RL433 - Nag Flag

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: The fried egg is not optional, referring to

The show title refers to the little window that reminded John that he hadn’t backed up his computer in 449 days and that didn’t provide a clear path forward, meaning it is just nagging.

Young Lloyd Bridges before he became a comedy superstar in John’s teen years he did the scuba-diving show called Sea Hunt that Merlin used to love.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John’s not having backed up his computer for 449 days (RL433)

It feels like John hasn’t talked to Merlin in a while and they have a lot of catch up on. Merlin is great and against technology even the podcasters must contend in vain. John’s computer told him it has bin 449 days without backup, which makes him feel guilty and irresponsible, but it did not get him to buy a hard drive and begin the process until the other day when he did get a STGX2000400 (Seagate 2TB).

Merlin thinks that reminding you that you haven’t backed up in 449 days is a form of nagging, which is not useful because when dealing with a procrastinator you are not making it better or providing a path to doing a thing that nominally should be done. Merlin has been a nagger, if he is still allowed to use that word - we are no longer allowed to say niggardly. Instead of nagging John it should give a suggestion, or explain if there is going to be something magical happening on day 450 or what magic on Day 446 got John out and get the STGX.

Day 446 sounds like a great Rush album. Merlin just read an article about Alex Lifeson why they don’t improvise live.

If there is no clear path forward you get mad at the nag. What if it actually said: ”You need to back up your computer! Here is a link to a hard drive you can buy through the Apple Store!” John would have clicked on that! The problem with a nag is that at a certain point the nagger and the naggee, or the nagor and the nagette… the thing is when the nagor leaves mordor… one does not just walk into the Apple Store… Why didn’t they just have the eagles take them to the Apple Store the whole time? Why don’t they make the whole plane out of Gandalf? At some point it becomes a Mexican stand-off, which we don’t say anymore either, a little bit of a Good, the Bad and the Ugly situation, and we don’t say ugly anymore either or crazy. We also don’t listen to this podcast anymore. Who is going to be right? Who is going to wait this out longer?

When it was 30 days John thought: ”What is 30 days?” and when it was 90 days it was: ”Alright, I probably have put some stuff on there that I want to back up!” Had they not nagged him at all until day 175 and it would have said: ”This is the length of time we have determined to be too long without backing up your computer. Signed: Your friends at Apple. Here is a link to a really sleek, futuristic, sexy hard drive, basically a sex drive, at a reasonable price!” John would have clicked on that shit so fast! He would have bought 2 of them!

As John was ordering extension cords recently for some reason he put a hard drive in the cart. For 449 days his computer has been giving him the nag flag and two days ago he was running cords all over and all he wants is just three better extension cord and all of a sudden he put a STGX2000400 in the cart. He has no idea what was happening. Was it 448 days of getting nagged? If the nag works and it takes 449 days, is that distinguishable from no nag?

How is it different from U2 putting their album on everybody’s iTunes? Maybe Amazon should just put a hard drive in everybody’s bastic [sic] once a year. Who doesn’t need to back up their computer? John is going to open the window and yell: ”I am mad as hell! Who doesn’t need to back up their computer?” and see who honks. ”It is going to be your big, fat, big-titted hit!” - ”I am going to take this foot and I am going to put it up your ass!” - ”Can’t do it, Sally!”

New iPhone charger cables (RL433)

What if they would give you one more additional new iPhone charger chord that isn’t compatible with any of the other little wall warts you have collected for the last 15 years? We are going to make it slightly easier on you to live in their ecosystem of products by recognizing that by changing that one little USB-adapter they have fucked you out of what was effectively you squirreling away the walnuts of those wall warts. Merlin has a whole bin of those little wall warts!

They used to have the 30-pin, but nobody loved that one. It is weird that they still have alarm clocks with the 30-pin in hotels today. Merlin would never put his phone on there, it is like a technology glory hole. Then they got the lightning and now there is also USB-C. But the question is: What is on the other end of the cord? All of the things! You get a USB-A with a dumb little wall-warts, but now there are different kinds of USB-A’s that can handle different amounts of power and you do still have the classic USB’s that have to go somewhere, and as Michael Stipe says: ”Where is where?” The 5 Watt thing does jack shit!

People wiring up their house with different jacks, extension cords (RL433)

Every once in a while John will buy extension cables and he wants them to be a certain way. He has a lot of extension cables that were bought by other people. In his 1952 house he has a lot of 2-prong wall systems that are ungrounded. The guy who built the house was an electrical engineer and he put outlets everywhere and there are a couple of rooms in this house that have just a 1/4” jack in the wall like a guitar cable because he was a ham radio guy.

Chris Walla actually put patch bays in all the walls of his house so that he could turn his entire house into a recording studio. It is the first kitchen in Bellingham to have plate reverb. Imagine buying that house from him after he moved out and the real estate agent going through and saying: ”You can see there are XLR-inputs and -outputs in every room, just in case!” Then somebody like a Matt Haughey or Marco Arment will put ethernet through their house, some people want HDMI.

When Merlin’s wife was growing up in another decade they had a fancy house with a Brady Bunch intercom and her dad could make announcements to all 7 kids. John also had one of those, even with a FM radio, but you would have to have a very big house for it to be easier than just yelling. Merlin gets delivery a lot of nights and he will just bring it up the steps and yell: ”Food!” The classic one is: ”Mom!” and you can go on the intercom and wait for her to reply. John’s neighborhood is full of houses with intercom, but for some reason John’s house didn’t have it. They made the house the way they wanted.

John is sitting at his new dining room table. He doesn’t have his root cellar anymore and hasn’t fixed it up yet and he has to podcast from the dining room table, which is the Broyhill Brasilia line of tables (see RL425). There is no 3-prong outlet in the entire wing of the house and John has a little grey translator, but doesn’t feel good about using it. There are outlets in this house that are grounded, but not where he has places to sit at a table. John doesn’t like an extension cord that sticks out wrong, he wants the prongs on the sides so that it is flush, but there are other applications in the house where he wants it to be straight on. He has all those extension cords that were purchased by his ancestors at a time when you wanted a milk-chocolate brown extension cord from an outlet to a lamp.

Back in the day things would come with long cords that were very accommodating and John has one lamp in the living room that he wants right by the plug, but it has a 20 foot cord. Now you get these shitty-ass little short cords because of safety. Now John has to coil up this cable at the foot of this lamp because there is no way to put it and he has this bowl of pasta of cable sitting under it and every time he walks past it it bothers him. It would almost be worth rewiring the lamp except it is the original vintage cable and he doesn’t want to change that.

Now John has his system plugged in with one of those grey adapters and he put in a surge-protecting power strip, which were a really big thing when they came out, and hopefully that will protect him from the surge. John has bins and bins of extension cords, he could have mocha-brown extension cords over here, over here you got no soup (reference to an episode of Seinfeld), but ”what I want…” (reference to The Godfather)… Merlin watched The Godfather this weekend. They talked about the actor Sterling Hayden for a short while who was a major movie star and he was also in Dr. Strangelove.

Restaurants that don’t do substitutions or changes to menu items (RL433)

Some restaurants say: ”I make this sandwich the way I want it! All cheeseburger have a fried egg!” There was a place in Sarasota that Merlin went to twice ever, one time by accident, and once for comedy value. It used to be a chain restaurant, maybe a Sambo’s and inside there was a setup like a 1970s Arby’s with the branding motif in literal brands, the large tall hat, the horsey sauce, the whole nine, pretty clean lobby most of the time, but it was totally not corporate and there is a guy sitting in a ruddy La-Z-Boy recliner behind the counter and he is low because you are supposed to be standing behind the counter and he is watching his Stories under the counter, or Bollywood videos.

They had just a few things and one was a disgusting hangover-food burger, and he made everything the way he liked it, so if you made him get out of his fucking chair to go make you food he was going to make it the way he wanted and the fried egg was not optional.

John was talking to a friend yesterday who is a very picky eater and she was talking about an experience of going to a fancy restaurant that is called Eggs & Pickles or Pickles & Orcas, something, and they had cheeseburgers on the menu and all she wanted was a cheeseburger…. ”I want you to hold it between your knees!” (Jack Nicholson quote from the movie Five Easy Pieces), which happened on the way to the Northwest, the movie where he plays piano in the truck on his way to San Juan island or whatever. Merlin has never seen the whole movie, he is just familiar with that scene.

Five Easy Pieces is one of those movies from the 1970s where filmmakers did not care whether you were entertained. Merlin heard people coming out of Easy Rider saying: ”I didn’t know you could make a movie like that!” - ”You probably shouldn’t!” The first time John saw it as a teenager he came out thinking: ”I didn’t know you could sit through a movie like that!” It looked good going in!

Similarly Billy Jack, who is part Native American and he is protecting an island of misfit toys school of super-brilliant super-hippie kids from all the mean locals, and he beats the shit out of them and there is a famous scene where he says to a fellow: ”I am going to take my foot and kick you on that side of your face, and you know what? There is not a damn thing you can do about it!” Merlin talks a bit more about he plot of the movie.

Pronunciation of different cities like Des Moines (RL433)

For some reason Merlin mentions Budapest and how people pronounce it wrong when they are trying to pronounce it like you would in Hungarian, and they go over to how you don’t say Barcelona with a ”th” really, and how the film festival Cannes is pronounced something else. There is a town South of where John lives called ”Demoins”. It is spelled Des Moines like the one in Iowa, he pronounces it ”Des Moánes” and it has become a little thing around here where everybody who is in the know will know what you are talking about, but the snorks can’t tell what you are talking about.

The residents of the town say ”Demoins”. Even growing up around here, even knowing that this is a shibboleth of locality, but when you are from a different part of the county you might not know this, but if you are from around here you don’t make this error and you also don’t pronounce Puyallup or Sequim wrong. In the same way nobody calls San Francisco for San Fran or Frisco.

John reading Harry Potter while he stayed in New York (RL433)

John is saving Shakespeare for prison, but he read Harry Potter when he was living at 118th and Lexington in Spanish Harlem in New York during the hot summer of 2001, 7 blocks from where Lou Reed used to get heroin, and there were some guys across the street who every day on an overturned cardboard box were doing a shell game. They always had a crowd! They were always out there with 25 people standing around them and 18 of them were playing for them. John would watch them for a couple of hours out of the window.

It was Chris Carniglia’s house. He and his now-wife Alissa had all of the Harry Potter books and they lived in a railroad apartment where the middle-room had no windows and they would go to work while John was staying at their house for free, reading their books. He was also writing the first Long Winters record.

Black Widow, Avengers (RL433)

One of John's pet peeves and complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that if the bad guys are just a faceless army of a) droids or b) undefeatable alien presence, and that means there are no stakes in your movie and it is just a masturbation festival of cartoon violence for an hour. In the Star Wars prequels the armies are just faceless droids and who cares? John just went to see Black Widow because he is a Scarlett Johansson fan and Merlin comments that there are a lot of butt shots in that movie, but she is an executive producer and she is so smart in this movie with great comedy timing. There is also the girl from Midsommar in it (Florence Pugh), Merlin loves her.

There is also a lot of exposition, relationship talk and feelings and John was 100% on board with this movie. It is really good and it has a major strong female lead. Men appear in it only tangentially and it passes the Bechdel test in the first 11 seconds. The movie Black Widow also has Rachel Weisz and Merlin watched two Rachel Weisz movies last night, the lady from The Lobster. John’s daughter’s mother / partner didn’t understand any of that Marvel stuff and why she was mad at the other people and who that person was and what they were talking about.

John didn’t want to do it, but he suggested they had to watch some bit of the Avengers Cinematic Universe in order for her to understand what they were talking about. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but… Merlin says you can skip the Age of Ultron stuff, but that is the mistake John made because he had seen the first Avengers movie and then he punched out of it and all the ones about Thor and the ones that came later… it is fine: ”I’ll catch up with you in the next town, I am going to get on a later train!”

This was a movie where Iron Man was a very brittle character, unlikeable in every way, all the effects are bad, and the forced banter is really bad, but what is terrible about it is that the bad guy is a robot, AI with the voice of Blane from Pretty in Pink (Andrew McCarthy, but that is not true, what movie are they talking about?), and he creates an army of robots that have no feelings. It is a whole movie of fighting a bunch of things that don’t matter.

John’s daughter having reached peak Star Wars, watching Westerns (RL433)

John watched High Noon the other day, which Merlin finds overrated and it is no Shane, it is a bit preachy and it is a very middle-aged white-guy film, like ”Nobody here appreciates me!” It is an allegory for blacklisting because it has been made in the blacklisting era and is a morality play written by people who were blacklisted. The Gary Cooper part had been offered to John Wayne, but he didn’t want to be in their communist movie. Gary Cooper wasn’t a liberal either, but he needed the work.

John’s daughter has reached peak Star Wars and there is no more Star Wars based information that she could onboard. They had a long time before started to get into the back story of minor characters and of planets that only appear in the background of a long shot. Merlin recommends to listen to Chris Gethard talk about Kit Fisto for half an hour. No-one has ever loved Kit Fisto more than he does, but John’s daughter might challenge him for that title. The fight scene in the arena, one of the good scenes in that movie, he is kicking some ass!

For a long time she didn’t want to get into Harry Potter because she was a Star Wars person, just like John in 1981 felt about Dune: He was a Lord of the Rings person and the Dune people could be over there. She argued that Harry Potter was full of magic and of course Star Wars was different. John reminded her that Star Wars is a Space Western and he suggested to start watching real American Westerns. In watching throughout the Star Wars media universe she has seen more violence in her 10 years than John has seen in his 52. John still flinches at movie violence while she has seen it all. Merlin’s daughter watches Grey’s Anatomy, giving open-heart surgery to a baby and Merlin and his wife can’t watch that.

John didn’t want to go to the terrifying movies and be grossed out, it was not a rite of passage like it was for Merlin. John wanted to stay away from original Slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because he knew he didn’t want to see gore, he is definitely not about being jump-scared. Although John believes in science and does not believe in ghosts he still doesn’t want to be around ghosts and he doesn’t want them in his house. There are no ghosts in his house, but there might be ghosts down in the ravine, but what he doesn’t want are attempts on his father’s life (reference to The Godfather) and what he does want is no ghosts. He doesn’t want to be spooked.

John’s daughter has never seen any gore. There is no gore in Star Wars, they just fall down. Merlin calls it impersonal violence and he would not let his daughter see personal violence. But what would be a goryer weapon than a light saber? It would be the most gruesome way to fight!

John suggested her to watch all of the black & white Western movies and show her what Han Solo really looks like because this is where he comes from. What John didn’t realize is that Gary Cooper is a real drag and there were a few times in the movie where they were looking at each other and wondering why he didn’t do a thing.

Lo and behold, completely unexpectedly, John’s daughter was wrapped! She spent most of her childhood in a childhood world. John’s mom had a no-guns-policy in the early 1970s, but she surrendered when she realized that John turned everything into a gun, every stick, every box, every piece of garbage, even a girl’s doll. When John’s daughter was little he would buy her cars and trucks as an alternative to Frozen, but she would put the truck in a bed and put a blanket on it and sing to it. John couldn’t fight it, she set the tone.

Their house is full of weapons now because she has gone through every stage of being a Padwan, there are blasters, there are cowboy guns. They will be at a thrift store and she will come over with a set of Tom Mix 6-shooters from the 1950s that she found and those are the coolest, so John got them and her mom is super mad about it, but he got his own house and can keep guns around over there.

By the time John was 10 he had seen a lot of adult movies and adult television, but his daughter has grown up in an era where there is so much children’s entertainment and when you look for a movie to watch for her you go to Common Sense Media and they will recommend one with strong values and not a ton of bad stuff, which sounds perfect.

By the time John was 10 years old he had seen Deer Hunter, he had watched so many freaking movies that were not just inappropriate for a child, but inappropriate for any audience. Then there was all the television with David Niven, even the cartoony stuff. Merlin suggests John should go to Dirty Dozen type movies next, but the problem is that there is always a scene that is very rapey. Don’t leave Telly Savalas alone with anyone! You wonder if that stuff was really on television, but it wasn’t really, they always cut out 2 seconds of it.

But you know that Gary Cooper is not going to rape anybody and High Noon has very strong female leads. Grace Kelly is really underused in this movie, but even when she is doing almost nothing in the film you can’t take your eyes off her. It is a slow moving film, but there is a lot interesting in it. What he would like her to do is end up as the sheriff of a small town that feels honor-bound to protect the residence of the town, like she could move up to Twisp (see RL28)

Being a Jedi is a bit of a dead end: It is going to look good on your resumé, but there is not a lot of opportunity to move up, whereas there are so many small towns still in America that need the law and what we need is women with strong values that go into those small towns and turn them around, get everybody vaccinated, tough as nails, but also heart of gold.

John has been working this project: If morality plays is what she is into and we are not afraid of gun fire, then John has a list of movies as long as his arm, movies that have gun play and heavy drinking, which is the thing that scares people away, but at the core there is the American messaging which is stuff they can parse and talk about it afterwards. John was really excited about it, they were watching Western, and she was into it!

One day she showed up with Harry Potter under her arm that she had found downstairs. At some point many years ago John had bought all the Harry Potter books because she is an avid reader. He asked her out of curiosity after all this time of her feeling like Harry Potter was her Dune, some baloney about the spice that she didn’t want to get into, what was going on, and she said that it was not bad and she read them.

Pretty soon any time you see her she got Harry Potter under her arm, ticking them off one by one. John doesn’t want to think that the reason she is doing it is that she is trying to get out of watching old black & white Westerns with her dad where there is an hour and 20 minutes of people looking at a clock and waiting for a train to arrive and then 3 minutes of gun fire.

Now they have started watching the Harry Potter movies and they have watched the first two and the third one is in the queue. Merlin thinks that the third one is the best one. John didn’t want to say this, but it is true: He is ready for a new Dumbledore. Richard Harris is not… (Michael Gambon replaces him from movie 3).

Richard Harris’ son is the guy from Chernobyl. The guy from Mad Men, Jared Harris, the guy from Chernobyl, is Richard Harris’ son. John just watched Chernobyl last week, it was the first time he has seen it and it is a television show that makes you sit around thinking about it when you are not watching it. John read a review in The New Yorker where a person who had grown up in Russia was giving it a terrible review and he was surprised The New Yorker published it because it was a bad review of Chernobyl by someone who was just mad that it was made by people who did’t grow up in Russia. Merlin recommends the Chernobyl podcast.

It is like John reviewing a movie and saying: ”That character never would have said that!” John Siracusa calls it the plumber problem. There are so many TV shows having something to do with technology or programming especially and he has a really hard time sometimes. Like on Letterman they had a welder review Flash Dance. John watched a couple of episodes of For All Mankind and it just felt like a show where some Millennial show-runners were going to redcon history in order to make it better, they were going to settle the family business.

He wants to entrust an alternate history to some show runners who care about what kind of can openers they had in 1969, but he also wants them to really care about 1975, not just have some show runners take him to a 1975 that didn’t exist when they don’t really know what the 1975 that did exist was. Merlin goes through this when he hears people under 32 talk about Johnny Carson.

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