This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: 1997 was a bye year, referring to there not having happened anything in 1997, it might as well have never even existed.

The show title refers to John wondering if he should surrender to letting his daughter see Frozen and being able to feel the ”Om” of surrender.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Watching videos about Samurai (RL147)

John was just watching videos of young Samurai displaying their swordsmanship skills and he is in a pretty weird mood. Not young, because a Samurai is 1000 years old, and these Samurai were in their 30s, and to acquire that level of swordsmanship at such a young age, these guys were using their swords to slice open an edamame bean. Merlin has seen one that does the move with the stick and then kicks over the water bottle, he loves those!

Somebody shot a pellet at a guy and he chopped the pellet in half. Deadpool does that in one of the X-men movies. That is a good move, but this is a real guy who is actually doing it! It was a Japanese game show.

The OMYGOD bumper sticker (RL147)

John was driving today, and the car in front of him had a bumper sticker that said: ”OMYGOD”, which reads ”Oh my God!”, but it is one of those COEXIST things where you visualized world peace. It had a very strange effect on John, which is that he said the word Om out loud and then he said it again, and pretty soon he was driving down the street, going. ”Om! Om!” George Harrison had a lot to say about this, about saying ”Om!” over and over, it is a holy word, it is going to put you in the Godhead space, and after half an hour John had been saying: ”Om!” the entire time and he feels really calm, super chilled out, and he didn’t want to stop saying ”Om!”, but he had to park his car and get out and rejoin the world.

As John was walking through the lobby of this building he was saying quietly: ”Om! Om!” and then he encountered someone pushing a cart with a bunch of papers on it and he had to stop saying: ”Om!”, because that would have weird, but then John wanted to go back somewhere where he could just say ”Om!” some more because it was really very pleasing. It is a very informal version of meditation, a walking meditation, and John was reflecting, he felt shaunty, he was ready to spin a prayer wheel and build a Mandala, he had a whole plan!

John build a lot of mandalas, they don't have to all be made of sand, but they do blow away. If he had a permanent Mandala for every sand Mandala he has built he would have a warehouse of Mandala.

Merlin has been exploring a lot of fruity things lately. One of them was a talk he listened to where this guy teaches a version of mindfulness meditation talk, but he has a version of that word that actually has three parts, a very satisfying three syllable version of ”Om!” that makes your body relax when you do it.

John has a cousin who is a practitioner of scream therapy. She and her husband have a compound in Northern California where people go and scream. It was their school, they ran a scream therapy school, and John is not sure how you measure the success of a program like that. He was about to say it was a very successful program, but earning money would be anathema to you if you were running a scream therapy school in Northern California. You probably measure the success of your scream therapy program by how many sacks of millet you have. Do people pay for it in hugs or in real money?

If you are going to have cult you are going to have an alternative therapy, you come up with a system, you got steps, there are meetings, there is usually a building, there are materials, you probably got to buy a mat. You have to have the land in the first place. In Northern California they are not giving it away!

John Lennon, The Beatles, Neil Young (RL147)

The first John Lennon record was recorded while he was in Janov's primal therapy, that really raw first album. Not the one where he was putting his hair up in a pompadour and wearing a leather jacket, that is Rock’n’Roll from 1976, that was much later. His post-Beatles career is so weird! He got a lot of credit for that, but just a few years later, Neil Young put on a pink Rockabilly suit (on the cover of Everybody’s Rockin’) and everybody dropped a ton of shit on him. They said that was the end of his career because he had officially gone into genre hell. They killed him for that record and for the album Trans.

John is a big fan of Trans, he is not transphobic. When you learn the story of Trans it is quadruply amazing. John responded to that music really positively the first time he heard it, the Vocoder really spoke to him and he liked his wraparound sunglasses and the headset microphone, the early Bluetooth, and the way he stomped around the stage like a Godzilla. John was also a big fan of Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks. That record was great! He is also a huge fan of Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Reactor, another record that gets dogged. Basically, Neil Young's late 1970s crazy time output was hugely influential on John.

Also their friend, the physicist Scram Balfour (?), loves those records. He turned Merlin on to a lot of those records that he had seen in cutout alongside the Kiss solo albums and lots of Frank Zappa records. Trans was in cutout for many years, and Reactor was the canonical cut out album, it was everywhere. John bought it for $0.99, he used to buy those cutout records, and most of the time they would be a massive disappointment, the most profound disappointment was Zappa's orchestral record (called London Symphony Orchestra). They should have had a classical music stickers on there.

The golden age of television, John’s TV cutoff when he lost interest (RL147)

When Charlie Parker got big and Bob, Cab Calloway called it Chinese music. Charlie Parker’s main riff is almost always a version of the Woody Woodpecker Song. Mind blown! Their young listeners have no idea who Woody Woodpecker is, they probably also do not know about Heckle and Jeckle and their mischievous hijinks. That was Merlin’s wife's favorite cartoon as a child, she always calls them The Magpies, which might have been a nod to Chip ’n’ Dale. They have a very Marx Brothers vibe, it is like two Grouchos. They were always extremely polite with each other, but it was a sardonic politeness. They are absolutely like Spy vs. Spy, (Sergio) Aragonés has some answering to do.

He did the marginalia in MAD. Every once in a while there would be one by somebody else and it was confusing and it infuriated John. Stop doing that! Why are you doing that? Go back to the marginalia that belongs there! He also did the marginalia for TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes, he did the dissolves between segments. John was not a regular watcher of that show. There was a cut-off for him in television land. Up to a certain point, anything that was on the television he was interested in, and he was fortunate enough to be alive during the golden age of television, especially for a kid.

1975-79 there was so much stupid shit on TV that was perfect for kids. The freaking Gong Show! The fact that they were kids during the tenure of that incredible program. They both can’t believe that show was on TV. John feels so lucky to have been 10 years old. All the garbage TV and the fact that that was the last heyday of Jackie Gleason, the golden age of entertainment, Gene Kelly was Xanadu. Fred Astaire was in that old people movie (Finian’s Rainbow?). You could turn on any variety show and it was still a Hollywood spectacle, but Kiss would be on. Those were the headliner guests of all the late night talk shows and then Robin Williams would be on there and David Bowie.

There was a moment in 1982/83 where it all gave up the ghost. John didn't get into Miami Vice and part of the problem is that it is hard for him to have his intelligence insulted, even as a child, and your intelligence is insulted by Fantasy Island, even that eight years old it felt insulting, dumber than Love Boat. Fantasy Island was supposed to be serious and John was just at the age where he realized that every single person that arrived on this island would be there to enact a sex fantasy.

If Fantasy Island were a true thing, it would just be a sex camp. If you could go to a place and they would give you whatever your fantasy, you are not going to go there to reconcile with your dead father, you are not going to go there to learn to swim for the first time, whatever those flimsy premises were, it would just be a sex farm and at 10 years old John was like: ”Wait a minute!”, not that he had any sex fantasies, but it was starting to dawn on him.

This was 1978 and there was also a lot of talk about that in the culture. That was the era where you would go to somebody's house and there would just be Oui Magazine on the coffee table, which was the sophisticated version of Penthouse and Playboy. They were all about stereo systems and mixing cocktails, but it is right there in the name: Oui is Yes in French! You got to have three different ferns in macrame plant holders in your house to even know what it means!

When you were a little younger you watched whatever the fuck was on and you were starved for it and you were prohibited by adults from watching TV all the time. When you got the chance, it didn't matter what was on, it mattered that it was on, you would flip through the five available channels, find the best thing in that half hour spot, and then you flip around and you would enjoy it. In Seattle they had four channels: ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS. Merlin in addition also had WXIX Channel 19, the big time East Coast Ohio people had an extra channel, they called it Porkopolis.

When John moved to Anchorage in 1978 you had ABC, CBS and NBC, but they were all on a 7-day time delay because the tapes were actually shipped. In the TV Guide you just made the adjustment that everything was one week later. They had this problem all the time: You go on a trip, you fly down to Seattle and John would run into some old elementary school classmates, and of course right away you are talking about the last episode of M*A*S*H because as a kid you are worried about what is happening in the Korean War, you are worried about the humanity, and John would always be a weak behind.

Then in the 1980s all of American culture began to be an assault on John’s blossoming intelligence. Bloopers & Practical Jokes, all that stuff where polished hosts were smiling at you and fake laughing as somebody got hit in the crotch with a volleyball? What is this? For Merlin 1974-79 it is bookended on the one end by his dad passing away and him becoming a latchkey child who got to watch more TV than he should have, and on the other end by his mom remarrying and him going to military school in Florida. He had such a 1970s childhood! That is a fucking after school special plot-line!

Did you have a John Denver bowl haircut? Merlin had a home haircut that was approximating a bowl because they couldn't afford a bowl! Did he carry his key around his neck on a piece of thread? For a while he did, and then he had it on a glow in the dark real estate key chain. It was the style at the time! Until John was in 9th grade he carried his house key around his neck on a red piece of yarn. Merlin thinks that is cool! He always thought it was a cool look, like tying your shirt around your waist.

John didn't feel it looked cool because every other one of his friends had a stay at home mom and he was the one with the house key. The others didn't have a house key until they went to college. The front door opens for them. They don't even have to touch the door knob because their mom is standing there looking through the keyhole with a selection of delicious Hostess products, a plate of fresh baked cookies, while John was keying into the house and there was nobody there and some cat would look over his shoulder at him and run upstairs and he tried to get the furnace to work.

Especially through 1976-78 Merlin literally didn't need the TV dial that was in the Sunday paper, he knew every primetime show exactly what time it was, even stuff he didn't watch. It was all the great shows: Alice, Happy Days, followed by Laverne & Shirley, Barney Miller, Love Boat, Fantasy Island, All In The Family, and The Jeffersons, Ms. Romano over on One Day at a Time, there was Schneider, the guy who let himself into the apartment. All John can see is Valerie Bertinelli's smiling face, she was what they used to call a Tomboy.

Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen are a classic example of people marrying their opposite sex Doppelgänger, they surely had a dog and the dog surely looked like them. Can you imagine naming your child Wolfgang Van Halen? John went to see the first reunion tour, the David Lee Roth, but with Wolfgang Van Halen on bass, and he did a very passable job, the young man.

Around that time Merlin went to military school he started being able to watch a lot less TV, but he picked it up again after he blessedly went back to public school, but: During the early 1980s there was a switch in programming at places like NBC where you have (Brandon) Tartikoff coming in. You also got Hill Street Blues which changed the way we think about dramas. The sitcoms did start getting dumber, and dumber in a less fun way. Three's Company was still around, but Mr. Roper was gone, they had Mr. Furley in there, he was a great comedian. There was Don Knotts, but once you lose Chrissy and replace her with the subsequent Chrissy's…

When people today think about dumb sitcoms, people who are old enough to have nostalgia, they think of the 1990s, the Too Many Cooks type openings, those like very silly 1990s sitcoms. People refer to 1990s sitcoms and John honestly has no idea what they are talking about, while the 1980s sitcoms he knew them all. Merlin has seen every Seinfeld many times, but he hasn’t seen a full episode of Full House or the one with Erkel, Family Matters. That was way past his time and he was playing in bands then.

The year 1997 did not exist (RL147)

John was looking up some Playmobil toys and LEGO toys the other day on the Internet because he would like to have classic LEGO, he has been very upset as LEGO have become more and more kit based and there just aren't those big bins of red, white, blue, yellow, green LEGO bricks. He doesn’t even think there were five colors. You tried to game eBay with your search terms, like ”vintage LEGO lot” and got all the ”1997 vintage LEGOs” - ”Die 1000 deaths! 1997 is not vintage anything!”, but for some people, for young people. 1997 doesn't even exist. It does not exist to John, it is an un-place!

For Merlin 1997 is the year before he moved to the new house, he was married two years at that point, about a year and a half, and musically it was before they put out their album, he doesn’t think 1997 happened, it was a bye year! For John it would be the last full year of The Bun Family Players, some might say the heyday of The Bun Family Players, their are 125 superfans, they were John’s first real big Seattle Rock band in the 1990s, they were called The Bun Family Players because they tried to pick an intentionally difficult to like name that subverted the dominant paradigm.

One of the guys, John’s best friend, really wanted them to be named something like Chunk or Pile or Dirt, because that was the fashion at the time and all the bands that were cool were all called Tool, Grunt, Tad, and Ass, but they were not a Grunge band and should have a name that reflected their difficulty and their smartness. All the bands that came out of that era all had three word names and they were all hard to listen to and they were one of them. Bun Family Players is a terrible band name, but they were not a terrible band.

John only kind of remembers where he lived in 1997.

Name a song from 1997! My Heart Will Go On was 1998. That still feels like the era where every song had a moment where the singer went: ”Yeah!”, except it was all popped up. Closing Time by Semisonic was also 1998, that is a good song, but John feels like that is a Courtney Cox song. There's an entire part of the culture that orbits around their generation that John just puts in the Courtney Cox category. She was married to the dummy David Arquette and they are the people that are in the culture that magazines are writing about, and John remembers looking at magazines and saying: ”I could not care less about them! I am trying to care less about them, but I can’t!”

Merlin feels pride when he doesn't know who people are on the cover of a magazine, but now they are both just old and don’t know who anybody is anymore, but at the time John knew who they were, he couldn't care less about them, and the fact that they were probably listening to Closing Time put that song and all the associated culture into a swirl. Merlin calls that Old Man Chunking, when you suddenly just go: ”No, that is not for me! That goes over here in this pile!” it is a little bit Ping pong, a little ageist. John did care slightly about Jennifer Aniston's still, he is worried that she didn’t get what she wanted out of life. Merlin thinks it is a Ginger and Mary Ann type situation (from Gilligan’s Island).

The double problem with the Closing Time problem is that John later on became good friends with one of the guys in the band Semisonic. John Munson is in that band, he does the music for John Moe's television show, and John has played music with him. Merlin thinks that John Munson, Dan Wilson and Jacob Slichter were a very good band (Semisonic) and he likes their song Chemistry! John Munson is an amazing guy, and John doesn't even know if he had any hand in writing Closing Time, but he is wonderful. One of the guys in his band wrote that very interesting book and John can't hate Closing Time or Semisonic and now he has to go back and revisit how he feel about David Arquette, but he doesn’t want to do that.

Merlin thinks that David Arquette might be an indie filmmaker now who wants to use Carparts for his commercial. The problem with this podcast is that they have said so many things over the years, and then one day somebody is going to come and say: ”If I start making movies with David Arquette, God Willing, Inshallah!” and then somebody who… their loyalest fans, Captn Mariam, is never going to betray them, presumably. Merlin thinks she is there as a resource, and as a librarian she is not going to tell you not to read that.

The problem with this show is that it is almost impossible to figure out where they talked about something, especially if it was more than once, and yet it is almost certain that every terrible thing that they have said will find the light of day. David Arquette might have John on a short list right now! He is probably not right now listening to the program, but if he and John make a couple of movies together, somebody is going to say: ”Hey, Dave, did you ever hear what he said about you?” John is still waiting for Dan What's-his-butt (Dan Harmon from the All the great shows story) Merlin’s wife watched his program Harmontown on Netflix while she has been sick and said it was very funny, she said it was like something John and Merlin would do, and that hurts John’s feelings.

John is convinced that Dan Harmon and John are going to be once again standing in front of each other, looking at each other, and John has no idea what is going to happen. He might look at John and say: ”You keep showing up in my Twitter feed because people are making jokes!” There was a picture of Dan Harmon at South by Southwest and a guy in the front row is wearing a Roderick on the Line T-Shirt, standing right in front of him, but John doesn’t know if Dan Harmon can see that far because he is a middle aged guy and he probably needs reading glasses like the rest of us do. Maybe he didn't even see the T-shirt, maybe if he did see it, he doesn't know what it means. Maybe if he does know what it means, he doesn't care. Who knows? But one of these days he and John are going to be stuck in an elevator together and maybe Jay Z is going to be in there and it is going to be very confusing.

Semisonic had four singles in 1996, they had two singles in 1998, and they had a single in 1999. 1997 does not exist! It is a buy year and nothing happened! Merlin could go to Wikipedia and look up what movies came out that year, but he is pretty sure, given that it is user edited, they will mostly be errors. He doesn’t remember anything that happened in 1997! John wondered if Beck put something out in 1997.

What about Either/Or (by Elliott Smith) John feels like it is 1998 (actually it was 1997), and XO (also by Elliott Smith) is 1999. Harvey Danger’s Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? might have come out in 1997 (it did!) Merlin thinks it came out in 1994 and that is an error, but in 1994 they were still playing at the Lake Union Pub and people were throwing beer bottles full of pee at them. Here we are, John doesn’t even know what year it is (it was 2015).

The problem with prequels, Star Wars and Better Call Saul (RL147)

What year did Star Wars -3 come out, the nominally first one of the series which John refuses to call episode one, but he calls it episode negative three. That came out in 1999. The third one came out in 2005.

John has started watching Better Call Saul, which he had been enjoying because he likes the star (Bob Odenkirk), he and Merlin bonded over him very early on and many of their earliest interactions were about Mr. Show. He is one of the great Americans and the best thing about Bob Odenkirk is his complete inability to do a British accent or any kind of accent. Also his singing is pretty special. ”San Francisco: doity city, filled with criminality. New Orleans: full of water!” He is terrible at accents, but he is amazing, and John also likes the protagonist of the show (Saul Goodman, Jimmy McGill).

It is the prequel problem, where the Star Wars episodes, negative three, Negative two and Negative one, the entire time you are watching all of them, and John can't speak from experience because he only watch negative one, he didn't watch negative three or negative two because he couldn't stand even the idea of Jar Jar Binks, but he imagines that you are just waiting for Darth Vader to arrive the entire time and for the things that you know to make their first appearance.

The problem with Better Call Saul is also that John is sitting there, waiting to first see these people that he already knows and what their surprise reveal is going to be. Merlin hasn’t watched the show, he has heard several things on Fresh Air about it, but he is given to believe that it really is its own entity. They are just seeding it enough, they can't resist it! That is more information already that he has to wrestle with every time he tries and watch one of these television programs, he is already wrestling with expectation, and that is not a thing that you have with a show that you have never seen, but in that case John doesn't have any interest in seeing them at all.

John wondering if he should show his daughter Frozen (RL147)

John has been really debating whether or not to show his daughter, who just recently had a birthday, Frozen, the film, which everybody raves about. None of the members of John’s family have seen it, but she is absorbing it from the culture enough. She came to him the other day and said: ”Elsa wears a blue dress and she has a song and it goes like this: Let it go, let it go, let it go!” and she walked around the house for the next 15 minutes singing Let it go, a song which he didn’t know if she had ever heard: She only had those lyrics: ”Let it go!”, singing at the top of her lungs. She knew these things, she picked them off a toilet seat, they are a contagion in their culture.

Somebody gave her a gift for her birthday with Frozen as a component of it because, like all great brands, if you wanted to buy a Heckler & Koch 9mm semiautomatic police rifle you could get a Frozen-branded one with Olof on there. John’s daughter pronounced Olaf Oolaf.

Merlin says there was a whole article in The New York Times about kids who are into Star Wars that have never seen Star Wars (maybe this one). They may not even have seen the cartoon, but some things are such a phenomenon. Merlin’s daughter has never played Minecraft, but she loves everything related to Minecraft. They bought her $10 worth of Minecraft cutouts at the Walgreens because she loves papercraft and made a bunch of little blocky sheep.

John was a member of Kiss Army in 1977 and really had only ever heard Beth, maybe Detroit Rock City.

John’s daughter unwrapped this present, brings it in, shows it to John’s 80 year old mother, who looks at the pictures of the two girls, Elsa and Anna, and said: ”They look like monsters!” and Marlo looks taken aback, and John is a little taken aback, and John’s mom continued: ”Their eyeballs are one third the size of their face area!” It is like the proportions of a baby face if you are talking about a baby Komodo Dragon or a baby Gray. They are UFOs! John’s mom said: ”They are disgusting, the big eyes, they look like lizards!” and Marlo was now looking at the Frozen characters through the eyes of her beloved Nana.

John went: ”Wait a minute! Hold on! I need to intervene! These are characters that every child that she knows thinks that these are the models of beauty and these are the princesses!” - ”They are repulsive!” Now Marlo is carrying that around today in her mind and John actually took the Frozen thing and said: ”The Frozen game is going to go live on a farm and one day we will go visit it and it will remember you!”

John has not resolved how he is going to deal with the encroachment on their lives of these things that they have not. It feels like she came home from school and she was like: ”Mom, dad, have you ever gone clear? Would you like to take a personality assessment test?” Where did this come from? John doesn’t want this in his house. He doesn't want people coming home with these things. And yet, he feels the ”Om!” of surrender! Just surrender to Frozen, it is a fait accompli, everybody is doing it.

It is the phenomenon of Merlin’s daughter's childhood where on a field trip some little boys, but definitely a legion of little girls will suddenly break into Let it go and sing the entire song. Merlin thinks it is by a Broadway star (by Idina Menzel, Merlin first says Helen Mirren).

Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Maggie Smith (RL147)

John thinks Helen Mirren is a very attractive lady. The three old lady English actresses Merlin has a crush on are Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, and Judi Dench, and they all have pictures from the 1950s with a nipple slip or whatever, they were all a little dirty and were doing some Gossamer blouse photo shoots back in 1949. One day when they were watching Harry Potter he did a lot of Maggie Smith googling. Few things make him feel lower than having a drink while he is watching Harry Potter with his daughter and looking for dirty pictures of Maggie Smith. Not dirty, but compromised, no empowered.

Judi Dench was a Christian Dior hat model in the 1960s, she went through a Twiggy phase. She is amazing! Her in the James bond movies are so great! There was probably a lot of dust-up when they announced that she was going to be M. ”She was going to BM?” (Bowel Movement) - ”Gossamer Blouse!” They both laugh really hard about that joke

”’ello gov’nor!” (Trying to talk in a Cockney accent) - ”She was only 15 years old!” (quote by Michael Caine from Get Carter, but probably a reference to The Trip where they make fun of it) - ”She gave that commode a right rogering!” (in a Cockney accent, commode = toilet, right rogering = a rough act of sexual intercourse) They don't just give those dames out to anybody. You got to really BM! That Dame comes at a cost. The Royal family was German! (reference to Merlin always claiming that Germans like to poop on each other during sex)