This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Strange love a star woman teaches, referring to the lyrics of the Star Trek theme song.

The show title refers to Merlin going back and forth on denying and believing the alleged effects of MSG on the body.

Sponsor Cards Against Humanity had Molly Lewis to record a jingle and it simply says: ”John Roderick”.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

John starting to walk everywhere again (RL138)

John is full of Sushi after a big lunch. It is rainy and misty in Seattle and he was trying to walk a bit more. He used to walk all over, they used to call him Mr. Walk Everywhere guy, but now he doesn’t anymore and it is having a profound effect on his life to go this many years without walking everywhere, so now he is trying to walk everywhere again and it is interesting how many encounters with other human beings he has while walking around. Because John lives in the street people are shaking their cups full of pennies at him and he is having encounters with them, he is tipping his hat at people, bumping into people in the street, he has seen old friends, it is really great!

Target (RL138)

The other night John bumped into a guy who was coming out of Target and he caught a glimpse in his bag and started commenting on the things he bought, which is not a thing you do when you are sitting at home commenting on people’s Facebook page. Merlin loves Target, but he is not good with the mall. There is a Target in the big Downtown Super Center called the Metreon where he and his daughter go to the movies a lot and as part of their journey they always stop by Target. They usually buy candy for the movie there, but don’t tell anybody! That is a huge life hack!

John’s problem with Target is that all the little boy clothes are pretty cute and cool, with motorcycles, skulls & crossbones, Minecraft, and then you go over to the little girl clothes and they are just waitress outfits from the Pantyhose Junction. It is a place to go and shop for a niece that you don’t really like. Merlin bought his daughter a lot of boys clothes there because they have a lot of superhero stuff, but there is not a lot in the girls section that his daughter finds attractive. They have more dress-up princess clothes than actual little girl clothes. We have reached peak princess in this culture!

Princess-clothes for little girls (RL138)

John’s little girl likes pink princess crap and he understands that Disney has figured it out, they inflate the eyeball just the right amount that it looks somewhere between a baby doll and a Grey. If real human beings had eyeballs that big they would be horrifying, half of their face would be eyeballs and they would be very vulnerable and couldn’t go into battle that way. They also don’t have the brow structure to protect them from a playground ball. The surface tension alone would be unsustainable.

John appreciates why it is happening, no part of him feels like it is part of a grander conspiracy, but it is part of a smaller conspiracy where people are making money off of it and they are tapping a penned-up desire for pink poofy furly (?) stuff, which seemed to be in John’s daughter from the day she was born. Still, John believes there is no room for any more princesses in the world. A princess would not make a very good driver. First of all she would be wearing those shoes, and second of all she would not be thinking about other drives, but about her high-level princess shit: She has balls to have and slippers to loose and pumpkins to get in and whatever all those new princesses are doing.

John wouldn’t want to be in line behind a princess in a store or in a restaurant, he wouldn’t want to have a princess be his server or his flight attendant. As we get more and more princesses there are fewer and fewer public spaces that he would want to share with a princess, so where are all of them going to go? Las Vegas?

When Merlin was a kid the whole narrative of princesses was about being rescued by a dude and that is maybe still a subtext, but it is not nearly as prominent a story as it used to be. It is a lot more just about wearing pink and purple. Also there is magic. But even if you are an empowered princess, you are not going to be laboring at the wheel. They talk about Rumpelstiltskin and if that was a princess or whatever she was (she was the Miller’s daughter). He splits himself in half in the end, a little bit like cut the Baby in Two, John’s favorite Joe Pernice songs (Baby in Two by the Pernice Brothers).

Pernice Brothers (RL138)

John did a lot of touring with the Pernice Brothers. They will do a hell of a Pop song! They had a couple of records in the early 2000s that were pretty great. They are bullet-proof Pop songs in the boy/guitar/singer vein. Merlin thinks of the song Working Girls and even includes a snippet into the audio. He saw them live and they were good, a little proto-lumbersexual. John thinks that Joe Pernice should be a lot more famous, except he looks like Bob Via (?). At some point he did an Elvis Castello on us with a peculiar beard and he had gained some weight and he looked he was here to put a new porch on the back of the house.

He had a whole philosophy of Rock music: He was a working class hero, and he was making Pop music for the people and he was not in it to get big and famous, but he would do tours old-style through Schenectady and Poughkeepsie, and six town in Pennsylvania that you might have heard of because the name was on the bottom of an oil can, but not a town you would ever think to go. Allentown was the big town. John would ask him: ”What about Philadelphia?” - ”Well, sure we could play there, but wouldn’t you rather play six shows in little towns where the church is boarded up?” When they are starting boarding up the church in a town, that is the end of the season.

Merlin going back and forth about believing in the effects of MSG, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (RL138)

Merlin is so full of MSG because he had a pound of Chow Mein and fried fish for lunch. John thought Merlin was a MSG Denier, but he goes back and forth on the skeptics board. Right now he thinks his feeling has to do with grease and wheat, which is one of the great Cat Stevens records, or was it Joni Mitchell? Grease and wheat is what this whole country is founded upon. The Quakers brought the wheat and the Pilgrims brought the grease.

Some people say they feel MSG strongly and suddenly in a way that they describe as an MSG headache. Merlin sometimes feels like there is still food in his mouth because there is still taste there. For John the feeling of MSG is like a wet tie that he can’t get off and is stuck in front of his face, cutting off the blood to his scalp. But John can’t avoid it, he lives on the Pacific rim and people just flatly lie about it. You ask them: ”Is there MSG in this food?” and you see them using a yard stick to smooth the MSG on the top of a 4-cup measuring cup and they say: ”No! MSG? What are you talking about?” and he pours that MSG into anything they are cooking.

Most MSG users are MSG deniers who don’t believe that the MSG sufferers have real problems. It is like talking to somebody who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or chronic pain and they say that they suffer from this syndrome, but it is impossible to get inside them and know exactly what they are experiencing. Or like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which Merlin thought he had but it turns out he doesn’t, but he has a different thing that is hard to diagnose. IBS is the worst, one day you have constipation and one day you have diarrhea and there is no way to prove that you have it and you sound like a crazy person.

A couple of years ago John had a lot of fatigue, not anything close to what he imagines Chronic Fatigue Syndrome seems like, but even a small amount of constant fatigue and depression is a tremendous burden. CFS sounds like a total nightmare, but the biggest nightmare for those people is that everywhere they go people are just: ”What? Have a Mountain Dew!” - ”No, seriously! Chronic Fatigue Syndrome! Why would I make that up?” There is no way to measure pain except on a scale from 1-5.

Merlin’s daughter leaving him messages in an envelope (RL138)

John has started doing that with his daughter because she will scream and ask for a Candy Cane, and he will ask her on a scale from 1-5, how big of a deal it is for her emotionally and she will invariably say it is a 1. It is not that big of a deal! The other day she was doing her new routine, saying: ”I like everybody except Daddy!” - ”On a scale of 1-5, how much do you not like Daddy?” - ”3!” That was the top score on any scale she has ever gotten to. That is 60% not liking Daddy!

Merlin’s daughter can write now and she will often leave him an envelope at night and say that he can’t open this until the morning, often with little messages like a little heart drawing, but the other day one said: ”You are going to die!” John is at his office, he is looking out at other people on this cloudy and windy day and he feels very good right now. He doesn’t have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but Belly Full of Sushi Syndrome.

Merlin looked at a Tumblr that is his and his daughter’s favorite website that is pictures of cute animals that people scraped off of Reddit. He also read most of a very long article on Slate about Outrage on the Internet. They went through each day of the year and made a whole calendar about what people were most outraged about. Merlin found that very calming.

Social Justice Kittens Calendar (RL138)

One of John’s good friends on the Twitter called LiarTownUSA made a thing called the Social Justice Kittens Calendar and he sent John a copy and he has been looking at it every day, taking a little bit of peace. Merlin linked to that on his Tumblr and a lot of people got mad. It is a shame that they didn’t get why it is funny because it is funny for 5 different reasons. There is an actual joke there, no-one is being harmed, there are pictures of kittens saying exactly the kind of asinine things that people with Internet-access say, except it is a cat saying it and it is really fucking funny, and not getting the joke is the character of the people that are being mocked in that calendar.

TV shows, lyrics to the Star Trek theme song (RL138)

Merlin starts singing his new theme song to overpower what John was just saying, apparently in the melody of the Star Trek theme, but there are words to it, which John didn’t know: ”Beyond the rim of the star-light, my love is wand’ring in star-flight!” It is pretty bad! John was a bigger fan of The Twilight Zone than of Star Trek, at a time when there were 3 channels on TV and then public television and late at night you would see Star Trek reruns or Twilight Zone reruns or both. Merlin got Star Trek at 5-6pm very consistently, right after Gilligan’s Island, and when he discovered Twilight Zone it was squarely at 11pm.

In Seattle they had Gilligan’s Island and also Hogan’s Heroes and The Munsters and Leave It to Beaver, which came in the afternoons between 2-5pm. StarTrek was considered more sophisticated and it was later on at night. Merlin had Crosswits at 10:30pm, the game show with crossword puzzles and funny celebrities. In Seattle at 10:30 pm people were busy sharpening their whittling tools, there was no time for crossword-puzzle-based game shows.

Gene Roddenberry at one point was called upon what the lyrics to the song were:

Beyond The rim of the star-light
My love Is wand’ring in star-flight
I know He’ll find in star-clustered reaches
Love, Strange love a star woman teaches.

It doesn’t even match the song! He is coming out of the 1950s/60s science fiction author culture like Harlan Ellison where they ultimately picture the cover of Heavy Metal Magazine over and over again where Conan is standing there with a sword and the girl in the ripped bikini (see here). There is a lot of that in Star Trek and maybe that song is like the poetry from a different planet.

A big part of the early science fiction is that a lot of teenage boys were not getting Earth love and were looking for strange love coming from Mars women. There was a green lady who just floated. Both John and Merlin are still super into that! If only they could have a green lady who just glided, or glid. Merlin would follow her to the star-clustered reaches.

The oldest kid on John’s street growing up was called Gary Klingon. He was actually really cool. The name sounds Polish, or an Americanization of something from Europe, maybe a German person who lived in Gdansk, formerly Danzig, which is also the name of the singer from the Misfits (Glenn Danzig). It was an all-German town, but it is now in Poland. Maybe they had names like Klingon? John has a visceral reaction to this memory. The boy had a giant model of the Starship Enterprise in his room, you could take the top off and see inside the bridge.

John’s neighborhood was all one-story houses, except the Klingon’s house was the only house with a second story and his bedroom was on the second floor, which was already pretty amazing. John didn’t go there a lot because he was so much older, but it was a lucky treat when you could go into his room and see this space shit. Pretty hot stuff! Then he grew up and got a car and drove away and John never saw him again. Star Trek was very prominent on John’s landscape, particularly in the years before Star Wars when he was already 9 years old, but from the years of 4 he was pretty vested in Star Trek.

Toys in the 1970s, John’s Guns of Navarone playset (RL138)

There was the animated show on Saturday mornings. Merlin never got into it. It seemed stiff to him when he was a kid. Some of his nerdier friends really liked it. Everybody he knew liked Star Wars, that was huge, it took over his life for 2 years. Merlin got the Trash Compactor Playset for Christmas, but it was pretty crappy and was not very high up in the pantheon of Star Wars toys. John’s friend had it and John could only play with it occasionally and he thought it was pretty impressive.

Merlin really liked the life-sized Han’s blaster that was cool and heavy and felt really solid. He had an X-Wing fighter where you pushed the R2-D2 and it made a noise. That was a great toy! The trash compactor didn’t have great build quality. Merlin had all the figures and he still has them and gave them to his daughter. The light sabers were already chewed off in 1978. He mailed off to the Kenner people and one day in the mail 4 Star Wars characters arrived (see RL197). It was the greatest day in his life, almost as great as the day when he got the KISS albums for free.

John’s number one playset was the Guns of Navarone playset (see RL15, RW41). It was a mid-1970s playset based on the original The Guns of Navarone film that came out after Force 10 from Navarone. David Niven is in the original, whom John loves, he is the British bomb guy who never got promoted and was very aristocratic. Anthony Quinn is in there and Gregory Peck. It is an amazing film. Force 10 from Navarone is the one with Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, and Barbara Bach.

That movie had nothing to do with the mountain of the original movie, but it is about a dam, but somehow the toy company made the Guns of Navarone playset because presumably every 8-year old kid in America had watched that 20-year old movie in black and white with their dad at night on the late movie. John saw The Longest Day 42 times because his dad never turned off at the late movie and it was always a World War II movies, that was how John learned about the world.

It was a giant playset with two canons and an elevator, you could assault this mountain fortress with your little green Army men every day for 1000 years and never get bored. If John still had it he would probably still play with it. Some of Merlin’s favorite toys were ones he got from other kids from the 1960s, like Tarzan and a whole shoebox full of original Batman cards from 1966, a remote controlled car that was 10 years old and still worked, which you can hardly imagine today.

John inherited from an older cousin a James Bond DB5 Aston Martin by Corgi Toys. Merlin’s friends collected those, they were so cool. The license plate flipped, the passenger seat was an ejector seat, a metal shield sprung up in the back that was bullet-proof, the headlights were guns, all these things actually worked. His cousin bought this in 1964 and played with it and John got it in 1974 and it all still worked. He wishes he still had that and he will probably spend all night on eBay looking for it.

Video game chairs (RL138)

Merlin found a video of a guy’s basement showing the Guns of Navarone playset and in the background there is a Video Game chair. It is like a shitty footless rocking chair and you can sit on the floor without sitting on the floor, like a sex bean bag, except for video games and you are alone. How many fraternity guys die every year going down stairs in a video game chair? If John had that, the first thing he would do back when he was drinking as a young person, would be to take it to the top of the biggest flight of stairs he could find. Those chairs look a lot like children’s chairs that you put in a car. Merlin thinks it is a little bit like a love doll and it would take a lot of self-knowledge to spend a lot of money on one of these. John doesn’t want to say that those are built just for jacking it, but they don’t look very comfortable in the lower back area.

Merlin has a terrible relationship with car seats and he ends up cutting his hand when he has to do something serious with them like for example in a rental car. John has a bad scar on his hand from the freaking car seat. The most amazing thing about Merlin’s kid’s car seat is that there was no way to put it down so it didn’t fall over. In the TV-show Friends Joey and Chandler had some TV watching chairs and it was a big moment in the show when they got them and all across America there was a collective sigh of relief from men between the ages of 15-50 because they had validated the idea that getting a chair for the sole purpose of sitting and watching TV was a progressive and fun choice. Maybe those video game chairs are a form of saying: ”Mom, I am never leaving!” on conversely: ”I just made $400 million in my IPO and I own an 11.000 sqft house in Palo Alto and the only furnishing is two jack-off chairs and my 8-person Jacuzzi is empty and full of dirty laundry and there is one Lamborghini poster on my bedroom wall so I have something to look at when I go to sleep at night!”

John being the ideal person to sit on a board of directors of a young startup (RL138)

John has been around, he has travelled and seen a bit of the world. Just because he is not on a lot of boards of directors right now doesn’t mean he hasn’t been asked. He hasn’t been asked enough. At some point some listener who has tremendous good fortune and when they search their feelings they will realize that everything they know they learned from John and Merlin and when that happens they are going to send a white Hummer limo to both their houses.

They are going to open the door and are standing there in their bathrobes, Merlin holding a half-eaten hot-dog, John holding a sword, maybe he won’t even be wearing a bathrobe, and the driver will hand them a giant bag full of bitcoins and an engraved invitation to be on the board of directors of the most famous company in the world. Maybe John will also be retroactively made a co-founder.

John will be a fixer like The Wolf from Pulp Fiction who never actually touches anything, stands there in his tuxedo with his Accra NSX, and just says: ”You! Clean up the brains! You! Throw your clothes in a bag!” and then Julia Sweeney is going to take this car full of dead bodies to her father’s junkyard and it is going to disappear, and for this problem-solving John is going to get paid an astronomical sum of money.

The old guard of Corporate America isn’t ever going to relinquish that authority to somebody like John who comes from an outside perspective, but the young people, particularly the ones who listen to their program, who wear Spread Collar shirts and who potentially have video game chairs, are going to admit that they are over their head because they are surrounded by former Google vice presidents who have degrees in finance who are telling them what they should do, but they don’t trust any of them. Merlin thinks John is an early stage un-disruptor because those company have too many people disrupting things.

John will order them to throw in the garbage whatever they are drinking because now they are going to be drinking straight-up coffee out of coffee cups, not paper cups, and if one person says ”Core competency” while he is in the room he will kick them in the balls.

They only need maybe 3 people over the course of the next 25 years who wake up one day and realize that they are over their head, that they have more resources than they know what to do with, they are surrounded by sharks and by people who they don’t like or trust, none of those are what they need, but they need someone with a scimitar who can tell them what they can drink, first off! All these guys who went to Thunderbird business college roll in there and see a meeting table strewn with Starbucks cups and they don’t see shit about them because they are not thinking at the micro level.

”And you: Sit up in your chair, God dammit! And put your shoes back on!” John is the old Bill Cosby before it came out. The first thing they are going to do is build some God-damn walls between people’s desks, and the ping pong table goes! Somebody has got to be the bad guy, and that is John’s core competency!