Ep. 421: "My Mom's Ohio"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Two minutes early.
I don't like to talk about the show on the show, but you're two minutes early.
I'm two minutes early.
Two minutes too early.
Killing the unborn in the womb.
That's not what I'm doing.
Tasting the redskins back to their homes.
Ha, ha, ha.
You know who loves history is Iron Maiden.
They love history.
They do.
All their songs sound like troops galloping.
You know, Charge the Light Brigade, not a great idea.
No, it turned out it didn't work out for them.
John, is that a classic pincer maneuver?
It's even worse than a pincer maneuver, right?
It's more like you see a pincer and then you walk into it.
Is that what they did?
Yeah, that's right.
They rode into a existing pincer.
Is it kettling?
Are they kettling, John?
I think they did the Old West thing where they rode into a canyon.
And they didn't look up.
You don't want to do that?
No, that's bad.
Have I heard correctly?
It's important that the position, when you're in some kind of a martial situation, it's best to, it's all about position, right?
It's about position, Merlin.
That's absolutely right.
It's position, position, position, like they say.
I love the army agents are always saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's true.
Cause like, cause like when my father was in Korea, the story goes, I believe this is a true story.
My father was in Korea.
He was a foot soldier and had a terrible time there.
He had PTSD before it was cool, but you know, he was a, he was a real, he was a private,
He was a fighter.
They told him that he became a corporal, but then he refused to paint something when he knew they were bugging out.
And so they busted him back down to private.
But he had, I don't know, I haven't thought about this too much, but the story goes that he wrote a letter, a somewhat coded letter to his mother, my paternal grandmother, saying something along the lines of, gee, you know, it's so hard here.
It sure would be great if Betsy were here.
And the story goes that my grandmother disassembled his pistol and sent it to him in packs of popcorn over time.
So then he had a way to deal with snipers.
Really?
The sniper has the superior position.
They got the superior preparation.
You know, I don't know if that's in Sun Tzu, but it seems to me that if you're a dude in a tree with, as they say, a long gun, you're going to have a significant advantage over the private foot soldier.
Yeah.
But he was issued a gun.
He was issued the typical, I want to say an M1, but I don't know, a rifle.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Why would I know that?
I don't know.
You're a knowledgeable guy.
I'm a gunsman.
Always with the guns, you know?
But his mom sent him his own personal pistol or his grandmother.
He didn't just send a pistol to Korea.
Right.
So they're watching for that.
She sent it one piece at a time in like, hey, I made you some fudge.
It's like a prison file.
Yeah.
Prison file.
Precisely.
So it's in this case, it was a popcorn pack.
That's the story.
No, that's the story.
Everybody involved is dead.
So I don't have a way to vet that.
But it's a good story.
Um, but, but he, uh, he was in, he was in regular combat.
He was, he had been in combat multiple times.
Well, I don't make it sad, but, um, my dad had a terrible time there.
He was in the story goes again, the story goes that he was in at least three like frontline battles.
Like as he used to say in the shit, like real, real bad trenchy type stuff.
And my father was a gun guy.
He was, he was an NRA guy when that was a cool organization.
He taught gun safety classes.
He was a marksman.
Like he was, he was an outdoors guy, believe it or not.
And he was pretty handy with a, with a firearm.
He never used it to, you know, pop a cap in someone's ass that didn't have it coming.
Yeah.
But he grew up with guns.
He grew up with guns, but also like his first big boy job, well, first he was in radio and broadcasting, but then he became, the job he had until he died was a sporting goods purchaser for a couple different small department store chains in Cincinnati.
God, that would be a fun job.
In the 60s?
He got me a basketball signed by John Havlicek.
Oh, wow.
Sporting goods when they were sporting and good.
So good.
So good.
Yeah, Brenda Moore's.
Brenda Moore's, and then he worked at a place, they eventually had to change their name to Van Lunen's, but in the early 70s, they were called Chinatown.
And would you like to guess what the typeface on the sign looked like?
A little chop suey?
A little chop suey?
Yeah.
So I don't know if that's true, but the idea being that in the time it would take you to pull out precious seconds, right?
Sure, sure, precious seconds.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But maybe it was probably just also nice to have a flavor of home, whether that's popcorn or a sidearm.
Well, you know, I think if you're a private or a corporal, you don't get issued a sidearm.
You're absolutely right.
Oh, my God, John.
Oh, my God, John.
This is not a bit.
It's just now occurring to me.
What?
Both our dads fought on the side of America in a war and did stuff with a pistol.
Yeah, in Asia.
In Asia?
Yeah.
Your dad shot a zero out of the sky with a pistol.
He did with his sidearm.
And, you know, I've told you the story about his sidearm, I'm sure, a couple of times.
But, you know, the additional story is that – and I maybe talked about this in the original telling –
But they issued them all, you know, 45s, 1911 models.
And then halfway through the war, apparently – this is according to my dad.
Yeah.
Guys were scoring the tops of their bullets –
Carving an X in the lead in their bullet.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
To make a dum-dum bullet.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
You've heard this story today?
Oh, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I've just heard of the notion of it.
I think Travis Bickle does the same thing in Taxi Driver.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on the slug.
Is that what it's called?
Right, on the slug.
And then that's going to be like, that's going to explode when it hits a body.
So explode, but it's going to be very heavily fragmented and do a lot more damage.
Yeah, it's going to misplode.
I shot a .45 once, John.
I don't know if you remember, but I nearly shot myself.
I was right there.
It's very heavy.
Yeah, but you know what?
You could tell you were a native gunsman.
Oh, you could tell I got in my bones.
I'm always out there killing something precious with a fishing rod or my sidearm or, you know.
But according to my dad, about halfway through the war, the Japanese—
sent a message by courier saying basically, if we catch any pilots with these 45s,
we're just going to kill them right out because it's an unfair – these .45s with the dum-dum bullets, it's not sporting.
Unlike the usual commodious accommodations that they provide to their prisoners of war.
Yeah, I mean a death march is one kind of sporting.
Well, death march.
I mean, you know.
Sure, death march or exercise march.
But it's like Mitch McConnell.
It's like – I don't know, Mitch McConnell or maybe like the guy who runs Andersonville and you're like, well, don't make me get mean with you.
Yeah.
I don't know if this is true.
It sounds a little bit like another one of these stories that's conflated out of a few different stories, including having read Uncommon Valor and just – beats me if this story is true or not.
But what the point of this story was, was that he –
That all of the .45s were recalled by the Navy.
You had to hand in your .45.
Oh, wow.
And they issued you a .38 instead of a revolver, instead of a...
an automatic or not, not automatic, but like, uh, you got to load single bullets instead of having them.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Um, what's the, what's the word I'll get, I'll get yelled at by the gun people.
Uh, but you get a magazine instead of a, uh, no, the other way around.
Okay.
You lose the magazine.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah.
You lose the magazine and now you're, you're wider.
Yeah, you're Wyatt Earp in it.
It's a pistol rather than a... A revolver rather than a... Well, whatever it is, a semi-automatic weapon of a kind.
It's a gun, basically.
So they take the one gun back and they gave you another gun.
But apparently my dad said that he lost it or something.
You know, there was some way, some reason...
That at the end of the war, when they said, everybody give your guns back.
He had a gun to give them back.
He gave them the one gun back.
Oh.
But somehow he was able to bring the other gun home.
Because I don't think every Navy pilot went home with his gun.
I don't think you're supposed to do that.
I think your clothes, you got to give them back your hat, you know, all that stuff.
They give you your wallet.
They give you your Blues Brothers suit.
They give you one used condom.
Yep.
One pair of sunglasses.
Yeah.
um but you know my dad's gun says property u.s navy on it oh do you still have it oh yeah i still have it is in a cigar box uh no i bought when my daughter was born um you know my mother is very anti-gun extremely anti-gun and uh turns out my daughter's mother slash partner
Although her dad is a kind of a gun, not a gunsman, but her dad is her dad is one of these guys that.
Is he a veteran?
He's an Air Force veteran from Vietnam.
Oh, but he wasn't like a career guy.
No, no.
He was like he worked in the press office.
He's a college professor guy.
Oh, just like Private Joker.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But he's like a car guy, motorcycle guy.
Like he raced Lancias.
Like he's not a gun guy.
He's like a Lancia guy or a Lancia guy.
Is that a car?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like a fussy Italian car.
Okay, I gotta look that up.
But he, for Christmas, gave my mom a K-bar knife.
Which is like the Marine Corps combat knife, and it's 12 inches long.
It's like a – Well, it's kind of rolling where you would have with a blood gutter, like a badass knife.
Yeah, it's a knife you would put in your – clench between your teeth as you scrambled up the feet.
Oh, as you're going over the hill.
Hamburger Hill, they call it.
Exactly.
You're out in the Ardennes just trying to keep it together.
He gave my mom this knife for Christmas, and it was a little bit... That's so weird.
Yeah, and so... I got you a knife?
So she, you know, takes me aside while everybody's cleaning up the turkey, and she's like, what am I supposed to do with this thing?
It's a freaking sword.
And I was like, I don't know.
Leave it at my house.
I'll find a use for it.
Now I use it every day.
It's my, like, open up boxes knife or whatever.
But the thing is, it's a bayonet, basically.
Whoa.
And anyway, he...
He had some pearl handled pistols or something when Ariella was growing up.
Um, and, but she's very anti gun.
Everybody's very anti gun around here because we're all, we're, we're liberals and guns, guns, guns.
And so I've got this, I've got a couple of guns.
I've got that shotgun.
I bought it at an auction for $50 and it turned out it cost me another 50 just to sign the papers.
Hmm.
And then I've got the, you know, I got this one over here.
I got this one saying no soup.
Hmm.
Hmm.
But I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not have a gun in the house with the baby and
And I said, listen, I'm a full-grown man.
You can't just stand here and tell me anything in no uncertain terms.
But that's not how it works.
You don't say something like that to my mom.
Well, couldn't you do what my dad did?
My dad, back when it was fashionable to not want your family dead, my dad did all the things.
He had that.
I used to play with.
He had a bunch of those little locks that you put over the trigger.
You know what it's called?
Trigger locks.
I guess that's what it's called.
See, but these people get so fucking mad if you call anything the wrong name.
It's actually the actuation lever or whatever.
But those little things with a little lock on them, they were so cool.
The actuation lever.
Yeah, the actuation lever.
And so he had those in all the firearms.
And I think they were, I don't know if they were locked away, but they were definitely somewhere you couldn't get to.
And, of course, then the ammunition was always stored somewhere completely separately.
Right.
Vis-a-vis, unlike, say, my stepfather, you would not have a loaded revolver by your bed.
Or like my brother, under your pillow.
Yeah, that gives you some real Chekhov teen years, you know what I'm saying?
My dad kept his gun on top of the refrigerator, as you do.
Yes.
And it was never...
It was never a problem because I always took the bullets.
I always took the magazine out of the gun before I played with it.
That's just responsible, John.
Yeah, thank you.
Did you check the chamber?
Mostly.
Did you do that chick-chick thing?
Like when you hand a gun to your superior officer, do you do the chick-chick thing?
Chick-chick.
Make sure there's not one in there.
Well, the thing is, once you pull the magazine out, if you go chick, it will stay open.
It remains open.
So then in order to get it to go chick, you have to push a lever.
Okay.
But I agree with them 100%.
And so what I did – because my mom grew up in a house.
Her dad was a freaking gun.
Well, weren't they – I mean – Gunsman.
I do not – email John about all of this.
But I think in a rural context –
There are much more reasons to have a firearm run.
If you're on a farm out in the middle of fucking nowhere, it makes a lot of sense to have a shotgun probably.
Yeah, but he was a crazy.
When he died, he had 200.
He's an Ohio nut.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He had 200 guns.
And my mom says that when she was growing up, there was a gun leaning in the corner of every room in the house.
Oh, boy.
That doesn't seem awesome, John.
They were just leaning in the corner, too.
They weren't like on a guitar stand or anything.
They were just like – she said that she was never afraid to be home on the farm at night because there was a gun in every corner.
But I think it might have done a little number on her because she's very much – but she's also like anti-police.
Like she doesn't believe that there should be armies.
And so, you know, I do a lot of tut-tutting.
And, of course, that's my only response when I'm told something in no uncertain terms.
All I can do is tut-tut because, you know – If the one power we have left is tut-tutting.
That's right.
What can you say to her?
All I can do is tut-tut.
And she can't do anything about that except –
say things in more uncertain terms.
You already know she's probably not going to pull out a K-Bar full-size U.S.
Marine Corps fighting knife straight.
That's a good-looking knife.
I kind of want this.
They're beautiful.
Wooden handle?
Is it like a wooden handle?
Well, it's leather.
It's a leather handle.
Is it?
Oh, this is cool.
They're really gorgeous.
You know why they're called a K-Bar?
K-Bar.
Because back in the 19th century,
A guy wrote him a letter, wrote the company a letter and said, I K'd a bar with your knife.
Oh, I see.
In the vernacular.
He K'd a bar.
And they were like, he K'd a bar.
Why don't we just call the knife?
Sometimes you K'd a bar and sometimes the bar K's you.
Exactly.
But anyway, so what I did was I went down to the place and I bought a safe.
I bought a gun safe that has like a fingerprint ID combination impenetrable gun box.
And when you open it, there's a little light that goes on inside.
Only I can access it in secret code.
And I said to everybody, all right, now the gun is in a gun box.
That's pretty good, right?
And they were like, still it's not enough.
And so then I had to hide the gun safe.
And I said, every one of these things, every dimension you make it, every extra step is
That I put in between me and retrieving this sidearm when the zombies come.
Yep.
You're making us all unsafe.
And I was scoffed to death by the army of women that tell me what to do.
Because of just generalized zombie skepticism or do they feel like you're trying to come up with a reason?
Yeah.
They believe that the whole argument of home defense and handguns is a specious argument that holds no water.
And...
And they're quick to point out that there was – that I had a burglar in my house that I thought was a possum.
I mean if you were awake, you would have done something.
Well, yeah.
I would have stood at the top of the stairs and said, get the hell out of my house.
And they would have dropped everything and would have ran.
Yeah.
If I had –
Yeah, that's a shame.
That's a shame.
You lost your opportunity, John, that one time.
I know.
If there had been a gun in every corner of the house, then that burglar would... I still blame the possums.
I still blame the possums.
You thought it was possa.
I do, too.
Is that the plural?
And, you know, frankly, possa.
Okay, possa.
I have not seen a possum in a long time, and I wonder whether something happened.
Oh, like where it got out, like the opposite of a crow?
Yeah.
No, no, I think that maybe there was a possum plague, but nobody cared.
It didn't even make the newspapers because nobody cares whether there are possums or not.
If that was pandas, people would care.
It was a lot of things, right?
I mean, if it was even other gross things.
Like bass players or something, yeah.
Nobody would miss them until the guy playing bass on the synthesizer...
Until you really took a good look at him and realized he was dressed like a doctor.
He's dressed like a doctor and that's just a keytar.
That's a keytar.
That's not even a base.
But I don't... You know, I've never done enough research on a possum to know what they're there for.
Right.
Like, when God...
made a possum you know i i would i would consult kipling's just so stories except they're canceled and i don't even know keep those in a separate vault now i can't even have them in the house i don't i don't know whether he even wrote one about a possum i doubt he did i doubt a possum even warranted a just so that could be a robert frost you know i think i'll never see anything as awesome as this really cool looking possum
But what do they do?
Do they eat grubs?
If I understand what you're saying, we'll have to bring in John Syracuse, so we've got to probably loop him in for this.
But this is what John Syracuse refers to as evolution, which is that there are challenges and opportunities that over time you get what they call survival of the fittest.
So what was it that the PASA...
were capitalizing upon what did they supplant, that kind of thing?
Or, you know, you get that whole classic, like, you know, playing God in Yellowstone thing of like, well, we decided we wanted more bunnies, so we got rid of the wolves, and then we had to, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
We're trying to do this hustle on nature, like it's not going to figure it out.
Oh, nature figures it out, don't worry about that.
But now you've got four problems, you know what I'm saying?
And in this instance, what is, you were saying, your question becomes, what is the PASA, what are the PASA there for?
And so, like, I have heard it said, and I am not a botanist, but I've heard it said that the only truly useless animal is the mosquito.
I've heard it said.
The mosquito does not have a role.
Like, you could say, like, well, roaches, like, they do a thing or, like, you know, or like Husker Du says, you know, the rats eat the cats and the cats eat the rats.
Their situation...
I feel like it hit my situation.
There's a situation where there's things that evolve that end up helping.
Like, you know, like those kinds of like animals that like there's those birds that sit on cows and eat their bugs.
Exactly the birds that sit on cows.
Yeah.
But what does an opossum sit on?
I always understood that a mosquito fed the bats, but is it just – is the only reason we have bats –
just to eat mosquitoes?
See, this is one of those things where, like I say, I'm not a scientician, but this is one of those things where I think it's difficult not to introduce certain kinds.
Even if you walk away from the anthropomorphism, there still is this sense of, ew, gross, nobody likes mosquitoes.
So I don't know, that might seep down all the way into the scienticians.
But there's a lot of cute stuff we tolerate that just would never make it in the wild.
Whereas some of the hardier things, I don't know if you ever camped in Gainesville, Florida, but woof.
They'll take a piece out of you, those skeeters.
Oh, well, you know, I come from Alaska.
I don't know if you know this.
Oh, is that the national bird, as they say, John?
Yes, it is.
Sorry, national state bird.
You know, I think the worst attack I ever got was in a tent in Gainesville.
But one time, my lady and I were visiting her family in Providence, and we went to the Y and said, oh, look, there's a beautiful little grove over there.
Let's take a walk before we go back to Grandma's house.
Like as soon as we step off the concrete into the grove, which is just a bunch of trees and some standing water.
Holy shit.
Torah, Torah, Torah.
Yeah.
It's the standing water that gets you.
That's how they get you.
The possum.
They'll lift a moose right off the ground.
You know what?
We have actually some fans who listen to the show.
Yeah.
Who are chiropractorologists.
Is that right?
The city chiropractors?
That's the name, I believe.
Is that a chiropodist, John?
What am I thinking of?
Yeah, chiropodists.
Okay, all right.
They're the ones that they scrape your feet and study pasta.
They're the bat studiers.
Oh, bats.
Yeah, the chiropterologists, as I call them.
Okay, okay.
They study the bats, and I've had them come up to me at events and say, oh, yes, I'm a chiropterologist or whatever you call them.
Yeah, sure.
I'm so uncommonly not interested in what people do for a living, but I would talk to a helicopterologist all night.
I would love to know more.
I'd learn a lot about bats, but I bet you by extension, by proxy, by metaphor, I would also learn about rats and other things that fly.
I bet you'd learn a lot.
You'd learn about rabies.
You'd learn about how it gets into a lady's beehive.
You learn how it fights crime as a sadistic billionaire.
There's all kinds of things you could learn from a charm and ophthalmologist.
You know, me, I like to learn what happens in a person's life that they become a charm and ophthalmologist.
Absolutely.
Like, again, you know, it's what John Syracuse would call evolution.
Did you excel in this course or did you just super eat the booger in this other course?
So you were going to be an actor, but your ophthalmologist was your fallback.
I'm like a biologist, and now I'm an ichthyologist, and now I'm a bop-a-na-na-na-na-na-na.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
I think that the way that evolution works in the case of like a possum is that God has a thing for everything, right?
Right?
And when I say God, quote unquote, I mean evolution.
Yeah.
Right?
So evolution, God slash evolution.
Okay.
Makes a thing for everything.
A thing for everything.
And it does it by evolution.
See, I've talked to Siddhartha about this quite a bit.
A thing for everything is in like something to eat and be eaten by?
Yeah.
A time for every purpose under heaven.
Oh, turn, turn, turn.
Okay.
Right?
So...
So John's explained this to me.
Okay.
It's basically that there are needs and there are must needs.
There are for also neither musts.
Right.
Or nor.
And that nature turns into nurture.
Right.
And makes a thing basically through evolution for everything.
Nature vacuums and abhorrence.
That makes sense.
Okay.
So the possum can only exist because there was a niche that it, that it needed to fill that God.
It's a niche that God needed to scratch.
I get it.
Viz evolution created a possum so that it can't be purposeless.
It can't just be wandering around like looking for its duck and
Things in nature have their ducks.
It's only we and our poor dogs who haven't found their duck.
A possum knows what its duck is.
And in most cases that I've seen, it's a bowl of cat food.
That's what possums are here to do.
They're here to take care of cat food.
They're here to take care of cat food.
See, we go through that right now.
There's something going on.
I need to talk to Syracuse about this, but there's something evolutionary happening in San Francisco.
As you know, when it gets rainy here, we talked about this a lot, you get way more rain than we do, but during our what we call rainy season, you get a lot of what they call sugar ants.
Monsoon season, yeah.
Kind of monsoony, but like it's – you get these ants and – Are you having some ants problems now?
Well, here's the thing.
It's not even rainy season.
We didn't even really have a rainy season.
Now, what I know is – well, what I know – I'll make this as quick as I can.
What I know is –
What I know is that when it rains, there's a lot of critters that get displaced.
Yes, especially in the park with the Confederate ghosts.
Okay?
So you're going to see displaced nails.
Nails?
Snails?
Snails?
What?
Why does the rain displace the snails?
Well, think about this.
Where do snail live?
Snail lives in ground.
Right, in the mulch.
In the mulch, a snail or a slug.
And then you get a surfeit of rain out of nowhere, that dry ground.
And, you know, dry ground gets confused about rain.
A lot of invasive exotics.
Trees are getting knocked over, dogs and cats.
And then, so they're kind of pushed out of their house.
Ditto sugar ants when it rains.
Rain goes down, right?
And then that's going to drive them out of their little condos.
And then they go seeking a shelter and food.
And they just keep going up and up and up.
Now, Ian Wilson talked about this, right?
So you've got these guys going all over the place.
They're following trails.
They're all working independently of one another.
Here's what's crazy.
Our heinous, our truly grievous grotesquery of a cat, those ants are still going ham on her food.
And it is the month of April.
We are way past Monsignors of rain season.
Oh, no.
But, you know, it's hard because you can't really fool them.
You know, it's sort of like, okay, you know this with Pasa, and you know this with Raccoonai.
With Raccoonai, not to be confused with Luakuan, but if you've got Raccoonai and you want to keep them away from your bird food, you try to do all this stuff, you go, ha, ha, ha, I'm going to put a cone on here, or I'm going to do a low ropes course, and that will surely keep the Raccoonai away.
It doesn't work.
It does not.
No, they're too smart.
How do you keep cat food away from Pasa?
I mean, you kind of can't, right?
They'll find it because it's food.
If you put it outside, if you feed your cat outside, this is the thing.
Possums aren't going to find your cat food because your cat food is in your kitchen.
Well, unless they're looking to get your passport and your old iPad.
Exactly.
Okay.
I believe, and I learned this when I was fighting sugar ants.
What it never occurred to me, because you think about nature, you think about ants, and you're like, oh, ants.
I mean, when it rains, they just climb up on a stick or whatever and surf it.
There's a surfeit of ants.
Surfing the surfeit.
But it turns out ants can drown.
Yeah.
This is not a thing I knew.
Because if you take a cockroach or you take any of these water bugs, you take one of those marmorated stink bugs and you put it in the toilet, they'll just swim around all day.
You can put a marmorated stink bug in the toilet and cover it with toilet paper.
You can visibly see them laughing at you.
They're laughing.
And if you flush them, they're somebody else's problem.
They go 15 miles down the river.
What's that marmorated stink bug doing in there?
The breaststroke, I believe.
Ha ha ha.
It's not that funny.
Stink bugs are gross.
Oh, and marmorated.
They smell like, what do they smell like?
Amaretto.
They smell like kind of an almond smell when you smash them.
I have found that people talk about, you know, they're literally called stink bugs.
Yeah.
But I have never found them to be particularly stinky, and that's, I guess, because I don't crush them.
Oh, good for you, man.
I just grab them and I... Just because you own a bunch of guns doesn't make you a crusher of bugs.
That's right.
I'm not a monster.
No.
I do flush them down the toilet.
Sure.
But usually, if I'm fighting marmorated stink bugs at any given time, I don't want to waste an entire toilet flush on one stink bug.
So I'll wait until I've got a full... Yeah, but I mean, if you're going to fight somebody at the veil, you're going to open up the moonroof.
And then you can throw the guy down and watch him fall.
You know what I'm saying?
Same situation.
I've been thinking about moonroofs a lot lately.
I was watching that episode last night.
It's a really good episode.
The other things I know.
So here's another thing, John, is we get a lot very confused.
Not everybody's John Syracuse or studies marmots.
Like a lot of us get very confused about this nomenclature.
So like in Florida, we have a lot of euphemisms.
I don't know if you have those same euphemisms.
You never call it a cockroach, even though it is an American cockroach, usually the big ones.
You call it water bugs.
a water bug we're having a problem right now with water bugs aren't florida florida water bugs aren't they don't they fly oh and they're africanized they're asianized i don't want to be ping pong but yeah some of them could fly and for whatever reason they're they're hardwired as john syracuse would say they're hardwired to fly directly into your fucking face when you turn the lights on they go now you got a face full of roach
I have a terrible story that someone told me once about being in Florida.
And they were partying.
They were chilling.
And there was a bong.
And they went to take a big toke out of their bong.
And there was a big water bug in the bong.
Oh, my god.
I bet he was so baked.
Oh, the water bug was baked and the person that had the bong with the water bug in it was bummed, bro.
It makes you look like a bad host.
Oh, right.
Right?
It's like serving somebody like something on a dirty plate or something.
One time my mom was playing tennis with a woman and she was drinking Pepsi like a monster and there was a bee in it.
So here's another one.
Is it a bee or was it a yellow jacket?
Chances are it's probably a yellow jacket.
What you think is bee is often yellow jacket.
Anyway, it bit the roof of her mouth right while she was playing tennis.
O-M-G, as my daughter would say.
Absolutely.
And like you always still, you know, right?
You still wipe off the top of a can of pop because you have this trucker pee on there, right?
I do.
Every time I did it yesterday, I was like, got to wipe off this pop.
Do you go tap, tap, tap on top before you pop it?
I do.
Yeah, I thought you did.
I thought you did.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, anyways, I'm just saying, now, yellow jackets also, we were set upon one time, the worst yellow jacket setting upon I was participating in was on a school field trip to the pumpkin patch.
In, I want to say second grade, I went to the pumpkin patch.
And boy, oh boy, you know who loves pumpkins is yellow jackets.
Huh.
Uh-huh.
And when they get bored with pumpkins, they go after the kids and the dads.
And then the thing is, do you know this about a yellow jacket?
Not a bee.
I'm not talking about a bee here.
I'm talking about a yellow jacket.
Do you know if you smash a yellow jacket, you know what happens?
What?
It's sort of like Mitch McConnell.
It attracts more yellow jackets?
Oh, yeah.
It just makes them mad.
It just makes them mad.
And now they know to go after wherever the, you know, oh, no, Uncle Sid, he got smashed.
And then, like, you go after that and you find the dad there going, ah, ah, ah, and waving things around.
Right.
They're also attracted to the color yellow.
Now, Pasa, because, like, there is this Hakuna Matata, circle of life thing that goes on, where, excepting the mosquitoes here, like, there are certain kinds of things, I mean, this is known, right?
That there are certain kinds of things that have a role in nature.
They eat a thing, they get eaten by a thing.
I believe I've heard it referred to as the food chain.
There are... Is the O silent...
Or is calling it a possum just a hillbilly thing?
Or am I just – because I only call them possums because my mom.
We're kind of back to the Cannes Film Festival problem here, I think.
You know what?
I will look it up because I would like to know.
I feel like the way you're supposed to say it at the kind of place where you'd sip tea with your pinky at is you say a possum.
A possum, right.
And a possum.
When we talked about them a long time ago, you referred to them as opossums then.
Yeah.
And my whole life I've been like, what's the difference between an opossum and a possum?
And I think it might just be that
Although my mom hates hillbillies, she is from Ohio.
No, no, no, she does.
They're the people that she hates the most in the world.
Are they worse than Bonaparte, you feel like?
For sure.
Really?
For sure.
No, no.
The people that she hates the most are, in order, people from Kentucky.
Ha ha!
And that's my people.
And then everyone else.
Oh, shit.
Really?
People of Kentucky are the top of her list.
Oh, well, no.
Then people of southeastern Ohio who are, in her estimation, people from Kentucky.
But not, well, southwestern Ohio?
Is she anti-Cincinnati?
Be honest.
No, no, no, no.
She loves Cincinnati.
You're talking like over in the holler.
You're talking like over a slightly more, a little more Appalachian over here on the right.
So I guess, I guess there's people from Kentucky at the top of her hate chain and then people from West Virginia slightly below that.
And then everybody.
It's what Freud calls the narcissism of minor differences.
That's exactly right.
We'll know as far as she's concerned.
She considers herself a Hill William.
Well, the people from northwestern Ohio and the people from southeastern Ohio, as far as she's concerned, there is no greater divide.
There's no thicker border in the universe.
The border between Turkey and Greece is not more fortified in her mind.
Whoa, really?
Than the border between northwestern Ohio and southeastern Ohio.
If you're comfortable saying so, and feel free to say so if you're not okay to say so.
So, like, I mean, I know something about Ohio.
I mean, I've made plaster.
I made a plaster Ohio.
Yes.
And I've made Indian mounds.
I've had the Ohio State education in fourth grade as a Cincinnatian, a Cincinnatist.
I know Toledo.
I know Cleveland.
I know Columbus, Dayton.
What?
What did you say?
You know Toledo.
You know Tolado.
Tolado.
Let's call the whole thing off.
I hate you.
If you're comfortable saying for OPSEC reasons, is there a city more or less, a town, a burg, is there anything roughly near where your mom grew up that would give me some sense of place apart from just generally Northwestern?
Do they just not have incorporated areas there?
Is she anywhere near like a big town?
Well, a big town.
I think that you would find that the big town where she grew up was Lima, Ohio.
Oh, really?
I thought it was pronounced Lima.
Nope, Lima.
And there is nothing to recommend Lima, Ohio.
Yeah, most towns up there are named such things like Buttsburg or Coxville or something.
They all have slightly embarrassing names.
Well, they're all built on what was formerly the edge of the Great Black Swamp.
The Great Black Swamp.
The Great Black Swamp, which was –
which was drained over the course of decades by our hardy pioneers.
But if you look at the way the towns are built up there, you know, in our Roderick on the Line geography lesson of where's the river, why is this town here?
Absolutely.
A lot of them are built on what was the dry ground along the edge of the Great Black Swamp.
Great Black Swamp must have been
an amazing place an incredible place i don't think i've ever heard that i've heard it i don't remember it it was enormous and it's now long gone but lima ohio now lima ohio when my mom was growing up was um was the bustling nearby slightly larger town that her father
drove the bus back and forth from and to.
Is it the kind of place where you go for like slightly different provisions, like for like canned food or something?
So in the...
If you were going to go to the department store to get some— Get some pretty ribbons for your hair?
Yeah, to get some frocks for the dancing season.
Dance frocks.
You would turn the other way and you would go to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Oh, boy.
But Lima is where you would go if you I don't know why you would go to Lima.
I've been to Lima and I don't ever need to go back.
And no offense to any Roderick on the line listeners who are who are in Lima at the moment.
Yeah, I got into a minor traffic accident in Lima.
Oh, no.
And it was a situation where I was like, give me the heck out of Lima.
And I might have even said to the cop, I was like, can you write that ticket faster?
It's a regular Doc Hollywood type situation.
I'm going to get the hell out of this town.
Because this place, there's a great black swamp, and it's hovering 100 feet above Lima, Ohio.
Okay.
But my mom's Ohio...
You would think that it would be oriented toward Toledo, but it wasn't.
It was oriented to Columbus because Columbus is where the – I think that my mom has an abiding love of Columbus.
And by extension, Cincinnati.
Right?
Like there's a kind of –
Columbus, Cincinnati, pas de deux.
It's not – okay, so Ohio is not a fancy place, but Ohio is kind of several different states.
And Cincinnati is, at least when I was there, very much almost its own state.
Not its own state, but like it was the – as I've said I think numerous times on here, it's sort of the cosmopolitan baby of –
of Indiana and Kentucky getting drunk and fucking one night.
And then their fancy baby is Cincinnati.
It's a very conservative area, like Indiana.
It's a very hillbilly area, like Kentucky.
But it's not the union state that the northeast part is, right?
But there's that corridor, I feel like, from Columbus to Cincinnati, where you've got Dayton along the way and stuff like that.
We would like to think that that's kind of the fancy area of Ohio.
Yeah.
Yeah, although the real money in Ohio is up in that Amish farm country out around Akron.
You know, if you think about the Rust Belt cities, it's like, ah, those cities are all poor.
But you get out into the farms around there, and that's big money, Ohio.
Those Mennonites can make a hell of a pie.
I'm just going to say it.
You ever have a Mennonite pie?
That sounds like something from Urban Dictionary, but the Mennonites make a very careful pie.
I have not had a Mennonite pie, but there is – We had a Mennonite pie place in Sarasota, of all things.
There's a hardware store in the Ohio around where my dad's people are from.
That's like an Amish hardware store.
And every time my mom goes back to Ohio where her city was born –
She goes to this crazy hardware store and sends me pictures of exotic woods.
She's like, look at this.
This wood is naturally green and orange.
Do they always sell hand tools?
They don't use devices of, what do they call them?
The English, right?
That's what they call us?
The English, yeah.
They use hand tools and stuff, but are they allowed to sell high tech?
Could you get a Dell laptop there?
I'm not 100% sure.
You know, weirdly, I have never been to this hardware store.
I hear about it all the time.
Sounds amazing.
I'd love to see some woods.
Well, some beautiful woods, some like crazy woods.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But my experience of Cincinnati, I think I've told you this before, the radio station there, Waxi... They were great.
...was a huge... My friend did their website, and I was a member there.
You were a member of Waxi?
I was a Waxi member.
They had a great streaming.
My friend Chris Glass, who did 43 Folders, also did their site, and he's the best.
I think he...
He was in Dayton, Cincinnati.
I think he's in Cincinnati now.
But Waxi was great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They really boosted the long-winders.
They're kind of like a KEXP in a lot of ways, I feel like.
They're like a proto KEXP, although they're gone now.
I know.
R.I.P.
But I've always felt, and this is one of those things that you hear at a stake and shake and you never shake it, is that Cincinnati is the capital of Kentucky.
And I believe that.
I like that.
I believe that.
Are airports in Kentucky?
Yeah.
Did you know that?
Yeah, I did.
The Cincinnati Airport, it's down in, I want to say Covington, but it's down in Kentucky.
Well, the venue, whenever we played Cincinnati, the venue was actually over in Kentucky.
No kidding.
They call it the Brent Suspension Bridge, it used to be.
We took the Brent Spence Bridge over and we played the Roadhouse there, and of course that's gone too.
I apologize.
My Amazon device decided to start telling me the top rated airports in Kentucky.
How many are there to rate?
Well, let's see.
It says here, number one, you got the Addington Field Harden.
You got Samuels Field, Louisville, Mohammed something.
I don't see CVG on here at all.
Huh.
Anyway, I'm sorry for that.
I can cut that out if you want.
No, no, no.
It's all right.
Cincinnati, that's so interesting because Cincinnati has had like, in the time since I left, it got, I think, cooler and redone and gentrified.
And like, isn't it like you got the South, what is it called?
The South Rhine area, but you've got like all these areas that were like, they do stuff now.
Yeah.
As far as I know, they did the thing that Seattle did that was very popular with American cities, which is that they built a stadium and then they decided to build a second stadium.
But didn't they tear down the stadiums and build a new stadium?
I believe so.
I do know that Riverfront is gone, and I believe the Coliseum's gone.
I bet you're right.
And so that would be what?
The Reds and the Bengals would play there, probably.
The last time I flew over Cincinnati in a biplane—
I remember looking down and saying.
On your way to Dayton to go buy some bike rims.
I said, there are too many stadiums here.
There are too many stadia.
Stadia.
In this town.
Stadia.
Did you have...
This is a little bit of an aside.
Did you have Nikes when you were in seventh grade or did you have a knockoff Nikes?
Both.
I had to, this is before I had sort of money of my own and my mom definitely did not have a lot of money of her own.
But yeah, I think the first ones I begged myself into were, the short answer is yes.
But like I got, I believe canvas, white canvas high tops with a black swoosh.
But then eventually I got the Nike dynasties, which are the coolest things.
athletic shoes I've ever owned.
Go look up Nike Dynasty.
They're really cool.
Mostly I had it big.
You know what I got?
I got those JCPenney ones.
They're fake Adidas with four stripes.
What I got in whatever this early 80s.
Did you get the one where the swoosh goes the other way?
No, I got the one where the swoosh looks like a whale.
It looks like a whale.
They're called Stadia.
I think they were sold by Kinney.
And they had a whale.
So it's like the white leather Nikes with the red swoosh, except they were white leather and they had a red whale on them.
And I was not somebody who was status conscious.
No, you would do your own aftermarket alligators on your shirt.
Yeah, aftermarket alligators.
But definitely when I got these, it was not because I was...
I wasn't like, please, mom, please buy me the red swoopy shoes.
This was when I think my mom just went to the store and bought clothes and brought them home.
Like she didn't even take me with her.
Oh, I know.
By the way, this is exactly what I was thinking of.
It's basically an upside down swoosh.
Yeah, except it's a little whale.
It's a little whale.
And she brought them home and I was like, cool, those are cool.
But then I wore them to school.
Uh-uh.
And it was patiently explained to me by everybody that my shoes were knockoffs.
And it was kind of maybe the first time I understood what a knockoff was.
Yeah.
Because it was like, it was, you know, after Polo came out and everybody had a shirt that had a little guy on it, but they were always the wrong guy, unless you paid $80 for the shirt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Moms hate that.
Moms really hate that.
Moms love kids who love Jif.
Yeah, but I mean, choosy moms will not let you get the shoes that are $40 just because of this little piece of leather on it.
It's absolutely mom kryptonite.
But then, of course, because I have the personality that I do, then I wore my Stadia with Defiance.
Then I was like, yeah, Stadia.
Of course, of course.
I rep Stadia.
And that just increased my popularity with all the kids.
I'll bet.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've had that.
My dad's people are from Kentucky.
That's pretty much where most of my family, before they were Cincinnati.
Well, my grandfather, as you know, comes from South America.
But all my dad's side of the family mostly.
And my grandmother is from Louisville.
I like the way you pronounce it.
Well, you know what?
I go kind of in between.
I don't want to go crazy about it.
I'm not going to fake a Brooklyn accent, you know?
How many vowels can you take out of Louisville?
When your grandfather came from South America, was it a thing where he had gone down there to escape a posse?
And then he turned around and came back after?
No, he was too young for World War II.
So, you know, Argentina rejected him.
His family was from London.
They were in the industrial diamond business, like not high up in it.
But like, yeah, they basically were down there, you know, just gutting all the resources.
So you had a friend in the diamond business.
Every kiss begins with K. Yeah.
Grandpa's family was in British Carolina, right outside of what we would later know as Jonestown.
And yeah, and they were in the diamond.
And so I, again, standing water,
Huh.
Huh.
Um, the, uh, the thing is I don't, everybody's dead.
Anybody I could ask about this is dead.
And, but I'm pretty sure.
That's kind of your catchphrase.
Well, it kind of is, you know, I got, there's a lot of death in my family.
The, um, he came to the story goes again, like, like Betsy, the pistol in, in the bag of popcorn, which is a great Warren Zeevon song.
Um, the story goes that he came to the U S to go to dental school, which seems very strange.
Um,
I wonder if that was some kind of, you know, a little bit of like, oh, yeah, that's what's on the form.
Like maybe he was an organized crime or something.
He ended up shutting off people's electricity for Cincinnati Gas and Electric for 34 years.
But I don't know how that happened.
But the story goes that he came from South America to Cincinnati, I believe in 19, I want to say 30.
So great timing.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Well, and that's what they call the great migration from Argentina to Cincinnati.
That was a great migration.
It's a good migration.
You going to do anything with those plantains?
You mean those fake bananas?
Yeah, I'll have them.
Go ahead, Barry.
Eat them up.
Yum.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I've... So...
my cousin Alfie is a cement contractor.
Alfie.
So when my grandfather, wait a minute.
Well, my great grandfather, judge George Alfred Caldwell, Rochester, when he died, he left all and his wife, um,
his wife whose name escapes me at the moment, although she's a, she's a nefarious character.
They left all of their exciting, uh, family history to their children.
And somehow it all filtered down in my family to two people, uh, Alfie through his mother, Mary Ellen and Junius through his father,
Alfred Ruffner Rochester.
None of it came to me because my dad was not interested when, when he was, when my dad was like the elder.
Oh, those Nike dynasties are so beautiful.
Aren't those badass?
Yeah.
Those are really nice.
With the mesh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like, I like the mesh a lot.
I like that.
It's got like a contrast of different kinds of materials.
Why don't they make those again?
Why can't, I don't know.
They also made them in high top.
I like the Oxford's better.
I like the Oxford's.
Yeah.
Um,
Anyway, Alfie, who lives out in Palsbo, Alfie has been sending me scans of pictures of all these people, all these, like, sepia-toned photographs of these people.
Oh, my God, that's catnip for you, John.
It really is.
The thing is, he sends them to me in the middle of the night.
He's like, hey, look at this.
And then he sends me some picture that I would walk over hot coals.
to hold in my hands.
And I'm like, that's incredible.
How did you find that?
That's a picture of this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy.
Yeah.
And, uh, or it's like, that's my grandmother and her mother and her mother on a boat to Paris in 1912.
And I didn't even know.
It's like puzzle pieces.
They're just like falling out of the sky.
And you know, and I know about all of the stuff, right?
And Alfie's like, yeah, I thought that that was that, what this was.
He's just going through what I think are in numerous boxes and
innumerable, innumerable boxes of, uh, of incredible photos that he inherited of all of these people on my father's side.
And my mom just pulled out her boxes recently.
I think it, I think it's partly that, yeah, that everybody that was in these stories is dead.
Yep.
I've got a shadow box now in my living room of my great-grandfather.
No, my great-great-grandfather's Grand Army of the Republic Reunion Medals.
You know, those guys after the Civil War, they got together every summer and they made medals and they would pin them on each other, I think, the entire rest of their lives until they were 95 years old and they're still pinning them.
Let them have it.
That's what I say.
Let them have it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Let them have it.
Old guys love giving each other awards.
They really do.
You know what?
You and I have never really made awards for each other.
I'm already extremely interested in this idea.
It feels very Finn and Jake, doesn't it?
Wouldn't you make me a medal and I would make you a medal?
I would.
I would make you the greatest burrito in the world.
I would make you a sandwich.
I would make you an award.
Yeah, but I especially love the idea of this is the award you didn't know you deserved, let alone earned.
Here's a very special episode where we give each other the awards that the other person didn't know they needed or deserved.
Our fans have made us multiple phony awards.
The phony award is tremendous.
I have it here and I look at it all the time.
It makes me so happy.
Yeah, it's a very nice award.
And we're multiple recipients.
We've been nominated a few times.
Is that right?
All the way down in Australia, they're still listening.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah.
It's based in Australia.
Is that right, John?
The phony award is an Australian podcasting award.
Okay, okay.
But it's entirely real, except insofar as it's not.
But it does have actual headphones on it.
I mean, it's a real phony.
It's a real phony award.
That's true.
No, to answer your question, I don't think we have.
That's not part of the usual.
I'm not saying this is bad or anathema, but it's not part of the regular day-to-day vernacular of our relationship is award-giving.
In fact, if I may say, I don't want to make this awkward, but I think you are resistant to awards.
You don't want a white ribbon.
No.
Well, I don't, except, and I know I've told you about this, when Millennium Girlfriend and I were cohabitating or planning, there was a brief period where she came to Seattle and we went house shopping.
Didn't it escalate via her fairly quickly from this thing to like, oh boy, this is where we're going and there's no turning back?
Yeah, it's like, oh, now it's a 3,500 square foot like Queen Anne mansion on the north side of Queen Anne Hill.
And that's not – I'm never going to live here, sweetie.
But we were talking about – like she had all these diplomas.
She had like really heavyweight diplomas.
And at the time, I didn't – I hadn't even granulated from the University of Washington.
And I didn't have any diplomas.
And nobody had ever given me any awards.
And so I had all these awards that were like certificates of participation.
And I don't want those.
I want some real heavyweight stuff.
I want the real things.
That's why I asked Jason Isbell if he would make me a Kentucky colonel.
And he was like, oh, yeah.
Is he still thinking about it?
I don't think he has – it turned out he didn't have the power.
If he could, he probably wouldn't say it.
I mean, with all respect, if you were going to be a Kentucky colonel, he probably already would be.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
There's a gal in Kentucky who was trying to make me a Kentucky colonel a couple of different times, and she was like, yeah, I keep proposing you, and they keep not replying to my emails either.
Oh, no.
I'm like, it's something.
They're against me.
They're against me.
Well, they probably heard about your mom's attitude, your mom's slightly retrogressive attitude about the people of the Bluegrass State.
Well, I know, but I don't have to appeal to my mom.
These are my father's people.
That's true.
You're saying you're a legacy.
You're a legacy.
Yeah.
A lot of them were bad people, let's be honest.
Well, Mitch McConnell, right?
That's right.
He's a bad people.
I don't like that guy.
I don't like him at all.
But, you know, the other thing is, like, it would be nice to get a prestigious award.
Like, let's say, like, you get the MacArthur grant or you get, like, a Mark Twain award.
Peabody award.
But, like, it would be even nicer if they made up a whole award for you.
And by that, I mean, like, about you.
So, like, you would, like, get, like, excellence in being John Roderick.
But it would have a better name than that.
But something that's, like, really tuned to you.
I don't want to be the next Mark Twain.
I want to be the last John Roderick.
I almost joined the Sons of the American Revolution.
At what point?
Well, a few years back.
Because you enjoyed the racism, but the networking is also important.
Oh, no, no, no.
That's the Sons of the Confederacy.
What about the daughters?
I thought the DAR were the worst.
Oh, maybe the DAR are not very... Maybe the Suns, it's different.
Maybe it's like Girl Scouts versus Boy Scouts, but in reverse.
Now it's just Scouts.
As far as I can tell, the only thing the Suns of the American Revolution do is that they have a dinner...
every month or so that you love to eat well but according to the emails uh that i get the guy that sends out the emails is like we need a head count because i need to tell the restaurant how many uh you know how many cutlets to have in the on the hot bar i'm like well this doesn't sound like like a great dinner oh
It sounds more like – I don't know.
I think Toastmasters is usually a breakfast thing.
They do a breakfast meeting.
That's nice.
That's inexpensive.
But I bet it's an early dinner also.
Let's be honest.
It's for sure an early dinner.
But the other thing that they appear to do, the Sons of the American Revolution, is hand out medals to each other.
Oh, man.
And it was partly my desire to have medals that –
That made me think, well, maybe if I join the sons of the American revolution, I can get a medal for something that my seventh great grandfather did.
Oh, wow.
Which was a fight in the American revolution.
You know, like I don't have to do anything, but I do get a medal for being around, you know, for, for having ancestors.
And that's a kind of metal, you know, like have an ancestor metal.
Ancestor metal.
But then it was like, I don't really want to go, I don't want to eat veal out of a hot bar.
Don't worry about that.
That's what we in elementary school used to call chicken fish.
This show's getting weirder and stupider all the time.