Ep. 290: “Gasthaus”
Hi Merlin.
How's it going?
So early.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was up a lot with a complicated dream last night.
Oh, really?
I was remembering my dreams this morning, too.
It doesn't help.
What happened?
Oh, I mean, you know, it's brain garbage, so it doesn't really help to explain.
But, you know, it's just the anxiety because now you're awake.
But yeah.
Yeah.
It involved renovating a hotel room with my friend Michael.
And we were working with a Vietnamese man in bare feet who had no toes.
And somebody came to our hotel room and they peed in the bathtub and I had to drain it.
Oh, that is anxiety producing.
Well, then it's just like, ah, like, do I want to do I want to lay down and try to get back into this dream?
Do I want to try and psych myself into something different?
Should I get up?
And I usually stay, which I probably shouldn't do.
What time is this happening?
Usually around three or four.
I kind of don't mind it as much if it's one or two.
It's when I'm getting within an hour of the wake-up time, which is a wake-up time I don't have control over.
I feel like I can go, okay, I just got to lay back now.
You have four more hours of sleep, and I'm going to be fine.
I'm fine.
So I don't know what the solution is.
I don't want to renovate a hotel room.
No, you don't want somebody peeing in the bathtub?
No, I had to stick my hand in there to drain it.
It's part of the renovation.
All day long, you're going to be washing that hand.
Subconsciously washing it.
Yeah, I got to get the sleep thing worked out.
I got to get better.
It's not terrible.
I've been in worse situations, but I can tell that I'm not sleeping enough because I do take naps and they do make a difference.
I want to get to a point where taking a nap is unnecessary or does not make a difference.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I do, yeah.
Yeah, I shouldn't wake up and go, wow, I needed that, which is how I feel every day after I take a nap.
Yeah, I've been back and forth on this so much because of, you know, I like a nap.
But also, I've been in parts of my life where I didn't need a nap, and that felt very liberating.
Not to come home in the afternoon and just be dragging ass so hard that I fell asleep in a chair.
Do you sleep differently in different places?
I mean, the conventional wisdom is that you go and you sleep...
Uh, somewhere else and maybe you don't like the bed or the nasty sheets or some, some youths are having a party nearby.
Do you find any difference to your quality of sleep if you're in like a hotel room?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
I have a super hard time sleeping in most places.
If anything is touching my feet, if I cannot get my feet some liberation.
Oh, I have a whole system.
Of getting liberation.
I feel like I should at some point, just for my own historical record, write down my canonical approximately five sleep positions.
And one of my five sleep positions is on my stomach.
I've turned my pillow a one eighth turn.
Is that right?
So I got a little corner pointing south.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
And a lot of my sleep, I think, comes down to breathing.
And so I kind of smash my, I pull my face back with my hand, smash down into the pillow.
And for some reason, I always have to have my left lower leg outside of the covers in that particular position.
I don't know why.
It's not required for every other one, but I'm with you.
I generally like my feet out, which is different.
When I was young, I liked them tucked in tight.
And now I don't, I feel, I feel restricted.
Yeah, I have to be free to ride my machine.
Without being hassled by the man.
Yeah, that's right.
If I'm sharing a bed with someone else,
Um, it, it's, uh, it has to be a certain set of conditions or I won't sleep at all.
I feel like you're pretty good at establishing the ground rules.
Yeah.
But you know, there are lots of situations where it's like, you know, not at liberty to say like, we're, you're not spending the night here, you know?
Um, and so, uh, but also, you know, this is particularly true in hotels where it's like,
you know you want to go on trips with people you want to you want to have uh you want to have adventures and then you get to the hotel and you're like oh no um that's right i'm super fussy about sleep yeah uh but then i'm i'm really good if the if the other person gets up early and goes out and you know like goes and does stuff if they're like a morning person who either goes to work or gets up and
you know, needs to go tour a bunch of museums.
I will...
I'm really happy to stretch out in a newly empty bed.
Oh, that's a nice feeling.
This is mine now.
Yeah, and that's good sleep there for however long it lasts.
One reason I ask is because one component of my waking up and being very anxious about my life is the feeling of what might be waking me up, which I know might very well be the cat who chooses to meow up to 13 times at night.
And so I do earplugs, but I'll still sometimes hear it.
There's that.
She goes...
unclear why was that uh yeah i mean like it's it's been a topic of discussion many times in many places yeah uh i mean she's got food and stuff the general consensus is uh from all my cat expert friends is that she is um bored
Or she is somehow frightened.
I don't know what she'd be frightened of.
She's a very traumatized cat.
But I got that.
I think about CO2.
Do you ever think about CO2?
Not CO2.
Not CO2.
The other one.
The bad one.
CO.
Do you ever think about CO?
Oh, carbon monoxide.
Do you ever think about that?
I actually have a carbon monoxide detector.
Yeah, but how even do you know if they work?
You don't.
Okay.
I think about that.
And then I think about ghosts.
I think about, I think about ghosts.
I'm not talking about like a full on spectral presence, but I'm saying, follow me on the logic and statistics here.
If your house has been around for coming up on 80 years, there's a pretty good chance that there's some bad spectral energy.
And, you know, a lot of those folks are up at night is what I'm thinking.
Do you ever encounter any spectral energies?
I very rarely encounter a spectral energy that wasn't just the cat being somewhere I didn't expect.
All right.
And then I go like this.
I go, ah.
But you don't have a thing where you're alone sometimes at night.
A feeling of presence, that kind of thing.
Yeah, or like you're puttering, and then you're like, and you just heard something behind you or felt something behind you?
That's a very good question.
Well, part of it is my brain will do that for me automatically.
My brain will create problems.
That's one of the performance characteristics of my brain.
But I have had the feeling sometimes that I totally feel like there's something over there.
Maybe behind a door.
Not strong enough to go look.
Right.
But I have had that feeling.
But the reason I mention this is that then when I go and I stay in a hotel, or we were in a cabin in Yosemite not too long ago, and the truth is, I sleep...
better oh yeah which is weird and you know what i really want to suggest everybody out there i suggest you go out and get yourself a casper mattress uh-huh absolutely absolutely this episode of roderick on the line is brought to you in part by casper podcast listeners are invited to take advantage of casper's competitive limited time memorial day sale offer
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Yes, sirree, Bob.
Thanks for listening to that, everybody.
I know exactly what you mean.
Do you?
I mean, I realize this sounds crazy, and I don't really believe in quote, unquote, unquote, unquote, ghosts.
But I do wonder if it could be carbon monoxide or possibly a spectral energy.
I don't think that, yeah, I don't think carbon monoxide is as much.
Because that would help you sleep, right?
Yeah.
Well, I don't think it's much of a danger.
Maybe I'm being unscientific, right?
I don't want to be like those vaccine people.
Maybe introducing a little bit of carbon monoxide would help everybody.
Maybe it's a little bit of airborne Benadryl for the family.
No, you would end up with a headache, I think.
You would have headaches all the time.
Chloroform, same problem.
Headaches are going to be your warning sign if you have a little bit of carbon monoxide.
Okay.
I don't wear headphones at night.
If I'm working on something, it's hard for me to wear headphones at night because of spectral energies that sometimes tiptoe up on me when I have headphones on.
You don't want them to get the drop on you.
Because there have been a couple of instances in my life when I've been sitting in some headphones and then I heard a voice from directly behind me
in my right ear over my shoulder.
Really?
With the headphones on.
And I had to throw the headphones off like, nah!
Definitely not a weed eater or a child.
No, it was 3 o'clock in the morning.
Okay.
Not a child using a weed eater.
I know that that is my mind.
Okay.
I think.
But it's always in old houses where they're spectral energies.
Yeah.
I used to sleep better in hotels, but the thing is that I stay in a lot of hotels.
And in the last couple of years, I changed my whole lifestyle.
Because your lifestyle is your death style.
Oh, that is good.
Right?
Yes.
But I changed my lifestyle.
Your lifestyle becomes your death style.
It becomes your death style.
I changed it so that I realized like, oh, it's a two birds with one stone situation.
I am always getting flown places and put up in hotels.
It's like part of my job.
And I also am like trying to go on vacations with people or see people I haven't seen in a long time or like, you know, have a fun adventure.
And so I've started to combine those things.
Right.
Hey, why don't you join me in this place?
I'm going there.
I have a hotel.
I'll stay an extra couple of days.
And it could also be a little bit of like a seasoning of familial obligation.
Right.
Right.
Couldn't it be a little bit of like we got to go visit a relative in this place?
Well, so there's so that's a small percentage of the of the the traveling.
But I've worked that out.
The traveling with the family, I have worked out because I understood after the first few years that.
I cannot exist in a world where the three of us are like in a room.
We've talked about this.
It's complicated.
It's super complicated.
I cannot do it.
Especially if you're somewhere where is your presence as you, the brand that needs to be on.
Oh, can't do that.
And you just got, you just got to go like, whatever, go be in a minor celebrity tug of war.
Yeah.
Well, and then that comes up during your time to watch the kid.
Yeah.
They're having normal family things with you.
Like, why don't, you know,
So blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, oh, my God, I mean, I have to I'm here for a thing.
But that but also like like earlier this year, we went to visit my uncle in Hawaii.
Right, right, right.
And, you know, and as a part of the constant sort of managing process.
That my uncle does of his own life.
And then the people increasingly that are trying to help manage his life because he's 93.
Jesus.
You know, he stayed in this.
He stayed in this other place.
And so it ended up that that me and my daughter and my daughter's mother were all in one room together for.
Like eight days.
One room?
One room.
And it was not a big room.
Were there any alcoves?
There was not a walk-in closet.
All you really got is the bathroom.
Yeah.
that's your that's your only bulwark against madness is the bathroom well there was a living room but the problem is it was an old folks home so everything was made to i mean basically like at a certain point in an old folks home everything is made to repel urine everything is made to wipe clean with a damp cloth right and so it's not cozy you're not going to lay on that couch it squeaks
Well, and you're going to stick to it.
Oh, chimney.
So I actually I've never done a thing like this before, but I drove us to Target and I bought new sheets for for this basically hotel room.
Because I was like, these are, I am not sleeping on these sheets and I'm not having my family sleep on these sheets.
Like these are just somebody else's sheets.
Yeah, those are cursed.
They're not good sheets.
So we're going to get our own sheets.
However much it costs, we're going to, you know, amateurize it over eight days and it's going to be nothing.
We're just going to just, this is no amount of money in order to have this basic, like I can't lay here with this pillowcase, like sticking to me.
Yeah.
So I tried, and I ended up putting the baby in the closet, which I highly recommend to anyone with a baby, because at the point that she is now, she was six at the time, I was like, hey, baby, you could have the whole closet as your bedroom.
Yeah, it's like a clubhouse.
And she was like, oh, really?
And into the closet she went, never had to think about it again.
But, you know, that's like, that is, that's a challenge because I look at that situation, I walk in the door, I look at it and I'm like, I'm going to spend eight days without sleep.
And that is terrible.
So what can I possibly do?
You know, what can I do?
And, you know, and I, I, I modified the room, I guess, uh, with the hope that I would, you know, pull off some sleep and I, you know, I got what I got enough, I guess.
But it's a, yeah, it's a,
Back in the old days, I'd go to a hotel.
I was all by myself there.
I would pull the blinds, sleep all afternoon.
I'd sleep through the event.
People would be like, hey, are you coming to the thing?
While you're there, that's your room.
Yes.
That's the thing about when you get a hotel room is it's your room.
You can make it the way you want.
You can do like I do.
First thing I do, I take all the printed materials, put it in a drawer.
Any fake plants go in the closet.
Interesting.
I have a whole series of preparations that I do in a hotel room.
Because you know why?
That's my room while I'm there.
That's right.
I had a time in a hotel and it wasn't a hotel.
Let's call it a let's call it a pension.
I was in Germany and it had it was one of those German hotel rooms.
And I don't understand why the Germans are like this.
There are there are large people, but they have these hotels with twin beds, two twin beds.
And the beds have headboards and footboards.
and the beds are five and a half feet long.
So here you come.
They just act like that's okay.
Yeah, let's just pretend I'm a German.
Dr. Lieber.
Oh, damn it.
I was just about to say that's the least offensive German you've ever done.
And I walked into the hotel room, and I'm like, I laid down on the bed, and I was like, how do you sleep like this?
You're curled in a fetal position just to get on this dumb thing.
So I said, this is my hotel room.
I moved some furniture around.
I pushed the two twin beds together, which is, as you know, the worst.
The worst.
But it's not as bad as trying to curl up on a five-foot twin bed.
They're not Lego, John.
If they were Lego, that would make sense.
Because you can put two Lego next to each other, and it just makes a big Lego.
When you put two beds together, you get two beds that are together.
The secret to two beds together is you have to pick which bed your butt is on.
Hmm.
You cannot... You could also turn 90 degrees, I guess.
Well, but that's... I mean, you still have to choose where your butt is.
That's true.
That's true.
And if you think your butt is going to be in the middle somewhere, you're wrong.
Because that's where your center of gravity is, and that's going to fall.
Eventually your butt is going to tell you, I need a place.
Pick a side.
It's like a Great Berlin Wall.
Either you're three quarters of the way on one bed, and your feet are over on the other, or your butt is over on the other, and your top half is sprawled out over the second bed.
Are you doing sort of an Abraham Lincoln deathbed angle a little bit?
You've got to be cattywampus.
You have to be at a sideways.
Got it.
Anyway, I woke up in the morning.
I went downstairs.
It's a German gosthouse.
Heavy breads, boiled eggs.
Yeah, boiled egg and some dark bread and pretty good coffee and marmalade.
Cold cuts.
Some cold cuts that had little bits in them.
Always got the bits.
Germans love bits.
Seven or eight kinds of jam, none of which I liked.
It's like apricot jam, peach jam, and you're like, do you have any raspberry jam?
Did you get these from a donation barrel?
Where did you get these?
No, no, this is the kind we like.
Get some Concord grape jelly like an adult.
These are the forest fruits.
The fruits of the forest.
We find it's a variety of stone fruits when they're milled down into the jelly-like substance on ice on the brown bread bits.
Yeah, 25 mustards.
But anyway, I go up to the front desk to check out, and the woman behind the counter says, My cleaning lady...
went to your room and said that you slept on both beds.
So I'm charging you for two people.
What?
And I said, well, you're wrong.
There was only one person.
I thought they were illogical people, John.
That does not make any sense.
That room is your room.
She was using an internal logic.
Okay.
A logic that belonged to her, which was that a person equals a bed.
And to clean two beds is essentially the same as if there were two people.
I see.
They're really billing you for sheet changing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like I'm getting charged.
I'm getting charged for for basically a spectral presence, which was my lower half.
They call it a Bedgeist.
Yeah.
Und Bedzengeisten.
Scheiße.
And so she and I sat at the front desk and argued about this for a long time.
I'm not always with you on your conceptual beefs, but this is a conceptual beef that must be beefed.
That is a beef that needs to get settled.
Well, and I was arguing with her on behalf of every other guest who followed.
Yeah.
who ever sat on the other bed.
And you know, I was personally offended and I also realized like, oh, if that's the kind of operation she's running, what keeps me from taking a poop on the other bed and then very carefully tucking the sheets back in so it doesn't seem like anyone was there.
Charge me for two.
That would be a turn.
Charge me for number two.
And so we hammered out something where she,
uh gave me a 10 euro surcharge and then i went back up to the room and stole all the light bulbs good okay there's there's so much bullshit in that okay i'm gonna you know i'm trying to grow as a person john i'm gonna assume that she had a bad day and she was acting at least emotionally and probably irrationally because here's the thing if you're ever in a room every i don't know if this is true for you i know this is true for me first of all that's my room that's step zero
Okay.
Now here's the deal.
Usually I have one bed I'm going to sleep on.
I'm going to have one bed I'm just going to luxuriate on.
That might be where I put the stuff, right?
The stuff, the stuff I would like to surround myself with.
And then when it's bedtime, I get out of that bed.
I go into the other bed.
I got two beds.
It's my room.
I control everything in that room.
Yeah.
But this is Germany where that is not the, that's at least at the time, 1999, when this happened,
It didn't seem like in that particular.
And the thing is, there are different parts of Germany where they have different rules.
So it's a land of contrast.
It is.
You know, there are different rules in America from place to place.
But if you go to California and stay at a best Western hotel, they're not going to have different cultural mores from the best Western hotel in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Right.
Whereas in Germany, who knows?
You're in some ghost house.
And it's like, oh, the reason that our beds are small is that's how we deal with spectral presences here.
So it might have been you.
The problem is you.
You didn't know the local lore.
Yeah, the ghosts can't be in the room because the beds are too small for them.
It's like part of our tradition.
And so you're being culturally insensitive.
Do you think she felt you were being culturally insensitive these days?
That's the only conclusion.
Ugly American.
So and the thing was, well, I mean, what made me ugly was that I didn't passively accept her dictum.
Mm hmm.
And stood there at the desk with a kind of wry smile on my face and was like, ha ha, no, no way.
They're not a smiling people.
Oh, she was not smiling.
No.
And she didn't think it was good that I was smiling.
We were having a confrontation.
Why was I smiling?
I'm not smiling.
I'm not smiling.
Why are you smiling?
I'm not swearing.
Why are you swearing?
I'm going to turn this opportunity.
Yes.
I don't know that one.
Oh, really?
Show my daughter the first two episodes of The Office last night.
Of the British office?
Yeah.
Oh, I remember when you showed me the first two episodes of the office.
We had to fest over a lot of parts of it.
There was a lot of... My wife made this face a lot.
Because they were off-color jokes?
Well, yeah.
That show gets a little randy.
It's technically a TVMA in the States.
I see.
But they blip... It's funny what they blip out.
Like when Tim...
When Tim says to Garrett, Gareth, of course it says Garrett on his stapler, you're a cock, you're a cock, you're a cock.
They blip the word cock each time, but they still show it in the subtitles.
Oh.
Mm hmm.
Do they typically blip subtitles?
No.
No, I think they don't.
I think it's done by a whole different.
I don't take you off your Germans, but I think it's a whole different part of the operation.
I've talked to the friend of the show, John Syracuse, about this.
It's his reckon that a lot of times it's like lyrics to songs, which he never trusts on the Internet.
Like maybe this group got like a shooting script.
They shot the scene five times.
And I don't know.
I don't know if you're a subtitles guy.
I'm a subtitles guy.
Especially if there's any chance that I won't understand what they're saying.
I usually have subtitles on.
You have them on, just running as a normal matter of course.
Well, in that show, it really pays, especially for a 10-year-old to hear some very, very English accents.
And it's a little bit of a spoiler because you see the joke before they say the joke and stuff like that.
Your mileage may vary.
But yeah, I think it's a whole different operation that does that.
And the whole audio group and the video group and then the subtitles group, I think they're not even in the same building.
At the same building, same time, they're in different places.
Right.
Well, and I always think that it's somebody that's sitting at a terminal.
You remember those terminals that they were like – I had a friend that had a learning disability, and he had a whole series of government –
tapes and he had an apparatus apparatus he did that was part of that was the library of congress was it part of his learning experience it was part of his learning where he had he had some sort of and it was the thing about it was the apparatus seemed to have proprietary tapes they weren't just cassette tapes they were some kind of like
Those sort of carts that you used to use in radio stations.
They weren't eight tracks.
They were some kind of special system.
Was it audio?
Yeah, that he would put in.
And I asked him several times, like, what is your learning disability exactly?
And he was like, well, it's something to do with learning.
I have a disability with it.
Yeah, you're also not good at answering questions, buddy.
Okay, well, all right.
Story checks out.
How do I get an apparatus?
Yeah, right.
Like, this machine is given to you by the government to do what exactly?
A government apparatus.
And he's like, well, it has these tapes.
And I was like, but what exactly are they?
And he was like, well, they're learning tapes.
I was like, all right, all right.
Let's just let this ride.
But he had this thing, and it was like, and it had all the qualities of,
being a thing from the government it was heavy it was made out of that beige plastic yeah it had it seemed like something that you would use in a courtroom it had been ruggedized and not made to be pretty it was ruggedized it was not but it was made also to be it seemed like something you know it seemed like something from the 70s too because the buttons were like
I know the look.
Mustard yellow.
What kind of headphones?
They have like Sennheisers, yellow Sennheisers?
It was some kind of special proprietary headphones.
Proprietary headphones.
Probably with a jack.
Oh, they're big cup boys, like a Nova 40, like big cuppy boys.
Or the kind that you would use to send a man to the moon.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
And I think that the jack didn't work in other things.
It was a special jack.
I don't know why they would do this.
Wow.
But anyway, I always think of people who are subtitling television shows as having that apparatus with those special headphones and they are doing and they have like 70 percent of their attention is on their work.
So they're like, oh, you think it might be a side hustle?
Maybe they're working at Geico, but they're also subtitling movies on an apparatus.
You know, they're doing this.
I mean, they're gig economy.
Early on in our show, I had a friend who, apropos of nothing, sent me several transcripts of our show.
Which inspired me at the time to believe that eventually our fans would transcribe all of our shows.
I've never listened to our show, as you know.
But reading our show, which I did once or twice because this friend made these transcripts, I was like, oh, flabbergasted.
I didn't have that thing that I do when I'm listening where I was like, ah, can't do it, ah!
you know like throw my headphones across this though because i've tried to listen to our show really yeah but like like three four minutes and i'm like nope can't do it no way how come i just i've never explored this i know this to be true but you just don't like hearing your voice or my voice that's understandable no no no your voice i hear i hear it's your voice sounds the same and i you know that every every monday at 10 whether we need it or not
No, it's just the like following us talking and and and being along for the thought journey and hearing myself thinking aloud.
At a certain point, I'm like, can't.
Do you listen to Omnibus?
No, I don't listen to... You don't really listen to podcasts.
I don't, but I also specifically do not listen to my own podcast.
I understand.
I understand.
See, I have a similar reaction to reading a transcript of a podcast.
Oh, really?
You don't like it?
Hate it.
I mean, I think it's valuable.
A friend of the show, underscore David Smith, has kindly included us in an index he does where he automatically goes in and he transcribes every episode of the show.
Oh, but with a machine, so it's like... It's a machine, yeah.
But to me, it's like, oh God, I was going to say it's like reading instead of seeing Shakespeare perform, but no, it's way worse than that.
It's like reading Bazooka Joe instead of seeing the Marx Brothers.
I don't like reading it.
I feel really stupid when I read what we say.
Oh no, I feel the opposite.
This is why this is such a good show.
See these different POVs.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, right.
Different POVs.
Goofus and Gallant.
I really feel like I'm Goofus.
I'm Goofus in there.
She would send me these transcripts.
Goofus loves to read transcripts of his podcast.
Goofus puts two beds together in a German hotel.
Gallant sleeps happily in his Gallant bed.
Goofus can't stay with his own family in a room.
Galant never complains.
Galant likes to take her easy.
Take her easy.
Galant paces the room because he thought he heard a cat.
Galant doesn't sweat the small stuff.
Goofus kicks the sheets off like a monster.
So she said she would send me these transcripts and there was nothing I liked more than going in and just doing minor corrections like, oh, that's not what Marilyn said.
He said this.
Oh, boy.
Because, you know, she would hear it and get – but syntactically she would have the comma in the wrong place, you know, just like – just because she's doing it as she's going.
And the thing is she had –
a totally other job she had just trained to be able to do this and it was part of this science friend that worked in like a missile silo at the time no science friend does not do she's more of a statistician she yeah this is uh this was other friend who had worked uh for a long time transcribing
doctors, because this is a thing.
Oh, that's the thing.
My grandma used to do that.
Yeah, they walk around with a little microphone and they're like... She had an apparatus.
She had an apparatus for that.
To do this.
So it's like a court reporter.
Yes.
And they just walk around and they're like, patient is exhibiting signs of not being able to sleep at night.
Patient says he hears cats.
And then somebody else far away listens to that and types it up.
And so she was doing that to our show and I just loved it.
And then some other people transcribed the shows and their different styles was really interesting to me.
But it was like my micromanaging tendencies.
When I used to do interviews a lot for the Long Winters and I would read articles that people had written where they were quoting me.
Right.
Let me just write this for you.
Yeah.
And I was just like, oh, my God.
I'll never forget that one.
Oh, my God.
That was a good one.
I was like, hey, John, that thing was really good.
He's like, yeah.
Yeah, I read that.
Would you send me your notes and just let me take another pass of those?
Yeah, I'm a believer.
But, you know, I talked about this on Roadwork the other day.
We have a fan who lives in Germany who is not transcribing our shows.
but paraphrasing our shows.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Ooh.
I don't know how I feel about that.
Well, it would be interesting, I think, for you to check out.
No, I can do that.
Where what he's doing is he's listening to the shows, and then he's essentially... Is this the person making the wiki?
Yes, the wiki.
The wiki is very interesting.
I did look at the wiki and it was very I don't only talk about the show on the show, but it was very interesting what this person decided to, you know, like like Bob Seger says, what to leave in, what to leave out.
Yeah, he's retelling the stories, but he's combing out.
What's what seems superfluous super train page could have used a little more super train.
Well, he's I think he's he's building it up.
And I think maybe eventually he'll allow other people to help him.
All right.
I don't know.
For right now, this is it's very personal to him.
So he's not McElroy brothers have like a whole I got a whole thing out there.
You can find out like who farted first in this episode.
That's all I just out there on their Wikia stuff.
That's not a thing I want.
I can go look up every little elf and halfling.
You know, it's all in there.
I learned all about Jenkins.
They got a whole page just for Jenkins.
You don't have a, you don't have a character.
You don't make a character that has a green skin because that's a, that's some kind of alt-right sign for juice.
Oh my God.
Why would, why, why would you ever make anything today?
Everything is so problematic, John.
It's very, very problematic.
But so, so, so I really, thank you for making this thing for me, asshole.
Yeah.
I really love your thing that I love to hate.
Anyway, I have some notes.
I don't know what it is.
I love transcripts, but I cannot watch...
a thing with subtitles on.
Interesting.
Unless it's in another language?
The other day, so for the war movie podcast that I'm doing now, Friendly Fire, we were watching a foreign language film.
Was it All Quiet on the Western Front?
No, it was an Italian war movie.
Was it All Quiet on the Western Front?
All Quiet on the Northern Front.
That's a spicy meatball.
Hey!
You know what?
We don't tease enough the Italians.
We gotta give those boys some stick.
What I want.
What I want.
Oh, listen, there's a big jet flying over.
I sure hear that.
You know, the other day... You think too much of me.
I know.
You quoted that real well.
That was good.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Well, you know, I know it.
No, who said that?
Salazzo.
Salazzo.
Is he the Turk?
Salazzo's the Turk.
Okay.
Salazzo wants to bring drugs into the family.
Right, right.
He should have known it was Barzini all along.
Yeah.
The thing is, look, the Don, God rest his soul.
Mm-hmm.
Capiche?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Keep it with the dark people, right?
In the colored neighborhoods.
That's right.
They're animals anyway.
Nice pull.
Yeah, thanks.
uh but but uh this transcript's gonna be so good just read the transcript you don't listen to the show just read the transcript you need to hear our voices you need to understand what we're talking about in brackets indicating ridiculous italian voice no maybe they don't include that
I was watching this movie, this for this war, this war movie for our show, which is in Italian.
And for whatever reason, I didn't understand how to turn the subtitles on.
And so I assumed that part because it was it was, you know, this movie was by a famous Italian director, like Rosalini or Apocini or Apollonia, one of those guys.
Donatello.
It was by Donatello.
It was by Donatello.
It was by Michelangelo.
He lives in a sewer and he makes black and white movies.
That's right.
Isn't their boss a rat?
Boy, I've never seen the show.
Me neither.
I've never seen it.
It's like Pokemon.
I only know it from other people talking about it.
Their boss is Vim Vendors or one of Induskin.
Yeah, exactly.
He hangs out at a library with other Ninja Turtles.
Yeah, wearing a special headphone.
Wearing a trench coat, and he'll come up and he'll put his hand on your shoulder at times.
Now, that would be funny.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as Wings of Desire.
That would be a very fun movie.
Have Peter Falk, the late Peter Falk, you can CGI him into that.
Well, one of the listeners, I'm sure right now, is having a very personal experience taking that idea and running with it.
Okay.
Yeah.
We don't like to talk about the show on the show, but...
I bet you we get some fan arc.
I'm not going to sing a song about a girl.
I'm not going to sing a song about a girl.
But I watched this film.
You're going to make me go look up what this is.
Is it out yet or is it just recorded?
We've recorded it, but it isn't out.
I watched the film with no subtitles.
That's in a good bus.
It was in Italian.
And, you know, I don't speak Italian.
I have that amount of passing relationship with romance languages that enables me to follow along.
I've spent a lot of time in Italy not speaking Italian.
So I've had this experience of sitting there going like, huh?
Oh, si, si.
Ciao.
Bicycle theater.
Yeah.
And but I got a lot out of the film.
I mean, you know, you you have you spend a period in the in the beginning of a vignette where you're like, who is this?
Why is she yelling at him?
And then by the end, you're like, ah, I see.
I see.
Capisce?
So I don't... If somebody's speaking... Does it take you out of the movie?
What is your opposition to subtitles even when you need it?
Okay, all right.
Now you're reading.
You're not watching a movie.
Like when they put subtitles on Bigby...
in uh in the original um oh in the uh the toilet movie in the toilet movie is that the one i'm thinking of what's that guy's name is the guy that played uh fader's boss he was in that and then you got the other guy and right and the gal begbie the one that yeah right he was the big is the guy is begbie the guy from the full monty is that begbie yes that's begbie okay
great performance that's what i'm thinking of you got sick boy and then you got the guy that was married to angelina jolie he was in it he was his name was like johnny blade or something he was married to angelina jolie yeah uh yeah the guy that was he was also in uh hackers with her i think oh you're talking about sick boy john no no wait a minute which one which one is obi-wan kenobi you're talking about the blonde one blonde one
blonde one is sick boy that's this is the thing you want to think that sick boy is the guy with the glasses because that seems like he seems sicker than the other boy oh he has the comedy glasses right yeah but sick boy is talking about he's sick because he's on dope because of the heroin you got to get your soups it's that kind of sick it's not the other kind of what was his name
His name was, he was the unnameable center of the film, right?
His name was like Pauly or, you know, Sollozzo.
Yeah, yeah.
He was like, hey, I left it loud.
It'll scare the, you know.
Oh, right, right, right.
Wait, I know that.
That's Fat Clemenza.
Yeah, Clemenza.
Hey, Michael, come over here.
I'll teach you how to make us gravy.
I want you to know, Mike, he was all real proud of you.
You know, he wasn't in Godfather 2 because he asked for too much money.
Too much money.
And so they did a little... And they brought the other guy in.
They brought in the guy, the Willie... Not Willie Chi-Chi.
Willie Chi-Chi's boss.
What's his name?
Yeah, Chi-Chi's boss.
You know, the guy who believed in the Romans.
Oh, you're talking about... Hey, Michael!
Frank and Candela!
And Candela!
Wait, what's his name?
Frank Costanza?
Frank Costanza.
Oh, Frankie Five Angels, right!
That's it, yes, yes, yes.
And then Chi-Chi... Chi-Chi, apart!
And also Chi-Chi, he's named Frank Spinell, and he wrote on that movie for a long time, and then he made a horror movie that I saw when I was in high school.
You know, he's a character actor.
I think his name's Frank Spinell.
Frank Spinelli.
I looked up Johnny Blank.
Frank Spinelli?
No.
No, Spinelli is a kind of pasta.
Okay, that's a no good.
That's a no good.
So anyway, the thing about subtitles.
I liked the subtitles on Bigby because it was part of the joke.
It was part of the knowingness of the movie.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, ah, we are very aware that we're making a film and you are laughing along with us.
But otherwise, no, I don't want to watch it.
I would prefer to sit and go, huh?
They have fun with that in the movie Hot Fuzz, which is one of my favorite movies.
There's one guy on the local police force who has an unintelligible accent.
And at one point, they go out to interview somebody, the guy who plays the squib in Harry Potter.
They go out and they interview him, and he has an even more preposterous accent.
So they have to translate from farm man gibberish to cop gibberish to English.
It takes three people to translate it.
Well, that sounds like that scene in Airplane, right?
Oh, with the jive translation.
Yeah, she speaks jive.
That was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's at least his second movie, because he was in the Bruce Lee movie, right?
I thought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did quite a few movies, but maybe I'm wrong.
I bet he was in some epic... What do they call that genre of movies in the 70s where buildings fall down and... Oh, sure.
Disaster movies.
I bet he was in some disaster movies.
Like Broken Elevator 2 and... The Quickening, yeah.
And These Beds Are Too Small in This Hotel 3.
Yeah, he was in Das Surcharge.
Right, because there was the movie about... The one about the submarine.
There was the movie about the boat that turned upside down.
There was a movie about the airport.
There were several airports.
You get airport and the other airport.
One of my first crushes was on somebody in airport, the stewardess Gwen.
Gwen?
You had the Poseidon Adventure.
That's the one.
I think you had one called Earthquake.
There was the one where the skyscraper caught on fire.
What's the one with Paul Newman?
The Towering Inferno.
Towering Inferno.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was, like... Joe Spinell?
It wasn't Myrna Loy.
Who was the woman in the Poseidon?
A little old lady?
Well, was she a little old lady?
In Airport One?
No, I'm talking about the Poseidon Adventure.
Oh.
Oh.
At some point, Helen Hayes was in Airport One.
She was the little old lady who was riding for free.
By the way, the guy's name is Joe Spinelli, not Frank Spinelli.
I apologize to the Spinelli family.
He died in 1989.
Look at that.
Really?
He had a movie in 1980 called Maniac.
He was probably 50 years old.
That's the thing.
That's the part that's going to make you sad.
Oh, brother.
Oh, you know, Poseidon Adventure, Gene Hackman.
Oh, really?
Roddy McDowell and wait for it.
Leslie Nielsen.
Leslie Nielsen.
Back when he was being a serious actor and not a comedy serious actor.
Okay, here's one for you.
Abe Vigoda.
Oh, it was Shelley Winters.
That's who I was trying to think of.
Oh, Shelley Winters.
At the time, Abe Vigoda was doing Godfather 1.
No spoilers.
He was, I want to get this right, he was one year older than I am now.
Who now say this again?
Abe Vigoda.
yeah was doing godfather one yes he already looks 90 yes he was he was he was born in 1921 i believe that was shot in 71 72 yeah so he's like a year older than me in that movie is he because he's still alive isn't he no no no he passed he passed he finally passed uh in 2016
But this was the thing that people were like, when did Abe Vigoda die?
A long time ago, right?
I think he was kind of in on the bit, but he was good.
He was fish.
Yeah, yeah.
But what was the name of his character?
He just went so one time for old time's sake.
What was his name?
Oh, Sally.
Sally.
Sally.
I can't do it, Sally.
Can't do it.
I can't do it, Sally.
He's the one who set up the meeting, right?
Yeah, that's how you knew.
That's how you knew.
Whoever comes to you.
Yes.
He was very wise.
He was very, very wise.
Hey, it was just, come on.
It was the right thing to do.
It was the smart move.
It was business.
It was the smart move, Sonny.
Let me tell you, my mom likes to have subtitles on everything she watches.
And she says it's because she doesn't understand the spoken word.
You know, she's a proponent of that whole, do you learn by hearing or do you learn by seeing?
Yeah.
First, we didn't have that.
And then we did have that.
And now I think people are like a little on the bubble about the different learning styles.
But there are a lot of people, especially people who consider themselves visual.
They're a lot like introverts.
They're always announcing that that's what they do, and that's how they like to learn.
I'm a visual person.
And that's how my mom got on board that train.
Because what's interesting is that she was a very early adopter of this whole world where somebody comes out with a book that explains how everybody is.
Like, oh, you're just an INFT.
Mm-hmm.
Or, oh, you're an orange.
It's really hard for oranges to interact with greens.
You're a Mars and she's a Venus.
Yeah, I don't think she went into that.
I mean, she's not into the loosey-goosey stuff.
She likes it if somebody has a science theory.
It has to be science-y.
And so she was an adopter of this all the way back.
Is it John Gardner?
Is he the intelligences guy?
Yeah.
I feel like he's John Gardner.
He might be a different novelist I'm thinking of.
I don't know.
Does he have a theory?
Types of intelligence.
Oh, right.
But every one of those.
I mean, there have been 45 different versions of this.
Somebody said to me the other day, like, are you a 14 or something?
I was like, stop.
Just leave me alone.
Howard Gardner.
All right.
But she was... So some of her ideas about herself, some of the ways that she sees the world are still located...
in some theory of the mind that she adopted in the late sixties from reading some pioneering book.
And I think one of these is like, I'm a visual learner.
Yes.
And so I need the subtitles on.
And I'm like, how much of that has just, you've just rewired your brain by saying that to yourself for 50 years.
But she's like, no, no, no.
Even when I was in, even when I was in elementary school,
I wanted to read it.
I didn't want to hear it.
Professor walking around lecturing, I just heard nothing.
But she continues to read those books and come over to my house, even now in her mid-80s, and wave some book under my nose that explains everything.
And I've told you the experience of understanding that I was an introvert had that effect on me.
I walked around.
I'm sure I said to you.
That's actually a very good example, especially in terms of like if you keep rehearsing that by saying this is the kind of person that I am.
Yeah.
Like my behavior is explainable because of this.
I'm an introvert.
And when I read that description of introverts, I was like, this explains me.
It really does.
Like finally I have a way of describing who I am and how I interact with people.
Yeah.
But nobody accepts that I'm an introvert because I don't seem like one.
Well, I think historically when you have a cliche or, you know, you have a mental idea of what an introverted person is, you think of a person who is like shy, quiet, keeps to themselves.
For a long time, I think it was like, well, are you an outgoing person or are you a quiet person?
And if you were an outgoing person, no way could you be an introvert.
Right.
In the old idea of that.
Right.
And so I found that liberating, but now increasingly it's also, like, insufficient to describe me.
I can't just say, like, I'm an introvert and then drop my highball glass on the floor and the party comes to a screeching halt.
Yeah, especially if you kind of announced it that particularly.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Oh, hold it.
Moment of your time, please.
Here are going to be some problems that I want to avoid tonight.
I'm going to read you a blog post called The Care and Feeding of Your Introvert.
Pshh.
I'm going to end up leaving this party without saying goodbye to anybody.
That's just how it goes.
Do you call that a French exit or an Irish exit?
I would say Irish goodbye.
Oh, the Irish goodbye.
The Irish goodbye.
Yellow moon zone starts.
I do that.
I'm good at that.
I'm real good at that.
You Irish goodbyed me a couple of years ago.
Probably more than once.
Doesn't mean I dislike you.
Typically, I keep an eye on you because generally I'm trying to get your little bag of gold.
Okay.
But we were at that party where I met Millennium Girlfriend.
Oh, well, you know what happened that night.
That night, I accidentally got really, really drunk.
Oh, I didn't notice.
Oh, yeah.
No, that was bad.
I don't usually get really, really drunk, but I accidentally got blindingly drunk that night.
Well, it was because they were serving top-shelf booze.
Wasn't somebody famous there?
Wasn't Elon Musk there?
Elon Musk was there.
There were a lot of famous people there.
If you are a San Francisco Bay Area rich...
person, follower.
Yeah, we don't get many of those.
Lots of billionaires.
Billions and billions of billionaires.
I heard a report this morning on the KQED where they're saying, oh, you know, places like Facebook, Salesforce, more and more of these companies are pulling up stakes from Silicon Valley and building their stuff right in San Francisco because people from San Francisco don't want to have to travel to places in Silicon Valley.
That's not making San Francisco better.
That will certainly help with the debilitating housing crunch.
We went to a Giants game the other night, a Star Wars night, and it happened at the stadium.
Now, this week, it's AT&T Park.
This year was very lame.
Last year, we got a Chewbacca bobblehead, which is very fun to say.
What do these things have anything to do with one another about?
It's a co-brand collab sitch.
Oh, no.
The Giants and Star Wars.
Occasionally, a little animated Millennium Falcon flies around on the board.
And Lucille, the mascot, is dressed as Darth Vader.
Stuff like that.
Why are we doing this?
Why?
This is over in an area called Mission Bay that people didn't used to give very much thought to at all.
Oh, that used to be where people lived in shipping containers.
You could.
I mean, there was not a lot there.
When I moved here a long time ago, it was like once you went past Caltrain, there was not a lot on third.
It was just warehouses and swamps.
I don't recognize it.
Like where my wife works, she works at a large university at Mission Bay and about a mile or so from the ballpark.
And, wow, it is unrecognizable.
It is unrecognizable.
Did her large university move from where she used to work?
No, no.
It's such a large university that it has different parts.
I see.
She's in a different part now.
Yes.
She used to be up near where the... I've said too much already.
Anyways, yeah, I don't want to talk about this.
It's depressing.
So you went to Star Wars night.
Oh, yeah, I went to the ballgame.
I had it brought...
Did the baseballs look like those little lightsaber training devices?
If they had a giveaway this year, we didn't get it.
Last year we got a Chewbacca bobblehead.
This year we got zilch.
But we had good seats.
To me, good seats.
We were away from people.
That was nice.
And it was right near beer and brats.
My daughter got a foam finger.
I'll send you a photograph.
We have a foam finger that we got in a Mariners game that my daughter still puts on and waves.
It's kind of a tradition.
It's not $10 we need to spend, but she really likes getting a foam finger.
Foam fingers are fun.
You get it each time and then dispose of the foam finger?
Just in general, I wish my daughter were better about collecting her items into collections.
It's kind of probably a separate issue.
We have one foam finger that's now going on like year four.
So you can do that.
You get a good foam finger and take care of it.
You know what I mean?
It's going to be like a toaster or a Ford.
I mean, look, you have to wax it every once in a while.
But it's, you know, a foam finger should last you 15 years.
Yes.
And you got to be careful about, you know, the climate.
You want to keep it somewhere dry.
That's them there.
I just sent you a photograph.
We have a case made for it.
Oh.
Look how big my daughter is.
Oh, my goodness.
She's almost as big as Maddie.
Yep.
She comes halfway up my wife's face.
Wow.
Look at her.
That doesn't sound good at all.
She, yeah, she's pretty tall.
And she has the finger on wrong.
Yeah.
She has her hand on backwards.
Well, maybe she's differently abled.
Maybe she needs an apparatus.
I think she does.
That apparatus is her scarf, which is as long as she is.
That's Hufflepuff.
That's, oh, is that a... That's actually my scarf, but she's wearing it.
It's a thing from Star Wars?
Yes.
No.
No.
Is Hufflepuff one of the planets?
I've self-assigned as Hufflepuff.
I'm an aspirational Hufflepuff.
I'm not actually as loyal and hardworking as a Hufflepuff should be, but it's what I aspire to be.
They say dress for the job you want, and that's why I wear a Harry Potter scarf.
Cedric Diggory was a Hufflepuff.
When I hear the word Hufflepuff, I'm imagining a small, like a dragon about the size of a basketball.
Ooh!
Is that what a Hufflepuff is?
It's one of the four houses at Hogwarts.
You're saving these for prison, right?
I recognize... Hang on.
You read these in the brig or you're saving them for brig?
I read them at one point when I was living in a closet.
You got up to like two or three, right?
I was like your cat.
No, I read the entire thing.
Except the books were still coming out at that point.
You probably got into where it got dark.
You probably got into Order of the Phoenix, maybe.
You might have even gotten up to Half-Blood Prince, maybe.
I think so.
I think there was a stack of these books.
It was 4 o'clock in the morning, and rather than walk around this apartment where I was staying in a closet.
It's hard to sleep.
I would sit and read these books on a flashlight.
It's fucking hard to sleep.
Everybody should give you Harry Potter.
And a large bed.
A large bed for a grown man who shouldn't have to decide where his ass is going to go.
This makes me sick.
The thing about sleeping on a floor is it's ultimately the biggest bed.
Whoa.
Because the floor just keeps going.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Except you can't hang your feet off the edge of the floor.
No.
No, you have to figure that out.
But so I did read the books and I and, you know, and I had the experience where you you open them up.
You're like, oh, yeah, OK, I'll write this book.
And then you get into the magic and you're into the world of it.
And then you're like three or four books in and you're like, I'm totally in this world.
And then it starts to have that thing of like, well, you know, now I see this world and I'm I don't I don't need to live my life in this world.
Right.
But I forgot what the different houses did.
Oh, that's okay.
No, you're not obligated to know that.
But I don't know if you have this problem with your child, but my child refuses to believe that any temperature can be different than what it is right now wherever she's standing.
Oh, so she's cold or she's hot?
No, she's wearing my hat.
She's wearing my scarf.
I recognize that as your hat.
Yeah, I'm freezing.
And so she's freezing, and Maddie's wearing gloves, and you are just in a t-shirt and shirt.
I'm there like Threadbear.
I'm hardly wearing anything.
I only had like three layers on.
I'll tell you what I got.
I got a Mack Weldon undershirt.
I got a Mack Weldon long-sleeve shirt.
And over that, I'm wearing a sweater.
A Mack Weldon sweater?
You know what you should really do?
Head on over to Mack Weldon.
Uh-huh.
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We've talked about this.
I have so many socks, too, but I'm not worried about being without socks.
Well, I haven't recorded the sponsor spot that you just heard yet, and I won't mention that here because they didn't tell us to say this, but I not only have another Mack Weldon parcel,
Oh, exciting for you.
But I recently culled.
I did a culling.
Of other things that aren't Mack Weldon things?
I culled both.
This is what a fancy duchess I am.
I culled not only the subpar non-Mack Weldon long-sleeve cotton shirts that I don't wear...
Because really, having the clothes just stare at you over and over just makes you feel bad.
So they went in the donation bag.
And I even took the step of taking some of my older Mack Weldon items that were old and yucky, and I put them in the donation bag, too, because somebody else might want them.
No, I'm kidding.
You've been on the Mack Weldon train long enough to have used Mack Weldon things.
You don't want to go to your account page on Mack Weldon because they tell you how much you've ordered before.
Whew!
They didn't tell us to say this.
No.
I do not.
So when I went... You're mainly underpants, man.
You like the underpants.
When I got the first couple of orders of Mack Weldon underpants, and I think I've told you before that my first order of Mack Weldon underpants got stolen.
And is, I think, being employed as we speak somewhere in Southern California.
Or maybe Haiti.
Maybe it's being used to deploy some kind of, I don't want to say voodoo.
Oh, no, no, I don't think so.
You don't think somebody's made a golem of your underpants?
No, she would never relinquish control of them.
I think that they're part of some, I don't know.
Has anyone asked you to try a saving throw?
I think it might be part of some witchcraft.
See?
Trying to get to sleep tonight, wearing my underpants.
It's being employed in a very different manner.
She's got them on under a little flower dress at her little law firm.
Oh, that!
Yeah, and she's thinking... We don't talk about that.
She's thinking, screw you.
We don't talk about that.
I'm wearing your Mack Weldon.
No, Mack Weldon.
Go to MackWeldon.com.
Yeah.
Let's see if you got a special offer code.
But what I did was I went through and I pulled out all of the Champion and Hanes and other underwears, other subpar underwears.
Yeah.
And I realized that I am such an underwear hoarder that I had underwears that should have gone away a long time ago.
It takes a cold eye.
You got to go in with like a whole – it isn't the getting dressed in the morning frame of mind, to paraphrase Howard Gardner.
You need to go into it with a different frame of mind.
You need different underpants glasses when you go in there.
Well, in my new frame of mind was I had all these these like spanking new, if you will, Mack Weldon underpants, which I which I bought in in fun colors.
And oh, so what ended up happening because these underwears should have gone and been made into asphalt or whatever they do with fabrics now are like children's park equipment.
children's park equipment right that's what they make but you know they shred they shred tires to make the floor of a playground yeah and i can make milk cartons into park benches they shred old underwear in order to make a like high speed rail is that right it's like if you want it like a hyperloop if you want a hyperloop that's why elon musk can't get that thing built because he's he doesn't have enough underwear he's just doing he's doing underwear seed round we've been sending our underwear to china for god
Oh, but I so but there were some underwear that I was very attached to.
For instance, when when Hodgman and I and Dick Cavett were making that aborted television show at the Chateau Marmont.
At one point, we sent a PA.
Somebody had an idea and somebody said to a PA, go get us like seven packs underwear, boxer shorts.
Was Dick in on this?
Dick was in on it.
And the thing is, Hodgman and Dick Cavett are both smaller people, right?
They're like mediums.
And I'm an extra large in the underwear department, if you know what I'm saying.
The underwear department?
I know you are, too.
And so the PA came back, and they had bought a whole broad selection of boxer shorts that
Because this was supposed to be a gag.
It was supposed to be like a part of the show.
It's going to be a gag where the three of us are going to be in boxer shorts.
So we all put on boxer shorts.
We did like this two second bit.
Do you have underwear on under it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We weren't just standing.
Dick Kevin's not going to stand there with his like boxer shorts.
He's an artist.
He's an artist.
He had some other.
I mean, it was like, you know, basically he had boxer shorts on over tights, over flesh colored.
Over like an acting jock.
They give you like an acting jock.
you know what i have never worn a jockstrap in my entire life really when you're playing ball no no no i just i refuse to i thought that's all they wanted to talk about when i got into little league that's that that was the first like first two years was just talking about cups yeah no they i i i thought i thought the terms cup and jockstrap were so gross they're very unpleasant as a 10 year old that i refuse to go anywhere near them i was like i'll take a baseball right in the middle of
John, I'm 51 years old, and I still don't understand why there was quite so much emphasis on athletic supporters.
I think it's coaches.
Do they worry about herniation?
What do you think it is?
It's just part of their weird culture.
Yeah.
They just sit and talk about locker room stuff because it's like, I don't know, it's that culture of men.
They're like, hey, get in the locker room.
We're going to we're going to like snap our jock straps at each other.
Ha ha ha.
Let's take something that used to be fun and make it weird.
I don't I didn't want anything to do with it.
And, you know, my dad is like a jock guy.
He's like, come on.
But he was my dad did not push this angle on me.
I mean, I honestly, I understand the cup part, like especially if you're a catcher, really for anybody.
The cup is a good idea.
I just honestly at the time, you know, OK, so when you're 12 years old, 11 years old in that weird tween age, there's so much stuff that makes no sense.
And you try to cobble together like what it might mean in your head.
You don't really, really, really super exactly understand the tampon.
You come up with these ideas about what things mean.
I don't understand what marriage was.
And I still don't.
But you should watch the watch the play Company by Stephen Sondheim.
Oh, you know, I got it from Married with Children.
Is that where you got it from?
It has the word married in it.
Do you ever watch musicals?
Not really.
Not really.
I mean, not not a purpose.
When a musical comes on and I realize it's a musical, I have that same feeling that I do when I'm when I try to listen to our podcasts.
Or you find something that has a raisin in it.
They act like it's a chocolate chip.
No, I just start to wince and curl up, and I kind of, like, I turn my body away from the music.
Yeah, no, I understand.
Oh, don't hurt me.
Company's very good.
There's a version with Neil Patrick Harris that's very good.
Phone rings, door chimes, in comes company.
I could do more if you want.
It might be a thing that I went to see all that jazz when I was too young.
i was too young to see all that jazz there's a lot of that's a very that's a very sophisticated story that is not showtime folks that is not complicated for kids and it's from the era it was probably pg was it might have been r it had to be r it was r it was r for sure yeah i mean like oh that is not for kids but you know my parents neither one of them was very great at
And deciding what movies I could see, like my mom was very careful to not let me see Jaws in the theaters and I couldn't.
She would not allow me to see Animal House in the theaters because of the racy humor.
But she did.
It's really hard.
It's so hard to watch now.
It's really problematic.
Oh, it is problematic.
Why would you take me to see Auntie Mame?
You have to be crazy.
Oh, I hated them.
PG movies used to be... I remember my mom took me to see a Pink Panther movie that was PG.
There was one scene that was very, very uncomfortable.
You got Cato.
He's hiding in the fridge.
How is that uncomfortable?
Cato hiding in the fridge is the best thing ever.
No, no.
That part's great, but there was some sexy stuff in it.
And it was even kind of some aberrant sexy stuff, and we were both very uncomfortable.
Oh, dear.
We're Protestants, John.
A little bit of slap and tickle?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Is she a goer?
Yeah.
go ahead no i'm good i'm just uh um so uh exceptional oh so anyway so i so i i have it's very it's still very early i mean we're whatever an hour in it still feels early i i have all the boxer shorts okay that used to belong to me do you have any of the ones that dick cavett actually wore absolutely oh shit dog
And what I discovered, and I never would have thought of this, and I would never order based on this, but I discovered that I can wear a pair of medium boxer shorts.
They're just really tight.
But they're like, they turn from boxer shorts, which are baggy.
You can wear mediums?
Well, because what they turn into is boxer briefs.
Okay.
I mean, but like a cotton, a typical cotton weave or like a stretchy boy.
There's a little bit of given.
All right.
All right.
Cause like I am right betwixt a medium and a large, depending on the month.
I could go either way.
So what they end up being is they're like coach shorts, right?
They're just like, Oh, I used to wear those.
They're not baggy.
Yeah.
They're just like, they get on and they're exactly the right.
I used to wear those in gym class.
Yeah, exactly the right dimensions.
And so I walk around.
Sometimes I go to meetings.
I'm sitting in a shower down.
He's right.
I'm sitting in a in a in city hall or whatever, talking to some people.
And I'm like, I'm wearing Dick Cavett's underpants.
You can't even keep it to yourself.
No, no.
It's a little bit of a power move.
It's like a black brassiere under your blouse for work.
That's right.
That's right.
Like, oh, these underpants?
Yeah, they were purchased for Dick Cavett and worn on screen.
These underpants have anecdotes about Groucho Marx.
But anyway, go back to telling me about what the budget says about rock education for children.
Oh, yeah.
Please continue.
Super interesting.
So it's very hard to have those turned into playground equipment or high-speed rail because, you know, they have –
Not a lot of sentimentality, but I have a purpose for them.
I don't just put them on unless I'm really in attack mode.
Oh, right.
And then Mac Underpants started arriving, and those ones that are made of silver became my new attack underwear because you're sitting in City Hall and you're like, my underwear is made of silver.
What do you got?
Oh, yeah.
How many of you have antimicrobial underwear?
Yeah, you guys don't have silver underpants or Dick Cavett underpants.
I guess if I was really going in, if I was going to get sworn in, I'd put them both on.
You could do that.
Put the silver underwear on and then the Dick Cavett underwear.
You put on some of your snug silver mediums?
Slip on some dicks over that?
Woo!
Yeah, look at that.
Put in a cup.
Let's go get around.
Okay.
Uh-huh.
Hey, you want to hit me in the balls?
Joke's on you, asshole.