This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: That’s Tim Burgess, U.K, referring to the singer of The Charlatans who is not the same person as the Seattle City Council member with the same name.

The show title refers to some banter that Merlin did when they talked about living on a boat.

The audio starts with somebody whistling loudly.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Trying to load a ringtone onto the iPhone, computers being awful (RL209)

Today is the 10-year anniversary of John’s album Putting The Days To Bed by The Long Winters. Merlin still thinks about that as John’s new record, and technically it still is. One of the reasons it went by so fast is that they invented Twitter somewhere in the middle there. Before that they were all pastoralists, wandering around their fields, tending their sheep, then they stopped doing that, but the herd was still there and the scented stationary paper, the parlor, and John spent a lot of time in the parlor, tapping his pipe onto his brass pipe stand, put a little marker in his book, lay it down on the bedside table and then go upstairs to his steam-operated computer and log onto Twitter once in a while, he would see his few amusing friends there, but then wave after wave there were zombies and blood.

Both Merlin and John are not super-awake yet. For Merlin that seems unusual. He has been listening to a capella music, which is calming him down. Last night John has worked pretty hard, and has yet to succeed, to get his ringtone to be an a capella selection. Merlin can help John with that. John has downloaded two ringtone apps, but neither thing can help him and he has to go back to the Mainframe and rewrite the encryption. He hates computers, they are awful, and he is very frustrated by them. Merlin is not such a fan himself.

John looking at small house culture on Pinterest, living on a boat (RL209)

During the last 2-3 days there has been a real uptick of wherever you go on the Internet they are rude and something pops up in front of you where you are supposed to log in or whatever. John did not mean to do it, but he went onto Pinterest on a phone to look at small house culture. There are families living in places smaller than Merlin’s office, there is also a TV show about it and a feature on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website. The appeal is that you can organize everything, you can knoll, it appeals to a certain sensibility. Merlin has a friend who lives on a boat.

John went to college with a guy who after graduating instead of renting his first apartment he bought a really old dilapidated enormous motor yacht, the kind that FDR would have a summit with (Hideki) Tojo on, although they two probably never met. It was a 1936 Chris-Craft 49’ all-wood that was in horrible condition and in 1991 there was no culture around a dilapidated 1936 motor yacht like it is now where everything is expensive. In Seattle you could buy a house in the Central District for $60.000 and now that house is worth $760.000.

The other thing people forget about boats is that they are constantly changing hands because every spring 1000 people decide that they want a boat and they buy one and they realize that it is an expensive, leaky, gross-smelling hole in the water. The father of Merlin’s primary lady friend in the 1990s lived on a boat and it was quite interesting. Think about the room you have for trash, there is no space for recycling or any of that. Also you can’t have stuff, but you have to have one of this thing that does lots of things, you can’t have a DVD collection. You have to have one tool that is a screwdriver and a saw and a Bosun’s Mate.

John was driving around in his GMC RV yesterday, then he parked it in front of the house and he might drive around in it next weekend again or two weekends from now, you putter around with it when you feel like it, that is the beauty of it, but when you have a boat and you leave it unattended for two weeks, maybe it sank or it is full of water rats. Nature is more actively trying to kill a boat than any other thing. Merlin has been told by their mutual friend John Siracusa that the greatest enemy of a home owner is moisture. If you live on a boat your house is literally in water, and it is not nice water.

Merlin wonders if Colin Meloy uses his own lyrics in his Twitter bio, it is possible.

Merlin had two coffee and some Pharma stuff over the counter. His friend has reintroduced him to a sinus medicine, which gives him a little energy, but it hasn’t really kicked in yet. He listened to a capella music and it really threw him off.

John used to sit at his Mainframe computer to do his tweets. He would sit at his desk, he would log on with his modem, he would go to the Twitter website, he would read all the tweets that had been tweeted over the last day, he would chuckle, he would put his hands together and rub them, correct his knuckles, put his fingertips to the keyboard and say: ”What witticisms will I compose today?” Those were the halcyon days of tweeting, but like with all drugs John’s teeth fell out, his cheeks sunk, he is living on a boat, he can’t keep the lines right, all of a sudden everything smells like mold and his greatest enemy is moisture. Merlin likes the smell of John’s RV, although his family does not. It smells like the 1970s.

John’s friend was saying that small houses are the future, he was looking at cute cedar-shingled little homes, and John suggested him to get an Airstream. John had a pretty good friend in college who designs custom interiors for Boeing business jets. Merlin’s brother in law Sam specializes in electronics for boats. He is a nautical electronics expert. John’s sister dated a guy for a long time who was a boat electrician. It is like writing checks because those boat folks are used to everything costing more. It is like staying at a resort, but you have not as much selection, it is going to cost a lot and they just laugh at you.

John’s dad having a boat and later an airplane (RL209)

John’s dad had a boat when his mom and dad were married and she used to say that if you needed a part you go to the hardware store and get the part, or you go to the boat hardware store and pay 50x more for the same part, but it came in a package that said: ”For boats!” When she was pregnant with John she told his dad to get rid of the boat because it was all he did, he was a sailboat racer, and every weekend and every sunny day he was out, winter or summer, racing his sailboat against other sailboats.

He tried to get the entire family to be his crew, but as time went on his older kids didn’t like to be captained and John’s mom didn’t prefer to be part of a sailboat crew either, she infinitely preferred to be reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman (by John Fowles) on the dock and watch the sailboat go by. At that point in time in 1960 she had probably big sunglasses on, her hair in a kerchief, wearing 3/4 length white Capri pants, and was watching the sailboats go by, while dad was out there with a jaunty cap, which was fine with her, but when she got pregnant she told him to get rid of the boat because it is a hole in the water where you shove in money, and it took all his time, and it was not something they shared as a couple.

John’s dad sold the boat and immediately bought an airplane, which was in his style. John grew up with an airplane, but he does not have any sailing experience. People who have airplanes are a special kind of person. John has plenty of friends, some of them listen to this podcast, who are still in their youth, but are already on the airplane track. They are Millennials, and it was always the airplane and it will always be the airplane.

John grew up flying planes, he was very immersed in Alaska airplane culture, but he never fully understood it because he inherited the desire to sit on the dock, reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman with his hair in a kerchief, he would prefer reading a book to almost any sport. He likes to travel, to adventure, and to get in trouble and to do stuff, but spending 45 minutes trying to get this motor started so you can drive this motorized thing over that dune and then come back over the dune faster and try and jump it 6” in the air, that sounds fun and when they get the motor started maybe he will take a turn, but if it is up to him he would leave this thing unstarted and just sit on the dune and read.

John’s dad loved to fly! He would get in that plane, read his check lists, take the chucks out, pull all the little flags that say: ”Do not remove until it is time to fly, but you must remove it if you do want to fly!”, and John would sit and read the check list out loud: ”Carburetor heat!” - ”On!” - ”10 degrees of flaps!” - ”10 degrees of flaps!” It is super-fun, but of his own accord he would never embark upon all the lead-up to it, which is why buying an RV was a bit of a surprise. He should have a checklist for it and somebody should be yelling it at him.

The flying is ”Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh” and you look out the window, but John’s dad loved it! John would suggest to get down 500 ft off the ground and fly through a barn, but his dad would tell him that is dangerous and he was very comfortable up there at 3500 ft, but that was no adventure, they were just puttering along and pretty soon they would land somewhere. That is a thing that a certain type of person just wants, they get their license, they rent planes, then they lease their own, and they save up their money and buy a 1954 Cessna 152, then they want a (Piper PA-18) Super Cub or a Cessna 172 or 185.

It is true of everything. How many drones are there right now that are sitting at the bottom of someone’s closet and will never be flown again? It is like a Thighmaster. You get it, you don’t use it for a couple of weekends, and then you forget about it. Every time John sees a drone he wishes he had one, but if he did it would end up in the top of a closet because he doesn’t have enough use for it and watching it go up and come back down isn’t that interesting.

Building your own computer, building a Hackintosh (RL209)

There was a time when people treated their computers like highly customizable, upgradable, ”pour all your money into having your computer be super-fast and super-smoking and cool and rad” and you could even make one from scratch like their friend Dan Benjamin would do to sell them. At a certain point that became a thing that people who were mostly into video games did because you can get a super tricked-out one, you would get funny cases and make it look steam punk.

Today with the ridiculous stagnation in Apple’s hardware releases people are returning to making a Hackingtosh where you make your own Macintosh out of parts. It is a hobbyist sort of thing and you need to buy certain parts, but they probably deliberately change things in the software to keep that from begin a thing. But even if you buy a computer from Apple, it has gotten very difficult to service your own Mac, let alone alter it. In some cases you can’t even change the RAM in it.

John and Merlin both having trouble with their mental sharpness (RL209)

John noticed it with himself because he keeps trying to put his hardware into a faster and lighter body, but then it becomes increasingly difficult to service. He is getting a pretty good bandwidth, although people around him have started to say that he is not remembering everything, but he doesn’t think so. Merlin is starting to really notice some problems that make him a little fearful. Sometimes he hears himself on a podcast saying the opposite of what he meant to say. He is used to being quick on his feet and fast-tongued and he could fly through an array of 50 different options, spin the wheel and land on one thing, but now he gets that wrong a lot. He might say Thomas Mann when he means John Locke.

John has a lot going on and it requires that he is really sharp all the time and that he is on top of his game from dawn to dusk. Thousands of people depend on him and they all have to feed their families. He can’t afford to let those lines go slack for even one minute, he can’t afford to have a decrease in bandwidth or to mistake Thomas Mann for John Locke.

John feeling Billy Crudup was his actor, Merlin thinking Edward Norton (RL209)

John never believed that he was mortal or even fallible, he was a cross between Voldemort and the pope, or like Blue Penis Man (Dr. Manhattan), except he has some chinks in his moral armor (which could be ping pong) and he has a certain distance from the feelings and needs of others. For a brief period of time Billy Crudup (who played Dr. Manhattan in the movie Watchmen) felt like John’s actor. He was Blue Penis Man in the movie, and he was in Almost Famous and in Jesus’ Son. He is extremely handsome and John felt it was his actor.

Merlin had that feeling about Edward Norton (he says Ed Burns) in Fight Club. He was the American History X guy, and he had two giant but very different movies come out practically the same day. He was in Everyone Says I Love You by Woody Allen and within a year he was everywhere, like Kevin Spacey. He was versatile and committed. The first time John saw him was when he played the attorney in The People Vs. Larry Flynt, he was in the one with the Buddhist guy with Richard Gere (Primal Fear) where he was in jail and Richard Gere was defending him.

Leonardo DiCaprio was never John’s actor, he is a little too old to have much respect for him. He had good hair and did a very good job in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, but he did not like any of the subsequent things. John doesn’t mind his movies, but he is never going to be his guy. Merlin doesn’t like what he does with his facial hair because he always looks like he is in facial hair transition and that is not an enduring look for an adult man. He still feels like a teenager although he is in his 40s.

John thought Billy Crudup was going to be the biggest star in the world! Why is Matthew McConaughey winning Oscars while Billy Crudup is mowing the lawn somewhere. Merlin feels like these days everybody becomes a voice actor, or a Christian.

John’s band being compared to Dave Matthews (RL209)

John was at a party two days ago by the guy who owns the guitar store he used to work at many years ago, and he said he hasn’t seen The Long Winters play in a long time, which is because they haven’t played in a long time. The last time he felt there was a Dave Matthews vibe going on, which of course is wrong. Thanks for the non-compliment! He is a good pal otherwise. In the 1980s he was in a lot of Hair Rock bands, but when he started selling guitar he realized that Garage Rock was the cool one, which is very rarely selling records and nobody is going to care about it, but it is always going to be super-cool!

It has its cult and The Strokes were Garage Rock and became a fairly big band for a while, but even they were just a big Indie band, they were never a huge Pop band. What he was saying is that he detected a tiny element of white dude groove in The Long Winters in the sense that not all their pick strokes are down strokes. He has a point, but you could have picked a better band than Dave Matthews, including Jimi Hendrix. Maybe he wanted to cut John off at the knees a little bit, or maybe at that particular show John did one thing that made him think of Dave Matthews and he planted a flag of a thing that he remembers.

The first time Merlin heard Shapes it reminded him of Haircut 100, which makes almost no sense and was surely not intended, but he still hears a bit of Love Plus One to this day. There was nowhere John could go on in that conversation and he went back over to the barbecue.

It is very unusual that John loses a point, but he had to think at that moment for a while what he was trying to say.

Actors being small, Spy, Ghostbusters, Allison Janney, Melissa McCarthy (RL209)

Merlin peed next to Mark Wahlberg not too long ago. He is smaller than you would guess, like most actors. You can always tell that an actor is small when they have the romantic scene and they are 3” taller than the lead actress, and you cannot be a lead actress if you are taller than 4’11” (150cm). Brienne of Tarth (played by Gwendoline Christie in Game of Thrones) is over 6 feet tall (she is 191cm), she is also the lady storm trooper (in The Last Jedi) Merlin loves her!

The press secretary in The West Wing (Allison Janney) is very tall as well (she is 183cm), Merlin watched the movie Spy with her last night. John loves her as an actor. They watched Ghostbusters for the second time last night, it was equally great the second time, and Merlin wanted to give Spy a third spin, the one starring the star of Ghostbusters (the 2016 version), who played Sookie in Gillmore Girls (Melissa McCarthy).

John went to see Spy when it first came out, because he will go and see anything that has the word Spy in it. If you open a distillery in Seattle and called it Spy he would go in there and drink all the booze, he would fall right off the wagon. John laughed and laughed in this movie, it was hilarious. Paul Feig got a cast of people together, some of the same that you saw in the incredible Bridesmaids, and they can do straight in a way.

Rose Byrne is a treasure, she is so freaking funny! John fell in love with Melissa McCarthy immediately and thought she was hilarious. This should be a dumb movie, but it is not because it is totally carried by her, and all the things are on the cusp of being corny and bad are on the right side of that cusp. Merlin adores Peter Serafinowicz who in that movie is on the side of sexual assault, but so funny in that role. John had a song on Gillmore Girls, but he doesn’t know which one. Probably Pushover.

John filming #heyseattle videos for VISITseattle (RL209)

(see also RW36 and RW43)

John just spent two days making a little TV production where he did videos for the VisitSeattle group where he had a talk show set with a desk and a couch and some potted ferns on the back of a flat bed truck and over the top of it in giant old-fashioned lights it said ”#heyseattle”. A lot about the whole project scared him a little bit, maybe this was corny or maybe this was fun? It was fun, they drove around town, parked in front of the Space Needle and others and John had cards with viewer mail in Letterman style where he would read the questions and use his own knowledge to answer them.

At one point he invited Jason Finn as one of the guests because he kept getting questions about pubs and alcohol that he didn’t have any answer to. He honestly doesn’t care and you probably find the answer to that on the Internet. Jason didn’t know anything about the brew pubs anymore, he knew that 25 years ago, but at least he can talk as if he knows. At one point he had Tim Burgess, his opponent from his race for Seattle City Council as a guest. It is not the same guy as the singer for The Charlatans, that is Tim Burgess, UK.

As in all film shoots, the on-camera time is dwarfed by the amount of time sitting around in a trailer with a bunch of people, and John was talking to the make-up lady, the wardrobe lady, the second assistant camera lady, the grip, the other grip, and the key grip. It is just like Rock’n’Roll: Right away you are telling stories about the time that you met the guy from Third Eye Blind in the restroom at the Center House, it is the whole nature of the entertainment business.

A lot of production people in the Northwest want to talk about Twin Peaks and about the TV Show Northern Exposure that was supposed to take place in Alaska but was filmed in Seattle because the ones that have been around for a while all worked on those. There was a call-in radio show in Anchorage every Friday morning after it had aired and people would talk about all the inaccuracies of the program, like: ”There was a Red-throated Warbler in the show that does not live in Alaska!”, or ”That is not the kind of grass that would grow in Homer!”

John’s makeup-lady had worked on Northern Exposure during the entire run and John asked her immediately if John Corbett was nice. Yes, he was really nice! He was hanging around the Grunge scene a little bit at the time, he was part-owner of a club and he wanted to be part of the scene. A lot of the Grungy assholes reacted like: ”That Hollywood guy, what the fuck?”, but according to the makeup-lady it turned out he is really nice.

Janine Turner (RL209)

Merlin had a little thing for Janine Turner. John didn’t want to ask about her right away and his makeup-lady said they were the most wonderful cast and everything about the show was wonderful. But when John asked about Janine Turner she was quiet and John knew already what was going on, but he wanted to hear her say it. When John was working behind a bar, wiping a glass down with a towel, people would come in and order a double because they were working on Northern Exposure and they were complaining about Janine Turner.

She is a very John Roderick-type of person, she ticks all his boxes, including the clear high-maintenance that exudes right out of her. His makeup-lady said it was awful and there are all these terrible stories about terrible actors, doing things where they hold up the whole filming because they don’t like the nail polish, doing things on purpose that causes all the tech staff to have to stay another 4 hours, like spill a can of paint on the set or kick it over because you are mad. Just awful! John hasn’t really followed her career after that and maybe he should google her like he did not very long ago with Marilu Henner (see OM277, find reference to recent RotL)

Merlin doesn’t just want to bag on women, there are also a lot of terrible men like Leonardo DiCaprio. He keeps dating really young models from Sweden. Apparently Janine Turner, which is also true of Janeane Garofalo, is a rabid right-wing who had briefly a radio show where she was a shouty Trumpista, she appeared with Sarah Palin many times, dyed her hair blonde, and was shouty Sarah Palin shouter and John can only guess she is thrilled about Trump. She was always like that, but has now become more and more like that. She is a ranger who has long-horn cattle.

John’s makeup-lady said that Janine Turner always wanted to have a baby with a sports person. Merlin wonders if that falls under eugenics because she wanted to make an uber-baby. John thinks that the way successful male athletes lead their lives and the relationship with their wives all falls into a pattern, like in a baseball stadium you have the wives-section. John doesn’t know anything about it, neither to be a baseball player, married to a baseball player, nor to be a retired baseball player who is living in a house in Florida with a really tall atrium and a staircase that curves around, a McMansion thing with a 5-car garage and a boat, or in the case of John Travolta your own 707-138B.

John Travolta has a house where you can land your plane on a private strip and drive it down the road to your house. John’s pal has a business to outfit Boeing business jets with cool interior with hot tubs and stuff has probably done Travolta’s jet and it is probably very nice in there. Merlin has a friend whom John has met who has been a handler for visiting celebrities and luminaries, and she has some God-damn stories about John Travolta, which Merlin won’t share on the air, but he bets that a lot of interesting stuff happens on his plane.

Bar tricks (RL209)

Marilu Henner has a booming business swallowing copper pennies in order to get your colon to believe in Ra. The penny will leach the toxins out because of free radicals. Then you poop super-hard and a bicycle inner tube comes out (see RL23). The penny makes an amalgam with all of the mercury, it is science! R. Crumb’s brother Charles used to swallow a string and poop it, that is one of John’s favorite movies. On Merlin’s first trip to San Francisco he saw him and he did a quadruple take.

John had a really good friend who could snort a piece of spaghetti and then pull it out the back of his throat and floss his brain with a long piece of spaghetti, which was the absolute top bar trick John ever saw and he tried it many times because he really wanted to have the ability to do this. He could do the Chevy Chase ”flip a cigarette inside your mouth” trick, which was very cool. People don’t have the same respect today for those kind of bar tricks. Merlin recently started doing nasal irrigation and it comes out the other nostril and it comes out of your mouth, so he believes that there is a spaghetti pathway.

Merlin had some Zippo-tricks, he was a very lonesome latchkey and he would make up a lot of skills for himself and then practice them for weeks, like knife throwing and throwing all kinds of things. He would come up with games, like: ”Could I bank this ball off of these two walls the same way three times?”, that was some lonely kid stuff. He had games that were designed for one lonely child, but he never worked on close-up magic. Ricky Jay was a lonely kid and he just shuffled cards for 45 years and now he is on HBO.

Drew Barrymore having staff to fill up her iPod (RL209)

John had a friend whose job it was to fill up Drew Barrymore’s iPod. She was a music supervisor and knew a lot about cool music and worked in bars and clubs and was a booker, that class of people in the Rock business who have been booking agents, club managers and music supervisors, radio DJs, who know how things work and they keep up with the scene. In college it was easy, they were just part of the college radio station, they brought bands to their school, they were really into music, something like Merlin was, but it stopped probably 10 years ago.

Merlin’s friend Andy Baio launched the website upcoming.org where you could say what shows you are going to, like a social media site for live events, and Merlin can’t believe how much stuff he used to do. He went to at least 5 shows a month. At a point you can just atmospherically stay up to date, just by being young, but it is an effort to keep up after that and you have to really want it. Like a lot of things, your knowledge has an expiration date, and it is easy to think that people will always care about your ability to detect a 1956 Les Paul, or people will always care about first editions or vintage glasses, but then you realize that everybody in 1994 really cared about vintage glasses, but now Warby Parker makes any kind of glasses you want, they all look like vintage glasses, they are $100 each, and go fuck yourself! Nobody cares that John is walking around in a pair of 1959 Bausch & Lomb, it has the status of being a beer can collector. It is garbage, you know that?

As a music supervisor, if you stop for a second you are completely irrelevant three months later. There are Hollywood people, and Drew Barrymore is probably not one of them now, but she was 10 years ago, who when they roll up on some place and hand their iPod over and ask them to play some random selection from it while they are in the club, you want that music to be right on the bleeding edge. As a Hollywood actor you can’t keep that current, so you hire somebody to be your culture consultant, your private music supervisor who is probably also putting movies on there.

John being close to one of Paul Allen’s librarians (RL209)

Paul Allen has 6 librarians, he has an entire library staff, and John is pretty close to one of his librarians who has been his librarian for over a decade. She flies around the world and makes sure that all of the media in his library at Lake Como is what he is into right now, but it also has to be somewhat comprehensive. If he wants to hear Ray Charles play the Whatoosie (?), then somebody better be able to get that to him right away. She is there in his house, curating his collection, making sure his library both digital and physical are all sorted. She claims only to have met him personally two times. She is part of his hive mind, he is at the center of it and he has 1000 people around him that function as extension of his mind and imagination.

That is a crazy job, particularly because Paul Allen is renowned for firing everybody who is close to him, and she is insulated by one level of person. There have been 15 chief librarians because he fires them, but she is his media librarian, the one who is actually doing the work, and she is somewhat insulated because if he comes in and The Once and Future King (by T. H. White) isn’t there he will fire the administrator and she is like: ”I actually had it here, the administrator just told me not to put Zardoz on his iPad!” - ”Can you explain a little bit why you left your last position?” - ”You know James Bond?” - ”I didn’t put Zardoz on the Octopus while we were 60 miles up the Amazon, making a Peter Gabriel record, and he wanted to watch Zardoz and it wasn’t there and there was no way to get it!”