Ep. 227: "Fifth Knob"
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Hello.
Hey, John.
I'm Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
Alright, you sound very subdued.
I can do subdued.
Yeah?
Yeah, I got it in me.
Keep it way down.
Make it kind of a public radio type discussion.
We've had those before.
Yeah, we can do it.
I turned my volume down.
Am I too low?
No.
Good.
Okay.
I worry about overdriving.
Why?
Because I like to keep a certain tone for the show.
And I don't really have skills with the microphone.
Oh, I see.
What is the tone you like to keep for the show?
I like to stay in the moment.
That's my tone.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
I'm here for whatever comes along, you know, whatever happens.
Well, yeah, stay in the moment is right.
God, I sound really quiet.
You do?
Yeah, I worry about overdriving.
I've always felt like, you know, because you drive the boat, because you're the sub commander.
Yeah.
You always can set the levels however you like.
Yeah, that's true.
You can fix it in post, as they say.
Yeah, you can fix it in post.
For all I know, you've been putting some weird filter on me all these years.
Well, then I talk like this.
So you put some wah-wah pedal on me?
You could have been fucking with me this entire time.
No, no.
I make sure you always sound very dignified.
So you have a dignified performance, and then I try to keep your... I don't cut out the snorts or anything, because I think that's part of the show.
Yeah.
You said a mouthful.
Keep the snorts.
Keep the snorts.
The snorts are part of the show.
That's our motto.
My curse is I do listen to the show.
And so I hear when I say things wrong.
I hear when I accidentally refer to Ghostbusters as Back to the Future.
And then I realize that's on the record forever.
Yeah.
Yeah, if I was worried about the permanent record, boy, I'd have another thing that woke me up in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
Last night I had a dream where I was, you know, I was being chased, running, chasing dream, and I hid inside the torpedo tube of a submarine.
I was in a submarine.
And I ran in and I climbed into the torpedo tube.
And then you can guess what happened.
Oh, no.
The villain, the chaser, sealed me in the torpedo tube.
Oh, no.
You don't like that.
No, it was terrible.
Did you awake with a start?
Yes.
Yes, I woke with a terrible feeling that I was trapped in a torpedo tube.
And then unlike, you know, in most cases in a situation like that, I roll over and I say, happy thoughts.
puppies, ice cream.
But in this case, I was so intrigued that I rolled over and was like, all right, let's play this out.
Yeah.
And then the torpedo tube was flooded, which was also awful.
This is a lot of your bad stuff.
I don't want to trigger you, but I know you don't like the idea of being closed in somewhere.
No.
So being on a submarine to begin with, probably not your best day.
I wouldn't have been a good submariner.
Yeah.
I would not want to be in a torpedo tube.
And the only thing that could make a small, confined, dark space worse is if it then flooded with water and I drowned in it.
Ugh.
Oh, my God.
You know, like drowning in a thing.
I mean, no, wait a minute.
The thing about drowning in a torpedo tube is that it'd be relatively quick and painless.
You hope.
You know, it's really suffocating.
That is the thing that I fear the most.
Okay, like a lack of oxygen.
That's right.
Yeah, I mean, shoot me all day long.
Knife me, acid, hot lava, throw me from a tall building, hit me with a car.
Bludgeoning me to death, all those things.
Yeah.
I'll take in stride with, as you say, dignity.
You sound like you're really prepared.
But don't suffocate me.
Yeah.
Come on.
Have a little fucking class.
Submarines are an interesting thing also, because if you think about the stuff you're exposed to as a kid...
At least for me, I feel like submarines, maybe like quicksand and gorilla suits, submarines were a thing for a while.
But even think of Hunt for Red October or think about... One ping only.
Way before that, though, the submarines that we had access to, there was always that element, some element of claustrophobia, but it was really cool.
And it wasn't until I saw something like Das Boot, where you get the real feeling of like, oh no, this is...
You know what I mean?
Because if you think about the scenes on the Russian sub, I mean, that main room is pretty roomy.
I mean, you can walk around.
You don't have to bend over.
There's chairs, and it seems very accommodating.
You're talking about Hunt for Red October.
What did I say?
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's what you said.
But I mean, Hunt for Red October.
Yeah, they've got like a dining room table in there.
Yeah, but I mean, even like even the like it was a mega sub.
Right, right.
But I mean, it's it doesn't have that sense of like if you're ever really on a boat.
I mean, it's it's such a model of economy.
It's a modern major general.
Major economical boat.
But every single cubic inch has to be utilized efficiently all the time.
And it seems like they very much err on the side of smaller rather than bigger.
And you're always up against somebody else.
There's not lots of places where two people can walk by each other without having to change their posture and position.
You know what I mean?
I did not know we were going to talk about boat design today.
Yeah.
That's a perfect example of how this show just goes where the day takes us.
Is that right?
You feel like you never really know what's waiting for you here.
What could happen?
I mean, I am about to.
I am pregnant with an Operation Petticoat reference.
Oh, right.
And I'm just sitting here on top of this Operation Petticoat reference, so excited by it, because when was the last, first of all, when was the last time I got to make one?
When will the next time be?
Where could I ever make an Operation Petticoat reference and have the person I made it to go, oh, right.
That's this show.
Was that the movie with Jack Lemmon?
You are, I think, thinking of... Oh, no, I'm thinking of Mr. Roberts.
I'm thinking of Mr. Roberts, probably.
The worst thing that I'm doing right now is, and I can't believe this never occurred to me until now, is I think in my head I conflate Operation Petticoat with Petticoat Junction, and I didn't realize it until just now.
Right.
See, that is a very common thing, and that has happened to me before also, but...
There's two things.
There's Petticoat Junction, the film with Cary Grant.
There's Petticoat Junction, the television show with Jamie Lee Curtis.
A young Jamie Lee Curtis.
Oh, my God.
I think you're... Oh, my gosh.
Okay.
All right, Jamie.
Ding, ding, ding.
Wow.
You know what?
Full points to John on that one.
You had me.
You had me good.
So, boy, there's this whole rat king of multiple sisters and country... I don't want to say bumpkins.
That's kind of an ugly...
old-fashioned term pumpkins but like wasn't now petticoat junction was more in that mold of like rural like the cbs rural tv shows right oh you're talking about yeah right like uh like dukes of hazard well you know you take something like an andy griffith show and you've got things like in that i think that was the source of the spinoff gomer pile usmc right
And you've got things like you've got your Green Acres.
Your Beverly Hillbillies.
You've got your Beverly Hillbillies.
I think.
And so all I remember about this.
So first of all, I remember those shows were on a lot.
They were in reruns a lot.
And I remember reading in my studies that there was basically something happened at CBS in the early 70s.
they decided to basically sweep the decks and say, we are losing the urban demo.
I think something along these lines.
This is the time of like, you know, it's the late 60s, early 70s.
Lots of crazy stuff happening.
And we have all these shows that are completely out of touch with the youth, the rabid youth culture.
Yeah, they're corny.
They're corny.
Yeah.
And so at least in the conventional wisdom, the history of this is that when CBS launched all the great sitcoms, you think about that era of All in the Family, later The Jeffersons.
What else you got in there?
You got Maude, of course, eventually One Day at a Time.
But that all started...
with sweeping the decks of all the rural shows.
Yeah, you gotta sweep the shit out of them.
No, I enjoyed the rural shows when I was a kid.
Well, the funny thing is, you know, a lot of these shows, they had a long run, five, six years.
I mean, and then they were in syndication when we were kids, as we've talked about before.
Yeah.
But where they were syndicated varied by region.
And Petticoat Junction and Green Acres...
Neither were in syndication in the Seattle area, or there's another possibility, which is that my babysitter did not watch that channel.
Oh, and one of your negligent babysitters was the one who controlled the channel changer.
Controlled the channel changer.
Well, there wasn't a channel changer at the time.
You had to get up and walk all the way across the room and turn the knob.
But the kids were not allowed to touch the TV.
At the babysitter's house.
That was one of the babysitter's small constellations, right?
Well, oh, she ran a tight ship, right?
But what was funny is the TV was all the way on the far side of the living room.
And it was just a regular style, American style TV at the time, which was about the size of a box of wine.
Was it a portable?
No, it wasn't a console.
It didn't have a record player in it also.
But it was a...
What size would it be?
It's like when you order toilet paper from Amazon.com, it comes in a box that was about the size of a television set for most of our lives.
Was it on a TV stand or was it on the floor?
It was on a piece of furniture.
Okay.
At the end that I think you would call a dresser, maybe an arm.
But like if you wanted to move it into the kids room when they're home sick from school, that would be quite an undertaking.
Yeah, this is a very large TV.
It was made out of wood.
I know what you mean.
Yeah, I see why you're avoiding console, but I know exactly what you mean where it might have some kind of like Rococo fake columns and stuff like that.
It was a color TV, but it wasn't dressed up.
Obviously, some of our listeners are thinking back to the largest TV they can recall, and it was made of black plastic, and this was not that.
This was made out of wood.
It was handcrafted by someone.
It didn't have...
It didn't have tubes like an amp, but it was a cathode ray television.
With a very prominently curved screen.
A curved screen, that's right.
That when you turned it on, a little dot appeared.
We could hear that really high-pitched noise.
And then it sat for a second as it collected itself and warmed itself up and got that picture.
Anyway, we couldn't touch it.
But she would periodically throughout the day stand up from her card table.
put out her more cigarette, walk across to the television, and change the channel.
And I don't know whether that was because Bob Barker was on.
She watched her stories during the middle of the day, and then at a certain point, I think on behalf of the kids when they got off of school, she got up, turned the channel, and then Hogan's Heroes was on.
Okay, go to UHF.
Well, I mean, there were three channels in PBS.
Okay.
Nothing was going on on UHF.
You didn't have an independent station?
No.
That's where we always got black and white reruns and Flintstones and stuff like that.
In Alaska, maybe.
Well, not even.
But the point is she did not have any particular fondness for the rural programs.
That's not what we watched.
And I always assumed that it was because they weren't on PBS.
They weren't on TV in Seattle or Alaska.
Those particular shows.
Petticoat Junction, or I'm sorry, Operation Petticoat.
Now you got me doing it.
Operation Petticoat.
Was that a TV show too?
The TV show is the one with Jamie Lee Curtis.
And what was crazy about it was in the film...
in the film that was made much earlier like the film is from the 50s right 50s right yeah 59 yeah it had tony curtis i thought you were making a funny on the fact that they were family no and then jamie lee curtis was cast like she was lieutenant barbara durin for 23 episodes
Yeah, yeah.
And so Operation Petticoat, the television show, was done as a kind of farce, like Gilligan's Island-style knee slapper.
Wasn't it kind of like a sexy ABC kind of show?
Yes, exactly.
That's what I was getting at.
It was a little bit sexy for a kid who is, I mean, the whole idea of these guys sailing around during the war
in a pink submarine yeah um pretty racy pretty racy to uh to my little kid the implications the implications for an adult are pretty different from just the wackadoodle of being a kid well but i think also there was some aspect of it like um not only was the submarine pink but uh but they were there was a they were they were
There was an emergency, right, obviously.
You've painted the submarine pink because that's primary.
Can I read you the short description on IMDb?
Yeah, let's hear that.
It's hijinks on the high seas when a U.S.
submarine has to take on a collection of female nurses.
Somehow or another, the subject's painted pink in the process.
There we go.
And I think the way that it got painted pink in the process was it was like a primer, right?
They had to prime it pink.
prior to painting in its battleship gray yeah or i don't remember but but anyway so it wasn't just that the sub was pink it was also full of nurses yeah so in that sense it was like a mash it had a mash vibe uh it only obviously only lasted for like a season and a half or something but i was it was it was right up there with charlie's angels yeah in terms of like nothing ever happened that
You never really got to, I mean, it was television, but your imagination could run wild.
What if I were a little bit older and I were on a pink submarine full of nurses?
Yep, yep.
The problem was I was 10, and so even if I was a little bit older, like 13, I still wouldn't have been allowed on a submarine.
Yeah.
Featured John Astin and also Jim Varney.
The guy from, you know, the Ernest guy.
Ernest?
You mean like Ernest goes to Washington?
Ernest goes to camp and stuff like that, yeah.
Jim Varney.
I didn't know he had a career outside of being Ernest.
The other thing about John Astin, I don't want to change the subject here, but the other weird thing is like, you know, a lot of times, you know, success breeds success.
Like one network will do a show, obviously, and then another network will do a very similar show.
So, I mean, it's kind of weird.
When you're a little kid, it's sort of like you and your Bartels.
I've never even heard of a Bartels.
Some people have CVS.
Some people have Walgreens.
It's also interesting, regionally, I think most stations that are buying reruns to fill the afternoon are not going to buy...
I'm guessing.
I can't say, but I'll just say this.
To me, you were either a Munsters family or you were an Adams family family.
And I didn't even see the Adams family until I was probably in like, what, junior high.
I didn't even know because we always had Munsters.
Same, same.
Absolutely same.
And I think Adams family was a better program.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Who can go back in time now and say what our lives would have been like if we'd been watching The Addams Family instead of The Munsters?
I don't even want to think about it.
Moments snap together like magnets.
Yeah, because The Munsters, very, very foundational.
And The Addams Family, there's a lot of subtlety going on there.
They're very different shows.
Yeah, Gomez is like, he's always smirking, right?
But Herman's not smirking.
So what do you think?
If you think Adam's Family came first, I'm not going to look it up.
I'm going to guess Adam's Family.
Because that was based on those New Yorker cartoons, right?
Yeah, Adam's Family's got a lot of class.
The Munsters is broader, right?
It's playing to the back of the room.
But I can't take it away.
I would like to point out John Astin's
photo on wikipedia is taken from petticoat junction no kidding yeah so it's not even uh it's not like a it's not like a small moment in his life um but i mean you would think he was gomez you would think he would be that would be the picture that he would be that we would know about but no it's like uh yeah i don't understand i don't understand who decides what picture to use it's it's always been bewildering to me here's a question to you yeah
Have you looked at your Wikipedia page lately?
No.
Do you know how it gets made?
Not really.
I want to talk about Green Acres.
I do not.
I have no interest in Green Acres.
I have not looked at my Wikipedia page in a long time, and still haven't, but it popped into my head the other day that it's out there, that it exists out there, and that it's probably either wrong...
Or poor.
It's probably either, I think it probably is impoverished.
You know what I mean?
The first time I ever saw a Wikipedia page about me was written by a fan.
And it was in the early days of Wikipedia where people could just, or I mean, maybe this is still true, but they just wrote a bunch of stuff.
It was just like paragraphs and paragraphs long.
written in the style of like a magazine article.
Yeah, there was a time where, you know, well, I mean, one thing obviously is if it's a very popular topic, God, I don't know fuck all about this.
I don't know why I'm trying to comment on this.
But I do get the sense there's a lot more
that the editing and sort of moderation has tightened up quite a lot so you don't get as much like weird abuse and stuff.
But, you know, if it's a topic that a lot of people care about and that there's a lot of interest in and that there's a lot of expertise in, I mean, there's some fantastic Wikipedia pages out there.
Oh, yeah.
You know, but the thing is, I think one thing is that people sort of adopt topics and sort of watch for changes in things.
Yes, I see.
I see.
Right.
I think when I first was introduced to the concept of editing Wikipedia pages, I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Starcaster, Fender's famously ill-advised competitor to the ES-335, which I owned a copy of, of which I owned a copy.
Wow.
The Starcaster.
You've seen me play my Starcaster.
I'm going to have to look it up.
Star Caster, very unusual guitar.
Oh, look at that.
I was working at Emerald City Guitars in Seattle.
It's like they took an ES-335 and wanted to kind of give it a little bit of the funky angle of a Fender, like make it like a little bit of a Mustang angle.
Yeah, they stretched it strangely like a Stratocaster.
Yeah.
But it's a 335.
So I was working at Emerald City Guitars, and I had...
within the year, purchased a 1968 Telecaster with a factory Bigsby tremolo.
And it was the most fancy, expensive guitar that I had owned ever since my original 1968 ES-335 was stolen out of my own living room while I was sleeping.
Oh, man.
That happened a long time before.
But so this was a fancy guitar.
It was very fancy.
But whenever I would play shows with it, I liked to play with my guitar kind of loud.
Because that was the fashion at the time.
And this Telecaster was very...
it was very uh feedbacky do you remember this do you remember when telecasters were were like oh they feedback telecasters at least in my i had i had a telecaster and i think one of the performance characteristics for better for worse was they were not as you would say a loud guitar and when they did get loud they were pretty i don't know the term for it but yeah it would feedback pretty bad and yet a single coil not super heavily wound pickup and that's what gave it the distinctive twangy sound
It's that distinctive twangy sound.
Are you playing with jingle bells?
No, I think it's just breaks.
Oh.
People break a lot around here.
Oh, oh, oh, right, right, right, breaks.
I thought you were talking about, like, drum breaks.
I was like, that was a cool drum break.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And so people did all kinds of things like they invented humbuckers that would fit inside the single space of a Telecaster pickup.
People would take their Telecaster pickups out and dip them in wax.
Right.
Didn't seem more.
I feel like.
i remember seymour duncan's being a big deal because they had was the quarter pounder but they came up with some pickup that where you could put i don't know if it was just seymour duncan but you could if you with the right amount of routing rooting what do you call it you know routing making a hole where you could get a humbucker a double coil pickup into the space of a single coil area right but it was tack it was stacked it was on top of each other rather than side by side yeah
And then, of course, there was the motherbucker, which was a Hamer invention, which was three.
It was three single-coil pickups together, the motherbucker.
Is that a Gillette blade situation?
Do you get a benefit from having those extras?
Well, you know, people aren't still using them.
Hmm.
So I think it was just a thing that looked pretty hot.
I remember seeing it in a Hamer guitar and thinking, that looks pretty hot.
For some reason, it seems like the pickup version of Rick Nielsen having a five-neck guitar.
And Rick Nielsen also famously plays Hamers.
Plays Hamers.
I bet he had one.
Nice pull.
But so now nobody plays that loud.
You can play any guitar you want, I think.
But then every time I stepped on my distortion box, this thing would just start squealing.
Especially if you were on the tail pickup.
Yeah, and I, at that point in time, never used anything but the bridge pickup because I didn't understand what the neck pickup did.
I never touched the controls of a guitar or of the amp.
I just turned everything up all the way.
And then the only way I had really of expressing myself as an instrumentalist was stepping on the distortion pedal because I had no feel of any kind.
I couldn't do anything with the guitar except the most brute sound.
Like, behavior.
Yeah.
Just like, blah, bling, blah, bling.
And this guitar was too crazy.
It was just like a scimitar.
But it was beautiful.
So I'm working.
I'm working at the guitar store one day.
And a guy comes in.
This used to happen all the time at the guitar store.
Somebody, a man or woman comes in with a guitar case.
And you can see the case through the glass door when they're still on the sidewalk.
And you're like, oh, here comes a live one.
Mm-hmm.
Because you see the case, you know it is something, and then you look at the person and you know that person does not belong with that guitar case.
And so you adopt that cool kind of guy at the guitar shop thing, and you lean your elbow on the counter, and you're like, hey, welcome to Emerald City Guitars.
How are you?
And they come in, oh, hey, I found this guitar under my grandfather's bed.
Or, you know, or my son went off to Vietnam and never came back, and we've had this guitar ever since, or any kind of story.
Like that.
And you're like, oh, let's take a look at it.
But kind of like a is this worth anything visit.
Yeah, right.
I don't know what to do with it.
I'm bringing it down to the guitar.
I saw your ad in the penny nickel.
Oh, all right.
Come on in.
And, you know, and you see the case and then you get that smell.
There's a certain smell that those old guitars had.
that if you're not into the smell of like it's sort of a little bit mothball-y a little bit like sitting in the closet for all these years those cases were made out of tweed but you flip it open and then inside is this guitar and sometimes it can be you know every once in a while it is like a 54 stratocaster or a 57 les paul custom at which point everybody gasps and then the owner of the store
He magically appears and gently puts his hand on everyone.
Even if there are four of us working in the store, he somehow manages to gently put his hand on all four of us and just push us away.
Is he dressed like the Monopoly man?
He's not.
It's a guitar store, so he's dressed like a rock and roll dad.
He's got a shark tooth necklace or whatever, but he's like...
everybody go, you know, like, I got this time to lean time to clean.
And then we all step back and he's like, hi, thanks for coming in.
And then it's just sort of like progresses into a different, it takes a different form.
But a lot of times it'll be the guitar case would open and it would be a very interesting and cool guitar, but not necessarily one that would bring the owner Jay down from his tower.
You know, something like a Mohs Wright or a later Fender.
I mean, nowadays, all that stuff is unobtainium.
But then it was like, oh, yeah, that guitar, you know, that's a... I mean, I bought that 68 Telecaster for $1,200, and it seemed like, whoa, $1,200?
What kind of crazy are you spending $1,200 on your guitar?
Right.
You know, you can get a perfectly good guitar for $600.
Right.
Um, and, and, uh, people who are listening to this program who are not in the guitar trades or even who are, uh, won't realize that.
Well, the people that are will realize, but those guitars don't exist like that anymore.
Nobody comes into a guitar store with a, with something under their arm like that, because the first thing everybody does is Google it.
And now everybody thinks their, their stupid 1999 Fender Squire is worth $1,700.
Um,
And so but at the time there was no resource like that.
It was just like, oh, I don't know.
I found this thing.
And so one day a guy comes in and he opens this guitar case and it's this Fender Starcaster, which none of us at the store had ever heard of.
Obviously, Jay had.
But the rest of us like younger guys never seen this thing before.
What the hell is it?
And it was this ill-fated guitar.
Fender tried to do this thing.
It was the 1970s, not the top era for Fender or for anybody in America.
We couldn't make cars or guitars during the 70s.
They started making them in 76.
And they were done by 79, right?
Well, I mean, I'm sure there was a tale, but yeah, 76 to 82.
Star casters?
That's what it says.
They only made them for three years.
I'll say this.
Obviously, if you're a guitar person, you'd know this, but it's not the way you would eyeball a Strat.
This is not a classic, right?
No.
And this was, I think, still at a time when Fender guitars of that era were derided.
Okay.
So until very recently, like a 77 Stratocaster, you'd spit on the floor.
You'd be like, 77 Stratocaster.
We called them, what were they, four-bolt necks?
Yeah.
There was some, maybe it was the three bolts.
Well, I forget.
It's been so long since I did any kind of work like this.
But it was widely understood that those guitars were not very good.
Now, a 77 Stratocaster is worth a ton of money.
No one even remembers a time.
when those were considered garbage because they're 40 years old now.
Yeah, and they're not making any more new 40-year-old guitars.
Right, right.
They're precious.
And when you could no longer afford a 65 Stratocaster...
And you could only afford a 72 Stratocaster, and then pretty soon you couldn't afford those.
So 79 Stratocaster.
And now, you know, I doubt you can afford that.
But this was from that era.
So a lot of people in the guitar shop were like, huh, what a strange curiosity.
It's kind of like a Fender Coronado 2, which is to say a guitar that I don't really care about.
And everybody sort of walked away.
Yeah.
And I'm left there with this thing like, my God, I'm so attracted to it.
And the one that came into the store that day was Root Beer Brown, which, again, most people in the guitar trades were like, yeah, not interested in a root beer colored guitar either.
especially not this thing, this thing, this ugly thing that no one cares.
I'm just looking at it, and just based on sort of aesthetics, you're not sure who this is for.
I mean, it wants to be kind of like a Chet Atkins kind of guitar.
Like if you're a successful local country musician, you might want this.
But then it's got humbuckers, right?
Right.
Yeah, but it's like, who would this be for in 1976?
I mean, you're going to get a Les Paul if you can, probably, right?
Well, who Fender imagined it was for was in the mid-70s.
You got all these Chick Coreas out there.
Oh, okay.
You got all these Trini Lopez's.
Later period Trini Lopez's.
You've got everybody's trying to do all these Jerry Garcia's.
Everybody's trying to do something new with the guitar, and there's a lot of jazz happening.
There's a lot of jazz guitar going on.
Everybody's jazzy.
And they're jazzing it up.
And the 335, I mean, that's a pretty valid question.
What is a 335 for?
It's the classic guitar.
But isn't it like B.B.
King?
Yeah.
Or the blues.
Blues.
But that's a bona fide classic, though, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, a 59 335 is worth in the multiple digits.
God, it's gorgeous.
What a gorgeous guitar.
It's a beautiful thing.
But Fender never had one like that.
They tried to do this Coronado thing back in the 60s.
That is not a pretty guitar, John.
No, it's terrible.
And the Coronados were made out of fiberboard.
Fender never intended them to be good.
But Gibson always cornered the market on the F-hole semi-hollow body guitar.
Gibson just cornered the market.
Fender never even tried.
But then in the 70s, they were like, hey, man.
They were like...
Hey man, what if we did a hollow body guitar?
And somebody at Fender was like, that's a great idea.
You know, because by then the company had been sold and Leo Fender was living in a Ford F-150.
And so they did it and they made it only for a couple of years.
Nobody bought it because as you say, who wants it?
Oh, the other thing that it had was a master volume knob on the guitar so you could set your different volumes of the pickups individually and then have a master.
Look at that.
It's got a fifth wheel.
A fifth wheel.
Wow.
Wow.
Oh, my God.
You know what?
I have an ad, an original ad from a 1970s guitar magazine hanging in my bathroom for the Starcaster.
And I'm sorely tempted to jump up and go get it.
Does it have an alligator?
The ad?
No, there's no alligator.
But it does have some copywriting that's very much of the moment, of its moment.
I'm going to get it.
Hang on just a second.
Okay.
Can you play some interstitial music?
Sure.
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Are you there still?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Here's what it says.
This is when the guitar was brand new.
Fender ushers in a new age in sound.
Pure sound with minimum feedback.
More sound with a solid wood center block for maximum sustain.
Two humbucking pickups.
Now this is a thing that's not really that big of a selling point, right?
By this point in time, if you're buying a guitar, you know that it's going to have two humbucking pickups generally.
Now, that's not necessarily true of a Fender, but here we go.
Cruise from metallic to mellow and anywhere in between.
Drive hard or lay back at the touch of a fingertip.
And now we're going to move on to the five knobs, which is the real innovation.
No guitar ever had five knobs, Merlin.
Nobody ever thought you could probably even add a fifth knob.
No, no.
Who would have dared?
Not even Roger McGuinn would dream of a fifth knob.
Who dared?
Who, you know, but that's right.
Who dares wins.
Am I right?
So then they were like, why don't we put a fifth knob?
What?
Dual controls, it says.
Dual controls.
I have no idea what that... I don't know what dual means in that context.
I'm guessing that means you can have this pickup or that pickup.
Yeah, right.
Okay, that's right.
That's what it means.
Dual controls.
Five stars to steer by.
Two individual pickup tone controls, paren, like every guitar.
Exactly.
And then two individual pickup volume controls, paren, like every guitar.
Wooden neck included.
And paren.
And then the last one, and, and this is, so two individual pickup volume controls, period, and then the next sentence begins with a capital and, and master volume control.
And that's the thing that they were gonna try and use as the big selling point for that.
I love that five stars to steer by.
Every time I go to the bathroom,
I look at that and I say five stars to steer by.
That feels like that should be somebody's motto.
You could find so much more stuff with five stars than four stars.
Five stars.
Five stars to steer by.
Well, the thing is, at the time, I don't think a five-star rating even existed.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Stars.
I get it.
You know, because a five-star general, that only happens in wartime.
Oh, no, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
For a wartime general.
Yeah, that's right.
A wartime consigliere.
Tom Hagen's not a wartime general.
You don't.
There's no five-star general right now because there's no general of the armies, which is like the big guys, the five stars.
That's where you get a MacArthur, you get a Patton.
Patton was never a five-star general.
Patton was never a five-star general.
Oh, right.
The other guy, Carl Malden, did he get the five stars?
Yeah.
No, I don't think so.
Four.
I don't think he got five.
No, I think it was Eisenhower and MacArthur.
I mean, you know, every once in a while they'd give one to a guy because he'd been around a long time.
I think Washington also gets, doesn't Washington get some kind of secret bonus star?
You're talking about George Washington?
Yeah.
I think back then, every time they gave you a new rank, they just gave you a bag of gold.
A bag of gold that you hung from your sleeve.
I feel like he was posthumously given something along the lines of no matter how many stars anybody ever gets, Washington always has one more.
Oh, interesting.
Because he's the OG.
I thought you were going to say it was like the posthumous, the way the Mormons baptized their ancestors.
Oh, okay.
Could be similar, yeah.
You know that that's kind of one of the deals.
Yes.
Yeah, we've talked about it.
No, no, it's fascinating.
So you've got five stars to guide by.
The ad I found is very 70s looking, and it has the guitar turning into an alligator.
Oh, you were referring to one that you were even then looking at.
The hard-charging, sharp-toothed Starcaster.
First heard emerging from the spectral depths of creation in 1976, Starcaster at Ben is the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo, whatever that is, and relentlessly climbs the charts.
Its attack is heightened by a unique semi-hollow body and jaw-popping vocal range, which makes it a prize trophy among animusicologists.
Uh-huh.
Animusicologists.
Yeah.
Did you know that John Astin is currently teaching acting at Johns Hopkins University?
John Astin is alive?
He's not only alive, but currently teaching acting.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, he's trying to reestablish the acting school at Johns Hopkins.
Oh, good for him.
Yeah.
Johns Hopkins now is thought of primarily as a science school, but has a long and storied history in the arts.
So Jay, was that his name?
He comes down from his tower?
So Jay, anyway, came down and I was like, I love this guitar, I want this guitar.
And he said, oh, I don't know, man.
That's a pretty cool guitar.
Because Jay was a wheeler dealer.
He always was a wheeler dealer, and even those of us that worked for him.
Because he was only paying me $50 a day.
But that's the business.
Yeah, that's the business.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's just like, if you work at the car lot, it's not like you get the Honda Civic for free.
You've got to turn and start negotiating with the salesman one level up.
So Jay's like, I don't know.
I don't know, man.
It's a pretty nice guitar.
And I was like, well, I mean, it's root beer brown and no one has one and it's ridiculous looking.
And he was like, yeah, I know.
But like I could probably get $1,800 for that.
He wouldn't have said that.
That would have been an outrageous amount of money.
But I said, what if I trade you that Telecaster for it?
And he, I think, recognized that that was a good deal, and he said sold.
Because he can move a Telecaster.
Oh, yeah.
And that Telecaster now, 68 Telecaster with a factory Bigsby, that's worth a ton of money.
A lot more than the Starcaster, probably.
Anyway, I played it for a long time, the Starcaster.
It was one of my signature guitars.
And then Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie liked it so much that his bandmates bought him one as a present.
Oh, that's so nice.
Yeah, he was playing his a lot more prominently than I was.
And then at a certain moment, Wikipedia arrived upon the scene, and everybody was on their...
you know, filling out people's Wikipedia pages.
And, you know, mine had all this baloney on it, like, grew up in, you know, he used to live at 1800 Stanford in Anchorage, Alaska.
And I was like, what is that doing there?
But it was written by a fan, you know, and I didn't understand how things worked.
But then I went to the Starcaster page one day because I wanted to know about Starcasters as much as I could find.
Mm-hmm.
And down at the bottom of the page, it said prominent StarCaster users.
And I was like, prominent StarCaster users?
Who are these people?
And it was Chris Walla and then some, oh, and Johnny Greenwood.
Chris Walla and Johnny Greenwood famously played StarCaster.
And then like a couple of other guys.
And I said, you know, I'm a prominent StarCaster user.
There aren't that many of us.
Sure.
And so I had just gotten, I just grokked the concept that you could change a Wikipedia page.
And so I sat and figured it out and pushed on the edit thing and went down and got, figured out the HTML, the XHTML.
Yeah, right, right.
And I added my name.
No kidding, right there.
Biggest day.
Prominent Starcaster user.
And then I went back two days later and it was gone.
Yeah.
And I was like, what the fuck?
I'm a prominent Starcaster user.
I got a record.
My current record is number four on the CMJ.
I put it back.
I put my name back there.
You're going to get the warning.
That week later, it was gone.
And I was like, you know, all right.
I surrender.
I don't know who's making these decisions.
Somebody's like...
And I assumed it was one of two things.
Either they were like, who made that edit?
Oh, the guy.
Even if it's true, even if Dwight David Eisenhower goes on and says, I was general of the army, they're going to say, you can't edit your own Wikipedia page.
Sorry.
Or it was somebody that was like, who's this guy?
And then they went and looked at my Wikipedia page where somebody was talking about that I played wiffle ball.
In, in elementary school.
And they were like, this guy is just, he's just some wiffle ball guy.
He's not a prominent Starcaster user.
I don't know what, this was a long time ago.
But, but that ended, that was the beginning and the end of me making any kind of Wikipedia entry.
Because I realized that I was not, at some level, I was getting, I was, somebody was stepping on my neck and I didn't want to play that game.
You're getting the Scroogey.
Scroogey.
Well, yeah, I mean, like, you know, I'm trying to think, what have I done here?
Is that derived from Scrooge?
I think I made two edits ever.
Are you looking through a file?
Yeah, you can go and see what, I've changed, I've made two edits.
Oh.
Both in the fall of 2008.
What were they?
Looks like I corrected the release date of Protect Your Neck by Wu-Tang Clan.
Right.
They had it as 1953, and I changed it to 1993.
And then on the page for Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk, it looks like I linked to the page for Orin Keep News from the personnel area.
Let's see if it stayed up.
Oh, yeah.
It looks like it's still there.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Well, look at you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Wikipedia wouldn't be the same without you.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
Producer.
Producer of Billion Corners.
Well, I sometimes I got onto this Quora.
Oh, brother.
I've told you about this.
Have I told you about this?
No, I haven't heard about Quora.
I feel like I would go to Quora, and because I don't have an account, I wasn't allowed to see the answers for things.
And I don't know if that's still a thing, but I haven't gone back very much.
Well, I don't know how.
So I have no idea how Quora ended up in my life, right?
One day I got an email that suggested that I was a longstanding member.
And it said, hey, here's some Quora articles that might interest you.
And it was all about tanks.
Wow.
Like the history of tanks, tank battles, tank warfare.
People asking questions like, what would happen if I opened a Pepsi and then put a mouthful of Pop Rocks, but I was in a tank?
Or if you took one M1 Abrams and pitted it against...
like 40 sherman tanks who would win like all this kind of questions that you only get on quora and i was like why am i getting this email but i was interested i i did i actually was is there a chance that you had signed up and forgot about it no because i wouldn't have i wouldn't have signed up for a thing that that said like what are your what are your major interests and offered me 80 options and i and all i clicked was tanks
Like, that's not a thing.
Even if I was still drinking, that's not a thing I would have done.
And it felt a little bit like somebody signing me up on a mailing list where I'm getting weird junk mail all the time.
Oh, like a prank?
Yeah, like somebody subscribed me to, like, Tank Driver's Digest or something, where I was coming in the real mail, but it was in my email.
I don't know why it happened, but then I got really interested in it.
And then I sort of dove into Quora.
But I didn't, I did go in one time and fill out a form that had all of my interests.
And I was like, you know, history and politics and philosophy and talking with your lips pursed like this with a weird voice.
And I want to know about everything.
And the emails and stuff that kept coming were just all about tanks.
What?
This is so interesting.
Yeah.
It never changed.
I'm sorry.
How long ago was this?
It's been two years now.
Okay.
And gradually over time, it has expanded to include special forces ops and other, like, just, I mean, it's basically the Quora topic list of an 11-year-old.
Right?
Like, what would happen?
What would happen if the USS Enterprise and 40 marine recon operatives...
All had to chase a rabbit down a hole.
Who would win?
And I was just like, wow.
And so I read them and read them and read them.
Because, yeah, if this is coming in my email inbox, I'm not going to stop it.
Who am I to stand to thwart history and yell stop?
Well, they must have gotten something right to tickle your interest bone.
But one of the things that I wonder is if...
If I had started getting emails from Quora on any topic, would I have had pretty much the same reaction?
Like, huh, that's interesting.
I'm getting all these weird emails now from Quora about farming.
But it's really interesting.
I mean, I think anything that came in that form where it was like, this is a very specific thing.
Every time you get one of these emails, there's going to be like answers to 10 questions.
And you can get in and get out.
Right.
But it's like, you know, if you think about the way you do, like a medium does a cold reading, where there's a certain set of things that you can observe or say to somebody that's very likely to get their interest, that they'll find the meaning in what it is.
But Tank seems pretty on the nose.
Well, but not necessarily.
Right.
Like, I don't know if you I don't know if you listen to the the food safety podcast they did with Don Schaffner.
I think I did.
But I was surprised that I had a lot of.
of questions about food safety i had the same experience uh right when you did that podcast and uh you get on there and you're like no wait a minute i didn't realize how many aspects of my life uh food safety touched and i finally but but you know you get specific and like you're in a room with somebody like that you're like you know what actually i do have questions like tell me the deal with ground beef
Yeah.
What is the deal with ground beef?
How much E. coli is actually in it?
Well, apparently, according to our friends on that show, you've got to be careful because you can get different kinds of beefs.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, in general, they ended up saying, yeah, every bit of food out there is poisonous.
You just have to decide how much risk you're willing to take.
Didn't that bend your brain a little bit?
I was on there to talk about sous vide cooking, for one thing, like where you cook in a water bath, where there's this whole different model.
I eat in the bath all the time.
You're saying you cook in the bath?
Oh, sorry.
It's a different, slightly different thing.
But there's this whole idea of what they call kinetics, the way the kinetics work, which I don't really understand.
But like by the time we were like half an hour into that show, my mind felt bent because I realized how little I actually understood about this.
And here were two people who actually did understand it.
And they're very articulate about it and entertaining.
And I see what you're saying.
But it wasn't like you had a profile up on Quora.
No.
And there's no profile of me in existence that ever mentions a tank.
Because even as a military history buff, even as a super military hardware nerd, tanks are absolutely at the bottom of what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in airplanes.
I'm interested in boats.
I'm interested in strategy.
I'm interested in...
I'm interested in guns.
I'm interested in uniforms before I am interested in tanks.
And all of that stuff is way, way, way below my interest in... I mean, I'm more interested in bows and arrows.
But there it was, and I was getting into it.
And so there's another thing.
I signed up for an email...
from a guy in england called worldwide words oh yeah right you've talked about this yeah and it's just one of those etymology podcasts where you're like uh this is interesting where did that word come from and and and so what i realized is that what these things are doing for me
I don't actually have that many doorways into the internet.
Yes, okay.
Yes, I do know what you mean.
And it's different than five or ten years ago.
Where there's like it seems like there's an increasingly smaller number of apertures To get you into something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean I sit and look at my phone all day But when you really look at what I'm doing, I'm only looking at five Places on the internet.
I'm looking at I'm looking at Twitter.
I'm looking at my email I'm looking at
A couple of games I play regularly.
I occasionally and begrudgingly go to Facebook.
I go to Instagram.
I do a little Snapchatting.
But all of that is, a lot of it is broadcasting and looking at what my friends are doing.
But I'm not... But isn't it like there was a time when I would go to like seven different news sites every day.
Yeah, right.
And I only get to news sites via Twitter.
I mean, I use Twitter primarily now as a link aggregator.
But, like, you would send me things like, here's Wolfram Alphra.
Wolfram Ralph.
Go there.
Pretty close.
And it'll tell you, like, what the mean deviation of the number of bugs in your food is or whatever.
I don't even remember what the hell that site did.
But I was always looking, like, when I would go to Medium, it just seemed like, oh, here's a bunch of blogs.
I don't want to read other people's blogs.
Like I didn't have a way, I still don't have a way to really like suck the marrow out of the internet.
And so worldwide words was always a thing that would get me going.
And I'd say, well, now wait a minute.
How did the War of the Roses pertain to how that word suddenly fell into the parlance?
And then I was off to the races, right?
Wikipedia-ing things.
Oh, Wikipedia is the other major, major place that I spend time.
And lately I've been buying a lot of Filson jackets on eBay.
But let's leave that aside because that's embarrassing.
That counts.
That's an aperture.
I don't like it, though.
I don't like it.
I don't want to be on eBay.
I'm embarrassed to be there.
I've become one of those people that goes on eBay and is the first bid on like 90 things.
I bid like 20 bucks.
The idea is to be the last one, right?
Yeah.
I go on and I'm like, 20 bucks.
And I think it's just because I'm lonely and I want to get emails from eBay telling me I've been outbid.
Oh, yeah.
So I'm like, 20 bucks, 20 bucks for everything.
And I guess I'm hoping that one of these things will be like,
People won't go on eBay that day or something and no one will see it and I'll get it for $20.
That never happens.
Do you like that?
Do you like that part of eBay?
Do you like the bidding part of it?
Is that fun or exciting to you?
You mean like racing someone to bid?
No, I don't like it at all because you just want the thing.
You're not there for that game.
No, I want the thing, and I'm always infuriated when I bid $150 on something, and then the person wins it for $151.
It makes me mad because $150 and $151 is not that different.
But I wasn't prepared to bid it to $180, and I'm not prepared to download one of those last-minute bidding programs.
Every once in a while, if something really matters to me, I will remember when the thing ends, and I will go to my computer at that moment, and I'll sit on my little tuffet.
And I'll wait until the last seconds, and then I'll get into this combat with what I imagine is someone else, but it's probably just bot.
Yeah.
And I almost always lose.
And then I'm mad.
I stomp around.
I lost a thing the other day that I was stomping around for a long time.
I don't blame you.
And that also is an aperture into the Internet, because I'll see things that I don't recognize, and I will say, oh, that's cool.
And then I'll Google what they are, and then I go down that rabbit hole.
But the tank thing has been very interesting because it's like it brings me in to the web.
And news does not.
I am not interested in news because for a long, long time I felt like news is garbage.
And now especially news is garbage.
I like to go to feature articles.
I like a feature article.
But I do not want to know.
I do not want news aggregated for me.
I don't like it.
It's not good for the soul.
But I don't have an aggregator that especially works for me.
I haven't programmed something.
Because how can you?
How can you go on and say, like, I want to read the most fascinating articles about everything.
Yeah, it's difficult to automate serendipity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you get it?
How do you find a way?
I've thought about this a fair amount, and I mean, I think about in the, maybe not the very beginning of when I was on the internet, but like when things were getting really interesting by, let's say, 96, 97, and Yahoo was where you would go to find stuff.
I've talked to Syracuse about this, about how back then, you know, you did not have...
even if you went to something like AltaVista or like a good search engine, it was still not as reliable as going somewhere curated like Yahoo.
Because unlike a search engine, I mean, people call Yahoo a search engine, and it had search functionality, but what Yahoo was was a directory.
And it was kind of, for a long time, it was the internet for us consumers.
It was the canonical directory of stuff, and it was curated.
But what I would do, this is an interest or a skill that kind of still sticks with me to this day, whether this is categories on Wikipedia or whatever,
It's like I want to find something in general.
And so I'll go to an area.
I'll find something that's similar to what I think I might want to know about.
And then I'll look at stuff kind of around that, like in a given category.
And this is why, for example, like I said, this is why Wikipedia categories are one of my favorite things.
I don't know what those are.
Well, it's difficult on your phone because you won't see this in the mobile view unless you turn off mobile view.
But at the bottom of the page, you'll see categories.
And you'll see what... So you'll either see things like if there's a portal for this thing.
Like if you're going in and you're reading about...
uh adoration of the eucharist or whatever you'll see that that's part of this giant collection called catholicism and that might i'm not this isn't in front of me right now but you might see oh here's other kinds of things that are you know sacred or sacraments or whatever but it's a great way to like not just i'm not sure exactly how to put this instead of searching horizontally you're sort of searching vertically
So you can go in and see like prominent Starcaster users, not as a section of prose, but as like a programmatic, like when you click here, you will get to a page with all of these things.
And there might even, like I say, there might even be like a portal about it.
It's all about this particular topic.
So I guess all I'm trying to say is that like as a survival tactic to find stuff on the Internet or locate what you thought you wanted on the Internet...
At first, you had to be a little bit of a detective where you had to go in and evaluate what your options were and then find things that were around it.
And now today, if you know exactly what you want, that's not difficult to find exactly what you want.
But it's more like, you know, tell me the things I don't know.
And so where do you find those discovery mechanisms?
How do you learn about the apertures that you never would have known about?
Merlin, there is someone knocking on my door, which never happens.
Oh, dear.
And so let's go over and find out what's going on.
All right.
John's going to go over and it's a little bit.
Mr. Rogers here.
I was going to address his visitor.
Hello.
Oh, hi.
It's sort of the phone.
Yeah, it's a form of phone.
It's OK.
Go ahead.
I left you my name and my phone number.
I don't think I asked you if you would call me if you see any activity.
There has been none.
But if I do, I will let you know.
I do have your number.
Mm-hmm.
That sounded pleasant.
The plot thickens.
So the other day... Do I need to cut that out?
No, no, not at all.
Okay.
The other day, I'm sitting here in my house.
Yeah.
Oh, you're at your home right now.
I'm at my house.
Okay.
And also, two things, two technology-related things.
Today, I'm going, after this podcast, to my office to get the internet restored there, finally.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Uh, but also I'm thinking about leaving AT&T, but we can talk about that separately.
Does that does that interest you at all?
I was getting a seltzer.
Yes.
And in fact, I'm glad to see that we have now we've just abandoned all pretense that we're not just going to the refrigerator during the show.
Well, sometimes I got to get my bucket.
You know, there's all kinds of things I got to do.
OK, so hang on a minute.
Let me let me let me trace back here.
So there's somebody.
who has a question about phone and activity, you're thinking about leaving AT&T, and second, that's third, and then second, you're gonna get your internet fixed at the office.
Right, so I'm gonna go back to the office, I'm not gonna be here with the dishwasher running behind me while I'm podcasting.
Okay, cool.
But anyway, so it seems like your office might might potentially get a lot more useful if you've got the Internet again.
Exactamundo, my friend.
And the problem with getting the Internet restored there was that the Internet people were like, well, great.
Well, we'll come a week from next Wednesday, anytime between 9 a.m.
and 7 p.m.
So go sit in this room with no internet for a while.
Yeah, go sit in your office with no internet and do some make work all day while we decide when to come.
And I was like, it doesn't work that way.
I want the internet restored.
And they're like, well, we can't do it without you there.
And I'm like, yes, you can.
You put it in when I wasn't there.
Anyway, I'm going down there.
I'm not sure you can use logic on those people.
I'm going down there right after I get off the phone with you, and I'm going to sit there all day in my office waiting for them, and then I'm going to get the Internet, and my problems will be solved from then on.
Also, I'm thinking about leaving AT&T, but we'll get back to that.
There was a knock on my door about a week ago, which never happens.
I don't like it when it happens.
What are you doing here?
How did you get inside my gate?
My fence is falling down, by the way.
That's number four.
So I open the door and there are two people standing, a man and a woman standing on the porch.
And they have a very distinctive look, distinctive to me, which is that look of, wait a minute, are these people my age?
Are they older or younger than me?
I can't tell because they're from a different culture.
They are white people, but she is wearing a Washington State Cougars shirt.
sweatshirt.
And as you know, I went to the University of Washington.
I'm a Husky.
And they're cougars.
They're from the Agricultural College from across the state.
And right away, they seem like they're sort of suburban people.
They're suburbans.
And it's like, are we the same age?
I cannot tell because you seem older than me because you are like a married couple who are living a life.
But wearing a college sweatshirt, that's kind of a tell.
Exactly, right?
You're wearing a college sweatshirt, but you are clearly living a life of adulthood where you became adults earlier than I did.
Sure.
Like I became an adult somewhere around the 41, 42.
Okay.
Arguably.
Okay.
They became adults.
You can just see it on them.
They became adults when they were 21.
And so they're standing on my porch and I'm like, hello.
Normally when there's a knock on the door at my house, first of all, it's not white people.
And so just the fact that they're white people is A, unusual.
Second, cougar sweatshirt, which is very, it's just generally just sort of unusual.
And they look like adults.
And I'm like, hello, how may I help you?
How may I serve you today?
And she leans in conspiratorially, and she says, the house across the street, by which she means the house where Gary lives, the house where Skeeter used to live before he died of cirrhosis.
Right.
She said, we just bought that house at auction.
Wow.
And I was like, what?
And she said, yeah, it was foreclosed upon two years ago.
And they've been living there ever since, and we just bought it at a police auction, basically.
Wow, wow, wow.
And I said, who the how?
And she was like, so what's the deal with the house across the street?
Hmm, okay.
And I looked across the street, and I've told you, I think, that they, within the last year, built a fence, which they forgot to put a gate in.
They built a fence because they were worried neighborhood kids were breaking into their house and stealing stuff.
When, in fact, the neighborhood kids were not.
They were either pawning that stuff and forgetting they were pawning it, or their friends were stealing it.
You had concerns for a long time about the foot traffic in and out of the house while that lady was maybe back in a bedroom or something.
Oh, yeah.
It's sketch-o-rama.
But instead of staunching the bleeding in terms of, like, don't let these people come by, they built a huge fence across the entire front of their house,
And they forgot to put a gate in it.
I mean, they put like a big gate for the car that immediately sagged to the point that it couldn't be opened.
But they didn't put a human gate.
And so no one could get in or out.
They didn't realize this until the day that the fence was finished.
And then it was like, wait a minute, we can't get in or out.
So they had someone come and then put a gate in.
That seems like a pretty significant design flaw that a fence person would be thinking about.
Well, the person that built the fence, I happen to know, was not a fence person.
He was a guy who came by one day in a truck that said, we'll haul junk.
Okay.
And he was there to haul some junk out of her place.
And while he was there, they got into a conversation.
She was like, I need a fence.
And he said, I'll build you a fence.
Is this like a chain link fence?
No, it's a fence made out of boards.
It's a cedar fence.
Wow.
But not an expensively done one.
You know, one where a guy that hauls junk was, I can get all those parts.
He could probably make a pretty good deal for you.
Made a good deal.
And then once he was there, and then I would come by and say, hmm, you're making good progress on the fence.
And then he would turn his attention to my house and say, you know, I could build you a windmill.
And I said, you know, I'm not interested in having a windmill on my property, but I don't think you're the guy.
If I'm going to build a windmill, it's going to be a licensed and bonded windmill builder.
But let's leave that aside.
So after they put up the fence and after they jury-rigged a gate into it, then all of a sudden a bunch of signs showed up on the fence that said, security cameras in effect, beware of dog.
Like...
You know, don't beware of dog, beware of owner.
Don't beware of owner, beware of chemtrails.
Saber rattling.
Yeah, do not enter, no trespassing, private property, no parking.
Like a lot of signs.
They just went to the store and they got every sign that said no on it.
And they stapled them up all over this fence.
And let me tell you, it really raises the whole look and feel of the neighborhood.
I mean, like, just shy of, like, a radiation symbol, right?
Yeah.
They didn't go that far.
They didn't say, you know, there's nothing in a foreign language.
There's nothing that says Achtung on it.
But, you know, like, it's only because they didn't have those signs at the Lowe's.
So the woman in the cougar sweatshirt is standing on my porch and she's gesturing with a thumb over her shoulder like, what the hay?
We just bought this house.
What can you tell me about it?
And I said, well, let's just say that the signs are more suggestive of like a general – on the other side of the fence, there's a general mood.
And the signs are more suggestive of the mood than they are of any actual surveillance, dogs, guns, or anything else.
Gary is very unpredictable, but also very predictable in that you can predict that every night at 1 o'clock in the morning he'll be standing in the middle of the street yelling at the moon.
And he's mad at the moon because the moon took his kids.
But otherwise, I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
So that was big news because I'd gone on the Internet.
This is another portal to the Internet.
I'd gone on the Internet and I'd done a property record search and I knew that the house was in foreclosure.
But it had been in foreclosure a long time.
And in Washington state, at least, your house can be foreclosed upon and you can continue to live there for a long time.
Surprisingly, a long time.
And so I was like, well, you know, times are changing over there.
I don't want her to lose the house, but I also don't want Gary living in the front yard in his van anymore.
Yeah.
Nothing against Gary.
I just don't, you know, if somebody in this neighborhood is going to yell at the moon about how it took his kids, I want it to be me.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, so now the home is owned by the Coop.
I mean, you know, it's a long time to kind of have to put up with that.
Yeah, and I mean, once I became good pals with Gary and understood his travails, my sympathy for him kept me from...
Calling the police.
It kept me from threatening to call the police because I'm not a person that wants to threaten to call the police.
Yeah.
Because it's not something that you need to threaten.
If you're all the way to the point of calling the police, then call them.
You and I have been around the block on this police thing.
Well, yeah, and it seems like there's a, at least if you're kind of raised in the suburbs, there's this impulse of treating the police sort of like your dad.
Don't call the police, unless.
Well, but there's this sense of like, well, yeah, but like there's something suspicious here or something I'm not comfortable with, and I need them to go like check it out for me.
Yeah, right.
Or I mean, it might just like if something suspicious and I'm not comfortable with it, I'll go check it out.
If there's something where it's like these people need to be arrested or somebody needs to clear and present danger.
Right.
Then you call the police and you say without, you know, no uncertain terms.
Uh, police, here's the problem.
Right.
And you know, when my next door neighbor was out in the street firing his pistol in the air, I didn't call the police because I find him to be a reasonable man.
Is that because his daughter had snuck out?
Or yeah, some guy had snuck into his daughter's room and then jumped out the window and onto the roof and down into the street.
And that seemed reasonable to me.
Of course you're going to fire your pistol.
He had his reasons.
Um, he had his reasons and I trust him generally.
I don't trust Gary.
But after I realized Gary was, you know, was predictable in his in his moods, then I was like, you know, I have more problems with the rooster.
than I do with Gary, because Gary's yelling things at 1.30 in the morning, which is kind of the middle of my day, whereas the rupture starts at dawn.
But now I'm concerned.
I'm concerned that she's losing her house.
I think she has family upstate.
We don't say upstate here, but that's the best definition of it.
Upstate is not a thing we say in Washington.
We don't say the five either.
Oh, that's like an L.A.
thing.
No, we don't say the 5.
You don't say it in San Francisco either.
It's creeping into the culture here.
But I-5 doesn't mean anything to you guys.
Well, but people might say the 280, and it's considered a Bay Area thing to leave off the definite article.
It's considered a very L.A.
thing to put the definite article in front of a number for a highway.
The 10, the 5, what's the matter with those people?
Yeah.
Uh, but now, now I'm, I've been deputized basically by the cougar lady, not of my own accord, but she gave me the number, her number.
And she said, if anything goes on over there, will you be sure and give me a call?
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
I see.
Okay.
The story's all coming together.
And I was like, Hmm.
All right.
Well, if anything goes on over there, you're definitely on the list of people I'm going to call.
Now, there was always a list of people I was going to call, the fire department, the environmental protection agency.
Anyway, so she just appeared on the porch and I answered the door.
And this is going to shock and appall you, I think.
But I'm in my underwear.
Okay.
And I'm wearing headphones and I have a microphone.
You're in your home, John.
You should be comfortable.
That's right.
Actually, you know, the microphone I use is called a bee caster.
Is this the one you like to put on your chest?
Yeah.
I've got my B-caster.
It's not currently on my chest, but it's on my dining room table.
I've got my laptop.
So I pick up the laptop, the B-caster, the headphones, the underwear.
I go to the front door, and I open it, and I'm just standing there in all my glory.
That didn't come across in the audio, but it really does add something to the picture.
Well, and her eyes got wide, and she said, are you on the phone?
You heard it.
You were right here with me.
Anyway, she said, yeah, she sort of re-deputized me.
I don't know if I made it clear.
But I want you, if there's any activity over there, and she kind of gave an eye gesture to the effect of if they're moving out or if they're stealing the copper plumbing or something as they're leaving.
Oh, I see.
I see.
I want you to give me a call because I don't want it to be one of those situations where there's no wall board.
Got it.
Got it.
Okay.
I see.
Did she ask you if you wanted this role, John?
No, she didn't.
But I think having had a conversation with her, now she considers me an ally.
And I said to them when they were on my porch, because her husband was fairly quiet, and I said, you guys do this a lot?
You buy houses at auction and flip them around?
And they were like, oh, yeah, it's kind of our it's our thing.
My husband's a contractor and we do work.
I see.
I see.
I see.
And so this was another this was another indicator that they were grownups in that what they do as a couple is not go golfing.
It isn't you know, they don't go to Thailand.
They don't.
They don't race cars.
Their thing is, let's go buy houses at auction, fix them up, and sell them.
Got it.
And I was like, what a very interesting husband-wife thing.
They do this together.
It's almost like a kind of entrepreneurship.
Absolutely, but it also absolutely has to be a hobby.
They have to like to go to auctions.
They have to know what they're, you know, buying a house is no small thing.
They have to know what they're getting into.
I'm betting that she handles the financials.
I see.
So that happens sometimes with people who sell real estate together.
You know what I mean?
When you've got a couple that does real estate, they'll break up the work so they have a project together, but they also have their own important roles.
Right.
So she's doing all the financial stuff, which is probably no small potato.
And then she's the one that knocks on the door and she's the one that says, hi, neighbor, here's the deal.
Here's our new plan.
We're going to be working on the house across the street.
And we're going to try and do a nice job and get and he just standing there.
He's looking at his boots the whole time.
He's shuffling.
And he's thinking to himself, I wonder how I wonder how cheaply I can redo the bathroom.
Were they both wearing college sweatshirts?
He had on what you would call contractor clothes, which I think of as like a car heart kind of thing.
Well, but he's the supervisor, right?
Like he's the, he's the owner operator.
It's like a plaid shirt.
Yeah.
He's the, he's licensed and bonded.
He doesn't need to, he's not wearing a tool belt anymore, but when the work is getting done, he's not above swinging a hammer, you know, cause he's, he's a small independent contractor, but, but he definitely, he definitely is like on the up and up with the city and the County.
He's not, he's not, he's not doing it under the, under the table.
He's a, he's a straight shooter.
Got it.
Got it.
And I didn't see their car, but 100%, I bet it is a Dodge Ram truck, and I think it's the 2500.
Hmm.
If you see a Dodge Ram 1500, that could be just a regular person.
Is that the equivalent of like an F-150?
Yeah.
So you're talking about, okay, I see what you're saying.
Because an F-150 is like, that's a consumer pickup truck, with all due respect.
Yeah, that's a half ton.
Okay, that's a half ton.
Okay, okay.
And if you see somebody in a Dodge 1500, you think, oh, they went truck shopping.
That's a Costco truck.
Yeah, they chose the truck.
I'm just saying, like, that's a go-to-Costco kind of truck.
Or put a canoe in the back kind of truck.
Yeah, put a canoe in the back.
Or you're just somebody that wants a pickup truck because that's the look you're going for.
Or you figure, yeah, you figure you're going to have to haul your bicycles.
Or maybe it's a real truck and you're doing real work.
But you chose a pickup.
And that seems to me like if you chose a Chevy, if you chose a Ford, if you chose a Dodge, that's just aesthetic.
Okay.
Now a Dodge 2500 diesel truck.
Is that one of the ones with like extra tires?
No, that's not one of those.
That's just the 2500 is like you're, you are going to use this truck.
It's a working truck.
You are a working person and you've chosen the Dodge because it can, it communicates to you.
Less flibbity-jibbity and more like, I'm going to work here, and this is a truck that communicates.
Oh, my goodness.
Look at that thing.
Oh, look at that.
It's like a bulldog.
It's a bulldog.
Now, if you see someone driving a Dodge 3500.
Mm-hmm.
it is almost 99% sure that that person is an asshole.
Okay.
Okay.
How did you get to that?
You can just tell.
Experience bears this out, that that is the truck of choice for people who...
For people who like burn coal.
Now, this one does, you can get this with the flared fenders where I think you get the extra wheel.
And it's my understanding the extra wheel on there is because you're carrying things that are so heavy, you would literally pop your tires because of the heaviness.
Or towing.
If you're towing a big, big, big horse trailer.
More ground surface.
Yeah.
If you're towing a big horse trailer or something, you're going to want the extra, the duallys, as they're called.
Duallys.
Oh, okay.
All right.
And almost universally, those are now diesel-powered.
They have big Cummins diesel engines.
And they're super macho.
And if you're pulling a horse trailer, let me say this.
If you're driving a Dodge 3500 and you are pulling a horse trailer...
I will give you one opportunity to prove you're not an asshole.
Okay.
But that's the only dispensation I will offer.
Everyone else is an asshole.
And if you ever see somebody burning coal, which is to say that they have modified their diesel motor so that it intentionally creates big clouds of black smoke.
Oh, okay.
As a fuck you to environmentalists.
Yeah.
You're you are 100 percent driving a Dodge 35.
And you don't see that.
You don't see the coal burning so much in the 1500.
No, no, no, no.
Why would you buy a truck?
You just bought a truck.
You're driving around in a truck.
Dodge truck.
We don't have two trucks like you can take care of that.
Yeah, it's your truck.
It's your car.
When you're driving out in America, I'm not talking about here on the coasts where people are living in their ivory towers and sipping wine out of little glasses and lifting their pinkies and stuff when they drink coffee.
I'm talking about out in America, in the United States of America, places like the Dakotas or the Nebraskas.
Mm-hmm.
You will find that every, every, every single person is driving a truck now.
There are no cars in those places.
They have eliminated all cars.
Everyone is driving a truck, and the trucks are just, they're in an arms race to see who can be the biggest asshole.
And the truck is the way of communicating that.
Seems like the truck, if that is the case, then just having a truck is table stakes.
Yeah, that's right.
You're not going to get to really participate in the asshole parade unless you have one of these.
I'm not agreeing because I don't have the experience with it, but I'm just trying to understand.
Yeah, if you're just driving a truck, that's just normal.
You're just the normal.
And if you're driving a three-quarter ton truck...
It's like yeah, I live in Nebraska.
I'm doing stuff.
I got hay bales to move around even if I'm a college professor I probably have hay bales to move around because because That's what my students sit on at the University of Nebraska.
Okay, right And if you've ever been to University of Nebraska lecture hall, it's just hay bales kind of stacked up in a like a grandstand That seems like a good use of the environment.
What's up?
What is the mascot of the Nebraska team?
That's not the Cornhuskers is it?
Yeah.
Is it?
Yeah, they're husking corn to build hay bales to build corn bales for the university.
Oh, it's a whole biome.
Yeah.
So you learn about corn, you sit on corn, you haul corn, you teach corn.
You use corn to thicken sauce.
It's corn all the way down.
You put corn in your truck, but not if you're driving a diesel.
Oh, because of the ethanol?
Yeah.
Ethanol is a gasoline product made out of corn.
I think if it's made out of corn, it's technically called Cornothal.
Cornothal James Simpson.
That's right.
And Cornothal was that great city in Greece, and there was also a book of the Bible.
I think he also played on Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk.
Brilliant Cornels.
That's the history of Nebraska in a nutshell.
They're probably taught at the university when they teach the history.
It's probably taught via corn.
Corn is the medium.
Well, so University of Nebraska is the intellectual school of Nebraska.
Nebraska State College.
Oh, God, those guys.
That's the real Aggie school, and that's where they teach you how to burn coal.
That's where they're really in their corn.
They're in their corns, and they all have corns on their feet.
Oh, wow.
It's really, really, really corny.
Is that like sympathy weight when somebody gets pregnant?
There's so much corn.
Corn is what's happening.
uh sympathy weight yeah it's like sympathy weight it's like shaving your head when your friend is going through chemo that's a nice thing to do now see in my head i feel like i associate iowa with corn have i you know i because i think a lot of what i i'm not gonna say what i learned i think a lot of what i retained about america uh came from maps on placemats where there was one item associated with every state and i think corn was on iowa right and what was nebraska
Was it a Dodge truck?
No, but like Florida, you get an orange maybe, right?
Or an alligator.
Washington, you get an apple.
Apple.
Or a pine tree.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I think a pine tree is being maybe Oregon.
Oh, I see, I see.
But, you know, if you only, I mean, that's a lot, let's be honest, it's a little bit reductive to bring it down to a single item.
Okay.
Yeah, I think there are more pine trees in Washington than Oregon, but you're right.
Oregon gets the pine tree as their emblem.
I think maybe Oregon should be like a handmade wooden wallet.
Nowadays, right?
Nowadays, a handmade wooden wallet or somebody in a Shakespearean costume standing on one toe playing the flute.
Yeah.
Nebraska at the time, I think, on that placemat would have been indicated by some jello with little fruit bits in it.
I miss that.
I miss that.
But if you think about corn-fed beef, where's corn-fed beef coming from?
Okay, so that's more about beef than corn.
Well, but you can't have beef without the corn.
The corn's got to come from somewhere.
Yep.
It isn't like you're just taking your herd and you say, yee-haw, you slap him on the butt and send him into a cornfield.
No.
There's not a corn maze for steer.
You've got to husk that corn.
You've got to shuck that corn.
You've got to tote that barge and lift that bale.
And you've got to bale.
The bale's in your 2,500.
You've got to get a little drunk and land in jail.
Yeah.
Okay.
But this is even before there were 2,500s.
People were doing this with horse-drawn cars.
John, I don't know the answer, but I'm going to say Colorado.
Where do you think corn-fed beef comes from?
So I think corn-fed beef is a real Nebraska thing.
They're real proud of it.
And I think they're not shipping, let's just say, they're not shipping that corn from Iowa.
You know what I mean?
That's locally grown, locally sourced.
Okay.
Oh, that's farm-to-table corn.
Right.
I guess it's farm-to-farm.
Farm-to-table-to-farm.
Farm-to-table-to-farm.
That goes right to the steer.
The corn goes through the steer, through you, and back to the land.
Hakuna matata.
But so nowadays, if you go, so back in the day when you would go into a restaurant, you'd get a corn-fed beef and a wedge salad.
You'd drink 14 gin martinis, and then you'd sign the contract.
Those days are gone, my friend.
Nowadays, if you're going into a restaurant that's called the walrus and the spaghetti squash, you're going to find that you don't want your beef fed by corn.
Is this one of those logos that has an X made out of a fork and a knife and it's got four letters in it?
I don't know what that logo is called, but the Portland logo?
Yeah, S-Q-E-D, or S-Q-O-R.
What is it, the whale and the squid and the spaghetti squash?
What's it called?
Yeah, the whale and the squid and the spaghetti sauce.
I'm sorry, spaghetti squash, not spaghetti sauce.
That's a different place, yeah.
Have you ever made a spaghetti squash?
No, I've seen photos.
I feel like I might have seen them in person, but I feel like the inside kind of freaked me out.
Yeah, I tried at one point to say like, yes, okay, I'm going to be a person that eats spaghetti squash.
And I tried it and sure, it's a food, it's an edible food, but it isn't spaghetti.
And so let's stop pretending.
Yeah.
It's sort of like carob.
The spaghetti squash is the carob of starch.
Is carob the one that's like fake chocolate?
Fake chocolate that you used to get in the 1970s.
You'd go over to a hippie house and they'd say, would you like a cookie?
And you'd say, well, yes, I always want a cookie.
It's a chocolate chip cookie.
Yo, I'll always take a chocolate chip cookie.
And then you eat it and it's like, that's not chocolate.
That's a prank.
It's a chocolate chip-style cookie product.
Yeah, that's a bitter root you put in there.
But so nowadays, you don't want corn in your beef.
And I think there was something called corn finishing, where you let a cow just wander around, eat grass, and then right at the end, you'd put it in a stockyard and you'd feed it corn.
Like give it all the corn it could eat.
Oh, it gets one little amuse-bouche before the end.
And so that's how it gets all the fat, the marbled fat, because it's just eating sugar corn.
But nowadays, you don't want that.
You want your cow to live in a bucolic environment.
You want it to eat alfalfa until its very last moment.
You want the cow to have a name.
You want there to be a little girl in pigtails that takes little flowers in a basket.
Maybe it's got like an associate's degree.
The cow?
Yeah.
Yeah, from the Aggie school.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
These trucks are really, really macho.
My goodness.
3,500, right?
It's just, if you see a truck with a Confederate flag in the back window 99% of the time... Well, now, wait a minute.
I think of Dodge Ram 3,500s as very much being a Nebraska-South Dakota...
truck, maybe as far as Missouri.
But I think when you get down into the south, like I think of an Alabama truck as being a Chevrolet.
Okay.
And like an, you know, it's hard to, like the F-250, right, is the standard truck.
But I'm going to say that an F-250 is somewhere.
They're doing farming in Ohio.
They're doing farming in Michigan.
Well, this is just a random data point.
But as you probably know, my neighborhood, if there are people who are tradespeople, a lot of those are the sort of folks who live in my neighborhood.
And there are a lot of white pickup trucks.
And I'm going to say the preponderance is Fords and Toyotas.
Now, this is San Francisco.
Okay.
But there's a lot of what I'm going to call Ford 150 sort of paradigm-sized trucks.
And, boy, a lot of them have the crap beat out of them.
These are people who are doing all kinds of different stuff.
These are not Costco trucks.
They are really, really using these.
And I think in some cases it's like what they could afford and what they'll use forever because that's kind of a vibe in the neighborhood.
Yeah.
So I think that's true.
That is the Ford.
The reason the Fords are the best selling trucks are always were is that they're just used by everybody.
It's not a thing that you're driving around with a camouflaged baseball hat and a piece of skull in your mouth.
It's a thing where you need a truck.
It doesn't have the kind of stuff.
It doesn't have like little step and it's not like, you know what I mean?
It doesn't have that sort of tricked out.
Like I'm here to make a statement about being a truck.
It's got a shop vac on the side and the lock, the door lock has been pinged out and it's been replaced with a padlock.
Yeah.
Sure.
The ignition is probably gone and you start it with a screwdriver.
Did you ever drive a car that you started with a screwdriver?
No.
Oh, that's a thing.
Are you feeling good about your role with this new potential neighbor contractor of yours?
Do you feel like, are you feeling, will you know, let me put it this way, will you know when it's time to give her a call?
Well, so what I'm guessing is that when they finally go, because I'm on good terms with
I don't know if I've ever mentioned her name.
I think I have intentionally tried not to.
But you've been... Historically, if memory serves, you have been friendly with her.
You've been kind of worried about her.
You sort of checked in on her.
And you just generally wish for goodwill for her.
Yeah, even more than friendly with her, I feel like I am her friend.
And she has only very occasionally called me on the phone.
And one time she broached... She tried to bridge...
She tried to build a bridge over my river Kwai, which was she came to me and asked me for a loan to build the fence, this fence that I'm this fence that I have to stare at all day.
And she said, you know, I need to build this fence.
It's halfway built, which it was.
And the guy, the junk hauling guy wants another $1,500 to finish the fence.
And I need to get the fence finished because the neighborhood kids are coming in the window and they're stealing the woofers and tweeters out of my speaker.
And I said, Jamaica, good fences make good neighbors.
This is not a good fence.
And one other thing that makes good neighbors is not asking neighbors for loans, particularly to finish shit fences.
And she was like, right.
And I said, yep, I know that you probably felt that you were in a situation where you needed to do that in order to finish this fence.
But I'm opposed to the fence.
And also, you know, it would be I would be giving you the money to finish a thing that I think is idiotic.
Right.
So but but other than that, we have always been very tight.
And she's never really called me because she she's never called me to say, like, there's something suspicious.
She generally calls me to say, have you seen my cat?
And her cat lives on my front porch.
No kidding.
Yeah.
Which is another thing.
Her cat lives on my front porch, but her cat won't let me pet him.
And so what that means is every night at 2 a.m.
when I arrive home with my keys jangling and some box in my arms, I am newly startled by this cat leaping out of the dark shadows on my porch and running away from me.
And for five years, I've said, Hi, kitty.
Hey, kitty.
It's just me.
Hi, kitty.
And the cat gives me nothing.
But he's living on my porch.
That's where he wants to be, my porch.
That is really disappointing, John.
Yeah.
And he's the one when I had the possum that sat there licking his paws.
Oh, come on.
This cat had culpability.
Yeah, I'm like, you're not doing shit around here.
Oh, that's sickening.
So she'll call me sometimes and she's like, I haven't seen my cat in a couple days.
And I never say this to her, but I feel the same way.
Like, hey, lady, if your cat got taken up a tree by a couple of raccoons, I'm not going to shed a tear for him.
Yeah, you got to pick your shot, though.
But I do feel like when they move, it's going to happen in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
And I don't think anybody in there is going to take – I don't think they're going to be like I was that one time when I was living in the apartment with the rat where I took all the light bulbs.
That's just bratty.
That's just churlish.
Yeah.
I don't think they're going to do that because there's not that much market for secondhand light bulbs.