Ep. 194: "Permanent Geranium Lake"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, yeah.
Pretty good.
Yeah.
Pretty good.
Crazy stuff.
Oh, yeah?
Oh, God.
Really?
Oh, God.
It's all such a struggle, John.
Yeah?
Did you have a crazy morning?
Oh, get the kids out the door and...
Tumble out of bed, stumble in the kitchen, wonder whatever happened in my life.
Yeah.
Did you go downstairs and drink a cup or did you wonder?
Yawn and stretch.
Yeah.
Try to come to life.
Did you drink a cup of ambition, though?
That's the question.
Yeah, it just kind of just keeps going like this, doesn't it?
Yawn and stretch.
Mm-hmm.
Donk, donk, donk, donk, donk.
The Sheena Easton song that we know of as Morning Train, which sounds a little dirty, was originally... Oh, interesting.
I had never thought about that interpretation, but yeah.
Morning Train.
It was originally called 9 to 5.
But they had to change it for the U.S.
release, which also sounds dirty, because Dolly Parton already had a hit with 9 to 5.
Right.
If you think about it, almost everything sounds dirty.
Yeah, U.S.
release.
I feel like I'm going to start using both U.S.
release and Morning Train.
Just incorporate them into my pillow talk.
Isn't that funny?
This is how the brain works.
Hey, baby, I'm going to have to change this for the U.S.
release.
Hoping to have a simultaneous worldwide release.
Oh, my goodness.
Boy.
Cup of Ambition.
Got blue here.
Got a little bit blue.
Yeah.
You got a little blue last week.
That was fun.
Did I get blue?
Did I talk about blue things?
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
I don't know if I have the energy to get into it.
But your interest in smelling the man's parfum, and then you followed him around a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, the parfum.
That's right.
That's right.
I did.
I did.
I talked about some sex things.
Yeah.
Sex feelings, really.
I read...
I read an article on the internet this morning about an artisanal dildo company.
Well, of course.
They make bespoke modern dildi.
Sure, you don't want to just be using an old model.
Well, either an old model of it.
The thing is, here's what you don't want.
You do want an old dildo, like one from the past.
Oh, some old world craftsmanship?
Yeah, that kind of burled wood...
dildo of the 19th century.
What you don't want is one of these sort of, you know, mid-period dildos from the 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe early 60s.
You mean like a Japanese electronic dildo you'd buy like at a Woolworth?
Yeah, you don't want that.
One of those inexpensive, I don't mean to be ping pong, but you don't want some kind of mid-market like LeBaron of dildos.
I think for a long time, most dildos were made out of the same material that Super Balls were made out of.
How interesting.
Right?
I think if you dropped one on the ground, the first time it would bounce like six feet high.
Yeah, like higher than you'd expect.
Yeah, and it was that kind of marbled plastic, red, white, and blue sort of marbled plastic, and that's not what you want.
Now, not a normal contemporary guy wearing suspenders with a long beard and the sides of his head shaved is not going to use a Super Bowl dildo when he could use one that's made out of brass and steam gauges.
Yeah.
Like a Jules Verne device.
Exactly.
You want one that's going to have probably some dials.
Maybe it makes a ping sound.
Yeah, when you start it up, it goes... We are living here in Allentown.
Oh, it takes a while to get started.
Yeah, right.
And the little flywheels start spinning.
Yeah, you know, I think if I were going to have a steampunk dildo, I think I would be looking for something that was like an improbably large machine.
Yeah, right.
Like the size of like a box fan, maybe bigger.
It drives a device that's actually kind of tiny.
Yeah, that uses a very heavily lacquered boat oar.
In some capacity.
It's got flywheels.
It's got gauges.
It makes a poof, poof, poof sound.
Right.
It should sound a little bit like an old-timey generator or something.
Yeah, and it's brass tubing.
Oh, of course.
You've got to have brass.
And you've got some studs on it.
Aren't there a lot of studs on things?
Yeah, but now it's starting to sound a little bit medieval.
Yeah.
It's starting to sound like something that Torquemada would use.
We just use the arm of a dead peasant.
The arm of a dead baby.
There's so many of them.
But that's the way economics works, right?
There's a need, and then there's something that changes in the marketplace.
Maybe something involving Copernicus, but you got a baby's arm, and you might want to do some business with that.
Well, and this is the thing.
Once you start talking about business, you start talking about the history of entrepreneurship.
You start talking about the history of entrepreneurship.
You're talking about the history of humanity.
This is the desire to better ourselves.
The history of humanity is the history of entrepreneurs pushing the envelope through entrepreneurial entrepreneurship.
Sometimes they push the envelope out of the box, don't they?
Ooh, I don't know.
I mean, I don't want to open the kimono too far.
Do a deep dive on this one.
But entrepreneurs, even right now as we speak, are terraforming.
the mental landscape.
Are you with me?
I thought that was a made-up word.
I thought you made up that word, but then I learned that that's a real word.
Terraforming?
Yeah, it's super interesting because you talked about the Gaia bomb, the Genesis device, these things I assume are Star Trek things, but I went and read about it.
It's an interesting, it's been around in sci-fi for some time now.
Oh, yeah, terraforming.
Come on.
What are you going to call it when you arrive in a distant sun-baked planet?
Right.
Or baked by multiple suns?
And the basic idea is, or has been in the past, it's mostly about in science fiction, speculative fiction, it's the idea of taking an existing planet or area that's currently not...
uh, naturally inhabitable by humans and doing something that basically hits reset and causes it to be something that would be inhabitable by humans.
Yes, exactly.
Now, did you just say speculative fiction?
Yes.
Because, because we've determined that science fiction is hurtful or because somebody within, somebody within the science slash speculative fiction realm has, has indicated that one is, is not equivalent to the other.
Yeah.
Well, now that you've opened that kimono, I have a feeling you're going to find out.
I see.
So someone is going to write me, you're saying, someone's going to write me an email or a tweet explaining the difference, pedantically explaining the difference.
No, nobody would ever do that.
I can't believe you respond to people about bits.
Well, we went through that whole thing where it's like...
I know the answer.
I know the answer.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
We talked about this a couple, three weeks ago, that distinction between science fiction and fantasy.
And I'm an outsider on these things mostly.
I like mainstream stuff.
I've read some stuff, but I don't know lots of stuff about either science fiction or fantasy.
But I guess speculative fiction, when did I first hear that?
I feel like I maybe first heard that, in my head, I associated with Kurt Vonnegut.
Well, you know, if it was just called speculum fiction, then it would be Harlan Ellison.
Is that right?
You don't think that's a German thing?
I think you're absolutely right.
Ellison's not a German name.
Anyway, no, go on.
I didn't mean to interrupt.
Well, no, I mean, in my head, like, I guess, see, I don't know, and please don't explain it to me, people.
I really don't care.
But I know it matters to you to tell me, but please don't.
No, but you think of science fiction, and to me, science fiction is the idea of, you know, it's fiction.
It's a story that involves science-y things.
With you so far?
Well, the thing is, speculative fiction, to me, I think of that more of like, this doesn't really rely on some kind of, it's almost more like an alternative, alternate, excuse me.
Oh, I see.
I think what we want to say is alternative.
People say alternate, but I think alternate means every other thing.
Oh.
It's one of those words like penultimate or epicenter that almost everybody uses wrong.
Oh, I see.
Or like deep dive or open the kimono.
I think when you say alternate, you say we're going to meet on alternate weeks.
Right.
And you would say... Or you would say somebody was someone else's alternate.
Right, which is like a second.
Right.
In a duel.
Right.
I think alternative means a difference.
Now, I know one both of us have used, and we'll get back to speculative fiction in a minute.
One of us...
One that both of us have used wrong even recently is uninterested versus disinterested.
And I think that is a difference that we need to bring back.
I agree.
If it doesn't appeal to you or holds no interest for you, you are uninterested in that.
If you're somebody who doesn't have a stake in it,
as i like to say you don't have a dog in the fight you're a disinterested party you know we always say don't have a dog in that race but i think it's because because the iditarod well yeah up here we race dogs i don't know what you guys do you fight dogs i guess down there in florida in florida there was lots of dog racing there was some very unusual uh betting in florida i was about to use the word paramutual except i don't really know what that means
Yeah, and at first I thought you said bedding instead of betting.
Oh, like dog bedding.
This is turning into kind of a Borges podcast at this point.
Last night I was watching, I actually happened to be watching some videos of Borzois hunting.
That's different from a Borges.
It's different from a Borges.
Or a Borgie.
Or a Borgie, which is when people who run an Italian city-state have intercourse in groups.
Right, sure.
John Hodgman would think that joke is funny.
Yeah, I think he's already laughing.
Now, Victor Borgia is the guy who had a puppet on his hand.
You know, I would say that I've been to some Borgies.
You know what I'm saying?
I sat against the wall.
Anyway, I was watching.
Afterwards, you got to go see the de medicis.
I got nothing.
The de medicis.
They make artisanal pasta, don't they?
The de medicis?
Yeah, I think so.
It cooks to perfection in 10 to 12 minutes.
But I'm watching these videos of borzois hunting.
Borzoi is a Russian hunting dog?
My understanding is that the Borzoi was the exclusive dog of the Russian royal family.
So much so that
After the Russian Revolution, all the Borzois in Russia were killed because they symbolized the royal family.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my goodness.
That's complicated.
Yeah, and the only Borzois that survived were Borzois that had been given as gifts by the Russian royal family to royal families throughout Europe.
Wow.
As a token of their royal esteem.
So there were Borzois in England and...
Presumably Germany.
But you can only find an expat Borzoi.
Yeah.
And then those Borzois were bred to survive the line.
And now there are Borzois back in Russia.
Because, you know, of course, there's a... We got oligarchs.
Oligarchs probably want a Borzoi.
Yeah.
There's a resurgence of Russian nationalism.
And the Borzoi maybe has... The symbolism of it has changed.
Or maybe it's just that they want to return to the Tsars.
Yeah.
I see.
It's their version of small batch whiskey.
It is nice, but it also signifies things.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like the contemporary fashion to wear powdered wigs that we have here.
For a long time, people just stopped wearing powdered wigs.
You'd see a powder wig and laugh.
And now today, it's not unusual at all.
You go to a coffee shop, you see four or five people in powdered wigs.
Sure.
I mean, the popularity of the musical Hamilton has brought back this whole powdered wig scene.
And for a lot of the middle period of American history, we were not impressed by the founding fathers.
We wanted nothing to do with them.
We consider ourselves contemporary, modern people.
We want to make a break from that culture.
The last thing we want to do is wear the wigs of our fathers.
Yeah, we were wearing helmets.
We were wearing helmets and goggles.
Caps.
Caps.
Some caps.
Maybe get a transistor radio.
You could have a Tam-A-Shanter.
A Tam-A-Shanter, right?
A deer stalker with a transistor radio.
But anyway, these videos of Borzoi's hunting.
The Borzoi is a very fast dog.
Faster than a rabbit.
What was Gibson?
He was a, well...
Have we talked about this?
The passing of Gibson?
Well, no, not the passing of Gibson.
But when Gibson arrived, Gibson looked like a small borzoi.
But what Gibson was was a borzoi crossed with a whippet.
And a whippet looks like a tiny borzoi.
Isn't a whippet kind of like a tiny greyhound?
Well, yeah, but, you know, greyhounds and, I mean, they're all long-nosed running dogs.
Okay.
And so what they did was they tried to get the long hair of a borzoi with the size of a whippet.
Oh.
And what they achieved in Gibson was he was a little bit too big to be in the family of this new breed they were trying to create.
Yeah.
And so he had kind of gotten bounced out of the breeding stock because, you know, they have to cull the big ones and cull the hairless ones and cull the... This is how it works.
This is the process.
That's right.
Cull the ones that understand English.
Cull the ones that, you know, that can tap their hooves to do math.
So Gibson arrived on the scene and I said, hello, new dog.
You are a small Borzoi.
And my mom said, no, the new breed...
is called the Silk... I can barely even say it.
Okay.
The Silken Windhound.
Silken Windhound.
That sounds expensive.
Because when the Borzoi has really long fur, it takes on this kind of... It looks like wings almost.
I mean, it takes on this very silky, cascading...
Lion's mane.
And so Silken Windhound was the name of the breed that they were working toward.
And it was somewhere in the middle period of a breed where it maybe hadn't been accepted all the way by the American Kennel Club.
But they were trying to produce a line that would make this a real breed rather than just a crossbreed.
But the problem was when I'm out in the world walking this dog and people come up and say, what kind of dog is that?
I'm forced to make a choice.
Either I say out loud, silken windhound.
Now you gotta explain.
Now you gotta explain.
Or you say, that's a half borzoi, half whippet.
Or you say, that's a small borzoi.
You could probably get away with... We talked about this before with career, discussing your career.
You could probably get away with something like, he's mostly Borzoi.
Oh, that's a good one.
That never occurred to me.
Mostly Borzoi.
But the thing is, the problem with that is it sounds like your Borzoi got out...
And, you know, and had an affair with a mongrel.
And I wanted to indicate that this was attempting at least to be a purebred dog.
Oh, yeah.
So essentially he's supposed to look like this.
This is what it's meant to be.
It's a little big.
It's very small compared to a Borzoi, but it's still...
you know, three feet tall.
I mean, the bourgeois are huge.
Right, right, right.
Anyway, as I was watching these videos, I found a video which originally was a film
of three borzois killing a wolf in 1910.
Wow.
In the snow.
Oh, they have a strategy, right?
Don't they have an inbred strategy, a bred-in strategy?
Yeah, one of them grabs one front leg, one of them grabs one back leg, they flip him over, and the third one goes for the neck.
Wow.
And this is how they hunt.
And they don't have to have a meeting or anything.
No, I think they just know what they're doing.
And you're watching this thing and, you know, it's a wolf, so it's not going down easily.
And it was much – I always imagined that it was like whip, whip, wa-pop, and then the bite on the neck and then it's over.
Right?
Like a very surgical process.
Like a cat on the savanna.
Like it would be some kind of like, boop, boop, you're done.
Boop, boop, you're done.
Is it uglier than that?
Well, it was intense because, you know, the Borsors are big, but the wolf outweighs them.
And so the one grabs the front, the one grabs the back, but as they're flipping the wolf, the wolf is also...
spinning and contorting trying to get away and so it's really like three dogs on a wolf and they are trying to enact their plan and and the wolf is against it and it's it's really a free-for-all um and what was crazy about this is i watched this video for about
I don't know, five minutes before I realized that it was actually a loop of a fight that in the loop is probably only 15 seconds long.
It's like an early 20th century dog vine.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a dog vine, except it doesn't have that weird jittery thing that vines do where it's meant to loop, but that sort of starts over every time.
It's also probably not trying way too hard to be funny.
Yeah, and also there's no entrepreneurial aspect to it where somebody... I wasn't going to say anything.
Somebody up the chain at Vine is hoping to do an IPO and make $40 million and get out.
This is when you'd make a wolf loop just out of love for the medium.
It's a passion project.
A lot of entrepreneurs, you watch any TV show that involves entrepreneurs, that's a frequent criticism.
First of all, they'll say, this is not a company, this is a product, and it's barely even a product.
Yeah, and where's your passion?
Where's your passion?
You want to have something that can scale.
You want a 10x growth for your wolf vine.
That's right.
I'm not going to invest my $1 in this unless I can see it scale.
But you can see what it ultimately was was somebody out in a snowy field hand-cranking a film camera
And the entire reel of film was probably just 15 seconds worth of film.
And so they caught this like incredible moment of these three dogs attacking a wolf.
And, you know, I've owned these dogs with my mom my whole life.
And I'd never seen one.
Oh, I didn't realize this is, I thought Gibson was a one-off, but he's part of a long line of large dogs you've had.
So when I was born, my mom was breeding Borzois.
Wow.
And again, the Borzois are as tall, if you take a guitar case and lean it against a wall, that's how tall a Borzoi is.
I mean, they're huge.
They're huge.
Maybe they're not that tall, but they're very tall.
And we had them all over the house when I was little.
And then sadly, at one point when I was still crawling, I was at my mom's feet.
She was in the kitchen.
It was the 60s.
And so two things were true.
One, the kitchen floor was shag carpet.
That's such an interesting design decision.
Which no one has done before or since, right?
I think that shag carpet in the kitchen was precisely from November of 1967 to June of 1969.
And you would never have done it before that or since.
Nixon doesn't get the credit he deserves.
You know what?
That's exactly true.
He was creating a world in which it was safe to have shag carpet in your kitchen.
And I'm sure the shag— But then he could also—only Nixon could decide to remove shag carpeting from your kitchen.
Only Nixon.
The thing is, a Democratic president couldn't have removed shag carpet from the kitchen, right?
It took a Republican to send Kissinger to take the carpet out.
Also the EPA.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Sure.
It was a catalytic converter issue.
Is there a bite coming in this story?
Because I'm getting nervous.
I have to imagine that the carpet was either avocado, burnt umber.
Oh, harvest?
Maybe harvest.
I think harvest was wasn't harvest the other popular avocado was everything we own was always avocado.
Harvest was that sickening throw up colored yellow, I think.
Right.
Harvest.
Sure.
Harvest sunshine or desert.
I'll find out.
Desert bloom.
And then there was always that brown color that was just sort of what would you call it?
chocolate donut?
Oh yeah, I had a pick group that was that color.
Anyway, I'm sitting at my mom's feet and her prized Borzoid, the mother who had produced the 25 puppies that had
Well, she was doing her part to keep this breed alive.
And she said when she got to Washington, there were no Borzois anywhere.
And she produced 25 puppies that ended up being the dogs that created the West Coast Borzoi population.
That's how it works.
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
That's very entrepreneurial of her.
It was.
Did she know that the trail that she was blazing when she made those dogs have intercourse?
Was she aware of that?
She was.
And I think for most of the 70s, she followed the line and saw the family tree of all these dogs that then, you know, I don't think you can find a Borzoi in the Northwest that didn't at one point.
end up in this shag carpet kitchen at our house.
But so I'm sitting there and then all of a sudden I start crying.
She looks down and Manushka, the old lady,
who had been my friend and companion, had bitten me 17 times in the face.
What?
Are you kidding me?
Pierced my eyelid.
Oh, my God, John, this is awful.
Almost took my nose off, and it happened in a flash.
Like, she bit me 17 times, like, just pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.
And they had, you know, they found, like, 17 individual bite marks.
All on my face.
And my mom was like, you know, little bits of your face were hanging off.
It was unclear whether you would be scarred for life.
Oh my God, John, that's so gruesome.
You must have been so scared.
Well, I was just a child.
I don't remember it.
It seemed...
I'm sure it left a lasting impact on me.
It's why I don't trust women.
Yeah.
And it's why I did bad in school.
It probably explains a lot.
Explains a lot, right?
There's almost nothing that that couldn't explain.
Every time you've tried to bite me, what have I done?
Yeah.
You get pretty upset.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So my mom, of course, had to, and Manushka was her, before I was born, Manushka was her child.
Yeah.
And so... Oh, she's got a Sophie's Choice situation now.
Well, she had to put Manushka down.
I think she did the right thing.
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, you turned out all right.
But then she became an evangelist of this whole thing that obviously you and I agree on also, which is that really, no dog is safe around a baby.
Don't ever make the mistake of putting your child...
next to a rottweiler no matter how much you feel like the rottweiler is a nice dog no matter no matter how strong the stats are i mean even if you take a take a 99.99 dog that doesn't kill a kid it only takes really that little bit that's right that's right you don't get extra credit for being mostly nice
Yeah, the dog is amazing.
He's always been a great friend.
Never done anything like this before.
And he only killed your kid once.
He's been around it for years, and it only happened that one time.
It only happened the one time where he ripped my kid's throat out.
So we did not have Borzois for many years because that was traumatic for us both.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever been a mother, but when you see your kid's face after it's been bitten 17 times by your prized dog...
I think you do say, perhaps I will wait.
That's a complicated feeling.
And also just being a parent, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, obviously you'd hate to see your kid suffering, but also just that feeling of like, oh, I'm a terrible person.
Right, how did this happen?
What have I done?
How did I let this happen?
And I thought, she thought like,
We were both right there.
I was touching her pants, you know, like how much safer could she be?
And Minushka was trained to the degree that, you know, my mom could make a hand signal from half a mile away and the dog would go left or right.
Like she was voice trained and signal trained like perfectly.
Anyway, so we didn't have Borzois for a long time.
And then we tried to reintroduce,
borzois into our lives but like a lot of highly bred dogs borzois have a couple of problems one the inevitable sort of haunches problem that all big dogs have you may take a drink some people listening just to hear you say haunches haunches
It has a haunches problem.
Yeah, it has a haunches problem.
Haunches problem.
He's one of my favorite comedians, Ron Hunches.
Like the great historical figure, Hunches Pilot.
That's right.
But one of their other problems is that they tend to be or some of them are very skittish.
That was my—see, now this, again, this is that kind of old thinking that you and I worry about, trying to be a contemporary person.
But I feel like in my headcanon, in Florida, you get a lot of adopted greyhounds because they just throw them out after a while.
You know, the greyhounds have not historically been treated well.
They get to a certain point.
And then you adopt a greyhound.
And then all the greyhounds I've been around, including friends of mine who'd adopted them, you know, as you know, we were just down the street from a dog track.
Right.
And you could adopt greyhounds.
And I just remember them being, like, skittish.
Woo!
Woo!
Skittish.
Very, very, very kind of unhappy, very preternaturally nervous animals.
Nervous.
I mean, they've been chasing an electric rabbit their whole lives and presumably being kept in the surplus cages that they use for veals.
Or worse than veals.
They maybe got them from Tyson's Chicken in their chicken cages.
And so these dogs are not well.
Greyhound quality of life, probably not high on the list.
Not high, right.
And I think before people adopted them, they just became dog food at the end.
Oh, gosh.
Right into the Soylent Green machine, which is why there's so much encephalitis in dogs.
Is that right?
Well, yeah.
Mad dog disease?
You've heard of this.
Actually, that explains a lot, too.
Yeah.
They're dogs, they're animals, you know?
Yeah, they're animals, right?
So why are we even talking about them?
Yeah, I don't know.
But borzois come out sometimes, even if you've treated them well, even if you've fed them food that you made out of raw materials, even if you feed them out of your hand, like you're trying to entice a doe out of the forest.
The first borzoi we got after the interregnum
was this borzoi that even though it was four feet tall of the shoulder, if you closed a book too hard, this dog would leap six feet in the air and try and hide under the couch.
Oh, can you imagine?
That's so awful.
Yeah, terrible.
You've heard of a dog called a Belgian Tavern?
Isn't a Belgian Tavern like something you keep gravy in?
It's, yeah, I mean, we would call it a gravy boat, not knowing that there is actually a term of art for it.
Sure, Belgian Traverne.
Could you hand me the Belgian Traverne?
Not the boat, the Traverne.
No, the Traverne.
Traverne.
Oh, the Traverne.
I live with a fella, I was really, really poor after college, like everybody.
And so we shared this...
what would you call it?
I mean, it, it was barely even, it was less, it was less than an in-law.
It was basically a room in a bathroom and it was, it was really, really, really small.
And we slept across two futons in a room and a bathroom.
And so we would sleep in there and my friend, so it was the three of us, two tall guys, me and one guy's Belgian to Vern.
What?
Yeah.
So so, yeah, yeah.
Basically in like probably like 150 square feet.
Oh, my God.
And it was very narrow.
It was it was, you know, an in law ish thing.
It was somebody had taken a room that shouldn't really be a place where people live and made it into a room.
And we paid, I think, two hundred dollars a month for the three of us to live there.
Mm hmm.
The three of you plus the dog.
Plus the dog.
I forget the dog's name.
But it was so narrow.
It basically was like a little hallway with a place you could sleep.
And this poor dog, it's so awful.
It had been like basically its entire life for years had been being in a cage and beaten.
That's it.
Beaten, cage, cage, beaten.
Like that was this dog's life.
And it was a hopelessly wrecked, emotionally just scotched dog.
It was terrible, this poor dog.
But like anything that happened in the house, anything that happened, this poor dog...
It wanted to run away, but the hallway was too narrow for it to turn around, so it would run backwards through the house.
I don't know.
You don't usually see a dog moving backwards unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
You see a dog go backwards for a second.
It'll take a step or two.
But to watch a giant, giant shepherd dog run backwards through a house is such a chilling image.
Because they're looking over their shoulder, right?
They're kind of looking over this way.
They're looking over that way, backing up.
He did it enough, but I think he got a pretty good feel for the hallway.
Yeah.
But it was, I'm not, I'm not, I'm only, I'm laughing because I haven't thought about this in years, but like the image of that poor dog running backwards down the hallway was just, it was so awful.
Yeah.
I feel for those dogs.
That's a terrible thing.
And so, but so after the interregnum.
Yeah.
You got back into the Borzoi business.
We got into the Borzoi business.
We had this dog that, you know, that leapt up on the top of furniture like a mountain goat whenever you stirred your tea with a spoon.
Oh, yeah.
And it was determined that this dog was too nervous to live in the city, right?
It was not enjoyable to own this dog because the dog had no...
affection for humans of any kind and i mean what could you do with the dog i i had a very interesting experience with it i was walking the dog one day and was kind of walking in the forest and i came because we always voice train our dogs so that we try to walk them without leashes so that the you know it just knows to stay at your knee and we're walking through the forest where it's going to be you know
It's easy to kind of keep the situation under control.
We're all alone out here in the forest and we pop out of the woods and we're on a busy street and we were in the process of training this dog and it was not fully trained and we got to the street and it jumped into the street and it was a four-lane road and there was a bus and
hurtling down the road, and this dog just jumped right in front of the bus.
Oh, no.
It jumped into the road, and the bus was going 60 miles an hour, and it was seven feet from the dog.
And I went, ah!
And I could see the bus driver, who was also like, ah!
And in the time...
Between the bus driver seeing the dog, but before he could slam his foot on the brake, the dog saw the bus and accelerated from zero to 60 miles an hour in less than a second.
And the thing is, it didn't keep moving perpendicular to the bus.
It turned and went in the direction the bus was traveling.
and accelerated away from the bus that was going 45 miles an hour.
Like just took off and accelerated away.
I'd never seen anything like it in my life.
It was the most stupendous feat of animal athleticism.
And it was when I finally understood what these dogs could do.
Of course, it took me an hour and a half to find the dog.
But anyway, so that dog we did not, I think, sent back to the breeder perhaps to live the rest of his life on a farm.
Not sure.
Then we got a second dog, just a baby, baby puppy.
this dog was a lover a wonderful wonderful dog who had some as it grew up some awful hip dysplasia where it was never able to walk like it sort of you know its back legs were like an injured rabbit it was like he'd been hit by a car but he just grew up that way and we nursed this dog for a long time and it just it wanted to please it was the happiest most wonderful dog
But as you know about my mom, she's fairly unsentimental.
And that dog went back to the breeder, perhaps to live on a farm.
And then there was a long period where there were no boarzois again, because we had at least figured out that the Alaska line was too, the Alaska line represented too much inbreeding.
Perhaps from the puppies that my mom had seeded.
Oh, this is like a Faulkner story.
This is complicated.
Back in the 60s.
Oh, gosh.
Hoisted by our own petard.
That's right.
Where were the borzois of Alaska coming from, if not Seattle?
And then we went a long time, and then we got into the silken windhound era.
And Gibson was the first, and then Barley, Barley came along, and Barley was the silken, Barley was a beautiful silken windhound, let's be honest.
And we had Barley for several years, Barley and Gibson, several years, they lived together in harmony.
But Barley had chronic diarrhea.
Oh, dear.
That sounds like that will not stand with your mom, I'm guessing.
And I know that a lot of people try and listen to this program when they're eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
And it's only a matter of time before we say something that will turn you off your food.
Chronic means it happens a lot and it's hard to stop.
That's right.
It's not just a little puddle.
It's like, oh, look what barley made.
Oh, look, here it is.
It's more like you just live in a constant state of like, well, when's the next time I'll have to clean this up?
Yeah, and it made the backyard fairly uninhabitable.
Oh, but it was taking place mostly outside.
Yeah, for the most part, but it was...
I think it was self-perpetuating, right?
Whatever is causing the diarrhea, if you're pooping in the yard and then, as Barley would do, just lounging on top of these poop eyes.
Yeah, it's in the biome now.
It's everywhere.
It's why you've got to wash your hands.
That's exactly right.
But dogs don't generally wash their hands.
So he never got better over the course of four or five years.
And as you know, as regular listeners of this program will know, my mom is fairly unsentimental.
And Barley was a lovely guy and dare I say it, a member of our family.
And then one day Barley was gone.
and we were like what my mom said well i just you know dog was never well whoa and so uh it went back to the breeder she's she's uh she's a tough lady she's a tough lady back to the breeder now there's a lot of words we've used here live on a farm back to the breeder uh are are these euphemisms
Live on a farm is a euphemism.
I learned that's a euphemism, yeah.
Back to the breeder is not.
My mom will, even after four or five years of owning a purebred dog, will take it back to the breeder.
Is that just something where you keep the receipt or how does that work?
No, the breeders all know who the dogs were.
Oh, and she's probably kind of famous.
Like, you'd want to take her whippet hound, what's it called?
Yeah, whippet hound.
No, wind hound.
The silken wind hound.
Silken wind hound.
Yeah.
And my mom was just like, basically...
She would go back to the breeder and say, you have sold me a defective dog.
Right.
And I have no way of knowing what their negotiation is like or what the breeder's response is.
But, you know, a lot of these breeders are running puppy mills or 10 acres.
The good ones are probably like Nordstrom where they'll take stuff back even if it wasn't theirs.
You see, listen, we're not selling curves here.
This is going to be this is a good ass dog.
And the dog has dog has papers.
And it's the papers, I think, that keep the dog from going to live on a farm.
The papers are like a dog receipt, but also it's sort of like a baby book.
Yeah, and I think the breeder wants to know, wants to maintain her knowledge of the line.
Oh, the bloodline.
That's right.
So she wants to keep track of all the dogs.
And if...
If the dog is defective, she will... That's good to know.
That'll change the way you make them have intercourse, right?
Exactly.
I think.
I don't know.
Barley was not defective except for this pooping.
And also, Barley was a smaller dog than Gibson.
But he believed he was a bigger dog.
He was always dominating Gibson.
And socially in my mom's house, of course, as you know, there's only one top dog.
She gets up early.
And Barley always, when he was on a walk, he always inched his nose one centimeter in front of my mom's knee.
Bad idea.
Bad idea.
Bad idea.
It's a bad idea.
But Barley was irrepressible.
And could never... It's not that he didn't understand.
Oh, he understood.
He understood.
He just wasn't going to get with the program.
And so... I can't believe she's kept you as long as she did.
Well, that's the thing.
But, you know, I try and get with the program.
Straighten up and fly right.
My nose doesn't go in front of her knee.
No way.
I don't want her to zap me on the back of the neck and go, ah!
Ah!
It's interesting, though, that... Gosh, your mom is so interesting.
There's something to this dog thing, though, because she kept at it.
See, a lot of people, I mean, a lot of people, like normal people, they get a dog, and they are inexperienced with dogs.
It could be any kind of pet.
It could be an AI.
Maybe it's a big screen TV.
But you get something in your life.
You don't really understand what's happening with it.
Something goes bad enough, and it's not even a question.
You are now out of that business, right?
So, for example, like a lot of people, you know, you get a dog.
The dog bites somebody.
Not only is that dog going to live on a farm.
But you're done with dogs.
We're done with dogs.
We are never having that again.
I'm interested that your mom seems to have some kind of stake in this.
And with this particular bloodline, this particular breed-ish area of Boarzoi-like dogs, was Gibson the end of the line for her?
She hasn't got another one, has she?
No.
So at the last, right, this is the thing.
Gibson was a constant companion for my mom for 13 years.
Spent, I mean, they were never apart.
And they were in this strange marriage where they kind of didn't really like each other maybe.
I mean, they tolerated each other.
Gibson adored her.
worshipped her, but she never quite did what he wanted.
All Gibson wanted was to sleep on the couch and eat spaghetti.
Yeah.
And my mom never let... And he liked walks too, right?
And he loved walks.
So they would go on walks and they loved that activity together.
But she never let him eat spaghetti and she never let him get on the couch.
Why not?
Because it's her couch, first of all.
That's true.
And you don't want dog hair on the couch and you don't want the dog to think that it belongs on the couch.
This is that couch in the back, by the back window.
That's right.
And you don't feed the dog spaghetti because you're not a ding-a-ling.
I had a cat that loved spaghetti.
That's even weirder.
Oh, yeah.
Well, and the cat we've got now, I made some late-night macaroni and cheese a few weeks ago.
I set it down for a second.
I turned back to the TV.
I'm sitting in the dark night here.
I've never seen this cat devour food like the one time I put macaroni on the floor.
She went bananas.
Now, my understanding, and I may be wrong, but it is that cats are pure carnivores and they don't want to eat anything that isn't meat.
I don't know.
I don't think the cats have any kind of vegetable portion of their diet.
We should ask John Syracuse about this.
This might be an adaptation or an evolution.
Oh, you think they might have evolved?
They might have evolved.
Well, like even since we got the cat, she might have evolved a little bit.
You never know.
We should ask about that.
But no, I don't know.
I can't explain why they would want pasta.
Maybe it's a, you know, these are salty pastas.
It might not be the pasta.
It might be as with humans.
It's, you know, pasta, let's be honest.
It's a conveyance for butter and salt, like so many things in life.
Well, and also let me, I'm sorry to the people who have persisted in trying to eat their lunch or dinner.
Yeah.
But this has always been a feeling of mine.
What does pasta most resemble from the natural world?
Uh, worms.
Or?
Uh...
Entrails.
Oh, guts.
It looks like guts.
And that's why we love it.
Put differently, you watch a zombie show and you see some guts and you think, wow, that looks a lot like lasagna.
Yeah, that's right.
And so the reason, I think...
That we love pasta is that it reminds us in our primitive mind of eating the best part of a kill, which is the entrails.
So we sit down to a big plate of spaghetti with meat sauce.
For most carnivores, I bet entrails are comfort food.
Entrails are the best because they're also full of grains and other...
Oh, I see your point.
Because it's like a double meal.
You get a meal inside the meal.
You get a little prize.
You get to eat whatever they ate.
They're basically... That never occurred to me, John.
That's brilliant.
Not to go too deep into this, but what are sausages...
Oh, sausages are like a built-to-purpose entrail.
They're stuffed.
They're basically... They're literally intestines stuffed with other parts of the animal.
It's pretty grotesque if you really think about it.
Which is our natural thing.
You kill the thing and everybody jumps around.
You rip it open and the first thing there is basically a pile of sausages.
I enjoy sausage.
Right?
Except they're sausages filled with whatever the antelope was most recently eating.
So I think that a cat might think when it encounters macaroni and cheese that here are some delicious entrails of something.
Are cats colorblind?
I'm sorry, color sight impaired?
I believe John Sarcusa.
Yeah.
Sarcusa.
Sarcusa.
Sarcusa.
Sarcusa.
might know better whether cats have evolved to be colorblind.
Oh, because it's an adaptation.
That's right.
In order to better see prey in the night.
Oh, like those goggles that SEAL Team 6 wears.
SEAL Team 6 goggles.
So basically, if you're in SEAL Team 6, you're basically simulating being a cat.
That's right.
You put on those goggles and suddenly you can see everything better.
You're simulating being a cat in a world that has been terraformed under a green sun.
Or a green moon.
Let's call it a green moon.
Green moon.
Sure, sure.
It's reflecting the light off the green sun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
The green sun hits the green moon.
You get double green.
And now that's why you need cat goggles.
Cat goggles.
Or it is a, I'm sorry, not a science fiction universe, but a speculative fiction universe where the moon on this planet is actually made of green cheese.
Oh, boy.
So the sun could be any color.
The light is reflecting off the green cheese.
And as you know, because we're receiving the green light, it means that actually every other color was...
being reflected, and the green was the one that wasn't being reflected.
Is that because of refraction, John?
Well, it's sort of like a... Is it a form of refraction?
It's like a prism, but it's like a prism, except it's an innocence project for light.
It's an innocence project for light.
They're using DNA to find just the green light.
Exactly.
Okay, that makes sense.
I'm glad we worked through this ourselves.
I think we're helping a lot of people today.
Imagine being in SEAL Team 6.
Okay, you've got a mission.
That's right, you've got a mission.
But maybe the U.S.
Navy is training these guys because they're aware of a planet that has these conditions and SEAL Team guys are actually astronauts.
Astronauts in training and they're not even aware of it.
Oh, that would make a really good speculative fiction novel.
Right.
Oh, see, that's so smart.
It's like Ender's Game, right?
We can't really tell you, spoiler alert, we can't really tell you what you're training for.
And you may actually be doing the mission, check it out, when you're training.
You think that you are in Somalia in the middle of the night to kill a warlord.
Thank you for your service.
But really...
UFOs are part of a secret one-world government that's under the North Pole, and they come from a planet.
That's why they have big, big almond-shaped eyes.
They come from a planet where the moon is made of green cheese.
Right, right.
And this group of highly trained soldiers is actually the first astronaut corps to return to the UFO home planet.
Oh.
okay, I got it, and here's the thing.
We call it terraforming, which is very Earth-centric.
They might be vertiforming.
So they're going to find a way to make our planet green, because that's how they roll.
Like greener.
Not that fake green like we've got, but like a real green.
Like a green cheese.
Maybe they're going to do that.
Maybe they're going to terraform the moon to turn it from... Luniforming.
Luniform.
which is a great kind of... I love a man in a luniform.
That's right.
It's a sports bra.
Sports bra.
Sports bra.
Lives and separates.
Thank you.
Automobile, automobile.
Money machine, counterfeit money machine.
Thank you.
And he was polite.
How many times have we watched that?
Not enough.
I've never been happier than sitting around in our underwear watching that.
The salad days, the salad days.
We hadn't even discovered the mighty boosh.
Oh, that's a hell of a show.
Trapped in cabinets, trapped in cabinets.
I'm starting, now the Steel Team Stick story is starting to worry me.
Okay.
Also, remind me to come back to Crayolas, because I think I may have discovered some of the greatest pages on Wikipedia, and they're about Crayola colors, but please continue.
No, no, no.
You have just dropped a major diarrhea of science.
Right, chronically.
They call it the chronic.
Whenever somebody says, I have found the best part of Wikipedia, you have my undivided attention.
Because I spend more time on Wikipedia than I do with my own family.
That's as it should be.
I mean, you've got more to learn from Wikipedia.
Have you ever donated to Wikipedia when they do those fundraising things?
I know this is going to be embarrassing and we shouldn't.
No, I give money to things, but I haven't given money to them.
And the reason is really terrible.
I hate those ads.
They make me, they make me angry.
And it's terrible because I use it.
Maybe the site that I use more than any other full stop.
So I should, I should do that.
I use my money the following way.
I let the market decide.
When an entrepreneur comes up with an idea, my money is like, well, it's the market, right?
And so Wikipedia has not successfully entrepreneured me out of my money, right?
They entrepreneur you right out of your money.
Wikipedia hasn't.
It's like NPR.
I just turn it off when it asks me for things.
Well, I'll tell you a funny story there.
Our mutual friend, Scott Simpson, he gives money to all kinds of stuff.
Like he'll just sit up, time was that he would just sit up at night drinking and just every night he'd just donate more money to fix a kid's palate in Iraq.
Wow.
He's a very generous guy.
You know, you can do that for a very small amount of money.
You can fix a kid's palate.
Yeah.
It's a really nice project.
And I get to things like that, but he inserted a thought technology for me that I have trouble unthinking now, which is, you know,
This is boring.
But but, you know, PBS, it's the kind of things that they run as they're like marquee programs.
Let me put it this way.
Early 1990s, when I would when I was very into getting very getting very into public media, very into public radio, very into public TV.
You know what they would show during the fun drives?
They would show something they didn't usually show, which was a marathon of things like Fawlty Towers.
Oh, yeah, right.
So that's what got me into Fawlty Towers.
And I remember actually I was recording.
This is so dorky.
But I remember recording Fawlty Towers and the marathon was on and I called to donate.
And I had a VHS for years of my name running across the screen.
Really?
That used to be a big deal to be on TV.
Yeah.
Was it like that bank of old people answering phones and then one of them was talking to you?
No.
Oh, yeah, I did that.
I mean, that was not – you didn't see me though.
No, because I was at home.
But it was still very much the day where you'd have usually the same things today.
You'd have a man and a woman sitting there.
Now, today they pre-taped them and they bought them in packages.
Oh.
So, and it'll be things like whatever Suze Orman is, the leopard skin money lady.
There's her.
You get things like the brain training stuff, all this brain training stuff.
Or you get doo-wop.
There's always a lot of doo-wop.
Sure.
And I don't know, but even like KQED, KQED's main, KQED has the largest listenership for a given public radio station in the United States.
Really?
Yeah, it's really quite large.
I thought it was WGN in Boston.
I don't think so, WBEZ.
Boston Mass 02134.
Send it to Zoom.
Anyway, but you know, the trouble is those brain training things, which I have to say, for a long time seem kind of like BS.
It's one thing to say, oh, grandma does Sudoku, and she seems a little smarter.
So it sounds like BS or PBS?
Peanut butter and shit.
Okay.
Anyway, I'm looking at the page.
I sent you those links if you click in the Skype.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
But I sent you a link to the list of Crayola crayon colors.
Oh, is this something where the flesh turns into flesh?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's stuff like that, too.
My body is the flesh?
Well, there's one I saw one time.
I remember it was like an engineering diagram of the changes over the years.
And this one's more textual.
Oh, my God.
This is so beautiful.
Isn't it amazing?
Oh, I didn't know anything about this, Merlin.
Oh, there's a color called macaroni and cheese introduced in 1993.
Look at this.
Robin's egg blue.
You know, I think what you just did was you just foreshadowed my next collection.
Oh, that's a great, look at that image, huh?
Wouldn't you love to have some of those in your house?
Can you imagine what that would be like?
Can you imagine?
Let's imagine for a moment.
Look at these typefaces, too.
Permanent geranium lake?
Two, three, four.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
There's a song.
He's awesome.
I feel like permanent geranium lake is some natural feature on the luniform.
Oh, it's been luniformed.
Yeah, sure.
Permanent geranium lake.
Oh, you know, I took you off that.
First of all, I have to say, I think if you're going to be an UFO, it's a good idea, if you have the technology, and I assume you do, to build your base under the North Pole.
Because who's going to check?
Who's going to check there?
That's right.
They don't even dust that.
I mean, how many people are at the North Pole right now?
Let's find out.
Counting the guys from Top Gear, counting Jeremy Clarkson, I'm going to say three humans.
I would love it if he just stayed there.
Three humans and 700,000 UFOs under the ice cap.
Alexa, how many people are at the North Pole right now?
Nothing.
Oh, wow.
That baffled Alexa.
Try again.
I'll try it with Siri.
How many people are at the North Pole right now?
I'm going to say 12.
Siri, is it raining?
Oh, there's a place called North Pole, Alaska.
And that has a population of 2,178.
Now, I've been to North Pole, Alaska.
That seems... That's some shoddy naming, John.
No, no, no, no, no.
The reason that North Pole, Alaska is named... What it's named is who sends letters to the North Pole?
Oh, children?
That's right.
And if a children sends... Children and charities.
Right.
If a children sends a letter...
To the North Pole, where does it go?
See, I assume they just throw them away.
Right, except they don't.
They send them to North Pole, Alaska.
You think they still do that?
Sure.
There are kids all around.
I mean, think about all the kids in Africa.
If a children writes a letter, it goes through the postal system, and somehow that gets conveyed to North Pole, Alaska.
That's right.
Oh, that's tremendous.
That's right.
Do they know it's Christmas in Africa?
Yes, they do.
They know.
They just don't care because they don't really observe it there.
They know now because of Bob Geldof.
Right.
Thank you for your service.
It's right in the song...
Send your letters to North Pole, Alaska.
I think it was sung by Willie Nelson.
Send your letters.
You let in light and you vanish hate.
That's right.
Let it in.
One of these colors, one of these Crayola colors, I'm not even out of the reds.
Dark Venetian red.
Yeah.
How do they know?
How do they know what dark Venetian red looks like?
I guess in some ways they get to be the arbiter.
But look at that.
Somebody made a distinction of thistle versus orchid.
Macaroni and cheese looks very much like the color that we used to call flesh.
Oh, right.
Yes.
It doesn't look like macaroni and cheese, though.
It looks like macaroni and cheese that somebody put some ketchup in.
What are these from?
Hang on.
Oh, 1903.
Oh, they could name the shit out of some colors in 1903.
Dude.
Van Dyke brown.
Asparagus.
I got to come make some Van Dyke brown.
You got burnt or raw umber.
Yeah.
Inchworm.
Inchworm.
Mountain meadow.
Flesh tint.
There it is.
Oh, flesh.
Flesh.
Flesh for fantasy.
Permanent magenta.
Flesh.
Flesh.
there's your permanent uranium lake oh look at that hold on right in the okay see now I'm starting to get suspicious we're looking through the yellows then we come down to the greens then we come down to the blues and right in the middle between turquoise blue and sky blue
There is a color which is the darkest black blue in the world, completely out of place in this color wheel, and it's called Outer Space.
What?
Let me find that.
What year is that?
Outer Space, 1998 to present.
Basically after we became, after the UFOs revealed themselves.
I don't think I've ever seen that color before.
Outer space.
I'm not sure I'm even really fully experiencing that color because I look at it and as I stare at it, it's kind of black, it's kind of blue, it's kind of green.
Right.
It does not belong between turquoise blue and sky blue.
It belongs down by midnight blue.
It belongs between midnight blue and navy blue.
Why is it where it is?
If not as an indicator, as a trigger, maybe, to remind us who's really in charge.
Oh, I see.
It's 1998.
Let's give them a little shot of what outer space looks like.
Let's get them talking about this.
Let's get them talking about it.
We've got the first astronaut corps in training.
eventually we're going to do the reveal.
And who's going to do the reveal?
This is why the Republican Congress won't consider a new Supreme Court justice.
They won't even meet with them.
They won't even meet with them because they know that we're coming close to reveal day.
Reveal day is coming.
Reveal day is coming.
Almost every one of these names, not everyone, but many of these names introduced in the 90s, especially the mid to late 90s, many of them do sound like something from Urban Dictionary.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Is there a color called Neo Maxi Zoomed Weeby?
I don't think so, but you can get, so you got Mango Tango, which sounds like a Sammy Hagar record.
Well, Mango Tango.
This guitar can shoot the balls off of a bull from 100 yards.
I don't know where they come from, but they sure do come.
Wow.
Banana Mania?
Right.
All of these sound like drinks at a Jimmy Buffett bar.
Wild Blue Yonder.
That totally sounds... These do!
Purple Mountain's Majesty.
Yep, yep.
I just feel like I'm at a cabana in Key West.
Can I get you a fresh jazzberry jam?
How about a razzmatazz?
Have you tried a razzmatazz?
Oh, you know what's good?
I'm still deciding between the Movilus and the Pink Sherbert and the Fuzzy Wuzzy.
These all sound like drinks.
Desert Sand.
No, that doesn't sound like a drink.
Timberwolf.
Antique Brass.
Antique Brass.
Antique Brass.
Oh, there is a Razzmatazz.
Razzmatazz.
Razzmatazz is a, what would you call it, like a hot pink?
What do you call that?
Yeah, I'd say hot pink.
But look up there.
Jazzberry Jam is really, I mean, are these drag queen names?
Ladies and gentlemen, give a nice warm welcome to Eggplant.
Jazzberry Jam.
Or, yeah, or are they drink names?
And then here we get down below the pinks.
First of all, Eggplant doesn't belong under Jazzberry Jam either.
Yeah, you should edit this.
You should edit this page.
We get down below Carmine and Blush and Tickle Me Pink.
Ooh.
Oh, right.
Oh, I see.
You got Pig Pink.
Pig Pink, you got Blush.
Right.
Tickle Me Pink, Moveless.
Pink Sherbert.
Is that supposed to be Sherbert?
How do you say it?
Well, it should be Sherbert, but they have it listed as Sherbert.
Oh, listen to this.
Sherbert would be a sweet name for a dog.
Sherbert or Sherbert?
Sherbert.
Oh, Sherbert would be a good name.
Sherbert's a little bit fancy.
Sherbert.
Sherbert.
That would be a great name for a son.
Oh, little Sherbert.
This is my boy, Sherbert.
And people would be like, what?
But if you look at pink Sherbert,
You look over in the metadata, it was formerly known as Brink Pink.
Brink Pink.
You think that's considered insensitive to the pink community or something?
Oh, it was formerly known as Brink Pink between 1998 and 2005.
So sometime in 2005, somebody at Crayola was like, Brink Pink's not working.
Let's call it Pink Sherbert.
Fuzzy Wuzzy used to be called Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown.
Which sounds like a question.
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?
Mm-mm.
But then we get down into this bottom part of the color wheel where all these colors just don't belong to each other at all.
It seems like sometimes when you get into the browns and the grays, people get confused about how to continue.
Well, I do this.
Where would you put Manatee?
Manatee is a kind of blue-gray.
I'd put it right off of Key West, right, with the rest of these drinks.
They're gentle giants.
I feel like, oh, and we're not even down to Razzle Dazzle Rose and Blizzard Blue.
Wow.
So I arrange my shirts by color.
Did you know this?
I didn't.
I didn't.
But without respect to collar type or French cuff, you go totally by color.
You're like those hipsters with their books.
Oh, yeah, except I hate that.
When I walk into somebody's house and their bookshelves are arranged by color, I want to kick them.
Have you seen the new thing where people put them in backwards?
With the pages facing out?
What is the point of that?
It's really telling to me.
It's telling that they bought their books by the pound?
Yeah, basically you could buy books by the foot.
Like if Ikea sold books by the foot, you could buy them.
And you're certainly not going to read them.
They're mainly just things to fill up your Billy Bookcase.
A foot of books...
To fill up the Billy Bookcase.
You know, Jonathan Colton family arranged their books by color at one point.
And I challenged him on it.
I was like, you better explain this or I'm going to kick you right in the knee.
And he said, I can find any book on that shelf.
And so I had him turn around and I named a couple of books and he turned and went right to them.
Do you think we're being insensitive?
I don't know.
I bet you we have listeners that are looking at their color-coordinated bookshelf right now and wondering whether...
they made a mistake or, or whether that's really something that they're going to stick by.
It's, it's a little cute, but I arrange my shirts by color.
And I had a conversation with somebody the other day where I was like, do you, do you imagine that I should put my short sleeve shirts in with the long sleeve shirts?
Because the short sleeve shirts belong there according to the color wheel principle and
even though they're totally different kind of shirt.
This person advised me, yes, they thought that the shirts, the short sleeves belonged mixed in with the long sleeves in order to have them arranged by color.
And I did it and then I hated it.
And I took all the short sleeve shirts out and arranged them by color on a separate rack.
I think there's something to be learned from how libraries were run for a long time, which is that the books are put onto the shelves in a very specific order that never wavers.
And if you want some flexibility in how you find stuff, you use the card catalog.
So you go to subject, you go to author, you could get a CSE also or something like that.
I don't think that should be happening tactically at the at the book level.
Now, at the shirt level, for most people, I'd say they could get away with that.
In your case, you have a fair amount of shirts, right?
Sadly, I have I have a ridiculous amount of shirts and this is it's beyond fair amount.
It's an unfair amount.
It's beyond unfair amount.
To redonkulous.
It's even past ridiculous.
It's all the way to redonkulous, which I'll notice is one of these Crayola colors.
Redonkulous.
And also would be a great name for a kid.
Oh, that's sweet.
Cerulean would be a pretty name for a girl.
Ooh, cerulean.
Cornflower.
Cerulean would be a great name for a girl that you were sending to live under the North Pole as a kind of emissary.
oh that's a good idea she doesn't have a last name she's just called Cerulean and she walks up and down the halls in a pencil skirt carrying some kind of like arm load of she got her hair in a bun in a bun or some kind of what was that movie with Bruce Willis where the girl had orange hair
Oh, Lila Dallas Multipass.
No.
Yeah, it's a fifth element.
Oh, fifth element, right.
Lila Dallas Multipass.
Yeah, so it's a kind of fifth element scene where Cerulean has like crazy hair and she's carrying an arm.
But it's not blue hair.
It's not blue hair.
There'll be two on the nose.
Yeah.
She might have maximum red, purple, or mulberry, or thistle hair.
Yeah, well, it's lesbian hair, let's be honest.
The best hair in the world is lesbian hair.
I want to get my hair cut wherever the lesbians go.
Exactly.
It's astonishing.
It's astonishing how good lesbians' hair is.
It is always the best hair.
Do lesbians have thicker hair, John?
It seems to me like a lot of lesbians have a nice thick head.
You know, you and I, we both suffer from this problem.
We have a dense amount of hair, but we have skinny hairs, densely packed.
I think even the skinny haired lesbians have better haircuts than we do.
It's just, it doesn't, it's, I don't want to say it doesn't seem fair because God love them.
They've been through a lot.
They deserve the good hair.
But could you just share a little love at this point?
I mean, you know, it's 2016.
Can I get a decent haircut?
Well, just make a book where it is explained.
Just, just make some kind of book where you explain what you're doing, why it is that you have the best.
I'm not even asking for a phone number.
I'm saying, I'm saying just give me an idea how to even approach this.
That's right.
Give me an idea.
Just share your wisdom.
It's not it isn't like thrifting.
It's not where you go somewhere.
And if it didn't work out, you're fine.
I'm out of the game for two months.
If I don't make the right decision, I'm certainly not going to have like Katie Lang hair.
Well, and this is the thing about lesbian hair.
It is good across the spectrum, right?
It's not all the same.
You don't see bad lesbian haircuts much anymore.
So this is what I'm saying.
Even the typical like butch like flat top.
They get a better flat top than I could get a better flat top.
It's denser hair.
I don't think it's about the hair.
I think it's about the science or the speculation.
You think they're working for the UFOs?
You think they might be working with Cerulean?
I think that Cerulean definitely has a lesbian haircut, regardless of sexual preference.
Orientation, gender, let's set those things aside.
That's a goddamn lesbian haircut, and God love her.
Because she's got UFO technology, right?
She has access... She might have taught them how to hair reform.
I don't know about that, actually.
I think lesbian hair has been good.
You're going to go right past Heraform?
Oh, I didn't even hear Heraform.
So Cerulean has a clipboard.
She's got a clipboard?
No, no, no, not a clipboard.
I think she's got an armful of Kindles.
Oh, I see.
She's got like nine Kindles and she's cradling them like a bunch of baby ducks.
And she's walking down a hall, an ice hall, under the ocean.
In a pencil skirt.
In a pencil skirt.
And it's just like some scene out of a Will Ferrell movie or whatever, whoever the Will is that has the bad kids that everybody hates.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
You got the guy.
That's the guy from Men in Black.
The Fresh Prince.
Men in African American.
So he's walking along.
Hmm.
He's walking along a hall and there's a bunch of UFOs of different kinds.
A guy that looks like a rhinoceros.
The band from the cantina scene.
Oh, right, right, right.
You get the hammerhead guy.
And she's just a human with killer hair carrying an armload of Kindles.
She's not a furry at all, though.
A furry.
No, but she doesn't have a fox tail or anything.
She's not a furry, but she may have a rabbit tail butt plug.
Because that's what they do now.
Right?
That's just what they do.
That's for me.
That's not for you.
That's for me.
This is for me.
I can do my work.
I'm not here to be judged.
I got an excellent haircut and I got a butt plug that gives me a tail.
Yeah, that's right.
And I cut a little hole in the back of my pencil skirt so that my rabbit tail butt plug can stick out.
But I'm not a furry.
I'm just doing this for me.
Yeah.
I'm not part of some subculture.
This isn't like a yellow handkerchief in my right back pocket.
Or a yellow handkerchief in your butt.
Anyway, so when I'm organizing my shirts, I always get down here just like on this Correola color wheel.
I get down to the backside and I don't know where to put the greens.
You know what I mean?
I think I have trouble processing greens because I get a little confused about the different greens.
Because here they put yellow, they put, they start at red and then they put, then they go to orange, yellow, green, right?
That's the Royjabiv.
Royjabiv, yeah.
But I start with white because where does... I mean, you have a lot of white shirts if you have as many shirts as me.
And where do you fit the whites?
I think in the alphabet of colors, you start with white and with black.
You start with white, but you can't immediately go from white to red.
You have to go from white to very light yellow.
I'm feeling extremely old-fashioned right now because I feel like there's almost exactly one kind of thing that should be organized by color.
And that would be conveyances like crayons that are used for imbuing color onto other things.
Organizing those things by color makes a lot of sense.
Organizing most other things, that is just not the way my brain works.
I do it based on utility, the way I would organize a kitchen, which is mostly not much at all.
But I always put the cutlery in this one area.
The high-frequency non-knives go in this drawer.
The lower-frequency non-knives go in this other drawer.
And if anybody changes that system, it's very off-putting to me.
So a non-knife is like a spatula or a spoon that has holes in it?
Right.
You get a slotted spoon.
You could have the temperature thing.
You got the silicon bands.
Any of the things that you need in all the various cooking apparatus.
But I would never think about organizing those.
I mean, this is the problem.
This is like one of those design kinds of things.
It's like something that looks well organized is not necessarily going to be a useful thing.
Oh, no, wait a minute.
Go on.
Well, you know, there's these trends that people go through, like the whole knolling thing.
Like, I'm going to lay things out in this grid and it's going to be myrrh.
And like, I understand that.
You know, if that makes you happy, like that to me is like a cat butt plug.
Like, God love you.
Have fun with that.
That's some Adam Savage stuff, though.
He's a knoller.
He's a knoller.
Yeah.
I've seen him knoll.
But you know what Adam Savage does is he makes stuff.
Yeah, that's true.
He makes stuff just to knoll it.
We watched a show where he made a cannon out of a water heater yesterday.
Who hasn't made a cannon out of a water heater?
I've thought about it.
But what kind of cannonball do you shoot out of a water heater?
I don't know.
We skipped over to The Dark Knight after that.
It feels to me like what you're doing when you make a cannon out of a water heater is you are shooting piglets.
Oh, okay.
Right?
I suppose.
You've seen the pictures of the guy that goes out in Knoll's parking lots, right?
Where he moves the cars around until they're all in the right spot.
You know, that stuff does not tickle my brain the way it tickles a lot of other people's brains.
What about people that talk like this on the internet and have little mouth sounds?
Oh, you're talking about people making smacking noises.
Little smacking noises.
Does that tickle your brain?
It's A-S-M-R.
It's like ASCII art.
What's interesting is in the section called multicultural, section 2.5 of the list of Crayola crayon colors, there's a section called multicultural.
I think it's interesting for several reasons.
Because, well, let's take it as red.
Let's say what we haven't been saying, which is that for our youth, for our crayon, our prime crayon using years, I suspect that you and I both had one crayon in anything over, probably starting at the 16, but definitely the 48, certainly in the 64.
You had a crayon, if memory serves, was called flesh.
It was called flesh.
And the thing is, it was the it was the flesh color of somebody you really wouldn't like.
It was like somebody from like North Georgia.
It was you look like a peach.
Oh, yeah.
And then at a certain point, it was determined, I think, very intelligently that, hey, you know, that's that's that's a little bit that's a little bit limited.
That's sort of normative.
There are a lot of there are a lot of other kinds of flesh.
I may be misusing the word normative because I have used it incorrectly on purpose for so long.
I know.
It's hard to go back.
So in 1992, Crayola released a set of eight multicultural crayons in italics, which, quote, come in an assortment of skin hues.
I'd like to try that.
I'd come in that.
Give it a shot.
Oh!
Oh, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
What's that called?
I'd like to comment a variety of skin hues.
Oh, boy.
I'm open.
Oh, boy.
Keep your foxtail on.
Oh, boy.
Eight colors used came from their standard list of colors, and the set was, for the most part, well-received, though there has been some criticism.
Footnote 14.
Now, what's interesting is, these are overtly, these are called multicultural.
I don't know if it's said on the box, this is for coloring people who aren't white or aren't Caucasian.
Right.
But here's what the colors are called.
Apricot.
Black.
Black.
I'm choking.
Black is pound sign zero, zero, zero, zero.
That is true black in internet terms.
You got burnt sienna.
You got mahogany, which is kind of a reddish.
You got peach, sepia, tan, and then full-on white.
Isn't that kind of interesting?
But they didn't call them, they didn't call them like...
Palestinian or... Right, Ethiopian.
Yeah, or Cree or whatever.
You know what I'm saying?
It's interesting that they still gave it these colors even though this is the multicultural edition.
I thought that was kind of interesting.
Well, I feel like... 1992 was a pretty fraught year in political correctness.
Boy, it sure was.
I was right in the center of it.
You know, I was in college still because I was in college from 1987 to 2007.
Teen.
Teen.
You're so close.
You basically just got to go fill out a form and you're done.
In 92, I was, I mean, those were the, that's third generation feminism.
We were really going at each other then.
I remember the first time I ever heard that phrase.
It was an interview with your Instagram buddy, Michael Stipe, on MTV.
And it was around that time.
It was, I think, maybe in the late 80s.
But he was the first person I ever heard use the phrase politically correct.
Michael Stipe?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I've heard it since then lots of times, but he's the first person I ever heard that I remember ever using that phrase.
It goes in and out of fashion.
And he was using it in kind of a meta way.
We were saying, yeah, well, that's the kind of thing that we would say today is not really politically correct.
Right.
Zing.
I'm disinterested and uninterested in this, but that's the first time.
In and out of love.
So I think the reason that you have to call these colors apricot and mahogany is that even within...
uh various uh cultures ethnic groups there's a lot of variation in skin tone so if you were to say ethiopian there's going to be a lot of people in ethiopia that that doesn't look like well like our friend grant who's african-american yeah that's right from africa means he's a he's one of the whitest people i've ever met he's uh comes from german aristocracy and he's from africa yeah or like john boyega
The wonderful actor from Star Wars, he's kind of sick of people calling him African-American.
He's like, well, no, I'm from England.
Quit doing that.
Well, or John Sarcusa.
John Sarcusa, who had no Italian.
He's a totally Italian guy, but they didn't even speak Italian in his household.
Oh, is that right?
They didn't speak Italian because it was that immigrant thing where the grandmother wanted their kids to assimilate?
I think that – yeah, we talked about this on a different program.
Can I give you one thought on race and culture?
Oh, boy.
I have a thought on race and culture, and I've been thinking about it a fair amount over the last few years.
If you think about it, for a long time there have been – let's put it this way.
There have been people who said, hey, you know, we should be a little bit cooler about race and stop making it this divide –
where the divide is important and we make the rules as white people for why that divide is important.
I think in some form or fashion, that's been a lot of the problem forever.
And the thing is though, even up into the last five or so years, that has still been a real, real struggle.
I'm not saying it's not a struggle anymore, but you know what?
There's a part of me that thinks
That when it comes to treating people of different races, like normal people, treating people of different genders, orientations, et cetera, as people, when that still felt like a mostly digital thing, like you're white or not white, you're straight or not straight.
Oh, I see.
Binary.
Binary.
Yeah, but then you start meeting people where you're like, I'm not even sure why to hate you.
Because, you know what I mean?
Like, oh, Bruce Jenner becomes a woman, which he feels like he's always been, but he's also a Republican who's anti-gay.
That is such a mind bomb for people of a certain age that I think they haven't recovered.
I think those going beyond, those whites and blacks, getting beyond those apricots and peaches, I think that is the terraform that has caused a lot of the change.
It's so confusing now that you wouldn't know what racial epithet to call
somebody.
Right.
What are you going to yell at Caitlyn Jenner about first?
I mean, I only heard this.
I haven't read this.
But supposedly Caitlyn Jenner is very conservative politically, and is actually not so into things like gay marriage.
Now, me, five years ago, that would make my brain pop out of my head because that seems so weird that a trans person would be not so into gay marriage.
I've been dealing with this for 20 years, or no, 25, because I lived in a mostly gay neighborhood and most of my friends were gay.
Capitol Hill is kind of like the Castro of Seattle, right?
That's right.
And Seattle and San Francisco had the largest gay populations of any U.S.
cities, I think.
Seattle, a distant second, but still a mecca.
And my first job in Seattle was working in a gay bar, so I was very much in tune with the culture.
And right about that time, 1992, the rise of the log cabin Republicans, which none of us could parse, right?
This is a whole group of...
of gay Republicans during an era when... But the people that were self-identifying both as publicly gay and publicly Republican.
Yeah.
There's probably always been people, like I imagine for a variety of reasons, Cary Grant was probably pretty conservative.
But then there's other stuff he maybe didn't want you to know about.
I don't think anybody that wore that suit in North by Northwest could be conservative.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, is that right?
But, you know, the log cabin Republicans take on it was we're just people and we have these beliefs and the fact that we're gay is irrelevant.
These are separate, totally separate things.
Yeah, except.
They're trying to do kind of like the opposite of identity politics almost.
Yeah, except that the Republicans were constantly and actively at war with gay people.
It didn't matter if you were in a log cabin or not.
Mm-hmm.
So this was one of those things, you know, this is the Jack Tanner and Clarence Thomas problem.
So my dad's best friend, of course, Jack Tanner, a federal judge.
And black and activist, liberal.
And when Clarence Thomas was up for, when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, my dad and Tanner, who would go to Chinese food restaurants and yell at each other about who did more during World War II,
They were yelling at each other.
Tanner drove like a duck.
You know, like ride the ducks.
One of those.
It's not exactly a car and it's not exactly a boat.
Yeah.
He was a sergeant.
He drove a duck?
And he drove a duck.
But back when the duck was actually a landing craft and it was a duck full of soldiers and he was driving it onto Iwo Jima.
Okay.
And then my dad, of course, was a pilot.
He was up there shooting zeros out of the sky with a sidearm.
Shooting zeros out of the sky with a sidearm out the window.
Ha!
And they would sit in the Chinese food restaurant.
By this point, Tanner was a federal judge emeritus or something.
He only had to adjudicate the cases that he chose.
And so most of the day, they sat in this Chinese food restaurant yelling at each other.
And my dad was yelling about Clarence Thomas, and Tanner was keeping quiet with a smug look on his face, which is basically how they always were, looking at each other smugly.
And Tanner said, I support Clarence Thomas.
And my dad almost lost his mind because they had spent their entire lives together, often together, working for the cause of justice and racial equality and, you know, and liberal politics.
And Clarence Thomas was...
was the worst, right?
An enormous step back for all of those things.
And Tanner was like, nope, it's a black guy on the Supreme Court.
I support him.
Oh, yeah, okay.
It's a different axis.
That's right.
It's a different axis.
He's like, it doesn't matter to me if he's an avowed Nazi.
It's important, and he matters to me, and he's a black guy on the Supreme Court.
Done.
And my dad could never accept it.
He would go this way and that way, but of course it was a thing that my dad didn't, even having been best friends with him basically their whole adult life since the time they were 24,
He couldn't get inside his head.
He couldn't understand what it was like to be a black judge, right?
Tanner was a federal judge.
This guy was his peer, and his politics were secondary.
So watching those two argue, because I'm sitting there, of course, in combat boots with a soul patch, going, Jesus, can we just order...
You know, what are you going to get?
You're going to get mooshu pork and General Tso's chicken like every time.
And the waiter's standing there and they're like, I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it.
You didn't even, you never even saw a pistol.
Yes, I did, David.
I fired my pistol many times.
I wish you'd recorded that.
I wish I had, too.
Oh, my God.
Tanner told this story one time that blew my mind.
He was a lawyer, and it was during the era of the radicalization of American Indians, the American Indian Movement, AIM,
that was behind the takeover of Alcatraz and the showdown at Oglala.
It was that early 70s era when the tribes became radicalized.
And the chief of the Puyallup tribe in Washington, right near Tacoma, was a man named Satyakum.
And Satyakum was a young, charismatic activist chief who was radical, but also personally radical.
And Tanner was his lawyer.
And they were...
always he was he was constantly in trouble he was you know he was like running guns and money i mean it was the revolutionary era the uh you know the symbionese army liberation army right let's say at the time when there were all kinds of groups coming along that were uh very unconventional and asymmetric and it was sometimes difficult to understand coming from the outside why this group was even together
Yeah, and it was like, well, we're overthrowing the U.S.
government.
That's the end goal.
And we're allied with the IRA and the PLO, but we're the Puyallup tribe.
Anyway, at some point, Satyakum was under indictment and the feds were coming for him.
And he showed up at Tanner's office with like three grocery bags full of money.
What?
And he said, let's get out of here.
And he and Tanner flew to Bangkok with three grocery bags full of money and proceeded to spend a year
like buying diamonds and emeralds and taking them to India.
And, and it was, it was, it was like a, trying to get him, trying to get him set up for the long haul.
No, just fucking being just living.
Wow.
And it was like a Hunter S Thompson scene.
Tanner was his lawyer.
They ended up, they ended up at the rumble in the jungle.
Yeah.
Right, the famous boxing match.
Watching the big fight.
Somehow, you know, somehow they were funneling.
They were running money through Paris and all these diamonds sewed into their waistcoats.
And then they made it back to America and Satiacum, I don't know, either went to prison or went underground, ended up in Canada.
And this story just...
I was probably 24, and he wove this story.
This was a story where my dad didn't interrupt him once.
We just sat there and listened to this.
And my dad verified.
independently.
This wasn't exaggerated or a tall tale.
Who knows?
I don't know if either one of those guys knew the difference.
But the way Tanner cast the story, Satyakum was this legend.
Like a folk hero.
A folk hero.
That's precisely it.
All the ladies loved him and all the men looked up to him and he had a gun in his boot and a grocery bag full of money.
And they're in Bangkok in 72 or what, you know, and at the rumble in the jungle with, with the, uh, you know, with George Plimpton.
And it's just like, what kind of lives have you led this, you know?
And then, then, uh, five years later he gets appointed to the federal bench.
It just makes me, I don't know.
It just makes me feel like, um,
Well, yeah, but I mean, it also kind of doesn't it also kind of feed into your whole like, how come I never got to be?
Well, yeah, I'm at South by Southwest.
That's the highlight of my year.
The highlight of 2004.
I saw a spoon in a garage.
Jack Tanner's in Vietnam buying and selling helicopters.
Maybe you should be carrying around more money in grocery bags.
Well, don't think that I am not trying.
How many times have I mentioned money in grocery bags or duffel bags?
Have you gotten any nibbles on that?
Have you gotten any?
Not a one.
Is that right?
Not a one.
That's sickening.
Well, I think it is that the entrepreneurs are waiting.
They're waiting for...
They're waiting for me to, I don't know, do the dog whistle, right?
It's a dog whistle.
It's a dog whistle, yeah.
And they're out there.
They've got a company with 15 people and they've got a CTO, a COO, a CEO, a CLO, a CQO, a CRO.
C-R-O-W, and then like two employees, two engineers, right?
And they're at their board meetings and somebody says, all right, we've been listening to Roderick on the line for a long time.
When are we going to hire Merlin and John and make them CMO and CJO?
Chief Merlin officer, Chief John officer.
That's right.
And they're like, not yet, right?
And I think it's a question of like pre-IPO, post-IPO.
Interesting.
So they're waiting to see how the product development goes and then decide.
They don't want to be the first ones to invest.
They want to be the second ones to invest.
Well, yeah, but if they bring us on pre-IPO and they give us options on a million shares each, how is that going to water down?
Oh, you're talking about what you're worried about, share dilution.
Share dilution, right, as opposed to bring us on after the IPO and then we're getting some compensation, not the preferred stock.
Mm-mm.
So I don't, I mean, I can't, I keep every morning I wake up, I go downstairs.
I used to go downstairs, open the door and there was the newspaper.
But the day after I lost the primary election for the Seattle city council, I also unsubscribed to the fucking newspaper because the Seattle newspaper is awful.
And so I was the first thing I did.
I woke up that morning.
I called the newspaper and said, cancel my subscription.
Take out your legal pad with the big checklist.
Cancel my subscription.
Take down that website.
You know, like never talk to these five people again.
Yeah.
But so now every morning I go downstairs in my robe and instead of opening the door looking for my newspaper, I open the door expecting there to be a Filson bag full of money.
You've been you've been very clear about this.
But it just keeps not happening.
So I don't know.
I mean, you know, the thing is there's nobody more frugal than a rich person.
That's how you get rich.
So they want value for the dollar.
They're driving their 1978 Volvo and they're like, where's the value for the dollar?
Sure.
Also, I think people may misunderstand.
Let's be honest.
There is an element to this of, yes, you actually do want somebody to give you a lot of money so you can be rich.
But there's a lot more to it than that.
I think there's a very human part of this story, too, which is you want what that represents for both you and the person giving it.
Right.
It's a Hakuna Matata.
Like them giving you this money is going to create a bigger gesture.
It's not just about the money, although it's mostly about the money.
Right.
Koyaanaskatsi.
Koyaanaskatsi.
Yeah.
Koyaanaskatsi.
Hey.
What's about you?
Right.
Of course.
I understand.
I mean, I've been to San Francisco, right?
That's true.
I know how it feels to be in the eye of the storm.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Right?
Do you remember when you wouldn't go south of market?
Now what's south of market?
Piles of money.
Piles of money on top of piles of poo because they never wash down the sidewalks.
People are just sleeping on the money because they can't afford a place to live.
Sleeping on the money is exactly right.
It's actually cheaper to sleep on money than get a house here.
Yeah.
Can't afford a house?
Just make a nest of money.
Sleep on your money pile.
20% down.
20% down.
Ah, Kriana Scotsi.
All right.