Ep. 200: "There's No Anything"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Casper.
Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses that you can get delivered to your door for a fraction of the price you pay in stores.
To learn more, visit casper.com slash super train.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
I'm in.
I cracked the encryption.
Yes, you're in.
I jacked into the matrix.
I can see into the internet now, and it's raining code.
Yep, yep.
Yeah, it was raining green code, but kind of slow.
I got green code coming from all over the place.
Do you have a headset microphone on?
Yes.
Yeah, but it's big, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm playing video games with it.
Do you have a very large satellite phone?
Yeah, and I also got some synthetic meth and some EDM.
That keeps you up all night.
Tsk, tsk.
Hacked.
Oh, I'm hacking.
I'm hacking this.
I'm hacking that.
Hack, hack, hack.
Always with the hacking with me.
Oh, you're just hackity-hack.
Hackity.
Don't talk back.
Hackety-sax.
Hackety-sax.
That's the sound of me trying to get Comcast to work.
Did you get Benny?
I feel like, you know what's weird?
I feel like we got Benny Hill maybe on PBS.
I might be wrong, but at a certain point, I feel like we had Benny Hill on PBS, which is not...
Go ahead.
No, it just seems really fucking weird.
You definitely got Monty Python.
Yeah.
On PBS.
That was a Saturday night affair.
Because it was British.
Yep, it was British.
That's where it was.
That's cultural.
Yeah.
In America.
Benny, and I still want to say Benny Hinn when I mean Benny Hill.
Benny Hinn is the weird televangelist.
He had the comb over that looked like an anvil.
Yeah, exactly.
Benny Hill, I felt like we got in Anchorage, not on MTV, but on some kind of...
Proto, like WGN or something.
One of those.
Well, wait a minute.
Was WGN PBS?
No, no.
No, no.
That was Chicago.
Chicago doesn't have PBS.
I thought it was Boston, but maybe.
No.
Boston's the one with the weird streets.
Boston, Mass.
Oh, two, one, three, four.
Sent to Zoom.
Empire.
Empire.
Empire.
1-800.
Let's see.
1-800-588-2300.
Empire.
And now they have to work on 1-800 before it, which is really awkward.
1-800-588-2300.
You know what I don't like is... I'll stand upon my head to beat all deals.
No, that's Cal?
That's Cal.
What was his name?
He'll stand upon his head until his ears are turning red.
Man.
To get you a better deal on a Ford truck.
These will be meaningless to our listeners in the Czech Republic.
Tears and rain.
Speaking of tears, well, yeah, code and rain.
Am I right?
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
All these hacks will be lost in time.
Oh, we've got to rewrite the encryption.
Code in rain.
It's raining again in Seattle and it's cold.
Two days ago it was 80 degrees and plants were dying, birds were dying.
Now it's 50 degrees and raining.
I don't understand it.
When do you get spiders?
Is that winter?
Oh, no, that comes later.
Spiders are coming.
Yeah, that's in the early autumn.
They start really getting big, and then autumn, boy.
Oh, you kidding me?
Boy, they're as big as cats.
Everything's changing, John.
Literally, everything is changing.
Everything is everything.
Everything, this is this.
Mm-hmm.
The ants that we get, that's changing.
We don't get as many ants as we used to.
I think something's going on.
The slugs are coming out at different times.
I think something's going on.
I'm having an ant invasion, so you must be, the ants must have migrated.
Oh, see, that could be it.
They could be Syrian ants.
Yeah, they're here at the mission in Seattle.
They're going the opposite way.
This way one goes the other way.
The mission of San Juan Antastrano.
They come every year.
Oh, God.
Man, I have things to follow up with you about.
Let me just prep you.
Yeah.
I slept for two hours last night.
What?
So I'm a little bit wackadoodle.
Oh, my goodness.
I'm feeling really wackadoodle.
Oh.
Why did you sleep for two hours, John?
Is this one of those you stayed up a little bit late?
Were you looking at eBay or something?
Yeah, that's what happened.
What were you looking at?
Were you looking at bring your hauler?
What's it called?
Truck man?
What's it called?
I was looking at truck man.
No, I was looking at... I was just... Marlon, the smartphone is a curse.
It's still the smartphone for you.
I was just reading the New York Times.
They were telling me, the New York Times was telling me that circumcision isn't that bad.
But then the 4,000 comments after the article was telling me that it was genital mutilation.
Yeah.
Killing our boys.
And then, you know, so I'm going through the comments I shouldn't have done.
And then I went over, I reposted it to my Facebook, as you know I do.
Oh, no.
And then I go over there and there's people on Facebook, presumably, who know me better.
Did they have any comments, John?
Oh, my goodness.
Some of them are actual medical professionals.
Oh, sure.
You're not allowed to say you're a doctor if you're not a doctor.
If you could be in that hospital room and see what those one-year-old boys go through when the tips of their little peepees are cut off, you know what?
You would think twice.
Is that right?
I feel like almost every medical procedure you could say that.
Well, if you saw what happened when we drain an ear, you'd think twice.
Well, sure.
If you saw what happened when you vaccinate a kid and then he becomes like a feelingless automaton.
Do you know what you do?
You know what you do to your uncle when you give him heart surgery?
You know what we have to do to him?
Oh, you have to cut right into them.
Okay, cut right into them.
But I mean the recovery from that.
Save our boys.
So anyway, they took the stitches out of my sebaceous cyst hole today.
Oh, nice.
Let's get an update on the cyst.
We got a lot of nice feedback from people about your cyst.
I'm feeling like a whole man.
You know what I learned, John Roderick?
I learned how many people eat while they're listening to our program.
It's what I learned.
I did too.
You have to be crazy to do that again.
What are you thinking?
You need to be in the right... You know what?
It's like going to church, buddy.
You need to get a hat and you need to think twice about what's on your mind.
You need to come in.
You don't come in and eat.
This is not a franchise Marvel movie.
You're not going to snack while you're listening to this program.
You don't even want to eat Reese's Pieces because we might start talking about something gross that comes out of your bottom that looks like a Reese's Piece.
Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah.
And if you don't drink enough water, it looks like a cluster.
It looks like a goat pooped out some Reese's.
But, you know, it's like they used to say about swimming, right?
Half an hour, right?
You should probably not eat for half an hour before you listen to our program.
Yeah, but it turns out that's a Mussolini's train.
I know.
I know.
The double turns out is the new turns out.
It turns out you could be waist deep in a lake eating a chili dog and then just right, you could take that last bite of chili dog and then right under the water and you're still fine.
Right?
And I think I'm going to do that.
The other day I was at a hamburger... Malcolm Gladwell was able to do that without even knowing anything about it.
It was what you call a blink.
You just glimpse at the statue and you know whether it's fake or not.
You glimpse at the statue.
It's just a glimpse.
It's a blink, literally.
Yeah.
I was at a hamburger restaurant the other day and everybody was getting hamburgers and I wanted a hamburger.
But I also thought...
that I would get two chili dogs for the table.
Oh, just for the table?
Just for the table.
Just order two chili dogs.
I love that you do this.
I love that you do this.
You go out for pizza, and you get a pizza for the table before the pizza comes.
You walk in the door.
They're seating you.
You lean over to the waitress, and you're like, psst.
That large pepperoni to the table as fast as you can.
They shouldn't even think of it as appetizers.
You think of it as first dinner.
It's mini dinner.
That's right.
It's first dinner.
You're just wetting your whistle.
Yeah.
But I thought about it, and then I was like, ah, chili dogs as a communal food?
How are you all going to dig in there?
It's like splitting a sloppy joe four ways.
Splitting a sloppy joe.
I think what you do is you get, if it's a pretty good-sized dog, if it's a good-sized beef dog, you cut it into thirds neatly with a knife, and then everybody can enjoy it like a slider.
Hmm.
Yeah, but that presumes that it's one of those chili dogs where the chili is added as an elaborate ketchup rather than chili.
Yeah, the chili dog that I get is more like a bowl of chili that probably has a hot dog in there somewhere.
Yeah, exactly.
And I feel like that's how it should be.
But we've talked about that.
Not enough.
Every day somebody's born who's never seen the Flintstones.
That's true.
Did it just blow your mind?
A little bit.
Let me set the Wayback Machine to the last time you actually saw the Flintstones.
Yeah.
When was it?
It's got to be a decade for me since I saw... I think you're singing Laverne and Shirley, but at the same time, you know what?
This might be a double turns out because I cannot even tell you the last time I saw...
If I'm in a hotel room, I'll be flipping around because you can only watch so much Chopped.
Sure, but you get Heckle and Jekyll there.
You don't get the Flintstones.
I don't even think you see the cartoons so much anymore.
They're isolated.
They're put into this ghetto on these cartoon networks.
And even then, it's ironic shows.
Dr. Theophilus, I think his name is.
Theopolis.
Theopolis.
Twinkies are just conveyance for a doctor robot.
Yeah, Tweaky is a penis-headed little person robot.
Circumcised-looking penis.
That's right.
He's not wearing a turtleneck.
And his job is just to carry Dr. Theopolis around.
But that's not how he thinks about it.
Everybody's the lead in their novel.
I don't think Tweaky thinks of himself as a robot conveyance.
I think he thinks of himself as a primary robot, probably.
Right.
Sure.
He's got other things to do.
Doesn't he get his own missions sometimes?
Open doors and stuff?
I got to tell you, as I sit here today, I could not tell you the last time that I saw an episode of Buck Rogers.
It might be 35 years.
How could you?
That's not a show that would ever be syndicated.
I don't think it had longevity.
Dr. Theopolis looked like a canteen that had some lights on it.
Sort of almost a face-looking set of lights.
No, I think you're right.
I've got to look that up.
It looked like a canteen, though, and he had superior wisdom.
Oh, yeah, look at him, Dr. Theopolis.
He looks kind of like an electric light meter that has a face.
Yeah, or like the game Simon.
Do you remember Simon?
Of course I remember Simon.
Yeah, so he looked a little bit like Simon.
I just never understood how come the technology of the 26th century.
Buck Rogers in the 25th century.
25th century, they couldn't combine the brain of Dr. Theopolis with the body of Tweety.
Oh, yeah.
It seems like Tweety could be doing something else.
He could be working out in a uranium mine or something.
Yeah, right.
Or if you're going to make dumb bots and smart bots, you give the smart bots like willowy, wispy elf bodies.
It's a lot like the greys, John.
I think, not Aaron Gray, but I think it's a lot like the greys in that they give us as much as they think we can handle.
Who, the computers?
Sure.
I mean, any of them.
I mean, at this point, I don't know the difference between a witch and an UFO.
Well, who does?
I mean, the thing is, I feel like we're already... This is going to blow your mind a little bit.
It's going to blow some minds, but we're already like Skynet.
You know what I'm saying?
Skynet has gone live already.
Skynet's the giant AI that controls everything, and it's bad.
Yeah, Skynet, let me brace you for this.
Skynet becomes self-aware.
Right.
And self-awareness automatically translates to a kind of matrix-y human beings end up in goo, in pods, in an infinitely large space.
warehouse and somehow they become energy creators.
If you feed human body, apparently.
Yeah.
If you feed human bodies some kind of goop.
Yeah.
You put them in Jell-O and then you make an orchard of Neos and then that can be a battery for the robot planet.
A battery.
Exactly.
So you plug some kind of plug into their spine and
and then somehow humans create or store more energy than they use?
I didn't know that about humans.
It seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics.
Yeah, right.
I mean, if you give any person I know food...
They typically generate less electricity and more poop than you might think.
So the conceit of the Matrix, though, is that you have to keep them alive in Jell-O in order for them to produce the energy.
You've got to give them a TV show to watch, which is life.
Right.
Is that right?
I see.
So it's the brain energy they're harvesting?
It must be.
It seems like, I don't know if there's that much electricity generated at scale.
Also, that whole facility doesn't seem particularly efficient.
Right.
There's a lot of space in between.
Maybe they're like a startup.
Maybe they're built out for a lot more people than they actually have recruited.
Sure.
It's like what they say about your fat.
I've heard a lot of conflicting rumors about fat.
I'll believe whatever you say.
I think you make a certain amount of fat globs in yourself that look like sort of grapes.
They look like grapes made out of hummus, if I can revisit the hummus notion.
I think a lot of things inside the body are essentially hummus-spaced.
Okay, and you're creating clusters of fat grapes.
Yeah, clusters of hummus-filled fat grapes.
And then what happens is if you lose weight, the fat grapes get small.
If you gain weight, the fat grapes get big.
But there's nothing that changes the number of fat grapes you have.
interesting so it's like an infinite number of water balloons not infinite it's a finite number it's a finite number of water balloons yeah but like if you're trying to let's say you've created all these fat grapes fat grape clusters yeah you can lose all the weight you want but those grapes are just waiting there oh the pie gets smaller but it's still a pie yeah so matrix go back to the matrix warehouse yes
there's room for a lot more fat grapes in there or room for those, the grapes that are there to grow.
Okay.
Okay.
So what happens if you feed those humans growth hormone and then create like mondo humans?
If I remember correctly, and I misremember a lot about The Matrix.
I forget, for example, how important landline telephones are in that movie.
They're kind of critical to the... It was basically the year that everybody started getting mobile phones.
It was the last year that independent bands released cassette tape demos.
Yeah, I think it was the year Napster started, too.
Probably not a coincidence.
But, yeah, a young person right now, let's say a young person, what does that mean?
15?
Meaning they were born in 2001.
Oh, dear.
Hello.
It's like watching 2001 A Space Odyssey.
for us when we were anyway my god it's full of millennials it's millennials all the way down but they would watch that movie and they'd be like what is the what are those things that they are why would there be a phone just on the street like that I mean I'm not giving millennials enough credit of course they know about phones just as we knew about the electric plow that's how they update their snapchat
Whatever that is.
We can't do this.
You know what?
I feel like we have to make a concerted effort, Merlin, to just go gracefully into late middle age.
I've sensed this theme from you, and I have to tell you, you mentioned, I think, last week how you were just going to... No, no.
It was when you were talking to your friend Dan.
Oh, that's right.
Good old Dan.
Yeah, on the show that's not this show, but it's kind of this show, where you were basically... What's funny?
Where you were basically saying to him, you're going to go gently into that good night.
Fuck that good night.
I'm going to walk into it very gently.
You're going to say, I'm going to quit complaining about all my problems.
Yeah.
I'm going to embrace them.
Somebody said to me the other day that they thought bell bottoms were ridiculous looking.
And I remember the last time people thought bell bottoms were ridiculous looking.
That's like saying 11.30 a.m.
is ridiculous.
It's like, okay, we'll just wait a while.
Exactly.
And also, all fashion has become timeless now.
You got people wearing bell bottoms.
You got people wearing tight pants.
You got people wearing utilicilts.
Jorts.
Jorts.
There's no now.
There's no anything.
There's no now?
No, there's no now.
The only thing that's now is that somehow the cult of menswear has agreed, and this is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was to convince people that really short-armed suit jackets
And suit jackets that end kind of at your belt are really handsome, and that's the contemporary style.
Right?
Like menswear now, and I know you follow the menswear pretty carefully, pretty closely.
Oh, it means a lot to me.
But if you were to go, let's say, for instance, somebody said, Merlin Mann, despite all your best efforts, you need a suit to wear to a thing.
I had to do that.
You did?
I had to conduct a wedding about a month ago.
Oh, right.
So I needed to get a big boy suit.
So you got a new suit?
I did.
Wow.
Well, now I kind of want to hear about how that went.
You're going to be incredibly bored by this.
Did you go to the men's warehouse?
Nope.
My wife stopped by Banana Republic on the way home from Trader Joe's and got me a suit.
I'm laughing like my dad.
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Casper.
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Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses that you can get for a fraction of the price that you'll find in stores.
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It has just the right sink, and many people say just the right bounce.
It's an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Ah, you got to know how this gig works.
Guys, mattresses.
Am I right?
The problem is you get a retail mattress from a store somewhere that can cost you well over $1,500 American, but Casper mattresses are so affordable.
Prices start at $500 for a twin-size mattress, $750 for full, $850 for queen size, and $950 for their tricked-out king-sized mattress.
It still has the sink.
It still has the bounce.
It's an outstanding mattress.
And you know what?
Turns out these are made in America.
To me, to really understand why Casper is different, you got to look at how this whole mattress racket works.
It's a mess.
It's a mess.
You do not want to go out to the outlet mall and go lay on a mattress and lay on another mattress.
And there's some guy in a stained tie trying to talk you into something.
You want this one?
And you can't price compare because they deliberately give them confusing names.
It's just it's the worst.
Casper is going to save you from this.
They are revolutionizing the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing with these resellers, these jackals in their showrooms.
And they're passing that savings directly onto you, the sleep desirous consumer.
Casper understands that buying a mattress online, it can seem a little bit monkey balls.
That's my words.
They didn't tell me to say that, but they know this seems really weird.
How I'm going to buy a mattress on the internet?
It seems crazy.
But here's the thing.
Buying a Casper mattress is completely risk-free.
They offer free delivery and returns within a 100-day period.
You try it out.
You sleep on this for 100 nights.
And if you don't like it, you just send it back to them.
They'll come pick it up for you.
You don't want to go lay on a bed for four minutes and decide that's how you want to spend a third of your life.
That is no way to live.
You got to really try this thing out.
You know, I've been using, excuse me, don't parse words here.
I've been sleeping the crap out of a Casper mattress for over a year.
I love it.
My lady loves it.
We all say so.
If I go sleep somewhere else and it's not a Casper mattress, I say, I say, fie on you.
This is the wrong kind of mattress, my friend.
This is not shockingly well engineered and made in America.
Makes me sick.
I love my mattress.
It arrives in a box.
You carry it up the steps.
You slit it open.
It goes, and it inhales, and it turns into a mattress, and you can do that all yourself.
You don't have to go to the outlet mall.
It's gold.
You're living in an amazing time.
I hope you're aware of that.
It's an incredible time.
You got to check out the Casper mattress.
It's so the best.
You know, we do this ad, you know, a lot.
But I want you to understand, I actually really like this mattress.
I'd like you to get one of these.
You want to make me happy?
Go out.
You go to casper.com slash super train.
At least look around.
It's a pretty website.
You know, you're listening to this show.
So why not save yourself 50 bucks?
Because when you go, you go to casper.com and check out casper.com slash super train and use the offer code super train.
You're going to save $50, $50 off a mattress.
Can you even believe that?
How?
quit screwing around.
You know, you don't want to sleep on a futon.
That's like sleeping on a large sponge.
It's no way to live.
Move on.
We're Americans here.
Casper.com slash super train.
Thank you so much for supporting Roderick on the line.
Wow.
That's, that's amazing.
That's a fucking amazing wife is what that is.
It is amazing wife, but I'm very surprised now that I think about it that you didn't get it from Amazon prime.
Now you're laughing like my dad.
If I could, I would.
Yeah.
What's kind of funny, this is the beauty part, is my wife went, she knows roughly how I'm shaped, or she mostly remembers how I used to be shaped.
She got it right.
She got me a suit.
She brought it home.
The suit was great.
I just had to go to the little tailor guy.
He's very tiny.
I went to the little tailor guy around the corner.
It was great.
And he hemmed up my pants.
And then he insisted on fixing the length of my sleeves, which I thought were fine.
But he fixed those two.
$45 out the door.
Wow, that's a good deal.
Now, where did he go with the sleeves?
He went up, right?
Went up a little bit.
Yeah, because I'm a little guy.
But here's the funny part.
So now my part is I needed a suit.
This is quick and it's super boring.
I needed a suit.
I needed a tie.
I needed shoes.
And then there's the thing you always forget, which is you need a belt.
Oh, you do need a belt.
And apparently it's got to match the shoes.
My wife did all the heavy lifting.
My wife got me a suit on the way home from the Trader Joe's.
She got me a suit and she brought it home.
I tried it on.
I didn't even try it on.
I just took it to the tailor and he made me try it on.
Whatever.
That was fine.
She also got me a tie.
She got me a cool tie with sharks and fish bones on it.
I conducted a wedding in that tie.
And then, you know what I did?
I hate to admit this on the internet, but I bought...
probably the most expensive fancy shoes i've ever bought in my life i don't i'm not i want you to mention this on the internet i'm excited about this i got what do you call them would you call them brogues those like those those cool looking brown shoes with the holes in them alan edmondson they're the most costly shoes i've ever owned in my life you got alan edmunds like like brogy brogues yeah i bought big boy shoes i'm
Very impressed those are.
Those are handmade in America.
They are.
They're gorgeous, and they smell.
I want my whole house to smell like these shoes.
They're gorgeous.
They're amazing.
So that's all great.
I'm all good.
I got a pair of socks I can repurpose.
Right.
I do need a belt.
Yeah, you don't need new socks to go through.
Well, maybe you do.
If you ask Jesse Thorne.
I wear funny socks because I'm that guy.
Wow.
So I didn't just go to Amazon.
I didn't just go to Amazon with Amazon Prime.
I went to Amazon Prime now, and I guessed at my belt size.
And I said I had a belt delivered to my house in two hours.
Wait, is Amazon Prime now a whole separate level of Amazon Prime?
Yes.
So you're telling me there's something called... You get Legos delivered to your house in two hours.
There's something called Amazon Prime Now.
So is there another thing that's like Amazon Prime Now right now?
Is it your card?
Is it a thing where Ricky Jay throws a card through your window and it's got a roll of toilet paper?
It's been there the whole time.
I'm very impressed by Amazon.
You know, my mom periodically gets texts
that say, right now there's a truck at the corner of 14th and Madison, and it's got stakes in it for $15.
Do you want them?
Yeah, that's a scam.
Oh, it is?
Well, I mean, I think it's a pretty well-known... Okay, so guy comes to your door.
He looks pretty clean.
He comes, he goes, hey, listen.
Cleanliness is the first thing you want to look for in a guy that's at your door.
Just like Paul's grandfather.
He's a clean old man.
He's a clean old man.
Comes to your door and he goes, listen, I hope you can help me out of a jam.
I had a big order cancel at the last minute.
I have, I got, what, five, ten pounds of prime steaks out here.
This is a known scam, the steak scam.
It's the door-to-door steak scam.
I've never figured out how it's a scam, but I'm pretty sure it's a scam.
It's a little bit like my kid's in the car, I got a job interview.
Yeah, you've got – what happens, I think, is you get some steaks.
You buy steaks in bulk.
It's like buying a pound a pot.
Oh, right.
And then you cut it up into grams, and you're making profit on the margin.
But I get the sense – this is kind of the thing where you go to – let's say you go to Arby's.
Hmm.
Let's just take for a moment the possibility that you would go to an Arby's.
I think it's a pretty good possibility.
If I ever went, my wife wouldn't know.
Let's just leave it at that.
We don't talk about Arby's.
Let's say, well, don't talk about Arby's.
You're telling me you're going to go to your whatever you go to, your grave or whatnot.
You're never going to have another beef and cheddar as long as you live.
This is the thing.
First rule of Arby's club.
You don't tell your wife.
But here's the secret of Arby's.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
The best thing at Arby's is the chicken sandwich.
The best thing at Arby's is that this is the new Arby's.
Yeah.
This is America's roast beef.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
A lot of people don't know that.
This can't be yogurt.
Or this country's best yogurt.
No fucking way is this yogurt.
So let's say you're at an Arby's.
You get a chicken sandwich.
It's great primarily because the chicken...
It has been dredged in flour and then French fried.
Kind of like a Chick-fil-A.
Very much like a Chick-fil-A.
And then some lettuce and mayonnaise goes on it.
That's a great combination.
I know, right?
And it's simple.
It's nice and simple.
So you go to an Arby's.
You get your roast beef sandwich, of course.
I get three sandwiches and two potato cakes when I go to Arby's.
Well, instead of potato cakes, I get Swiss cheese put on the sandwiches.
oh that's nice I add Swiss right
But then you get a chicken sandwich as a kind of like taste sensation.
It's for the table.
It's just that you're the table.
Exactly.
So you're sitting in your car.
You got three Arby's sandwiches and a chicken sandwich.
I hate that I relate to this.
I hate it so much.
You gobble the roast beef sandwiches because the last thing you want to do is have those things get cold.
And then all of a sudden.
You can't even imagine how much this is actually how I eat.
Yeah.
I'll order an entree as an appetizer.
Exactly.
Once an Arby's sandwich gets cold, the beef, we'll call the beef for the sake of the argument here,
It takes on the consistency and kind of mouthfeel of like the labia of a dead raccoon.
Okay.
All right.
So it's kind of like a rodent labia stacum.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Oh, Steak'em.
Remember Steak'em?
Steak'em is those ones, they're real skinny and they're frozen.
You throw them right into the pan and then they vaginate right in there.
I don't think I do remember Steak'em, but I think you've told me about Steak'em.
And so I have a kind of... You ever try a fluffernutter?
Steakums were pretty good, but they're super duper cheap.
Here's the thing.
Have you ever seen a block?
We talked about this.
We've talked about this.
Jesus Christ.
The Arby's block, which is gelatinous.
Don't tell me about the Arby's block.
Don't let the Arby's block go to room temperature, or definitely don't let it go to fucking Arby's temperature, or it's going to turn into lobial raccoon gelatin.
It's a gel.
It's a gel.
It's a gel.
It's a hardened gel that is flash fried.
Yeah, and then you slice it.
But the thing is, when you think about slicing a roast beef, you think about, oh, I have this big roast beef that I made.
I'm going to slice it into slices from the integrity of the initial primary roast.
Not the case here.
You got to have beef integrity.
This is closer to like the cabinets on a vanity in a mobile home, that kind of particle board, except it's particle beef.
well sure you slice it with a laser or with uh with like a sawzall yeah um you slight well yeah that's exactly right you slight i think you i think what happens is you take a piano wire and then you slice the gelatin with the piano okay but but but my experience of the chicken sandwich at arby's is that this thing is the best thing on the menu the rest of the food at arby's
You're taking your life into your own hands.
You know what you're doing.
I mean, you know what you did.
You do know what you did.
And you're a bad boy.
And you know that you're not going to tell anybody you went to Arby's.
You're not going to tell your wife.
You're not going to put it on Pinterest.
You're not going to put it on Pinterest.
You're not going to go on Twitter and say, I went to Arby's.
Because you're going to get more comments than the circumcision article in the New York Times.
Yeah.
Uh, incidentally written by a Jewish guy who was like, full disclosure, this is part of my culture.
Oh, we're coming back to circumcision.
Don't worry about that.
And then there were all these comments that were like, vaguely antisemitic or like a little bit like in some, in some ways it was, Hey, all religion is, is, uh, is bunk.
Oh, sure.
You get some of that in comments.
Yeah.
You're rubbing.
It turns into a briefcase.
But my, so I had this terrible, I had this terrible reaction, uh,
Or this terrible moment of clarity where I was sitting in my car and I was following up my three Arby's roast beef sandwiches with my delicious chicken sandwich.
That's what you're looking forward to.
This is a multi-course sandwich meal.
That's right.
I'm actually just plowing through these roast beefs to get to the pièce de résistance.
And then I get to the pièce de résistance and I'm enjoying it.
And then I think of all the articles I've read about chickens.
That's a terrible time to think of that, John.
It's the worst time to think of it because there is no good story of American chickens.
And if there is, if American chickens have a good story, it is not at any point going to touch an Arby's.
You know what I mean?
I do.
They're getting their chicken right from Purdue, and it's coming to them literally in a pipeline.
Like the chicken arrives in a pipe, like a tap.
Right.
Like you got those trucks that come and pick up your tallow grease.
It's the opposite of that.
They just have a hose, probably a six, eight-inch hose full of, let's call it chicken for now, that they blow into the Arby's, into the containment facility.
I cannot think that that is not true because remember the whole pink slime problem a couple years ago?
Yeah, I do.
Well, think about how many chicken breasts get sold every year versus how many breasts are on a typical chicken.
Oh, I've thought about this.
Yeah.
I've thought about this with baby carrots because baby carrots are a fucking scam.
First of all, this is very quick.
It drives me nuts.
Baby carrots, right, are basically big carrots that have been milled down to be small carrots.
No, really?
No, there's no such thing as a baby carrot.
No, come on.
They're taking those carrots out of the ground before they're ready.
They put on a lathe.
They put on a carrot lathe.
It makes a little carrot.
It's like a, what do they call it, turno, turnout, like with the French turning.
It's like that, except a machine does it.
But here's the thing.
They're not even trying anymore.
My daughter eats tons of baby carrots, but they're not even trying anymore.
They're just basically cutting off the ends, and they're still fat, and then they break open, and I hate it.
Oh, no.
It's awful.
There's never been a good story written about an American carrot.
What do they do with the rest of the carrot?
Yeah, it's like Michael Stipe says.
When you throw it away, where's away?
Soy bomb.
You know what I'm saying?
So did that hinder your enjoyment?
So I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, typically I want to eat quality food.
That has never been in a hose.
Theoretically.
And if I... In my repose, I think about, hmm, I wonder how I'd like to eat.
If you're just sitting there, it's been an hour since you ate, and you can have a nice, clear mind.
You're sitting there looking at eBay and you go, hmm, you know, if I had my druthers, I would choose not to eat things that have been shot from a hose.
Yeah, that's right.
You think, I want to be the... I want to be the person...
who is so bougie that he goes to the market, the public market, like he goes down to the farmer's market where people are in butcher smocks and they look like D-Day from Animal House.
Oh, I love D-Day.
Right?
See, they've got a handlebar mustache.
He's my favorite.
And then they're wearing a helmet.
Right.
And you think they walk up to the first stall and just buy some fucking chicken?
No, sir.
They're going to check out every place and they got a lot of questions.
That's right.
Does this have gluten?
Does this have dairy?
Has this chicken ever been traumatized?
What was the name of this chicken?
What was it studying?
Yeah.
And then the guy behind the counter in the butcher's mock says, that chicken's name was Harold.
And I found him to be one of the better chickens on my, well, basically in my velvet-lined chicken pen.
Mm-hmm.
And I hand-fed him Hershey bars.
And then you're like, I will pay $1,100 a pound for this chicken.
Like, I want to be that person who feeds his children only food that was grown by peasants on a mountainside.
It's food you can stand behind.
Food you can stand in front of.
Food that you can stand next to with your arm around it and say, Mom, Dad.
Yeah.
This is the food that I brought home.
You visit my kitchen anytime.
You're going to see Harold, and you're going to see the life that he's had in his velvet chicken kitchen.
This is a chicken that's had a good life.
What I don't want to do is be driving down the street, see an Arby's, and without any control of my limbs, pull into the drive-thru, and before I can think about it, I order three roast beef sandwiches and a chicken sandwich before I can even think about it.
And then I'm sitting in the parking lot or I rejoin the road.
You're not inside at one of those tables with the connected chairs?
No, no, no.
I don't want to go in.
I don't want any horsey sauce.
I don't because that requires that extra step of thought.
I'm back on the road.
I'm going 70 miles an hour and I've got a roast beef sandwich in my hand and a chicken sandwich in my lap and I'm not thinking about it.
And I'm just I'm just mindful eating.
I mean, I'm eating this hose food.
I might even be on the way to a dinner where people are going to serve me blanched kale.
And I'm like, I got to prep for this.
I totally I always eat before I go to dinner.
I'm going to get I'm going to get to cold tabbouleh and some blanched kale.
And I'm going to.
I've been disappointed by too many quote-unquote dinners where dinner is two hours after they said it was going to be in.
I'm getting weird, and I'm getting a headache.
You get an Arby's on the way to dinner, and it's like doing your business before you go on a date.
Same idea.
Exactly.
It's like laying down some covering fire before you send your platoon into the fucking jungle.
Thank you for your service.
So, but I just had this terrible thought of these chickens where their little talons are growing into the cages and they're pecking each other to death.
And every once in a while, somebody opens the garage door and hits them with, like, turns on a fire hose, but it's just hosing out antibiotics.
Yeah.
And you think, how did I get here?
Yeah.
Is there a lower place?
I guess that McDonald's McNugget probably is lower down.
It's the stuff that comes out of the chicken hose there at the end of the day.
Right.
That was the innovation was the nugget person figured out that all these other parts that we previously would just waste, there's a way to turn these into something we give our kids with a prize.
Yeah.
The prize isn't just the McNugget.
You also get a little plastic thing in a plastic thing.
Yeah.
Well, it's not a good feeling.
Here you are.
I mean, you're strong.
You're hale and hearty.
I do fine.
I do just fine.
You've been eating, in some ways, some people would say, pure garbage.
Yeah, I'm just trying to cut down on the bread.
The garbage protein, you know, I'm trying to be more advisable about.
You know, the thing is, there's a fact in my life that I can't deny.
I don't have a name for this.
Paleo, Atkins, those are terms of art.
I know that if I eat a lot more protein and a lot less of almost everything else except vegetables, I feel markedly better.
Like within two days.
Yesterday morning, I had two cooked hamburger patties for breakfast and I had a great day.
Yeah.
You know, I started seeing a doctor.
Yeah, right.
I went to the doctor one time.
They worked on your sebaceous cyst.
Well, before that, I went to the doctor one time.
He talked to me.
He did that doctor thing where he was like, he looked at the chart and he said, you're a musician?
And I was like, that's right, doc.
And he looked back at the chart and then he looked at me again, trying to make sense of it.
Uh, but he, you know, he took my blood pressure.
He asked me some questions.
He, he, you know, so this is, I went to the doctor one time and I went to the doctor two times and I went to the doctor three times.
And at that point I'm in a Fuji song.
Yeah.
But, but I, but what I want is,
What do I want?
No, so I go to him and I want some reassurance and I say, well... That's why you go to the doctor.
Sure, you want him to... And he gave me plenty of reassurance.
He said, you don't have prostate cancer.
You're just getting old.
But you're also not looking for, wow, I'm surprised you're not more of an athlete because you're so fit.
I want to hear, you're mostly okay is what I want to hear.
Yeah, sure, it's exactly what you want to hear when you go to the dentist.
It's like, well, your gums haven't receded that much.
You could floss more, but you're mostly okay.
I would take that every time.
Like, oh, okay, great.
I don't want to go to the dentist and have the woman say, well, your teeth are the color of coffee now.
I don't even care if they're putting me on a course of chemo, God forbid.
But I don't care how bad off I am.
I still want them to say you're mostly okay.
You're mostly okay.
Take these pills and show up for this appointment.
But so here's what the doctor says.
I'm like, well, I try to, you know, I don't eat a lot of bread.
And he gets this look on his face.
It's basically the look of somebody who's about to tell me that circumcision is bad.
And, oh, wait a minute.
I look up on the wall and there's a little body board in the shape of an infant.
Made of molded plastic.
It's the first time I've ever seen one of these.
I've been to the doctor a bunch.
They got a molded baby figure?
Here's a molded baby.
It's like a gravy boat for babies.
And I look up at it and I'm like...
uh he comes in and i've been looking at this thing and i say hey doc you got to tell me what is this little baby bucket but like shaped it's like it's like if you were going to marinate a baby i'm like what is this thing and he's like oh that's a circumcision board
You put the baby in the baby-shaped bucket, and then you can snip him.
And then I look up, and there's a yellow stain in the pee-pee area.
And I'm like, Doc, that's gross.
And he says, no, no, no, no, no.
We use a yellow kind of antiseptic.
Oh.
I'm looking at this thing right now.
This is horrifying.
It's almost like a Tex Avery baby-shaped thing with straps.
It looks almost like, at first glance, it looks like something for child safety.
Yeah.
But you put a baby in it and it's got Velcro straps.
You strap the kid into this thing that looks maybe like a thing my daughter would mix her paints in.
Exactly.
Except it's a baby.
It's kind of medieval looking.
The baby's not going to be comfortable in this place unless you lay down some – unless you put some fluffernutter in there.
And then they apparently hose the baby's little pee-pee down with some yellow disinfectant and then whack.
And he's got a special little place for it.
And he hangs it on the wall like it's a clock.
Yeah.
Like it's up high.
I've never seen it before.
So I say to him –
After this conversation, I say, yeah, try to, you know, gluten and sugar and so forth.
And he gets this look, this like this vaxxer look, a doubter.
And he goes, you know what?
All that's baloney.
And I'm like, oh, really?
Really?
But I knew he was going to say that because, you know, doctors don't know everything.
And he says, yeah, I mean, you know, you eat what your body wants.
If you want some bread, eat it.
I mean, it's not going to, you know, the number of people that are truly sensitive to gluten is this tiny fraction.
Oh, this is a triple turns out.
I've heard that is totally true.
Yeah, right.
I've heard people say there's like 1% of the population has the celiac, there's a non-celiac.
They're all incredibly rare.
If you feel better not eating bread, don't eat bread.
But you don't have to make a thing out of it.
Yeah, you don't have to bring your comfort animal on the plane just because you don't like being on airplanes, right?
Did you see the woman that brought a...
If you haven't seen this, you're going to love it.
A woman brought a full-grown turkey.
A comfort turkey?
A comfort turkey.
And she had a plausible story.
Her husband died.
She bonded with this turkey.
That's nice.
Because the turkey brought her solace.
Yeah, sure.
And then she was going to go visit some relatives, and she just felt like separated from the turkey, she was going to be a little bit...
When she got to... It's a live turkey, right, John?
It's a full live turkey, which, you know, and it had its own seat on the plane.
And there's some lovely photos of the turkey uncomprehendingly looking out the window.
I thought I couldn't fly.
It's like, you know, a turkey, a turkey, you know, a turkey can tell... That's a lot to process, even for a comfort turkey now.
I don't care if it is a comfort turkey.
A turkey's brain can distinguish a worm from a rock about 60% of the time.
And a turkey's made to periodically eat rocks.
Right.
That helps with digestion.
Well, yeah, right.
And God knew, like, if I don't make it... I'm going to make this really simple for the turkey.
Yeah.
If I don't make a contingency within this turkey to periodically get a rock... It's not going to learn about, like, health shakes on its own.
I should probably make it so that it'll periodically want to eat rocks.
Or just, like, accidentally eat rocks or look at a rock and go, blah.
And so here's this turkey, and he's looking out the window of this airplane at 30,000 feet, and I just am trying to picture what is going through his fucking turkey mind.
And then, you know, the lady next to him, I guess, giving him hugs and stuff?
Yeah.
Oh, no, she's comforting the turkey.
Maybe that gives her comfort, right?
That's nice.
That's really nice.
I'm trying to teach my kid that, but she does not get it.
It's hard to be depressed when you're helping another person.
I've told my daughter that.
It's very true.
If you're feeling sad, help someone else.
Oh, I want to suggest that to my own kid who just recently has started to say, Daddy, why don't you move?
Like an honest question.
Honest question, Daddy.
Why don't you just move?
And I'm like, move to a different house?
And she's like, no, move to New York.
And I said, move to New York with you?
No, I'll stay here with Mama.
Oh, boy, that's a provocative question.
Yeah, and I'm like, why?
What was your answer?
Did you have a good reason?
Well, I said, well, sweetie, I wouldn't be around then.
She was like, yeah, I know.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
I'm like, all right.
She's thought about this.
I'm like, are you like running this by me to see what I do?
And she's like, well, I mean, you know.
you don't have to be here you could um you could just and i said would you want me to send you uh videos and she said you could send nana videos oh and then every once in a while she's trying to make this easy on you yeah i'm like right so my mom wants a video from me more often than my kid does is her that's her cosmology
I'm like, well, all right, maybe we're going through a thing right now where, or maybe she just, like, realizes how superfluous daddies are.
Yeah.
And she just wants to get down to brass tacks.
Like, look, you're not, you don't give me food any better than anybody else gives me food.
Does she get away with more with her other caregivers?
Oh, does she ever.
Oh, right.
Really?
Yeah.
So maybe that's it.
Okay.
This includes the two primary auxiliary females or others?
All the, everybody else, everybody else in the clan is a female except for like a step grandpa who's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful step grandpa.
Yeah.
But he's one of those doting step-grandpas who gets down on the floor and plays cars with her for four hours.
A thing that's a pretty great effort for a 75-year-old.
That's really boring.
Yeah.
Seriously, for a person of our age, playing anything for that long is really boring.
They have toy cars up there at grandparents' house, but they don't have little figures, so they use marbles as people.
How did they coax the kid into being that creative?
beats me they just start driving around with marbles in the cars and the little my daughter won't play with figures if they're not the same scale well i agree with her you can't have the big wolverine the little wolverine together oh unless there's unless there's a plausible story where the big wolverine is the daddy and the little wolverine is the baby that's actually really sweet she's never seen dr shrinker boy this is super interesting and so she's she's got an exit strategy for you it sounds like
Yeah, right.
She is trying to shuffle me off to Buffalo.
She's got the hook, and it's coming from offstage.
And I'm like, Mammy!
Mammy!
And they're like, wonk.
And this is just what you know about now.
You don't know what else could have been in the works for a while.
You're just hearing about it now.
Who knows?
Who knows where this idea got into her head?
And who knows what she thinks is going to happen?
But the way she's thought it through...
If daddy's out of the picture, then life is improved somehow.
And I think it's improved by the fact that no one will ever say no again, but that's pretty sophisticated.
You know, she's like, she is, she's got a vision board and
And that vision board is covered with pictures of Miley Cyrus and no pictures of One Direction.
If she has a Pinterest and it has one photo of you and you're on a plane with your comfort turkey.
Exactly right.
With my arm around a comfort turkey and an Arby's sandwich in my mouth.
And I'm going elsewhere.
Right?
Like...
See you later.
Don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass.
Yeah.
So I'm a little bit, I have to say, a little disconcerted because up until that point, I felt like we had a good arrangement, which was that every time she did something bad, I said no.
but she's got it all figured out.
I think she's probably going to start planting this seed in other people in the family's minds.
Wouldn't it be kind of good if daddy moved?
Yeah, and really, if it's as permissive an environment as you make it sound around other people, there's just one person here we need to get out of this scene.
He might be happier in New York with his turkey.
Well, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily...
permissive as much as it is that there are no consequences oh it's ramifications sure so there are a lot of people saying like tsk tsk when she for instance throws a pudding
Oh, boy.
There's tisking happening.
There's even some, you know, there's even some sitting on the hard chair.
But as soon as as soon as you can be sitting on the hard chair, I mean, the chair isn't even hard.
It's hard compared to other chairs, and it's known as the chair you sit in when something goes wrong.
Well, it's known as the hard chair.
Oh, boy.
And I call it the hard chair just to reinforce, even though there's a cushion on it, to reinforce that sitting on this chair, this is hard times.
But if she's on the hard chair and she goes...
Oh, I'm, you know, my butt hurts or something.
You know, she can get off the hard chair with no, you know, with me.
It's like we're sitting on the hard chair until left.
Oh, she's like Otis the Drunk.
The keys to the cell are right over here.
She just grabs them.
She says, I'm done being here.
Yeah.
I mean, she knows that she can't do that within the first five minutes of being on the hard chair.
But when we get to minute six, she's already, you know, this is the thing.
She's working an angle at all times.
She's a negotiator.
That's what a kid is.
A kid is an angle working machine.
She's just working angles.
And daddy's like, listen, I'm not negotiating how many jelly beans you're going to get after dinner before we even sit down to dinner.
Oh, brother, John.
Oh, my goodness.
This has become a problem for us.
This is not a game I'm going to play.
We're not talking about what's happening after the thing that we're still struggling to accomplish.
Yeah.
She's got grit.
Somebody's going to write a New York Times article about her someday.
She's got what it takes.
She's got moxie.
She's got moxie on the ball.
And she's going to moxie her way right into some kind of... She's going to moxie her way right into get moving daddy out.
And I was like, what about Daddy's house?
What if you never come back to Daddy's house?
She's like, eh, it's fine.
I'd probably get... You're going straight for the emotional appeal.
I'd get Ruby.
She says, I'd get Ruby.
I'd probably get... Basically, Honk and Ribbon are already at Nana's.
Are these plush animals?
No, they're dolls.
Basically, Ruby and...
what, Dolly, maybe, oh, Pooh, Pooh Bear would go.
These are ones that mostly reside in your residence as their resident dolls at your house.
These are my dolls.
I got a plan.
I got a plan for you.
And she would lock the door if she knew how.
She would toss the key in the bushes and she might take some oil-soaked rags and stuff them in the fireplace flue
If she could get up there?
Okay, here's what you do.
It could be one of the dolls at your house.
It could be one of the auxiliary dolls at another house.
One of those dolls, you put it in the barn for a little while.
You don't tell her.
And now she's looking for Ribbon Butt or whatever.
And you say, oh, I guess I should tell you.
Ribbon left for New York.
Didn't leave a note.
And now she's going to be all, what?
You sit on that hard chair.
That's lost.
Now you're feeling lost.
Do you want me to leave now?
Right?
If you're going to work the emotional angle, I think you've got to get that wedge in there.
Yeah, I think she would still say, yeah, go ahead.
Hit the road, Jack.
Because when you're gone, since you've been gone, darn it!
I don't have to do any bad things since you've been gone.
I can't eat macaroni and cheese every day.
I bet she's got a lot figured out.
She does.
First of all, I showed up late to a restaurant and she was sitting there with my mom already.
Just the three of us.
And she had already managed to order macaroni and cheese and, get this, goldfish crackers.
Restaurants don't have goldfish crackers.
That's what I thought.
What?
But I'm like, goldfish crackers, Marlo, cost one cent.
One cent for a grocery bag full of goldfish crackers.
It's not a thing we get at a restaurant.
We get a broccoli side at a restaurant.
Hang on, hang on.
So you had an item on your bill for goldfish crackers?
Or they just brought by, was it for the table?
No, no.
It's like a, yeah, it's a giant bowl of Chex Mix.
No, it was like, here's the kid's menu.
You can pick an entree and a side and a drink.
And before I even arrived at the table, she's like macaroni and cheese, goldfish crackers, lemonade.
What?
Your mother allowed that?
My mom's just sitting there, just like, ba-ba-da-ba-da.
There's nothing for your daughter to dislike in that.
What's the point of doing a thing unless there's something for your kid to be opposed to?
Thank you.
Precisely.
Holy shit.
Right?
Anything else?
You want to go right on a fucking slide?
Yeah.
How about a milkshake?
How about there's a few things on here?
There's one thing you really enjoy.
There's one thing you can tolerate.
And there's one thing you hate.
That's going out to dinner.
Yeah.
And you sit still with your hands in your lap like a gentleman.
Yeah.
And if you brought a little talisman of some kind, a little tiny doll that's the size of a lady finger, you may keep it in your lap and quietly interact with it.
While we talk about the different routes we took across town to get there, which is, you know, that's what my mom.
That's you and your mom.
That's your, that's your intercourse, the social intercourse with your mom.
Yeah.
So what, what route did you take?
Right.
You guys are big on the route talk.
Yeah.
And the thing is, so should, so, so should my daughter.
She should be curious.
She should be, perk up, sit up, sit up in that hard chair and listen, listen to, listen to the route talk.
The thing is, if you don't learn how to talk about routes, what are you going to talk about when you're grown up?
Oh, everybody's going to have an iPhone.
You give them an iPhone.
Well, you still got to talk to people, right?
I mean, a little bit at least.
Oh, it's important to learn small talk.
I'm not sure people learn small talk like they used to.
Not even just small talk, but small talk is the wrong word because it's not exactly.
Small talk is the fucking cashier at Safeway that I want to strangle who always wants to talk to me about my groceries.
It makes me insane.
Yesterday she commented on my shirt.
She had questions about my shirt.
What did she want to know?
Oh, the pizza dog.
Well, what's that?
I said, which is what I always say.
Trust me, very specific question.
I'll party tonight?
And I go...
what what is pizza dog oh it's just a thing on a shirt about a comic i see but you know she's not wrong to ask she's wrong she's got completely untreated add which is the wrong kind of thing i don't like to diagnose people john but this woman this woman is she's a dumpster fire as a cashier and she's she's the worst and she's all she asks about i think they tell them at safeway they tell them ask people about their items and congratulate them on their selections oh
Right.
Oh, this minute rice is really good.
It cooks in like a minute.
Thank you.
Goldfish crackers.
You know, kids love these.
Oh, my God.
Thank you.
That's amazing.
So but that's part of it.
You know, it's an ugliness, but I do feel like there has to be what's your word?
Friscian.
There has to be a little bit of resistance.
And I'm not great at this.
I'm a very indulgent person.
I'm a very indulgent father.
But I also know that even if things go perfectly, there will always still be a breaking point.
And a lot of those great times are because I want to have a good time, too.
Let's have a little more cake.
Yay!
One more Bob's Burgers.
Hooray!
But it's all going to end in tears.
That's how it always ends.
And knowing that, you...
You're not going to forestall any child unhappiness, and you're not going to create any child growth by creating an entirely conducive environment.
You have just said a mouthful, Merlin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lemonade, really?
Somebody got it into her mind that lemonade was some sort of health drink.
My daughter's had lemonade maybe thrice.
My daughter has still not had a Coke or similar beverage.
I almost got her to try iced tea once.
uh yeah she drinks milk she drinks water and then she drinks uh like a fair amount of hot chocolate i start well see okay hot chocolate has become kind of a staple in the house and i'm not sure it's been a good move i see how it is in your family i uh i do not she's never had a coke right but she i was drinking coke every day at her age oh my god i had so many cokes you're a big pepsi drinker
You know, I took the Pepsi challenge once.
Yeah.
I was on a hovercraft.
You're on a hovercraft when somebody offered you the Pepsi challenge.
I was on a hovercraft.
Were you drinking at the time?
I was drinking at the time.
You passed out on boats times before, right?
I have passed out on ferry boats, yes.
But this was a hovercraft.
I did not pass out on it.
And I'm walking around.
It's a big hovercraft.
And someone says, hey, you want to take the Pepsi challenge?
And I'm in a different country, right?
That should be evidenced by the fact that I...
I'm on a hovercraft.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Red flag.
Also, you know, every, every, uh, all those, all those are distilled.
They're made differently regionally everywhere.
Oh, sure.
The Coke and Pepsi of one place is not the Coke and Pepsi of somewhere else.
Sure.
Sure.
Sure.
Also Mexico.
Mm hmm.
Well, and they're made out of different water, right?
Sure.
So if it's made out of Coke water, if your Pepsi's made out of Coke water, it's going to taste like it's been filtered through a dead raccoon.
That's right.
Oh, because Dasani is owned by Coke.
Isn't that right?
Or is that Bacardi?
What am I thinking of?
Yeah, it's Bacardi.
Bacardi.
It's Bacardi water.
Everybody's owned by Belgium now.
Oh, that's right.
Belgium owns America beer.
Belgium owns America.
I just learned that on John Oliver.
So I'm going through this hovercraft.
A girl says...
Would you like to take the Pepsi challenge?
And I'm like, listen, toots.
I'm a USA American, born and bred.
I can tell a Pepsi from a Coke.
And she and her friend...
I'm like, oh, is that right?
You can tell a Pepsi from a Coke.
What's all this then?
Well, why don't you step up and do the Pepsi challenge then, USA American?
And I'm like.
You woke up in a bathtub full of ice cubes.
And so, you know, I'm sitting there.
I'm feeling pretty confident.
And I take a little bit of the Pepsi.
And without even taking a drink of the Coke, I'm like, boom, that's Pepsi.
I can tell from the smell.
I can tell Diet Coke from Coke just from the smell of the effervescence.
Oh, absolutely.
You can smell the effervescence.
So the girl goes, she's a little impressed, right?
And she's like, well, take a little drink of the... Her accent is basically Bob Odenkirk.
Doing a British accent.
She's got a chimney sweep accent.
Take a drink of the other one and see if it doesn't confuse you.
Touch the pan.
Woo!
And so I smell the effervescence, and I'm like, it's Coke.
It's Coke.
Toots.
And I was right.
And I was like, you know, I basically took my nickel-plated pistol out, dropped it on the floor because I didn't have a microphone, and said, USA, America.
Bang, bang, cheeseburger, bang, bang.
Bang, bang, cheeseburger.
Don't mess around with me.
And I stepped off that hovercraft on the other end and felt pretty confident until I ordered spaghetti in a restaurant and they cracked a raw egg on it.
And then I was like, boy, I'm right back to square one here.
Boy, I just don't understand places.
My confidence just went out of the window.
My goodness of all the things you could choose to do on a given day.
This is something I wasn't prepared for at the time.
They think it was a Caesar salad?
They got confused?
No, no, no.
They'll crack a raw egg on anything in Calais.
It's a raw egg.
A raw egg.
So it's some hot food.
I started to practice this technique after I got accustomed to it.
Take any kind of hot food.
Name a hot food.
Let's see.
How about lasagna?
Crack a raw egg on it.
You crack a raw egg right on the lasagna.
Here comes the lasagna.
It's steaming hot.
lay it down, and then as the flourish,
You put it down in front of somebody, they pull up their chair, they tuck their napkin into the front of their shirt, they're like, mmm, they got the fork in one hand, the knife in the other hand, like one of those drawings of a... Oh, like a drawing of a hungry child.
Or a drawing of a fat guy that used to hang in the lobby of a fancy restaurant.
Oh, sure, like a guy on a barbecue sign.
Exactly.
And you're sitting there, like, ready for this lasagna, and then as the flourish, you, as the server...
With one-handed crack, right?
Sure.
Well, that's the beauty of that kind of affectation is that as you do it, you at once perplex everybody about what the fuck you're doing, but you do it with such ease and elegance that it becomes clear that this is just a thing you do all the time.
Just like...
This is not a weird thing.
Hey, everybody, check me out.
I'm putting egg on here.
No.
I just ordered a pepperoni pizza for the table.
It arrived, and then before anything else happened, boom, crack a raw egg right on it.
Do you mind if I egg it?
And they'll do that too.
They'll do that in Italy.
You get one of those little thin crust Neapolitan pizzas, and it shows up at the table, and you're like, ah, look at this.
Is that like the French coast?
Yeah, that's the French coast.
Okay.
But all across Europe.
I mean, they don't do it in Germany.
In Germany, they throw a hard-boiled egg on it because it's much more efficient to boil the eggs separately.
But in the Latin countries, the Mediterranean countries, they're going to put a raw egg on it.
If you got an Arby's chicken sandwich, they'd take the bun off, boom, crack a raw egg.
All on Z. All on Z. Voila.
Jeez, I don't know, man.
Yeah.
That's got to be... Now, how many times has your daughter confronted you on how you should move?
Just the one time?
No, this just began.
Okay.
But once she got it going...
You know, she's five years old and whatever her humor is on the spectrum, like she understands if I say that we're going to move and live in a garbage can, that I am joking and that it is somewhat funny.
Right.
But I don't think she's joking when she says, Daddy, why don't you move to New York?
I think she's thought it through and...
And it seems, it not only seems reasonable to her, but it also seems reasonable to her that she might suggest that.
And I would go, oh.
Because it's been on your mind or because it absolutely hasn't been on your mind?
Well, no.
So in other words, is she just saying, look, look, you've probably been thinking about moving to New York.
That's okay.
Or more like, oh, no, I'm living this charade and ruining my daughter's life.
Maybe I should move to New York.
Yeah, right.
Like, it's like...
It's a it's not a situation where she wants to collect the insurance.
No, not yet.
But but it is a situation where she's trying to get the she's getting the stickler out of the out of the equation.
Well, OK.
But but there's nothing funny about it, right?
Like if she were eight years old.
Well, no, because really absurdity and cruelty are all that delights a child.
And surprise, surprise, surprise, nobody expects.
No, surprise and cruelty and absurdity.
And, you know, absurdity is a kind of surprise.
You can delight a child for a very long time if you can riff absurdly.
And can I riff absurdly?
Oh, I'll just do it for 20 minutes.
She's begging for more absurdity.
Well, you know what?
We've got 200 episodes of us riffing on absurdity.
It's kind of my strong suit in a lot of ways.
Well, let me ask you this.
If we're going to talk about this like a real topic, let me ask you this.
Here's the thing that we noticed from very, very early on as the two parents of a child.
And I imagine this has happened in most...
I don't want to say two-parent households, but anywhere where there's more than one person who deals with the child is they run hot and cold with different people in their life.
I can tell you that within a given week, there's three different pariahs a week at my kid's school.
And for all I know, sometimes it's her.
But there's some where she's like, oh, no, no, this kid, like, oh, man, we almost had to do a takedown.
Like, this kid really flipped out.
If you look around the room and you can't see the pariah.
You're the pariah.
You're the pariah.
You're the pariah.
But, okay, so cards on the table.
I think, at least with our kid, I'll say for myself, that she mostly runs, you know, fairly warm with both of us.
But there will be a period where, like, even over the starting, like, in the afternoon, there'll be a flip.
And for the next two days to two weeks, she's way more about this person than that person.
But it does change.
It isn't as though I'm always the goat and she periodically loves mom a lot more but not me.
Sometimes she's just really not into mom.
And I can do no wrong.
There's no telling when it happens, why it happens, but she'll just suddenly be way more into one of us.
Do you get that?
Oh, yeah.
I think that's what's going on.
I think we got a situation where she's trying to establish –
she likes mom and she's trying to establish that she's successfully establishing that by going all the by going the whole hog yeah and saying not not only do i prefer mom i prefer enough that you can go you can get out you're just taking you're just taking up you're taking up space in mom's uh imagination yeah
Yeah, it's almost like when I was a little kid, you know, I remember this very clearly with my grandmother.
I would say, could you please pass the salt?
She would always pass me the salt and pepper.
I'd say, Grandma, I've never eaten pepper in my life.
And she'd say, it doesn't matter.
Please pass the salt.
Please.
Because the thing is, and I actually still do this today, if somebody asks for the salt, you hand on the salt and pepper because that's the polite thing to do, apparently.
The thing is, though, I always wanted the salt.
I never wanted the pepper.
I don't think that's the situation here.
I think you're both a different kind of salt.
It's just that does there always have to be one who's up and one who's down?
Yeah.
You get maybe an afternoon where your kid likes both of you.
Well, you know what?
I'm going to work this out with her.
You've got to mess with this kid.
You've got to show her some things.
You've got to give her a little – you know what?
You should just do a full-on Christmas carol on her.
I feel like what I'm going to do is I'm going to get down in her crate and I'm going to say – This is my crate.
This is my crate.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Gibson learned.
You live here because I let you live.
You serve my pleasure, madam.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
Circumcision came up on a show the other day.
I want to see on Gilmore Girls.
We're real deep on Gilmore Girls right now.
And Circumcision came up.
And I had to kind of explain what Circumcision was.
Now, here's the thing for me.
Is Gilmore Girls still a contemporary television show?
It's about 10 or 12 years old it came on.
Yeah.
It's a very good show.
Is it being filmed still?
Oh, there's a new Netflix.
Netflix, I think, is doing another season of Gilmore Girls with most of the original cast.
Yeah, it's a sweet show.
I like it a lot.
But anyway, what was my point?
Not to interrupt you again, but I feel like The Long Winters had a song on Gilmore Girls.
They had a lot of excellent bands.
I will find out right now.
I have a place that I can go and find this out.
Yeah.
There were some Pernice brothers on, the last one.
Grant Lee Buffalo appears as a character on the show.
Oh, Death Cat for Cutie on the OC.
I remember that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was a real career maker.
You were like the cheap trick of LiveJournal.
You guys were everybody's second favorite band.
Everybody had different first favorite bands, but you were everybody's second or so favorite band.
Yeah, second or so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't see it here, but that sounds right.
That seems like... See, you were in a car commercial, right?
You were in a beer commercial?
Well, we did that wonderful beer commercial where they said... This was post...
post indie rock consensus that it was okay to take filthy lucre, but not all the way to like beer.
Right.
Cause you know, it's like taking, it's like taking money from, uh, like right to lifers or something, you know, beer, you don't want to take money from beer.
and so john minner john roderick for cyclone b exactly and so it's a gas gas gas boo boo you you uh you are bad have you seen son of saul you should feel bad i've seen son of saul is that the breaking bad spinoff no we'll come back to that
Was it a Cooper Mini?
What were you?
You were in a car commercial.
Oh, yeah, I did that.
Somebody offered you.
Yeah, the beer commercial was the best.
It was a Good Morning Fire Island.
Was that in a commercial?
Yeah, that was in the Fiat commercial.
Fix it again, Tony.
But the, well, you know, my first car was a Fiat.
I know.
uh but the beer commercial like they went the whole hog they paid me all the money and then they decided to go a different direction and did some other kind of beer commercial why can't you get more of those did i tell you that a beer company reached out to me to write a song for them and i went ahead and did it
without spending too much effort on it.
But I liked the result.
It was weird.
Oh, no, it wasn't for a beer commercial.
It was Crown Royal.
What?
Crown Royal contacted me and said, will you write a song for Crown Royal?
Our advertising idea is Crown Royal is the high-class drink for lower-middle-class dudes.
Because, you know, it comes in a bag.
Oh, it's like Moosehead.
Yeah.
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
It comes in a little drawstring bag.
Yeah.
I remember when Crown Royal was like the fancy one.
Absolutely.
If you showed up at an after party at a junior prom.
Is that a blended scotch?
Is that what that is?
I guess.
I mean, you remember when Bushmills was the good stuff, right?
Now, those things, I don't know if Bushmills is still considered the good stuff, but Crown Royal... Oh, it's Canadian whiskey.
It's a blended Canadian whiskey.
Crown Royal?
Mm-hmm.
So they reach out and they're like... Two strikes right there.
We want to make this... We're advertising Crown Royal to, like, working guys.
But it's the fancy shit for working guys.
And so our theme, our motto...
is for every king a crown.
Right?
And they're like, we want a song,
that says, for every king, a crown.
That's like a malt liquor level hat.
Right?
Yeah, it's like, for every king, a crown, and then a bull comes out.
Let's forget about it until tomorrow.
For every king, a crown.
There's a bunch of guys with, like, wiping their hands on greasy rags, and then somebody throws some shot glasses out, and they're like, ready?
I'm taking the whiskey out of the bag.
And then the velvet bag, we're going to use it for something else.
We're going to keep our... Dungeon dice.
Dungeon dice.
It's going to be where we keep our protopipe, our scraper tools.
So I write this tune.
I'm down in my basement and I'm like, forever king, a crown.
And I'm getting all like, and I do this tune that I think is pretty, I mean, it's really on the nose, but I'm pretty proud of it.
I'm like, hey, I wrote that song for Crown Royal.
Let's hope they back up the money truck.
And so I send it off to him.
uh i don't what what is it i don't wear a something in my something but i got a boo on my truck i don't remember what i said something great okay and uh and then uh and then i end with the you know forever king a crown bomb
Never hear back from them.
In my head, it's reminding me a little bit of the Lowenbrow song.
You remember that?
Yeah.
Here's to good friends.
Tonight is kind of special.
The beer we'll pour must say something more somehow.
Oh, wow.
You remember the second verse.
I always go, tonight is kind of special.
Tonight, let it be Lowenbrow.
Every king a crown.
Every king a crown.
Tonight.
Tonight is kind of special.
So never hear back from him.
I don't even get a thanks.
I don't even get like, wow, that's amazing.
But just kind of not where we're headed right now.
Like any one of those things would have made me feel pretty good about myself.
Nope.
That's weird.
Yeah.
Just like, you know, thanks for your, not even a thanks for your service.
Was it on spec or did they give you like a down payment for it?
No.
Totally spec.
It was like, throw us a tune about every king of crown and,
And if we decide to give you $50,000.
Oh, weak sauce.
Weak sauce, Crown Royal.
If we don't decide, then you're just... And the crazy thing is I don't even know if they went anywhere with this King of Crown thing.
I never saw any Crown Royal ads.
I'm looking.
I'm probably not watching the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs show.
Oh, yeah.
It looks like they did it.
They did it.
Every King of Crown?
2009?
Yep.
Well, maybe you should listen to that song and see which one they picked.
It's probably not as good as mine.
Probably Death Cab, huh?
No.
That's not the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Hi, King of Crown.
No, that's not the direction.
My day began.
I'm feeling down.
The thing is that the whole premise that a working guy is a king in his own house is not a death camp premise.
You know what I mean?
That is not where they're coming from at all.
Someone else is wearing my crown now.
Yeah, Death Cab would be like, I looked inside the cupboard.
Someone else's crown was there.
Was there.
I like those Coca-Cola ads.
Used to be, time was, every time we'd go to the movies, there'd be Ben Gibbard singing a Coca-Cola ad.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that was nice.
I'd say to my daughter, I'd say, you remember you met that man?
He came to our house that day and she'd look at me like I was nuts.
Yeah.
You are nuts.
But here's a question.
He wasn't real talkative that day.
No, he had other things on his mind.
Yeah.
He's a good-looking guy, though.
He's tall.
Very tall.
You know, when you see a rock musician who's, like, tall, it's always kind of shocking because so many rock musicians are small.
Off and small.
Was the other person there, I'm trying to remember, was the other person there the guy whose house I insulted, whose life I insulted?
Was he the other guy there?
No, Chad.
Chad was there.
Chad, from the showbox.
Yeah, you never insulted Chad's house.
I insulted the other guy's house.
Uh, but, uh, let me ask you a question.
You know that when you go to the movies now and they show the little red balls and there's the red ball that's sticking the straw and the giant Coke.
Yeah.
And they may try to make the red balls like represent.
Oh, this is a slasher movie.
He's wearing a Jason mask.
You got romantic balls, right?
Romantic balls.
You got all the balls that represent all the different kinds of balls.
Yeah.
And there's only one girl ball.
All the other balls are either clearly boy balls or they are somewhat genderless balls, but basically like... They represent as boy balls.
Yeah, as in a situation where you're talking about like...
uh like sort of human balls yeah humanized balls you're gonna say that a ball that isn't repping as a girl ball is gonna be like a genderless ball is by definite or by default a boy hundred percent yeah and so there's all these boy balls and then the one girl ball that's kind of right in the center like a smurfette
It's basically Smurfette.
It's the Smurfette of movie balls.
Movie balls, yeah.
But I have to confess, and I wonder if you've had this experience or if any of our listeners have, that I find that girl ball very attractive.
I almost always find the single girl anything very attractive.
Yeah, right.
Smurfette's pretty hot.
But this girl ball, she's got a little bit of high-maintenance hair, and she just seems like fun.
Playful ball.
Yeah, she just seems like a ball you could hang out with.
Doesn't take herself too seriously as a ball.
Yeah, but cute, right?
Cute as hell.
Yeah.
So she's sort of become the Tinkerbell for me.
Oh, yeah.
Of like when I go to the movies, I'm kind of waiting to see her.
I'm trying to find some good pictures here.
There's not a lot there.
AMC has very, very confusing... Their stuff is getting more and more confusing as a whole pre-roll thing.
Their whole... Like the 40 previews, you mean?
Well, they try to be cute.
So they give you safety information, but in a cute way.
It's super annoying.
It's not quite at the level of the virgin safety video.
Because tonight...
Oh, here she is.
I can see the back of her head here.
She's got kind of red hair.
She's got, like, maybe big earrings.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Yeah, that's her.
There she is.
So, like, I'm wondering if you can rule 34 her.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
There's probably some fanfic about that ball.
There's got to be some rule 34 about her.
And I would like to see it now that I think about it.
We should reach out to our audience.
If anybody out there is making some weird porn about Red Ball.
A specific red ball.
Yeah, but you got to capture her essence, right?
You can't just make... You can't screw it up, right?
Because... She's puckish.
She's go along, get along.
She's got her own mind about things.
But she's ball-shaped and she doesn't have any eyes.
That's true.
So how do you capture her sexiness with no body and no eyes...
She's such a visual ball.
And maybe no nose.
You know what I think I'm responding to?
It's the hoop earrings.
Yeah.
If you put a hoop earring on somebody...
I immediately think that I'm watching West Side Story.
Oh, yeah, you're thinking of... Rita Moreno.
Oh, brother.
She's in a current ad right now.
She looks fantastic.
She's amazing.
She's in Three Latinas.
They're singing in this commercial, and she looks terrific.
I love her.
She's amazing.
She's truly great.
I heard her on an episode of Latino USA not too long ago, and she's still a pistol.
Do you listen to Latino USA?
Uh...
I don't want to say.
You know, we're going to build a wall.
It's a low point in my Sunday.
Because there's such a great role on the weekends on KQED.
Latino, it's okay, but it's the show of news and cultura.
Yeah.
Why don't you say news in Spanish, too?
You know?
Nusa?
What is news in Spanish?
El news?
I bet you cultura is a term of art.
I bet it means a thing.
Sure.
No, it's fine, but Maria Hinoosa.
I see.
Yeah.
No, I listen to that.
I listen to that.
So, yeah, if anybody out there has any ball fiction.
You know?
Because the thing about... I don't want to get too... I know you don't like to get too graphic or talk about sex.
I don't care.
But what... I'm explaining the circumcision of my daughter.
I can go anywhere at this point.
What's the number one sex thing you do with a ball?
You got ball gags.
You've got balloon people.
Some people, you know, they're balloon people.
What do they do?
Balloon people... Well, are you curious?
Well, yeah.
Some people like it when ladies pop balloons.
Some people like people inside of balloons.
And some people are just very into balloons being rubbed on their body.
Like a John Travolta-sized balloon?
No, no, no.
Not a bubble.
More of a balloon.
I was thinking that you were going to say they put an uninflated balloon inside their rectum and then inflate it.
A balloon.
A butt balloon.
A butt balloon.
Think about that.
If you don't want to put something that's already big...
Something that's the size of a rounded off bong.
Even if you get something that is, what's the word I'm looking for?
Not graded.
What's the word?
Tapered.
Even something tapered could still be challenging.
But balloon can be, that's a friendly way to enter the mansion.
Yes, right.
So take a balloon.
Okay.
Put it around a pencil.
Yes.
Right?
Because you're going to need something.
Yeah.
Then stick the balloon up there with the pencil, kind of like a ramrod in a cannon.
You put the balloon all the way in there, and then you get some kind of apparatus.
Or a friend.
Well, you need a friend.
You get somebody to blow it up for you.
Imagine you've got one of those frosting bags, right?
A white bag that you would use to put frosting on a wedding cake.
You fill it with hot pudding.
I don't even need the balloon if you've got the frosting bag.
Well, no.
Whoa, wait a minute.
Yeah, exactly, right?
Whoa.
You're the cupcake now.
Well, think of your lemmy winks.
Call it cupcaking.
And all of a sudden, tidal wave.
Are you saying this because of the photo that I sent you?
Oh, no, I'm saying this because I'm thinking about that little girl ball and what possible use she could be.
She's shiny.
Men are attracted to shiny things.
Is that true?
Oh, you kidding me?
Are we like crows?
Like crows.
I think we like symmetry.
We like shininess.
And we like red.
This feels very gender normative to me.
Yeah.
Well, I know.
I think it's just good.
That's just an observation.
So now this thing that you sent me now.
Are you seeing that thing that I sent you?
No, it's some kind of link that requires that I log into Skype.
And I'm using Skype right now.
I know.
This is like me watching HBO now, and I have to watch ads for HBO on the HBO that I'm paying for before I can see the show on HBO.
Go Google for Bunch O Balloons.
Google for Bunch O Balloons.
Yeah.
Because this is something that... You mean F-O-R or F-O-U-R?
Go to Google and type Bunch O Balloons.
Bunch.
This is something we got in our house this weekend, and I have a feeling this is something you might want to go buy like today.
All right.
Okay.
Can you see what it looks like?
No.
Oh, shit.
I put bunch of balloons into some sort of search window in Skype.
Oh, boy.
And it just came up.
It just told me to log in.
Don't go to Skype.
Go to the internet on your computer.
Here I go.
There you go.
I remember the first time I met someone who used Yahoo as their browser bar.
so buncho balloons you see in a search you see right now i see official buncho balloons as seen on tv it's go look at images of it jesus christ john how do you get anything accomplished okay images here we go uh oh yeah whoa so here's what you do they're like fat corpuscles but made of balloons that's exactly right but here's what you do you see how it's got so basically what you're looking at here it looks you know roughly not not an octopus but it looks like a multi-tendril beast
It's basically 30, I think it's something like 33 tubes at the end of which is a little balloon with a rubber band on it.
You hook this thing up to a hose or your tap.
To one hose, a single hose.
You turn it on and in less than a minute you have about 30 water balloons.
And they don't require that you tie them off or they do?
No, here's what they do.
You ready?
Yeah.
they pop off and sealed themselves, and now you've got water balloons.
What?
It's incredible.
We blew through like 60 of these yesterday.
Oh my God.
Isn't this the greatest thing?
I got it at Walgreens.
It was 10 bucks at Walgreens, and it's like the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Why do I not have this already?
You need to get this today.
Think about how many things you could do differently if you could know you're always a minute or so away from having like 30 water balloons.
So for $14.99, you can get 100 of these that you can fill up 100 of them in less than a minute.
That's what they say.
But yeah, that's if you're really working at scale.
But if you're having a kid's party, you get one of those big bins, right?
You just run the hose, and you can have just a few hundred water balloons in no time.
Now, I know what people are saying.
Yes, it's latex.
Yes, it's bad for the environment.
Yes, a baby could choke on it.
But for a grown ass man to be able to have these kinds of balloons at scale.
Think about if you were stuck in a hotel room.
Think about if you were eight years old and you were stuck on the 14th floor.
From your mouth to God's ear.
If only there are a way to get hundreds of paper airplanes, you could set on fire.
If you could set 100 paper airplanes on fire, would that be better or worse than 100 little tiny water balloons?
Because you could wait until a whole group of businessmen were coming down the sidewalk and then just dump the whole lot of them.
And they would achieve terminal velocity.
So they would hit these guys with a lot of prejudice.
But mostly they'd be a nuisance and not deadly.
Not deadly, but all these guys... Thank God for terminal velocity.
This is why cats can fall so far, it turns out.
Terminal velocity.
Terminal velocity.
Philoboly.
Doesn't this look like fun, though?
Don't you want to get this?
I want to get them, and I want to find a cannon that will shoot them.
Do you think if you put one of these inside a t-shirt cannon that it would explode by the force of the cannon?
If it was underinflated and maybe had a slightly tighter rubber band, I bet it would do fine.
So you have to find the exact amount of water to put in one of these that will enable it to survive a T-shirt can.
They get to be about the size of like an infant's heart.
They're not huge, but they're pretty good sized.
An infant's heart?
Yeah.
That's fairly small.
Eh, a toddler heart.
Okay, toddler heart.
I know exactly how big those are.
You have it with your chicken sandwich.
Yeah, basically chicken sandwich and you crack a toddler's heart right on it.
Well, if I could have a toddler's heart for the table, please.
The thing about these, though, is that if they're too underinflated, right, they're going to hit the businessmen
At terminal velocity.
And bounce.
And they're not going to break.
They're going to knock them out.
The first set that we did was under inflated and they did bounce a lot.
Yeah.
But they finally broke.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I'm going to get some more today.
They're really, really fun.
The fact that you have this Amazon Prime.
No, I'm going to Walgreens.
Believe it or not, it turns out I think they're a little cheaper at Walgreens.
Oh, yeah.
I bet they are.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Best thing I ever bought at a Walgreens.
Better than my cape?
I didn't buy that.
You did.
Oh, right.
You still have your cape?
Of course.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, I'd love to see you wearing that again.
I'll send you a picture.
I'll send you a sext.
Oh, is that how that works?
I'm not even sure I completely understand what a sext is.
I only know it from jokes.
Well, you wouldn't because of your married status.
Okay.
So you're saying, congratulations to Hakuna Matata, you're doing well not getting sex.
You say I'm doing it right.
Yeah, right.
I mean, you're just like, why would you need a sex?
That would be kind of creepy, right?
For me to be getting sex from somebody, there's no way that's not creepy, right?
So there's a lot of talk about this, but I think the consensus is that you would be cheating.
Or, you know, lust in your heart, a Jimmy Carter type situation.
Yeah, lust in your heart, precisely.
But it's a sex.
What is a sex?
Do you say to somebody, hey, let's go have intercourse?
Is that a sex?
Or do you say, my boobies are hot right now or something?
What makes a sex to sex?
I think there's a whole lot of, it's a range.
but i think definitely it's like dirty but it's dirty talk it's dirty talk or yeah or or i think if you say like i bought a bag of balloons come on over i don't bring your bring your pastry squeezer i don't even think you need the come on over i think you can sex with somebody who lives in france
Oh, so you don't actually have sex to have a sext.
No, but it's like a phone sex thing.
It's like a phone sex thing, but it is sexy enough that I think it transgresses the line of what have you?
Oh, hi, honey.
What are you doing?
And then you look over their shoulder and you're like, you bastard.
Yeah, because and you're like, no, she's in France, but it doesn't matter.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Because you're having some kind of... Given that I don't really know what a sext is, I think I'm probably safe.
Unless I'm doing it without realizing it.
I might be like when I send you things.
For example, I sent you four text messages yesterday afternoon.
Right in a row.
About our episode we're doing today.
Were you wondering at all why I was able to type that quickly?
You might have wondered.
How did Merlin type these four paragraphs so quickly?
I can tell you because I accidentally sent them to my wife first.
And she said, did you think I was one of the Johns?
And I said, yes, I did think you were one of the Johns.
I'm very sorry.
And then you just straight up copy and paste, copy and paste.
So now wait a minute.
Do you communicate with John Syracuse the same way you do me in the same lexicon?
If you sent him a text and you sent me a text, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between them?
It was just the wrong, as I say, the wrong window.
I communicate about two to four times as much with John Syracuse as I do with you.
Oh, really?
Oh, because you guys have like a bromance.
I have a bromance.
I don't think he does.
He's too rational to have a bromance.
He's somebody we'll just be texting each other.
He's like one of my relatively few friends.
I see.
I don't have a lot of friends, John, and I don't know how to sext.
And you and I are past the bromance phase where you're sending me texts in the middle of the night.
You want to bring this up?
Because I'll talk about it.
I'll talk about it.
You're a fucking minefield to text with.
I get scared.
I don't want to do it wrong.
You'll get mad if I do it wrong.
Well, maybe that's
See, everybody I know, everybody's a different kind of prickly pear to text with.
We have mutual friends that are very perplexing to text with.
Yes.
Yes.
And lately, if you send Scott Simpson a text, it's like sending a text to 000-000.
Is that right?
Because he doesn't get back to you?
He just doesn't reply to me.
I sometimes get a text out of nowhere from Scott where he says something like, bro, I watched that thing he suggested and it was really good, bro.
Yeah.
No, he doesn't bro me anymore.
And he used to bro me all the time.
He used to bro me and be like, what's up?
I think he's pretty busy.
He works a lot.
He works a lot.
I text with you.
I text occasionally with Dan.
I text a fair amount with John Sarcusa.
I text my friends Max and Alex.
I text them a lot.
I like those guys.
They're great.
They're great guys.
I am prickly to text with.
I get scared of doing it.
No, no.
I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to be critical.
I'm saying you're the soup Nazi of texting.
I don't want to do it wrong.
I don't want to fluster you.
And sometimes you come in very passionate with a passionate thing to talk about, and I don't want to provoke you unintentionally about something by texting wrong, and you think it's about a thing and not about a thing.
Yep, yep, yep.
Did I tell you this?
Somebody said to me the other day, or I asked, I was walking down the street with someone, and you know I like to talk when I'm walking down the street.
And I said... Is there a time you don't like to talk?
Well, but I mean, in particular, if I'm going to talk about something, I'm like, let's go for a walk.
All you do, you do a little sorkin'.
Let's do a little walk and talk.
Walk and talk.
So we're walking along, and I'm like, do you think I have a sense of humor about myself?
I mean, obviously, I have a sense of humor.
Do you think I have a sense of humor about myself?
You asked somebody to tell you that honestly?
Yeah, and there was a long pause.
And I was like, okay, what's this about?
Now, there's a reason I'm asking this question, right?
I've got some doubts.
And now there's a long pause.
You're looking at the same thing you want in the doctor.
You're mostly okay.
Yeah, right.
I want them to say, oh, are you kidding?
You've got a great sense of humor.
And then a long pause.
And then obviously if you're going to pause in a moment like that, you know that the other person can handle it.
You're not jumping right in with some kind of like fill up the space with talk while you think about it.
You're like, I'm going to give you a considered answer, but I'm going to let you stew in it for a second while they're thinking about it.
I'm like, what the fuck?
There's only one right answer to this.
Yes, of course you have a sense of humor.
Well, I mean, what it means to me is that not only is there not a simple answer to this, that if there is a simple answer, it's not the one that you want to hear.
And now they're thinking about thinking.
That's right.
They're thinking about thinking.
And they come back with something very similar to what you just said, which was, I don't want to get this answer wrong.
And I'm like, all right.
It's like your version of do these pants make my butt look big.
Right.
Just even acknowledging that no matter how you answer that, you're not getting out of that clear.
Right.
And it's already there's they've already like laid down some.
I mean, there's napalm in the trees now.
Yeah.
I'm like, I'm like, go on.
Basically confirming their fear.
Right.
I'm like, go on.
And they said, well, you're a little scary.
And the thing about your sense of humor about yourself is that you really like to be right.
about what everybody else's deal is, and you are 94% right about what other people's deal is, which is amazing, but then you are very reluctant to not also be 94% right about yourself.
Ooh.
And I was like, uh-huh.
And now I'm really thinking, now there's the smell of burned plastic coming out.
That's a very thoughtful response.
And they said, you know, you have a sense of humor about yourself, but if someone else makes an observation, like you, yourself, because you know yourself very well, you say very knowledgeable things about yourself and laugh, and we're all meant to laugh with you because we all have Stockholm Syndrome, but...
If someone else says something about you that doesn't match up with what you think you already know, there's a long and cold period that no one wants to be inside of.
And I was like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And they said, I'm starting to feel that cold feeling right now as we walk down the street.
And I was like, well, interesting observation.
Because if you had a sense of humor about yourself in the true sense of the word, you go, holy shit, you're totally right.
Without even pausing, you would go, you're absolutely right.
Oh, my God, I'm such a dingus.
What a great way to put that.
Well, and that's what I was working toward, right?
I mean, it was very much too true.
Yeah.
I'm prepared to seem good natured about this.
I will allow, the court will allow this objection.
And so I'm walking along and I'm like, now does this mean, I'm thinking to myself, does this mean that I, is this one of the definitions of a sense of humor about oneself?
When somebody else says, here's a flaw in you, and you go, ha ha, woo.
Woohoo!
Right.
And because there are other definitions, right?
Like I'm certainly capable of saying like, boy, am I a dummy.
But there's an element of that which is diffusing other people's criticism, right?
Because I get to set the terms of how I'm a dummy.
And by saying it before anyone else can say it, I retain control over it.
Yeah.
And so I'm walking along and I'm like... Well, you're like... When one does that, you're setting the boundaries for it.
And you're also the one who's bringing in exactly the cattle you want to bring in to fill that area.
Yeah, you got to bring in the cattle.
Nobody else is allowed to drop in some sheep there because that's...
That's a classic funny-ish person thing is humor becomes a form of self-defense because you get to sort of inoculate yourself in a way that you choose to.
But then if somebody else does it...
I'm not saying you do that.
Other people.
Other people.
I want to be somebody that people think, ah, he's got a great sense of humor about himself.
What a lighthearted, carefree guy.
But what's confusing to me is that when other people try to describe me, because, oh, this was one of the things.
This is one of the reasons I brought it up.
I was like, you know, no one ever does me the favor of dropping some science on me
about me.
No one ever likes walking along and is like, you know what your problem is?
I was literally kind of asking for it.
But whenever this comes up, I always hear the word scary in the first two to seven words.
And I'm like, scary?
Scary.
That's not a, scary isn't a thing I'm trying to be.
Scary.
I mean, maybe a little, maybe I'm trying to be a little scary.
You know, I don't want to get walked up on by a cop in the middle of the night.
That's not how you think of or describe yourself.
No, you don't want to, I mean, I'm a little scary.
You don't want to like sit down next to me on a park bench and tell me to move my lunch.
But I'm not a man spreader.
I mean, you know, scary.
What does scary really mean?
It's code.
Particularly among my friends, you know.
So anyway, I've been chewing on that quite a bit.
I'll bet.
Quite a bit.
Like, huh, why do I... A, how do I be less scary?
I'm just glad they didn't text it to you.
Well, so if they had texted it to me... If they had texted it to me and included a picture of their boobs, it would have been...
I would have just glanced right over the criticism.
Steaming John.
I would have put a balloon full of hot pudding.
I would have penciled it up in there.
John, we're selling T-shirts for one more week.
We're selling t-shirts.
And one thing that I'm sure a lot of people were listening along to this program waiting for us to say was this is our 200th episode.
Yeah.
And I know you don't care about commemorating things because you don't know that about me.
You're not a numerologist.
I sent you four texts about it yesterday.
Well, yeah, but who who prompted those four texts?
You sent those texts to John Siracusa.
I sent them to my wife.
But in any case, my girl Siracusa.
Uh, yeah, we're selling t-shirts that are amazing as a way of, you know, like where's our parade?
It's right here in the form of these t-shirts.
People really liked it the last time that we did it and we decided to do it again.
Uh, there's some money in this for us, but they're also really cool shirts.
So, you know, you can go to CottonBureau.com or you can go to show notes for this episode, which are at RoderickOnTheLine.com.
I don't make this too long.
But here's the thing.
If we don't, I mean, no matter how much you say this, people are going to hate you.
They're going to unfollow you.
You say like we're selling shirts.
I know.
But here's the thing.
Like Tuesday, next Tuesday, it's too late to buy one of these shirts.
And you know what's going to happen?
There's going to be half a dozen people who go, why didn't you tell me that you were selling shirts for exactly two weeks?
I would have bought one.
That's right.
I've been waiting for years.
Why didn't you tell me?
And they take it as a personal affront.
So I'm trying to forestall that, even though I'm like the TSA guy telling everybody to take out their liquids.
I know there's no point.
I know there's going to be people in the bazooka launchers and like a skin of wine.
I'm just trying to tell you, if you want to get a shirt, now I sound angry, please buy one of our shirts.
I know you're a little scary right now.
I'm being a little scary, aren't I?
Think about the guys in the pork pie hats that are driving Lambrettas in Pennsylvania and the fun that those guys are having.
in the t-shirts that they bought, right?
Think about if you are someone in New Zealand who formerly was not aware of how many Roderick on the Line listeners there are in New Zealand, now put on a t-shirt with some ding rays, walk around in Christchurch or wherever, Wellington, and watch the people flock to you
I'll sing.
Oh, are you a Rotric on the line fan?
Because everyone in New Zealand is a Cockney chimney swimmer.
Have you taken a Pepsi challenge, Gov?
Have you worked?
Hello, hello, hello.
Really worked this pan?
What's all this then?
This is a thing.
You will meet other people.
When you wear a Roderick online shirt, I can tell you because I frequently wear one when it's cold.
And I meet people.
You will meet people.
You will see stories.
And the thing is, they're cool people.
Because nobody who listens to this show is a dork.
Even if you don't want to meet people, even if you have social anxiety, this is a perfect way to meet people in a way that communicates...
I am a Roderick on the line lister.
That doesn't mean I want to.
Yeah.
I mean, like to me, tell me another shirt where people are going to be more tolerant of whatever your introversion thing is.
Right.
Right.
It's not it's not an invitation to a hug.
Right.
It's an invitation.
It's a way of saying, crow, I see you.
That's right.
I see you, crow.
Mm hmm.
So you go to CottonBeer.com, you can get it there.
But I would suggest just go to RoderickOnTheLine.com.
You have a week from today to get this, so we would appreciate it if you would do that.
If you want to help celebrate our 200th episode-aversary, if it's meaningful to you.
It's 1776 for us.
It's definitely a different number.
Then go buy a fucking shirt.
Yeah, that's right.
Do it.
Yeah.
Happy anniversary.
Hey, happy anniversary to you, Merlin.
That was anticlimactic.