have self-domesticated myself.
There is no guy in his pajamas who's brought me here to this doorway.
It is, I am the guy in the pajamas and I am the dog and I am ignoring the duck.
Well, and as much as you can say, and I know you didn't get a long view of this because you were watching the rat, but like, for example, the guy in the jammies, what's his duck?
Exactly.
Okay.
All right.
The thing is, when his dog went off into the bushes, he's left holding the duck.
Now everything's changed for this guy, right?
Is he going to let this dog come into his bed and lick him on the face tonight, covered in rat blood?
If he goes and he finds Ginger...
And you've seen dead rats or stomped rats.
The place our band used to practice was at my friend's house, and he was feral.
My friend was feral.
He hunted.
He would go out in the backyard and shoot rats, and he hated rats, and he was – he worked for a living.
He had rough hands and boots, our drummer.
He used some kind of –
steel press he would stomp them he would stomp them in the kitchen and then scoop them up with the cardboard um you know thing that 12 bush beers came in and then just throw it out in the backyard and it looks like half rack box which also they make a great hat too i just saw a coors light cowboy hat for sale on amazon just yesterday i didn't even know that existed isn't that weird
He would smash it.
He would smash it with his boot and scoop it up.
He had no problem.
And to me, oh, it completely freaked me out that he could do it.
And it wasn't even something where he was like, I'm drunk and I'm going to kick a rat.
He had done this so many times.
You know how hard it is to stomp a rat?
Do you know how fast those little fuckers are?
Yes.
He was not startled.
He was not scared.
His name is Legion.
His name was Bruce, but I think he's a commando.
He's a commando.
But the thing is, though, when you see a rat that's been smashed or like a neighborhood of pigeon, thank God, it looks like what?
It looks like – you don't really understand the word guts until you've seen a smashed animal.
Even if you've seen somebody cut up a cow or a pig, it's still not the same.
There's a surgical nature to cutting the ham off a pig.
This is something completely different.
This is nature.
This is your duck staring you in the face.
It looks like steak tartare maybe.
Swash.
With a plate of spaghetti put on it.
Yes.
Okay, that's guts.
And you stuff all of it in a furry slipper.
Yeah, I've seen some squashed things.
Here's the problem.
I'm just going to say this just quickly in passing, and I'll probably cut this out.
But the thing is, if you obtain a dog whose entire raisin to Etra for its entire line of existence down the line with all these dogs was to literally kill things, to kill big things, not be scared of things.
Like dinosaurs.
You can hide from a dinosaur as long as you just stand still.
Once you start moving, that dinosaur goes after you.
That's how it works.
They're not super bright.
They've got a brain the size of a walnut.
Right.
I have not had that much experience hiding from dinosaurs, so thank you for teaching me that.
Okay, all I'm saying is this.
What happens after every – you know what?
I'm not going to say pit bull.
Act like I'm saying pit bull.
After every vicious dog attack that kills a child or old person, to a person, what does the owner always say?
Oh, he's the nicest, sweetest dog.
They've never done anything like even near this before.
Right.
There's not a single person in the world that hasn't had their dog except for maybe like a football player or somebody.
They've never had anybody.
There's never been anybody with a dog that killed a person who said, yeah, that's happened five times.
There's always a first time.
But this is exactly the problem with human beings, too.
That's what everybody says about the maniac white supremacist guy that walks in and kills a bunch of Sikhs because he doesn't understand what a Sikh is.
Oh, wrong turban.
Yeah.
Wrong turban.
This guy that walked into the Sikh temple and killed all the Sikhs, and everyone's saying, well, gee, I don't understand what his motivation was.
Right.
Well, because he's an asshole, and he's an idiot, and he doesn't know the one turban from the other, and he doesn't care.
Right.
And there could be three minutes, like we said before with the Klan, there could be three minutes in junior high that largely explains why he is the way he is.
It didn't take a lot of breeding.
Well, there's probably some breeding issues.
But you know what I'm saying?
But he never did anything like this before.
He's an asshole.
That's the problem.
He never did anything like this before.
And then all of a sudden, oh, he killed nine people.
Well, it's like none of us have ever done anything like that before until we do because we're animals.
Yeah.
You're right.
It's one of those stupid sayings like whenever you find something you lost, it's always in the last place you look.
I cannot believe that adults still say that.
Well, I found it, but I kept looking for a couple hours.
It's the weirdest thing.
Okay, so here's the question for you then.
You know about serial killers.
I do.
I have a sideline on serial killers.
Are you a fan?
Do you follow serial killers?
No, I'm not a fan.
I know you're not a fan of anybody.
But I'm pretty interested in serial killers.
And it's my understanding that, yes.
Did this start back in the day?
There was a time in the early 90s where serial killer fandom was a thing in our culture.
Right.
John Wayne Gacy selling paintings and getting marriage proposals.
Yeah, I had a lot of friends that literally corresponded with killers in the jail and had books about them and stuff.
It's pretty easy to send a letter to anybody.
It really is.
And I did not approve of that and I did not indulge in it.
But since the internet has arrived in all of our lives...
I must confess to having spent many, many hours late at night trying to understand... Not trying to understand... Well, yeah, trying to understand Bundy and... Jeffrey Dahmer.
Well, and our local... Bundy's a hell of a story.
Bundy was one of my first serial killers.
Because he was in Florida.
He was in Florida, you know.
Bundy was one of the first serial killers.
And he was smart as shit.
Yeah.
Smart and diabolical and – He broke out of jail.
He changed his – because a lot of it is you get some guy in Quantico who's drinking a lot of coffee.
He thinks he has it figured out.
Well, Bundy – and again, I'm not here to promote Ted Bundy.
But he did.
He took an eternity.
He switched it up.
He tried different things.
He'd go to different places.
He escaped multiple times.
But he also... I mean, there's this, like, oh, yeah, and he was this super killer.
But then he also would go up into the mountains and have sex with the dead body of the person he'd killed for multiple days until, in his own words, the body was... You could no longer have sex with it because of decomposition.
He's a polymath.
And that is a thing that it's very difficult to square with, like, yeah, he was a Bonnie and Clyde, and then, oh...
Oh, if you even spend two seconds thinking about the things that he did, there is no possible way to contextualize that.
You can't live in a world where that is possible and yet you believe that people are like...
It's reasonable, predictable, and that – I guess what I'm saying is it is not possible to live in a world where there are Bundys and at the same time you believe that we can educate people away – educate our society –
to a point where there is no longer hatred or suffering.
You know what I mean?
Like there's, this is the liberal conceit, right?
That if we just, if we just pour enough education on people.
People are basically, people are basically good and need to be given the circumstances to do the right thing.
Yeah.
And we just, we just threw a, threw a process of culturation and also some sort of draconian
and maybe we throw a little bussing on there and then all of a sudden all of our hatred of one another will go away and we will live in a utopia where we wake up every morning and make muesli for one another and we all gather at a common table and eat muesli and our linen garments don't chafe and then oh except for this one guy who likes to eat people's faces or have sex with dead bodies
But he's, you know, really, like, he just found his duck, and we're just going to have to walk him over to this other area, this fenced-off area, even though fences are a terrible thing.
Because that's the exception to the rule.
Yeah, and it's like, well, he certainly is an outlier, right, on the bell curve.
Of the people we're aware of and the people we've caught.
Right.
I bet there's a lot of panty snatchers out there.
I bet people would be... Here's one of the problems, turns out, is that everybody thinks... For example, child abductions have gone way, way down since the 1940s.
Oh, interesting.
It's just the reporting of things like child abductions has gone through the roof.
There were probably way more missing blondes back in the days when cars were larger.
It's just that today it's way over-reported.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes, I do.
Yes, yes.
And so I think that's part of it.
But here's the other thing.
Go ahead.
But Bundy worked...
As a pretty high up staffer for the Republican campaign for governor here in Washington state, and he was like a trusted advisor of the man who eventually was the Republican governor of Washington.
And so you have to be a pretty high-functioning – not just high-functioning maniac.
You have to be a pretty high-functioning person to be working that.
John Wayne Gacy was not only a clown at children's parties.
He was one of the most respected businessmen in his area of Chicago.
And here's how he got a lot of those young men in the car was that he would say to them, hey, look, I own this construction business.
do you want to make a little bit of quick money?
I'd be more than happy.
I'm a clown at parties and a member of the Rotary Club.
So I hope I didn't get that wrong.
You know, I got the Argentine stadium wrong.
I'm a clown at the Rotary Club.
And yeah.
Yeah.
And so, and so, but, but, but people get in the car and then pretty soon they're in the basement.
He's got to stick with a wire on it, twisting around the neck and he's reading a Bible verses.
And then he pulls out the screwdriver.
That actually sounds kind of hot, especially with a clown.
I wouldn't like it.
I wouldn't like it at first.
No.
No.
My understanding is that he put – it was Gacy, right, that buried the bodies in his own basement and then just poured lye on them.
Yeah.
I mean it worked for a while and then they found there was something like I want to say 28 of them.
But here's what I want to get at.
Speaking of ducks, you've got – you look at somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer who's a super interesting character.
Talk about a freaky little guy.
He was a real freaky guy.
But you know what?
He had that same pattern as a whole bunch of people.
Can I just say?
Killing cats.
You meet a kid who blows up a little bit too much stuff.
You excluded.
You meet somebody who has killed a lot of cats.
I've never killed a thing in blowing things up.
I'm so glad.
I always said, clear!
Fire in the hole.
Fire in the hole!
Get out, everyone!
And then I would push the ignition button and boom!
I can imagine you wearing those yellow marksman glasses, those goggles.
But all I'm saying is this.
If it is fair to say, and I think it's fair to say, because I've read enough books, I've watched enough TV shows, and I've spent enough time on Wikipedia to know that you take somebody who's a 14-year-old cat killer...
And you're seeing the seeds of something that will become the discovery of ducks.
Which is a terrific Marquez story, by the way.
Now, here's a question to you.
Is there something – is this just for serial killers?
Are there other things where we should be watching, not necessarily cats that are being killed, with animals?
Should we be watching animals doing freaky stuff?
Like animals, I don't know, they like to chew furniture.
I'm just saying, are there ways that we can see this feral nature coming out before it comes to a dead rat or a coed?
Are there markers, John?
Are there markers?
You're saying in the animal kingdom or in the human kingdom?
John, it's the same kingdom.
It really is.
I'm going to say that, yes, there are markers all the time, and that's why we don't hang out with people who listen to white supremacist music.
But we do hang out with, say, for instance, bronies.
Oh, man.
You know?
You look at some bronies and you think, has a brony ever flipped his lid?
Don't you think the bronies found his duck?
I think they have.
I think that's absolutely true.
But there are a lot of ducks, right?
There are a lot of... There's a lot of ducks and there's a lot of decoys.
That's exactly right.
And there are tons of dogs...
for whom that rat would not have been their duck.
They'd come out, the rat would run right under their nose, right across their paws, and the dog, obviously, the ears would go up.
They would be attentive.
The tail would go up.
Just as every other human on that street, if we had ears that could go up, our ears were all up when that rat came from under the car.
Our tails all went up.
If I see a rat, even though I understand, if I see a rat at a remove, and the thing is a rat doesn't want to be seen.
No.
A rat that he realizes, uh-oh, he realizes I am clocked.
He's going to find a wall.
He's going to run along the way.
He's going to do that creepy thing because their body is like a ferret.
They're kind of a weasel.
They're kind of bifurcated and they kind of scoot.
There's big butts.
They're so gross.
Big butts.
But they're going to hightail it away.
They're not going to come confront you about having been seen.
You know, when you just said big butts, it occurred to me that there is someone listening to this podcast who is not 100% sure that they aren't maybe attracted to rats.
Sexually.
Is Mix listening?
Ha ha ha ha.
I don't think... Have you made him aware of the show?
I don't think that Mix listens, but I did recently learn that not one, but two... I knew that one of the presidents of the United States of America was a regular listener, but now it turns out that two of them are.
You think?
You know, Jason only has two strings on his drums.
Did you know that?
I did know that.
That's part of his sound.
You know, one of his rack toms is a beer cooler.
Oh.
That guy's a riot.
He knows how to live.
But no, lead singer of the president's Chris Ballou.
Hello, Chris Ballou.
Welcome to the family.
Famous American.
Has listened to every episode.
He'll quit now.
Every episode.
And he gave me, he broke it down for me the other day.
Gave me the exegesis of our whole thing.
He pulled a little bit of a Flansburg and he was like...
Here's what you need to do.
Jason gave, after Flans, gave me the second biggest exegesis that I've ever gotten of this show.
And may I say, John, of you.
I think you might be Jason Finn's duck.
Finn knows a lot about me.
He also... He knows where the ducks are buried.
He also thinks he knows a lot more about me than he does.
Are you looking for equal time?
Because he told me a lot of things.
No, no, no, no.
Trying to decode Jason Finn is a thing that I do in private with Jason Finn.
It is not a thing that I'm going to take out into the world.
guys i keep imagining what you and so many people i can't remember i think i want to say it's the raven but it's this one roger corman movie with like peter laurie and i want to see christopher lee vincent price and there's this one magic duel that's done on like five dollars worth of effects where they like throw fireballs at each other across this long table that's what i keep imagining sounds like every friday night for me sitting on a long table with my friends just casting like cheap effects at each other let me ask you this have you ever known a border collie
I did not come up in a culture where border collies were a major currency.
The dogs that I knew growing up... Like Malamutes and Huskies.
They were Malamutes and Huskies and Shepherds and actually Bernie's Mountain Dogs.
Big dogs made for cold weather.
And calm.
And then...
You might be surprised, but my high school girlfriend, their family were wiener dog owners.
My aunt and uncle were wieners.
And the wiener dogs could never go outside because nature would kill them instantly.
Alaska... Oh, they're not suited.
They're like invasive exotics.
They're not devasive.
They're not suited for the environment.
Yeah.
Alaska itself, Alaska personified, would see a wiener dog and immediately crush it.
It would just direct some cold.
Do you think people in Germany keep their husky inside, if you know what I mean?
Germans don't have huskies.
Is that right?
Well, I mean, modern Germans can have anything they want because they're... They made them all move to Czechoslovakia.
Because their Deutschmark became the Euro, and then that has purchasing power.
But traditionally, no, they made all kinds of dogs there.
They're the ultimate dog makers.
Oh, no, no, no.
China gives them a run for their money.
China has made some fucked up dogs.
Now, here's the thing.
In England and France, they were very practical.
The reason I ask you about border collies, just quickly, I've been around a few border collies, and there's one thing in common with all of them.
Here's what happens.
Excuse me.
I think people go out.
Sorry, cough button.
I was going to say cough button.
I think people go out and they look on the Internet or they buy a dog book at the Barnes & Noble.
They bring it home.
Oh, my God.
Border Collies.
Look at that sweet face.
Look at those eyes.
Oh, my gosh.
Well, yeah, yeah.
They read the first paragraph.
What they don't read is that dog will never stop hurting everything.
Oh, right.
Of course.
Well, I had a friend that had an Australian Shepherd.
That dog could actually climb walls.
They see ducks everywhere.
They've got to see ducks.
Their herding instinct is so powerful that they will herd like dust around the house.
They will herd.
Seriously, they'll sit and herd anything that moves.
If you had some streamers on a fan, they would try to get those streamers like...
I've heard this from – yes, like a cat.
I've heard this from three different people who've had this to varying degrees.
My friend Richard in particular grew up in a border collie house, and they herded the children.
If he tried to leave the dog – excuse me, if he tried to leave the yard, the border collie would grab him in a non-harmful way by the seat of his pants and drag him back into the yard.
Which is, I think, an advantage if you have children who are stupid.
Right.
So you just need to find the right duck for your dog and the right dog for your duck.
If you have stupid children, it goes both ways.
Get a border collie.
If your children are smart, stupid children, smart dog.
Yeah.
If your children are smart, then maybe you need a dog that doesn't have that.
So if you've got a super genius in the house, like a super train, it's okay to have a dumb dog.
Now Gibson's not, not the, I don't want to say anything about Gibson.
I don't know if your mom still listens.
Gibson is a not, no, wait, don't tell me.
I know this.
Oh shit.
It's not a Greyhound.
It's a, what's the first letter?
What's the first letter?
B. Borsoi?
A borsoi?
Yeah, a borsoi.
You're exactly right.
You found it in your mind.
Gibson is a borsoi, although he is a borsoi crossed with a whippet.
That's a nervous fucking dog.
It is.
He's a smaller dog.
Well, he's less nervous, but he has incredible... You ever been around a Whippet?
It's like a great amount of meth.
It is.
But he's a much bigger dog than a Whippet.
Gibson has doggy ennui.
He's got like angst?
He does.
So he has anxiety, but really he has ennui.
Oh, man.
So he spends many, many hours sitting with his paws under his chin, staring out the door, wondering about things.
Does he need a duck?
No.
He's a cipher.
He has a duck, which is spaghetti.
Spaghetti is his duck?
He wants spaghetti, and there's nothing to account for this.
There's nothing in the history of this dog that would indicate that spaghetti was the...
I had a cat that ate spaghetti compulsively.
So, Borzois were the... Is it Russian?
Yeah, they were the dogs of the czars, and they were bred to hunt wolves, and they would work as a team.
So, three Borzois would approach a wolf, and I don't know if you've ever seen a wolf up close, but wolves do not like to be approached, let's say, by anything.
Wolves do the approaching.
In this case, the Borzois, which are huge dogs, a proper Borzoi stands three and a half feet tall.
They're like at the shoulder.
Oh, my God.
It's like the size of a schnauzer.
It's big.
They're like horses.
And they can run in bursts up to like 50 miles an hour.
And so three of these dogs would come up on a wolf.
Some of them weigh more than 100 pounds?
Yeah, they're massive.
I thought these were little skinny motherfuckers.
I don't know.
Gibson has been, some of this has been bred out of him.
The closest that Gibson has ever seen to a wolf is a very wolf-like squirrel.
But the real boarzois, like my mom used to breed boarzois and she lived out in Kitsap County here in Washington, which is basically like you have to take a ferry and then you are living in the forest.
You're living in the trees where Sasquatches come and want to borrow a cup of sugar.
But she said she had these borzois and the queen of her borzoi pack was a dog named Manushka.
And they would drive down these long country roads out in the forests there.
And there was a person who had a wolf hybrid.
This is in the 60s.
And she said the first time that when this person first got the wolf, they turned a corner on this long country road, still deep in the forest, about a half a mile from this person's house.
And Manushka sat up in the back seat of the car and started howling.
Like for the first time?
The first time.
And it was the spookiest sound.
My mom said the spookiest sound that she'd ever heard.
And she didn't know that the wolf was there yet.
She only found out like a week later that this guy had owned a wolf now.
And Manushka howled for like 45 minutes.
That's insane.
As they drove.
Just with this prehistoric knowledge that her prey... She had never in her life smelled a wolf...
And now she smelled one and she knew something.
Isn't it interesting?
So we sit around and we wonder about crows and ravens talking behind our backs.
Right?
But you're telling me that this is a dog that it was completely unprompted.
That duck popped up except it was a wolf.
It was a wolf.
Holy shit.
And the way they would hunt wolves is that the three dogs would get on.
So the wolf obviously is moving as fast as it can.
And these three dogs are right on its tail.
Is it scared of the wolfhound?
Yeah.
The wolf knows that this is what's coming for it.
Yes, the wolf is scared.
Because behind the wolfhound is the freaking czar and 400 people on horseback, all carrying blunderbusses.
And it's a bad scene.
They are blowing on trumpets.
The wolf was not into this from the beginning.
And then when he sees these wolfhounds, he knows, or she knows, this is a bad deal.
Uh-oh.
So the first wolfhound is trained to grab the wolf's front paw.
So the first dog gets in alongside of the wolf and latches onto its front paw, tripping it, where the second wolfhound then can grab onto one of the wolf's hind paws, spinning it.
This is all happening at 40 miles an hour.
They don't have to have a whiteboard in a meeting about this.
This is just what they do.
They know what their job is.
And then the third one gets the wolf by the neck.
And they hold it for the czar.
Whoa.
And they are meant to do it.
This is why they live.
And I have one of these dogs.
I grew up with these dogs.
And they are bananas.
They are absolutely bonkers.
Because...
need i need i say there are these skills are not called into daily action right we do not i do not have a way to activate this power in my thoughts because we i am not on horseback i i do have a blunderbuss but it's not useful in the city and you know we're not hunting wolves so here this dog has all these powers these incredible powers and
And it's just like, sorry, you want to go for a walk down to the playground and chase a tennis ball?
Is that cool with you?
Or is that going to be enough today?
One time I went through a phase where I was riding bicycles because it was a thing that you could do with girls.
You know what I mean?
Let's go for a bike ride.
Oh, that sounds fun.
And then we would ride around Seattle, which is a city of 10,000 hills.
But I took Gibson with us one time, took him off the leash, and it was 3 o'clock in the morning.
We were going on a bike ride.
And we rode around town.
We probably rode...
I don't know how many miles we went on this bike ride, and Gibson ran alongside us absolutely as fast as we could pedal.
He ran alongside us with this look on his face like, come on, are we going to really kick it in now?
Are you going to kick it into gear?
Are we going to run?
And he kept having this disappointment like, this is it, right?
This is as fast as you can go.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
You haven't really pushed him to his limit in the way that he's looking for.
It wasn't possible.
He wants to go from a canter to a gallop or something like that.
He was just trotting alongside us as we're barreling down these hills with this look on his face like, well, this is fun.
This is new.
But also, he is not being used.
He is underused as the Great Pavement might have it.
And if I had a group of people with motorcycles, maybe we could have, like, given Gibson a true opportunity to catch his inner, like...
Use his wings for a second.
Anyway, so Gibson gets five walks a day.
I mean, he is not, as far as dogs go, he's living the life of Riley.
But he has all this doggy ennui because he's dreaming of wolves.
And there are no wolves.
That's horrible.
Well, and that is... But your mom does take him out.
That is true of every dog.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, some dogs it's easier than others.
I mean, again, with the Chinese.
Pardon my saying.
But they bred some serious lap dogs.
And some fighting dogs, right?
I mean, some of those little... Those lap dogs are all meant to guard temples, right?
Their job... They make that terrible yap, yap, yap sound because their job is to wake everybody up when the barbarians are at the gates.
You know, they weren't... I mean, sure, they're meant to like...
Disguise your boner while you're sitting in a chair.
That's its job.
Its job is like, whoop.
A boner hiding dog.
A boner hiding dog would be so handy.
Yeah, it's got a boner.
Get up there.
Oh, my gosh.
Then you're just petting the dog.
And you're like, hello, welcome.
And you're petting the dog.
But really, it's just the dog.
You're watching the maid pick up a brush.
It's just a thin sort of like carpet between you and the boner.
Oh, man.
But I feel like this is true of people, too.
No person, we did not evolve for 10,000 years so that you can be, so that you can work at a Best Buy.
Have you ever been to a Best Buy?
I have.
You walk through the aisles.
There's no ducks.
There's no ducks.
No, there's all these 23-year-old salespeople, and every one of them is thinking, I was bred to chase wolves.
Yeah.
May I help you find a quarter inch to eighth inch adapter?
And it's like, yeah, you were bred to catch wolves.
But in fact, I do need you to help me find a quarter inch to eighth inch adapter.
And they shuffle off and they try and make a joke with you.
They try and make common cause with you.
And they're screaming behind their smiles like, get me out of here, please.
Please, I will work as your cabin boy.
I will be your slave.
Do whatever it...
I don't care.
Please just get me out of this Best Buy.
Help me feel alive.
Get me back to my atavistic duck-chasing nature.
That's right.
Let me be the person that is here.
Let me be your assistant who just coils your cables and touches 9-volt batteries to his tongue to see if they have any charge left in them.
I'll be that person for you.
And I'm like, I just need a quarter-inch to eighth-inch adapter, dude.
Thanks, though.
See you later, bro.
Take it easy.
Peace out.
See you later, bro.
Peace out.
And they're there and I walk out the door and I am going out literally to hunt wolves.
With your new cable?
With my new cable and they are adjusting their name tag and they're just like... Just so you know, you should really pick up the monster cables and you should get the replacement insurance.
You know, if you get HDMI, you want to make sure to get a digital HDMI.
You know what?
These have a lifetime guarantee.
And so, you know what I have here in my house?
I have like three milk crates full of cables that don't work anymore that have a lifetime guarantee that I keep meaning to take down to Guitar Center and dumping on that, you know, right inside the sliding door.
Like, I'm just going to walk in and just dump this pile of dead cables and be like, lifetime guarantee, motherfucker.
That's what you said when I bought these.
I want $650 worth of new cabling.
And they'll say contact the manufacturer.
Yeah, well, exactly.
That's exactly what they'll say.
See, this is where I think cats are interesting.
And I'm not a big cat person.
But anymore, I'm not really a big dog person.
I'm not a big person.
But certainly not a person person.
You're a baby person.
You have a daughter now.
You don't need a proxy daughter.
You have an actual daughter.
Yeah, I married a model.
I don't need a magazine.
Yeah.
But listen, I'm not going to say that having a pet is like having a proxy child.
That's a terrible thing to say, and please send your letters to Merlin.
Yeah, I'm using this John Roderick address for that now.
But cats, you ever fuck with a cat, like with a laser pointer?
Have you ever put a hot dog on a string on a ceiling fan?
I have fucked with cats in more ways than I'm proud to say.
There's so many ways.
Because the cats are just smart enough to be really... You can really fuck with them.
Have you ever put scotch tape around a cat's paws?
I have not.
What does that do?
Well, so a cat stands... And also, when it's spreading its paws and making biscuits on you, that's part of how it gets its scent on you, right?
It's...
Isn't that part of it?
I didn't know that.
You ever had a cat make biscuits on you?
I have many, many times.
But a cat stands by spreading its paws, right?
Its weight is... It's already funny.
Its weight is spreaded by spreading its paws.
So if you tape a cat's paws...
And you put it down on the floor.
It dances.
It hops on its little stumps.
It can't spread its toes.
Don't do this.
Don't do that.
It's so wrong.
Also, if you have a retriever, don't give it a tablespoon of peanut butter, whatever you do.
You ever seen a dog eat a tablespoon of peanut butter?
Yeah.
Well, it's a thing that they do.
Now they fill those little Kongs, those little dog toys.
Oh, yeah.
They fill them with peanut butter to drive dogs crazy.
They think it's like, oh, she loves it.
It occupies her mind.
It's like Gitmo.
Yeah, it occupies her mind.
Yeah, it turns her mind into a hot coal.
It's just like, how do I get in there?
How do I get in there?
Yeah.
So tape on a cat's paws is a little bit like bound feet.
If you did that for 200 years and kept getting the ones that danced funnier and funnier, you eventually wouldn't need the tape.
I'm surprised the Chinese have not made dancing cats.
There's a place in China where they have dancing cats that don't have toes.
These are just the cats that we've seen that made it over here.
You know, the Chinese, in a lot of Asia, they do some pretty awful things.
It's a big country, China.
Big, big, big.
Growing economy, a lot of tape.
Yeah.
So anyway, taping a cat's paws, terrible thing to do.
I had a friend, I was at his house one time, and a cat walked past him.
And he grabbed the cat.
We were sitting on beanbag chairs.
He grabbed the cat and was holding the cat with one hand while he unzipped the beanbag chair with the other hand and threw the cat inside the beanbag chair and zipped it.
That's not funny.
It was terrible.
So the cat...
The cat came out of the beanbag chair five minutes later, absolutely covered with beans.
Oh, the styrofoam?
The styrofoam bean.
Oh, John, this is awful in like seven ways.
Yeah, it was terrible.
But again, we were like, and I can't believe that we're talking about animal torture on this because it's a terrible thing.
And I don't, I highly don't.
Well, this brings us back around because I was 12 years old.
And I mean, I didn't end up becoming a serial killer.
In other words, I was just, I was just watching.
I understand.
Music for Steamboat Willie was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and includes the song Steamboat Bill, a 1911 Arthur Collins composition and Turkey in the Straw.
The title of the film is a parody of the Buster Keaton film, Steamboat Bill Jr., next paragraph.
Well, the film has received some criticism due to humorous depiction of cruelty to animals.
Oh.
I guess that's when he spit chewing tobacco on Mickey Mouse.
What does he do?
He makes him ring a bell.
I'm looking at one picture here and trying to figure out what the whole show is.
He does his Steamboat Willie dance.
That's as far as I've gotten.
I got to tell you something.
I'm a big fan of Turkey in the Straw.
That's a hell of a tune.
It is.
Turkey in the Straw has more melodic complexity than 98% of modern Mexican pop music.
Yeah, well, as long as we're going ping pong.
Yeah, I like that.
I think I know that you're talking about the kind with the really like over compressed trumpets that.
Yeah, we call it taqueria music.
It's umpah music.
It's German.
But it's got these awesome snare fills, too, that are almost like, you know, like the only good part of ska songs is the end and the drum fills.
I didn't know there was an awesome part of ska songs.
The problem is most ska songs never end.
They might as well go on forever.
But you know how every ska song starts like this?
Right?
Not just mirroring the bathroom.
2-4-2-4.
They've got some – so like in one of those – how's it sound?
It's like – and you hear this.
They get these great little snare fills.
Now, personally, I like listening to that station.
It's Stereo del Sol.
Sol, Sol.
I like Estereo del Sol.
It makes my wife lose her mind.
You ever seen people who have a really visceral reaction to bluegrass?
I really like bluegrass.
What?
People have a negative reaction to bluegrass?
I'm kind of like that with reggae.
I have to be honest.
That's insane.
That's the craziest thing you've ever said.
What?
Reggae music, man.
Ja Rastafari.
I told you my reggae story.
Aye, aye, aye, aye.
Yeah.
I don't ever need to hear it again.
That is amazing music.
I'm not talking about Peter Tosh.
It's been polluted by the bros.
Just the whole legend.
Legend ruined everything.
Bob Marley was so cool.
I had a copy of Burnin', and I had a copy of...
Like, his first few, like, good records.
Peter Toshman was, like, a good band.
And then, like, everybody in my fucking college had, like, three copies of Legend.
I know, I know.
And it just went on and on and on.
I told you what happened to me in Kind of Blue.
It's the soundtrack for Eating Outside.
No!
Kind of Blue, really?
I never told you this story.
No, it's a durable record.
I worked at a shop.
Oh, dear.
And there were about six or seven employees.
And we all could play our own music and listen to stuff.
And then one day, one of the employees played a record that had the word crap in it or something.
The singer said, I'm not taking any more crap.
It sounds like the Eagles.
Yeah.
I think the Eagles used the word crap.
I think Joe Walsh introduced crap to the Eagles.
Well, there was plenty of crap in the Eagles before he arrived, but I think he brought the word to them.
It's made of crap.
Can I beg you not to get me started on Don Henley?
Somehow the Eagles, just as you would take a giant square of butter and carve an elephant out of the butter so that it could sit in the middle of the buffet on a cruise ship, the Eagles carved an elephant out of a block of crap.
you think you think that's true of glenn fry old school glenn fry you don't like you don't like the old glenn fry not miami vice glenn fry you don't like old glenn fry no don't listen oh can i just mention can i mention your buddy your buddy joe walsh no your other buddy the one you're so you're so gay married for is phil collins appeared in an episode of miami vice oh i know i know the full phil collins miami vice connection
God, you're so in denial.
You don't like that tequila sunrise?
You don't like Hotel California?
I am not an Eagles hater.
You know, I got to say, there's some... I like the Eagles very much, but at their heart, it's the same problem with Clapton.
At the heart of the Eagles, there is nothing but cocaine.
LAUGHTER
i'm making four in this one there's no soul yeah to the eagles i love that i love the music but what about fleetwood mac now you like fleetwood mac right i do because at the heart of fleetwood mac there's intense suffering but yes it's cocaine in a rhythm section cocaine intense suffering and a guy who can do fucking pull-offs like a motherfucker
And some older British dudes who are looking at the back end of Stevie Nicks every night, and that's going to do a thing to a guy.
We should table that one.
I got to tell you, I think pull-offs might be my duck.
Really?
Mm-hmm.
I like a pull-off.
I really like a good pull-off.
Even when Jimmy Page is up there being sloppy, I like me a pull-off.
I was at a guitar store.
Anybody can hammer on.
It's like triceps versus biceps.
You know what I'm saying?
Pull-offs are the triceps of guitar.
I was at a guitar store the other day, and a guy's walking by, a guy I know, and I'm sitting there playing a guitar, and as he walks past, I'm like, hey, teach me a lick.
And he's like, what?
I was just heading out of here, and I was like, I know, two seconds, teach me a lick.
And I say this to guitar players all the time, teach me a lick.
That's all your kids.
99% of the time, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
And they don't teach me a lick.
And I'm always surprised at this.
Like, if somebody said to me, teach me a lick, I'd go, here's a lick.
Or I'd play them something.
Turkey in the straw.
They teach you turkey in the straw.
No, wait, no, that's the Arkansas Squatter.
What's Turkey in the Straw?
Wait, wait, I'm getting confused.
You just said that you love Turkey in the Straw.
No, I know, but now I'm having a stroke and I just started singing the Arkansas Traveler or whatever.
Turkey in the Straw goes... Well, that's the tuba part.
Oh, isn't it?
Wait a minute.
I got to look up Turkey and stuff.
I'm sorry.
This guy stopped and spent 30 seconds teaching me a lick.
Teaching me a – not just a lick, teaching me a concept that I've been – I'm sitting with my guitar all day trying to figure this thing out.
Now, that's a gift you can give another person, and it involves some pull-offs, some hammers on and some pulls off.
I'm not saying you're any Joe Walsh or Don Felder, but you know what?
I mean, remember I used to tell you – He's a great guitar player.
Yeah, he's fine.
But you know that – I always told you that Shape song, Sound Like Haircut 100?
Hmm.
But I really like your little pull-off thing in that.
I have no idea how you play that song live and sing.
I think it's really weird.
I've tried to play it, and I've tried to play it just sitting here, and I think it's hard.
It seems like once you learn it, it must be not as hard.
That's very insightful.
Yeah, that's right.
Once you learn it, just keep going until you're there.
You got a guitar nearby?
Can you play it for me?
Uh, once you, once you are a lead singer and lead guitarist on a thing, you, you learn that you're giving, you have to give yourself a lobotomy.
So it goes, is it, is it E?
Can you hear that?
I totally can.
Start it, start it over here.
I'll shut up.
Do it from the beginning.
Yeah.
That's fucking insane.
Yeah, well, to sing and do that.
You're like an autograph.
That's amazing.
I'm like an autograph.
I know how to play that solo, the four-finger.
No, I know that one.
I learned it from Guitar for the Practicing Musician.
See, now that to me is like a Hotel California.
You will.
I used to love that, you know, the...
Oh, yeah, the solo.
But that's a kind of pull-off.
It's not exactly like a end of Stairway to Heaven solo pull-off.
It's a thing.
When I play that song, if I am looking out at the audience and I make eye contact with anyone, then all of the music in my head goes away.
I have really screwed the pooch on that tune a couple of times.
Do you get lost?
Well, I'll be looking around, and it's not a song that I can really be looking around, but I'll be looking around, and I'll make eye contact with a girl, and she'll go, wink, and I'll go, ha-ha, and then the ability to play the song leaves my hands.
Well, also, I don't know anything about music, but also the singing is very, I don't want to say syncopated, but you're singing a real different rhythm than that thing.
You're kind of doing some kind of, what's his name, Stanley Clark, Stanley Jordan?
Who's the guy with the aluminum guitar?
What's his name?
Who am I thinking of?
Steve Albini?
The aluminum guitar.
Remember that guy?
No, not Steve Albini.
It's the other guy.
Stanley Clark.
The bald one.
Oh, you think it's Joe Satriani?
Joe Satriani.
Fuck him.
And then the other thing was Cat's Crap.
Oh, Cat's Crap Fever.
You were going to say about playing crap.
So what was the record that they played when they discovered the crap on a song?
Oh, so here's the thing.
Yeah.
So somebody said crap in a song.
And actually, the employee who was playing the music was a dreadlocked gentleman.
Oh, God.
And so I have no reason to think that it wasn't Fishbone that he was playing.
Yeah.
And, um, and so some customer, I kid you not.
And this was a, this was the magazine store where we had magazines about, uh, like naked motorcycle gangs.
We had magazines about like, like, uh, long pigs.
Did you sell Granta?
We sold Granta.
That was a Granta customer.
This customer complained not to the person with dreadlocks who was working at the counter, but they wrote a letter to the manager saying, your dreadlocked employee played a song that said the word crap in it.
And although the owner of the store was like... I shouldn't have said although.
The owner of the store was a West Coast liberal do-gooder magazine guy.
And rather than...
Say to the employees, hey, a customer complained about the word crap, and so you got to not play songs that have the word crap in it.
Or rather than say to the employees, get a load of this letter I got from some asshole.
You know, like somebody that objects to the music that's being played in a store, like, really?
Fuck you.
Actually, just straight up fuck you.
But instead of doing that, the owner said, okay, well, obviously, I can't trust you guys to play music that doesn't have swear words in it.
So I'm going to pick the music from now on.
What a dick.
And he – it's just – this is just classic.
But he doesn't have to be there all day.
No, he doesn't.
And he's a business owner.
You can just say show a little bit of decorum and responsibility and please don't play stuff that's – don't play – especially don't play things loud.
They're going to make people – that's the main thing is don't play it loud.
So what this guy does is he selects five CDs that are acceptable work music.
Yeah.
And one of them is kind of blue.
And one of them is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
And one of them is... I don't know what they are.
It's a selection of modern jazz.
Instrumental music, though.
Instrumental music and jazz music that's not going to hurt anybody's feelings.
Even though when this music came out, it made everyone that heard the record... It's like a Coltrane record that literally caused people to become junkies on the spot.
at the time but but in the intervening 40 years it has become just background music for people you think so kind of blue
So anyway, well, let me tell you the story of Kind of Blue.
So we rotated through these 10 CDs until eventually nobody cared anymore.
And then we didn't have a 10 CD player.
We just had one CD player.
So you had to go back and change the CD when it was done.
You know what I mean?
Well, eventually nobody cared anymore.
We'd all heard all 10 of these records a million times.
We weren't authorized to put an 11th record into the mix.
And Kind of Blue got put into this record.
cd player and stayed there for two years and and the other thing about the owner was he did not want you to not play music you were supposed to have music playing and so the life went out of everybody that worked there we just were like whatever kind of blue fine and so for basically two years every day i would go to work and hear
It became the sound of hate to me.
I wanted to have Miles Davis and his little wiry neck in my hand.
And I wanted to hold him underwater.
Until he stopped breathing.
I was so mad.
Was the dreadlock guy a black man?
He was.
Can you fucking believe that?
Yeah.
He said, here, you want some black music?
Let me play some black music.
That's exactly right.
Here's your new black music.
And so I could sit right now and give you like an angry mouth trumpet version of every note of Kind of Blue all the way from start to... Let's save that for our... I should book that as a show.
As our Davis and Stuff show.
I should book it in a club and just stand up there and go...
That's actually pretty good.
You've brought out, I think, a trigger word.
I think you did a trigger word because now I'm remembering one reason I hate the Eagles was that when I was a busboy, every night when we closed, the coked-up manager would put on a cassette of –
fucking the long run oh which is not it's it spawn hits but i had to listen to the greeks don't want no freaks every friday and saturday night as well as the long run as well as heartache tonight there are a lot of there are a lot of b-sides there's only so much heartache tonight that you can take it's a good song that's your at this point i'm good to hear heartache tonight once a year it's a pretty good song
If a friend came over to your house and was like, hey, I just wrote a song and he played a song and it was Heartache Tonight, you'd be like, wow, good job.
It's got great harmonies on it.
But it is not a thing you want to hear multiple times.
I think once a year is too often for me.
I think Heartache Tonight is a thing that if I'm driving through, if I'm in a different state and I'm spinning through the channels...
And all I'm hearing is like, uh, like Christian ministry.
So many Christian radio shows.
Yeah.
And then I get heartache tonight.
I'll, I'll stop and listen to it.
Right.
What about Bruce Springsteen?
Would you change it?
Would you change back to the ministers?
Well, what kind of Bruce Springsteen are we talking about?
Well, you know, his best album is Nebraska.
You want me to send you a copy?
You know, I'm on fire.
If I come on, if I come on, I'm on fire as I'm driving across the country, I'll stop and listen.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Oh, yeah.
Rosalita comes on.
You change the channel.
You know what?
Let's move on.
John, it should not surprise us at all that there are so few ducks and so many people.
You think about all these examples that we've given this week.
There are so many occasions where there might be a duck and we look the other way.
And then we sit there.
So you know what happened?
You know what?
Dreadlock guy sat there.
He had his duck.
And then that guy brought in a rubber duck and made him play with it all day long.
How fucked up is that?
He put peanut butter in the Kong.
Peanut butter and the Kong, that's pretty good.
God, I got to blow my nose.