Ep. 264: "Whisker Fatigue"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Happy cheese November.
Yeah, it's fall now.
It's fall.
It's autumn also Pumpkins pumpkins everywhere as the song goes gourds gourds gourds
I'm just sitting here.
I mean, that's the end.
The end.
Well, you know, I don't like to talk about the show on the show.
Yeah.
But with that said, everything that's in the show is in the show.
Sure.
Are you on your new old computer?
I am.
I'm in my new old room.
In my new old computer.
Not my new old bedroom.
My new old studio room.
You're kidding.
In my new old computer, which I just...
two minutes ago set up for this and I've got there's a little bit of an awkwardness because
I've got a table, and the table's not big enough for the computer.
Is it like a card table?
No, I mean, it's a table, but it's wide.
It's long, but it's not wide.
And it's not like it's not big enough, but if I put it on the table, then I can't see past the computer.
It would just be me and the computer.
And so I got a little table, like a little cocktail table that I put on the side of the big table to put the monitor on.
So that I can kind of look down sort of like the master control program in Tron.
Okay.
Oh, so your big CPU iMac unit is on the secondary table?
It's on the side, right?
Ooh, doggie.
And then on the table is only the wireless Logitech sunshine-powered keyboard that you turned me on to.
But the problem is I don't like using a wireless mouse.
I just don't like it.
It doesn't feel right to you?
No, I just feel like it's an offense to nature.
A wireless keyboard is just as God intended, but a wireless mouse?
It's not really a mouse anymore.
No.
In the analogy, part of what made it a mouse is it had a little tail on it.
Thank you.
It's like a farmer's wife cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Which is pretty brutal.
Well, no, I can't unsee that.
So I like a wired mouse, but the problem with that is I also don't want an offshore mouse.
Hmm.
Like a mouse that looks like it was made for a PC.
Oh, oh, I see.
This might be a little bit of mouse racism, but I don't want a Logitech mouse.
Hmm.
I don't want a mouse that's got lots of buttons.
I don't like a mouse with a spinner ball.
You would not like my Logitech mouse, because even though it is a baller mouse, it really kind of looks like Ed Bagley Jr.
designed a race car.
Not in a good way.
Yeah, I don't want a mouse where it looks like I'm at a nail salon getting my manicure.
I don't want a mouse that looks like a koi pond.
A mouse looks like a gentleman's mouse.
A gentleman's mouse.
And I have a nice Apple mouse that I like that came with some ancient computer.
It's basically clear plastic.
It probably came with one of those apples that was colored and looked like a gumdrop.
We say African-American now.
What was that?
I just sent you my mouse.
You can see the Ed Begley mouse.
All right.
Let me see this mouse here.
I'm looking at it.
Oh my goodness.
What's going on with that mouse?
It's pretty high tech.
It's got a lot of affordances on it.
So I was looking online at mice and I saw that mouse touted somewhere.
The MX Master.
The MX Master is a go-to mouse.
I was like, what abomination is that?
Yeah, it's really ugly.
Uh, so anyway, but here's the thing.
My little Apple mouse, which is, which is clear like crystal, uh, and only has, as far as I can tell, it only does one thing.
Just, it just moves.
Well, it does two things.
It moves around and it clicks.
It has one way of clicking.
It's on a USB cord that is very short.
It's not meant to be strung around.
It's probably not meant to go all the way to a side table.
Right.
And my side table is on the left for ergonomicables.
And you're righty.
And I'm a righty.
So I want my mouse to stretch all the way over to the other side of the big table.
And so I went on a quest for a extension USB cable, female to male on one end and male to female on the other.
As God intended.
As God intended.
And so that's right.
Yeah.
God didn't make Adam and... Adam and Ed.
And Jeeves.
So in my house, as you probably know, there are 40 bins full of power cables, quarter-inch cables, XLR cables.
Do you have any of those old 30-pin USB cables you used to use for your phone that you can't use anymore?
Do you have a couple of those around?
Oh, yeah, I do.
I have some BlackBerry power cables.
I have a lot of cables from LG phones.
I have printer cables.
I have wall warts for every distortion box ever manufactured by any manufacturer.
I have radio shack equipment dating back to the 50s.
I could make a crystal radio set out of the cables I have.
And so I'm like, I will not go to the store or log on to Amazon for this simple cable.
I will find it in my archives, my cable caves.
And I spent the equivalent of the man hours that they use to build the Panama Canal.
Looking for what seems to me to be a simple cable that everyone should have.
It seems so intuitive.
There's got to be one of those around.
And there is not.
There never is.
I've got things from the 90s.
I've got five of something from the 90s, and I've got like one of those in the entire edifice, and I can never find it.
I think it's red.
I think it's a very important cable.
I have a million USB on one side, fire wire on the other side.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know why.
Remember when they made you change, Sean?
Remember when they made you change from the 30-pin USB adapter?
Remember you had to get all new cables?
Oh, yeah.
And you had to get an extra set because you go to different places.
You remember that?
I remember.
Do you remember how frustrating that was?
It was frustrating.
Yeah.
Well, so I went on Amazon and I was like, okay, fine.
I'm defeated.
Like every time we go to Amazon, it's like, fine.
You got me again.
You got me, Bezos.
Go ahead and, you know, go ahead and take my money, build another magic dirigible that he won't even show the rest of us.
There's a reason he's laughing all the time.
He's flying around in dirigibles and they have cloaking devices.
He's not even sharing the fun with us.
No.
We can't even see what he's showing off.
If I were...
Listen, I've said if I were Elon Musk enough times that there ought to be an acronym for it.
I-I-E-M.
Or I-I-W-E-M.
I-W-E-M.
I-W-E-M.
Would you get a dirigible?
No.
I would have had a dirigible a long time ago, but not just a dirigible.
I would have done a scale, not a scale.
I would have done a two scale reproduction of the Hindenburg minus the swastikas.
Decked it out even nicer, you know, just like decked it out really nicely.
Would you have like tea service and stuff like that?
Oh, for sure.
White glove service.
And then here's the thing.
I wouldn't use it to...
To go places, I would just park it off the coast and it would be my apartment.
Oh, no question about it.
It would be like a tree house without a tree.
Yeah, it would just.
Sky floor.
Does Elon live in San Francisco or LA or somewhere like else?
I, you know what?
I don't know the answer to that.
It's going to drive our listeners nuts, but I feel like he must, well, I'm sure he has more than one.
Well, I'm not sure.
One imagines he has more than one home.
I'll bet he's got something in Silicon Valley, right?
Yeah.
He's got something where he lives in a tube.
A bunker somewhere.
Mm-hmm.
You know, actually, I started thinking about this not connected to Elon, who obviously has enough.
You know, he's building a super high speed train to space.
So he's he's busy.
I thought about this when I was interacting with the orbit of that like preppy bro that started Snapchat.
Rich, young kid with a rich lawyer dad who's just sort of a beach bum.
Starts this thing, now he's got a billion dollars.
And he's... And something like 100,000 pairs of glasses that he can't move.
LOL.
Lowercase LOL.
But he did a smart thing with his money, I thought, which was he bought up the entire town of Venice, California.
Now, even if his company tanks at least...
He has all this real estate.
I mean, he became the biggest real estate company in Santa Monica.
He owns so much land.
He bought Santa Monica Airport.
It's the only true wealth.
Right.
So he just was, you know, like rather than just keep that money in sports football teams like Paul Allen,
Paul Allen also bought a bunch of real estate.
I mean real estate, right?
But so he's doing that thing of like young tech billionaire.
He's doing a little bit smarter because he's buying real estate, but I'm sure he's rolling around Venice on a unicycle with six armed guards also on unicycles.
And I was like, why wouldn't that kid have a Hindenburg built for himself?
Park it right above and slightly off the coast of Venice and just sit there all day with those engines just...
Can you imagine how relaxing it would be?
And, like, if you need to go somewhere, maybe you want to get a bite.
It's something you don't have on the dirigible.
You want to go to, like, In-N-Out or something.
You just slowly lower it down.
You hop out.
Maybe you had something to do in downtown L.A.
and you would just, like, slowly... The shadow of your fucking Zeppelin would just...
I would be so into that because I've always loved forts.
Over my life, I have created so many secret hideouts for myself.
There was a time in junior high when I almost lived in the crawl space where I had a whole environment up there that I created.
What was your best secret fort?
man that was a good one well no it's okay it can be revealed now it's been unsealed but like circa eighth grade when i was really at peak weirdo um at some point we got you know you get you get a uh they you don't really call it an attic you call it a crawl space and it's usually accessible but in florida you don't have basements it's accessible uh in the garage there's usually like a little door you move you get a ladder you move this door aside and you can go up there and put your christmas shit up there
Right.
And I'm not sure why this happened.
Maybe we had a credit card with Sears, but we started getting lots of Sears things.
We had Sears come out and install those.
It's like a door.
You pull down a handle and then folding steps come down and you walk up, you ascend up into there.
And I had made that has got to be up there for me.
excluding certain porno forts in the woods and stuff like that.
To have that in-house nearby, to have someplace you could go that was in your house but away from your house, it was like finding a secret room.
It felt totally underutilized to me.
Why would you just put Christmas ornaments up here?
You could bring Choose Your Own Adventure books and a 16-ounce bottle of Coke up there.
It had a floor and the roof was... It kind of had a floor.
It mostly had that pink, itchy insulation...
Right.
That's sort of one reason you wouldn't.
But, you know, here's the other thing was when you're in eighth grade and you got Coke and potato chips in a choose your own adventure book, you also have relatively unlimited time, especially if you don't do homework.
So you can really, you can really plunge your resource.
I'm just thinking like, you know, if you were to apply that, if you took that mindset with the budget of a Zeppelin, whew,
Well, sure.
But I'm curious about this space.
Did you put in a floor or what what what did you stand?
I don't remember what I did because you really weren't supposed to be up there.
It troubled my family that I went up there.
I wasn't doing anything like bad.
I just didn't want to be around people.
I think I think I would bring up a portable radio and then I would have had a little bookshelf I put up there with my books.
And I would just mostly go up there and just be by myself and listen to Key 105.
See, I want to say that I put down boards, but I can't imagine I had the upper body strength to move boards up steps.
I probably put down like a cardboard box or something.
Fashioned an airsats chair between the beams of the house.
There was an apartment building here in Seattle where a bunch of... I used to work at a punk rock pizza parlor.
And a bunch of the pizza parlor people all moved in together into one sort of rickety, old, janky apartment building.
Would you call it a squat?
Well, they were paying rent.
Okay, okay.
And it was one of those things where the nice bedroom...
belonged to the responsible girl who was kind of the assistant manager and then the next bedroom belonged to you know the girl that worked hard and then the next bedroom was the lazy girl and her like her incompetent friend and then like
There was an actual stair, like a finished stair, up to an attic, which was unfinished and had just no floor.
It just had, like you're saying, insulation.
But it was a proper stair up there.
And so a couple of the dudes...
At the pizza parlor went in there and showed all this ingenuity and and put all this effort and money into buying wood, nailing it down and building a floor in this apartment building where I think the rent for the whole thing was probably four hundred dollars.
Wow.
And then all of a sudden they had they built this like because it was an old building.
So you could stand up up there.
Um, it was, it was a big, big attic space.
It was a proper, not just bedroom.
It was a root.
It was the whole top of the building.
Wow.
It was a flat and they had this incredible loft up there, uh, which they just constructed out of the air as far as I could tell.
And I think the arrangement was that they pay, you know, I don't know how much rent they paid cause they invented the, the room, uh,
But, you know, it was such a step up from my thing, which was like, hey, is anybody sleeping on this couch tonight?
Oh, yeah.
That I just, I was in awe of it.
And they're probably, you know, glad to have you a little bit out of the way.
Well, they were glad to have them.
None of them wanted me there after a very short period of time.
And that was a house or a set of...
set of people that I would that was at a time when I was behaving just shamefully and so Even when I think back at it What should be wonderful memories of my?
like mid to late drug period They're awful memories and when that building eventually was torn down by a giant
collection of backhoes and bulldozers and replaced with a just skeezy new condo, eight-story tall new condo, I rejoiced a little because some of my bad memories were buried, buried in a hole.
But I'm with you about the forts.
Problem is we didn't have, none of our places had
Good forts anywhere.
No good forts.
You know, I feel like part of it is, I mean, obviously there's this one thing where like when you're a kid and I would count, you know, being 14 is, you know, still being a kid.
But, you know, when you're a kid, especially when you're a little kid, you're small, you can fit under the sink.
You could go into the credenza.
There's this there's a certain appeal to like, I wonder if I could fit into that.
you know what i mean and like then you see these uh photographs of like apartments in hong kong i don't know if you've ever seen any of those photos of the inside of apartments in hong kong but they're just they're crazy i mean they're like a little bigger than like an airport bathroom and a family lives in them and it's just completely crazy what people fit into these i think there's something very appealing to a certain kind of introvert weirdo personality about having a hidey hole yes well all i ever wanted was
a secret room.
And I forget who I was talking to.
But it was a friend who was having a house built.
Oh, oh, I know who it was.
It was my good friend, Matt Dresner, former bass player of the Gits.
He had, he has just rebuilt his house.
It was, you know, it was, he did a sort of gut renovation of it.
And of course, the first question I asked was,
well, did you have a secret room installed?
And on the face of it, his denial that he had a secret room built is the smart move.
Right.
If I did, I couldn't tell you.
Right.
You're not going to say like, yeah, want to know where the secret room is?
It's behind the painting where the wall safe is.
Like you're not going to reveal it to just any, you know, dumb purpose.
Yeah.
But I could tell in his reply that,
that he he didn't have a secret room built because what he said was i talked to the contractor about a secret room and it ended up that the bid to build a secret room would have been was prohibitively expensive i'll bet that's how they get you i'll bet oh they oh we got a live one right like we this i see this guy coming a mile off he's gonna want to hidey hole
Or a hidden staircase or all those... Just even like... I feel like there's a hierarchy of these things.
We've talked about the monk hole.
I think having a way to get out of your house and move a distance away, even if it's not inhabitable per se, it's just a smart idea.
Every house has to have two means of egress, like in case of a fire.
You've got to have a way to get out.
That just makes sense.
Tunnel to the back nine.
To the back nine, but you also, I mean, don't you need an existential means of aggress?
What if you just need to get away from you?
What if you just need to be somewhere?
So I think you get a monk hole, and that can be a very modest monk hole, but it doesn't have to be like a full-on hallway, like a James Bond hallway, although that would be really nice.
That would be nice.
Then you get, I think you can think about, and this is not as spectacular, but certainly hidden panels.
What's the first thing you do in D&D?
You go in a room and you search for doors and panels, right?
Someplace where you could put stuff.
I think a secret hallway feels like a really smart, grown-up thing to put in your house.
A way to get from here to there that's just for you is a very, very good idea.
My aunt's beach house...
The entire inside of the house, and I'm talking about walls and ceiling, was painted beadboard.
And it's a style of Oregon Beach House that I think is an imitation of a style of Cape Cod Beach House.
Except because it was Oregon.
Like, Oregon in 1890...
really wanted to be Cape Cod in 1790.
And so they built like whole communities, including the little town of Gearheart, Oregon, in imitation of this, you know, like weathered cedar shingles and this...
But the thing about Cape Cod, and I don't think a lot of people know this, is that the beach houses of the East Coast, the vacation homes of the East Coast, often not even beach ones, but like up in Maine and out on the coast, a lot of them are uninsulated.
It's just the out walls and then the beams.
I've been in a lot of vacation homes in pretty nice areas that are essentially like a hovel.
Yeah, just a fucking hovel.
It's almost like a lean-to.
Except when you look at these on Cape Cod from outside, they're three stories tall.
They look like beautiful, elegant homes.
It's just that the inside isn't done.
Yeah.
And because what they do is at the end of the season, the last day of summer, they lock the door and they don't come back until May or June.
And it seems crazy to me.
And from the Northwest perspective, it's never consistently... The weather is never consistent enough here that you would build a house like that.
I mean, we don't have air conditioning anywhere, but we certainly do put insulation in things.
So the Oregon Beach House...
has insulated walls but beadboard floor to ceiling and also the ceiling and in this house it was painted kind of dark green the beadboard was dark green upstairs the beadboard was all painted a bright and cheery cream yellow but what it meant was because the beadboard is just panels they had
A few different places where if you kind of pressed on the wall, it would go and this wall would just open.
Oh, my God.
And that's where their liquor cabinet was.
Oh, my God.
Behind a wall next to the fireplace, if you just like leaned on it, it would go.
And then the wall opened and it was full of booze.
You got a liquor hole.
But the problem was over the course of 50 years of living there, they...
that was a popular place.
And so there's a spot where... You get wear and tear, you get a little bit of a... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
10,000 hands had pressed against the same... Touched the liquor hole.
And so there's basically like a sort of a gray hand-shaped stain in the paint.
Yeah.
That's bad opsec.
Yeah, because now you can tell.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, I think you also, if you're going to do it that way, you also have to carry a hanky with you.
Okay.
Well, it should be like a hanky on a string.
Well, I mean, I think you're probably establishing one of the guidelines for this kind of thing, which is that, you know, have it be commensurate with how secret you need it to be, how much it's used.
Right?
So if you're the kind of person, like we were recently looking at cat boxes, new litter box, and you can get some various, obviously you can get self-cleaning litter boxes, you can spend a lot of money.
Some people want a litter box that also doubles as like an end table or a nightstand
Who wants that?
Well, I'm not here to judge, but that for me kind of feels like the worst of all worlds.
Right.
But I mean, you know, if it's something where like you wouldn't want your refrigerator to be invisible, like, you know, that's not hiding anything from anybody.
Although you do see those kitchens where you walk in and you're like, where's the refrigerator?
Which of these things are doors for something?
Yeah.
And it just they made it look like a cupboard.
I don't like that.
That's that's a little cute for my liking.
Well, yeah, because are you ashamed to have a refrigerator?
Why would you mask it?
Yeah.
We all have them.
Yeah.
It's just nature.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
But, like, what... I mean, so in the hierarchy, though, then... So you got... You move up.
You got Munkles.
I realize that Munkles is a very ambitious project you probably want to undertake from the very design of the house.
But, like, you know, a secret panel.
You get into, like, a hidden corridor.
And I would call it a corridor.
But, like, a secret room.
It doesn't even need to really... It doesn't need to be, like, a V for Vendetta room.
It doesn't need to be, like, an entire, like...
secret den.
In fact, I think it would be less detectable from people who are going and looking at your plans.
You don't want it to be too detectable.
There's probably some kind of illusion you can use with false walls and depths and assumptions and visual illusions and tricks, but I'm talking about a room that's big enough to have even just a chair in it.
But a place to lay down would be nice, too.
The first thing I do when I'm in a space for any length of time is I walk around
Trying to make sure that the physical space as I perceive it from outside comports with the way that the space is configured inside.
100%.
I don't talk about it, but I do the same thing.
I learned this in the Amityville Horror.
When you read the Amityville Horror, you realize there could be a secret red room in your basement that you don't know about until it's 3.15 a.m., right?
Right.
I don't want that.
no no no no no uh no alarms and no surprises i want to know what i'm dealing with here and so you could do that you know and again to talk to another movie you look at uh the uh the watchman movie where rorschach takes out his tape measure he has an airsats tape measure to figure out where the comedian is hiding his costume and photos so even something like that i would take a hidden panel in my closet i would put my trophies and my pictures of silk specter one in there i would totally do that
Well, and also, who doesn't want a thing where you open a wall and it's full of machine guns?
Machine guns, newspaper clippings, maybe things you've received from the mayor?
I think I've told you before about the house in Sun Valley I went to with my friend Trevor where his uncle...
After we were smoking cigars after our steak dinner, he said, you want to see my gun room?
And we went upstairs.
This is back before gun room was a thing where you would go like, oh, no, are you a murderer?
This was back when I was like, gun room?
It didn't used to be the last thing you'd hear.
No, it was like, you're a top shelf gentleman.
And we went upstairs and into his bedroom.
He had a big, big house in Sun Valley.
And we walked through some...
door in his closet and then threw a secret door into an entire room, a full on bedroom sized room full of machine guns.
Oh, man.
And he wasn't a survivalist or anything like that.
He was just a rich dude.
He was probably an eccentric.
A rich eccentric that Trevor was like, oh, that's my uncle with the, you know, like rolled his eyes.
But when we went to Sun Valley, this uncle was like, yeah, Trevor's here with his friends.
And he just like, we couldn't pay for anything.
He treated us like big shots.
Steak and cigars.
And he also had a room full of guns and probably a room full of gold bars that he didn't show us.
That's what he showed.
Exactly.
Yeah.
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Right.
That's the room that he showed you.
Yeah.
Okay, now let me ask you this.
Is it... How does one put this?
Where is the line in deciding what you offer up to people vis-a-vis showing your secret things?
Because it seems to me somebody who's offering to show you their secret things may not be so good at keeping a secret.
Right.
Or do you think it's like a false flag operation?
He's showing you the little gun room.
He's never going to show you where the big gun room is.
My sense of that, because this was in the 1980s, my sense of that is that at the time, conspiracy was not
A mainstream thing.
No, it wasn't.
I remember... I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I remember very specifically, I was working at my parents' restaurant, and there was a guy who pulled me aside.
He was a regular customer every Saturday night, and he asked me what I knew about the Trilateral Commission.
And I said, can I get you more water?
And he said, do you understand what the Trilateral Commission is?
And I said, I do not know what the Trilateral Commission is.
And this is going to surprise you, but at length, he told me what the Trilateral Commission is.
And that was my first...
My first hands-on exposure to conspiracy culture was probably 1979 or 80.
I don't think it became such a thing until maybe even Waco.
Normal people would look at something like that and go, you are a loon.
Yeah, well, because the great conspiracies all were anti-Semitic, right?
I mean, you already had established yourself.
If you were talking about the Trilateral Commission, there was an 80% chance that you were going to start talking about the Rothschilds.
Oh, and you get into Zionism.
Yeah, and in a winky-winky kind of way.
Okay, okay.
You know, the protocols of the elders of Zion was like...
Well, so that was right.
I think JFK was the first great probably the first.
I mean, after after, let's be honest, after the Judaism issue, JFK has got to be one of the first truly great white people conspiracies.
Right.
Where the where the I mean, the CIA, the Cubans.
Lyndon Johnson, the like the people that manage Wiggly Piggly, like everybody was involved.
It's all connected.
I have to look at this red yarn.
But in the in the 80s and into, I think, the first conspiracy book I read that was that wasn't like a mainstream conspiracy like Who Shot JFK?
was a book called Behold the Pale Horse.
Oh, yeah, you've talked about this.
Remind me about this.
Yeah, and Behold the Pale Horse was written by one of these guys, probably the same guy that wouldn't let you finish your busboy rounds because he wanted to talk about the trial.
It's all connected, John.
Everything's connected.
But this was the first book, I think, that made that argument, that it's all connected.
And it goes down throughout the book, and it talks about
All of the conspiracies, the flatter, the under the under the ice UFO secret government.
Has that been around for a while?
The lizard people?
uh yeah it has and and this guy took it all and put it together you know as you know with a conspiracy it there only has to be loose association well if it was an obvious association it wouldn't be a conspiracy do you know what kind of do you know what kind of like self-knowledge insanity it takes to take in that much disparate information and stay a sane person it takes a very strong character john it does it does and and the
It's funny because yesterday I posted without comment a couple of graphs.
I put up some infographics.
I put up some infographics that I found as I was watching the internet go.
As I was watching it roll on, roll on, steam rolling on.
I found these infographics on Vox.com.
And they were two very interesting ones.
It was just like gun ownership on one axis...
to violent deaths on another axis by state and by country, by nation.
And, you know, predictable results, right?
The states that had more gun ownership had more gun deaths.
I know that's a radical...
I mean, you're not even drawing a conclusion from it.
It's just data.
And the countries that had more guns had more gun deaths.
There's not a graphic indicating how many good guys with guns bring up that save rate.
Yeah.
And to be honest, it does not...
make a distinction between gun deaths, suicide deaths and violent crime deaths.
Biggest cause.
And and and there was and it was hilarious because, you know, at first, of course, my Twitter followers, the initial wave of them are like, wow, you know, this should this is a wake up call or, you know, it was like the sort of Twitter responses that
are validating the amplifying preaching to the choir ones.
And then it got into that realm of internet professor.
Oh, boy, here he comes.
And people who are like, I'm not a statistician, but I play one on TV.
And I got the first reply where the replier used...
the word causation and i was like in before correlation does not equal causation like i wanted to get in before that in the in the in the uh 4chan parlance because lol and the the first ones were these people that were like interesting
And I was like, that feels like a dog whistle.
But then out it goes into the world.
And pretty soon it's one of those things that has found its way to people that are sitting on their branches out in the dirt.
And there's no... They lost their toadstool.
I made no comment on these graphs.
And within the graphics themselves, there's no commentary.
It's just simply a line.
Turns out when there's more rain, things get wet.
That's right.
It's just a thing.
And people started arguing.
They started arguing with the graphic because they started arguing with the implication that they drew from the graphic.
And gradually, little by little, came this wave of correlation does not equal causation.
And what that is, that's another one of these things like ad hominem attack or straw man fallacy, where you get a term...
And it's used enough that it is disseminated out to a group of people that don't really know how to use it.
But now they're employing it as a way of like – like during the last election, the number of times I read the word straw man.
Mm-hmm.
Um, even referring to things that was like, well, that's what, no, that's actually not, I mean, it, it is a fallacy.
It's just not that one.
But so it's one of those ones like, like, uh, the one, the classic hit for me is just introducing the notion of hypocrisy.
It's one of those, it's in your quiver as one of those things that will just shut down the conversation.
And you may not understand why the conversation just shut down, but you feel, you get to feel like you won because you said, you said, you said, uh, correlation.
Yeah, that's right.
And so that, I think, came as a result of people trying to talk to conspiracy theorists and say, well, I mean, I see there is some correlation here, but it doesn't
That doesn't mean that there's causation here.
And the conspiracy theorists got that and they were like, hmm, that shut me down that time.
I didn't know what that meant.
So now I'm going to turn that around.
And now all the conspiracy theorists are using it, or rather all the nuts, are using it to...
argue with graphs right argue with like not just statistics that's the price of freedom john it was really an interesting really an interesting like three hours because it's the price of freedom john in order to have in order to have the freedom to have guns for no particular reason we need to understand some people are going to die from guns because that's the price of freedom it is price of freedom
It is the price of freedom.
The other thing you have to remember is that people die.
Oh, that's not just a correlation.
You go to sleep and there's no snow, and then you wake up and everybody's been shot.
That's a correlation.
It's not the gun.
It's the bullet that kills people.
So what are you going to do, Merlin?
Are you going to make bullets illegal?
What are you going to do?
Are you going to take physics and make it illegal?
You can't land on a fraction.
Lol.
Cars kill people.
Are you going to make cars illegal?
Lol.
Your argument is invalid, sir.
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Next.
Here's a picture of Nick Thune with an eagle for a hat.
Your argument is invalid.
so anyway but i i want to return just for a moment to your search for a cat box yeah have you ever i've seen a lot of cat boxes advertised as smell free smell proof and um
I've never actually seen a cat box in the wild that was truly smellproof.
I've seen smellproof self-cleaning cat boxes in the wild, but they smell like cat boxes.
Yeah.
Do you know of, in all this technology, so we put a man on the moon, right?
We have invented the Roomba.
Can't put metal in the microwave.
But you can't put metal in the microwave.
Also, a microwave cannot cook the center of a lasagna no matter how long you put it in there.
I have seen that.
That's not correlation.
That's just a fact.
Yeah.
So, oh, you guys are real smart.
You got a thousand rams in your computers.
Yeah, figure this out.
But how the fuck do you cook the inside of a lasagna?
You can't do it.
Yeah.
Why has there not why has Elon Musk or someone or the or the dude bro from Snapchat?
Yes.
Why did he make those sunglasses instead of actually inventing a way to own a cat and not have your house smell like a cat's anus?
Oh, let me piggyback on that.
Why would anybody spend money putting in fucking granite counters in their kitchen when they could use that money to make a secret room?
Whoa.
Right?
Oh, how about I... You know what?
I want everything in my kitchen to be invisible.
I don't want doors.
I don't want to see doors, but I can't afford a hidden room.
Here's the thing.
I think there's two ways to look at smell, at least two ways to look at smell.
And the one way, the one that people think about is, ooh, my cat makes a tinkle in a doody in a box.
Right.
And I don't want to smell it.
No.
Right?
I think that's... When most people talk about that, I think that's what they mean.
In our case, it's that...
As much as one does not want to be led around by one's cat, one's cat decides whether or not that box will accommodate its blessing.
Oh, I see.
And so the other kind of smell is, ew, maybe the cat doesn't like the way that thing smells.
So although the pleasant knock-on effect of frequently changing or, you know, sifting out the cat box, a nice knock-on effect of that is your house does not smell like ammonia as much.
But the important thing is you make sure you maintain a high level of confidence and dignity with your cat, that your cat knows that he or she or they can go into the box and offer up their blessing in a way that won't be disturbing to them.
Has it ever occurred to you or does it appeal to you at all to be one of those people that teaches their cat to crouch on the toilet seat and go to the bathroom in the toilet?
I'm intrigued by the people who do.
And I've done a little bit of scholarship about cat training.
I don't hold that it is impossible.
It's probably difficult.
But I think if you're the kind of person that really wants to train a cat, maybe you can.
Or more importantly, maybe you could convince yourself you've trained a cat.
If you're the kind of person who wants to think that you've trained a cat, I like that.
It's a kind of feline suggestibility.
I'm not against it.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist.
Don't email me.
But what we were looking for was we have an old cat who's got a lot of problems.
At one point, why did we do this?
Basically, we wanted to have a box that she would enjoy using and that we ideally wouldn't have to see and smell, so we've tried some different ones.
Now, we're going to get a lot of letters about this because you can actually plunge a lot of money.
I have friends who have the very expensive self-cleaning boxes that look like a space capsule.
Uh-huh.
And you just spent four figures on something like that.
And those work?
They're useful devices?
They think they work.
They tell you that they work.
But, I mean, that's a lot like training a cat.
Yeah, right.
That's the thing, right?
They tell you that it works.
But how much side maintenance are they doing that they're not acknowledging?
John, is there any chance that it could just be cat correlation?
No.
A cat correlation is not cat causation, Ron.
It could be a cat availability heuristic, right?
It could be a cat confirmation bias.
It could be a cat hominem argument.
Well, it is cat confirmation bias because they're typesoplasma trichinosis.
Tryptoplasma trichinosis.
And also, yeah, you know, I mean, like, you know, who knows?
Who knows?
The cat has you convinced that the smell of the cat is important.
Hmm.
Right?
The cat's like, you love the smell.
You love the smell.
So maybe, hmm, who's training whom?
Maybe it's part of the question.
That was one of my favorite late period Aretha Franklin songs.
Who's training whom?
Who's training whom?
I don't know why we have animals in our house.
But the idea of having, like, some of the photographs of these cat boxes are very, very funny.
Just, like, the idea, like, you got your lamp up on the table and you see this little head sticking out.
Oh, yeah, this is my ship box I put a light on.
I visited a cat last night that I used to own.
Oh.
After my wonderful cat, my beloved cat Lewis, was killed, I was despondent, and a friend of mine had a cat that was, this friend of mine was in a love relationship with
with a guy that i know i know them both they're both friends of mine uh and it turned out that they and then they had a baby a beautiful beautiful baby and then it turned out that the guy uh didn't really want to like be tied down by a bunch of rules oh man and so they're always trying to tie you down with rules i know rules and stuff and so their relationship ended and as a parting gift to kind of
Like maybe salve the wound of him just moving into an apartment across town and getting a girlfriend.
He got them a cat.
Hmm.
That they didn't want.
I'm trying to follow this.
It was like a lovely parting gift.
It was sort of like, oh, you know, brought it home.
It gave the cat to the little girl like, sweetie, I got you this wonderful gift.
You take care of this now.
Yeah.
And the mom was like, we didn't want a cat.
Yeah.
And if we had wanted a cat, it wouldn't be that cat.
We didn't even get to choose the cat.
And he dropped the cat off and then was never seen again.
That's definitely a certain kind of genre of gift.
Here you have this.
Yeah.
And it's not that he was never seen again.
I see him all the time.
It's just that he never was seen again in the context of the cat.
He's an absent cat father.
This was one of those cats that was weaned too early.
It's a cat whose head is too small for its body.
Oh, no.
Not like microencephaly cat.
Oh, micro.
Okay.
Oh, nanocephalic.
It was just, you know, cats have proportions like anybody else, and I don't want to body shame this cat, but it's just like... Good for you.
It's not the prettiest cat.
No, no.
You wouldn't have picked it to bring into your home forever.
This is not a cat I would have picked.
This is a cat that my mom would suggest that you drown in a river.
She's from Ohio.
She had 20 cats living under the corner crib, but that's a different thing.
And so the cat was one of those cats that if you touched it the first time, it would purr.
If you touched it the second time, it would rub up against your hand.
And if you touched it the third time, it would grab you in its claws and bite you.
I'm not a cat psychologist, but you think that comes from the weaning too early?
It sounds like it has trust issues.
In addition to have a tiny head, it sounds like it's got trust issues because a cat is ultimately a wild animal.
It wants to be wild.
That's right.
That's right.
And this cat did have trust issues.
This cat was purchased or scavenged by this guy who immediately handed it over to a one and a half year old.
How did that day start?
And a woman that didn't want it there.
But I think it was already this way.
So the cat stayed with them for a while.
And was the guy gone at this point or was he still in evidence?
No, no, he left immediately.
He brought a cat into the house and like dropped it off and said, here, this is me now.
Like this is your new dad.
No, no, no.
I mean, I think he sees her on Wednesdays and Sundays.
That's nice.
That's sweet.
And so this little girl, you know, these are progressive people.
These are good friends of mine and progressive people.
And they were one of the parents who taught their pre-verbal child sign language.
Oh, right.
Because of the understanding that a child can communicate before they can talk.
Mm-hmm.
And so they taught the the baby how to sign like hungry and tired and stop condescending to me mad and like, you know, you're not the boss of me and whatever else.
And so the mom, my my my pal came into the room one time to find the cat like.
Claws in each side of the baby's head, like a cat biting the baby's pate.
It made the baby into prey.
While the baby was signing, frantically signing, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Oh, no, no.
I hate that image.
Oh.
That's terrible.
And the cat didn't stop because the cat didn't speak baby sign language.
The cat did not speak baby sign language.
See, they should have taught the baby cat sign language.
Well, this is the thing.
They taught the baby sign language.
They didn't, I guess, communicate to the baby that she needed to be looking at someone while signing and so that they could see her.
She was just talking to herself with her hands.
Yeah.
She was talking to the walls.
And so the mom immediately called me and said, we need your help.
And that help is get this cat out of here.
Got to do an extraction.
And I said, I'll be there in 15 minutes.
And so I came over with a... Your purpose-built cat extraction vehicle.
That's right.
It was like a geek squad Volkswagen.
It's not a siren.
It actually does meow.
Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.
I showed up with a cardboard box and a roll of masking tape.
15 minutes, huh?
I've been waiting for this call.
It was already sitting by the front door for other reasons.
I was like, I'll take this box and this roll of masking tape.
So I show up over there, and here's this cat who now just seems demure.
And the...
And the baby.
The cat doesn't know it's bad.
We put that on the cat.
The cat's fine.
And, you know, I am a cat whisperer.
That's why she called me.
And so I'm there and I do the thing that a cat whisperer does, which is not approach the cat.
You just sit and start making pleasant chit chat with the other humans.
Let the cat find you.
The cat's going to find you.
cat's not unaware that you're there.
It's curious.
It just needs its time.
So I'm talking to the, to the grownup and, you know, and interacting with the child.
And they both have a look of desperation in their eyes, like, like a Stockholm syndrome situation.
Like everything's fine.
Everything's fine.
But they're, they're eyeballing me.
Oh, their adrenaline must just be pumping.
Yeah.
When are you going to get this, this monster out of here?
Right.
And I'm, you know, I'm like, uh,
I'm like the bus driver in the Dustin Hoffman movie One Wild Day.
No, the one where he walks around the streets shouting Attica, Attica.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dog Day Afternoon.
Dog Day Afternoon.
I'm like the cop bus driver that fooled the audience in the big twist at the end of the movie.
Oh, I see.
So spoiler alert, you're the sleeper cell.
I'm the sleeper cell.
Or something.
You're at least in disguise.
But you know in your cat training that you need to come in and play it off legit.
The only way to make friends with a cat is to not pay any attention to the cat.
That's right.
And so the cat eventually finds me and I pick the cat up and the cat gives me two, three pats and then is biting me and clawing me.
But in a way that it thinks is fun.
And I'm like,
You know, Kitty, I've been clawed by bigger cats than you.
And I gradually, just maintaining friendly eye contact with my friend and her daughter, I take the cat.
I put the cat in the box.
You make that sound so simple.
Did you scoop it?
Did you grab it by the scratch?
I already had the cat in my lap.
Oh, you were doing like a Blofeld pet.
Yeah.
And then the cat, a Blofeld pet that's attacking you.
Okay.
And I put the cat in the box.
Now, the cat did not expect the box.
The cat never expects the box.
If you leave a box out, a cat will go into it.
But the cat expects that box.
So if you try to approach that box with the cat in it and close up the box, it depends on the cat.
That's going to work sometimes.
But in this instance, it was like, hey, cat, why don't you go in this box for a little bit?
Mm-hmm.
I put the cat in the box, and then I tried to seal the box with masking tape.
Loosely.
Sure.
Right.
But you got a standard cardboard Amazon-style box with four flaps?
That's right.
Oh, boy.
Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to seal a cat in a cardboard box with masking tape.
Oh, I've tried to seal some cats.
Yeah.
But the cat was not into it, and masking tape is not sufficient.
You know, you're never really truly ready for a motivated cat.
That's right.
That's right.
A motivated cat moves in ways that are very unpredictable.
The best you can do is like a blanket party.
The best you can do is basically throw it in a sack, which I've done.
I have thrown a cat in a sack.
You need to really overwhelm the cat so quickly that there's no part of their body.
They're like any kind of a pest.
If they can get their head out, the whole body will come out.
That's exactly right.
And you've got to get four flaps down and tape it.
It was very hard.
Oh, God.
I mean, I read a thread on Quora the other day where some European smarty pants was like, why are American cops so rough?
And then, of course, there was the predictable answer from a bunch of cops.
That's just correlation.
Yeah.
One of the cops was like, I'd like to propose a thought experiment.
Why don't you go wherever you are and find the smallest person you know?
Just the one that you think is like the smallest, least physically imposing person you know.
Now, try to put handcuffs on them if they don't want you to.
Yeah.
Where neither one of you get hurt.
I challenge you.
Go do it now.
Find the smallest person.
I mean, that's not a child.
The smallest adult person and try and put handcuffs on it.
You're saying you're going to apprehend a twink.
well now that's not a word we can use anymore we don't use that word anymore i can't say twink because it's not part of okay okay let's say you've got to um you get a slender boy uh yeah that sounds bad yeah i don't think maybe we should avoid the whole cop thing let's just agree it's very difficult to get a cat into a box so i get this cat in the box i put enough masking tape over it that it
Is just an initial level.
Are paws coming out of the crack?
Well, at the very first, I think I had successfully convinced the cat it was a game.
But then I pick the box up and I am saying au revoir to my friends as I'm hustling to the door with the cat in the box.
The cat then realizes the jig is up and he's got nothing to lose He's trying to get out of that box sure and once we get outside I don't want to let the cat out of the box outside because it's not an outside cat So I'm on my way to the car and I'm trying to keep the cat immediately has nine paws Right like how are how do how are all these paws getting out of this box?
There's like I can count nine paws and
It's just thrashing and rowing Well, I get it to the get it to my car and I get the cat in the car and then I don't care if it gets out of the box because the car is a contained environment all I have to do is get the cat in the box one more time I Get it in the car.
I take it I and I get in the car.
Okay, and she puts a bunch of cat accoutrement in the trunk and
And she's so grateful.
She's like, thank you.
Thank you so much.
You've collected all the cat's things.
All the cat's luggage in the trunk.
The cat and I go home.
The cat is walking around my car, rowing at me.
I'm only grateful that it is a girl cat because she's not like pissing on everything in that kind of fury piss that only a cat can do.
Like a dog does a defensive spray.
Or a scared spray.
Or a scared spray, right.
I think that's what a cat does when it feels threatened.
But a cat's an asshole, right?
Cats are all assholes.
It feels threatened just because you put it in a car in a box covered with masking tape.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, I get it home, and I get the cat in the house, and the cat and I began to live together.
Did you reach an accommodation?
Well, so the cat is named Lucy.
And I could never separate the cat's name from Lucille Van Pelt because they basically have the same personality.
The cat is deceptive.
The cat is like, you know, like it's one of those cats where you wake up in the morning, you stumble down the stairs, pour yourself a cup of ambition, yawn, stretch, try to come to life.
And
This cat leaps out from behind, leaps out from its secret room, which you weren't even aware existed, and claws the shit out of your ankles while you're not ready.
And now you're in a Clouseau and Cato type situation.
That's exactly right.
Where the cat thinks that it's funny to come attack you and then rage off into the night.
And so you're always walking around the house.
Your ankles and wrists are always covered with scratches.
I mean, I had cat scratch fever the entire time.
Cat scratch fever.
It's better than Wango Tango.
It's a great riff.
I don't know where they come from, but they sure do come.
It's a great riff, Nuge.
That is a really good riff.
So eventually... So you're getting scratched by Kato.
Yeah.
Eventually I'm like, Cat, Lucy, Lucy Cat, she lived here for about six months.
I was like, Lucy, I find this relationship just isn't going anywhere.
Like, I'm not falling in love with you.
I mean, I fell in love with Louis the day he showed up.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's just not meant to be.
I'm not bonding with you, sweetheart.
Mm-hmm.
And I said, you're going to go live on a farm.
And in this case, the farm is my mom's house.
Oh, I see.
It's a metaphorical metaphorical farm.
That's right.
Because my mom had 20 cats living under the corn crib and only two of them had names.
She knows what to do with a disagreeable cat.
She's not going to train you to go to the bathroom in a toilet.
She just doesn't care.
Mm-hmm.
And that lack of care kind of extends in all directions.
So the cat went to live with my mom, and my mom was fine.
She was fine.
The cat was fine.
I think Lucy understood, as all animals do, that you do not jump out from behind a piece of furniture and claw my mom.
Oh, boy.
Well, you do it once.
It's not a thing that you do.
You do that one time, buddy.
We had a cat...
um that would not enter the living room i knew it knew better it knew better than to go into the living room and we would all be in the living room with the doors wide open on both sides and the cat would would come to the threshold of the living room and sit
Now, if you can train a cat to do that, I will put in with you.
You cannot train a cat to do it unless you are my mom.
And she never hits an animal.
She never touches it.
This is also an important distinction, though, because training is meh.
I'm going to get a book, and I'm going to get an audio book, and I'm going to watch some YouTube videos, and I'm going to train my cat.
Or you could be the kind of person who throws a certain shape where the cat just learns how to stay alive.
Yeah, the cat was like...
entering that room puts me at risk somehow.
I need to get my mind right.
Yeah, psionic risk.
Because the woman there, the woman that is vibrating in colors that only I can see, the woman that is making noises at both ends of the sonic spectrum that no human can hear.
She comes in colors everywhere.
Yeah, she will send mind lightning at me if I walk across this threshold.
So I don't want that.
Psyonics.
That's a good word for it.
Yeah.
And my mom uses psionics all the time.
She uses it on... I haven't seen her in months and I get her psionics.
Yeah.
Well, she walks around and like, you know, like bad men...
sidewalk in the middle of the night will kind of step to the side and take their balaclavas off on their way to their appointment robbing stores.
They'll say, good evening, ma'am.
Can I carry your groceries if you have groceries?
Yeah, it beats the hell out of me how she does it.
But she eventually said, there is no magic to this cat.
Yeah.
And if I'm going to feed and clothe a worker, I would like that worker to be working in the mine.
And a cat has a job.
And this cat is not performing up to the standards of employment here.
Well, right about that time, Eric Corson, bass player of The Long Winters,
was spending a lot of time at the house because we had built a studio in our monk hole in the basement of her house.
We had a rock and roll monk hole.
Down in the basement.
This is down by your racks of glasses.
Yep.
You had a whole room down there.
We call it the red room, but it was only because I had chosen for it bright red carpet, but the room itself was painted gunmetal gray.
So it was already creating a disturbance in you even as you walked through the door.
It was like alert, alert, alert.
Monkhole, Monkhole.
Eric loved it down there, and he and I were spending a bunch of time down there recording tambourine tracks on the unreleased Fourth Long Winners record.
Months and months.
Anyway, Eric and Lucy saw each other across a crowded dance floor and moved through the crowd toward one another and
And met in the middle and were never to be apart.
Wow.
And Lucy now, to this day, 10 years later, lives happily with Eric Corson in his house in White Center, Seattle.
And Eric thinks about her and she thinks about him every minute of their lives forever.
And he and every morning he wakes up and stumbles to the kitchen.
She attacks him and shreds his ankles.
And he considers it the ultimate gesture of love.
And he grabs her and goes, oh, do do putty do do do.
And she bites him and shreds him.
And he goes.
And she loves him.
I've never seen an animal love a person so much.
So she wasn't doing it out of malfeasant aggression.
No.
That's just how she do.
This is just a weaning thing.
See, it's so important.
Didn't get enough time with her mom.
So I'm interacting with Lucy all the time because I've been over at Eric's house.
Oh, really?
I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah, it's fun.
It's fun.
And my impression, I mean, I've had more interesting interpersonal interactions with a hard-boiled egg than I have with Lucy.
Do you see Lucy differently now?
I mean, now that you see Lucy in an accommodating environment, do you see the cat differently?
Well, when I look into her eyes, deep into her eyes.
Tiny little head.
I see into infinity.
Because between her eyes and infinity, there isn't anything.
It just goes and goes.
Is she an old soul?
I don't know.
That's the best part of the infinity.
I think there's a soul in there.
And it may be that I don't see it because it's smaller than the space that it's meant to occupy.
It's kind of like maybe it's down in the bottom and I can't quite see it.
But she and Eric understand each other perfectly.
And watching her be a good house cat and a good studio cat and like a constant companion and friend, she and Eric play this game.
You know, he has one of those walk around houses where you walk into the kitchen and you can go down the hall and then you come back into the living room and, you know, you can go around in a circle.
Oh, that's a nice plan.
They play a game like an adult and a toddler where she follows him around the circle.
Eric's the adult.
Eric's the adult in this case.
Or actually depending.
It depends on how old the toddler is and who's in charge of the game.
But he'll go around.
He'll sneak around until she's like, where'd he go?
And then she turns around and goes the other way.
And then he turns around and goes the other way.
And I'll sit in the living room and watch them play this game.
And they're both having the time of their life.
Wow.
And Eric's like, where'd he go?
Where's the kitty?
And she's like, looking around this corner.
And then she's like, I'm going to get him this time and goes this way.
And I'm like, this is amazing.
I feel like this is a YouTube channel that they just haven't discovered yet.
I mean, this could be a YouTube channel that had 40 million views.
Yeah.
Oh, no question about it.
Well, they would both be huge stars.
Oh.
So, and of course, in Japan, a fat cat with a tiny head, there's probably a whole word for that.
There's a word and there's a fan group.
You could probably get a pillow like that you can sleep with.
Get a pillow with it.
Fat cat with a tiny head in a bikini.
And a tiny bikini.
Spiky blue hair.
But it has taught me, you know, it has taught me to believe in happy endings.
Oh, I should say so.
I did not see it going this way, John.
No, I was like that.
It seems like you just fired into the sun.
My God, I was prepared to take Lucy down to the Washington State ferry system and take her on a ferry and then leave the ferry without her.
And after a while, the people that work on the ferry would.
After about three trips, I think they'd be like, is there a cat on this ferry?
Yeah, it's like a little monkey's paw.
Yeah, and then they would find a home for her.
Right.
This is yours now.
Yeah, that's right.
A car would get on, and the cat would jump in the car.
I mean, whatever it would be.
It would be one of those great adventure movies.
But that's not what happened.
It turned out that all Lucy needed was Eric, and all Eric needed was Lucy.
Right.
I don't like to talk about this because it reveals something about myself.
It reveals a lot of things about myself that I'm just, it's not very on brand for me, I hope.
We heard that there's a thing you can get.
When you have a pet, especially a cat, you hear about things that you can get.
You hear about this from like news groups?
Yes, sure.
Friend circles.
You hear about like, oh, you should get it this kind of scratching post.
You should get your cat this kind of a bowl so it doesn't get whisker fatigue.
You should get it this kind of a box.
We heard about something called comfort zone.
Comfort Zone, it looks like one of those modern air freshener things, like a renews-it kind of thing where you plug it in.
And basically, it claims to release a relaxing scent that relaxes the cat.
We bought these.
I didn't see that going that way.
Ask me a couple years ago if I would have seen this coming.
Ask me if I'd have four.
Ha ha ha!
And so we got these.
Are they different scents or is it the same scent?
I don't know.
I'm not a cat.
Can you smell it?
No.
It just uses electric as far as I know.
It could be glycerin in there.
I don't know.
But we went through this time where the cat has had a very traumatic life.
She was bullied.
She's old.
She's funny looking.
She's got a lot of problems.
And then sometimes she'll just stand in the hallway and do this.
up to 13 times.
Off at four in the morning.
And so my wife says to me, she says, well, maybe we should get some of these cat relaxers.
And I said, do you think she had a job in like a nuclear missile silo?
She used to be a klaxon.
And we got these.
And, you know, you got to buy refills for them and stuff.
And now you're buying cat relaxer refills.
We used it for a while.
It ran out.
I didn't give it much thought.
But it was determined by members of our household that it made a difference.
Really?
Really.
And you know what?
So we got more of them.
I now have a reminder every two weeks to check out.
I actually have something I have to click that says check on cat relaxers.
These things only last two weeks?
No, they last supposedly a month.
This is the ultimate eel, Merlin.
Oh, God.
Sing it, sister.
I buy boxes of six.
I buy them in six packs now.
You have the greatest eel of all, the electric cat relaxers.
I have to stop what I'm doing and walk around and unscrew the bulb of cat relaxer and put a fresh one on because it's been determined that it helps.
Now, here's the funny part, and this is why I'm so simpatico with your cat training you type situation, which is I think they might work a little bit, but I can't tell.
I don't know if it's a toxoplasmosis.
I don't know if it's love.
I don't know what it is, but we now have cat relaxers, and I think it might work.
Does the cat continue to klaxon in the middle of the night?
Well, this is the problem.
Now we don't know if it's the exception or the rule.
Because sometimes she doesn't, and it's because she wants food.
Other times it might be because she's lonely.
I think it's because she's deaf and blind, although, candidly, I'm the only one who thinks that.
She doesn't seem to understand that, stop stepping right where I'm about to step, and then take the next step to where I'm about to, and stop seeming surprised!
I've never walked anywhere but where I walk all the time, and if you keep walking right where I'm walking, you're going to have surprise for the rest of your fucking life!
So that's the thing I do now, is I refill those.
Do you think it could be whisker fatigue?
Well, we got the rules for that.
Help!
Help!