Ep. 470: "Too Clever by a Cat"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, hello, Merlin.
How's it going?
I mean... John, I'm angry.
I'm angry.
Oh, no.
No, I'm going to tell the world I've had it.
I've had it.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Today's the first... Are you fed up?
I've had it, John.
This needs to end.
Today's the first day of high school.
August 15th.
You're kidding.
High school's supposed to start on September 5th.
It should be after Jerry Lewis has gone back.
It should be October, I would allow.
I'm going to look past it because we've got stuff to do here.
August?
We're not even Catholic.
Whatever happened to summer?
Does anybody remember summer?
Am I right?
And you go there and you're not supposed to, you know, I'm not going to complain.
What are you not supposed to?
Well, apparently they've loosened up a little bit on the phone policy.
But in middle school, you know, you weren't supposed to take your phone out all day long, which is a lot to ask of a kid.
Well, sure, sure.
What are you supposed to do?
You put it in a Bastic when you walk in the front door and get it at the end?
I don't know if they can even afford a Bastic, but I'll tell you what you do.
You go into the unisex bathroom with your friend and you watch a squid game on the phone in privacy like a gentleman.
Like we used to do with cigarettes.
Like cigarettes, yes.
Phones are the new cigarettes.
People say that.
I've heard people say that.
It makes me want to smoke.
I don't know about you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I am.
Oh, are you okay, John?
I used to smoke.
Oh my goodness.
I sure did.
How many cigarettes do you have over door frames at your house right now?
Be honest.
Well, the thing is I moved into this house long after I last smoked cigarettes.
So there are no hidden cigarettes.
As far as I know, I haven't put any cigarettes.
There are no joints in the refrigerator because I haven't had any friends over.
Okay.
Huh.
You know, my old house was full of drugs because friends would, because I was, I lived close to the airport and traveling people.
would stop, uh, stop off.
They'd stay with me.
No, you're the best.
And then they, then, then they'd say, oh, I don't want to take these drugs on the plane.
And I'd go, you know, nobody cares anymore.
And they're like, still, because I'm a nerd, because I'm a nerd, I never did drugs until I was 34.
I don't know how to do drugs or take drugs.
Tell Brittany Griner that.
It's complicated stuff.
Because, you know, even you could say it's, you know, the thing that we track on the Dubai Friday program, we have a segment on there called Man of the Week.
Frequently, it's just somebody who was doing some kind of weird masturbation in public.
And I was wondering, well, I was wondering, is there something where you need, and what I proposed to Alexandra was, do we need to have something issued that's a cross between
like marijuana for your glaucoma combined with an open carry permit where there are certain men that just need to masturbate so much they get a note oh i don't i'm not saying that's right or wrong and as you know i'm not a lie i anal i'm not a lawyer right i'm just saying maybe it's time to update all of our thoughts about what goes in the plastic
I don't think so.
I think that the problem... I don't want to clean the plastic.
The problem is not that we're too restrictive on where and when you can masturbate.
I don't think that's the problem.
I know there are people out there that are like, society is too... Who do they think they are to tell us?
But I don't think that's true.
I think there should be laws.
Just so I'm clear, you're saying it's not an issue of... You know, like they say sometimes, hey, don't make new laws and force the laws we've got.
I'm trying to understand.
You're saying there's not that many places where it's legally a problem to masturbate until the police arrest you.
I just feel like this whole... The whole notion...
that maybe there are people who have a compulsion to publicly masturbate
and that we are too restrictive, and that is therefore a rights violation, I don't think so.
Interesting.
We could do an Oxford-style debate.
I would take the other side just for rhetorical reasons.
See, the thing is, and I'm not trying to be anti-woke.
I want you to understand that.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
But, like, for example, is there Loggins farting?
A lot of people would say, I fart a lot.
I eat a lot of processed meats, and I don't really move very much.
I have three BMs a month.
Each one costs several hundred dollars.
And now you're in no position to tell me to put my farts in a Bastic.
You're absolutely right.
I don't know.
I'm just asking the question, much like Joe Rogan would.
No, you're just asking the question.
I feel like what we're talking about now is norms.
Oh, we're talking about norms.
You're talking about the mores.
We're talking about a little bit of mores.
We used to confuse them with eels.
Eels are different on this program.
Although mores and eels.
Wait a minute.
Mores are thought eels.
Morays or thought eels?
Morays with an accent or something?
Accent ague?
Accent agrav?
Morays.
Moray eels.
Not moray eels, but morays or thought eels, right?
Morays or thought eels.
Their norms, they're not eels like a monthly payment.
They are eels like a monthly thought payment.
Is that hegemonic, John?
Because I studied that in my college years when I got my bachelor's degree in cultural studies, whatever the fuck that is.
I read Gramsci, you know, Frankfurt School and whatnot.
I was obsessed with the idea of hegemony.
And hegemony, in my understanding, which was certainly wrong because I went to school in Florida—
Well, and a long time ago, am I right?
It was a long time ago.
The 80s were a different time.
But my understanding was that hegemony is the, I mean, it's like culture.
It's air.
You can't touch it, but you know what it is.
And you don't need anybody to tell you because that's what hegemony does.
Hegemony is the bass stick telling you to put what stuff in.
And I don't know.
See, I don't... I'm going to speak... I think it's important sometimes to differentiate the difference of, like, I personally... Not only do I not want to masturbate publicly, but I really would just as soon not see a lot of guys masturbating on the reg.
You see ladies on public transit clipping their toenails, and I'm not loving that.
Oh.
Right.
Sure.
No, sure.
That's legal.
People go about clipping their toenails racistly.
And meanwhile, I'm not allowed to, in this most recent instance, be so high on meth that I've gone into a bar and it takes up to 15 police officers to get me to stop masturbating and get me out of the bathroom.
The problem with hegemony is that that when you hegemony, you hegg.
Of emo.
Of me and I, New York.
Of emo and me.
Oh.
Huh.
And that's, so.
Am I being ableist?
You have to think about it.
I might be being ableist.
What if you can't stop jerking your gherkin?
See, this is my argument.
What if it's important to you?
What if cranking your hog vis-a-vis public?
And what if you're nice about it?
What if you wear like a dinner jacket?
Mm-mm.
And maybe a bib?
I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm just asking the questions to you.
You're literally just asking the questions.
You and I are both just asking the questions.
We're just asking them questions.
We're asking the questions before it occurs to other people to ask them.
That's right.
I don't even know there's a question.
Let alone answer.
I don't think there are enough laws.
I think what we need to do is take what were prior norms, what were thought eels, and make them into laws.
You're saying supersize the eels.
There used to be a gentleman's agreement, what we used to call a gentleman's agreement, that the president would not use the office of the presidency to steal billions of dollars from America.
He didn't even know to make a lobby.
It wasn't a law because who would have thought?
He's the highest classification.
Did you know that?
Highest classification.
Well, I mean, like, well, supposedly, if you do it through the channels, you can declassify information.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Usually you have meetings of people in various bureaus to go, no, that's totally going to out, you know, uh, uh, uh,
Bobby.
Bobby.
As it means and motive.
What's it called?
No, it's opportunities.
What's it called?
It's called, oh, methods and means.
Opportunity stakes.
Opportunity stakes.
Hey, that's not going to work at all.
It's a foodie break.
No, but you, for example, you say something like, hey, look, just like when the previous fellow puts a photo on his Twitter account, and they're going to say, hey, to you, that's just a photo of a thing.
But the thing is, people on the other side are going to know the only way that we could have gotten that shot is through Bobby.
Oh, right.
Although I'm going to argue, I'm not even arguing, I'm just asking the question.
You're not even arguing the question.
Is that other sidesism?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
There's a lot to think about here.
There's a lot of laws to pass.
This is going to be one of those things.
This is going to be one of those things.
I'm going to run between the raindrops of ideology here.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
And say there are things now that a lot of folks think that we didn't think 5, 10, 15, 100 years ago.
And let's just set all that aside for a minute.
But we can still be, as you like to say, forward-looking.
We can be forward-looking and say, what are the kinds of things now?
Animal rights.
That's one that's a little bit still on the bubble.
You know, like in Berkeley, I think they want to let them be like, you know, hold office and stuff.
And maybe the people are the ones that have a pet.
You know what I'm saying?
Not a pet, a companion.
Yeah.
The mayor of Tolkien, Alaska is a cat.
And I think they're running that city as well as they've ever done.
Didn't that cat die?
Well, that cat did die.
Yeah.
But I think they've got now.
Term limits.
Yeah.
What they did was they made an AI of the cat and now the AI is running the town.
And so the thought is that then there's other stuff, right?
And again, I'm running between the raindrops, so don't make it weird.
What I am going to say, like, for example, in the future, like, think about personally when I use a voice assistant almost every time, but definitely every time it occurs to me, I always say thank you, even though I don't need to say thank you.
But, yeah, honestly, 5% of that pie graph is I don't want the robots turning against me.
But I also just think it's a thing.
I say thank you for me, not for you.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you say sir and ma'am.
What about robot rights?
Even if you're talking to a microwave, you say thank you, ma'am.
It says enjoy your meal.
And I say die in a fire.
Don't, I don't like being, I don't like automated, uh, etiquette.
Okay.
So, but then there's another one.
There's another one.
Okay.
So I'm eventually going to get to Jack and your mean bone at the TGI Fridays.
Is there a gradation to that?
We're just asking the question.
It's just in the meantime, do we need to be thinking about more things we should be worried about?
Like a masturbating man.
Are there more things like that as we run between the raindrops?
You know, I don't need to say what I'm talking about here.
But like there was a time when it was okay, for example, to own people here.
We do less of that now.
What, in San Francisco?
Yes.
Oh, well.
It's called being a daddy.
That's right.
You get a little, you get a pop.
BBSNM community.
Well.
But you can opt in.
That's the thing about that.
A couple nights ago, we were watching a Lord of the Rings movie.
My kid and I came up with something that- Us too.
Really?
We were watching the last one, which is the only one I like.
And we started talking about- Last night we were watching.
Okay.
So you saw the cool tree.
I love that tree.
Well, yeah, the tree.
I was wondering, I said to my kid who knows more about everything, especially, you know, communities than I do.
I said, do you think there's such a thing as being a lifestyle hobbit?
Sort of like you would be a bear.
Yeah.
Well, or a furry, yeah.
Or a furry, but like, are there lifestyle hobbits?
And like, could we turn that into like an HGTV show where you and you finally, you think, boy, you know, the first time you ask, for example, you ask your friend to like wear the Batgirl outfit and she goes, actually, I'm super into the Batgirl outfit.
And you know, you've found your mate.
In this case, you meet somebody who's really into fantasy literature, for example.
Okay.
I haven't met them.
Well, but some of them are listening to the program.
Yeah.
But you meet, you meet somebody who you think is compatible and you go like, okay, question one, will you marry me?
And the other person says, yes, I'll marry you.
And then you say, number two, there's some stuff I need to lay out for you.
Can we have a Hobbit themed wedding?
I am a lifestyle Hobbit.
And I wonder how you would feel about also being a lifestyle Hobbit and living in the side of a fucking hill where we raise our child.
And they say, yes.
I would ask, but it's a question, are you LARPing Hobbit or are you living Hobbit?
This gets into what you've called intersectionality, which is, hey, I'm a six foot tall man who does IT support.
Right.
Right.
For a mid-sized company.
It just so happens that I'm over six feet tall, but that does not make me any less of a hobbit.
Well, but with VR headset, you can be however height you want.
So you just make her wear that all the time.
Well, you both wear it all the time.
Encourage her.
And you can live in a normal house in a normal neighborhood.
And it seems like... That's what Peter Jackson showed us.
If you do force perspective correctly, you don't have to fake anything.
That's right.
That's right.
You can continue to live in an apartment in downtown Seattle.
It just seems like it's Hobbiton.
You buy everything a little small.
It's not doll size.
It's not ridiculous.
But you get the right size stuff, but then do you have to get extra tall friends?
Well, no, I don't think so.
I think what it just does is it just, it will make, so what you do is instead of getting a quart of milk, you get a gallon of milk, but the VR headset makes it look like a quart of milk.
So when you grab it, it feels really big.
In your tiny little IT hands.
In your little tiny hands, right?
And it looks like, oh my God, I'm so small.
Isn't there one Hobbit movie where it's just dwarves wrecking Dildo's place for like 45 minutes?
Isn't that one of the Hobbit movies?
I don't know.
I didn't see those Hobbit movies.
It's definitely the Hobbit.
There's like six of them.
The Hobbit book is all about dwarves wrecking your house.
Yeah, that's my kid's favorite of the books.
There's a new TV show coming out where we just watched the whatever it is.
The trailer?
Thank you, the trailer.
Is this the Amazon Prime one about Lord of the Rings?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It seems like some Ted Leo porn where it's all about the Cimmerillion movies.
Except, and I'm not saying Ted Leo's jacking it anywhere about the Simmerillion getting made into a thing.
Those are form-fitting pants.
Well, you can jack it in form-fitting pants.
All you have to do is just gyrate.
The pants do the work.
They do the jacking.
Yes.
I guess there should be laws.
I think litigiousness, you know, it can be a whole thing.
Litigiousness can be a thing.
The first Dubai Friday Man of the week was a fellow on a plane.
I'll find the article for you because I know you'll want to read it.
It was a guy on a plane who gets on the plane.
And I know how you feel.
Think about this, John.
Think about your feelings about you take off your shoes and your socks and put your feet on the bulkhead.
Think how you feel about that.
I don't feel very good about it.
Well, this fellow sits down next to the person in the next seat who he was not acquainted with at the time.
And he literally took out his penis and started masturbating.
Oh.
And it just kept going on.
And it sounded like the fellow was having some trouble achieving escape velocity, let's say.
Okay.
And he really, he just like.
He was digging in.
Yeah.
But like on three separate occasions during the flight, he'd done this.
Well, you know, Dan Savage says that if you grab it too hard, then it's, you're going to lose sensitivity and then you're going to need to grab it that hard.
Just that one day or over time.
Over time, over time.
Oh shit, really?
You lose the ability to just actually have normal intercourse.
Oh, with all due respect to Dan Savage, that's extremely normative.
Well, this is all Dan, when I referenced Dan Savage, it's all Dan Savage in 1996 because that's when you knew him.
He really made the impact on me then.
Ever since then, it's just, you know, same story over and over.
Yeah, blah, blah, blah.
Somebody with Mean Bones.
I want to point out that the former mayor of Talkeetna, Mayor Stubbs, did die in 2017.
And he's been succeeded by a new mayor.
also a cat the new the new mayor's name is denali like the uh the new the new name for the mountain well yeah what's the old name mckinley mckinley yeah oh yeah that guy's dead actually denali is the old old name that's like it's the new new deli deli not the new new oh like ayataroa uh new zealand kind of thing but the thing is this is my suspicion if the cat so denali is a big mountain and it's right there by tokina tokina is the town that you go to
when somebody's going to fly you.
Oh, that's like where you buy your ice picks and stuff.
That's right.
There it is.
It's just as big as the world.
If you're naming the cat after the mountain, it feels a little bit like putting a hat on a cat.
Oh, I see absolutely what you're saying.
That's too clever by a cat.
Yeah, exactly.
Mayor Stubbs wasn't named something like Mayor Alaska Flower.
It had a name.
Stubbs.
Probably in reference to a stubby tail.
I used to name my D&D characters like that.
I gave them really lame on the nose names and I regret it.
Like what?
Like Leaf Cutter?
Well, because I was really...
Well, or, you know, Bard McThief or something.
Oh, Bard McThief.
No, no, no.
No, because I was into Excalibur at the time, which seemed very adjacent to D&D.
My Excalibur period and my D&D period kind of overlapped a little bit, and I think I had a character named, like, Pendragon or something.
Mm-hmm.
Pendragon.
That's a terrible name.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think my D&D characters' names were always like Stubbs.
Stubbs or Denali.
Yeah, Stubbs or Denali.
Do they ever run, if you know, and if you can say, I know you have an interest in public service, is there ever a time where having a cat as a mayor, it's fun for a while, but then you accidentally fuck up and you realize that you can't turn the electricity back on because there's no way for the cat to sign something?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, do you like, is it really, is there, I guess put another way, is there somebody who actually is like the city manager who's not a cat?
Yeah.
I mean, Tolkiena never needed much management because it just isn't that big.
But I do think that what they're saying up there is that, yeah, the bureaucracy is just people getting paid to do their job and let them just do that.
You know, like if the sewer pipe breaks, there's somebody whose job it is.
But we don't need some highfalutin mayor.
Except that's exactly what you need in Alaska.
Every Alaska town gets some highfalutin mayor.
If you want to commit to the bit, and this is humor, but instead of civil servants, you can have serval servants.
You can actually get literal cats.
That's a great idea.
that's not funny what is this fucking Zootopia I got a lot of problems don't get me started on Zootopia I got a lot of fucking problems with Zootopia I will not get this is one thing this is my pledge to you okay I will not get you started on Zootopia I appreciate that it's just there's a lot about it where like it's obviously a human centric world and then they jam all these goddamn animals into it like yeah
Did I get you started on this?
I'm sorry.
I'm passing it.
I'm achieving escape velocity.
And it's a lot of stuff like, oh, yeah, we pass it off with this one school play where we explain how the predators and the prey get along now.
Well, you know, there's that wonderful book.
Well, no, I'm not going to give.
Now I've given away the ending, so I'm not going to tell you the name of the book.
Is it Animal Farm?
No, no, no.
I'm going to leave it alone, and then six episodes from now, I'm going to mention the book, and nobody will know what I'm talking about.
Okay, cool.
I think, you know, when I was running for city council, I proposed at one meeting that I felt like the problem with the militarization of the police was that we, the first thing we did that was wrong was that we let them wear black uniforms.
We never should have let the police choose their own uniforms.
Oh, and it's just escalated and escalated.
Yeah, because they said they were like, oh, we have to wear all black because that's cool.
And it's like, no, wrong.
Until they're indistinguishable from special forces, but fat.
Any movie that you see where the police are wearing all black, you know they're bad.
Why would we have ever acquiesced to that?
And so I said, the way the police should dress should be determined by the civilian authorities, in this case, the Seattle City Council, which I aspire to be a member of.
And I think the police should wear uniforms that are pink and yellow.
I think they should be pink outfits and they should have yellow accents, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
And maybe a hat with a feather in it.
And that way anybody that's visiting- And the higher up in rank you go, the more you look like somebody you say aunt.
Yeah, exactly.
Like you're wearing a muumuu, a house dress.
Well, or big, big, big, big epaulets and lots of sashes and scarves.
And what that does is, first of all, tourists are never going to have a hard time finding a police officer.
You think the Buckingham Palace guys get photos taken?
No.
Imagine when you run into a local, I'll call him, not a Bobby, but a Bobby with an I. Bobby with an I. Bobby, you run into a local Roberta, and you want to get your, you're like, I think I got those same scuffs from my grandma in 1978, officer.
Yeah, can I get a photo?
But also...
that it would inhibit i think the the police i mean they're still gonna police are still gonna police but they're not gonna be like a big fat no offense i'm sorry that is ableist in me but they are fat guys fat guys with with uh reflective sunglasses like they're in fucking cool hand luke you can't do that if you're dressed like my grandmother if you wear if you wear reflective sunglasses you're you're gonna look amazing in these outfits
Well, if you do, they're going to have to be cat eyeglasses like my grandmother wore.
But you're not going to feel like you are some kind of badass.
No, no, no.
You're going to feel like you're some kind of fancy ass.
Well, and you're not going to have, I mean, not to make it real, but the thing we all learned in the last couple of years also, all these guys show up, they cover their badges, they're wearing some kind of face thing, and they all look like fucking Judge Dredd.
Yeah, that's not what you want.
You want them to feel proud of themselves, you want them to be out and proud, and you want them to be...
Fancy and fun.
You know, that's what the police, they're protecting us.
So highlight the public service component of this.
Right, right, right.
And less of the whole, like, I'm dressed like, you know, some Rob Liefeld character.
Like, I don't have pouches and guns like fucking Deadpool, right?
So as a corollary to this, I think that every mayor of an Alaskan town should wear a top hat like Robin Goldwasser's father in Deadwood.
Right.
I think they should all have an old West-y country kind of top hat.
Wait, is he the guy at the other bar?
Yeah.
With the mustache?
Yeah.
Wait, he runs not the gem, but the one that Buffalo or Wild Bill goes to?
No, what's his name?
You know what I mean.
The one that Keith Carradine goes to.
Well, I don't remember.
It's been a long time since I saw that show.
Oh, shit, dog.
I'm going to be looking that.
Okay, sorry.
Please continue.
Okay.
No, no, no.
He is the guy.
The guy that was in... The guy who says in Charlie Utter... Charlie Utter.
Charlie Utter goes and talks to him and says, hey, you know, Bill could come and gamble here.
You give him a break.
You give me some of that money to put into savings, right?
Well, like I say, I don't remember the show.
I'll find out.
But he was... Robin Goldwasser's dad was also in They Live.
He's the one that... He was in They Live and he's also in Deadwood.
He had a mustache and a top hat.
He's been in a movie with Keith David.
Holy shit.
And that top hat should be the official uniform of all small town mayors in America, but especially in Alaska.
Brian Doyle Murray in Groundhog Day.
There it is.
Well, yes, but it's got to be a little bit more of a curly top hat.
A little bit more like the guy from the imagination ride at Disney World.
Yeah, you don't want it to look like Mr. Millionaire from Monopoly.
Don't you?
No, I don't think so.
He's chairman of the Exchequer.
Yeah.
Sean Nelson briefly wore, if you recall, a top hat during the long winters mid period.
Did he get it from that photo shoot and just kept it?
No, it was.
I don't remember where he got it.
Some kind of he was like, I'm going to start.
You know, I'm a big guy with a huge head of hair.
I'm going to start wearing a top hat.
And I said, two thumbs up.
Most of the time when people in the long winters make sartorial decisions, I roll my eyes.
In this case, I give you my heartiest endorsement.
Wear that top hat.
And he did.
He did.
And it looked great.
It was amazing.
He's got a huge head.
And what do we know about huge heads?
First of all, you look great on TV.
If you don't have a huge head on TV, if you see anybody you ever see on TV, see them in real life, you're like, Jesus Christ, they are really short with a huge head.
But also, a huge head good for hats, if you can find an accommodating hat.
It has to be a big hat.
I wear a big hat, but sometimes I get a hat and it's too big.
And it's like, well, I thought I had the largest size, but apparently I don't.
Now this baseball hat is over my ears.
You know what I'm saying?
My grandparents, I was so envious.
My grandparents...
who lived in Clearwater, Florida, went to Disney World.
And they went to Disney World in Orlando when it very first opened.
I was so envious.
Do you remember those little things where you could have a little, like, Lucite block with six photos in it?
Yeah.
And you could put it on your table.
I have one.
I have one right here.
No kidding.
I have one, and it's got a picture of Babe the Blue Ox from that place, that roadside place in Oregon where Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox is.
And it's got some pictures of me in the seventies.
It's I'll send you a picture of it.
Oh my God, Merlin.
It's right.
It's on the shelf right next to the picture of you.
That's in the Lucite.
Yeah.
The Lucite frame.
It's the, it's, I've got a picture here on the shelf of you standing on a chair in the middle of a field of Ivy wearing a sweater and gesturing out into nowhere, uh, saying angrily that it's time for web 2.0 or whatever.
It's time for computers.
Everybody out of my park.
Yeah, you're like, computers!
And so I love that, and I put it on the wall here.
The photo cube loomed large in my youth, and just real quick, and so they had one on their table, and it was six photographs that were taken when they went to Disney World in 19, whatever that was, 70, probably?
72, whatever it was.
Whenever it first opened.
Now, my grandparents were old people, and they went on a tour.
I'm sending you some photos right now.
I developed a huge crush.
on one of the women in the photo, which is a Disney World official tour guide.
If you would go in the early 70s, you go on official, which a lot of people did because it was brand new.
It's big.
They would go on an official tour with tour guides.
John, did you receive the photos of Disney World tour guides that I just sent you?
Yeah, let me check here.
I was just taking a picture of you standing next to Babe the Blue Ox.
I love that.
I love that.
I'm going to send that to you right now.
Let me look at your photos that have just come into my computer.
Very recognizable uniform.
Oh, it's an equestrian, but also like Highland Scottish.
Let's just say, I'll probably put this in nuts.
Oh, I know which one you had a crush on.
Well, these are just off the internet.
The one I had, she had like a little riding crop.
It was really, it was quite tantalizing.
But I'm just saying, John, let's say something happens, somebody stole your purse, and you go and you call a Bobby, and one of these ladies shows up.
Except it's not a lady.
It's just, it's a veteran of the local police who happens, this is the outfit.
This is the street cop outfit.
You wear not a tartan skirt.
It's not exactly... You wear a waistcoat, like a velvet waistcoat.
Yeah.
And you wear a hat like that.
Now, would that help with your outreach program through the police?
Well, the problem is that I'm afraid that this is... Because this sort of has a Highland Scottish look, unless you are Idi Amin...
Otherwise, this is going to convey Eurocentrism.
Oh, that's insensitive of me.
You're right.
So you need to find something that's a little more bespoke, a little more custom made for our modern times that incorporates aspects of like the police and military cultures of all nations of the world.
But they should be dressed, if we were going to bring this back to D&D, cops should look like NPCs, not the regular playing characters.
Maybe you could look like a coppersmith or something.
Maybe it's more like my friend Dennis.
He used to work at Colonial Williamsburg.
And he'd have to field questions as though he were from the 1700s, which Dennis was great at.
Could it be a similar thing here?
Could you, maybe you come in, maybe like a character class in D&D, you say, you know, I don't know why I keep thinking of Smiths.
I'm a Cooper.
I'm a Smith.
I'm one of the other ones.
You know what I'm saying?
I don't know.
I just, I would like to take some of the wind out of their sails, if I'm being honest.
Yeah, but I also feel like they are, you know, they are police, and police naturally want to be fancy.
I really do think that.
If you look at, the thing is, they're wearing all these, I was about to say swastikas, they're not typically, or at least you can't see them, but they're wearing all these swaths, and if you look back just 100 years,
The police, if you look at their uniforms, they had sometimes 150 to 500 brass buttons on their jackets.
They had very tall hats.
It's like quadruple-breasted.
Yeah, they had so many epaulets and so much gold braid, and they were so fancy, and it made them feel very proud, I think.
And it set them apart.
And I think that's what the police want.
That's why.
But now they have all these flashlights and tear gas canisters and all these utility belts and fanny packs.
Yes, yes.
They've got all the Batman stuff.
And like, you know, maybe if instead we said like, you know, you look like you're in like a local production of Pippin or something.
Something that just, like, you can have, or I don't know if you saw the wonderful movie Jojo Rabbit, but Sam Rockwell is not seeing that, and he's designed his own uniform, and it's fabulous.
He's designed a fabulous uniform.
Maybe you could design your own within parameters.
I came up with this when I was, this idea really evolved when I was King Neptune, and I was set about to make my own fancy outfit that was both fancy and
conveyed that I was the king, but wouldn't offend anybody who was actually, um, or wearing a uniform.
Like I, I like talking to the Naval officers where I was like, yeah, well, I was working on my King Neptune outfit and I was going to wear, you know, I, I was going to take a Naval officer's uniform and dress it up with a, and they were all like, what?
No, you can't.
Why would you mess around with?
And they were offended that I was going to take the basic
core element of what they considered to be kind of their sacred uniform.
And then, you know, that's off limits.
Yeah.
And so, so what I, what I, and the thing is if I used like army dress pants and a Marine Corps, they would still recognize it.
Right.
I get it.
So, so I was like, well, what if I wore a uniform from the Canadian Mounties?
And they were like, well, there are none of those around here.
And so it doesn't matter to us.
But maybe like Adamant, you could dress like a highwayman with one of those cool Les Mis jackets.
That's it, that's it, a highwayman.
I forget what that's called, but I would love, like Bob Pollard wears one of those sometimes.
But you know, talking about the Les Mis jacket that Adamant wears, I'll find out what it's called.
Do you know what it's called?
Yeah.
It's a fancy, it's a fancy jacket.
Yeah, it's called the Cat O' Nine Tails.
It's called the flipping on the Jim Jam, flipping on the frats.
But that, you could look, I mean, I guess that would be the dress uniform.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a high-waisted, it leaves room for your cummerbund.
There's a name for it.
What's the one, you remember the guy in One Day More, the guy who's, you know, he's got one of those.
Angel Ross.
Oh, Angel Ross.
I think that's his name.
Angel Ross.
I don't know, man.
I just feel like what we should do is we should say every piece of combat equipment that you turn in, it's like a gun exchange, right?
Where every once in a while, Seattle used to do this, where they would say,
Total amnesty, you know, no questions asked.
You come give us a gun, find a gun, any gun, bring us the gun, and we'll give you a $50 gift certificate at Lowe's or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This was big.
I feel like this got big in the 90s because on the face of it, you go, hmm, that seems like a good way.
And then, you know, we'll beat your revolver into plowshares.
Yeah, and I talked to some police about it.
And they were like, yeah, it was really great.
Basically, bring us all your broken guns.
Yeah, we got a bunch of broken guns.
But the problem for them, and this is a revelation to me, the problem was that every once in a while, somebody showed up with a beautiful, like a Beretta or some incredible Italian shotgun that was worth $30,000.
Oh, wow.
And the rules were, yeah, well, you can't take the good guns out.
You have to throw them all into the crusher.
There's no, this isn't like some gun collection thing where it's like, bring us your cool guns and we're going to take your cool guns and use them ourselves.
Right.
And so these cops were like, it broke our hearts.
Like every 50th gun was some gun that belonged in a museum.
And we just had to stand there and watch them kill these incredible guns.
And I was like, wow, I'm feeling your pain.
If it wasn't the sort of, say, like a pistol that you would use on the streets.
So maybe you bring in, well, God forbid, I don't even want to say this, John.
But imagine somebody, let's say somebody, for example, had a much, much older than you'd think they should be father, who had been in World War II, who had served, as we say.
And who, for example, shot a Japanese Zero out of the sky from his own plane with a... Was it a .45 service revolver?
Like, if you had that gun, you wouldn't want to melt that down.
No.
No, you wouldn't.
But if somebody broke... If some teenager...
broke into your house and found that gun above the refrigerator, that teenager might take the gun and then use it in the commission of a crime.
Oh, you're not accounting for provenance.
And it's very unusual for someone to rob a convenience store with a $20,000 Italian bird hunting shotgun.
But it's not, it's not impossible.
It's not impossible.
Anyway.
So, but the problem was, I think what really happened was the city ran out of $50 gift certificates at Lowe's and then they couldn't get, they couldn't re up the program.
Something, something, blah, blah, blah, something, something.
But what we should do is have a program like that, but for the cops and say every piece of gear that you got, that we gave you already surplus,
From the US special forces that we got because we were getting out of Iraq and they had all this stuff on pallets.
You give it back and we'll give you an extra button on your tunic, an extra piece of flair.
You know, just in general, I'm loving what you're saying, but I'm also just loving the idea in general of like, you know, you turn in your old one to get a new one.
Except the new one doesn't explode.
Okay.
They're not going to be fooled.
H-U-S-S-A-R, is that a word?
Hussar jacket?
Yeah, the Hussar, yeah.
Okay, so that's what I'm talking about.
An Angel Ras or an Adamant jacket.
Like a stand and deliver video.
And that's what I'm saying.
I think that would communicate to people that had a police sensibility.
It would communicate a certain kind of policeness.
that they would be totally into.
You just have to get them more into the fashion of it and less into the tear gassiness of it.
That might in the long run attract a different sort of person also.
You're going into this not because you have some kind of, I don't know, arbitrarily say some kind of Napoleon syndrome and a chip on your shoulder your whole life.
In this, it's guys who want to look fabulous and answer questions on the street.
I think the Venn diagram of people that really want to do a good job of policing
And who want to look fancy is, I think they overlap each other pretty good.
And what you're going to eliminate is that small sliver of people who are really into policing, but don't want to look fancy who are, who are bad, who are bad at policing.
Now, of course, there's the other sliver on the other side of people that really want to look fancy and are into policing who are serial killers.
I mean, it's obviously a little extreme, but I get the feeling Mussolini, for example, he liked a fancy outfit.
Mm-hmm.
He did.
And it's a problem because fanciness and fascism are not mutually exclusive.
Hell no.
There's a whole book about it.
There's a whole book about it.
that my girlfriend in college read for one of her gender classes.
It was basically about the history of fashion in Nazis and how the deliberate introduction of some, like, let's just say some slightly edgy Weimar culture into some of those outfits.
But that's why you have to have civilian oversight.
And I think that everybody on the fashion board for the police, the people that want to be there,
are people you can trust right they're going to be middle-aged gay men for the most part and they're going to be super into this and they're all you have to do is replace all the skull iconography with more feathers colored feathers let's let's go more feather and it could feel a little bit like i'm having a big fossey stage right now obviously pow pow pow right right but you think about the beginning of all that jazz but a bump bump
But where he's looking at all the dancers, you think about the beginning of a chorus line, where if memory serves as Michael Douglas out in the audience, or you think about flash dance, where the woman who's pretending to be Jennifer Beal comes in and dances in front of those three people, and she blows things open.
They've never seen anybody try to get in school with dancing like this.
What those are doing with dancing, I want to do with policing.
yeah yeah well and i wanted you know actually i want to do it with dancing too tell me more about that well there was a time there in the 90s when dancing got all self-serious and i guess it happened before the 90s but then it was really self-serious and now dancing like most of the arts i just don't know if it knows where it is i don't know if the arts know who they are now i understand the arts you know what are the what even are the arts everybody's an artist now so you so so nobody's like oh no but i'm a fancy artist or
if they are you're just like yeah okay you're a fancy artist but what's the difference everybody's fancy everybody's not fancy there's no you know there's no like uh there's no oompa there's no there's no jazz hands anymore would it help if the in your in your various recruiting efforts that you're formulating do you think it would be helpful to say
For example, you think about the real hoofers back in the day, in the Fosse days, you got somebody who's, they can dance and they can sing and they can act and they can, think about Eliza.
Not everybody's Eliza.
So forget about that.
You're no Eliza.
But like, maybe you bring in people and part of it is maybe it's marksmanship or maybe it's, you know, memorizing a lot about, you know, jaywalking, but also maybe, maybe there's a little bit where we learn a little bit about your movement.
Yeah.
Well, what kind of dancing do you do?
It could be tap.
It could be ballet.
It could be jazz.
Yeah.
But you have to do it.
It has to be appropriate, right?
And you have to not feel weird about it.
We have to put you at the top of one of those.
Every town in America, and I think every town in the world now,
has at some point in some part of the city decided that they were going to build a grand staircase.
Does San Francisco have one of these?
Grand staircase?
Well, we have some.
There's one near my house, actually.
I want to say maybe it's 16th Ave.
There's some famous, mainly famous now for car break-ins.
But there'll be these fancy steps where they did like...
what's the word i'm looking for like a mosaic where they've they're like very beautiful um i mean it was it isn't like a like a donald trump escalator or anything it's more like if you want to get to these houses you go up these steps and that's a tourist attraction i think that attracts people yeah i think it does too you got the spanish steps there in rome we've got them here in seattle we built them as part of some crappy housing development you know not not low-income housing but crappy like rich people housing development
Anyway, I think you should take police recruits.
You should put them at the top of that stair.
You should put them in a tuxedo and say, can you tap dance all the way down this set of this grand staircase and never look like you're like like a Bilbo Jangles Robinson or a Nicholas Brothers like a Nicholas Brothers.
Exactly.
And those guys can throw.
You have as long as you need to study, right?
But you have to be able to do this.
You don't have to do all the steps, but you can't just like Bill Bojangles Robinson.
I hope I'm saying that right.
Like he's working.
He's, you know, you know, some people eat every part of the Buffalo.
I feel like he dances every part of the stair.
We're not looking for you to be Bojangles.
That's going to be your boss.
But you need to be able to show me that you can handle a three-step shuffle stuff.
And if you can, on the way down, jump up on top of the piano and dance and then jump back to the stair, you're automatically a sergeant.
Or do a DLR where you, like, kick your hands or something?
I think that's a Nicholas Brothers movie.
I was explaining Randy Rhoads to my daughter the other day.
And I was like, here's the thing about Randy Rhoads.
And she, bless her heart, feigned interest.
In Randy Rhoads, enough for me to, in the middle of explaining Randy Rhoads, get a little sentimental about a time when- So sad.
He was so humble.
He would get lessons every town he went to.
Oh, he was a sweet man, really.
He did so much.
He did so much.
I was at the architectural salvage yard the other day.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, the architectural salvage yard, it's got a lot of architectural salvage, but the ones here in Seattle, they also all have like a little fancy corner, kind of like the Goodwills used to have or the Salvation Armies where it was like- Oh, before they were all upscale, there would be the nicer products.
Yeah, somebody that was working there would always be like, actually, this is a nice handbag.
And they would put them over to the side and then they'd have a little sign that said like, grandma's attic.
And they'd be old typewriters or whatever, but then a couple of nice things.
So all the junkyards have these things now.
And most of the time it's nothing.
Most of the time they're like, it's a Nagel print.
It's like, yeah, there were 70 million of those made.
That's not a thing.
But there was a little section of framed artwork that
And I was like, okay, I'll look, I'll see what's here.
You know, every once in a while you read an article about, oh, somebody found a Van Gogh in a, in a dumpster.
And now it's, you know, we're $70 million.
So I always go through those things.
And I find, you remember those foam core board things?
sort of paintings, illustrations.
Yeah, of course you remember.
It's not framed, but it's not paper.
You mean like when you could mount your own stuff on Film Corps?
Yeah.
I used to do that with art posters.
Like when my girlfriend and I did our big museum tour of New York,
I had a Demoiselles of Avignon.
And I did not do an Impressionist.
I'm not that guy.
But I did have, I think I did, not a Decirico, but a George Tooker.
Yeah, I put those on Film Corps professionally.
See?
That was a thing.
Yeah.
It's not the best for longevity because they do get warped and stuff.
But that was totally a thing.
I did that.
So I see this thing.
And it's an architectural drawing.
It's a, not a, not a drawing, an illustration.
It's a CAD illustration, very nineties looking, but it's an illustration of a cityscape, a whole cityscape.
And I look at it briefly and I go, Oh, that's Seattle.
But wait, it's wrong.
Like it's not, it's Seattle, but it's not Seattle.
And so I pull it out and I look at it and I realized that this was an artist's rendering of
That at some point in some big presentation in front of a room full of people, someone was giving a talk pre PowerPoint, probably.
And somebody behind them was putting these things on a giant easel one at a time.
Oh, absolutely.
I totally, I totally like in a big, yes, a big presentation.
Yes, yes, yes.
And they're separate.
And then there's somebody's job to like, to like flip them, like almost like slides.
I get it.
Yes.
Either that or, or it was a thing where there was a cocktail party in a room in a, in a high rise where all the, all the decision makers were.
Oh, like they're announcing the kickoff of something.
A kickoff of something.
And there were five or six of these on big easels and you could walk from one to the next and see the artists renderings of the big plan.
And this is the kind of stuff that I really like the big plan.
And this was the kickoff to the big plan.
And I don't remember what the big plan was called.
I was here for this.
I was here in Seattle at the time, but the big plan was,
And I immediately bought, I grabbed it the way you do when you see a Van Gogh at a thrift store and you're like, mine.
And if anybody comes and says, what's that?
You go, get away.
I grabbed this.
Although it was a thing that nobody else wanted.
There's three people in the city that wanted this.
Better safe than sorry, I say.
That's right.
And it was like $4, you know, it was like, oh, this is in the fancy area, but it's $4.
And it's big.
It's like two feet tall by four feet wide or something, three feet wide.
And it's a rendering of the downtown waterfront.
in someone's total act of public masturbation.
Like an after photo, basically.
Here's what's going to be on the Seattle waterfront.
There are going to be... So is a pitch.
Somebody's making a pitch.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to take all of the container shipping port area and we're going to move that somewhere else where we can't see it.
We're going to put all that working waterfront stuff over here.
Down the way, and you can have all your cranes and containers down there, but this area right here, we're going to turn into an urban oasis full of lakes and canals and buildings and a ferry terminal and a high, you know, like a monorail going through the whole thing.
And it's all going to be landscaped.
And there's a little, you know, a small boat harbor and a venue that looks like the Sydney Opera House.
Pretty different than what's there now.
Kind of visionary sort of idea.
Super visionary.
Super 90s vision of the future.
Jeez.
And I looked at it and I was like, you know, you can see all the ways in which, well, that wouldn't have worked.
But there are also things where you're like, oh, man, that would have been...
Cool.
And the more you study it, it's kind of like,
wow, this was still a time when, I mean, there's no, presumably when they pitched this, there was somebody over on the side that was like, and there will be some affordable housing, if you know what I mean.
There's going to be like 10% affordability housing, you know, just to check the box.
But the element, you know, looking at it, it's like, there's nothing, this isn't meant to be affordable housing.
This is, you know, we're going to put, we're going to turn this town into Venice 2.0.
And
And it's got a monorail and it's got, you know, but the thing is that there are elements of it that actually did get built.
They built a tunnel under the city that originally was part of this plan.
Because they were going to build a tunnel under the city, take away the Embarcadero freeway.
Yep.
And put a tunnel under there.
And then there was going to be a broad boulevard with plantings.
It was going to be beautiful.
There were going to be two, not one, but two sports stadiums.
And they did end up doing.
So on this one, the second sports stadium is still just a dream.
It's still Paul Allen's dream.
Huh.
And.
So I bought this thing and I brought it home.
And Merlin, I cannot tell you how much time I spend studying this thing.
I don't blame you.
Dreaming of the future that never was.
I loved any kind of speculative future stuff.
I mean, even the corniest, you can still, I mean, I've made my kid watch some of these vintage educational films or things, you know, you can see on YouTube, but like anything in the kitchen of the future, any of that stuff.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is if they had built this, it would be there now.
Like the target date that seemed so crazy in 1997.
Like this whole project will be done by 2000.
Everything after 2000s, you might've well said the year 35 million.
Remember?
Yeah, right.
And we were like, I'll be 54.
Like, might as well be dead.
And now I look at it and I'm like, well, this would all be here.
We would be riding monorails through the lake, the new lake district that they built with the gondolas and those high rise.
And, you know, maybe if they'd built that, then they wouldn't have torn down all the affordable housing in the other part of town.
Is it wistful, John?
Do you feel wistful?
Seeing what could have been?
There are so many Seattle's that could have been, it's almost a wistfulness for a time when this is what, this is what, uh, constituted like, uh, urban kind of almost a progressive fantasy.
Yeah.
Like this is what cities should be and cities shouldn't be, uh,
like small dumpy ports, they should be like, like, like gems of the Pacific rim.
And I think what defeated that, this project was that the ports.
Now I'm not this, this, listen, I'm just saying this speculation.
I'm, you know what?
I'm just asking the question, but my sense is that the port itself and the, and the longshoremen and the working waterfront coalition, which weirdly put,
was a situation where the unions and the, and the, the bosses joined together and said, Seattle's a working town and you're going to, you're going to displace the workers and you're going to make it into some kind of rich people place.
Interesting.
And in the 90s, we saw this a lot where the early billionaires were like, we're going to terraform Seattle.
We're going to drop a Gaia bomb and we're going to turn it into a park.
And there are going to be all these gleaming sky rises.
And the people of the city at the time were like, no, Seattle's a working class town.
You can't do that to us.
We're going to keep it this.
So sort of the opposite of what you would expect today.
Where today, yeah, it would be the NIMBY sort of feeling or the like, you know, you can't, you can't, we've already got our beautiful staircase here.
We don't need you people coming in and gumming it up with poor people's stuff.
And what we realized in the aftermath was that the rich guys bought all the property anyway.
And so the idea that you can just stand, you can just stand your ground and say like, no, we're going to keep this place gritty and blue collar.
What they did was they bought all the property anyway, and then they didn't build a big vision.
They didn't build a big park.
They just built crappy office towers.
And they were like, well, we own it, so we're just going to build an Amazon campus in the middle of town instead of building a big park.
So the gritty blue-collar stuff is gone anyway.
It's just, it got replaced with something that was really, like, had no vision.
No vision.
And so you're sitting there puffing on your pipe in your repose and looking at this.
And give me some of the thoughts that go through your mind.
I mean, is it time to bring back the foam core notions of the future?
Do you find yourself stimulated into thinking, you know, dress like the city you want?
Well, I mean, it's, I always go back to,
When I was running for city council, I was going back 20 years and saying, here's what the city council did 20 years ago.
They thought they could control the future by passing legislation that choked off
opportunities for what they called big rich guys to come in and develop the city.
They thought they were choking it off and they were going to keep Seattle a certain way.
And what they did was they choked it off, yes, and they kept those things from happening.
But here's what ended up happening.
Now we have, now we have a garbage city that there's no transportation.
There's just, you know, the, they put 60,000 new workers down in this area that they were proposing would be a big park.
And they didn't, they were under no obligation to improve public transit because that's, you know, cause it's not a master plan.
It's just, this is what I'm doing with this and I'm putting a building here.
And I, so then you look at it and you go, okay,
So we're passing laws now that this is the way we still think of law.
We still think like, oh, somebody's trying to do something, so we're going to get in there and pass a law.
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't pass laws against public masturbation to codify some of those norms.
Right.
Well, I mean, it depends.
You know, you have a fact-finding committee and that kind of stuff, right?
But if you can't look ahead, you can look ahead 20 years and envision...
what you imagine your policies are going to make.
I mean, that's what they were trying to do.
They were like Seattle 20 years from now is what we're trying to fight for, but they could only see their own vision.
They didn't have anybody that was like, well, you know, another possibility is the opposite of what you are trying to do.
And yeah,
And I think it's because, you know, you circle the wagons and you only hear from the people that you want to hear from.
Yeah.
And, and we're doing it now and we're, and we've done it constantly.
We do it and we'll keep doing it, which is to say like, we're going to do this because we know what the result is going to be down the line.
We know what the result of the, of the, of our enemies will be.
And we know what our result will be.
But the problem is they don't, you don't know what you're, you don't want to know what the result will be 20 years from now.
You have to think of every possibility.
And account for free will and American ingenuity and blah, blah, blah.
So I look at it every day and I just go, what of the present slate of laws is going to produce this?
And what of the present slate of laws is going to produce a giant burning pit?
And even though they're all a moving target, there are some that would seem to indicate more of one than the other.
If you look at this area now, it is still a working waterfront, but all of the area around it is basically like a homeless encampment that is 20% on fire at any given moment.
Oh, Jesus.
Right?
It's Winnebago's.
that are parked under freeway off ramps that are, that will never run again, that are on fire.
And you go, huh, well, I mean, that's another possible vision.
I don't think anybody would have put it on a foam core board and said, we're not going to call it that, but, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you want to talk about our special offer?
Here's, we have a special offer.
Ordinarily, we would have a paid sponsorship spot at this point.
But John, would you, you want to talk about something you like?
Tell me about something you're excited about.
Well, Merlin, although... How long have we been doing this show?
Over 11 years.
Am I right?
45 minutes.
11 years?
Oh, yeah.
We've been doing it since, I think, I want to say 2011.
It's been a while.
2011.
And I think our anniversary is coming up, our 11-year anniversary.
I think it's in the autumn.
I think we started in the autumn.
Okay.
But, you know, we don't like to break the fourth or the fifth wall.
But...
We've never had any kind of crowdfunding for the show.
We need money.
Well, you know... I'm sorry.
I'll speak for myself.
I need money.
Podcasts don't sell ads like they used to.
And more importantly, the ads don't... They don't pay any money.
And we know people have wanted us to do a crowdfunding for a long time.
We've gotten a lot of angry letters from people.
And a lot of loving, appreciative...
Letters.
Anyway, all by way of saying we're launching a Patreon for Roderick on the line.
It's called it's at Patreon dot com slash Roderick on the line all the way written out.
because I didn't, because ROTL was taken up by some boating supply store.
I don't remember why.
I just wanted to do Roderick on the line because just say it, just say it loud and proud.
Yeah.
Roderick on the line.
Roderick on the line.
It's got a nice mouthfeel.
So patreon.com slash Roderick on the line.
Uh, we have a lot of different tiers and we encourage you, uh, we encourage you to support us at the, at the
Well, first of all, the tier where you're most comfortable, but second of all, the tier where you are just a little bit uncomfortable at how much you're giving us.
Yes.
Right.
Like just find that place where you're like, oh man, should I really go to?
Yeah, I get, I should, I should.
Right.
Just go there.
Just take it all the way.
If it doesn't hurt, it may not be working.
Exactly.
At present, the tiers as you move up, the higher tiers really don't grant you any perks, any different from the lower tiers.
Really is doing a lot of work in that sense.
But yeah, but you get a cooler name.
You might get a cooler name.
You could be like a salami captain or something.
Yeah.
And, you know, who knows about the future?
Am I right, Merlin?
Who knows?
Well, I don't know about the future.
You make plans for the future?
Yeah.
You make plans?
And maybe you get a smoking homeless encampment?
God laughs.
Yeah, when we make plans.
That's right.
But it's a way you can go if you like the show.
And, you know, it helps us because I want money.
And I'm avoiding all of the usual sort of like...
happy talk most people do about blah blah blah and like we wouldn't be able to do the show well we probably do the show no matter what but like if you like the show and you have liked the show and you continue to like the show well thank you that's three of you and if you do uh that's a place where you can go in and you can uh give us a monthly tithe that uh befits your love and i would encourage you to do this because i i could use the money
Yeah.
Well, I could, no, sorry.
It's charity.
No.
Not charity.
If you like the show, support it.
I do it.
I spend a lot of money on the Patreon every month, honestly.
I think I'm near a hundred bucks a month on Patreon right now.
You go get them.
You go get them.
I do.
I go and I get them.
But I put my money where my eyes are and my ears.
You know, I do the, it always makes me happy when I see Marco and me both in the credits for Technology Connections, one of my favorites, Strong Songs, obviously Brian David Gilbert, all the great shows.
I do that.
And if you want to do that, no pressure.
But if you wanted to, that would be great.
Yeah, I'll put a little pressure on you.
You do the pressure.
Shouldn't we do, like, not good cop, bad cop, but, like, how about good cop, masturbating cop?
What about fancy cop and not fancy cop?
I notice when I say the word fancy, I put a little spin on it, don't I?
Oh, I do, too.
Well, in our house, there's another level above fancy, which is fancy.
Fancy.
Fancy.
But I will tell you, I will tell you listeners now breaking the sixth wall that selling ads really sucks.
And we spend, when we think about the amount of time we spend talking about ads and thinking about them and putting them in and just like worrying about them.
And then companies are like, well, we're only going to pay you half what we used to.
It's just such a drag, and we don't want them there anyway, you know?
And I'm not saying that we're not going to have them there.
I'm not saying that.
Thank you, everybody.
Thanks for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
And thanks to all our sponsors.
Thank you to all our sponsors.
You guys did great.
Thank you for our ads.
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
Hybrid.
We do love the fact that there are companies that support podcasts, but you, the fans, can support it too.
That's just what it boils down to.
Toast and go.
It's like, yeah.
So anyway, so just the most important part, if you're going to do this, you're going to do it.
If you're not, you're not.
That's fine.
Maybe your friends can persuade you.
Well, there are those people that are on the fence.
You know, you always imagine there's people on the fence.
There aren't or there are.
Who are all the moderates out there?
Who are the people that sometimes vote Democrats, sometimes vote Republicans?
Oh, I've had it with centrist, John.
Don't get me started.
I know you enjoy a centrist, but, you know, I'm just saying.
You know, you've had it with them.
Well, I'm just mad about school.
School should not be starting on August 15th.
And that's a very centrist.
That's some centrist bullshit, if you ask me.
You know, why don't we why don't the schools get all the money they want?
And the Air Force has to have a garage sale to buy a bomber.
You know, that was that was a popular bumper sticker in the 80s that was way too long.
Do you remember how long that was?
You see it?
You had to get right up on the other car to see what it was saying.
Yeah.
I wonder who said that.
So anyway, if you're on the fence, if you're on the fence, get off the fence and get off the fence on the right side, which is the side of supporting Roderick on the line.
Patreon.com slash Roderick on the line.
Yes.
Can I be the masturbating cop?
I think that went without saying.
Okay, fire one warning shot.