This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: He didn’t believe in friendship, referring to John’s Hungarian friend Arpad’s friend Zoltan who would sell home-made magic tricks in the parking lot of Die Toten Hosen concerts, and Arpad would sell things like friendship bracelets, but he didn’t believe in friendship.

The show title refers to Merlin’s total disbelieve that cutting a hole in a popcorn container to get your date to touch your dick is even a thing and them talking about adolescent horniness.

Warning: This episode of Roderick on the Line contains spoilers for popular holiday characters, candid discussions of never-nudes, and graphic depictions of penises in snack foods. Listener discretion is advised.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Egg in a cup (RL208)

John is reading about Dexys Midnight Runners and is eating his new special breakdast [sic] life hack, which is egg in a cup. ”Chicken in a basket, picking out dough” (actually ”Chicken in the bread pan pickin’ out dough” from the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels Band) Merlin has only done the Girl Scout thing where you use a shot-glas because Girl Scouts drop a shot glass of egg into a beer, it is called the gentleman’s Mimosa. He has done a Toad in the hole where you knock out some toasted bread and make an egg in the middle of that.

Merlin guesses that egg in a cup is something a go-go-yuppie in the 1980s would do that involves poaching an egg in a coffee cup in the microwave, which is right on. It is a thought technology! John is going to be convicted as a serial killer because he is going to blow so many minds right now and they will know him by his trail of death. You take an egg, crack it into a coffee cup, put a fork in, stir it once to break the yolk, most of the egg is still intact as an egg, and you put it in the microwave for 30 seconds (see also RL232 and FS108), you pull it out, you stir it three times, scarping it off the sides and the bottom of the cup, and you put it in 20 more seconds. Even taking into account the stirs it is a flat minute until you have the perfect egg.

Merlin has the basic office cooking setup: The second-cheapest microwave from Target and the Costco dorm refrigerator that everybody has. The microwave is almost certainly not dangerous and it is 84% certain it is not irradiating Merlin. He keeps the door closed when he is not using it. Sometimes John adds a few bits of cheddar or a little salt & pepper. If you put two eggs in a coffee cup you are pushing your luck, but two eggs in a beer stein is a whole meal. You can also add some shaved butter or thinly sliced prosciutto ham. You have to pierce it because otherwise it will explode and you have to account for physics and for science, and as we know science is love and love is music (see RL207).

Merlin has had eggs in artisanal places. Especially in New Zealand and Canadia they know from eggs! They also got incredible bacon in New Zealand that is beyond Irish bacon. It is like a ham-ish bacon steak. Hamish Bacon, John loved his books. It was not the guy from Aztec Camera, that was his father. The Canadians have 40 different kinds of bacon. They don’t call it Canadian bacon, just like the French don’t call it French Toast.

Eating almost spoiled food (RL208)

Merlin is going to try that because he wants to eat less bread and less sugar and he continues to struggle with that because every convenience food in the world involves bread and sugar. Merlin’s problem is that he forgets to eat which is at odds with his family who are serial snackers and they eat dinner like a snack while he is a dad in a 1950s sitcom who wants to sit there with his TV tray and have his Swanson. He wants stuff around that he can eat quickly that isn’t total junk and eggs have been good to him. Another thing that John’s generation doesn’t know about eggs is that they don’t need to be refrigerated.

John does leave butter out on the counter, covered in a little butter dish. On hot days when hit is clearly softening he will put it in the fridge. His mom has a strong feeling about rancidness, and all fat-based foods will get rancid which affects their taste, but not necessarily the edibility. You can eat rancid butter! Merlin’s friend Dr. Don is always advising him on these things. There isn’t one way that food can go bad, but there is spoilage and other ways that are not dangerous. John is on the bleeding edge of spoiled food, he is the Chuck Yaeger of the sound barrier of eating almost spoiled food. He can see the curvature of the Earth and all he can hear is the sound of his own breath in his helmet.

John’s mom having grown up on a farm (RL208)

His mom has this farm gal wisdom about things that has now transmuted through 60 years of city life. If you give her a live chicken - Merlin gave her a wallet once and John is still carrying it - and a plastic fork she would be able to turn that chicken into food. It wouldn’t be pretty, but she has knowledge of every step and she lacks queasiness and sentimentality. She has seen her grandfather kill a chicken by swinging it around by its head. There is the image of granddad with a hatchet and a stump out in the yard and you put the chicken’s neck across the stump and whack it with the hatchet and supposedly it will run around headless with blood spurting out.

John’s mom used to can chickens by putting a whole chicken into a jar, boil it, and stick a lid on it, a mason jar, a bell jar, not The Bell Jar. In the basement on the wall in the larder were all the canned chickens in a jar. She tells the story of her grandfather, and John has never quite figured it out because he is so busy taking mental notes and there are additional questions he doesn’t have time to ask, taking chickens into the basement and chop their heads off and the chicken would run around in the basement with the blood spurting. Why wouldn’t you do it in the yard?

It probably wasn’t a rec room basement with Bumper Pool and a Farrah Fawcett poster, but it was a classic basement that was full of potatoes in a giant bin, surely a coal hopper with a way in which the coal man can deliver coal through an outside door down a coal chute, and you have shelves full of jar with chickens and fruits and vegetables so you can survive the winter. She had a very low opinion of the back-to-the-landers in the 1960s and about the whirly mustache stuff her feeling is: ”Do you know how hard that is? You have no sense how hard that is! No-one does that because it is cute!” It is great to have 6 chickens and go out and get eggs from them, that is adorable, but if you really try to live off of those chickens your life becomes a Hobbesian Hellscape very fast.

They would take the sopping wet sheets out in the winter and hang them on the clothes lines because there is no better way to dry them and you would go out after a while with a laundry racket and beat the sheets and the ice would break off. All by way of saying: You left egg and butter out on the counter and you left a big pot of lard on the stove and whenever you needed to cook an egg you dipped a spoon in the lard pot and fried the egg in lard, which is something that has been lost. We don’t even know what eggs taste like, we are not even living!

Bands that had to legally change names in parts of the world (RL208)

They do call it Wham UK in England. The Charlatans were one time legally required to be Charlatans UK. What about Dinosaur Jr? Is that legal? There had been an old band called Dinosaur and so they had to call themselves Dinosaur Jr. Dinosaur was a German band like Can. The hippies were really doing Kraut Rock. 99% of all hippies were actually doing Kraut Rock. You might find yourself living in a Shotgun Shack. John listened to Neu!, they were spectacular!

Grunge, Die Toten Hosen (RL208)

To Merlin Kraftwerk is to Krautrock as Nirvana is to Grunge. If you listen to enough Kraut Rock, then Kraftwerk doesn’t seem like a Kraut Rock band anymore. Neu! and Can are more classically considered Kraut Rock bands. John adds that, unlike what Merlin said, Kraftwerk is to Krautrock as Nirvana is to Punk because Nirvana basically defined Grunge which didn’t exist before. To Merlin at the time Nirvana did not sound to him like other things that were considered Grunge. They are closer to a Mudhoney than a Pearl Jam. John adds that the word Grunge was a retroactive appellation. Nirvana didn’t sound like Grunge, but until Nirvana there was no such thing as Grunge. Mark Arm (from Mudhoney) coined the term, but he did it sarcastically.

Merlin says that it is not totally dissimilar from The Beatles and the British Invasion. The British Invasion bands don’t sound that much like The Beatles except for those who just sound like The Beatles, like the Animals and the Kinks are British Invasion bands, and Paul Revere & the Raiders was a great band, as was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Die Toten Hosen means The Dead Trousers, they are basically The Dead Milkmen, a jokey name, but about pants. John is not even sure what constitutes a joke in German band names. They might even still be a band, the are the Scorpions of weird Punky German Hip Hop.

John’s Hungarian friend Arpad, seeing a Sheryl Crow concert in Vienna after Metallica had been cancelled (RL208)

John had a Hungarian friend named Arpad who was very into Die Toten Hosen and travelled around with them. They don’t have a Grateful Dead vibe at all, but they do have a Grateful Dead component in that people travel around with them and sell things in the parking lot. Arpad had a friend named Zoltan who was a Hungarian living in Romania, and he made magic tricks for kids out of match boxes that he would sell, things like you put a quarter in one side and push it out the other side and where did the quarter go? He would sell that for a couple of Pfennings in the parking lot of a Die Toten Hosen show.

Arpad didn’t do magic tricks, he did something like friendship bracelets, but he didn’t believe in friendship. It was something harder and darker. The three of them believed in friendship, and John never went to a Die Toten Hosen concert, but he did play many times with the little contraptions they built out of found materials. They had a pretty complicated relationship and John did actually go to a couple of European ren fairs (renaissance fairs) with these two and they were setting up a little card table and were selling their wares at the ren fair, and John was just wandering around the ren fair.

They were making these things in order to make enough money to go to the Die Toten Hosen shows or in Arpad’s case to buy Ramones themed clothing items. They travelled together for a little while, John went to a couple of ren fairs, and he heard a lot of stores about the Heavy Metal parking lot alternate life that they would lead, but he didn’t have any first-hand experience with it. He did tried to meet Arpad outside of Vienna one time for a Metallica concert and when they arrived at the site there was no-one there and it was just a giant empty field. It had been cancelled over a month ago, but neither one of them had any way of contacting the other one. Apparently there was also no way to know because this was pre-cellphone.

Instead they went back to Vienna and hung out and there was a summer concert on a little island in the middle of the old Danube. They had channelled the Danube a long time ago and made it into a giant super-fast-moving death canal. The Austrians are really good at that stuff, they were tall hats and really tall boots. The reason that Vienna is where it is that there is a big wide flat plane and the Danube spidered out into a huge delta, but not like the Mississippi Delta, but the river separates out into 1000 little rivulets and a big swampy morass, and in the olden times when you were travelling around it would be a very difficult river to get across, but since it has spread out into this wide swampy area it enabled you to cross it more easily.

Even though it was a swampy pestulent place you and your camp train could get across the river, and Vienna was situated at those trading crossroads. As the Austrians gathered themselves into the uniform-wearing giant cement-eagle-building empire people of much later they no longer wanted a pestulent swamp there and they channelled the Danube, which was a long time ago, even before the 19th century. As they channelled it the river became deep and fast-moving, but that wasn’t their problem, and all the little spidery little rivers that used to make up this Danube wide spot became long thin ponds.

On one of the islands in the middle of one of those ponds John and Arpad happened upon a Sheryl Crow concert. She was playing with Joe Cocker (probably June 23, 1995 at the Donauinselfest). It was Austria in the summer, people were out, there was nude sunbathing and unicycling and all the things they do. They are big walkers and they like to walk nude.

Setting birds on fire to make a lamp (RL208)

Merlin read this week that they used to set birds on fire. There is a New England bird that almost went extinct because it was the cheapest way you could tear the head off, you put a wick in it and you set the goose on fire. Taxidermy meets practical lighting. Three isues of Sunset Magazine from you we are probably going to see an artisanal goose lamp. They may not be made out of a real goose, but they might have just carved the goose out of wax.

Nevernudes (RL208)

John mentions the concept of a Nevernude. They are a kind of people who just never will ever let anyone else ever see them nude, and John’s sense is that they don’t congregate, but they nevernude in solitude. It is possible that you go on several dates with somebody and it would never come up and you would get married and you would be in the wedding bed and try to take off their blouse or their Hosen, and they won’t let you do it. John doesn’t know enough about Nevernudes to know how they do other things, like how they poop.

Merlin adds that if one person is a carnevore and the other person is a vegan, that is going to come up very quickly, and he recently read an article about how many relationships are quietly troubled by how much the people hate the TV shows the other person watches. In today’s society those things would come up, but a Nevernude might walk to the altar and later on there will be the big reveal that there won’t be a reveal. If you are somebody who wants to leave the lights off when you are having a convivial relationship, in the olden times all you had was the moonlight, you were not going to light a candle.

Maybe there is something dirty about it for them, they never show themselves and therefore they are the one who is a little bit transgressive. People are so weird and the more you learn it doesn’t get better! There are certain subcultures where everyone within that subculture does not recognize that they are part of a subculture and every one of them is a rogue agent. By definition Nevernudes are probably not going to publizice that fact about themselves. It is Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy): You can become pervers in your own way because you are doing it in solitude.

Putting himself into the mind of a Nevernude John would think to get a union suit, which is plenty of excuse to say you can’t take it off because it is one single garment with a flap at the back and you could arrange a front flap. There are going to be some nevernudes that have sex-specific garments and others that are slapping the hand away. Merlin thought that was just a joke from Arrested Development, he didn’t know it was a real thing.

The only reason John knows about it is that he knows a woman who is a Nevernude. In he description of herself she would say that shyness was a factor. In the rest of life she is nobody’s patsy, she is at the wheel, but a long time ago she decided that nobody was ever going to see her. It is a strong stand that has set in motion a clockwork, a Deus Ex Machina, which is another great Smiths album, where John is trying to put her all together in his mind.

Merlin was never dosed, not that he knows of.

Cutting a hole in the bottom of the popcorn container in the movie theater (RL208)

John asks Merlin that when he was first beginning to know other in their altogether, was he in a dark room? This is awkward. In the important first touches it was almost always in a dark place, not least because there was not a place for 14-year old kids to go to do these things, so you had to do them during E.T. in the movie theater, which was the first time Merlin was ever visited upon. Cutting a hole in the popcorn container was a whole next level thing, and it feels like an urban myth. How do you even pull that off, literally? Setting aside the hot butter, which is a key element, how do you get a hole in a popcorn container? Imagine doing literally anything in the world with your dick out in a movie theater and somebody not noticing it. It seems like The lady doth protest too much, maybe the guy just likes fucking popcorn and he wants the woman to watch, and there is probably a German name for that.

There is a kind of adulescent horniness, and we all have a different version of it from extremely horney to not at all, but there is play style of 1940s adulescent Coney Island Horniness where there is no possibility of sexual gradification except by doing these weird… isn’t it a scene in the movie Porky’s where you cut a hole in the bottom of your popcorn container? Merlin thinks it makes absolutely no sense. You want a lady to touch your dick and you have to trick her into it and you know she is going to be thrilled to accidentally touch your dick for a little bit of a second? It is also predicated on the fact that you have enough teenage horniness that you are erect all the time. They spend some time discussing how this is all possible in practice.

When you got your dick in there you wait like a panther behind a log, it is the same theory as a cigarette load, you have to be patient, you stick the cigarette load deep into the cigarette and fill the tobaco back up and put it back into the victim’s pack and then you wait and sometimes you wait a long time, and you have added the extra wrinkle of not being able to borrow a cigarette from this person. Once the dick is in the popcorn you are waiting and the thrill is in the wait. You can’t dig in there, you are not eating popcorn anymore. As soon as she understands what is happening she is going to run out of the theater and it is going to be a terrible experience, but as a teenage boy you are creating something you are going to revisit, like Ted Bundy.

John working at the news stand, the guy asking for a magazine about diapers (RL208)

One time John was sitting at his news stand in his old job where he sat on a slightly raised platform behind the cash register and read magazines about quilting and model training and foreign affairs. It was not a busy day, somebody over there was the pre-McSweeney’s Magazine, maybe the Dave Eggers Believer Magazine, the one where they started a rumor that Danny Bonaduce died (they did?), and each issue was so lovingly designed. John should have had a subscription, but he didn’t because he was working in a magazine store. Merlin has learned his lesson three different times with Harper’s and The Atlantic: As soon as he gets the subscription, by the time the next issue arrives he is not interested, whereas if he has to go to the newsstand and buy it, he enjoys it a lot more.

John was pretty sarcastic working at the news stand and one time a guy came in in a hurry and asked: ”Do you have the local paper here?” - ”What kind of a news stand would we be if we didn’t have the local paper?” - ”Thanks for making me feel like an asshole!” and he turned around and stormed out. About three years later John was involved in a group of people who would dress all in black and climb up in the middle of the night and deface billboards. They would print out new words in the same font so that the ”Chevy, the heart beat of America” truck ad would say: ”I have a small penis!”, some real culture jamming shit. One of his fellow culture jammers was talking to him and wondered where he knows John from and John said that he worked at the news stand and the guy told the story that the guy said to him: ”What kind of news stand would we be…”, but John didn’t say anything, he didn’t say: ”Now you know who I am, I am the mid-day guy!”, they were all wearing balaclavs.

One time a guy walked in and asked if they had magazines about diapers. They had a lot of magazines about stuff, they had 4 different magazines about being a ham radio operator, and so many magazines about baskets and figurines and every kind of things. ”Tell me more!” - ”Like diapers, like poopy pants” - ”Say what now?” and he literally got a shit-eating grin on his face. ”Get the fuck out of my store!” and the guy was so proud of himself, he was maybe 30 years old, and as he backed up on his way out John noticed that he was wearing diapers under his pants, and he got down from his platform: ”Get the fuck out of here!” and he was laughing and the guy was laughing because he was a very bad boy and this was the most fun he had today.

Having sex under water not being a thing (RL208)

John wonders at what point when Merlin was starting out did the lights come on. Butter, Vaseline, and handcream seem like such a good idea, but it is not. Merlin feels the same way about intercourse in water. Growing up and becoming penis-aware in the 1970s and eary 1980s he saw many images of people having intercourse in water and it became a whole thing. It is like gorilla suits and quicksand all over again. With his first lady paramour they tried it and he found it extremely difficult, it is next to impossible, and people who act like it is a normal thing that people do all the time might not have actually done it.

John adds that there are a few types that work, like the From Here to Eternity style where you are right at the tide line and as the tide is coming in and you are spending more time under water you just scoot up the beach. Merlin was talking about having sex in a hot tub, but it was a lot of work. He was sold a bill of goods in a lot of ways, there is so much out there, ZZ Top alone. They did a job on him and he can’t get into it. He couldn’t grow a beard.

There is always a step in the swimming pool or the hot tub and you have to raise the area of primary contact just enough out of the water that you can be both in the hot tub, but not in the hot tub. But that is not how they show it in the movies.

Merlin’s daughter making a crazy wall about the TV show Gravity Falls (RL208)

Merlin’s daughter has made her first crazy wall the other day, like from a scene in a movie where somebody put a bunch of documents and usually photographs on the wall and connected them using yarn. There is a very good cartoon show she likes that features elements of the Illuminati and she has strated not only researching the Illuminati on the iPad, but she has made her first crazy wall in her bedroom having these things go together, and Merlin’s favorite is a piece of paper with a question mark. There are several cyclops triangle characters wearing top-hats. His name is Bill Cipher and he is a character on this TV show (spoken by Alex Hirsch, the TV show is called Gravity Falls). They continue describing things on the crazy wall.

Merlin has not told her about the Illuminati. Like religion he is neither for or against it, but he is super-glad to know that the research is being done. If she would ask him if he used to go to church, he really loved going to church, it was very important up until the age of about 14, but he doesn’t want to start and lecture about it.

Merlin’s daughter is big on Wikipedia, they have talked about her Emilia Earhart report (see RL201), she is especially big in finding Shopkins on Google, which is a horrible toy that you need to keep your daughter away from, they are self-referencial toys about consumption and you buy it just to buy it and it is collecting shopping.

John’s daughter losing her first tooth, talking about the Tooth Fairy, wanting a Silver Dollar (RL208)

John’s daughter lost her first tooth and they talked for several days about what their familiar relationship to the Tooth Fairy was going to be and she asked if the Tooth Fairy knows Santa. Merlin is surprised John went with Santa, but between the two of them she will ask questions about Santa and John will answer them. If you talk about the Tooth Fairy, Easer Bunny and Santa Claus they have to be in the same universe and there has to be a continuity and if you see a boom mic appear in one of those stories, it better be in every one of those.

Her conclusion was that they share intel because she knows how Santa gets into the house and he probably shares that information with the Tooth Fairy. They continue describing about how they both talk to their children about the Tooth Fairy and about Santa, how they know about it and how they get into the house. Her grandfather told her that if she puts her tooth under the pillow the Tooth Fairy brings her a silver dollar, and she immediately called it the Silver-D and now John was on the hook for a Silver-D when she last night after carrying around her tiny tooth for 5 days was ready for it.

It just so happens that John has a briefcas full of various Silver-Ds, some of them just your normal ones, like your Eisenhowers, your Sacagaweas, and your Susan Bs (Susan B. Anthony, the Kennedy is a half-dollar). He also has Morgan dollars, Peace dollars, and even a US Dollar coin from 1856, and he was trying to decide which one of them is the fantasy Silver-D in his daughter’s mind. John in her place would think it is made of silver, but a Morgan Silver Dollar is wroth $50 and an Eisenhower Dollar, what if she tries to buy a candybar with it? The person in the store have probably never seen one and think it is Pokémon. Catch them all!

John decided on a Susan B. because in 1979 when they were introducing them… Nobody used the Eisenhower silver dollar because it was too big and this was the first one where the mint was banking on the idea that everybody was going to use these and they made them look almost like a fraudulent quarter and they feel like a quarter. The English Pound coin and the Spanish 100 Peseta coin are smaller, but thicker and a Pound coin feels like a Pound because it has some weight and feels thick, but it is smaller. They minted millions of Susan B. Anthony dollars and the only way it got used was that when it came out everybody said it was a collectible and grabbed as many of them as they could and put it in a sack somewhere.

Every single 1979 Susan B. Anthony Dollar is worth precisely $1 because it is still legal tender. There are a few with certain mint mark that are rarer than others. John has some of these, not because he ever fell for this dumb thing, but because his dad collected a bunch of Susan B. Anthony dollars that he was sure were going to be worth money some day and then John ended up with a poke of Susan B. Silver D’s. and he has enough of them to cover the debt through his daughter’s baby teeth. They continue talking about different coins and why faces are always shown in profile except for the Sacagawea Dollar because they wanted to show her papoose. Merlin always loved how Washington looks on the quarter.

John’s daughter getting a vintage 1970s Starr Doll (RL208)

The other day someone gave John's daughter a vintage doll from the 1970s called Starr, which is a Barbie-style doll, but she is a typical High School girl with her friends. There is a whole Starr universe where they are in a band and they have a yearbook and she is the cool girl, the cheerleader, but she is also artistic and her boyfriend is a guitar player and also a football player.

Somebody gave her Starr in the original packaging with her little shoes and hairbrush all still in the box. Had John been there for this, because of his proximity to nerd culture he might have grabbed this Starr out of her hands and looked on eBay first what this one is all about, but of course somebody had handed her this Starr doll and now the box is all shredded and ripped apart, and John went onto eBay and found out it is worth about $50 and that is nothing that he would be willing to take this thing out of his kid’s hands.

They are not participating in the collectible culture, even with her new toys. If he buys something for her it is to be destroyed and he wants her to cut this doll’s hair and to draw on her face and to chew on her and let there be nothing left of this doll when she is done playing with her. John will take it out of the packaging and sit it like she had entered the house under her own power and sat down under the tree and then deanimated, like Priss (?), ready to come alive and Karate-chop you and grab a boiling egg, but for now they are her little friends.

Merlin’s daughter learning the truth about Santa, annoying packaging (RL208)

Yesterday on July 17th 2016 was a very important day because his daughter laid out in extreme detail her entire case for the Santa problem. It came up when Merlin had purchased a new can opener that was attached to the packaging with annoying plastic ties and whenever some packaging is annoying his daughter is inclined to bring up the very famous Christmas of 2010 that was possibly the greatest Christmas that has ever been. She was 3 years old, it was a pretty good year, and she got a really cool IKEA kitchen, a really cool doll house, and the night before Merlin ans his wife were watching Goldfinger and were putting so much stuff together.

It was also the year of Toy Story and that summer right around when Toy Story 3 came out and those three movies were on constant repeat in their house twice a day. John has only ever seen Toy Story 3 and it is his Rosebud. Merlin explains that Toy Story 2 is a much better film than Toy Story 1. At this Christmas Merlin’s daughter not only got a really nice Woody, but also a really nice Buzz Lightyear, and he was rubber-banded and wired into his package. When she saw the can opener yesterday she was reminded of that Christmas and the Buzz Lightyear and that Merlin said the F-word, but she didn’t know back then what it meant. That is how Santa came up. The first time she remembers hearing the F-word and knowing what it was was from John when he was at their house.

When John was a kid his mom would spend the whole Christmas Eve not just putting together the doll house, but she would also unwrap the presents that needed to be unwrapped. If you would have to spend 16 minutes fighting the packaging before you could play with this doll, or if you couldn't play with this thing before it was built then she would build it. John has taken after that and will do the same with his daughter, not that she gets a lot of this type of present.

Merlin and his daughter had an amazing talk yesterday about how Santa wasn’t real, she didn’t cry and it really went well. He had been preparing for years that when this day comes he needs to gauge how she feels about it. She seemed to know it for a while and had just been playing this for her parents, and she is fine with it. Now it is very important that now that she is on this side of it, don’t be that kid to other kids. And also: Now she is part of the Illuminati and they want to keep doing this in their household and they need her help, even though those cookies are for no-one, and that is why it is important. Boom! Mic drop!

John and his mom still give each other presents from Santa.

It is a relief that it went well and there were lots of hugs when it was done. Merlin is probably soon going to teach her to parallel park and he has to get that in pretty fast because there are going to be self-driving cars, but don’t get John started. You are not going to believe what can fit into what once you have been to San Francisco, especially on The Castro.

John learned about Santa at about the same age when he was 8 years old, and he had a younger sibling and was brought into the fold and not only did he have to be careful around other kids, but their whole family was engaged in a conspiracy to keep this secret from the baby who was 6 years old, but his little sister probably knew that Santa was fake a long time before John did because she is a very practical person. Then they were all engaged in a conspiracy, including John’s little sister who was humoring them all to continue to santafy.

It is like the entire country treated the Bush administration: We all know that this person is not suitable and we all know that there is no actual threat to America and this is all a trumped-up thing, but each of us has a military base in our congressional district and we do not want that base closed because how are we then going to sell Mustangs, and selling Mustangs is a big part of our economy. Most Corvettes are bought by Lt. Colonels. Most of the Dodge Challengers and Mustang GTs are sold to new recruits. Merlin is sure those are the guys who put their dick in the popcorn. Thank you for your service!