This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: He never lived in Pakistan, referring to John’s dad who has only ever lived in the Pacific Northwest and not in Pakistan or Boston, and having a very localized fandom for sports.

The show title refers to people on the Mount Alyeska ski slope who were special characters and who wore their hat in a jaunty way.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Mouth noises, anxiety noises (RL211)

Merlin is trying to get better at reducing his mouth noises, although John heard a little sound from him when he picked up the phone, he always found Merlin’s mouth noises fairly charming. Merlin thinks his body is developing Existential Fishers (?) that will make random noises. John has been hearing sounds lately, too. Merlin’s array of unconscious anxiety noises has also been widening. His classic is very similar to the Dustin Hoffman noise in The Graduate and goes like: ”uh”, and when he is waking up in the morning, realizing what a wreck his life is he goes: ”Uaaah!” (Jonathan Coulton does that, too!) or he is making another classic Dustin Hoffman noise that goes: ”Oh Boy!” Merlin’s wife when she is in the middle of dropping something she goes: ”Aaaah!” and Merlin started doing that.

When John is dropping something he does something that he thinks of as a sound by The Three Stooges, but he has never really watched them enough to know if it is right, it is like: ”Njenjenjenje”, he does the ”Mhmm”, they both do that. John doesn’t make a lot of squeaking sounds like Merlin does, but according to Merlin he doesn’t seem to have a lot of anxiety.

John says that when you read enough library books about mental health, it turns out that anxiety manifests itself as all other disorders. Merlin is not a clinician, but he does great nails, his French nails are the best, they are classy. The lay person’s idea of mental health falls down in areas that are a little un-subtle. There is anxiety and depression in so many different things. Also, there is anxiety and depression and there is depression and anxiety, which seem mutually exclusive unless you have lived it. They work really nice, like the salt and pepper of small mental illness.

Merlin rediscovering Hip Hop from the 1993/94 era that he missed at the time (RL211)

John loves that Salt-N-Pepa record! Shoop came out in 1993 and it is still really good, that is where they took control. Spinderella (member of Salt-N-Pepa) is no slouch. They had a little bit of a situation, every band has that person. John brings up Left Eye Lopes, but that was TLC who counsel not to chase a waterfall (from their song Waterfalls). Salt-N-Pepa had a Mary Wilson (from The Supremes) type, they had a handler, and that was the transitional record where the one lady said that she can write really good songs and work on the production, so Shoop was co-authored with their Mary Wilson, and then they went on their own. It was a strong record!

For the time, these were sexually empowered ladies, doing a legitimate Hip Hop song, and it was in the Top X. John is not able to comment on popular culture between 1991-94 with any reliability because those were the top years he was disconnected. Merlin still thinks of the 1989 as the apotheosis of Hip Hop, but he keep forgetting how much stuff was really good in 1993/94 that he was aware of at the time, an in retrospect going back he can’t believe how much he missed. The dark Gangsta stuff, all the East Coast / West Coast really put him off and he didn’t like Biggie (The Notorious B.I.G.), but now he has gone back and listened to so much stuff from 1993/94 in particular and it is fantastic and he feels like a doofus for how much he missed.

John follows a guy on Twitter who will take on everybody who says there is a better rapper than Biggie. Merlin is learning that that is a commonly held belief because of his flow. John enjoys watching the guy’s thread unfold as various people will say: ”But…, but…, but…, what about…?” and he just destroys them with Biggie defense.

John is not familiar with a lot of these catalogs, he is much more familiar with the Hip Hop of the 10 years prior to that because he went down the A Tribe Called Quest corridor during that period which to Merlin feels like the last chapter of that story. Hip Hop was getting really smart, conscious, and more and more ambitious, introducing Jazz and stuff. It felt like it was going to get more interesting, while at about the same time MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kris Kross, or House of Pain, got Merlin to shut down, thinking it had jumped the shark.

It splintered and what survived was not what John would have expected to survive. All the stuff that seemed really cool and intellectual. When Atlanta rose to the top John was thinking: ”Why of all the things? Why is Atlanta leading the charge?” and he felt that way because he was a Pacific Northwest booster and the Hip Hop there was always smarter and bit less hook-driven. The stuff that got a lot of airplay was what became the dirty South stuff, which was not for Merlin. Listen to late-1990s OutKast, and it is really good, but Merlin was not aware of that at the time.

Merlin is into Hamilton lately, and John should have a list of anxiety sounds that he makes whenever people start talking about Hamilton. He (Lin-Manuel Miranda) is very generous about saying that for example the song Helpless is very similar to the song Countdown by Beyoncé (Merlin says Clockwise), a song that had totally passed Merlin by and now when he goes back and listens to it he finds it fucking great. It hugely influenced Shook Ones, Part II by Mobb Deep, which is so freaking good! Merlin finally went back and listened to Ill Matic all the way through and it is fucking genius!

There was a time when Merlin was really int Wu-Tang Clan and the offshoot albums, they had a pretty good two years of solo stuff and Wu-Tang stuff, it is really special and Merlin has to eat his words and say that he was dead wrong and it got different, if not just better. It definitely got more sophisticated. The flow became more important. Mid-1990s Hip Hop is a lot like any kind of humor: You can dissect it and say why this is more successful than that and you can talk about Nas’ internal rhyme schemes, but that does not really get at the thing, it is like saying why this Monty Python bit is funnier than that one.

John not actively consuming media, but still having a passing knowledge (RL211)

During 1991-94 John was completely unplugged. People ask how he can claim that he doesn’t consume media intentionally and also have a passing knowledge, being able to identify a song that comes on the radio, and being able to keep in the game of a conversation about something, and he can’t explain that exactly either. He hasn’t bought a record album in a long time, and even then he can count on a couple of hands the number of albums that he bought since he was out of High School. He might have bought 15 albums.

The day OK Computer (by Radiohead) came out was in the year that didn’t happen (1997). John was sitting in his little magazine store and loved to read the British Pop magazines like Q, Mojo and NME. There was an article in Q about Radiohead in the studio, working on their new record for a long time, getting it ready to come out (see RL12). John didn’t know this band, but he really liked this article. At the end of the article it said the date when the album was coming out, and they always had the British magazines on a bit of a delay because they had to come in the post, and the day was today (2017-05-21).

John picked up the phone, called the record store down at the end of the neighborhood, and asked about the Radiohead album and they said it just came out today and it was incredible. John couldn’t get off work until 11pm and the record store closed at 9pm, so they worked out a deal and the guy brought it to John. Every once in a while something like that will happen where it sounds like John is a massive fan of things, he had a guy bring him the record before the store closed, but that was just the one time this ever happened, and it happened to be OK Computer and that was a record that was on heavy rotation.

During that period of the early 1990s John was consuming a ton of stuff because he was living in Seattle and was surrounded by culture, but as far as what was on TV at that time, what contemporary fashion was, or any kind of music that was happening outside of his world of happenstance he doesn’t know about. It is a happenstance thing.

One time they were on tour and Sean was DJ:ing, driving into the night, and he started asking John if he knew the name to the songs, and he did. They turned it into a DJ game: Can Sean play a song where John couldn’t tell him what band it was. They drove through the night and John was able to identify every band. Sean was really trying, shooting out some obscure shit like Thee Headcoats. John couldn’t do that now, but he could in 2004. There is a permeability to John that he hears and registers stuff, but he doesn’t intentionally seek it out and sit around and consume it voluntarily. During that era John was soaking in it.

Merlin not actively following sports, but knowing enough about it, different baseball players (RL211)

Merlin would seek out professional sports in addition to it being a huge part of his environment in Cincinnati. He collected Baseball Cards etc, all the things a kid does, and when you are younger you have so much more retention for all that stuff. Today he doesn’t follow sports, but it is everywhere and you have to know at least a little bit to be a man in America, it is even considered somewhat confrontational to go into a discussion with: ”Can we not talk about sports?” John doesn’t even have a TV!

Should Pete Rose be in the (Baseball) Hall of Fame? Yes, probably, but he should be under some sort of conservatorship and have a power of attorney and get him to quit Donald Trump:ing all the time and being such a dumbass. He is not a very nice or very smart person, but he was legitimately great at what he did and what he eventually did in the late 1970s/early 1980 shouldn’t have an effect on the 20 years where he was Pete Rose.

What about Barry Bonds, all-time home-run hitter? That is complicated! What about Alex Rodriguez? He was a Seattle Mariner, a very popular player in his game, but nobody really liked him. Everybody like Ken Griffey Jr. in Seattle, if he walks into a restaurant, everybody falls to the floor, giggling. He was the young guy who brought the Mariners to national level, a charming kid who hit the ball out of the park and everybody loved him. Some will call the new Seattle stadium ”The house that Griffey built”, but John would never call it that, it is ”The house that got built after 3 different city-wide votes came out against it!”, but that is hard to fit on a shirt. John continues talking about Alex Rodriguez.

Ken Griffey Jr. bought a house in Florida, and John doesn’t care about any of that, but John felt a little bit betrayed. Why was he buying a house in Florida when he was a Seattle guy? It was the same as when Ichiro Suzuki went to the Yankees. Those guys are Seattle! Where are they going? Players moving other places is a super-interesting phenomenon to Merlin. Merlin had a Jason Johnny Ace blouse, or chemise. John misses using the word chemise all the time. It sounds like a wine. John has said things like: ”That is a beautiful chemise!” and the person he was complementing said: ”I don’t think this is a chemise!”

The sheer amount of Mariners merchandize, not to mention Yankees merchandize! The number of Yankees baseball caps in the world has to exceed the number of domesticated cats in the world. There might even be more Yankees hats than people, like 1.1 Yankees hat per person, like cellphones in South Korea, they are beyond 100% saturation. John is 100% saturated all the time, he often does this program in the bath (see RW24).

John really felt strongly about Ichiro because he had a personal grace. He spoke English, but insisted doing all his interviews through a translator, the way he walked out on the field, his little quirks, he was a tall man. There is a lot of criticism about the way he appeared to be batting for himself and his own legacy rather than for the team, but that just seems like weird sports radio talk. John often wondered why he singled so much when he clearly could have knocked that ball out of the park also, and he could have tried to be a hero like the Alex Rodriguez type, but he plonked the ball into the field somewhere where nobody can catch it, called a small ball, and move the runners forward. John liked everything about him.

Merlin’s friend John Gruber says that some people are into baseball for the numbers and some are into baseball for the story. They continue talking about various baseball players. There are more mobsters in Rhode Island than there are mobsters in New York. Ted Leo is too moral to be a mobster, he is not a wartime consiglieri. ”Who is a better consiglieri than my father?” - ”We are going to need you somewhere else, Tom!” (from The Godfather) Ted can talk to mobsters, there are mobsters all around him. ”He’s got me waiting in the lobby!” (from The Godfather, Part II) Ted is like a straight-shooting district attorney whose brother is a mobster.

Merlin is just a tourist who can enjoy a game on its own terms, but his in-laws are screaming obscenities the whole game, they are made about the calls, and they are very invested. Merlin used to be into the hitters, but he appreciates pitching more and more now. John follows the Mariners most closely because it is part of the culture in Seattle.

Félix Hernández is a big deal in Seattle, he is a pitcher that has his own fan-group in the stadium, and he is a great pitcher, but John is just not into him. He appreciates his performance, but he doesn’t feel an emotional resonance with him. Sometimes a pitcher walks out and John is just into them, he doesn’t know what exactly it is.

John getting emotional and crying when some great moment happens in sports (RL211)

One of the problem for John watching the Olympics (in Rio) is that he cries every time someone does a thing. The way that they televise the Olympics, the commentators are so awful. Lately they are doing this thing that John has never seen in past Olympics, saying for example that this person is a 5-time Olympian who has never won a medal. Imagine being one of the greatest athletes of our time, and yet championship eludes you! How must that feel? John will emotionally engage in this. He doesn’t need that contextualizing drama-building American television ”Let’s make everything MTV’s The Real World” impulse, but just by watching sports people performing at their highest level, he will already start to cry.

John does not typically cry in the course of a week, a month, or a year, he doesn’t cry about things that happen to him, but watching somebody do a race and The Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat (line by Jim McKay in the show Wide World of Sports from 1961) he gets so worked up. He feels that way about truly great moments in sports of all kinds, like when somebody does some baseball thing that is captivatingly good, even in a mundane game, and he is not sure if sports fans are experiencing those feelings too and if that is why sports is so popular with people. John finds it almost a little overwhelming.

John’s dad always rooting for local sports teams / players (RL211)

John’s dad was from the Northwest, he grew up and went to college in Seattle and then moved to Alaska, he never lived in Pakistan or in Boston. He had a very geographical fandom that like lyme disease went in concentric circles out from the initial wound. His number one favorite thing was the University of Washington Huskies. In the 1950s/60s he followed Huskies basketball, but as time went on Huskies Football became the big thing. He liked college basketball and he would watch any sports game. He would always root for the team or the person that originated closest to Seattle. If there were two Tennis players, one of them from Baltimore and one of them from Boston, he would adjudicate which one was closest and he always rooted for Berkley over UCLA.

John loves watching curling on TV (RL211)

John doesn’t know how it is that he can tune into Curling at 2am on a hotel television, and he will prefer watching that to almost anything else if he can find it on TV, and he will sit and watch it as long as it is on until 5am, even if he has something to do the next day. He will get really into a curling match between Prince Edward Island vs Saskatchewan and will be really rooting for Prince Edward Island, but it would depend on whether or not he likes the captain or not, and on the uniforms.

John likes the throwing of the stone, more than the sweeping, because it is so focused and he understands it: Your whole body slides with the stone and then you just set it free. ”Fly! Be free, stone! Let the sweepers sweep as they may, but I have set you on a course on a path through life! Are you going around those other stones? Are you going to hit those other stones head-on? Are you going to run down and fuck one of those cows or are you going to walk down and fuck all of those cows?” (line said by Robert Duvall’s character Bob Hodges from the movie Colors)

Discovering entertainment on a flight or late at night in a hotel room (RL211)

John stumbled upon the TV show Girls late at night in a hotel room, which is a great time for discovering TV show. Merlin has seen and he thought it was good, but he doesn’t have a strong opinion on it. Some of his friends were very into it. It has Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) in it. John once discovered Band of Brothers on a flight, one of the early flights. There are three things he discovered on flights: One was Delta Airlines trivia game, except they keep putting in European sports things, like: ”Who was the captain of the 1970s winning Manchester United team?”, John is still mad at them. Fuck you!

The two entertainments that John discovered on airplanes was Band of Brothers, which he had avoided up until then because it felt like this was just some Saving Private Ryan bullshit, Steven Spielberg produced, Tom Hanks involved, some weird high definition fake war movie. John didn’t see Saving Private Ryan when it came out although his dad was still alive and they should have gone and seen it together. When he finally watched it he wondered what he was so afraid of because it was just a great war movie, and he has watched all the war movies.

On some long flight from Europe they had Band of Brothers and John didn’t start from the beginning, but from Episode 2 and he spent 10 hours watching Band of Brothers. It was like The Civil War documentary, the first Ken Burns, which he could watch once a year for the rest of his life. The name of the battle where they are stuck in the woods outside the village and they are fucked and they are freezing and they are just picking them off… the ability to tell that story and to keep drawing that out with so little relief is masterful according to Merlin. It is over two episodes at least, and it is so relentless and so well done and he just loves that cast. It came out just a bit before 9/11 and everybody was too sensitive to watch a shoot-em-up.

The guy from Homeland (Damian Lewis) is so great on there. John cannot watch him in anything else. He just appeared in a new spy movie (Our Kind of Traitor) as an amoral Q spy master character when they were escaping from some baddies, using his actual British accent. He is Lieutenant Winters forever for John!

The other thing he discovered on a flight was David Blaine: Street Magic and he was just like: ”God! Show me more of this street magic!” Who cares if it is real! ”Think of a card!” - ”Six of diamonds!” - ”What?” How did he just full-on guess the card? Merlin and his daughter watch the video of Apollo Robbins, the greatest pickpocket in the world, every couple of weeks, and he knows how he does it, but he still doesn’t see him do it. That is all genuine brilliant sleight of hand. There is one guy in India who has one arm raised for 45 years (Amar Bharati). It has become completely atrophied and is only the bones left.

John being interested in close-up magic (RL211)

What interests John most in magic is close-up magic. He doesn’t want to see a big show or a lion disappear, all of those things that Penn & Teller do where Teller is walking around and some rubber ball is following him across the stage, that is all just show, they just set up the lighting in those big Las Vegas shows that you can’t see the wires. But the Ricky Jay stuff! David Blaine is the thing that John always wanted to do. He uses magic, and he is a complete corn ball.

They go to Downtown St. Louis at 1am, the place that everyone is the most scared to go, and they are walking around with a TV camera with bright lights on, and even the neighborhood guys go: ”Are you crazy? This is the place of all place where you don’t want to be! What are you doing?” - ”Why don’t you come over here and pick a card?” - ”Pick a card? All right, I’ll pick a card!” - ”Is it the four of clubs?” - ”Wooooow!” The idea is that for magic you don’t need a common language, it is like a protective bubble because you are amazing people. You are not taking their money, it is not a game of dice, but: ”Let me show you something that is going to blow your mind!” and it universally blows people’s minds anywhere.

It is what John always wanted to know how to do: He wanted to know magic and he wanted to play the Harmonica (he eventually learned the Harmonica for a tribute concert in RW170, RL362 at the end of 2019). With close-up magic and with the Harmonica you can go anywhere, you are going to delight children all over the world and you are welcome everywhere!

Apollo Robbins can get things out of your pocket, which is amazing, and he has even shown the misdirections he does where he will lightly brush this part of your body where you don’t even notice that he has touched you there, but that is now where you are paying attention without even realizing it. You see it, and even though he explains how he does it it is still magic, and then he goes: ”Now look in your wallet!” How is there a $20 bill and a pen, or the driver’s license of your friend who is standing there laughing at you. When did he do that?

John’s favorite Apollo Robbins one is the one with Penn. ”Show me something that impresses me!” and Penn is so unlikable. John can’t think of a single person in the world who is a fan of Penn Jillette. You don’t become an atheist because you like people. Merlin gives himself a bell there and goes into an ad spot. He has heard that a listener has gone to great expense obtaining a 1970s orange bell from the game Pit in order to have what John has (John has one of those orange bells!) They should go and sell those! 2016 is going to make 2011 seem like 1974 and they are going to go into the hall of fame of merchandizing podcasts this year 2016.

Penn Jillette decided a couple of years ago that he was going to take on… and Teller and he probably don’t like each other very much, they have a very professional relationship and they have zero contact that is not about the act, which was true also about Mythbusters, the guy who looked like a Doobie Brother or like Jeff ”Skunk” Baxter (Jamie Hyneman) often looked like he didn’t want to be there. Although he was on a long-running television show that made him both famous and rich, he was contemptuous of all entertainment, like a Libertarian whose business depends entirely on public roads paid for by taxes.

Merlin likes Adam Savage a lot, he is one of the good people, but he has maybe seen 5 episodes because he can’t stand the cable-TV-ness of it, the teasers and all the televisional metadata and reminders and lower thirds and cut-aways. There is 4 minutes of stuff there, but if that was all you were showing you would have to solve 15 mysteries per episode.

Military helmets, ski helmets, fashion choices (RL211)

With the Black Hawk Down movie, a dramatization of the actual event, it was revealed that a lot of Special Forces people from the Delta Force don’t want to wear those tin pot helmets that infantry are wearing, but they did recognize that you needs something from bonking your head and they decided to wear skateboard helmets. Merlin doesn’t think they have the right to make decisions like that, but they said if they were forced to wear tin pot helmets they would just throw them away the second they get out on a mission. There was an episode of 99% Invisible recently if you should wear Hushers, you can take 32 dB off a sound by putting these things in your ear, but you lose the subtlety of somebody rustling around or whispering, so they risk long-term hearing damage because it enables them to hear smaller noises.

The Black Hawk Down inspired a redesign of the helmet for all of the armed forces to make it closer to a skateboard helmet, closer fitting, the ears more revealed so you can hear better, less clanky-di-clank, less made of steal, but there is one recorded example of a Special Forces Person dying of a traumatic head injury in the whole history of them wearing skateboard helmets. On the one hand that is too bad and maybe he would be alive today if he had had a helmet on, but also they seem to know what they are doing and they are telling themselves that one way to keep from getting shot in the head is to keep your head down, but if you are just running through some situation in the middle of the night nobody is going to shoot you in the head.

When John was growing up there was a guy at Mount Alyeska who skied in a Russian tank commander’s helmet, which are several pads that go from the front to the back of your head and it looks like no other helmet, a little leather head cage. It stood out! When John was a young pre-teen and teenager the way people wore their ski hats at Mount Alyeska really mattered to him and stuck with him. Everybody is wearing a hat, you are all on a mountain, and there are a lot of ways to express your style on a ski mountain. Do you have the latest sweater? Are those this year’s skis or last year’s skis or three-years-ago skis. Ski fashion changes very fast.

When John started out everything was wool and red, white, and blue, and as time went on ski fashion looked like stuff from In Living Color, but he was very impressed with and interested in anyone who wore their ski hat in a jaunty way and he can still think of 4-5 people who wore their hat in a jaunty way. They were characters of the mountain! Was that because he was a teen and things like that were making a strong impression on him and he felt like the fact that this guy was wearing his ski hat slightly askew is a bold move on his part. Was that because he was a teen who had some latent interest in fashion that was different from other people’s, or is it because it was genuinely impressive?

Merlin says that the reason there are so many missteps in trying to ape what other people do is that you try to emulate the dumb physical characteristics instead of trying to emulate the confidence and exuding of personality behind that jaunty hat.

The Merlin Mann from the late 2000s had a hair that was a bigger than life character. John likes to think of him as the Merlin Mann of Flickr that he liked so much, he really ran Flickr, and his different hairs were really exiting to John. A lot of people are trying to do this, Wil Wheaton is very big about his morning hair, it is one of his tropes. Merlin’s pioneering hair explorations are very interesting. He is not wearing a flamboyant shirt, but a pretty dependable solid shirt, the with the hair he made some bold choices. He had a hard time finding a hair cut that he would like, but he has no distinguished record of deliberately doing something interesting. He might stumble ass-backwards into something interesting.

John buying a blue double-breasted blazer with brass buttons that he doesn’t wear outside because it is not his idea (RL211)

A few years ago John saw a picture of a guy who was standing out front of a fashion show, which is a type of photograph that you have to pursue, you are not just going to stumble upon that. John doesn’t read fashion magazines because they have perfume samples in them. Every once in a while Vanity Fair will send a magazine at him into the mail, but John does not want that! Maybe there is a very interesting profile on John F. Kennedy Jr. that he might actually want to read, but do not send these to his mailbox unbidden because when 4 conflicting male perfumes are pouring out of his mailbox he might have an allergy attack and he doesn’t even carry an inhaler, but he should have one just for an encounter with a random Vanity Fair.

On this photograph the guy was wearing very old knee-ripped Levi’s, but they were not just blown out at the knee, but ripped all the way down, like a carefully ripped set of old Levi’s, but they were not fancy ripped on some pre-ripped jeans, but they were vintage Levi’s that had been fancy-ripped, which you do by delicately running a razor to get it started and then they will fray very well. He was also wearing a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons, an open collared shirt, and his hair was really slicked with a side-part in a post-Weimar, pre-Macklemore brown-shirt haircut.

The unexpected element on this photo was the double-breasted blazer. There was some flair happening with that, it was not something anybody expected, and at the next opportunity John got a blue double-breasted blazer with brass buttons and he would put it on in his house, but when he got to the front door he would hesitate because it was not his invention, but he saw a picture of a guy. Sometimes you see a picture and you know that that belongs to you and the guy doesn’t even know what it is.

One time many years ago John was driving in a car with Sean Nelson and the light turned yellow when they were at a remove from that light sufficient that John could have applied the brakes and stopped, and he should probably have done so, if you are a stickler about the law. But surveying the scene, looking to the left and the right, there was no impediment to him continuing forward, and he neither applied the brakes nor the accelerator, but simply let the car move as it was moving. As he was in the intersection the light was changing to stop and Sean, in a gesture indicating a contempt for John’s insouciance, raised his hands in the air and imitated shooting two pistols like a bandito. It was not in admiration, but he was doing it as a commentary, implying that John was a bandito and the law does not apply to him.

This gesture belonged to John now, and when he was about to do something reckless he would do the gesture in the air with his fingers. He does it all the time, everyone he knows associates it with him, and it is just a way of saying: ”Well, fuck it!” Sean has a long time ago seen John do it and commented: ”Hey, you took that from me!”, but Sean was never going to use it again and he used it against John and John repurposed it. It is his n-word, he took it back, he was taking back the night, he took those guns back and he spun it into something positive.

John still has the blue double-breasted blazer with brass buttons and he puts it on sometimes and gets as far as the threshold of his house and stops and thinks: ”This looks amazing on me! No-one else in Seattle is doing this! This is my homage to Caddyshack. This guy was in New York City, and nobody is going to come at me and say: Wait a minute!”, except now John has revealed his hand on this program. John was never able to get outside in this thing, partly because he doesn’t know that when you sit down you are supposed to leave it buttoned and he cannot do that, he finds it really uncomfortable.

2001: A Space Odyssey portraying space travel as something elegant until Star Wars came out (RL211)

There is one section of 2001 that Merlin watches a lot, in the middle when Heywood R. Floyd goes to the space station and it is just courtliness on a space shit, sitting and having a drink, doing a little phone call, having the meeting with the people, and he does that move that when he goes up he will unbutton / button his blazer. John does it all the time, but he doesn’t know if he is supposed to do it in a double-breasted blazer. Letterman was a riot, but he used to drive Merlin nuts that he wouldn’t button up his double-breasted blazer. He looked like a Manta Ray with those fucking flappy wings. It is like if you don’t tie your Gi.

We think of 2001: A Space Odyssey as expressing the 1960s, but there was a very brief moment where so much of what constituted the buttoned up Buzz Aldrin / Dick van Dyke 1960s was still reverberating. You might wear you hair a little bit longer, but you still had a tailored suit, and that carried into the 1970s. 2001 doesn’t seem like a thing of John’s era, the 1970s, but it was because of something that happened 5 years ago now in 2016?

Merlin was listening to Superchunk all morning and he had to remind himself that this was 21 years old. When he was a little kid he would see distinctions within a given year about stuff. When it was 1985, this re-run from 1982 was so dated, or this fashion from earlier in 1985. Merlin still thinks that some of the sequences in 2001 stand up so well still today. This movie was only 8 years old when John was 7 years old, at a point when he was getting into space and imagining what life in space was going to be like, it was essentially the most recent idea and space was very chic.

It was analogous to taking a business class flight, everybody was dressed very well, there were amenities, Pan American airlines was the purveyor, and it really influenced him. It was only when Star Wars happened and the aesthetics was that most of the space ships you are going to be riding will actually be a little greasy. 2001 was a very brief moment in time when we were imagining colonizing space and it was going to be elegant. Then it became inelegant. All through the shuttle years it felt like astronauts were people who did pretty well in biology, they weren’t swashbuckling Navy pilots that they had been in the 1960s, although they surely all were until recent times. It felt like we were sending a teacher into space, it was not elegant, but we were working here, they were not just bold explorers, but they were up there doing tasks.

Now we are introducing for-pay Elon Musk jets, meaning there is going to be some fake elegance there, like flying Virgin Airlines where there is purple lighting. Maybe we have just lost the elegance of the 1960s and that is what John is complaining about, even the elegance of the 1960s as prognosticated into space flight, into SST:s (?)

Why is space exploration a controversial topic? (RL211)

John is always astonished that strong advocacy for space exploration is a controversial topic. Why are we even talking about this? John is embarrassed that we are doing such a poor job at it and have been for such a long time! Not just that we should do it, but what the fuck are we doing? After the Vikings came to Newlandia, whatever they called it up there in Canada, then nobody from Europe came back to the Americas for another 500 years until the Spanish, Italians and Portuguese headed back out and tried to get rich by raping people.

But once Magellan sailed around the world, it is not that there were another 100 years where people in Europe wanted to take it easy because this was not in their budget, but somebody had found gold and nobody has found gold in outer space yet. We put a dozen people on the moon, but there were just dust mines, so bring back some more dust that is worth a lot of money only because so few people have been there. Something is going to happen up there where somebody realizes they can collect fairy dust up there and use it to build cubic zirconium. Maybe there is some new drug up there, one that does what it should, one that doesn’t make you feel too bad, one that doesn’t make you feel too good.