This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: There’s no lucky fun, referring to online dictionaries where you don’t make any accidental discoveries by reading the next word on the page.

The show title refers to John’s car mechanic who drives a Dodge Viper that John thinks is an absolutely ridiculous car that only an 11-year old could have designed, but it has gone the fastest lap around the Nürburgring, so at least it has done that.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

People who get up early and people who sleep late (RL106)

It is very early, but it is good to go early, and people have been telling John his whole life that people who get up early are morally superior to people who sleep late, but that is only because he is not up early enough to defend himself. The Earlies are running the world, and a lot of what they are getting away with with their particular personality type is because they are literally up 3 hours early, or sometimes so much earlier as if they are living in a different parallel universe.

Back in the old days John would routinely stay up all night and he never had a walk of shame exactly because he is too full of pride, but he would walk down the boulevard in the morning, wearing last night’s clothes, and he would see all the Earlies pooling and congregating in their little early clatches, they are walking strong and fast, and they look like different people with different physiognomies.

John wouldn’t wake up before 11am, neither by preference nor by nature. He spent his whole life trying to reconcile that with a world that feels like 11am is pretty much too late to get anything done. You will not be out of the house before 12pm, at which point the stores are already starting to close. So many places close at 5pm which seems crazy! Why isn’t every place open until 8pm? What kind of place opens at 8am? Who is doing anything at 8am besides dragging their sorry ass somewhere?

The problem is that the world runs 9-5, and in the past you really had to plan and think ahead, you couldn’t buy stuff online or you couldn’t buy stuff on Christmas. Yesterday Merlin’s local post office, which is like something from East Germany in the 1970s, started cutting hours and is now closing at 5pm instead of 6pm, which has a huge impact on people who actually need to do anything with that place. It is the whole premise behind Daylight Savings Time, a crazy solution to a simple problem. They think that we are still getting up to plow? Just keep the stores open later! Keep the time the same, move the opening hours!

When Merlin was in college in the late 1980s gas stations were open all night. They didn’t yet have Super Walmarts then, but as recently as 5-8 years ago, the Super Walmart is open all night long, and it really serves an ironic sad purpose for all the people who work in these crazy jobs at crazy hours, they wheel in there with their 3 kids at 2am because that is when they can go get groceries.

Super Walmart (RL106)

The first time John ever saw a Super Walmart in Florida (see RL17, RL317) he was flabbergasted. He had to cross an 11-lane boulevard, go down into a storm ditch that was again 4 lanes wide, and up the other side and across a long misty arc-light-lit parking lot. It was his first time in Florida and he was hyper-vigilant for alligators. In Alaska he knows how to not get eaten by various things, but in Florida where he had never been he presumed you didn’t just put a bell on your backpack to scare the alligators away like it does the bears. Merlin would worry that such an alligator-bell would draw attention.

It was like John’s fist trip to Vietnam: The air is heavy, it is hot, and alligators were foremost in his mind, and whenever he thinks of Walmart even now he thinks of alligators. Merlin is that way with New Orleans and Nutria (see RL40), he only ever needed to see one Nutria in his entire life to put him right into alligator country. They raised them to make fake beaver coats, but that market dropped out and they released thousands of them and now they breed prodigiously. They are the face of Satan, they are horrifying creatures, they are rats the size of beavers with big yellow teeth that make a sound like a Korean water ghost.

The first time Merlin walked into a Super Walmart it was like Valhalla, it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his life because at the time he and his girlfriend were moving to another place and they needed tarp to cover up a U-Haul trailer and they ended up buying tires and frozen peas, he had never seen a Walmart that had food, and they ended up spending 2 hours in there because they had literally everything and it was all $1.20.

It was an illuminating experience for a flaming Liberal to go back to Florida for about 10 days in the mid-2000s when his mom was recovering from surgery. His grandmother was still alive and she was very old and ill and had Alzheimer’s and his mom had some movement stuff. You pull into the Walmart, you pull up right next to the door because everybody has a handicap tap in Florida, they just give it to you and if you don’t want it you give it back. You get a Rascal Scooter with a basket on them.

In San Francisco, if you can find a space at all, you park on the roof of the Safeway, the elevator is probably not working or sometimes it stops working while you are in it, you get carts downstairs or upstairs. It is amazing if you have lived in a pseudo-urban area like Merlin or John to pull into a Walmart that has literally hundreds of parking spaces that they have never filled except maybe on Christmas Eve. The worst space at a Walmart is the best space at Merlin’s local mall. At a Walmart you get two Rascals, you drive away, and $120 later you have filled a truck, and you can do it at 2am.

When Merlin left for college in 1986 they went to Walmart to buy all the pots and pans and at that point there were still Strip Malls everywhere with retail stores, there were so many drug stores and grocery stores, and this 8-block area where there used to be all these different stores is now one ridiculously large building with ample parking. You can’t build those in the city limits of San Francisco and they don’t have them in Seattle either because of Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail.

John’s blue 100 foot ethernet cable that he used to connect directly to the router while recording (RL106)

When they first started doing this podcast Merlin sent John a giant long bright-blue ethernet cable (John calls it hyperlink cable), a direct-in cable for the Internet. The first time they tried to do this television program John was doing it on the WiFi, but it didn’t sound good and then this blue cable showed up within hours because of Amazon. For a long time John was at the end of the show unplugging the 100 foot ethernet cable that ran down the stairs to the router across the hall and in the other wing, plug the WiFi back in, and coil up the cable all the way up the stairs and put it behind the computer.

Over time he just got used to the blue cable running through the house, and everybody got used to it, and it ended up just not getting coiled up and it just runs through the house, through 3 doorways and right across a pretty highly trafficked area. Over time doors have been shut on the blue cable many times and now the long blue cable looks like it has been chewed upon by a Nutria, it is completely mangled, and if any real electricity would be running through it it would be a hazard, and the NSA probably comes in and sweeps up all the Internet that spills out of it and catalogs it.

John realized as he was looking at it today that this thing is fast approaching uselessness, and he went on Amazon to get a new one, and in the course of being on Amazon even for 5 minutes he filled up a shopping cart with $700 worth of stuff, told himself that he can’t just spend $700 on all this stuff and didn’t buy any of it and the blue cable is still in the shopping bag. This cable now belongs in the Roderick-On museum and he can’t part with it as it has value because at least half of all the Roderick on the Line episode have gone through it. John thinks that Amazon needs to start opening physical stores in a big building with a parking lot.

For a long time Merlin was John’s computer guy who would also spin a story whenever John asked him something and pretty soon he would be down at the Mac Store buying Apple TV. John has thought about getting someone in to draw him ethernet upstairs so he doesn’t need his blue hyperlink cable anymore, but there are a few mistakes he has made in life: When he bought his house there was cable TV in every single room and at the outside of the house there was a cable junction box that looked like Doc Ock with his normal two human hands and six octopus hands.

At one point the house was used as a place where a lot of people lived and everybody had TV in their room (see House) but a junction box like this divides the signal in a way that every TV only gets a 6th of the power. John wanted the most powerful bandwidth and asked his cable guy to take all these cables off and give him just one big pipe, which comes into the house in the middle of the living room, but he just took out the junction box and did not spend the afternoon taking all the cabling down off the outside of the house, which John only realized later that his house is held together by coaxial cable.

John didn’t think so long as to realize that he is not going to have a computer terminal in the living room and he has either given himself a router behind a couch and he constantly has to move the couch from the wall to reset the router, or he has to run a blue cable over the hills and dales over to where he wants the Internet to be. Merlin says that it would not be a big deal to rout an ethernet drop upstairs. Ethernet Drops sounds like John’s favorite candy or a great Retro Jazz Band.

Online dictionaries (RL106)

John has started buying dictionaries in addition to the dictionaries he already owns, which are several. The main flaw of online dictionaries is that they are so concerned with profiting from the idea of a dictionary by throwing advertisements up all around the word you are trying to look up. They have misjudged the best thing about a dictionary, which is that you go there to look up the word Djinn and you see Djibouti and pretty soon you are reading the dictionary and make some amazing discovery through the accidental proximity of dictionary findings.

In dictionaries on the Internet you can look up any word at any time, but there is no lucky fun to them. Wikipedia has the hyperlink and is very much how we used to do with encyclopedias. The time John spent reading the encyclopedia as a child absolutely trumped every school he ever went to. During 3rd-6th grade he learned more out of encyclopedias, completely unguided, unstructured learning, you just want to look something up and you are there for the rest of the afternoon. Hyperlink allows for that, although you never really feel you are getting all the way into a (rabbit hole).

Oftentimes the words on either side of the word you looked up are related to the word you looked up and you are developing all this word context that is crucial to understanding language and to understanding concepts. In a way the opposite is true with online stores. When he goes to the giant brick and mortar Amazon store, looking for a 100-foot hyperlink cable, it is a store full of things, he is just looking for the cable, maybe they get him with a point-of-purchase Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, but for the most part he is just there to get the one thing.

But if John goes on Amazon.com, looking for a thing, they are genius about saying that if you would get one more thing you would get free shipping. He doesn’t have Amazon Prime because then he would order even more stuff. This is why Merlin doesn’t have a car anymore, because if you buy a car you are going to have to find ways to use it and you just end up spending more money. He would rather put the money into some Uber or MUNI passes.

As John’s dad said when John took away his car: ”I need it to do stuff, I have appointments!” - ”What appointments do you go to?” - ”I got to go to the car repair guy!” It was a social thing for him, hanging out and shooting the shit with the car guy as he slowly swindled him out of thousands of dollars. He had also decided that the only guy he would let work on his airplane lived in Alturas California, it is the kind of thing where you sit next to a guy on a commercial flight and the guy turns out to be an airplane mechanic and you own an airplane and you decide to come see him in Alturas California.

John’s dad landing on random small airstrips (RL106)

In one of his many cross-country flights he used to fly along and see a little unmanned airstrip and he would just put her down. You pull out your map, find the little airport, look up the correct frequency, and you say over the radio: ”Attention uncontrolled airspace! I am Cessna 634 Mike Alpha, I am on final approach!” and you look around and if there is nobody in the air or on the airstrip, you just put her down. That is America right there! Merlin thought you have to stick to your flight plan and you would have a big bag, but you can change your flight plan over the radio, you would just file a new flight plan.

John and his dad would do this all the time and one times when John was about 10 years old they landed on a little dirt airstrip that had clearly been carved out of the forest up in Yukon territories way North in Alaska out in the middle of nowhere. They were taxiing down this little dirt runway and a guy came out of the forrest holding a shotgun. John was thrilled, he was expecting dad to do what he always did, which is turn the engine off, open the door, climb out, and they were going to meet this very interesting man who was holding a gun.

But John’s dad went ”Whoooa!”, and he threw the throttle forward and spun the plane around in a Dukes of Hazard style with dirt flying, kicking up sticks, and he headed down the runway at a clip. He didn’t say anything until they were at 2000 feet and then he said: ”No, that man was explaining to us non-verbally that this was not a visit that he was interested in!” In Alaska of course dad put slightly bigger tires on the plane and he landed on the side of the river on a stretch of mud. Putting it down isn’t the challenge, but the challenge is getting it back up off the river bank.

He would put himself down on those airstrips, and when he was flying along in the corner of Northern California and South Eastern Oregon and Nevada that should much more properly just be an un-bordered ungoverened area because there is nothing there. Why would you even pay a surveyor? You could put a new state in there and call it Winnemucka or Prisonton, and no-one would know or care.

At some point he landed on an airstrip, taxied up to a hangar, and John has been with him many times when he has done this, and the airport looks abandoned at first, you are taxiing down the runway, pull off to the side, puttering along, there are a couple of old World War II Quonset Hut hangars that all look completely abandoned, you are slowly driving by, and invariably a door bangs open in a building made out of corrugated metal, and an old man comes out, literally wearing overalls, wiping his hands on a rag, and dad goes: ”Hey!” and points the plane at the guy, cuts the motor, and the guy comes over.

He is absolutely and invariably one of the most laconic men you will ever meet, dad goes out: ”Hey! How is it going!” - ”Yeap!” and that is it and then dad is holding up both ends of the conversation. Then it turns out that they both fought in World War II and John’s dad was an officer in the Navy and the guy was a Petty Officer in the Navy and there develops right away some ancient officer / enlisted man dynamic between them that only they understand and only they are comfortable with.

John will walk around some sun-blaced airstrip, kicking rocks while dad and this guy go into a hangar and sit and talk about God only knows what, dad buys a baseball hat from him that says ”Alturas Chevron Avgas and Feed” and they go back in the plane and fly away.

One of these time he met this guy who he decides is going to be his mechanic and the only guy he is going to let work on his plane, and because he lives in Alaska, once a year for 15 years he went on a 4-day walkabout each direction in his airplane. John ended up spending more time in Alturas… It is an old West town that still no-one had discovered and turned into a mountain biking town, but it was still the type of place where you pay for your shot with a silver dollar, there are still problems between the ranchers and the rest of the demographics, like the meth dealers, trying to decide who owns the territory.

Like with his car mechanic, this was a world that he didn’t understand. He did not know how to fix his own airplane engine and he didn’t know how to fix his own car, so those things became magical realms and he figured out he just needed to find one guy that he trusted and then once he decided he trusted the guy, even if all empirical evidence indicated that this guy was not trustworthy and that he was ripping him off and was a jerk and a bastard, John’s dad would privilege their friendship from that point on. His last car mechanic was billing him $400 a month for work he was doing on an $800 car.

Merlin’s family also always had a go-to person. His granddad was born in 1903, he was a Shriner and a Freemason and everything was a secret deal. He would do strange gestures to security people that made Merlin think he was part of a cabal.

John’s Palestinian trusted mechanic (RL106)

John has an auto-mechanic in Seattle who is an Arab from Palestine, but he is a Messianic Christian (see RL270). He is a very nice guy, he drives a Dodge Viper with a V10 engine with 8.4 liter. The Dodge hot rod division was at one point given free reign by someone like Lee Iacocca to built The Supercar, and rather than building an attractive looking, good handling sports-car, they took a truck motor from a dump truck and put it in the front of a car that only an 11-year old could have designed. John always thought those cars were jokes for somebody for whom a Corvette is too subtle and a PT Cruiser is too conservative.

The other day John was looking up the fastest laps around the Nürburgring (John has a really hard time pronouncing that and Merlin really thinks that name sounds funny) in Germany that is the standard in Europe when you are testing out a car. Everybody in the sports car world wants to get around this ring at least once in their life. It appears that the fastest lap ever is in a Dodge Viper, faster than any Porsche or Ferrari. That just seems crazy! John asks Merlin to look up RUF Yellowbird Nürburgring, a video of a guy driving a super-hopped-up Porsche 911 barefoot around the Nürburgring and it is phenomenal, it is better than a rollercoaster.

This mechanic has been recommended to John’s sister or mom by somebody and he has become the trusted mechanic character in their lives. John has called him a few times and told him that he was thinking about getting a certain car and every time he replied that John should never get that car, and John was putting it all in his hands. The fact that he himself drives a Viper is very confusing to John, but independently he has found this Nürburgring Confirmation, which is at least something.

John buying his house on the top of the market (RL106)

After John bought his house the market immediately crashed. He was at the YMCA with his dad together with a whole group of elder statesmen who ended up in their declining years going to Water Aerobics, guys who once shook Henry Kissinger’s hand, and now they were doing Water Aerobics to Paula Abdul at the Tacoma YMCA. She started out as a dancer and she was a liquorish person, which is a little Ping Pong, no a Lakers person, a cheerleader, and she was one of The Fly Girls on the TV show Living Color with that guy Wayans.

John had just bought his first house and one of those old sons of bitches said: ”Good job, at the top of the market!” - ”You have seen some ups and downs in your days, is that what you are telling me? You have seen the cycle? You can peer through the cheese cloth that the rest of us are looking through, and you see the cycle of time? Asshole!”, but his words rang in John’s head as the market crashed and his house was not worth what he had paid for it.

For several years after that he thought that this was the final straw and he was never going to participate in Wall Street ever again, and he was not going to join this dumb-ass American economy that was such a blatant lie and that time after time has duped him and his family personally and all of us collectively into believing that it is anything other than a shell game. It is just a giant rip-off, like two people at a Roulette table where they have a button under the counter.

John loved his house, but he had this psychic tension about it that he had been rooked somehow and the goal was to get up above water again and then get out of everything and go live in a shipping container. But now that the economy has recovered John is back in the black, he still likes his house, and now his mortgage payment is less than any rent would be in this crazy times. He has been there for a while and maybe he should get some ethernet drops or rehab that wing of the house that he was meaning to do, maybe he should build a Yoga studio in the back yard? Maybe he could have the fireplace taken out and replaced with a Franklin Stove, dig out the basement and build a media room?

Wanting to build a monkhole like in the James Bond movie Skyfall (RL106)

John has some outbuildings, and of course he would want a tunnel network connecting them all. If Merlin ever achieved anything like success, the single thing he would want to have at his house are tunnels like Batman. You need a way to get out off the property, like Professor X with the X-Mansion.

What infuriated John about the movie Skyfall is: James Bond goes to his childhood mansion in Northern Scotland, the caretaker is still there, there is a beautiful monkhole, he goes behind the fireplace down into a secret passage, and somehow the basement is full of barrels of gunpowder that they must have been stacking up since the Revolutionary War. Multiple times people follow this monkhole, a passage that a man can walk in upright, but somehow there are 200 yards they travel under the grass which we never see, presumably unmaintained and unlit, and then we see them reappear in the yard, but we never see the opening, we just see it from over the top. Is it just open to the world? Then the entire thing is going to be filled with bears!

John would likes to see that technology revealed because he is also interested in building a monkhole passage way to the fen, just in case he ever has to escape from a very poorly explained Barcelona bad guy who was living on an island in China with computers, taking over the world, but really he wants revenge. It is a terrible movie, but Merlin thinks it is a good movie. The problem with that monkhole is that 200 yards of it plus a door go unexplained. What about upkeep? It is Scotland, it is a very wet place, this thing should have caved in. And even if you assumed that the caretaker guy is also maintaining the monkhole, stockpiling muskets and sabers and cannon balls, there is still this whole business that you just pop up in the garden like the groundhog in Caddyshack. No, thank you! That thing would be full of bears.

As the outro Merlin plays the theme from Caddyshack called I’m Alright by Kenny Loggins.