Ep. 578: "Aspirational Black Banana"
Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Boy, it's allergy season.
Oh, no.
Is it?
Is that what it is?
Boy, it's going to be a hot one here today.
Oh, is it going to be a hot one?
Yeah, I'm currently sans ponts.
Oh, really?
Yeah, this is that rare time of year where all of my training, the things that I've been training for my whole life come to bear, you know, on an unusual weather day.
Yeah.
Oh, it's going to, I'm looking at the weather app here.
You know, it's going to be 80.
Well, and in my neighborhood, yeah, it says here it's going to be 75 at 2 p.m.
But the thing is, you know, we live high up.
So you can add 10 or sometimes 15 to that.
You're right in the sun.
Well, the afternoons.
Anyway, the weather is not something people like that.
What I want to do is brag that, first of all, I am literally not wearing pants.
Yes.
And can I tell you why?
Yes.
This is something that I learned in Florida, and I had to relearn over and over in Florida.
The thing is, we don't have air conditioning here.
Most places have air conditioning in Florida, but, you know, it's not always as much as you'd like.
But, like, I've lived places that didn't have air conditioning.
Like where you live now.
Like where I live now, or in Brian Israel's large stilt house on 46th Ave, near the dog truck.
But what I learned was you've got to start early.
You understand what I'm saying?
So, like, it gets warm, say, in the afternoon or whatever.
You need to cool before it gets hot.
And that's why, for one thing, I'm not wearing pants.
But I've also opened a lot of windows.
I'm running fans.
So, you know, we go to war with the history we've got.
My mom always would seal off the house from the sun in the, like you're saying, start in the early part of the day, lower those blast curtains.
Really?
Keep the sun out, you mean?
Keep the sun out.
Okay.
And then when the one side of the house is out of the sun...
Then you open up that side of the house.
Uh-huh.
And you got the blast curtains on the hot side.
Oh, I think a lot of people don't understand.
Yeah, you keep the hot side hot, you keep the cool side cool.
Yeah, hot stays hot and the cool stays fresh.
Yeah, and then you open the windows on the cool side.
Yeah, and then as soon as the sun goes down.
You're getting into a lot of very interesting issues, including cooling lore.
Cooling lore.
Cooling lore.
And I... Did I tell you your mom and I talked yesterday?
Did she tell you?
No, she didn't.
I haven't seen her yet today.
All right.
Tell her I said hi.
Well, one thing... Yesterday, she walked into my room in the morning.
Uh-huh.
Woke me up.
Oh, dear.
Right there in your home.
Yeah.
She was like, well, this is, you know... Yes.
This is what no boundaries looks like.
And she was holding a lamp...
And she said, you have to help me take this lamp apart.
Okay.
And I said, huh?
What?
And she sat down on my bed, handed me the lamp.
I wasn't even sitting up.
She meant right now.
She had the tools.
She had a plier.
She had a screwdriver.
I bet she sat on it for a few minutes, so to speak, and then realized that this has to be escalated.
I need to go wake up John and get going on this lamp.
Was there a treat inside or something?
Treasure?
A map?
No.
What she'd done is she was rebuilding the lamp and she put the lamp together and then, this is her story, not mine.
Okay.
Then, after she'd hammered all the parts together, then the instructions fell out of the bottom of the box of the lamp parts and she realized she had forgotten a step.
Oh, no.
But she'd put the lamp together in the way that the lamp was meant to go if you never took it apart again.
I get it.
And so then she was like, I got to get this apart, but I can't.
I've already done too much.
So you're a big, strong man.
So then I had to sit up in bed and now I'm trying to figure out.
That's no way to wake up, John.
That's no way to wake up.
trying to figure out how to take apart a lamp i didn't put together and in the process she was leaving out key elements about the process about the fact that she had actually hammered this together yeah i've never heard of hammering a lamp unless you're fashioning a genie lamp out of a sheet of brass or something i don't know how to make them
It's not what I would have done either.
Okay.
But do you feel any – I'm just gleaning from this.
There's no need or purpose in saying, is this a thing I need to do right now?
That's the thing about things.
Do you know that?
Do you know that that's something in that instance where that's not even a conversation worth having?
I think that this may be a gendered issue because somehow all of the women in my family come to me with things that are like, this has to get done immediately.
If this were a private podcast, I would completely agree with you.
And then I go... Sometimes a person might think, well, if it's bothering you that much, is that something you might want to go ahead and try to take care of rather than just get emotional?
I don't know.
Sometimes I'm standing knee-deep in a creek, and I'm like, do I really have to get out and do this right now?
Well, and you don't... I mean, if I could say this is nothing against your mother, who I talked to yesterday, but this is nothing to say that you're slighting somebody's desires or needs, but I think sometimes it's worthwhile...
In a variety of ways to talk about, you know, it's like the queen says in the crown.
She says, does this need to be said?
Number two, does this need to be said by me?
Number three, does this need to be said by me right now?
Hmm.
Now, you're a smart fellow, so I'm just going to leave you with that.
You can take that anywhere you want.
But me, if I finally manage to get to sleep in a given day, I don't want a lamp waking me up.
But anyway, that's all just to say that I also talked to her yesterday.
Okay, all right.
And did you guys have a good conversation?
Yeah, we did.
Did she need me to fix anything?
Here's the lore, and then I'm going to finish this one part.
One of my first, you know, I love an opening sentence in a book.
I can't do this one from memory because I think it's like 300 words long, but the opening sentence from Absalom Absalom talks about how Miss Rosa, you know, who'd been around, I guess, since the Civil War, she always kept the study dark with all the windows closed and all the curtains closed because the belief at that time was...
kind of a la your mom but not as subtle or nuanced is you got to just shut the whole place down to keep the heat out and maybe that's different in mississippi when you got those tall ceilings and whatnot but what i've learned is you also got to work the angles you got to work the drafts and you have to learn the proper way to use a fan and i i'm really not trying to piss from the high ground here i'm acknowledging my privilege but seriously a lot of folks don't really understand how fan do
how fan do what you got to do i'll tell you one thing you can do you know like like when you see somebody like a david niven type and they want to know how the wind's blowing you drop a little bit of sand or dirt or maybe you drop a leaf and see which way it blows uh-huh do that in your hallway in my case and then you set up the fans so that they're they're working with the way the wind is blowing and you end up if you do it right and this is very nuanced i don't have time to get into this but then you can create what's called a cross draft
And you'd be amazed what kind of cross-draft you can make, especially with two fans, if you know what you're doing.
Yeah.
And you do that before it's hot, John.
If it's already hot, it's too late.
Do you understand?
Yeah, no, you get the water moving.
You get the water moving like in a bathtub.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
I used to do that.
I still do it sometimes a little bit just to mix the water.
No, wait.
Do you take baths?
Constantly.
How have we not talked about this a thousand times?
I think my core has gotten very cold over the years.
And so baths are the only thing to get.
It's on my extremities.
I'm not a pregnant woman.
Yeah.
Um, but, uh, no, but sometimes, yeah, I do.
I'll take, I'll take a bath.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's nice.
That's nice.
I'm not as good at it as you are, but you know, I do.
I do.
Yeah.
You know, I think I've even taken a bath in your old apartment.
Yeah.
You should really clean that first though.
It's got lead in it.
Well, anymore, I'm not going to take a bath in your apartment.
Oh, yeah, things do change.
20 years ago, I did.
Absolutely.
I don't think you ever wore pants in my house.
I'm not wearing pants right now.
This really takes me back, John.
We should just stream the office together.
The thing about your office, though, is it's a double, triple bunker, right?
I mean, there's no, you could just be in there.
There's not a lot of, and because of my family, whom I love, I've taken my beloved office fan to the house.
To help with the effort.
Because why should, heaven for fin, why should I be comfortable?
I'll just sit here and talk to John in my underpants.
That's right.
It's not bad now.
We have a lot of listeners in, you know, Australia and other hot places like Florida.
Yes.
And Georgia and all these, you know, muggy, muggy places.
And they don't know that here on the West Coast, we never had heat at all.
It was never an issue before.
And now it is.
Heat here in Washington.
In terms of air temperature.
Yeah.
You know, it's like sometimes it was 80 and everybody was like, woohoo, unbelievable.
That's interesting because as you know, San Francisco's climate is anomalous.
Yes.
In almost endless ways.
In an almost self-referential, like fractal way.
Like it's very difficult to know what, especially if you live where I live, it is a very...
To say the least, it is not a good indicator of the weather in several other parts of the city.
No, San Francisco feels like it's pranking you 320 days a year.
It's the worst kind of prank.
Well, the worst kind of prank, I guess, is where you die.
But I don't like the kind of pranks where it's not even all that funny.
But it also is really not helpful.
But really, ultimately, it's just not funny.
It's almost always in the 50s here.
And pretty chill, which is one reason I like that temperature.
Now, here's my question for you, and then we'll talk about your mom.
I...
I don't know a ton about climate change, but one thing that I find a little bit frustrating amongst people who are, say, at least skeptical about climate change is they seem to some of them have a pretty simple idea about how it works.
Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold type of thing.
Well, yeah, or like that one fellow saying, oh, look, it's snowing in New York, so there must not be climate change.
And the thing is, I think that's one of the good reasons we stopped saying global warming is it's not just warming.
It's stochastic disruption of patterns.
So we haven't gotten that heat in the same way.
Has it gotten hotter where you are?
Some people say the older you get, the more you become like yourself, for better or for worse.
Is Seattle becoming more like itself?
No.
Like I say, my entire life, if it got hotter than 87 degrees,
for two days, Seattle was like, okay, what is going on?
And let's just say for our listeners who are rolling their eyes in Georgia or whatever, like everything, you got to get your head out of your ass.
It depends on infrastructure.
It depends on what you're prepared for.
And if you want to get real smart about it, it's based on what you've optimized for.
So if your city is optimized for something different,
then what's happening, that's going to be a problem.
You can't just roll your eyes and go, oh, you think that's bad?
It's $114 here.
Well, you're the one who bought a mortgage there.
Don't blame me.
But, do you know what I'm saying?
But you're getting, so you're getting, it's less like Seattle.
What's it more like?
Has it changed the way that the city operates?
Are the spiders angry?
What's happening?
Well, what's interesting is that we always used to say that summer started basically on Bastille Day.
And up until July, end of June... So, 4th of July, not so much.
Gotta wait a week or so.
Sometimes.
You know, it was like, up until the end of June, it was gonna rain...
on a fairly regular schedule the rain of course you know is its own magical thing and but you know it would start getting warm but you know it's still you know magical rain and then july and august and the first part of september it was dry and by dry we mean that it only rained once every 10 days
this is the kind of thing where somebody in another place who likes to roll their eyes could look at that and go oh dry means different things dry means different things but that was the dry season and you know and and there was always that's the other thing about seattle there was always a beautiful week in february and a beautiful week in may that made everybody go it's here the summer you know the sun and everybody's out in their bikinis because it's 72.
Then you know, and then it would rain but it was not a constant rain but it but so all of the plants in the northwest are used to it raining until June and That's what you're set up for there.
That's what everybody's set up.
Uh-huh the last ten years
There have been years where it stopped raining April 1st, and then it got to be 115 degrees or it was, you know, there were eight days where it was over a hundred, which had never happened before.
And I don't think in recorded history.
And then sometimes it wouldn't rain again until October and plants everywhere, like their whole, their whole, um, types of plants that have been growing in Seattle since people first brought plants here.
And I'm talking about not native plants because native plants just do what they're going to do.
You know, rhododendrons and azaleas and plants that are monkey trees and all this stuff.
Monkey trees, new world trees.
Yeah, that were part of the landscaping here, and they just can't live here anymore.
they're just like what the hell is this 102 for 10 days with no rain for five months so yeah talk about that's true it's a different world the thing about my house of course is that uh they have those maps i bet you have well your whole neighborhood is would would be in the map but there are maps here where it's like do you get enough sun that they will subsidize solar power for you oh
Because our local utility is like, hey, man, we'll help you put solar power on your house.
Right.
If you're in this, you know, if the map says that you'll get enough power from it over the year.
Oh, Uncle Sam?
Does he decide?
I think it's maybe Washington.
I mean, it sounds like hippie Washington.
The government.
Yeah, the government is trying to reopen Alcatraz.
I don't know if you've read the paper today.
I would, for a variety of reasons, I would actually, including its relationship to solar power, I would actually love to talk about that when you're done.
Because I don't know if you know, but I live with someone who worked on Alcatraz.
Yes.
Okay, we'll talk about that in a second.
But anyway, the map, the color-coded map.
Just in case y'all don't make it to the end if you have struck out or something, just so you know, the reason they closed it around the time, yeah, the whole reason they closed it, it was about three times as expensive as any similar thing.
It doesn't have it.
I'll save it.
I'll save it.
But I got a lot of input from my park service intern about this this morning.
My little ding-a-ling and I went and toured Alcatraz just a couple of years ago.
That's a good tour.
It's been a whole day.
It was pretty great.
But anyway, just to conclude, the map that maps how much sun you get, my house does not qualify for any solar abatement.
Is that racist?
Well, no, I've got giant, unless it's racist against maple trees and firs and hemlocks and all the other cedars.
Thank you.
Got so many trees around here that the sun only comes through in a kind of dappled fashion.
So looking out the window, the trees that are right outside the window are illuminated.
No discount for dapple.
But the ones behind are dappled.
It's so dapply.
So dappled.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the Northwest in it.
But, uh, to, to the point of Alcatraz, uh, when we were there, I was struck by how, although it's mostly made of concrete, the concrete is actually rusting.
Like the S the, the steel, the iron, the, the, the rebar that's inside the concrete has been penetrated.
Wasn't it built in like the 30s?
I mean.
Yeah.
And the whole thing, like you can stand in there in the middle of summer and freeze to death because it's so porous and also so unfit for human habitation.
It's a marvelous place.
Marvelous.
It's historically like absolutely fascinating.
What a nightmare though.
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you imagine spending one night at Alcatraz?
Like they turned off all the lights and you're just in Alcatraz.
I don't know.
I just think I think from a philosophical standpoint, some of this depend upon your state of mind.
Like if you were there for like a charity ball, like let's say you were dressed up like a fancy society lady in the 20s for a party and they had like some kind of lock in.
I think it's a Catholic thing.
But you know what I mean?
Maybe if it was maybe if it was for for, you know, charity.
But no, I don't think I'd care for that.
You know what would be for me?
It would be the noise.
The noise.
The noise of a situation like that.
I can get this out of the way very fast.
Yes, please.
It's really easy.
Thank you.
My kid worked at Alcatraz and was a, I think I'm going to call it an intern, but worked there a couple, three times a week and actually did the talk.
Do you remember like you arrive in the boat at the island and then somebody with a microphone introduces you to the island and explains like where things are and stuff like that?
Great, great, great, great talk.
I loved that.
That was my kid's job.
My kid's job was to greet people at the doc and then answer questions and do whatever.
But just real quick, I mean, I was like, so, do you see the headlines?
He's like, yeah, that's pretty ambitious.
I'm going to mention in passing.
I did not fact check this.
This is just mostly interesting to me as a factoid that I have no intention of tracking down.
But my cognitive bias leads me to say somebody sent me a link to something on Twitter, which people do.
And apparently, according to somebody, the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie, Escape from Alcatraz, was showing on local TV in the Palm Beach area on the evening he did that.
Really?
Yeah.
So here's one.
I mean, like, I guess you can just go read up on the history of Alcatraz.
It's a fascinating place.
But it doesn't have its own supply of anything.
Right.
Including electricity and water, let alone food and tasers.
Right.
Clean uniforms.
Like, I mean, there's, there's a plant, there's plants there to do things, but as it is right now, it runs on generators and now increasingly solar.
But I'm just, I don't think the solar was there during the Kennedy administration.
No, I don't.
Nevertheless, if you want, and it's just silly, why are we even talking about this?
But it is just, it's just, it is kind of funny because to have somebody, in this case, a 17-year-old kid...
who's in a position to know more about this could go especially, oh, no, no.
It's bad for all the reasons you think and the reasons you haven't thought of, plus these other reasons you'd have no way of knowing about.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
You could go like, oh, man, that's a really odd thing to do, to take this place that hasn't been open in 62 years, that was falling apart at the time.
I mean, you remember when the guy made the little head out of the thing, got barbershop hair and the soap and whatnot?
Beeswax, yeah.
I mean, one reason they were able to claw through that wall is it was kind of falling apart.
Anyways.
Yeah.
But, you know, and then the other thing is, like, okay, so, like, you ever go to Alcatraz?
Like, you got to get a blue and gold line.
You go out there.
Like, Billy went on, like, there was a boat that, like, staff would take, you know, in and out and stuff like that.
And anyways, it's just, it is.
It's a great boat trip, too.
Yeah, it is.
Oh, it's wonderful.
And you get to see the seals.
You got to be careful of the gulls on that island because they are very aggressive.
They attacked my child many times.
But that's just, that's part of the grind.
That's part of the work.
I had a friend that used to work on the Blue and Gold line.
Uh-huh.
And he said that at the end of the day when they were headed back, you know, because there was a bar.
Yes.
I've been to that bar.
Yeah.
And he said that they would soak pieces of bread in vodka and then throw it off the back of the boat to the gulls that follow behind.
Mm-hmm.
And he said that...
Throw these vodka-soaked breads to the gulls until the gulls were like... The drunken gull sounds like a Jackie Chan movie.
Really?
And even at the time, I heard this story in the 80s, and I was like, huh, that seems like somebody would complain about that, doesn't it?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Even in 1989, somebody would...
1989, it has a reputation for being a very freewheeling city.
You got your Lawrence Ferlinghettis and whatnot.
You got your Peaches Christ and like, yeah, we all have a lot of fun here.
But as much as I personally dislike a lot of gulls, I would not personally participate in poisoning them.
I'm not judging people who do.
Because they're kind of a pain in the ass.
You ever be eating on the Embarcadero and you go up to get a napkin and you come back and the whole table's gone?
Not just your burrito.
That whole pier belongs to the birds now.
We have the same goals that you do up here.
They're such assholes.
They're so well organized.
They're almost like the Corvids, where they're able to work in teams and have one guy who's just a distraction guy.
Yeah, but they're idiots at the same time.
The corvids, at least, they look like they're thinking, whereas the gulls are just... And they're taller than bald eagles.
And yeah, they'll steal a french fry right out of your hand.
Oh, absolutely.
Take the child with it.
And they're loud.
So loud.
I mean, still not saying that we should throw alcohol.
Hey, listen, two things can be true at once, John.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's the whole basis of the liberal arts.
Right.
you're so right it makes me cry i can't you can't have this conversation with people hey like two things can be true one time one time my ex and i used to work at this same office uh doing different work very different work but at the same office in tallahassee and and you know she was very she spoke she's very funny very smart and spoke very colorfully and one time she's like oh geez i didn't close the database right i'm on crack and
I'm on crack.
And the ladies all turned, because they called them the ladies, the ladies all turned to her and looked at her, and they're like, you're on crack?
Did she seem like she was on crack?
No, no, she just seemed very animated, which was part of the charm.
And she's like, no, I'm kidding, Donna.
Okay.
and joanne like i'm i was joking and using that as a way to say you know to explain my behavior metaphorically you know you you so i'm not saying i'm on the side of poisoning a gull no with a vodka with a vodka bread we're both against it and can i still and yet can i still have a feeling about a gull yeah like even a negative feeling like a feeling uh that gulls should be somewhere else i think you need to be careful about how much you trust birds
The challenge for another podcast I do this week, which is a show where each week we challenge each other to do something.
The challenge for that program this week, which is germane here, is just simply the phrase, get into birds.
Oh, get into them.
Yeah, yeah, which came up in part because I've been hoarding and acquiring new bird feeders and interacting very heavily with the birds.
And so I'm learning a lot more about birds than I knew a couple weeks ago.
On that podcast, do you differentiate between challenges and what would be, in any other context, a dare?
Oh, they used to be much more dare-like.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's one where we bought bracelets so we could shock each other remotely.
We don't do that kind of thing.
Oh, no!
Yeah, now we're like, hey, watch this show on Netflix.
Well, it's not, it's kind of lame, but the bird part, I also, but I mean, I'm closing the thread on this, but I just wanted to say like, I am thinking more about, but it's also fun though, because you can bring whatever you want.
If you name the challenge in such a way that it's kind of broad, then you can bring your own sort of personality and Weltanschauung to whatever it is you want to do.
But could you ever say, I challenge you to send me $50 a week for a month?
I mean, $50 a week for a year.
I think you could do it for one week.
So you might want to round that up because it's just for that week's challenge.
I see, I see.
So I challenge you to send me $15,000.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a pretty good challenge.
You should have me on as a guest.
I would actually...
Wow.
I, those are, these are two really big parts of my life, not just my quote unquote work, but two big parts of my life that I don't think have ever interacted in any way.
And now I kind of want it.
Yeah.
Would you be open to doing the challenge or maybe helping us nominate the challenge?
We have a spreadsheet with 1,100 challenges in it.
I will do any challenge you challenge me.
I'm writing this down.
But anyway, mostly I deal with finches, which is great because I like a finch.
I like a house finch.
They're small.
They move around fast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We get pigeons.
But the pigeons are kind of bullies.
So what I've done is I've changed the food I'm putting in.
I've moved to more of the huma.
They're also dumb pigeons.
Yeah, but they're that kind of, they're like, you know, there's a phrase I use sometimes as an adjective.
And I know it's not very nice, but sometimes as an adjective, I'll use the phrase dumb guy.
You know, that's a dumb guy way to do it.
Or like there's dumb guy ways to talk where like you want to sound like a smart guy, but it just makes you sound more like a dumb guy.
Like pigeons are the worst kind of dumb guy.
You know, because they're real touchy and erratic, but they're also bullies.
And sometimes they'll just, I'll send you a photo right now.
Sometimes they'll just sit on the house and just kind of prevent others from using it.
Isn't that the thing?
Isn't that a pigeon?
Finches don't do that.
Finches ain't.
That's just a pigeon.
Do you have crows there?
You must.
I saw one about four minutes ago eating some kind of a pastry in the street right in front of our front window.
And I said to Madeline, what I always say, I go, Corvid.
Corvid.
The young crows here like to try to eat from my bird feeder.
And they can't.
Really?
The crows never try to eat from my bird feeder.
I'm like the lady in that coffee commercial.
They never have a second cup of my millet.
I have a lot of baby crows around here because the crows, every year they sire a new bunch of really loud, like baby crows and teenage crows are the loudest, most, you can hear them in the trees and you're like, you...
Rat, shut up.
Is it especially strident and loud, John?
Absolutely.
And they want so much.
They're so needy.
You can hear them be needy.
And the adult crows are like, oh, my God.
I bet they say in their own crow language.
Because apparently they do, as we know.
Well, John, you never know when somebody didn't listen to the show 10 years ago.
So people may not know that we've had a lot of discussion about Corvids on this show, including a lot of work that you and your mother, who I talked to yesterday, have done with tracking down these boys, trying to find the tree that they go to.
So you've got a lot of Corvids.
We talked about that UW guy, a person who wore a mask.
And the crow hated him and told all the others and the word got around.
They must talk to each other.
See, I say talk, John, and I think that might be culturally insensitive.
Whatever crows do, I think they do interact.
And I'll bet the crows sometimes go, when their kids are going, but they're like, I'll be so glad when the stage is over.
I know.
You know what I mean?
It's like you can't wait for your kid to not be, say, 14.
You can literally hear them say, Mom!
Mom!
Mom!
Dad!
Mom!
And it's just like, what?
What?
And they're like, I'm hungry.
And you're like, ah, come on.
I imagine it being like a three or four-year-old.
And for some reason, of course, I'm thinking of the wonderful movie, Finding Nemo, where the seagulls all go, mine, mine, mine, mine.
And that's still so funny.
That's what I hear now when I hear gulls, anyway.
Gulls, sorry.
Not crows, but gulls.
But they do go on quite a lot, and you don't want to mess them up.
Now, what I did was I did go into Chatty G about a month ago, and I should pick this back up and ask it, how do you attract crows?
And I started to do that, and then I thought...
Is that wise?
Yeah.
Do you really want to do, you know, ask a vampire to come into your house?
That's right.
You got to let the right one in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you make it too accommodating for the crows, you know, and heaven forfend they ever start working with the fucking gulls.
So the baby crows, they come here and they see the bird feeder.
They know that I put suet out there.
Oh, you do suet.
Yeah, I'm not just doing seeds.
Do you buy that or do you produce your own suet?
My grandmother was a big suet person.
No, no, no.
I buy suet.
It's not expensive.
And that's like a beef tallow?
Yeah, it's tallow, but it's got seeds in it.
You know, it's like a whole thing.
It's like a power pack.
A power pack.
You put it in a bird feeder that's kind of a cage, and the birds can perch on the cage and peck it, but they can't just, like, take big hunks of it.
And the baby crows will land on this thing.
And, you know, it's hanging.
It's not like yours that's stuck to a window.
This is hanging from... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got one of those, too, for Finch Millet.
Yeah, right.
Which sounds like an indie rock performer.
Right.
And so the crows, then the thing starts swinging wildly back and forth because it's not meant to hold a crow.
No, that's not a crow bearing house.
No.
And then the crows are hanging upside down from it, trying to peck at the suet.
But the thing at that point is swinging around like completely out of control.
The crows are flapping their wings.
And they don't realize that it's not helping, that they're causing more tumult for all the crows when they do that.
Yeah, it's insane.
And I'm sure that the adult crows are up in the trees like, oh my God.
Look at these fucking assholes.
Look at this guy.
Think he's got a way to beat the system.
And now I'm looking out the window at it just like, I mean, this is better than television for me.
Oh, you have no idea.
You have no idea.
Okay, here's one.
This is my feeder.
Oh, this is before I changed the seed and this is a different feeder.
I love this stupid pigeon you sent me sitting on top of your bird feeder.
Yeah, his face is like, hmm.
He's just kind of like, hmm.
What does he think is going to happen next?
I don't know.
I got another one of him flying away a second later.
Here's the one.
This is one.
So this has seed.
Hello, everybody.
So you are getting into birds.
Is this part of your... It's both part of your challenge and also something to do with the fact that you're in your late 50s now?
These are all terrific and horrible points.
Thank you.
Yes.
Yes.
And here's the thing.
When you work for yourself, you can make anything your job.
And if you don't, you're kind of dumb.
That's a nice bird feeder, that one there.
I took the seed out of that and replaced it with just like a thistle, you know, like those little skinny seeds.
So now my finches can get in there and stick their little beacon and just take out, like you're saying, just take out one little piece.
i'd like to see your backyard there where we filmed our yeah our backyard pilot yes and you uh you definitely have done uh have done uh not very much well okay so you're seeing that in an angle such that that's actually the house just slightly to the south the one with that weird bastic thing is our yard
oh oh that looks much well the neighbors that our neighbors our wonderful neighbors are doing some uh doing some stuff down there so everything changes you can't get too attached to anything everything changes you know my sister uh susan who comes up on the show periodically she has a neighbor who feeds the hummingbirds oh and she feeds the hummingbirds like a crazy lady and
And so my, so Susan, you know, out on her balcony looks down and there's like 90 hummingbirds.
Ooh, that's kind of upsetting.
Well, so Susan had no prior interest in birds.
I've never seen more than one or two at a time.
Oh, no, hummingbirds.
I mean, hummingbirds up here, they're everywhere, and you've got multiple kinds of them.
And talk about bullies.
They're, like, legit mean to each other.
But so this lady goes out of town, and, you know, the hummingbirds will drink 40 gallons of sugar water in a day if you've got that many of them.
and susan who had no prior interest in um birds uh noticed that the hummingbirds were like didn't know what to do and so susan went and bought a hummingbird feeder and filled it up and hung it out on her balcony okay well then all of a sudden it's a hummingbird party
And Susan's watching the hummingbirds, and she does this thing that's happening with you, which is like, birds.
Yeah.
And so she goes and gets another hummingbird feeder.
Well, the lady's still out of town.
Oh, no.
We should get her on the show to talk about this problem.
Susan's got 70 hummingbirds.
Okay.
And she's as happy as... And these are different hummingbirds?
Does she attract them away from the out-of-town person?
Well, not intentionally.
She was just like, those hummingbirds, you know, nobody's feeding them.
And what's going to happen?
You shouldn't bite somebody's bird.
Well, so then the lady comes back.
Oh, she's like, look, oh, look who, look who, look who decided to have a hummingbird feeder.
Yeah.
And now there's, now both of them have got, for a while they went away and Susan was like, where are all my bird friends?
And then it's coming back.
And now that's like a hummingbird.
I don't know.
It's a hummingbird sanctuary now.
and there's i mean then now susan's a bird person and this this only took a month to happen and now she's like the bird isn't that amazing yeah yeah i think you might have gotten at it with the the being in your 50s thing i don't know i'm sending you this is this wonderful app cornell university puts out that is oddly enough called merlin and it's uh the actual full name of it is merlin bird id it's a free app you can get for your telephone and
And it's really, really cool.
And you can download these packs.
So like I got the West Coast pack and it's like 400 megs, like half a gig.
And it's got like 400 birds and it's got so many birds.
And so it has this thing on it where you can become a bird person.
So I just sent you something.
They call it the life list, which is every time that you eyeball a bird,
You put it on your life list.
You put it on your life list like a bird person would do.
And you can see here, well, I saw a crow in 2023.
That's pretty good.
I got a finch and a dove.
And now it's saying, because it uses your location, it says, hey, keep an eye out.
You can get a common raven or Anna's hummingbird.
Now, I don't think I've ever seen an Anna's hummingbird.
Do you get hummingbirds that are that pretty?
Oh, even prettier.
No kidding.
Yeah.
The hummingbirds have this thing where they're iridescent.
So when they're flying, like they'll change colors right in front of you.
And some of them are bright blue and some of them are like this green and red.
And, um, it looks almost like a little bit like a, like a Macaw kind of coloration.
Well, and they change colors throughout the year.
Like when they're in mating season, birds are brighter.
And you can see there are differences between the boys and the girls in terms of brightness.
Oh, finches.
Big difference on the finches.
Big difference.
So sometimes you can be like, well, that can't possibly be the same bird.
And it's like, it's the same bird.
Oh, no.
It's hilarious.
My family just makes fun of me.
I'm forever going ka-ching and taking a photo.
And every time it goes finch.
Finch.
Still a finch.
No, that's a female finch.
That's why you thought it was a nuthatch.
It's not.
It's not any of those.
It's not a J. It's not a thrush.
It's any of those.
When the hummingbirds get happy and then they get happy around where you are, then they'll land.
They'll perch.
And when you see a hummingbird that's comfortable enough to stop and just hang, that's a whole other level of like, now I've got hummingbirds that are just hanging out.
Is it because they're getting comfortable, John?
Yeah, I think they're like, this is a safe place.
Well, they said when I got that one, that weird-ass one, that's my fourth bird feeder that I have up right now, the one that now has the thistle in it, what they say is you should go and put it somewhere where it's almost hidden so the birds can keep used to it not being out in the middle of everything.
But I didn't do that.
I just decided to go commando and just put it straight up.
I want to see it.
I don't want it to be hidden because I want to look at it.
No, I'm not attracting birds because I'm an ornithologist.
I'm attracting birds because I'm 58.
Yeah.
I don't want to see them.
I mean, my problem was that I, you know, that then I was like, well, I also want raccoons.
So I started taking it when my eggs got older.
This I want to hear about.
I really want to hear about this.
I would take my eggs down in the ravine and I'd put little eggs.
You put your eggs in the ravine.
Yeah, because I'm like, hey, raccoons like eggs.
They got to like eggs.
And bananas and stuff.
Were they cooked?
No, no, no.
Just like eggs.
It's like, boy, because I'm a bachelor, right?
So I'll get a dozen eggs.
You open the fridge, you kind of don't see the eggs.
Yeah, I know.
And then it's like, these eggs are nine months old.
Maybe a raccoon will like it.
But then, of course, you know, you don't want to attract other.
That's the catch.
Yeah.
You don't want to be like, come on in, mice.
Every night my grandparents, my grandparents, very long story short, they had like a little acre of land.
That they lived on in Cincinnati on Boomer Road, of all things.
And they had this little add-on room that they'd like.
And they put in like kind of, you know, like you can get like a sunroom.
Anyhow, they had this little screen door that went out to their backyard in the orchard, the apple orchard they had.
And by the way, great fucking place to grow up.
I'll just say in passing.
Is that right?
Also, my grandfather, at the time in his 70s, built an entire, basically like a 20-foot long porch out of red brick and then built a multi-tiered walkthrough, like a funeral, not a funeral home, but like a memorial garden, made an entire multi-tiered, three-tiered red brick thing where grandma could plant roses.
It's pretty badass.
Here's what they did every night.
They'd take a little pie pen and...
Pie pan.
They take a pie pan and they scoot their leftovers, their inedible leftovers into that and put it out for the raccoons.
And you know what would happen?
Eventually, every night, every time I stayed over, I'd see it.
You'd look out the screen and you'd see.
What was in there?
I'll tell you what you'd see.
You'd see two little black paws on the window and a little face going, hey.
Hey, what's going on?
Where's my scraps?
And then you see two raccoons.
And they never overran the house that I'm aware of.
But if you lay that down, here's another problem with bird food, is you've got to watch out for the rodents.
Yeah, the rodents.
Because some of these have like fruit and nuts and whatnot in it.
You get a peanut or something in there.
Yeah.
I don't know if they'll eat thistle.
Hey, everybody.
Thanks for tuning in.
Okay.
What happened to me recently was I bought a bunch of bananas, and then I made the classic banana owner mistake.
Classic banana owner mistake, which is I put them in the refrigerator.
Don't ever put your bananas in the refrigerator.
I don't understand that.
I was going out of town.
Do you like them chilled?
Well, no, I was going out of town and I was like, I don't want to come back to a bunch of rotten bananas.
No.
And so I put the bananas in the refrigerator.
Well, you know, you don't want to do that because when I came back, the bananas were all the color of a battleship.
They're just, they turn.
Yeah.
They're just gray.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My kid comes in and she's like, John, I don't think it thrives in that kind of weather.
It doesn't.
And I'm, and I said, if you peel the banana, it's fine.
It's just gray on the outside, but inside it's fine.
It's still, it's basically still like a perfect banana.
It's a little green.
And she was like, no, I'm not eating that.
And so then I got gray bananas.
I put them out on the counter and they immediately turned to black bananas.
The kind of banana that everybody puts in a Ziploc bag because they think they're going to one day make banana bread.
Oh, you mean the stuff that comprises about a third of my freezer?
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
It goes next to all the packages of frozen fruit from Trader Joe's and all these notional future smoothies that I'm just storing garbage for.
Yeah, the aspirational black banana.
The aspirational black banana.
That sits in the freezer forever.
Hey, use me.
Use me.
I'd be yummy.
And the thing is, if you've ever taken a... You've got a Vitamixer, why don't you use it?
If you've ever tried to peel a frozen banana, it doesn't want to peel.
I haven't.
I have no interest in frozen bananas.
No, you have to cut it open, basically.
It's because we have a garbage museum where we just refrigerate garbage until I throw it away, and then somebody goes, where did that go?
And I say, you mean your leftovers from March...
they went where leftovers go yeah where do leftovers go they go away they go away john well so now i've got like seven black bananas and i'm no but that sounds like a white stripes record i'm not anybody's fool that i think it's ever going to go into a smoothie plus my freezer is full of pork loin that i never make yeah but see that that's a choice
Yeah.
I'm very comforted by a pork loin.
People send me steaks sometimes.
Like, hey, I sent you five steaks.
How do I get on that list?
I know, right?
And then I have five steaks.
And it's like, you know, I like eat dinner...
uh, four nights a week over at Ariella's house where she's making some blue apron or something or, or something like that.
And, you know, I like to support the cause.
So I'm like, yeah, of course I'll come and eat, uh, whatever that is, but muesli and, uh, and black bananas farming.
And so, so then my farm egg, farm egg, farm egg, farm egg.
Oh, farm egg.
Yeah.
You get, you get your box and there's a single egg in there.
It just says farm egg.
i'm glad it's from a farm glad it's not like a mechanic egg or you know like as you say like a monkey egg yeah tree egg yeah raccoon egg so anyway i got these seven bananas and part of me wants to go put them in the ravine and say like hey raccoons here's seven black bananas it costs you nothing to find out if it's garbage anyway you might as well throw it with the eggs in your ravine and see what happens
do the neighbors have a thought about this well so this is the thing i don't want there's so much old produce in the ravine i don't want to attract anybody that doesn't belong in the ravine i don't want to attract rats although yesterday i was down in the ravine and and all of a sudden here's this beautiful cat this beautiful like calico cat
And the cat's looking at me, and I'm like, I've never seen a cat down here.
First of all, there are a lot of owls down here.
No shit.
You haven't talked about owls in a while.
Yeah, there's a lot.
Everybody's down there except no cats.
And I'm like, what the hell do you think you're doing?
And the cat runs away.
Is this your first day, or are you lost?
Yeah, right.
And I, and it didn't have a collar, but it was beautiful.
And, uh, so then I'm working in a completely different part of the routine work and work and work.
And I look over in the cats there again, looking at me.
And I said, is this one of those things where you're going to start coming around and then I'm going to have to adopt you?
Well, I mean, I think that's the best circumstances.
Well, another one just could be that it's trying to get you to go on a building's remand, to go on some kind of a journey.
Maybe, you know what I mean?
Could it be a Joseph Campbell cat?
Or maybe somebody's hurt down the ravine and it's like...
Follow me.
Oh, yeah.
You got to get Timmy out of the well.
Yeah.
Timmy's in the well.
Again.
So then I'm talking to it because, of course, I try to talk to him.
You're not a fucking monster.
Yeah.
I'm like, you know, what are you doing?
Like, kitty, kitty, kitty.
And the cat's like, not so much.
But now I've got a new thing down there where I'm like, well, I guess I'm looking for the cat now.
And, you know, I wouldn't mind if a cat showed up here and was like, I live here now.
That's a low friction cat.
Yeah, and I've had that happen before, and it was the best cat I ever had.
How'd you get Lewis?
That was it.
Lewis was just on the porch one day.
Shit.
And I came home, and here's this cat on the porch.
And I was like, how do you think you're doing?
Yeah, and he was like, well...
And I said, well, look, I'm stopping by here.
I am not coming home.
I'm on my way out.
I'm just stopping by to, I don't know, trade belts or whatever.
Yes.
And so I left and he was still on the porch like, and I, and he was clearly a cool dude.
And I said, all right, here's our deal.
The way that now actually can really have an impact.
Yeah, yeah.
He was very, you know, very personable.
I said, here's the deal between you and me.
If you're here when I get back, which won't be until later tonight, then you'll get a bowl of milk.
And if you're not here, then go with God.
Do you feel like it...
Do you feel like you had a meeting of the minds about that?
I'm not so sure.
There's no way to know, really.
In some ways, he was smarter than I was.
And so I was gone all day, and I come back, and I walk up, and I'm putting the key in the door, and then there he is.
And I was like, okay, guy.
All right, okay.
So I gave him a little saucer of milk, because he was a small cat at the time.
And then the next day, I had to go, and I didn't let him in, because I was like, I don't know you, bro.
But I gave him something.
When I left the house.
You want to take it slow.
I'm not talking about moving in.
I don't want to change your life.
You know what I'm saying?
You want to go easy.
You don't want to crush the bunny, so to speak.
And at the time, I was like, look, I do not have space for a cat box in this house.
And, you know, like, let's just, like, figure this out.
So I left the house again.
And then Susan came by, now making an appearance in our show today for the second time, and she left me what was, I think, then a note that said, what's the deal with this super cool cat?
And I was like, oh, now Susan thinks it's super cool.
Oh, boy.
I don't know how long it took for me to open the door and let the cat walk in, but Lewis just walked in.
Boy, see how it starts out, though?
Just lots of little subtle things that accumulate.
Yeah.
The cat was like, okay, I live here now.
Did you end up getting a cat box, or was Lewis an outside cat?
Lewis was an outside cat, and that's why Lewis died.
Yeah, didn't Lewis run into another animal?
Yeah, well, he did, and then he ran.
Oh, and there was a car.
I think he was running from an animal when he got hit by a car.
And it devastated us all.
We're still talking about him 15 years later.
I don't normally say things like this, especially to other people, but I think you should open your heart to having an animal friend in your life.
Can you just pump the brakes for one fucking second?
I didn't say go buy a fucking cat.
I said, open your heart, John.
Open your heart to me.
Open my heart.
Okay.
All right.
I'll open.
Well, I mean, because here's the other thing.
Even if you don't, because like, you know, possession is nine tenths of the law.
But if you love something, let it free.
And what I'm saying is like, you know, this could be something in there.
Maybe it could just be a ravine cat.
You don't know, but you don't know.
If you don't try to force it into being the thing that you expect, there's a lot of beautiful serendipity in this world.
Well, and the thing is, the ravine is full of little critters that I don't actually want a cat murdering.
Oh, like what?
You got voles, or what do you got?
Well, all that kind of thing, like little lizards and birds.
Really?
Yeah, little birds.
This ravine, huh, it sounds like a little ecosystem.
Yeah.
It's that's what I'm trying to make.
And one of the things that the ecosystem does not include a local flora or fauna is a calico cat that's down there killing birds.
So it's complicated.
And also, I don't want an owl.
I don't know how many cats owls typically eat.
I mean, I think the owls around here are also like eating squirrels and rabbits.
I think of owls as being like more going for mice.
Yeah.
Well, and there are a lot of rabbits.
Really?
What color are they?
Well, they're brown and black and they're never white.
But earlier this year, my mom, in some situation where she came in in the middle of the morning and woke me up, sat at the end of my bed, she said...
She said, I haven't seen any rabbits lately.
Where are all the rabbits?
She came in and you were sleeping.
And I was like, what?
I don't know.
Can we do this right now?
And she said, you know, four years ago we had a million rabbits.
And I was like, I don't know.
You didn't have an answer for it right then?
No.
And then she must have conjured them because this is one of those years where it's just rabbits everywhere.
And I think that's when the owls and the coyotes are also like, hey, why don't we have a bunch of babies too?
And then the rabbits all go kind of down.
And you're having sort of a critter baby boom.
And so there's rabbits everywhere.
And I know for a fact that I'm going to start finding half babies.
eating rabbits because that's what happens when we get a lot of rabbits and the rabbits aren't so smart.
Rabbits don't think of themselves as a target, but I think a homeowner should be aware that for a lot of, you know, that rabbit is a target.
Every once in a while you meet a rabbit that's smart, that stays, that goes from one place to another where an owl can't get it.
And I always, I'm like, Hey, you're one of those rabbits.
You're like the rabbit.
You're like a watershed.
Like a Western bar or like a museum or just, just like coverage.
Yeah, just a western bar, I guess.
We don't have very many of those around here.
Bunny on the bull, they call it.
But, you know, the bunnies that are just like, I'm not just sitting out in the middle of the yard.
And sometimes they're a little less skittish.
Yeah, exactly.
We had one the other day.
We were playing pickleball because we live in the suburbs.
Do you have a special outfit for that?
Yes.
And Marla was like, look at this rabbit.
And there was a rabbit right outside the fence of the pickleball court.
What?
And it was a baby.
Isn't pickleball loud?
Everybody's always complaining about pickleball.
It didn't scare the rabbit away.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
And we got down next to the rabbit on our side of the fence.
And this rabbit understood fence.
enough that it was like was low oh it's got concepts yeah and marlo was like it's not running like this rabbit should be yeah yeah yeah and the rabbit was just like but it was also kind of under a bush and there was no way any predator i mean a coyote probably john i know i'm just repeating what you said but i admire that
I liked it.
Maybe the bar's not open yet, but just getting some kind of coverage, something that you just got to figure out.
It's like the guy says, the two guys are out walking around, the tiger starts chasing them, and the one guy starts running.
I know you know this anecdote, but in the anecdote, the first guy who's running, he's running away, and the second guy says, hey, why are you running?
You can't outrun a tiger.
He says, I don't need to be faster than the tiger.
I just need to be faster than you.
That's right.
I think about that a lot.
That's very Sopranos, that thing.
It is.
There was a thing, I don't have this in front of me, but I recall reading an environmental ethics class, second or third year of college.
And I remember reading something, I think it was called Playing God in Yellowstone or something like that.
And you probably are aware of this, but it's kind of like the Game of Life, I guess, or one of those things where it's like, they were like, hey, you know what?
It's crazy.
Oh, shit.
What was the, it was coyotes and I want to say deer.
But it was something where, like, oh, no, they've overfed all and they've eaten all the deer.
So, long story short, you can just jump into this horrible positive feedback loop at any point.
But they introduce fresh targets and meat.
But you know that thing I'm talking about where, like, okay, first there's not enough food so the coyotes die.
And then there's too much food.
You know what I'm saying?
That kind of thing.
Yeah, sure.
That's what I call playing God in that case.
It's like you can't just go in and by fiat change the population of an ecosystem and expect it to work in a way that you find desirable.
Well, you might not be able to change anything at all.
And what you do change, again, could be very disproportionate to what you expected because it works sort of chaotically.
Well, you know, there was that, there was that thing that happened in Yellowstone where they reintroduced the wolves and through one of these processes of like, well, now the, now the deer have predators.
And so there aren't so many deer and now the plants are this and that.
And it actually changed the course of a river.
and they come on yeah they could trace the fact that the wolves were there to the fact that the beavers did something and this and that and all of a sudden like it's all connected john it's an ecosystem that's right they had changed the whole of the area and not just because they were thinking like we got too many deer let's put some wolves in here and it turned out no everything oh we just need to introduce more clover and everything will be fine
Yeah, that's right.
All we need is this one kind of barracuda in the Great Lakes, and it'll take care of all the muscles that came in the ballast water of the ships from the... You know, butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon, the possums are living in your house.
Just saying.
You're exactly right.
You're exactly right.
And there's a kind of woodpecker here that does the thing where it gets up on people's chimneys.
Do you know that I have... We have a mutual friend who has been... It was a topic on a program.
We have a friend who was deeply harassed by a bird like that.
Did you know this?
Syracuse had a woodpecker on his chimney and it drove him fucking insane.
Yeah, because it gets up there and it's trying to signal...
I think he eventually might have resorted to a wrist rocket.
Yeah.
Just to discourage it.
And it just rattles the horse.
Well, it's like hitting a drum.
Yeah.
Well, so my house does not have... We don't have any metal inserts here because we're using 1950s technology.
Oh, you know, that terracotta will be fine.
The people like down the block from me have one of these things and it absolutely drove them nuts to the point that the guy was hiding in a bush outside of the house.
I think maybe with a BB gun.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Trying to get this.
These critters.
We love these critters.
I mean, that's the whole point of this program at this juncture.
But like at the same time, they can really drive a person crazy.
I don't know if you remember what I went through trying to catch one mouse in my garage.
But I set up an entire panopticon.
Like I had like three different security cameras down there triggered.
And I won't get into it because, you know, the Internet doesn't like anybody taking care of rodents at a house.
And they have a lot of strong ideas about how to be.
Is that right?
oh yeah you're supposed to use some really humane traps where it like falls onto a bed and then has an opportunity to get an associate's degree oh oh that's nice yeah my associate's degree is a glue trap but i don't tell people that and you're so cruel i mean the thing about a mouse i could persuade the mouse to leave it wouldn't be a problem but i can't have boxes that i discover full of stuff that looks like thistle by the way if you drop some of the thistle it really looks like mouse poop and people in the house are not loving that
But you know what I'm saying?
You don't control that.
You don't control that.
You're just paying rent.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
We had a similar thing.
You become a crazy person, though.
Like when you can't find a cricket or, you know, all those famous kinds of things that drive a person crazy.
You know what I mean?
Like you get really weird and pretty soon you find yourself with a child's BB gun in a bush trying to shoot a bird.
Yeah.
We don't have crickets here.
So that's one less thing we have to worry about.
We got silverfish a little bit right now.
Oh, silverfish.
We got silverfish a little bit, and right now I just came in this morning to my private office, and I have a few ants, so I'm going to need to deal with that.
Ants are a real problem.
Yeah.
But, you know, once again, an ant can't get inside a black banana.
An ant can't get inside a black banana.
So if it's in the ravine, it's not bioavailable.
I don't think a mouse can get it.
Yeah, like a mouse isn't going to chew into a black banana either.
I don't know, man.
I found some stuff in our garage a month or two ago.
Because, you know, they do that thing where you're like, oh, shit.
Yeah.
fuck here's like a bag with a hole in it and then you open it and it's like oh it's baby clothes that these things have been eating and using for bedding and then you get you see all the like spit out plastic parts of like what it didn't want to eat
It's really upsetting to find.
I'm not against rodents at all.
I love almost all creatures.
I know you do.
I know that about you.
You're a creature lover.
I tolerate most creatures.
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, I'm not trying to play God, Yellowstone or otherwise.
Well, and this is the thing.
We live on the West Coast, so the number of creatures that we have to contend with is relatively small compared to the creatures that you have to deal with if you live in...
You mentioned Australia earlier.
I think Australia, Northern Australia, and you're going to run into some fucking shit.
Yeah, well, and in Florida, right?
I remember a guy, a friend of mine in Florida, who took a hit off of his graphics bong and a flying cockroach flew into his mouth.
I was once standing in a little general waiting for my turn to play Defender, not Stargate, but Defender.
And a guy who was playing, he was sort of like mini teens.
He was a little fidgety.
I'll never forget this.
And he starts kind of fidgeting a little bit with his right foot and a roach crawled out of his sneaker while he was playing.
Oh, oh.
So the thing is, though, even if you've never had a roach in your sneaker, now you're going to think about that.
They can get anywhere.
I've spent a lot of time in roach places.
I've seen a lot of roaches.
But that's one of the reasons you live in the Northwest.
The only things we have here are spiders.
Ants.
Only things.
You're underselling your spiders.
Okay, well, the spiders are... You're no Queensland, but, I mean, I think you do.
Don't you have your fair share of spiders?
There are quite a few spiders, but none of them are super big.
They're not, you know, they don't crawl like some kind of robot.
They're just, you know, they're not little, but they're the size of a half dollar.
There's a lot of critters in Florida.
Um...
That you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
Yeah.
Like we were watching on a program we're watching right now.
There's a storyline involving alligators.
And I was telling my kid about how like you just sometimes, not a lot, but you'll just see alligators in Florida.
Famously, one time when we were visiting from Cincinnati and my mom and grandma went to the, as we used to call it, the beauty parlor.
They walked out to go to their automobile and there was like a four foot alligator just like right outside the door.
I was mowing a lawn once.
from one of my mom's properties and i saw an alligator come up out of one of those little like those ponds those are those are the the um the possums they're out of control but can i show you pound for pound what i think might be my least favorite of the critters in florida you ready yes okay check your messages okay and assume for the moment that that is a normal-sized man's hand
All right, here we go.
Okay, you got a man's hand.
That hand is pretty white.
Wait a minute.
That's a real thing?
It's literally looking at the camera.
Yeah, it's got an eyeline.
And what we're looking at here, I'll look up the actual name of this, but it's a kind of grasshopper.
It's a locust.
It's a grasshopper.
And here's the thing.
Like I was complaining recently about how my eyebrow hairs get so long.
I feel like I can hear them hitting my glasses.
I don't like animals when an animal crosses that threshold of being something you can like really pretty distinctly hear and even maybe know what kind of animal.
So what I would do is I go out in my yard and I was pretty good at snapping towels and I would kill them by snapping them with a towel.
Is there any more Florida anecdote that you have about me?
That has got to be a skill set, a very narrow skill set, right?
Right, right.
And like Jackie Chan, I would never use it against another man, but just so people are clear here, and I'll put a photo, this might be the show art, is I would say this is at least three inches long, and it looks more like a shrimp.
I know they're somewhat related, but it looks more like a langostino than an insect.
Yes.
Now, wait a minute.
Grasshoppers and shrimp are related?
I mean, everything's related.
Well, that's true.
No, but I mean, aren't they arthropods?
You know, birds and dinosaurs.
You ever seen the movie Jurassic Park?
It's a lot to think about.
Sure, sure, sure.
You build it and they will come.
Wasn't that the tagline?
That's what they said.
You're scientists.
We're so busy deciding if people wanted to see large grasshoppers.
Anyways, and I hate these.
I hate the little hairy legs.
I hate their giant eyes.
I hate their two-inch long antennae.
What are they trying to do?
I don't know.
What are they going after?
Well, here's what I say, John.
I don't know if you go to Google Images and search for Florida grasshopper.
I don't know if I want to.
Well, I'm just giving you context.
First of all, they are grasshoppers, which means they have the weird backwards knees that are kind of upsetting.
Can I just be clear, though?
This is four to nine times bigger than the grasshoppers you think of as crickets, right?
Then you think, we fed crickets to our lizard back in the day.
I didn't love that.
I didn't like introducing crickets to our Yellowstone, which in this case was our house.
But your lizard loved them, my dad.
Mmm!
I'll send you one of my favorite photos of the lizard and show you why we eventually stopped doing that.
It's on his nose.
It's literally on his nose.
And if you haven't already picked up on this, there's a phoneme that I associate first with our lizard, but now with almost every animal.
Because I've realized that almost every animal in its resting state has a face that says this.
Hmm.
So it's picture Bando sitting there in his cage in his vivarium with a with a cricket on his nose and his face is just going He's not mad.
He's not hungry Yeah, but do you just go camp out in the corner for a year
So really, he's just like, nah.
I don't know, man.
I don't know if it's something where he's so lazy.
I have so many endless videos of us feeding him hornworms.
And he can't be fucked to pursue.
Boy, he's dead now.
But he couldn't be fucked to pursue anything.
He would not chase anything.
You had to hold it very still in comically large tweezers.
We have tweezers that are about a foot long.
You hold it, and Bando's tongue starts to come out a little bit, and you're like, okay, I think he's going to do it.
And he goes, completely misses it.
Airball.
Just air cricket.
How would Bando have survived in the wild?
Very poorly.
He had a very broad center of gravity, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
Okay.
No, no, no.
Keep going.
I don't think he would have survived.
But what do you think of those grasshoppers?
Do you think you want to see more of those?
I don't.
No.
I don't.
You know, it's the type of thing where because we don't have them, I get to pretend that they don't exist.
Oh, man.
Isn't that handy in the end?
Yeah.
Ultimately.
It's wonderful.
You know, the world is full of those things where because you don't have them, you can pretend they don't exist.
I've got a take on that.
A lot of people live their whole lives like that.
Like, that doesn't exist.
But there's a slight subtle corollary to that, I think, which is also that, like, you don't always have to seek everything out.
Right.
I'm going to keep that real general.
But you don't have to just keep putting everything in your eyes.
It's true.
It's so true.
We forget it, don't we, at our peril, John?
Yeah, leave it.
Leave it.
Leave it.
That's still my motto.
Leave it.
Leave it.
This morning I woke up and there was a DM on my Facebook where somebody said,
and i have this has been four years i haven't gotten a single one of these somebody's like fuck you bean dad huh and i was like like today yeah somebody somebody set aside some time to share that with you yeah and so i was like hmm and i went and looked at their facebook uh profile and they had seven friends okay
And I thought... I bet several of them are brands.
I said, you know what?
Leave it.
Leave it.
Well, as you know, I'm pretty popular with Carnation Instant Milk.
Someone out there did this morning, maybe based on my post about the Cocteau Twins or whatever, who knows, decided when they woke up this morning, they were like, you know what?
You know what?
Bean Dad.
Bean Dad.
That's where... I'm going to spend a little time this morning on that.
and uh either you know i just want to talk about the speckle maker either they looked me up or they've been following me the whole time chalked you down a little bit yeah i don't know i don't know four years four years it's been since the last person since the last like bearded guy bearded non-player character was like hey funky man you're bad yeah this person just out of nowhere and then oh and the other thing about it was their bio was complaining about gen z brain rot
oh and i was like okay well you're talking you're you're telling a story about yourself but i mean complaining about it not as a gen z person but like as a somebody as the generation that i don't mention anymore that's one above gen z the ones that have you know that have in rank that have that have a lot of things to say uh on online uh so and one of those things this morning was fuck you bean dick oh
Yeah.
Yeah.
You didn't respond, right?
No, I said leave it.
You said leave it.
Just like your mother would say to your gorgeous, was it Borzoi?
What was Gibson?
Yeah, Borzoi.
Gorgeous Borzoi Gibson.
Leave it.
Leave it.
We could all learn from that, couldn't we?
I try to leave it a lot of the time.
I've said it enough times that now people in my life will say, leave it.
And I go, look, I'm not the one that came into your bedroom and said, fix this lamp.
No, you did not.
You just think you're going to back into that?
So suddenly you've claimed that and now you're going to tell me to leave it?
Yeah, me?
I'm going to leave it?
You?
But in this economy?
I got a missed call yesterday.
You did?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yesterday, early evening.
And it said that it was from your mom.
Yeah.
And I'm always thrilled to talk to your mom, but I thought, huh, you know, oh, gosh, I hope everything's okay.
Yeah, right, right.
So I did a very generation above Gen Z thing, which is I texted and I said, hey, I'm sorry, Mr. Call.
Is everything okay?
Also, hello.
Yes.
She got back to me, and she said— She likes texting.
Oh, good.
And she said it was a butt dial.
And I said, this is the best butt dial I've gotten this month.
And we caught up a little bit, and I sent a photo of the little Lord, and we talked a little bit.
And it was really nice.
Yeah.
Because, you know, I'm thinking, you know, something catastrophic happened.
You know, you never know.
Sure, what's going on?
Yeah, what's going on?
How do you get a call from my mom?
It's a butt dial.
Isn't that cute?
Yeah, I don't know how that happens.
But, you know, it's her butt, not mine.
But I'm a big fan of hers.
Yeah, well, she's at that age when she really is into birds.
And I'm butt dialing people all the time now.
This is interesting.
By my count now, we've got at least three people, amongst you and the small council, we've got at least three people who are currently into birds.
Is your little one interested in birds?
I'm guessing not.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Couldn't be.
Are there any critters?
Now, have you gotten browbeaten about the acquisition of a mammal for the house or other pet?
Well, yes.
As a matter of fact, because there's a cat over at that house, and it's literally the worst living creature.
Oh, I hate those cats.
I feel like God put this cat here.
And the people put up with them for so long.
And that's true in this family, too.
They're like, oh, the cat.
Does Ari love the cat?
Yes.
And the cat is a miserable son of a bitch.
There's nothing to love about this.
I don't even know the cat's name.
I'm just mad.
That's just terrible.
But the other day at the pickleball court, the little one is like, I want a rabbit.
No, no.
Oh, I don't usually respond like that, John, but I don't know a lot about rabbits, but I've heard they are a handful.
In fact, I have on numerous occasions used it as a metaphor.
Oh, something that's unnecessarily or perhaps ungratifyingly very complicated.
I've heard Amy Sedaris talk about this, taking care of rabbits.
Is that right?
Oh, they're very easily disturbed.
You can upset a rabbit.
Now listen, here's the thing.
This is what they call natural selection.
If you just got little Mr. Pickleball, which would be a sweet name for the bunny, if you got a bunny that could hide from owls and was not upset by Pickleball or children, that's a mitzvah.
But I would not just go out and willy-nilly start picking up a bunch of neurodivergent rabbits to stick in a hutch.
That's a lot of work, John.
I mean, I feel this way too.
I feel like I was like, you want to wrap it.
I'm pushing the choir, aren't I?
A little bit.
You want to wrap it because it's the last thing you saw.
And that is, I mean, I understand that.
Believe me, because I want almost everything I own is, I got it because it was the last thing I saw.
And I'm like, wow, look at that.
It's so, that's so, look at that.
I need that.
Maybe this one made me happy.
Maybe this, maybe this.
You know what?
Yeah.
It could be a bunny.
This is the pocket knife.
I didn't have a pocket knife before that made me happy.
Maybe this one will.
And I'm all better now.
Yeah, all better.