Ep. 218: "The Valve"
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Oh, boy.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Fourth time's a charm.
Fourth time's a charm.
What?
Oh, my God.
Now, what caused it that time?
Well, see, here's the thing.
Think about the Internet.
Yeah.
the way it's provided to you i don't know what it's like in other countries but i don't know i don't know what it's like but here in america it's provided to you by a company right yeah even though the internet itself exists it's been a sphere right it's a series of tubes under the rocky mountains in salt lake city
in an old salt mine owned by Jeff Baker.
Is that where the internet mostly is?
It has tendrils that come out via tubes and orbs, but it's largely located in Colorado?
That's my sense of it.
Between Salt Lake and Colorado, there's a giant tunnel that used to be a salt mine that now has a biohazard billboard outside of it.
Okay.
That's smart.
Yeah, so that future generations, when they don't speak languages anymore...
And they're just wandering the desert post-apocalypse.
Here be dragons.
Right.
Exactly.
They see the pointy biohazard sign.
They know that either there's a giant metal concert happening there.
Or the internet.
Or that's where the internet lives and don't mess with it.
Oh, my gosh.
We finally found a way to contain it.
Yeah, right.
But the tubes, the tendrils, let's call them tendrils.
Tendrils, yeah.
The tendrils come out, and then at some point, there is coitus interruptus between the tendrils and me.
And in between, there is a portal.
Let's call it a valve.
Okay.
I should be writing all this down.
You got the cold storage and the spiky signs.
That's where they mainly keep the internet.
And then through a series of tubes, orbs, tendrils, and portals, there are various methods by which the internet does or does not get to John Roderick.
Right.
And the valves are controlled by companies.
Oh, the valves.
Okay.
Right?
In my case, at my office, the valve is controlled by a company called Wave.
John, did you have many, many options for your internet provider at your office?
At my office, Wave Company has the exclusive rights to provide internet.
And that right was negotiated, I think, at a level above my access, right?
I wasn't included in that discussion.
So I can only use the internet provided by Wave, and Wave is very inconsistent.
Sometimes the valve slams shut, and then I am in a situation where I have to take out my big chief notebook and write down some –
Very, very angry letters to various minxes.
Both of these as wheel turns.
And sometimes you fear that your valve may have permanently sealed.
Permanently sealed.
And so I called the customer service and I talked to a nice man.
At a certain point, I yelled at him.
At a certain point, he reverted to, as we've talked about before, customer service formality.
Oh, he got nice.
He did.
He said, sir.
Sir.
And then he said, well, sir, before you swore at me.
When in fact, all I had said was bullshit, which isn't swearing.
I think in the realm of customer service, I'm not a lexiconographer, but I think in the realm of customer service, that's just a response.
Like, did you try plugging it in?
Yeah.
Bullshit is a totally valid response.
Totally valid.
And I got a ton.
He asked me seriously if I had unplugged and replugged in my modem three times.
Yeah.
And that one point he said something.
I don't remember what it was.
And I said, bullshit.
And he said, well, sir, before you swore at me, I was about to tell you to unplug your modem.
And I was like, oh, my God.
So anyway, here I am broadcasting from a separate location where the tubes are clear.
The valve is open for now.
The valve is open.
The tubes are clear.
The Internet is provided by a different company.
This internet, this is Comcast internet.
Another internet provider that is some kind of oligarchy, oligopoly.
And they don't care about me, right?
I've been on the phone with them too.
They don't care about me.
I might have even said bullshit to them.
Hmm.
And what I want is unfettered, unrestricted access to the tubes.
I want to control my own valve.
Yeah.
And I don't – you tell me, Merlin.
What about net neutrality?
Oh.
Can I literally beg you not to get me started on this?
But now you have.
And here's the thing about the valves and the tubes and the orbs and the tendrils and, yes, about the cold storage by the spiky sign in Colorado.
And by the way, it's pronounced Colorado, I found out.
Colorado?
Colorado and Nevada.
Oh, and how are you pronouncing that?
Well, I used to say Nevada and Colorado, and apparently that's not correct.
I found a webpage that tells you how to pronounce states.
Colorado, and now you're saying it's Colorado.
I'm supposed to say Colorado.
But here's the thing, and this is, I think, the vexing part about so much of the technology stuff, is it seems like it either works 90% well or it doesn't work at all.
And when it doesn't work at all...
There's not much recourse except yelling bullshit at somebody you don't know.
There's not much you can do.
And I was trying to, so just in terms of a little bit of Inside Baseball, this is our third, well, counting today's failures, a fourth attempt to record this show in the last week and a half because of your wave problem.
and the inherent valve issues, and you don't have control of the valve.
Right.
So we've had some abortive attempts to do this.
And I was trying to help you troubleshoot it because the error message you were getting, I used the Googles, and I found out that that's for your router.
Yes.
And the router was throwing that message.
So I was trying to help you log into that to see if maybe it needed to be rebooted.
Right.
So here's the thing.
The Wave people now, I'll just interrupt.
The Wave people have the capacity to reboot the router via...
Their own valve.
Assuming all of the tendrils are intact, they should be able to say there is a router here.
There's a modem here.
And I should be able to see if that's working.
So here's what happened.
Here's where the mystery deepens.
They were able to see the router.
That doesn't make you feel better.
And they said, seems fine.
Looks fine from here.
Works for me.
Looks fine from here.
And that's why they were like, try and unplug it.
And I said, listen to me.
I have been, you know, this isn't my first rodeo, which is a good phrase.
I don't usually use it because it's kind of trite.
This isn't my first rodeo.
No.
I was driving in a town called McMinnville, Oregon the other day.
And a guy – That happened in Howie Country.
That's right.
And I was parallel parking and a guy in a very big Dodge Ram truck pulled up right behind me.
And I had my blinker on and my reverse lights on.
And I proceeded to back up in order to get to my parking spot.
Yeah.
At which point he honked his giant horn.
And so I leaned out the window and I said, I'm parallel parking here.
You know, in a kind of, I didn't use a Brooklyn accent, but like parallel parking here, you know what that's from.
We gave him a little ruts of Rizzo.
That's right.
And he leans out his window and he says, that movie's overrated.
No, he's wearing a baseball cap and he has a mustache and his wife is in the truck.
And he says, you ran that stop sign and everything.
referring to a prior stop sign which i had made a free right turn at which is legal in the northwest and maybe i didn't come to a complete stop i slowed and then made a free right right you were respectful he said you ran that stop sign and everything and everything and that's and that's why the horn
That's why he came up behind me, didn't want to give me an inch to parallel park because I had run that stop sign.
Oh, it's time for some frontier justice.
That's right.
And everything.
And so I thought at that moment to yell, is this your first rodeo cowboy?
which I thought would be a good burn.
But then I thought, that's two on the nose.
If that were three lines from a screenplay, it would never pass muster, though, because it's such an odd exchange.
Yeah, and so what I said, because this is the problem, right?
If you edit yourself in the moment,
Sometimes you do it, sometimes it works, but a lot of times you get in front of yourself, right?
And so I should have said, is this your first rodeo cowboy?
Oh, that would have been devastating.
But instead, I said, is this your first day?
Because I got halfway in and I was like, don't say rodeo.
Is this your first day?
It sounds like this has been translated from maybe Polish.
Yeah.
Is this your...
You run the stop sign and everything.
Is this your first day?
And so, of course, he like big diesel like takeoff around me on his way to the other side of McMinnville, like to the feed and seed store because it might have been his first day.
Oh, you might have triggered him a little bit.
Well, but then I sat in my car and I was like, God, is this your first day?
Nobody's going to be like, sick burn.
All the other people walk, all the hippie moms walking the streets of McMinnville are going to be like, is this your first day?
They're going to walk home.
They're going to be thinking about that.
Was that a burn or what?
So anyway, you were about to go on a rant about Internet portals.
No, no.
It's just that I know what you mean about the valves, though, because I get this.
I'm going to say something shocking here.
I'm not.
huge fan of cable town the company but uh but the comcast service has been fast and solid for me mostly for the past few years with some crazy exceptions and you know the the thing is that in order to have the technology that we have there are so many layers of abstraction to make us not have to see the bits and bytes
And that benefits us a lot of the time when it works extremely well.
You don't want to even think about the bits and bytes.
But then when something does go wrong, there's not they don't easily expose.
I think about this all the time on my phone.
If something's not working on my phone, if my messages are coming up in the wrong order or not at all, there's not a button that says show me what's going wrong.
No, you can do nothing.
and this is super true to the 11 millionth power with the internet because if your internet goes out you well unless you're on your phone and wireless you can't even go to the website and check it out it's the ultimate network diagnostic says the network is not working kind of right right so i mean one handy thing to do is like luckily with comcast you can go in and if you log in with your phone using you know your regular old lte service or whatever you can go in and see if there's any problems in your area but then you get these mystery me problems this is almost done i swear
But a fairly common twice a year thing for me with Comcast is their DNS servers go down.
Oh, yeah.
And DNS is just for people who care.
Do not service.
Do not service.
That's right.
No shirt, no shoes, right to reserve.
It's basically the system that says that this IP address equals this name and vice versa.
So the thing is, though, you experience that as websites don't come up.
Because it's using the names of them usually, not the IP addresses of those things.
But how would a normal person ever... That's me.
Well, how... Okay, so I know to do this because it took several times of this happening to hear like every couple... Few months, oh, the DNS servers go down.
So one thing you can do is you can go, you can log into, in my case, my router is an Apple router.
I can go into the Apple router and I can say, use these different DNS servers, avoid the Comcast servers...
I don't think many people are going to think to do that.
If their Game of Thrones isn't showing up, it's not necessarily going to occur to them to go find alternate IP addresses to use as DNS servers.
That would not occur to me.
And even then, it doesn't always work because that may not be the problem.
And so...
Well, you know, it's really vexing.
And you start to feel like you got morgelands.
Like you go to your doctor and you say, I have threads coming out of my skin.
And here's a matchbox full of skin and mushrooms.
And so what do we need to do to fix this?
And they go, that's not a thing.
And that's how you feel when you're talking to these folks.
Yes, that is how I feel.
And so not to press a bruise here, but this is still, I'm giving that you're at a third location, that this is not a resolved issue with your wave.
No, because then the person, the very nice man, and we ended up being good friends.
Did you reconcile?
We did because he went away to talk to somebody and put me on hold with some jazzy music.
And when he came back, I had calmed down.
And he had calmed down.
And then he was talking to me, not in his like training voice, but he was talking to me in a human voice.
And I sat and listened to his human voice.
And then I said, I'd like to apologize for my outburst earlier.
Oh, good for you.
And he said, thank you, sir.
And then we proceeded from there in a very human way.
And at the end, he said, I understand how frustrating this is.
I would be frustrated if I were in your situation.
And I said, you're going off script now.
Yeah.
I don't think he's supposed to say that.
No, you're apologizing.
Like, hey, let's keep this between us.
If this call is being recorded for quality assurance, let's hope nobody reviews it because they're going to see that you're being a human being.
So then he said, I have the following, because you have to be there for Wave to come.
Check it out.
So he was like, I have the following appointments.
Monday at 11.
And I was like, too late.
I have a podcast at 10 on Monday.
All right, what about Tuesday at 11?
Well, that would be after the podcast.
So that's no good.
What about Sunday at 2?
Do you think I want to be at my office Sunday at 2 waiting for six hours for a wave guy?
Yeah.
Like Sunday.
That's Sunday fun day.
It says right in the name.
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
I'd be at a monster truck rally.
Yeah.
So what it ended up was none of the times were convenient to me because guess what?
It's never going to be convenient for me to go sit at my office without internet for four to six hours waiting for your repairman to come.
It's like your basement is full of water and they want you to just go sit in waist deep water for a couple to eight hours until they maybe show up.
Yeah, go sit in the basement.
Sir, we can't fix that until you go sit in the water.
So for me, what that means is go sit in front of my computer from 1997 and go through old files and try to remember why I put that in a file.
Oh, that's no good.
You know, like some of them are like, why did I put that in a file?
Yeah.
Isn't it weird how long we used computers before they were on the internet?
It seems so weird now.
I guess I'll look at my text files.
I remember taking some little, you know, what were the floppies that weren't floppy?
Yeah, I know what you mean, like the little ones with the little silver slidey thing on them.
Yeah, little Pop-Tarts.
They still call those, you can call that a floppy disk, that's all right.
Yeah, but how would you distinguish that from, like, a giant seven-inch across flop?
Right, you got the big PC floppy disks with the little record player in them, and then you got the little ones, and you get, like, what?
Like, you get an, was it 800K or?
Yeah, 800 full-on K. Right, and you could put tape over the little notch and make them bigger.
There used to be a trick.
Yeah, that was a trick, right?
Because you'd flip them, it would flip the switch.
Double-side double density.
Double-sided double density.
I remember that.
That was like a double-sided tape.
That was like 120-minute bass of tape.
That was a huge technology.
Yes, it was.
Anyway, I had a bunch of the little toaster-sized ones, toaster poppin' fresh floppies.
Oh, like a Pepperidge farm bread, that size?
Yeah.
And I took them in to the Stranger, Seattle's weekly alternative paper, back before I was feuding with them the most recent time, because they had some old Mac, some Lisa, that they actually had hooked up to their system.
Where you could put in floppies and translate that material into a contemporary format.
So you could get like old Microsoft Word files or whatever.
Yeah.
And so I went in there and I had like – I had 800 files where I had sat down after smoking a doobie.
And written some – what we would call now a blog post but which at the time was a post for a zine that I had the idea to publish one day.
Wow.
Which I never did publish.
A zine and all this stuff, all this writing that was at a time before I had ever published anything where I would sit down at the typewriter or the computer later and say, a writer writes.
Yeah.
And so I would write.
I would write, write, write.
And the writing would be garbage.
But I would fill the page with writing about my feelings or observations.
And I think via that process did actually develop a writing style.
And I have like hundreds and hundreds of these pages and I translated them all over into a format that I can now even go into my 1998 computer, waist deep in water, waiting for the internet.
Yeah.
And read some of these wonderful, wonderful historical posts, unposted posts.
That's what we'll call them.
Mm-hmm.
And then be unable to either delete them because they're part of the historical record or edit them because, again, that would be – that's like going back and putting shockwaves around the destruction of a planet.
It's kind of like, oh, yeah, it's kind of your Paul McCartney problem.
Right?
Yeah.
Don't go back.
You know, never, never go back.
Always go forward.
Yeah.
And so what are they?
They're just these albatrosses.
I don't want nobody's ever going to read them.
I'm never going to publish them in a zine.
Do I give them to my daughter when I die?
I'm not sure how I feel about this story.
It's getting kind of sad.
Yeah.
Every one of my stories, if you pursue it long enough, turns into another year passing where then death is raking up my year into a garbage bag that looks like a pumpkin.
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Right?
That sits in death's front yard.
Happy holidays.
Oh, God.
It just never gets better, does it?
Nothing ever gets better.
Well, how could it?
No.
Nobody's working on making it better.
You know, it's Sisyphus all over again, right?
You're pushing a modem up a hill.
Sisyphusian.
Yeah.
I think people are trying to make more rather than better.
Don't you think?
Yeah.
Yeah.
More, do better.
Yeah, and just more and slightly different, but not better.
You don't get better that much so often.
Right.
What was the last time you upgraded or updated?
Let's say upgraded or updated.
Anything where you felt like that...
was not just new, but there was a marked improvement in what was already there.
Right.
Not that often.
And it's usually, feel free to disagree, but sometimes by getting to the fact that the operating system on the phone gets better, the people who make the apps that I use are sometimes able to do something really quite amazing and actually very useful from the minute I get it.
That is one place where I do see that improvement.
Now, is that something where having millions, literally millions of apps on the App Store has led to life being better?
Absolutely not.
It's a shit show.
But no, in regular life, I mean, our friend John Syracuse has talked about us with toaster ovens.
You think about the toaster oven of your childhood.
To me, that's a pretty great example.
The toaster oven that we had...
It was before Black & Decker.
Later it would be a Black & Decker model, I think.
But there was this one toaster oven that everybody had in 1978.
I remember it.
It was flawless.
I mean, not flawless.
Well, they still work now.
If you find one in a thrift store, plug it in.
Oh, there's so many grandmas and grandpas that still have this thing.
And it works great.
It does what it needs to do.
It makes toast fast and dependably.
It has an analog dial that lets you choose exactly how dark you want it to be.
And you can also make a Stouffer's meal in it.
Yeah, Stouffer's.
And like, you know, so I mean, yeah, whatever.
Old man talk.
But, you know, instead now you go to Walgreens and you get a toaster for $19.
It's just it's a piece of shit.
So I don't know.
I mean, well, knobs.
Can we just say knobs?
Yeah.
Why can't we have more knobs?
Nobs are such a good idea.
I don't want a digital display.
I don't want a button.
I don't want to scroll through something.
Give me a knob.
It's a great scroll.
You actually literally scroll.
Especially like a ticky, ticky, ticky knob.
I like a ticky, ticky where you can go like, you know what three notches means on your old clock radio or you know like in your car stereo.
Think about an old AC Delco where you knew exactly how to turn to get right to Q105.
You knew exactly how much motion it took.
Yeah.
Do you want to know a secret?
Yes.
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell?
Who are listening to the Beatles this weekend?
Who are listening to the Beatles this weekend?
They're a good band.
Yeah.
You know, George.
George wrote some kind of mean songs.
He had a little bit of that Rolling Stones fever.
He was really mad at women for a while.
Well, George, you know, like still waters run deep.
Yeah.
Except in the case of George.
Still waters barely run.
He got way better, even by Revolver.
Something like I Want to Tell You is a much better song.
He's my favorite Beatle, obviously.
Whoa, really?
Yeah.
Okay, I don't know how I missed that.
Yeah.
okay continue um but he he was a dark little dude and that's why he went to the to um the swami land he went to swami right and then uh then harry krishna which is actually harry krishna nevada nevada nevada
Harry Harry.
You wouldn't call it Harry Krishna, right?
Harry Krishna.
That's my father's name.
Don't call me Mr. Krishna.
But George... Actually, Krishna's monster.
Yeah.
Harry Krishna.
He changed it at Elvis Island.
I always felt like the – whatever was dark and fucked up about Lennon was right on the face of things.
Whatever was dark about Paul, his true darkness, Paul's darkness I think was – Paul is probably the darkest man that ever lived.
But it is so Barry.
He's like Voldemort?
I think that Paul, if you took the They Live human face mask off of Paul, you would find a many tentacled Cthulhu.
Really?
Yeah.
Ringo is the only person, the only beetle who is genuinely nice.
Like Ringo is is purely a nice person.
I believe that.
But George, there's something there's something dark in in George that, you know, that that he tried to solve.
Let's call it.
Let's say George tried to solve his darkness.
And I and I admire him for that.
That's one of the reasons he's my favorite.
He's also the smallest beetle.
No.
You tell me Ringo is taller than George.
Well, I don't know if he's taller than George, but he's bigger than George.
Right?
Like smallness.
George is kind of narrow.
George is narrow.
I think if you put them in a mass spectrometer, George would have this.
Beetles in a spectrometer.
Oh, my.
But George is my favorite.
He's got more molecular weight.
Ringo does.
Yeah, Ringo.
Yeah, his molecules are bigger.
Okay.
But there are a few songs by George that just make me as happy as any music.
And it's – I can't explain exactly why.
I'm sorry, I'm typing now.
That's fine.
I can't explain exactly why these George Harrison tunes made me happier than almost any other Beatles song.
But they did, right?
Like, I Want to Tell You.
Does that not make you happy?
Just to think about it now.
I like everything about that song.
It's really...
He feels hung up, but he doesn't know why.
But it's also just the music.
I'm just kind of singing it in my head.
It's very angular for the time.
It's kind of got a weird vibe for the time.
I mean, that's heavy.
That's a heavy jam.
And it's got that cool bridge.
But Savoy Truffle is a thing that you just go WTF.
That's not – nobody puts that on the list of best Beatles songs.
But I really, really like it.
And then Within You Without You.
That's where we're talking about the space between ourselves?
That's right.
Okay.
George Harrison, Beatles songs.
And then you got that solo record, which is just like, whoo.
Right.
What is life?
I mean, come on.
Those lyrics make no sense at all.
You're a lyrics guy.
I'm just talking about... Man, he's got so many killer riffs, the horns on that.
Like, ah...
Oh, my God.
Now, I suggest to you this.
Yeah.
Go into the internet.
Okay.
I'm going in now.
Go up the stream through the valve.
Past the tendrils.
Through a tendril all the way to the cave.
Into the bridge orb.
Don't listen to it right now, obviously, because we're doing a podcast.
Right.
But there is a track on the internet of...
clapton playing guitar on what is life oh it's like an isolated track well wait a minute he george so i love this because of the story that it suggests george had clapton in his pal his wife's dealer
And Clapton laid down a track on What Is Life that George did not use.
Oh, What Is Life's second lead guitar?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, and he's got – but it's a rhythm.
It's a rhythm track.
So there's a – if he plays a lead, I didn't hear it.
But he does play a rhythm track that's very, very Clapton that's all like –
he's just got like he's got a whole part it's not just uh he's not just laying down a strumming acoustic he's got like a he's doing a bit throughout that's claptony and i was like is this in there as i was listening to it i was like is this in the track i can't believe it this is such a like claptony chicka chicka
It's like a, it's like, it's Chukalin.
And I don't remember that song, Chukalin.
I don't remember Chukalin.
I remember it having a, like a six chord, like a, you know what I mean?
That's what I remember the rhythm guitar being.
Well, so then you go listen to the track and you realize George had, George had, uh, uh, George Clapton come in.
George Clapton.
And play this track.
And then he was like, when they were mixing it, he said, it's not really working.
And he pulled it out because it would have totally changed the tune.
And that's a thing that George Harrison can do, not use the Clapton track.
Like if Clapton came in and played some Chuglin thing on a Long Winter's song, I'd feel somewhat obligated to have it in the track.
But George is like, no, that's not what I'm going for.
And I thought that was pretty cool.
Like, mute the Clapton track.
Okay, I'll check that out.
I'm trying to see some of the ones here.
I think you'll like it.
I'm looking at a few here.
I want to tell you, I mean mine, I need you, Savoy Truffle.
Who am I without you?
You know, Harvey Danger covered that tune when I was in the band.
Really?
There's a local band in Tallahassee that covered that, too.
It's such a great little three-chord pop song.
Yeah, it is.
It's nice.
Oh, man.
Did you know, I don't know if I've ever told you this, we did not have a toaster oven in my home when I was growing up.
you did not have a toaster oven in your really no toast no toaster oven we had a toaster well i know you got you and your sister and you got your mystery brother you never talk about but this is you and your sister living with your mom that's right no toaster no toaster oven was it on like ethical moral grounds why would you not this was this was one of the this is like not having a calculator in your house well we had calculators sure use them all the time she's not afraid of science and math no but your mom's the original stem baller
That's right.
She had, we had one of the first.
She probably made one, John.
My mom, I don't think made a calculator, but she knew how to use a graphing calculator.
Hot.
Which I never figured out.
No offense.
But, you know, I could find a, I could, I could push the cosine button and watch what it did.
That's going to look good on your CV.
You know, I spent many an afternoon pushing the cosine button and wondering what that meant.
Shell.
Shell oil.
Boobs.
But here's the weird business is that I had never seen a toaster oven.
We just didn't have one.
It never came up.
My dad didn't have one either.
And then later on in life, like when I went to college, some kid had a toaster oven in his room.
And I was like, what's this miraculous thing?
You can put a piece of pizza in there?
And it makes it like – So much better than a microwave.
Pizza heat?
Yeah.
We had no access to this technology.
And I think if we wanted to heat up a pizza, we turned on the oven.
Yep.
uh but we did it we were early adopters of microwaves okay so so your mom did have a microwave we got a microwave uh fairly early in the consumerization of of uh nuclear power and the youngsters today the millenniums will not remember that we we got our first one and i want to say 77 70 probably 78 oh we were a little later than that but but no but you know why because it was you know it's gonna be like having hiroshima in your kitchen
yeah you turn it on then you run into the other room you're telling me you got like nuclear technology in your oven you think that door is going to protect you yeah well so we got ours in about 1980 but it was the size of a stereo speaker and i mean the size of a 1980 stereo speaker sure right it it had it was the if you could put two woofers but the usable space inside was still kind of surpassingly small there was a lot of stuff in the oven
By 1980, they had made it so that it's not like you're going to put a turkey in there.
And if you did put a turkey in there, it would either explode or become like it would have the consistency of flan.
I tried to cook a chicken once in college.
I tried to cook a chicken in a microwave.
It was unspeakable what I did to this animal.
What did it do?
Well, you know, there was a time when – I'm sorry I took you off your story – but there was a time when you could get microwaves.
Because in the original vision of microwaves, I think the marketing geniuses realized that the microwave part – it's sort of like Steve Jobs and the iPhone.
We're like, we want to give you this internet communicator, but we had to call it a phone.
Otherwise, you wouldn't buy it.
Sure.
this is a whole new technology but it also had to feel like a regular oven so it would do stuff like browning you'd have like a little like a kind of a burner in there where you could brown things because people like why would i because people's idea about microwaves was they're dangerous they make your food toxic and it doesn't really cook anything except maybe scrambled eggs and then that's really gross that was the thought or you know bacon you can make bacon in your microwave and by the way i've got a great bacon recipe for you
So this one did not have that.
If it did have that, I didn't use it.
I didn't really understand how to use a microwave.
And it was everything you can imagine being horribly wrong about this food.
It was kind of like a big pile of human skin.
Yeah, it was yellow.
Oh, no.
It was yellow and kind of crackly, and it was very, very unpleasant, and I had to just let it go.
It was a little bit of a crackling rosy.
So you just tossed the whole chicken.
What are you going to do?
I hate throwing food away, but – and also I used to cook in my bathroom in college.
That's a different issue.
The microwave that we had in 1980, we continued to have –
Through the 80s into the 90s.
And then when I moved to Seattle, I took said microwave.
Did it have a handle that went ka-chunk?
It had a, oh, it went ka-chunk.
It went ka-chunk like a vault door.
Yeah, but like the deep freeze at a restaurant.
And it had like a latch.
It didn't have just like a little door that swung open.
You had to go ka-chunk.
No, it wasn't an industrial food service one.
It had a wood grain finish.
Right, so did ours.
But I put it on top of the refrigerator in my apartment in Seattle, and it was the same width as the refrigerator.
It sat proudly on top of the refrigerator, giant microwave.
And then one day I came home, I opened the door,
And opened my front door and was greeted with a blast of hot air.
And I was like, what the?
Hey?
And I could see into my apartment and I saw that all the windows were steamed.
And I was like, what the who?
What?
Did I leave the shower on?
Is there someone?
And then for a brief moment, I was like...
is there some amazing woman that's come into my apartment and is showering?
And when I walk into my place, she's going to get out of the shower.
She's probably in trouble and say, right?
She's in trouble.
She needs a place to go.
She wants to get a quick shower.
She's either in trouble or she says in a Russian accent, we've been watching you or some many movies I've seen led me to believe this would be, that is a fairly plausible explanation for why you have steam in your house.
Sure.
I kept – I stood there and I was like, this is – I then mimed taking out my pistol from inside my shoulder holster between my tweed jacket and my turtleneck.
And then I peered into the bathroom thinking that there would be a lovely Russian spy.
Who stepped out.
But in fact, there was not.
And then I walked into the kitchen and the microwave was on.
Oh.
And had been on all day.
With nothing in it?
Turned itself on.
No.
And I was like, what?
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no.
What the what?
Yeah.
And I ran in and I pushed stop on the button and it did not stop.
It did not want to stop.
Oh.
And so I think even in 1996 when this was, I think I did absolutely feel like maybe the entire apartment was full of radon.
Yeah.
And I ran out of it.
That's one of the first rules.
I mean, one of the rules is you never put metal in the microwave.
And the other one is you never have nothing in the microwave.
Right.
And I never really got the full explanation about why that would be.
I can speculate.
But I think radon is a very – that's a pretty predictable outcome.
Radon or – Thetans?
Yeah, Thetans.
So then I ran back in, unplugged it.
And then stayed out of there for the rest of the day, came back in very suspiciously, still no one interesting in the shower.
And I immediately set about moving out of this apartment.
And when I moved out, I left the microwave because this was also the apartment.
This was the apartment where the manager said, I did not make the rat.
God made the rat.
And so – Look at your lease, sir.
And so it says right there, God made the rat.
What is it?
Force majeure?
That's God rat.
That's not my rat.
Yeah.
So this was the apartment that – so here's how I left the apartment.
Rat under the refrigerator.
I took all the light bulbs and I left the microwave.
Yeah.
So he either had a real mess to clean up or he just rented the apartment with the microwave.
I don't know if he plugged it back in and it started running again.
I don't know which one of the little synapses, the open-closed doors, the on-offs, the ones and zeros.
I don't know which one shorted out so that this thing was like, I'm on now.
You can't keep me off.
Can you imagine if you've been away for the weekend?
That's how my mind works.
Imagine if that went on for like a Liberty weekend.
Yeah.
How long before it melted itself?
I mean, it steamed up the house.
I don't even know where it got all that steam.
Isn't that one of the rules of robotics?
You're not allowed to hurt people.
Right.
You can't hurt other microwaves.
Right.
Don't go on by yourself.
Right.
Stay on the road.
Stay out on the moors.
What are the other rules of robot microwaves?
Right.
Stay out of the Moors.
Yeah, never initiate a land war in Asia.
Right, no sushi on Sunday.
Right, don't invade Russia in the fall.
Go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
All these things should have been in the microwave's prime directive.
Why are we not putting out e-books?
We could help so many people.
Do you know how many people have microwaves and don't really know all the laws and rules?
There are 40 Merlin Man parody accounts on Twitter, but there's no Merlin Man e-books.
Oh, yeah, we get the bot that does that.
I would be indistinguishable from my actual account.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
I don't think my account is weird, but people tell me it's weird.
John Syracuse thinks my account is very weird, and I don't get that.
You make references to things that are flying through the sky.
Yeah, that can all be Googled.
Well, but there goes.
Yeah.
And you see it and you refer to it.
But in a lot of cases, no one else saw it.
Oh, I see.
See what I mean?
Yeah.
Like two policemen saw it.
They chased it over a hill.
They're not going to talk about that like a pilot, like a pilot.
The last thing a pilot's going to do is say, oh, yeah, yeah, I saw an UFO.
Yeah.
You know, that's a quick trip to retirement right there.
I watched a I watched an actual like not a documentary, but like someone was filming in a control tower at some point in the 1970s.
And there was a there was an UFO and the control guys were talking to the pilots and there were like three pilots that saw it.
And they all were describing it to each other and they were all talking about it.
And then at the end, the air traffic controller was like, do you want to report this?
And there was a long pause and you could hear the pilots go, not me.
Negative.
I don't want to report it.
And it just went downstream.
Oh, Jiminy Christmas.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
Mm-hmm.
Because the thing is, we talked about this before, but with regards to the Anchorman and the UFOs, if you're in a cockpit a lot, and forgive my French, but if you're in there a lot, you've seen a lot of stuff.
You've identified a lot of stuff as this thing and not that thing.
And it seems to me if you've done that for even a few years...
If you see something that doesn't seem right, I mean, you know, maybe there's corner cases, but they know a weather balloon.
They know stuff like that.
That sounds like a jam up to me.
And a lot of the time that you're piloting and looking at stuff, the whole game is what is that and how far away is it?
Right.
Like what altitude is it?
What direction is it moving?
How far away is it?
And what speed is it going?
That seems really hard.
When we sit on our back porch, sometimes we like to sit on our back porch and just look at the sky.
And one of our little games is to notice how many things are planes because I guess there's a flight pattern out over the Pacific, which is what we look at from our back porch.
And there are times when my daughter and I will both look up and go, those planes look way too close.
And they look like they're heading in the same direction.
Obviously, they must not be.
I've looked at FlightAware.
You ever spend time on FlightAware?
You must have.
Huh?
It's a nice program.
I spent a lot of time looking at flight patterns.
But in this case, now I know that's because I don't know how far apart those things actually are.
Yeah, they know.
But a pilot, man, I don't know, man.
So those guys, I mean, you ever look out the window of a plane that you're flying in and then all of a sudden a plane going the other way goes by really fast?
Happened to me last year and it scared the shit out of me.
I thought there's no way this is a good idea.
Whoa, there it goes.
It's one thing to be able to see a plane, but to be able to actually see that, oh, I can see that this plane is going this much faster or slower than my plane is too goddamn close.
You get what they call the parallax effect.
Get a little bit of a parallax effect.
But so that's all pilots do all day long.
They're like...
Oh, here's the thing.
And then they call in and they say, I see the thing.
Or the tower calls them and says, do you see that thing?
And you go, yeah, it's 2,000 feet above me and it's moving in this direction.
Like that's it.
That's all they do.
So when they say, I don't know what that is, but that doesn't belong here.
And here's how fast it's moving.
Here's how big it is.
Here's how far away it is.
And the tower goes, hmm, I either see that or I don't.
Let's call over to the military base and see what they say.
And the military base predictably says, not one of ours.
Then what do you do?
But you don't want to report it because then you're going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
And at this point, it's like calling wave.
We know what I mean?
They're going to return no.
They're going to be like, what?
Looks fine from here.
That's not weird.
They're going to say, reset your router.
That's right.
Just unplug it.
Not into it.
Not into it.
George Harrison, modems.
You had something else.
Microwaves.
You know what's great about FlightAware?
You know these programs that allow you to, and it might even be FlightAware, that allow you to put in the tail numbers of aircraft.
You can do that at FlightAware, yeah.
Yeah.
Or the registration number of a boat and find out who owns it and what the story is.
Oh, I didn't know that.
That's interesting.
There's a boat one, too, that will tell you every boat that's on the water.
and all their IDs, and you can click on them and see.
So if you're in a place and you see a giant yacht and you're like, what asshole owns that yacht?
Right.
You can click it.
You just gotta go over to Asshole Aware and put in the boat number.
And they're like, ah, it's Sergey Brin.
No, no, no.
He's a wonderful person.
Wonderful man.
Helps a lot of people.
I think he's listening to us right now on his Google Glass.
Hello.
Hello.
But the other day, John Hodgman was somewhere
Probably London.
And he sent me a picture of a Learjet that was painted all black.
A flat black Learjet.
And right on the front of it was the old Woody Woodpecker.
Like a...
With the extra elongated bill.
No, no, just the – oh, the long bill, right, but no body, just the head.
Like a brush.
The same tattoo that was on – The guy in – What's-its-face in Raising Airs?
John Matuzak.
John Matuzak.
Why do I know that?
And also Nicolas Cage.
They had the same tattoo because they were, what, brothers?
Mm-hmm.
We don't know.
We don't know.
That's one of the mysteries of Raising Arizona.
Sure.
Were they what?
Frat brothers?
No.
Brothers of another mother?
Brothers of another mother?
What's the story there?
Boom.
We'll never see it because he's blown up.
Spoiler alert.
Oh, yeah.
That was sad.
I think he's one of the great ex-boxing actors.
oh he was a boxer i think he was a boxer this is before they had ultimate fighting this is back when they just had boxing uh was he a fighter by his trade by john matuzak yeah did he carry a reminder of every glove that laid him down or cut him till he cried out his anger and his pain shame shame john wait john matu no wait not john john matuzak was a football player who am i thinking of
The guy.
No, Randall Tex Cobb.
Randall Tex Cobb.
I even had heard that name because I probably Googled him one time because I thought he was fascinating.
Six foot three, born 1950.
He did boxing and karate.
You know, I'm six foot three.
No.
He seems bigger than me.
Yeah.
Isn't that funny how that works?
Is that a forced perspective thing, John?
Well, I think it's because a lot of Hollywood actors are small in stature.
How tall is Nicolas Cage?
I bet they say he's 5'10".
Or I bet they say six foot tall, but he's really 5'9".
Okay, I'm going to say Nicolas Cage is 6'1".
Nicolas Cage.
No H. No H. No, I'm going now.
Nicolas Cage.
He's related to... Nicolas Cage.
Feet.
Nicolas Cage.
No, Nicolas Cage is 6'0", according to you.
Yeah, see, that means 5'9".
I'm two inches taller than Tom Cruise, turns out.
Yeah, he's not a tall person.
John Travolta is 6'2".
No.
Yeah, that seems like a stretch.
Baloney.
Sylvester Stallone, 5'10", please.
Please.
No chance.
Have you seen him?
I think he's littler than that.
Somebody I know just published a photo of themselves on their zine, and they were standing next to Sylvester Stallone, and he was the size of a waste paper basket.
Yeah.
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He was like an office, an office waste paper basket.
Yeah.
His nose was wider than he was tall.
Oh, dear.
Anyway, Hodgman sent me this picture of this airplane and he said, let's buy this airplane and went to the site, went, followed the flight aware to the site and it was owned by the owned by an LLC and
called something dumb.
Something like Little Woody or I don't know what it was.
Is that what you call a shell corporation, John?
I think it was a situation where somebody with more money than brains
I'm going to get my Learjet through a broker.
I'm going to buy some Learjet from Glenn Frey.
The great Glenn Frey estate.
And I'm going to rattle can it black and put a Woody Woodpecker on it.
And then people will know I'm coming.
Right?
That's what I want.
I want to land in a regional airport in my black Learjet, and I want people to be like, I don't even know about FlightAware, but I want to download it just to find out who this playa is.
It's really, it's so noble to get to that point in life where you're successful enough that nobody tells you what an asshole you are.
Ha ha!
What do you think the finishes are?
We can do that.
We can do that.
We can paint it black.
Sure.
You betcha.
You betcha, Mr. Guy.
Any chance you want a woodpecker on there?
So on the inside, I'm thinking either it is like a super 80s interior, like mauve linoleum, right?
Because you got it from Glenn Frey.
Yeah.
Or it's some situation where he took a lot of bench seats out of a Ford F-150 or like out of an E-350 van and just bolted them in because he just bought the shell.
And he was like, this thing needs an interior.
And he got a bunch of seats from a bus.
But I highly doubt old little Woody.
I don't think his Learjet is like custom appointments inside.
Yeah.
yeah all uh all hat no cowboy all hat no cattle is that no cattle all hat no cattle is this your first day all hat no cowboy is what you say about a cowboy ghost boo partner yeah death is raking up him too oh my gosh he's just pushing the cowboy out up the hill
Never gets any better.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
So let me ask you this.
Yeah.
If you were going to have – if somebody gave you a jet.
Okay.
Let's say, first of all, that you had money.
Yeah.
All right?
Sure.
Here we go.
Let's imagine that you have money and enough money.
I'm going to need a minute for this one, but sure.
Okay.
Get the gears turning.
I know you're going to have to oil.
You're going to get an oil can out and start oiling those.
I'm going to put on my VR headset.
you have money enough money that you that it's now reasonable that if you traveled you would not want to fly commercial anymore okay yep yep yep because that's a tremendous inconvenience you have to wait around you have to sit with other people they don't serve kentucky fried chicken nothing's gold sometimes you want to leave when you want to leave you gotta go you want to get there yep
Because you've got money now, which means you're important enough that you have to be placed.
I'm Mr. Guy.
I got to be placed and I got to get back to my bedroom in Manhattan because that's literally the only place I can sleep.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
You need your pillow.
My pillow.
But you're not going to bring your pillow.
No, I'm not a monster.
Because your pillow stays in your bed.
That's how you know where it is.
So in this model, somebody gives me a jet and let's just stipulate maybe a place to keep it.
And then for the sake of argument, I have enough money to do something with it.
Yeah.
You have enough money, A, to maintain it.
B, to keep a pilot on call.
Oh, boy.
C, to pay the exorbitant gas bills that attenuate every time you turn the lights on.
Oh, God.
Oh, I know.
But the thing is, you have enough money that you don't have to think about any of this stuff.
You charge your executive assistant with it, and then the bills get paid.
You never think about it.
Here's your jet.
It costs you $250,000 a year to...
just so that you can fly to wherever it is you need to fly.
Yeah, but for a guy like me, that's a rounding error.
Right, exactly.
It's just the interest payment on your boat.
Yeah, right.
Now, how would you configure your jet airplane?
Okay.
I'm not super clear on the constraints, but I would say would I be taking my family places?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Do I have the same family or now that I've got money, do I have a different family?
Well, I think you're going to have to have the same family you have, but you could add additional families up to four.
Okay.
So sliding doors.
I got it.
Okay.
And also your family doesn't have to work.
Your daughter no longer has to work or go to school.
That'd be nice if she didn't have to work anymore.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, she gets to come out.
She doesn't have to thread the needles at the thimble factory anymore.
Yeah.
That's true.
Testing out the thimbles.
Those tiny little fingers.
Ow!
Ow!
This thimble goes back.
But I want to buy Shopkins.
I have to work at the thimble factory.
So you're all just flying around.
You're going places.
Oh, I think you would have like five bathrooms and a pretty nice kitchen and places like soundproof rooms for everyone.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And see, the thing is, this is all speculation because I haven't been on a lot of fancy jets.
A big jet.
Everybody gets their own stuff.
I've seen a lot of fancy jets.
We were watching Sherlock last night and we saw a fancy jet in that, on the inside of that.
Of course, I've seen the Republican president's jet many times.
I've seen the Air Force One movie.
Most of those seem fairly unambitious.
It seems like they basically go nice chairs, more leg room, a table.
And maybe like a wet bar.
But not really.
You're right.
They don't really go for it.
They don't.
It's not very fantastical.
It isn't like a psychedelic 60s idea of a sex jet.
Like it's it's very it seems most of these I know they're very costly.
Now, if I want to get like a like a Learjet or a Gulfstream, we're looking at like five million dollars.
Oh, it's a lot depending on, you know, it goes up very quickly from like, oh, that's an expensive indulgence to that's a ludicrous thing.
Yeah.
that you would have to that there's frankly no justification for like no ceo is so important that he needs to show his face like the more important a ceo is i would think the less likely he would actually have to get his face in front of other people that's a really good point let me ask you this pop quiz hot shot um how many rack rate first class round trip flights per year would you need to spend to make it worth the effort to have a company jet
Answer any way you want.
You would have to be in the air all the time.
Really?
You would have to be a supervillain that was getting refueled in midair.
Oh, my goodness.
And never touch the ground again.
It's that costly.
Well, just the airplane.
Like a brand new Gulfstream 2.
Gulfstream.
I think they were on five last I checked.
Two.
Oh, Gulfstream.
Oh, that's right.
Gulfstream V. Let's say Gulfstream V. And let's see.
Oh, it's best.
$36 million as of 1998.
I don't even know what the latest Gulfstreams are.
Named by owners as the best in value business aircraft.
$36 million in 1998.
Yeah.
12 hours nonstop.
Here you can get a used one here at GlobalAir.com.
Oh, is that right?
So a 1999 Gulfstream 5 is only $14,900,000 now.
So it retains its value pretty well.
So this is one of those things that you wouldn't want to make it too fucking weird.
You wouldn't want to have like a small abattoir in it because that would take some of the retail value away.
I think if you – it's like a house.
If you decorate it too closely to your own style, you are going to have a hard time selling it later.
I went and looked at a house in Tacoma the other day that was like a beautiful four-story tall Victorian.
But it had been decorated by a couple of eccentrics.
I'm going to say a husband and wife team of eccentrics.
And the outside of the home was covered with – it had trombones stapled to it.
That sounds eclectic.
I'd never seen the like and I was like, wow.
Don't see that every day.
So when you thought to put this house on the market, you didn't think, let's take the trombones down.
Yeah.
You were just like, maybe the next owner wants to fuck on a pile of trash.
Why would I deny them that?
Right?
Maybe it's going to be somebody from Neutral Milk Hotel.
And, you know, they wanted some trombones around.
So a brand new Gulfstream is $61 million.
$61 million.
What are you talking about?
A brand new Gulfstream.
I'm looking at a Gulfstream G650ER, which is $68.68 million.
It seats 19?
Mm-hmm.
68 million.
Yeah.
So who so that means if you have six hundred and eighty million dollars, this is already 10 percent of your.
My my back of the envelope calculation on a first class flight, which I never buy, it's only ever bought for me.
But generally speaking, I think you can expect most American first class flights to be at least two grand rack rate.
Yeah, I always think first class, anywhere you'd want to go.
And if you're flying first class, you're probably not booking those flights a long time in advance, right?
Because you're a first class flyer.
But can we assume $2,000?
Is that fair?
I would have said $4,000.
Okay, well, let's say $4,000.
Let's say $3,000.
If you figure $3,000 and you fly once a week, is my math right?
That's a little over $150,000 a year.
Okay.
Is that right?
Am I doing the math right?
So do that again?
No, I probably did that wrong.
Yeah, say that again.
Do you need a graphing calculator?
Should I co-sign this?
I'm going to use the internet.
$3,000 asterisk 52.
$159,000.
Per?
A rack rate, first class round trip flight, more or less.
Let's double that.
Let's double it.
You double that, right?
$318,000 a year.
Let's say maybe you can go to Canada sometimes.
I don't know.
Yeah.
How are you calculating this?
$300,000 a year for what?
Oh, so if you took a $3,000 flight 52 times a year.
Oh, once a week.
That's $156,000.
Per flight.
Yeah.
Amateurizing that jet over the course of only one year.
If you amateurize it for one year, you get to that.
But you have to factor in how much gasoline it costs to fly a Gulfstream 5.
Oh, did I mention you have to hire a pilot?
Yeah.
And a pilot and a co-pilot and probably a – Don't you want somebody to serve you drinks?
What are you going to do?
Can you make your kid make drinks for you?
Make me a bloody.
No, you're going to have – The whole reason you're rich is your kid doesn't have to work anymore.
That's right.
Gone from the Thimble factory, you're going to want an air steward.
Yeah, you're going to want her on richkids on Instagram.
Yes.
And you're not going to want her fixing people's drinks on richkids on Instagram.
yeah she should be showing off her three rolex watches oh right so what one of those things like like a russian rapper like or you know the you know those crazy russian guy photos where it's a guy with like two pistols and like you know uh you know a bunch of 20 bills on a bed a diamond grill what do you call that
What do you call that kind of – is there a name for that genre of people showing off their wealth and guns?
I have definitely gone on the internet and found like ultimate fail websites, which used to be a thing I loved to go to ultimate fail.
Tattoo fails.
Oh my god.
My daughter's favorite is no regerts.
No records.
Tattoo fails.
Especially where the picture of the person's infant child is there and then the tattoo representation of the person's infant child.
It looks like somebody drew it with their feet.
Yeah, like a shrunken apple head.
Yeah.
And I think on some of those sites, Ultimate Fails, I followed links to sites that just had people with like $180 spread out over the bedspread of a motel bed.
And, like, two guns and one pellet gun.
And an outfield CD.
Yeah, and a couple of, like, a couple of... Pack of cigarettes.
Guitar band.
Is there anything else I can put in this photo?
Mom, can I borrow the microwave?
Two flat-brim Yankees caps.
People.
I just sent you a link to my favorite new Twitter.
This is the kind of... It's in the Skype.
This is the kind of thing where...
You used to see a lot of this on the internet 10, 15 years ago.
And then I guess it became kind of a 4chan thing.
But if you want a nice mainstream, fucked up Twitter to follow, try Cursed Images.
Cursed Images.
And you can find that by just going to twitter.com slash cursed images.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
So is this an art space?
Well, you'll see.
It's just mostly disturbing photos.
How about those, what is that, badgers?
Badgers.
That's a lot of badgers in one yard.
There's like 80 badgers.
And look at the cat.
I know.
There's a cat in the corner looking at the badgers.
Holy shit.
This is not how I wanted my life to turn out.
So I have – I've told you in the past that cats and possums will interact with one another.
You've not only told me that.
You've seen it, John.
You've seen it firsthand.
You know that they could make a – they could have an accord.
They could have a detente.
Detente.
Well, apparently, according to this image, a cat and 30 badgers will also just chill together.
I think a lot of these are Russian.
There's a guy drinking a tumbler of vodka.
Yeah.
Well, he eats what looks like salmon roe out of a big tub with a spoon.
Scroll down.
These are tremendous.
I like the Christmas wreath made out of baby carrots.
Keep going down.
I think those are Cheetos.
Oh, yeah.
Whoa.
Whoa.
I do feel like a badger is not a thing.
Oh, here's a guy in an oxygen tent who wanted to play the violin.
He sure did.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's a viola.
Oh, okay.
Nice.
I do feel... Oh, my goodness.
See the Russian guy?
Look at him with the tub of roe.
Yeah, and look, that's a lot of roe, and I think that's probably... You think that's vodka he's drinking there?
Yeah, he does seem like a Russian guy.
He didn't need to put a shirt on.
He's just enjoying some roe.
I really do feel like...
Now I want to know more about it.
What is the deal with that bed?
With 10 eggs on it?
With 10 cracked eggs.
Yeah.
You just got to say what happened.
Interesting gag to do on somebody.
I spent a lot of time on this website.
I'm going to have to look at that.
But now I want to know more about badgers.
Yeah.
I think this isn't – the reason I want to know more about this – oh, the first thing that comes up, of course, is the Wisconsin badgers.
which I'm guessing is the University of Wisconsin football team.
Wait, who's the Gophers?
Oh, it's Minnesota.
The Minnesota football team is the Gophers?
Is it the Golden Gophers?
Oh, well, I don't know.
I mean, the Oregon team is the Gooey Ducks.
Remember in Fargo they say Go Gophers?
Yeah, Minnesota Golden Gophers.
So, oh, badgers are in the same family as otters, weasels, wolverines, and polecats.
I see the wolverine.
I see the Wilberforce resemblance.
Yeah, weasels even too, but otters?
I bet badgers are tough.
They look pretty tough.
They do look tough.
I'm going to start calling otters sea weasels.
Oh, water badgers.
Why the hell aren't they already called sea weasels?
It's a missed opportunity.
You know, like a sea lion doesn't look like a sea lion.
It looks like a sea dog.
Sea dog.
Sea dog.
Yeah.
But I guess sea dogs were already taken by pirates.
Oh, wow.
There are a lot of different kinds of badgers.
And in America, we have the American badger.
You've got the American badger.
And then there's the European badger.
And then the Asian badger.
European badger thinks he's fancy.
Japanese badger.
Hog badger.
Burmese ferret badger.
Javan ferret badger.
You know, is a ferret badger, do you think a ferret badger is something that like a Javanese goth would carry?
Yeah, I think it's the kind of thing Strunk and White would say eventually that needs to become a new word.
When you're hyphenating something like ferret badger, like you're not really done yet.
This has not reached its final form.
This needs to be called something other than a ferret badger.
That's, you know, with all due respect, I know we live in complicated times.
I think that's probably a little off-putting to ferrets and badgers.
Yeah.
Yeah, pick a side.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
But now I'm looking at a ferret badger.
It actually looks like a perfect cross between a ferret and a badger.
My friend had a ferret as a pet.
So I've been to people's house back when I would buy drugs.
Yeah.
Oh, I bet you see a lot of ferrets.
From people that I didn't know.
Let's be clear.
This is not a Mr. Show bit.
But buying drugs in the 90s, I bet you met a lot of people with exotic pets.
I did.
Oh, C-3PO.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, you know, I mean, how many other people have kissed a parrot, right?
French kissed a parrot.
But yeah, you'd go to somebody's house.
You can't trust these online polls.
I told you about the time I was at a guy's house and he had a rooster.
I'd love to hear it again.
In his snake cage.
He got a rooster in a snake cage?
He bought a little chicken.
to feed his giant boa constrictor.
And then the boa constrictor wasn't hungry, I guess.
Or not boa constrictor, it was a python, some Burmese ferret.
But it's the kind that squeezes its prey, the prey turns purple, and then they kind of eat it.
Yeah, it's a boa constrictor.
It squeezes a chicken, and it eats it.
But this snake, his giant, what I can only recall as being a giant yellow Burmese python ferret,
was in a huge enclosure in his living room.
And he bought a chicken and he put it in there for the thing to eat.
Live.
It's got to be live.
It's got to be live because that excites the python.
And that's what you want, an excited python.
And you only feed it like – we had one of these in my seventh grade science class.
We used to put rabbits in there.
And I think it was like once a month.
You didn't have to feed it that often.
Didn't feed it that often.
And that's why this situation got confusing for my drug dealer friend.
And my friend looked like the lead singer of Out, no, what was the band that did Jump Around?
No, no, no.
House of Pain?
Yeah, I think he looked like the singer of House of Pain.
But he had this snake.
He put the chicken in there.
The snake wasn't interested.
And the chicken lived in the cage with the snake long enough that it was revealed to not be a chicken, but in fact to be a rooster.
And then it grew until it was like not a full-grown rooster but a teenage rooster.
Like its legs were – it had foghorn leghorn legs which were, if I recall correctly, six inches tall.
Like this rooster now was two feet tall.
And my friend said, I don't think the snake can eat this now.
It's too big.
Yeah.
And I don't know what to do.
Oh, my gosh.
In the fullness of time, did he start feeding the rooster what the rooster would enjoy eating?
I think he had to keep feeding the rooster.
There's a point where it converts from food to pet.
Well, sure, snake food to pet, but he didn't want a rooster.
And I can't think of anybody that wants a rooster except my next door neighbor here who has that freaking rooster out there that wakes me up every morning.
It would not be a typical 90s drug dealer pet.
A rooster?
No.
You go to McMinnville, I bet you're going to see a lot of drug dealers with, sorry, medicinal marijuana.
I bet there's tons of roosters in McMinnville.
Oh, well, sure, but those are good-eaten roosters.
Those are artisanal bespoke heritage hen roosters.
Sure, they're stew roosters.
Stew roosters, okay.
Anyway, so he said, I don't know what to do with this rooster.
I don't want to just turn it loose in the yard.
No, that'd be cruel.
But I'm thinking that that's what I have to do.
And, of course, in my state at the time, in the place I was in my life, I didn't have very good judgment.
And I said, I'll take the rooster.
Okay.
And so he was like, really?
And I said, yeah, I'll take that rooster.
Oh, she still had the invoice for that.
One bag of marijuana?
One rooster.
He took the rooster out of the cage.
But somehow I'd been dropped off at his house.
I was a long way from where I lived, which wasn't my house.
I was crashing at a guy's house.
And so this guy I was buying the pot and getting free roosters from, he had a white 72 El Camino.
And he said, I'll give you a ride back to your house if you take the rooster.
And I was like, I'm taking the rooster.
So the rooster and I got in the back of the El Camino.
El Camino, for people who don't remember, is a pickup truck like automobile.
It's not a brat, but it was like it would.
Wouldn't you describe it as a car that happens to have a bed in the back?
Yeah, it looked like a car, but it was a pickup truck.
It looked like a Chevelle, but it had a pickup.
But he lived across town, so we had to get on the freeway.
And so I'm sitting in the back trying to keep a hold of this rooster.
And the rooster initially was very suspicious of me.
But when he realized that his life was in my hands, it's not like you're going to bond with him.
But he stuck close to me because if he got away from me, his little rooster claws were not able to gain purchase in the metal back of the truck.
And so he would just slide.
He would slide all the way to the back.
When the car would accelerate and then when the car would break, he would slide all the way to the front and I'm trying to get a hold of him.
He's trying to get away from me at first.
Finally, you know, the rooster and I like reach an accommodation.
We get across town.
I come into the house where I'm crashing where they're like five guys sitting around watching friends.
And I'm like, guess what?
I got us a rooster.
The guy that is renting the house, the head rooster in charge, says, I don't want a rooster in my house.
Well, you know, at first everybody's like, wow.
Right?
And they're all like petting the rooster and interested in the rooster.
And I feel like a hero.
because I also had weed.
But then it becomes clear that the rooster is not welcome.
And he says, rooster can't stay.
And so I'm trying to negotiate with him, but I'm like, okay, I'll put the rooster on the porch for a minute while you and I talk about what's going to happen to the rooster.
You don't want the rooster to hear it.
Well, and also, like, I don't have a place to go.
Right.
So I need to keep crashing at this house, but I don't want to be separated from my rooster because by now I feel kind of bonded.
Did you name it at this point?
I don't think I had names.
Yeah.
I might've called it Sri Raja.
Okay.
Um, so I'm talking to my friend and I'm like, can we leave the rooster in the backyard?
And he's like, the backyard is my hot pepper garden.
I don't want the rooster eating my hot peppers.
So we talk about it for a little while.
We did not reach any kind of agreement.
And I go outside.
Rooster's gone.
Oh, no.
He flew the coop.
You said it.
I searched the whole neighborhood.
Can't find the rooster anywhere.
And this house was on the border of Little Saigon.
And so we all speculated that someone came along.
The rooster escaped.
The rooster was walking down the street, headed on its merry way.
Cock of the walk.
Thinking that it was, like, headed somewhere.
Rooster Town.
Rooster Town, USA.
And then somebody.
I hear this job's picking grapes out there.
Somebody who is thinking stew rooster sees him, says, hmm, unattended rooster.
It's like Uber for roosters.
And again, presumably, if you know a stew rooster, if you recognize a stew rooster when you see one, you're also going to, A, know how to grab a stew rooster.
For us, it would be like seeing a cheeseburger.
Whoa.
I'll have it.
Cheeseburger.
And so they knew how to grab it, and they knew how to tell whether this rooster belonged to somebody.
They check it for tags.
And they're like, rooster, you're coming with me.
And the rooster might have even thought, like, this person knows how to handle a rooster.
I'm headed to rooster Eden.
I'm going to rooster town.
Yeah.
And then death raked up his leaves.
Oh, God.
You're pushing the rooster uphill.
Yeah.
And then right into the stew pile.
my god what a confusing week for that rooster right i mean think about that you couldn't you couldn't write that story up like from a rooster's point of view what a very very confusing week you're not gonna fucking believe what happened to me somebody bought me for food which apparently they think i am i think of myself as a rooster i might be an architect someday and they throw me in a tank with a with a big ass python python's not interested
I start to grow.
I start to grow.
I get too big for the cage, too big for the python.
They realize that I'm a tough guy.
They've got to get rid of me before I hurt this python.
They're going to give me this guy over here.
So we get in a pickup truck.
I'm a little baked because I'm living in a drug dealer house.
Sure.
You've got to get a rooster contact high.
Yep.
Wow, that's rough.
He gets in a car with a bearded young guy who wants to kind of be his pal.
Yeah.
You know, the young bearded guy wants to interact with me.
He's been adopted.
yeah like hey hey pal can i scratch under can i scratch the back of your neck you ever scratch chicken never scratch chicken when you uh when you go to scratch a chicken's neck you realize that a chicken is 98 feathers yeah that's like our cat yeah and all that's in there underneath the feathers because you're like i want to scratch you and then you're like whoa i don't want to just scratch feathers i want to scratch a chicken
I'll catch a bird.
Yeah, you get all the way in there and you're like, there's hardly any bird here.
It's like his neck is as big as a crayon, but surrounded by feathers.
Yeah, I never thought about it from the rooster's perspective, but that was quite a day.
Yeah.
Oh, never gets better, does it?
Did you know that?
Well, no, it doesn't.
You're going to end up in a plastic bag made to look like a pumpkin on death's lawn.
Oh.
Thank you.