Ep. 106: "Nürburgring Confirmation"
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Hello.
Hey, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How are you?
Oh, it's very early.
Yeah.
It's good, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's good to go early.
Are you moving earlier?
Moving.
Have you had a personal time change?
Yeah, I'm moving earlier.
I am trending earlier.
I think that early is morally better.
That's what people have been telling me my whole life.
People who get up early are morally superior to people that sleep late.
I've resisted it.
That's because we're not up early enough to defend ourselves.
That's right.
They're writing our biographies and we're sleeping.
And then when you wake up, they hide them under the pillow.
And they're like, oh, look who's up.
Lazy bones.
It's typical of the earlies.
It's just the kind of thing they do.
The earlies do a lot.
The earlies are running the world.
Well, because there's lots of things that I think earlies tend to do that ladies wouldn't do or we do in a different annoying way.
Like an early, they do stuff like they move things around at the house.
Right?
Have you ever noticed this?
You might notice a lot of what earlies get away with.
with their particular personality type is by virtue of the fact that they're up literally three hours earlier.
That's right.
They're sometimes up so much earlier that it's like they're living in a different universe, parallel universe.
Mm-hmm.
Back in the old days when I would stay up routinely all night and I would be, I never had a walk of shame exactly because I'm too full of pride.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, I would walk down the boulevard in the morning wearing last night's clothes.
And I'd see all the earlies like pooling, congregating in their little early clutches.
Power walking.
Oh, they're walking so strong and fast.
And I would see like, oh, oh, you look like different people.
You have different physiognomies.
Yeah.
No, I think – well, I don't know that word very well, but I think you might be right.
Now, my question for you is in order to be getting up even a little earlier – and I guess this might be partly because I mainly – the time I've spent in person with you is when you're on tour.
So your whole life kind of has to be later.
But it seems like in the past you've naturally – you wouldn't naturally wake up before like 11 in the past.
Yeah.
No, not by preference or by nature.
Would I wake up before 11?
I'm not shaming you.
No, no.
And the thing is, I've spent my whole life trying to reconcile that with the world, with a world that feels like 11 o'clock is pretty much like too late to get anything done.
If you get up by 11, you're not out of the house by 12, at which point the stores are already starting to close.
Because this is Madrid.
Those stores that are open from 7 to noon.
And then they're just like, oh, well, if you needed sewing supplies, the sewing store closes at noon.
Bob's notions is not a night owl operation.
Yeah, it's like, what do you expect?
You expect us to stay open until 5?
And that's the crazy part about being an 11 o'clock wake-up person.
It's just that so many places close at 5.
And that just seems crazy to me why every place isn't open till 8.
Right.
Yeah.
And what kind of place opens at 8 in the morning?
Like who is doing anything at 8 besides dragging their sorry ass somewhere?
I was in probably my mid to late 20s before this all really clicked.
I mean, it was after I'd had a job and then not had a regular job and been freelancing and sleeping generally 3 a.m.
to 11 most days.
But, you know, it finally really did click something that should be so obvious, which is the world runs 9 to 5 because the world runs 9 to 5.
That's exactly absolutely.
You just said a mouthful, sir.
And so you're able to do things.
But, I mean, it's so bitter that you would have to go and be somewhere during the working hours, and then right at the time you get out – and, you know, for these kids today, they don't know from hours.
But it used to be you couldn't buy stuff on Christmas.
Time was.
You couldn't even count on –
Couldn't count on an ATM being there.
I mean, there was a lot more stuff where you really had to plan and think ahead.
Like, for example, I just noticed yesterday our local post office, which really is like something from East Germany in the mid-70s.
Understandably, I think they're cutting hours, so they're going to start closing at 5 p.m.
instead of 6 p.m.
But think about the impact that that has on people who actually need to do anything with that place.
Right.
Well, absolutely.
And this is the whole premise behind daylight savings time, which is a crazy solution to a simple problem.
You know, daylight savings time, I guess what?
They think we're still getting up to plow or something.
But I mean, here's a clue.
Just have the stores open later.
Keep the time the same.
Just move the opening hours and the closing hours of the shops.
Yeah.
That's what's strange.
I've said this to you probably half a dozen times, but that's one thing that's so starkly different from when I was living in Florida is I remember even being in college, mid to late 80s, gas stations open all night.
It was, you know, more and more you were seeing stuff.
It still wasn't the point when, like, I don't think we had super Walmarts then.
But, you know, as recently as maybe what, like five or eight years ago, going to Florida, the super Walmart is open all night.
night long.
And that's, and it really serves an ironic, sad purpose, which is all the people who are working those crazy jobs at the crazy hours.
They go and they go in their wheel in there with their three kids at two in the morning.
Cause that's when they can go get groceries.
It's insane.
The first time I ever saw a Super Walmart, I was so flabbergasted.
It was in Florida, and it was one of those Super Walmarts... Well, it seemed like it was a... To get there, you had to cross an 11-lane boulevard...
and then go down into a storm ditch your journey is not over yet traveler down into a storm ditch that was again like four lanes wide and then up the other side and then across a long misty parking lot like arc light uh lit parking lot and it was the first time i'd ever been to florida and i was hyper vigilant
For alligators.
Oh.
So I'm like, I'm trying to get across this boulevard and through this storm ditch and over and through the Mirkwood forest.
And everywhere I'm, you know, every step I take, I'm thinking, and I'm a fully grown adult.
Like I don't, the thing is, I don't know anything about alligators.
Yeah.
You know enough to be scared of them, and that's smart.
I know enough that alligators are... You know they can outrun you, John, in a straight line.
Mm-hmm.
I did know that.
I knew enough about alligators, but I didn't know how to spot an alligator on the land or in a pond.
And, you know, in Alaska, I know how to not get eaten by various things.
LAUGHTER
But in Florida, where I had never been, the prospect of like, you know, I presumed that you didn't just put a bell on your backpack and that would scare the alligators away.
Like it does the bears.
An alligator bell.
An alligator bell.
You didn't like, you didn't walk, walk along in the middle of the night.
I would worry that would draw attention to me.
Well, yeah, right.
I mean, in Alaska, you walk along in the middle of the night through the forest and you say, everyone's want to say, oh, bear, oh, bear, oh, bear.
And the bears hear you and they prefer not to have an encounter with you.
But I was not about to start saying, ho, alligator.
Just to be clear, this is early in your first visit to Florida.
So this has got to be an overwhelming experience for you.
I'm 12 hours in country.
Really, it's my first trip to Vietnam.
The air is heavy.
It's hot.
And there's this, the concierge at the hotel says, oh, you want to go over to the super Walmart?
Open 24 hours.
You know, and I see it in the distance glowing.
It's like the bridge that they blow up every night and then rebuild.
And yeah, but alligators, foremost in my mind, I do not want to walk along and step on an alligator.
I do not want an alligator to surprise me from behind a garbage can.
And so, so whenever I think of Walmart, even now, I think alligators.
I'm that way with New Orleans and Nutria's.
Have you ever seen a real live nutria?
John, can I be honest with you?
I only ever needed to see one nutria in my entire life.
And that puts me right into alligator country.
It was because my friend had been joking about it, say, oh, you know, these things, they raised them to make beaver coats.
And then the beaver coat, fake beaver coat market dropped out, I guess, in the late 20s.
And they apparently, however many, like a thousand, two thousand, even 10,000, they let them go.
And now they breed prodigiously.
And they are like the face of Satan.
They are horrifying creatures.
They're rats, but they're the size of beavers.
They're rat beavers with big yellow teeth, and they make a sound like this.
They're like the Korean water ghosts of Louisiana.
Oh.
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The thing is, I'm not going to front here, John.
I mean, yes, we could have a conversation about what Walmart has done to America.
But the first time I walked into a super Walmart, I thought it was like Valhalla.
I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Because at the time, we had – my girlfriend and I were driving and I think we're moving one of us one place to another.
And we needed a tarp to cover up like a U-Haul trailer in the back.
A tarp Poland, as they say in Florida.
Yeah.
And we went in there and I think we ended up buying tires and frozen peas.
I mean it was – I'd never seen a Walmart that had food in it too.
Did you say frozen geese?
Sorry.
I'm over here in the other aisle.
You couldn't hear me.
Frozen peas.
Oh, frozen peas.
No, but I mean I just remember I think – memory serves.
We ended up spending about like an hour and a half, maybe two hours in there because it was like, oh my god.
They have literally everything and it's all like $1.20.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I don't know.
I don't want to make this about the economics and politics, but I have to say it was a really illuminating experience for me to go back to Florida in the mid-2000s.
My mom was recovering from surgery, and I spent like 10 days at her house, something like that.
When you went back to Florida, did you make a White Castle slab out of the Indian sacred cow?
What's that mean?
What?
We're going down to Florida.
Is that Buttle Surfers?
No, but I did see the crepe and the salad.
So I had to tell you, though, there was something about it that was weirdly illuminating to this flaming liberal.
There was my, at the time, still living grandmother who was very old and ill and had Alzheimer's and my mom who's got some kind of movement stuff.
And I'm just here to tell you, man, you pull into the Walmart, you got your little tag.
Everybody's got a hang tag now.
We should talk about that at some point.
Everybody's got a hang tag.
In San Francisco, everybody's got a hang tag.
Oh, you're talking about a handicapped parking spot.
Yeah, I think they just give that to you in Florida, and then if you don't want it, you give it back.
But anyway, you pull right up next to the door.
You get two rascal scooters, and you can drive rascal scooters like retail rascals.
They've got baskets on them.
So, actually, I wasn't super into grandma driving her rascal, but she did pretty well.
She was really into it, I guess.
But we had this little, like, sad AirSats wagon train of me with a giant-ass cart, and then my mom and my grandma were wheeling around.
But it was – the thing is, in San Francisco, you've been to our Safeway.
You park – if you can find a space, you park on the roof of our Safeway.
The elevator, which I'm pretty sure – pretty positive was probably not working when you were here.
It would sometimes just stop working while you're in it.
Right.
You got to get carts downstairs or get carts upstairs and then go into the – and it's amazing though when you've lived in even a pseudo-urban area like where you live or where I live.
It's so strange to pull into a Walmart that has literally hundreds – I don't think they've ever filled that parking lot except maybe like Christmas Eve.
It's the hugest parking lot.
You've got – the worst space at a Walmart is like the best space at our mall.
And then you get two rascals, you drive away, and like $120 later, you fill the truck.
All I'm saying is – and you could do it at 2 in the morning.
And at times when you're dealing with things like moves or transitions, you just find yourself going to Walmart three times a day.
It completely blew me away.
And I don't think it's a great thing, but it was really illuminating to me as somebody who likes to look down his nose and talk about all the people who are ruining America with all their retail.
Because that was all that was there.
Funny thing – sorry, I had some coffee.
When I left for college in 1986, we had gone to Walmart to buy all the pots and pans kind of stuff.
And at that point, there were still strip malls everywhere with retail stores.
You had so many drug stores, so many grocery stores.
But it's – I don't want to make this too idiocracy, but it really was kind of like this eight-block area where there used to be all these different stores was now this one ridiculously large building with ample parking.
The Ultra Store.
Yeah.
Now, do you get those?
You know, you can't build those in the city limits here.
No, no, no.
We don't have them here either in Seattle because, yeah, right.
Basically because of Meg Ryan's character in You've Got Mail, we are prohibited from building superstores in the city.
But, you know, when we first started doing this podcast, you sent me a giant long...
bright blue hyperlink cable.
Is that what it's called?
It's such a hyperlink cable?
It's a hyperlink cable or whatever it is.
It's like a direct-in cable for the internets.
Because the first... For our listeners' home, John's talking about an Ethernet cable.
Ethernet cable.
The first time we tried to do this television program...
I was doing it on... So I said to the gal... I was doing it on the Wi-Fi, and you were like, doesn't sound good.
I'm going to send you something.
And then this blue cable showed up within hours.
And we never looked back.
Because of Amazon.
Anyway, so for a long time, I was doing the housekeeping of at the end of the show, I would unplug the cable that runs down the stairs to the router.
If memory serves, part of the fun of this was your internet connection was downstairs, but you were recording upstairs?
I record upstairs, and the internet connection is down.
You had a 100-foot Ethernet cable.
100-foot Ethernet cable, because the internet connection is down the stairs across the hall and in the other wing.
And so for a long time, I would get done with the program, and I would go down, I would unhook the 100-foot Ethernet cable, I would plug the Wi-Fi router back in, I would coil up the Ethernet cable all the way up the stairs, and put it behind the computer.
Well, over time...
I just got used to the blue cable running through the house.
And everybody kind of got used to it.
And so the blue cable just ended up not getting coiled up.
The blue cable just runs through the house.
But the blue cable has to go through one, two, three doorways.
And across, it goes right across a pretty highly... That sounds like a health class video, John.
That sounds like a terrible tripping hazard.
Well, what's happened is that doors have gotten shut on the long blue cable many, many times.
And now the long blue cable, it looks like it has been chewed upon by a nutria.
It is completely mangled.
And if any real electricity were running through it, it would be a hazard.
As it stands, it looks like a hazard.
It's just dropping internet bites.
It's just dropping bites, right?
And I'm sure the NSA comes in and sweeps up all the internet that spills out of it.
And goes and catalogs it, as they're doing to me all the time.
But I realized as I was looking at it today, oh, right, this thing now is fast approaching uselessness.
And I went on Amazon to get a new one.
And in the course of being on Amazon, even for five minutes, I filled up a shopping cart with $700 worth of stuff.
Wow.
And I was like, well, I can't spend $700 on all this stuff.
So I didn't buy any of it.
And the blue cable is still in the shopping bag.
And now I feel like this blue cable...
belongs in a museum you should sell it it belongs in the roderick on take it to the merch the merch table and so so i can't part with it because now it has value every time the door is closed on it it's you know every single roderick on the line has gone through this cable at least half of it wow and so what am i supposed to do i'm gonna go burn it in the yard
So yeah, now I'm, now I have this, I have this kind of busted ass cable and I don't know if you can even find one at a Walmart.
I need to just, I just need to go to, you know what I need, you know what Amazon needs to do?
They need to start opening stores.
You mean, so you're saying they would have the equivalent of, I guess you would call it a, it'd be retail, but a store.
Yeah.
Like a retail store, a retail store.
So it'd be like an online store, but in a building.
Like in a big building with a parking lot.
And people would – I think I'm following you.
You're saying that instead of buying it online and having it delivered, they would go there, they would park there, they'd go inside, and they'd give something like money to take something in their hands and walk out of it with a receipt?
Bitcoin.
You could use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin.
Okay.
I'm going to write that down.
But the thing about it is that –
When I'm on the internet, you might have noticed this.
Well, this is the reason that dictionaries, this is the reason I've started buying dictionaries.
In addition to the dictionaries I already own, which are several, I've started getting other dictionaries because I realized the main flaw of online dictionaries is that they're so concerned with profiting from the idea of a dictionary by throwing advertisements up all around the word you're trying to look up.
That they have misjudged what the best thing about a dictionary is, which is that you go to the dictionary to look up the word djinn, let's say, or, you know, like, let's say you go look up djinn, which is... A kind of djinnie?
It's a djinnie.
And then you're there and you say, oh, interesting, Jin, right?
And then you go, oh, Djibouti or whatever.
Like you see the next DJ word.
And you say, oh, that's interesting.
And then pretty soon you're reading the dictionary.
And I defy anyone to tell me a dictionary story that doesn't start and end with some amazing discovery they made by this sort of accidental proximity dictionary findings.
And new dictionaries, which are on the internet, you can look up any word at any time, but there's no lucky fun to them.
And it's the same... I mean, Wikipedia has the hyperlink, which is very much like we used to do with encyclopedias, where you would...
Yeah, like related articles or inline links.
And you're just – then pretty soon you're reading the encyclopedia.
And I mean I think that the time I spent reading the encyclopedia as a child absolutely trumped every school I ever went.
That's worth three academic years for me, like three good academic years.
That's worth like fourth to sixth grade.
Absolutely.
I mean, and those are precisely the years from fourth to sixth grade, probably third to sixth grade.
I learned more out of the encyclopedias than out and completely unguided, unstructured learning.
But just like you go to the encyclopedia to look something up and then you're just there for the rest of the afternoon.
And so hyperlink kind of allows for that, although you never really feel like you're getting all the way into a...
Hyperlink cabling protocol.
Okay.
It's funny you would say that.
HCP.
Okay.
HCP.
Got it.
Okay.
I would never have thought of that, and you're exactly right.
We just finally – it's a Webster's, I think, or a Merriam – the Red Dictionary that everybody had at one point.
It could have gotten a fancier one, but I wanted the dictionary that I had when I was in middle school.
Yeah.
You can hold it in one hand, that dictionary.
And I realized that it's important that we do that really annoying thing that your family always makes you do, which is you go look up a word.
And my daughter's not so much of a reader that she can go and do that on her own, but we do it together.
And you circle the word, and that becomes a thing.
But you're absolutely right.
If you do that on the internet, you don't get the Djibouti.
No, you don't.
And oftentimes the words on either side of the word you looked up are related to the word you looked up.
And so you're developing all this word context that is like crucial to understanding language.
It's crucial to understanding concepts that you look up a word and then you go, well, what is this?
This looks like a very similar word.
And you read about it and you're like, oh, it is a similar word and here's why, et cetera, et cetera.
So I feel like in a way the opposite is true with online stores.
Because when I go to the guitar store and I'm looking for something.
Or let's say I go to the giant brick and mortar Amazon store and I'm looking for a 100 foot hyperlink cable.
I go in there.
It's a store full of things.
I'm just looking for the cable.
Maybe they get me with a point of purchase Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
But for the most part, I know I'm going into a store.
It's going to be full of stuff.
I'm just here to get the one jobber.
Right.
But when I go on Amazon looking for a thing...
that's dangerous country for me when i go on amazon.com looking for a thing and they're they're they're genius about this like oh well you know if you had if you had one more thing you'd get free shipping you don't do amazon prime well this you don't do it enough to make that pay for it
Well, that's the thing.
If I did it, then I would be like, oh, I've got Amazon Prime.
This is why we don't have a car anymore.
Because I realized that if you buy a car, you're going to have to find ways to use it, and then you just end up spending more money.
I would rather not have a car and put it into some Uber and Muni passes and stuff like that.
But don't you think?
Isn't that kind of the thing?
Absolutely.
As my dad said when I took away his car, and he was like, I need it to do stuff right here.
Oh, I go to appointments.
And I was like, what appointments do you go to?
name an appointment.
And he was like, I gotta go to the car repair guy.
I said, and he's dead serious.
He has to go to the car repair.
But wasn't that also kind of a social thing for him?
Well... No, no, I'm not saying you're robbing him of his social intercourse, but hanging out and shooting the shit with the car guy, wasn't that kind of a thing he did?
Yeah, absolutely.
As the car guy slowly swindled him out of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, as the car guy was swindling him out of... And I think this is like...
I've told you before, right, that he decided that the only guy he would let work on his airplane lived in Alturas, California.
That sounds like a drinking-style decision that you would really pull back on after a week or so.
Well, I didn't occur to me that I would have to go to another state to get this plane worked on.
Yeah.
Like it's the type of thing where you're, you're, let's say you're flying a commercial airplane and you sit down next to a guy and the guy turns out to be an airplane mechanic and you own an airplane and you're like, I'm going to come see you in Alturas, California.
But my dad in one of his many, many cross country flights, you know what he used to do?
He would fly along and he'd see a little airport.
He'd see a little airstrip and he would just put her down and
Can you do that?
Yeah.
You just call ahead and you say, can I get clearance to land?
No, you don't call ahead.
You just put her down.
That's all you got to do.
These little uncontrolled airports.
You just line up and you go.
It's more like an unmaintained road than an airport, really.
It's a little bit of road and you land on the plane road.
That's right.
You turn the radio to, you know, if you pull out your map, you find the little airport, it'll have a little... It's channel 19.
Yeah, channel 19, right.
You go there and you say, hey, you know, attention, uncontrolled airspace.
I am this airplane.
I am coming in.
I am Cessna 634 Mike Alpha.
I am on final approach, you know.
And you look around and if there's nobody in the air and there's nobody on the...
You just put her down.
That's America.
That's America right there.
That's goddamn America.
Holy shit, that's cool.
I thought you had to have a flight plan and a big bag, and if you didn't show up somewhere by a certain time, it just shot you out of the air.
No, the thing is, the thing about a flight plan, I was explaining this to somebody the other day, you can change your flight plan over the radio.
You can just file a new flight plan.
It's like a topic sentence.
That's good to know.
You can just file a new flight plan.
So we would do this all the time, and sometimes, one time when I was about 10 years old, we landed on a...
On an airstrip that had been clearly carved out of the forest up in Yukon territories.
I was in Alaska, but it was up way north.
We landed on a little dirt airstrip out in the middle of nowhere.
Dad was just like, look at that.
Somebody carved an airstrip out of the forest.
And he turns around and lines it up and puts it down.
And we are...
We're, you know, taxiing down this little dirt runway and a guy comes out of the forest holding a shotgun.
And here come the revenuers.
And I was thrilled.
I was hoping, you know, I was expecting Dad to do what he always did, which is turn the engine off, open the door, climb out, and we were going to meet this very interesting man who was holding a gun standing at the edge of the woods.
And Dad did a thing he hardly ever did, which was he went, whoa!
Whoa!
he threw the throttle forward and spun the plane around in a like dukes of hazards sort of like dirt flying kicking up uh sticks and headed down the runway at a clip and i was like whoa whoa whoa what's going on and he was like he didn't say anything until we were at 2 000 feet and he was like nope that's not an air strip that
That man was explaining to us non-verbally that that was not a visit that he was interested in.
There are some unwritten rules in aviation.
One of them is if a guy is running onto the field with a shotgun.
Oh, he was calm as could be.
This guy just stepped out of the dark forest.
Yeah, that's creepy.
Yeah, with a gun and was just, you know, and a gun like cradled, not pointed.
Can I just say though, man, that is so freaking exciting.
Like I remember when I very first started, like around college age, being old enough to just drive around and go places and go, let's drive to this place we don't even know about.
And that was exciting.
But I can't imagine doing that in a plane.
I mean, that must be so exciting.
Just go, oh, there's an area where we could put the plane.
Let's go there.
Yeah, well, and in Alaska, of course, Dad put slightly bigger tires on the plane, and he landed on the side of a river.
Those guys up there, if there's a stretch of mud, like riverbank that seems solid, they'll just put the plane right down, and Dad would do it too.
Just put it right down.
Putting it down isn't the challenge.
The challenge, of course, is getting it back up off the riverbank.
Sure.
So you've got to have a good sense.
Because gravity, right?
Because gravity and because a lot of things, yeah.
So he would put himself down on these airstrips and he was flying along
In that corner of Northern California and Southeastern Oregon and Nevada, that corner that's just like, what?
How is this even?
I mean, it should much more properly just be an unbordered, ungoverned area because there's nothing there.
Why would you even pay a surveyor?
It could be like a penal colony or something.
Yeah, absolutely.
You could put a new state in there and call it Winnemucca, and no one would know or care.
Prisenton.
Prisenton.
But so he landed on this airstrip at some point, just like, hey, look at that.
There's an airport.
Yeah.
And taxied up to a hangar.
And I've been with him.
It wasn't there the first time he went to Alturas.
But I've been with him many, many times when he's done this.
And what happens is airport looks abandoned.
You're taxiing down the runway.
You kind of pull off to the side.
You're just puttering along.
There are a couple of old World War II era hangars.
Quonset huts.
All look completely abandoned.
You just put, put, put, put, put, put, put, you know, as you're, you're, you're slowly driving by these little, these little abandoned structures.
And then invariably a door bangs open in a building made out of corrugated metal.
And I'm old man comes out wiping.
Is he wearing a cap?
He comes out.
Sometimes he's literally wearing overalls.
He comes out, he's wiping his hands on a rag and,
And dad goes, hey!
Points the plane at the guy and, you know, cuts the motor and we wheel over and the guy comes over and he is absolutely invariably one of the most laconic men you'll ever meet.
Dad gets out, hey, how's it going?
The guy goes, yeah.
And that's it, you know.
And then dad's holding up both ends of the conversation and every once in a while the guy goes, merp, merp, merp.
And it turns out dad fought in World War II and this guy fought in World War II.
And you go try to find an encyclopedia.
And there's also, it always turned out that dad was an officer in the war.
Dad was an officer in the Navy and this guy was a petty officer in the Navy.
So there develops right away some ancient officer enlisted man dynamic between them.
that only they understand and only they are comfortable with.
And then, you know, so then I'm walking around some sun-blasted airstrip kicking rocks while Dad and this guy go into a hangar and sit and talk about God only knows what.
Dad buys a baseball hat from him that says Alturas Chevron.
In the heart of Princeton.
Yeah, Avgas and Pet Store.
Avgas and Feed.
And then we get back in the plane and we fly away.
Well, anyway, one of these times he meets this guy who he decides is his mechanic.
This is the only guy that he's going to let work on his plane.
And he lives in Alaska, which requires that once a year he go on a four-day walkabout each direction in his airplane.
And I've ended up spending more time in Alturas
So he really did it?
He went through with it?
Oh, he was... Based on this one random chance thing?
Yeah, he went down there for 15 years.
That would be like driving somewhere and stopping at a Stucky's and deciding that that was going to be your physician or something.
It's so strange.
Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre.
And Alturas is one of those old west towns that...
At least the last time I was there, still no one had discovered and turned into a mountain biking town.
It was still just like the type of place that you pay for your shot with a silver dollar.
And there are still problems between the ranchers and whatever the other demographic is.
It sounds like a musical waiting to happen.
The ranchers and the meth dealers are trying to decide who owns the dairy.
The ranchers and the meth dealers should be friends.
That's incredible.
But boy, your dad has a real sense of loyalty, huh?
He was a very loyal guy.
He was loyal to... And I think part of it was like his car mechanic...
This was a world that he didn't understand.
He did not know how to fix his own airplane engine.
And he didn't know how to fix his own car.
And so those things became magical realms.
And he figured out that he didn't need to know how to fix those things.
He just needed to find one guy that he trusted.
And then...
Once he decided that he trusted the guy, even if all empirical evidence indicated that this guy was not trustworthy and that he was ripping him off and that he was a jerk and a bastard, my dad would privilege their friendship from that point on.
I mean, his last car mechanic was billing him $400 a month for work he was doing on an $800 car.
It's a pass-through fee.
Yeah, exactly.
It was just like, oh, Dave, I think you need a new water filter.
It's like, hmm, a car doesn't have a water filter, Dad.
I think my family had a lot in common there.
There was always a go-to person, especially – now I think of my grandfather who was roughly – probably a little younger.
My grandfather was born in, I think, 1903.
And when was your dad –
Oh, 1921.
Your granddad was a lot older.
Well, this is when I was a kid.
But, you know, he was very much of that.
Like, you know, he was a Freemason.
He was a Shriner.
And everything was a secret deal.
Like, he made it look like he would do these, like, strange gestures sometimes to security people that I'm sure were entirely constructed to make me think that he was part of a cabal that didn't actually exist.
Like, every time we'd drive somewhere, he'd do this little kind of, like, this little, like, the sting thing with his finger on his nose, kind of brushed toward them.
Yeah.
he's like that's why we got in i can't tell you why but uh but no it's the same way and i think really everybody in my family was like that where you're like oh this is where we always get our tires and eventually i was like oh mom like these tires are really expensive and it takes them three or four days and they don't answer the phone so yeah well we've gone to them for years yeah isn't that is that a thing i think that might be an old people thing
Which increasingly will become a me thing.
I think it's a thing.
We have now in Seattle here, we have an auto mechanic.
I've talked to you about him before.
He is from Palestine.
And he is an Arab, but he's an evangelical Christian.
Right, and he gives you some notes occasionally, right?
And I think maybe he's a messianic Christian.
And...
And he is a very nice guy.
He drives a... What is the car?
The Dodge... Not Rampage.
Dodge made the super hot rod with the V10 motor.
It's a Dodge Cobra.
The big pickup truck?
No, it's a car.
It's like the Cobra Verde or what is it called?
The Dodge Insanity car.
It actually looks like a... Oh, it's the Viper.
It looks like a snake.
The Dodge Viper.
Have you seen one of these?
It looks like the head of a snake.
And...
I always thought that it was just a clown car, like a joke car, that the hot rod division... 8.4 liters?
Yeah.
It's $100,000?
Is that possible?
The hot rod division of Dodge was given free reign at some point by somebody, by Lee Iacocca, to build, like, the supercar.
And...
Rather than build an attractive-looking, good-handling sports car, they took a truck motor from a dump truck or an airplane motor and put it in the front of a car that only an 11-year-old could have designed.
it's got a real idiocracy feel to it you know it's just like okay that is you can't be serious right i mean that is a car that that is a car that only an 11 year old would buy or who drives an eight liter car well so this is the thing so i always thought these cars were were just jokes for for somebody for whom a corvette is too subtle
For somebody that feels like a PT Cruiser is too conservative.
John, it's like the car version of a Trap Street.
It's like something you would put on the menu just to see if some douchebag would buy it.
Right.
That's exactly right.
And they sell them.
They sell them.
And so I just assumed that it was...
It was the hot rod PT Cruiser.
I mean, the only type of people that would buy this are people that have no eyes.
And yet, the other day, I was looking up the fastest laps around the Nurnberg Ring, or the Nurnbergen-ringen-gergen.
Scheisse.
I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's the Nurnbergen-gingen-gergen-gergen-gingen.
It's not getting better.
The Nurnberg Ring.
Nurnberg Ring.
Thank you.
I assume that's a stretch of road.
It is.
So in Germany, they built this test track, the Nürburgring.
Stop saying that!
And in Europe, it's the thing where if you're testing out a car... Nürburgring!
That's hard to say.
Nürburgring.
If you're testing out a car, you go running around the Nürburgring.
And that's your standard of like, how fast do you make it around this thing?
And everybody in the sports car world wants to go around at least once around this Nurburgring.
Wow, turn seven is a little bit hairpin.
Turn seven's a little freaky, right?
Whoa.
It's actually less than a hairpin.
Less than a hairpin.
Yeah.
No, you know what I'm saying?
I mean, you go almost a circle to go around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Oh, and I think if you do those car racing video games where you can pick your track...
And you can do Monza and you can do... Turn number one, the Yokohama S here is really dangerous looking.
Well, and people blow up on this Nürburgring.
Like they crash and bad things happen.
Anyway, I was, as you do, looking up the fastest laps in history of the Nürburgring.
And it appears that the fastest lap ever of the Nürburgring is in a Dodge Viper.
Which I was just like, what are you talking about?
Faster than any Porsche or Ferrari or, like, is it a Dodge Viper?
That just seems crazy.
It seems like the classic, you know, the story of sports cars is that Americans throw horsepower...
Yeah, I mean, it's not a drag race.
You've got some crazy handling here.
Yeah, it has to really, really make it around this super spinny track.
And I don't know if you've ever done this, but... No, I'm... You know what?
I do know that you have never done this.
I haven't even heard it, and I know I haven't done it.
But I am going to tell you to do something today, and it is 10 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes of your life that you... That once you've experienced it,
you will never look at life the same way.
Are we going to need to get a zip car?
Uh, no, I think it's all going to happen on the internet.
Okay.
You are going to Google rough.
Are you F rough?
Yellow bird, uh,
Nürburgring.
R-U-F.
Rough.
Yellowbird.
Nürburgring.
Okay.
And it is a video of a guy driving a super hopped up Porsche 911 barefoot around the Nürburgring.
And it is phenomenal.
You put your headphones on, you get in full screen mode.
It's bad resolution because it's a VHS.
Somebody put a VHS camera in the back of this car.
But it is astonishing.
It's better than, it's really better than going on a roller coaster watching this guy drive this one car around this Nurburgring.
Your Palestinian mechanic has a Viper.
Okay, right.
So he has a Viper and he was discovered by my sister or by my mom.
Someone found him out in the sticks and he was recommended through somebody, through so-and-so.
And he has become this character in our lives, the trusted mechanic.
And I have called him a few times and said, I'm thinking about getting this car.
I'm thinking about getting car X. And he says, he's like, can I stop you right there?
And I go, yeah.
He says, would you like my advice?
I go, yeah.
He's like, don't ever get that car.
It's like, oh, you are the trusted mechanic now.
Like you are the guy that I'm putting.
I'm just putting it all in your hands.
Like if you tell me that I need a new water filter, if you tell me that I need, you know, whatever.
If I need new hoses, if I need...
If I need to buy a hundred pound bag of grass seed, whatever it is that you say, I am going to just go with it because you are the, you're the wizard and you live inside this world that.
Assuming obviously that he must have, he must have like the greatest car available, right?
Or that he's, he's seen so much about what can go wrong.
So what can go well and poorly about cars that he's obviously a sage of these things.
Well, yeah, but I personally feel like the fact that he drives a Viper...
It's very confusing to me.
It's like something out of Seinfeld, John, where you've been trusting somebody for years, talking about what kind of real estate to buy, and then you find out that he loses his shirt every couple months on some terrible deal.
But he swears by it, and as I've explained before, he's not a guy that you're going to enter into a conversation like that unless you're prepared to have an hour-long lecture about why the Dodge Viper is the greatest car ever made.
But independently, I've discovered this confirmation, this Nürburgring confirmation, at least that it's done that.
It did that.
Huh.
Sorry, there's so many letters to write down.
Nürburgring.
Rough.
Rough Yellowberg Nurburgring.
Rough Yellowberg Nurburgring.
Yellowberg.
Yellowberg Nurburgring.
It sounds like a stroke test this week.
Expertise, man.
That's complicated.
It's hard to know who to trust.
Trust your mechanic.
Yeah.
And, you know, for a long time, you were my computer guy.
Yeah.
I remember that.
I told you to buy that hyperlink cable.
Yeah.
If I had any computer problems, I would call you.
And then, you know, and then you would spin a web of lies.
You would spin a story.
Yeah.
And pretty soon I would be down at the Mac store buying Apple TV.
Are you just reading things off a card at this point?
Now, here's the question.
You're going to be in this house, God willing, for several years.
Have you thought about bringing somebody in to do some work and get you some Ethernet upstairs so you don't need the blue hyperlink cable?
Hmm.
I'm going to guess you haven't.
No, I have.
I have, but there are a few mistakes that I've made in life.
Get a fresh card.
When I bought this house, there was cable TV in every single room.
And when you went outside and you looked at the outside of the house, there was one of those cable junction boxes.
And it looked like Doc Ock.
Somebody loved TV there.
He had his normal two human hands, and then he had six octopus hands.
And then there were like ten other hands.
Somebody loved TV.
I think it was probably at one point it was used, this house was used as a place where a lot of people lived.
And so everybody had TV in their room.
And I said to the guy, so I said to the cable guy, is a junction box like this, does it divide the signal so that each box has one-sixth of the available bandwidth?
Or does everybody get equal power?
And he was like, the former.
Yep, I discovered that.
And so I said, well, I want the most powerful bandwidth.
So I want you to take all these other... Oh, I see what you're saying.
You want the one big pipe.
I want a big pipe.
I don't want a bunch of little pipes.
And so I want you to take all these other cables off and just give me one solid pow right into the room.
We had the Doc Ock Legacy Spiderweb.
that at one point.
In the Comcast, there was not enough signal, enough digital signal to keep our internet connection up.
Because there was so much stuff and so much transit and junctions and little joiner things and all of that.
And somebody came in and just tore all of the unnecessary stuff out and it fixed it.
Yeah, it was leaking ones and zeros all over the yard.
Are you kidding me?
I gotta get down there and sweep it out.
So I say to this guy, like, kill it.
And so what he does is he takes all the
cables off of the junction box and rewires it so it just it's a cable coming in and it goes right in the house right where the cable arrives which is like the middle of the living room well two problems one he didn't then spend the afternoon taking all the cabling down off the outside of the house so
It wasn't until he left that I realized, oh, wait, all that cabling is still, I mean, this house is basically held together by coaxial cable stapled to the outside.
And that – if I think about that, that drives me crazy.
That bothers me.
I want that cleaned up.
I want – it's somebody's responsibility to come clean that up.
It's so trashy, and in our case, our cable box is like hanging off the wall, and nobody wants to take any responsibility for it.
It's one of those like, oh, the tenants are going to have to be the ones who go to pay to fix this.
That's right.
The landlord is not going to come out and like fix a cable box, and you know Comcast ain't going to do it.
Well, yeah, and the Comcast guy –
If there was ever an opportunity to get him to make this change, it was that first time, that first visit he came out, I could have said, hey, I just bought this house.
This isn't my responsibility.
Get all this cable off of here.
But even then he would have said, nah, nah, man, nah.
But now it's grandfathered in.
As far as Comcast is concerned, I put up all that cable.
But anyway, so that was the first mistake was that I didn't think, you know what I'm not going to do?
I'm not going to have a computer terminal in the living room.
And so now I have either given myself a router behind a couch that I constantly have to move the couch out from the wall to reset the router.
Or I have, you know, or I have to run a blue cable
Over the hills and dells up to where I want the internet to be.
I think – I'm not an expert on these things, John, but I think you're not facing too much here.
I think – no, because all you got to do – the thing is somebody's just got to string that up through the wall, just the actual – you just got to get an ethernet drop upstairs and you'll be good.
Ethernet drop.
Sorry.
Ethernet drop.
Let's start over.
Some of my favorite old-fashioned candies, the Ethernet drops.
Old people love those.
They're also a great retro jazz band.
Love the Ethernet drops.
I like when you wake up early.
So, you're right.
Just recently, I have gone through the looking glass of feeling like when I bought my house, the market immediately crashed.
And I actually remember being at the YMCA with my dad.
And I was there with the whole group of elder statesmen who ended up in their declining years going to water aerobics.
You know, all these guys that once sat in the seat of power.
Guys that shook Henry Kissinger's hand.
And now they're doing water aerobics to Paula Abdul at the Tacoma YMCA.
And I had just bought my first house.
Someone very slowly moving in water.
She started out as a dancer.
She was a Lakers girl, right?
That's right.
Did you say licorice person?
No, that's a little ping pong.
No, she was a Lakers person.
Yeah, and she was on that television show with Waymond Marnes.
Oh, with that guy, with the guy from TV, yeah.
Waymond Marnes.
Anyway.
Living Color?
Yeah, she was on Living Color.
Oh, that's right, that's right.
Gould was one of the Fly Girls.
She was a Fly Girl, that's correct.
Fly Girl, a Fly Girl, a Fly Girl, a Fly Girl.
I'm sorry, you were supposed to join in there.
Oh, sorry, Fly Girl.
There you go.
So anyway, your dad was doing water aerobics.
Yeah, and one of the old men, I was there and I was like, I just bought my first house.
And one of these old sons of bitches says, oh, good job at the top of the market.
Ha ha ha!
Shut up, old man.
And I was like, oh, you've seen some ups and downs in your day.
Is that right?
Or is that what you're telling me?
You've seen the cycle.
You can peer through the cheesecloth that the rest of us are looking through, and you see the cycle of time.
Hakuna Matata.
Asshole.
But his words rang in my head as the market crashed and my house was not worth what I'd paid for.
And I sat here for several years going like, oh, this is this was this is the final straw.
I'm never participating in Wall Street again.
I have never, ever, ever.
I am not joining this dumbass American economy that is such a blatant lie.
that has time after time duped me and my family personally and all of us collectively into believing that it is anything other than a shell game.
That there's any order, that there's any kind of law, that there's any kind of sense to it that isn't just a bunch of made-up bullshit.
It's just a giant rip-off.
It really is.
It's just like two people at a roulette table
where they have a button under the counter, and they're like, come play this amazing game.
One big roulette button.
Yeah.
So for a long time, I loved my house, but I had this tension, this psychic tension about it, like that somehow I had been rooked, and that really the goal was to get up above water again and then get out of everything and go live on a sailboat, go live in a shipping container.
But now that the economy has recovered and I'm back in the black here, I realize, oh, I still like my house.
And now my mortgage payment is less than any rent would be in this crazy city.
Nice.
In these crazy times.
And so, yeah, now I'm looking at being here for a while.
And I'm feeling like maybe I should get some drops.
Maybe I should get some Ethernet drops.
Maybe I should rehab that wing of the house that I've been meaning to do.
Maybe I should build a yoga studio in the backyard.
This could be the time to put up those shelves, you know.
Put up some shelves.
Put up some shelves, like some built-ins.
Get some built-ins.
Maybe have the fireplace taken out and replaced with a Franklin stove.
That's cozy.
Maybe dig out the basement and build a media room.
What about tunnels?
Speaking of the Vietnamese, have you thought about having tunnels?
You can't say.
You can't say.
Never mind.
Never mind.
That's what I want.
If I ever achieved anything like success, my single thing in a house is I would want to have Batman cabinets.
I have some outbuildings.
Yeah.
And of course I would want a tunnel network.
Oh, sure.
Connecting all the outbuildings.
Well, something gets you out past the pool in case you have to get away.
Kind of like Professor X, you know, at the mansion.
You need a way to get out off of the property.
Right.
That's the thing.
I mean, no matter how good your defense is, you still need a way to get out of your own property.
Otherwise, you're just locked in.
It's just like living in prison.
Well, this is one of the things that infuriated me about the movie Skyfall.
Like Skyfall, James Bond goes out to his childhood mansion in northern Scotland.
The caretaker is still there.
Oh, right.
The little monk hole.
It's this beautiful.
What's that called?
What is it called?
Yeah, monk hole.
Oh, it was awesome.
God, that was such a boner moment for me.
I would love to have a monk hole.
goes behind the fireplace down into a secret passage and then somehow down in the basement it's like full of barrels of gunpowder and like it's not just a monk hole it's a true like monk we've been stocking up on plot devices for decades exactly it's like wow since the revolutionary war you guys have been you've been putting cannonballs down here what's what's in that deus ex machina box
Open it to find out.
But then in the film, multiple times, people follow this monk hole, which you see in the shots.
It still has brick or stone walls.
It is still a passage that a man can walk in upright.
And then somehow...
Somehow there's 200 yards that they travel under the grass, which we never see.
Do they have to get down on their hands and knees at some point?
Totally unmaintained, presumably unlit, unless it has spooky candles.
Yeah.
Do they run the entire way?
And then we see them reappear in the yard...
But we never see the opening.
We always see it from over the top.
I don't remember this being that flimsy.
I'm going to watch it and probably get angry.
That's very frustrating.
Because there's always some sort of chase scene element where it's like what you're really interested in is are they going to make it over to the chapel or whatever.
It seems like it should be almost like The Great Escape, where it should be a little bit perilous, super low.
Like, you know, the thing is, that's not going to be – who knows?
Maybe that was a very expensive undertaking at the time, but it's not going to be maintained.
It's going to be dangerous.
That should be a huge peril getting out of there.
That's right.
And –
is it just open to the world then it then the entire thing is going to be filled with bears you know like what what is there a door and there's no in the movie no one ever opens a door they just they run out this monk hole and then they appear in the garden don't you think it's probably like a hogan's hero door or maybe like a doghouse
Well, I would like to see that.
It's not on the screen.
I would like to see that technology revealed because I am interested in building a monk hole passageway to the Fen just in case I ever have to escape from a very poorly explained Barcelona bad guy who was living on an island in China with computers taking over the world, but really he wants revenge.
That's a good movie.
It's not a good movie.
It's a terrible movie.
It's a really good movie.
I hadn't thought about the bears.
It's awful, that movie.
I agree.
Really good.
And so the problem of that monk hole is 200 yards of it plus a door go unexplained.
John, I can't get away from the upkeep issues.
If you think about how wet it's got to be there, it's Scotland, right?
It's a very wet place.
It's loamy.
It's moaty.
Yeah.
It's Scottish.
So this thing didn't cave in.
And even if you assume that the caretaker guy is also maintaining the monk hole.
I would not count on that.
I wouldn't count on it either.
But let's say he's down there stockpiling muskets and sabers and cannonballs.
I think there's much more likely to be recently disappeared children down there.
Right.
Something terrible.
Who's stashing what in the monk hole?
Stuff in the monk hole.
But then this whole business of like, and then you just pop up in the garden.
You pop up in the garden like the groundhog in Caddyshack.
No thank you.
That thing would be full of bears.