RL68 - The Opposite of Sherlock Holmes

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

  • Nicknames (Factoids)
  • John’s first email address (Internet and Social Media)
  • Merlin having Car Parts as John’s ringtone (Merlin Mann)
  • The titles of the army of the Third Reich (Military)
  • Being more sensitive to criticism (Currents)
  • John’s neighbor smoking pot in a car in front of John’s house (Neighborhood)
  • John’s neighbor’s cherry tree (Neighborhood)
  • John playing in Hot L Baltimore in the Alaska Repertory Theater, Blue Thunder (Early Days)
  • Young people’s attitude to jobs, feeling underused (Humanities)
  • Follow-up: Not understanding culture anymore, the war in Bosnia (Military)
  • Why the holocaust is still so present in our culture, The Passion of Joan of Arc, genocides that nobody talks about (Military)
  • Kids in John’s neighborhood bouncing a basketball (Neighborhood)

The Problem: Four days later, John stopped being cute, referring to him not being picked for a role as a 12-year old in an Ibsen-play, but that was probably wise because 4 days after turning 12 years old he stopped being cute.

The show title refers to Merlin’s brain going off on small pieces of logic trying to find the story and then in the end trying to find the evidence that supports it.

The audio begins with 2 seconds of an unknown EDM-like song.

Merlin’s brain has an affliction to find the story and it will run off in a million directions, he is like the opposite of Sherlock Holmes, he will see something and put pieces together and pretty soon he has taken a long walk off of a short piece of logic and now he is looking for evidence about that.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Nicknames (RL68)

John picks up the phone with singing Merlin’s name in his usual way. Merlin feels bad that he hasn’t yet come up with a good song for John. His whole life John has been pretty resistant to nicknames. People have always tried to nickname him, but it just doesn’t stick. He is mostly known as John Roderick with both names, and in college they threw nicknames at him every which way and they all bounced off. Maybe it is the same with theme music: He can’t be themed. People were trying to call him Sasquatch and things like that.

John has been called Rad Dog for a while and that kind of worked at the time because he was a rad dog, it was the 1980s and he was a skier. It was short for Rip-roaring Rad Dog Radical Rocking Righteously Rascalling Reefering Roderick (see RL261, RL287) and the reason it took was that John was a Junior and that name was bestowed on him by a bunch of seniors whom we would now regard as nerds, but at that time being a nerd wasn’t cool. They started calling John this and they would say the whole thing every time and John had to accept it.

Merlin likes a nickname for others, but he likes it to be organic. He doesn’t need a nickname because his name is Merlin Mann, but nobody believes that. It would be the best nickname in the world, but it is his actual name. Merlin thinks it is a pretty weird, but John thinks it is also an amazing name. Today parents are putting a lot of effort into giving their kids unique charming twee little fucked-up names, and Merlin’s name is Merlin Mann and no-one can ever top it. He could name his child Bismarck van Schnitzengrubel and the child would still have to step aside to let Merlin Mann walk by.

As a kid Merlin always envied people with names like John or Bob because he went through a time in his life where he wanted to be invisible on pretty much every level. The very first day of school they go through the roll call in alphabetical order and Merlin is right in the middle and after they read his name Merlin Dean Mann III they pause. He might as well have a crazy Indian name, the other kind. On the first day everybody is nervous and everybody is looking for weaknesses, and especially when he was a new kid he would have killed for a Todd. Merlin is literally the magician, that is a lot to live up to.

Merlin saw en article in the whacky news section in the mid-1990s about a poor 10-year old bastard named Bart Simpson. It could be worse, like you could be named Adolf or Eichmann (there was an Adolf Eichmann).

Merlin likes nicknames when they are organic and he nicknames people when they really deserve it. Some of them have really caught on, like Scoots for Scott Simpson, it is like when your dog is scooting across the carpet because he has an itchy ass. Merlin thinks of it being the Trotts (?) Merlin’s friend John Gruber has a very popular blog about Apple stuff (Daring Fireball) and Merlin always calls him Chairman Gruber, a Chairman Mao joke because Communism is funny. Having an affectionate nickname for somebody is an honor.

John’s theme music for Merlin is a type of nickname because Merlin Mann is not a nicknamable name unless you sing it to the tune of Janet Jackson’s Nasty Boys. Merlin claims it is Private Eyes by Hall & Oates. Some people are mishearing the melody, but John demonstrates how Private Eyes would sound like, but it is not. John is one of the very few people apart from Merlin’s wife and people he knew before college who calls him Merl a lot, which is his father’s name. On the first day of school in 4th grade they were reading out all the names and asked if they wanted to be called something else and as a tribute to his late father Merlin wanted to be called Merl, which stuck for a while.

Merlin has friends whose name has a certain cadence so you always refer to them by their full name. John has a friend called Mike Mack like that. Merlin had a friend in college called named Patti Frew that has a nice mouth feel to it. One reason why Merlin uses nicknames a lot is that he has a poor memory and he will call people Chief or Captain. John’s dad always said: ”Counselor!” when he couldn’t remember the person’s name. Merlin learned in church that if you don’t know what to call a person’s name, just call them ”Doctor!” because nobody doesn’t want to be called doctor. Especially in church there are so many titles, it is almost like in the Third Reich.

In Rock’n’Roll calling people for counselor or doctor doesn’t work. You could say Bro, but you would get a kick in the nards. Merlin likes to think that he is not a creepy person, although when John first stayed at his house and they were driving around, getting breakfast with Ken Stringfellow he was super-creepy, but he was star struck by all of those guys, except for Michael. In any social situation when Ken Stringfellow is there he is the creepiest person there and everyone else seems perfectly normal and well-adjusted in comparison.

Merlin thinks that John deserves better than Hot Rod. Sometimes he calls him Roderick, he calls Jonathan Coulton and John Hodgman by his last name sometimes. If you shorten Jonathan’s name to John he gets all pinch-faced and he will tell you that Jonathan is a separate name and he will be upset about it. The same is true for Mike and Michael. Michael Schiller, original drummer of The Long Winters would hate to be called Mike. John doesn’t know what he does now because they have fallen out of touch. He was teaching a writing class at a local arts college and asked John if he would come in and give a lecture to his class, and John said: ”Of course!”, but Michael never contacted him again.

This happens to people: When they reach a certain age weird things happen and they go into a comfortable living room setup with maybe a sectional couch where part of it is called a Chaise, they get an extraordinary television, and their needs are met pretty much. There is a new Chipotle grill that opened down the street, and where is John going to see Michael? They are not going to see each other in church!

John’s first email address (RL68)

Merlin likes Hot Rod as a nickname for John. Of all the nicknames it was the one that stuck the longest and it was also his first email address at the coffee shop that was a front for drugs and prostitutes and the guy who owned it told John that he needed an email address and John didn’t know what that was, so the guy just showed up with it on a paper and said: ”You are now ten.llihlotipac|dortoh#ten.llihlotipac|dortoh!” and the rest was history. The guy had just made that up when he was sitting there, trying to think of an email address for John because he wanted John to be a patron of his Internet café. John did not understand why he would have an email address or why he would ever go on the Internet. It was all newsgroups of child pornographers and Magic the Gathering.

The first email John ever wrote was to his friend Derek Chamberlain, a prolific writer and technology visionare person and he wrote John back within the hour with some thing piece about what it meant that they were emailing one another, and John found that fun and wrote him 5 pages. Merlin had a friend in Oxford whom he went to school with and when he send him an email message he replied inside of 5 minutes, which in retrospect is not a great pattern for dealing with your email (Merlin is the Inbox Zero guy).

Merlin having Car Parts as John’s ringtone (RL68)

Merlin asks John to call him to demonstrate that his phone has a custom vibration that is playing Car Parts when John calls him, which is super-creepy because John is an inch and a half from Merlin’s dingus, such as it is, and he can literally feel his favorite song from John’s first album vibrating by his penis.

The titles of the army of the Third Reich (RL68)

Both Merlin and John think that there were many good Nazi titles in the Third Reich, like Obersturmgruppenführer. He was on a great page with uniform pictures and everything. There are 30 different kinds of arm insignia and different arm bands. John thinks that on pictures where they are all walking in a line, headed up the stairs somewhere with Hitler in the middle and 15 guys walking abreast, every single one of them has a slightly different take on the double-breasted ankle-length leather trenchcoat. How many version of that could there possibly be? The original braun shirts were found in a thrift shop. Merlin reads some of the titles and John can’t wait until someone remixes that into a beat.

Merlin got a suggestion on Twitter that he watch Shoah (Holocaust), which is apparently 9.5 hours long and he is going to make some time for that.

Being more sensitive to criticism (RL68)

Both John and Merlin have been a bit shaky lately. John can take a metric ton of shit, he will stand in a room with 400 people where everybody in the room hates his guts and it just bounces off of him, but lately? Not so much! He is walking around like a wounded elk that has been hit with a stone-tipped arrow, the arrow has falled out, but John is a bit lame in his rear haunch. Merlin knows he has gotten off-track because he starts feeling unappreciated and that is his flag that something is wrong because he does not fucking care normally. He might not be getting enough sleep, he might be getting too much or too little medicine or something.

John promises that everything Merlin tells him is in the strictest confidence, like a priest lawyer, or Merlin’s wartime consigliere. He would even go to the mattresses and all over town he has rooms set up that are full of mattresses. Under John’s influence Merlin starts to get more interested into spy stuff and he has been thinking a lot about safe houses. A Safe Room is a sucker’s game because you are going to get immolated in there when they burn your house down. You are just helping them, like when you put a big lock on a door: ”Don’t go in there!” This is why John has booby-trapped completely random stuff in his house. You wouldn’t think that his family Bible would be an old-fashioned rat trap!

John’s neighbor smoking pot in a car in front of John’s house (RL68)

See Neighborhood!

John’s neighbor’s cherry tree (RL68)

See Neighborhood!

John playing in Hot L Baltimore in the Alaska Repertory Theater, Blue Thunder (RL68)

They mention the movie Blue Thunder with Roy Scheider that is basically Zero Dark Thirty, except in the mid-1980s and in Los Angeles. Merlin had never seen it, but he has seen All That Jazz (also with Roy Scheider) a couple of times. Following the success of All That Jazz and Jaws 2 Roy Scheider made Blue Thunder.

The only reason John knows about Blue Thunder was that John was a kid in the 1980s with a flight suit (see RL13) and also in 1980 he was in the Alaska Repertory Theater production of Hot L Baltimore (by Lanford Wilson, see RW30 and OM151), an award-winning play about the decline of the inner city that took place in a once-grand-now-crumbling hotel and John was the paper boy. It featured real-life nudity on stage and John was 12 years old. Every night for the entire run of this play this was the moment when he was trodding the boards with actual adult actors who had been imported to Anchorage for this first-run off-Broadway play and he got to see this woman’s boobs every night.

It was also where John learned about Arlo Guthrie because they played him in the soundtrack every night. One of the actors in this production was Jack Murdock, a character actor in a lot of television in the 1960/70/80s, he was in an episode of Hawaii Five-O, was the husband of the gal that was on The Love Boat, he is someone where you go: ”Oh, that guy!” when you see him. He played the old guy in the lobby of the Hot L Baltimore, which was a reference to the ”e” being burned out at the Hotel-sign. It was a vérité-play that was popular in the early 1970s with street vernacular and the message was ”Good morning, America, how are you? Don’t you know me? I am your native son!”

Every night the cast was back in the dressing room with the mirrors with the big round light bulbs and everybody was getting dressed in their costumes and getting their make-up on and they were telling theater stories, they were all from New York and the girls were all dancers and Jack Murdock had stories about Hawaii Five-O, he taught John how to play chess because John was their mascot, he was this little kid. He was telling John that his next job after he would leave Alaska was to make the movie Blue Thunder with Roy Scheider. He just plays some cop in a room somewhere, but when the movie came out John knew this guy and he was his buddy. The movie had Roy Scheider in a secret helicopter that could run silent run deep.

The actors who had come up to Alaska to be in this play were the same culture of people as Richard Dreyfuss in Goodbye Girl, just was 4 years later. It was like being on the set of Taxi. The women were wearing leotards around because that is what you were wore. John learned a lot and immediately afterwards when he tried out he was flush with success at having being in this massive production and he auditioned for the oldest kid in An Enemy of the People (by Henrik Ibsen) and did not get the role. He was going to go from here to the big time. The offered John the understudy role, but John has never been particularly resilient who would dust himself off and go back at it, but everybody consoled him and he rejected their consolation.

It was not so much that John was devastated, but he took tremendous umbrage at the idea that there was another 12-year old blonde kid in Anchorage who was as cute as he was, or potentially even cuter, and unfortunately when John stopped being cute 4 days later and he was never cute again. They made the right choice because had they picked him he would have become un-cute on stage in front of the audience. They probably picked an 11-year old and were safe for a year. Theater is a job that you really have to want and you have to get into a certain state that you just have to show up a bunch and it is probably not going to work out and if you keep doing it long enough it will happen.

They continue to talk about movies and TV shows where Jack Murdock has been in, like en episode of Remington Steele, St. Elsewhere, or Cheers. If you are Paul von Hindenburg, wouldn’t you look for someone a little younger? Murdock was also in Any Which Way You Can. Merlin is very interested in the idea of status, although he is not personally obsessed with it. He has been around famous people and unless it is someone he really likes, like Scott Miller, he will mostly go into the background because he doesn’t want to get into that.

Jack Murdock died in 2001 and John has been checking in with him before that, just to see how he was doing. John still has his script from Hot L Baltimore and the program from the show that has everybody’s picture in it. Merlin says that if John ever actually dies he hopes there is someone who can work through the chain of custody for what is going to happen with what is in that house. The thing is that nobody cares! They don’t know that John has two copies of The Official Preppy Handbook (by Lisa Birnbach, see OM54) because on was a reference copy and one was to be preserved. They don’t care!

”He fixed Mr. MacAdoo’s old BMW by adjusting the anti-sway bars.” was a lyric from a proto-Rap song about preppies (called Prep Rap by Russ Mason).

Young people’s attitude to jobs, feeling underused (RL68)

Is there anything worse than getting a job? Merlin thinks that the only thing worse than having a job is losing a job, but you will never lose a job if you don’t get a job. You are what you do. People ask you what you do and they want to know how much you make. John is trying to ring his bell, but he is leaning back in his chair and can’t reach the bell and he is hitting a roll of toilet paper because it is the closest thing he can reach. Merlin thinks John sounds like Khrushchev (referring to the Shoe-banging incident). Merlin tries to counsel his kid about it, that when you are in your 20s and lose a job it feels like the end of the world.

A lot of the young people John knows are not averse to work, but they want to have jobs where they do fulfilling work in the work and make a contribution, and the problem is that they feel underused. Nobody joins IBM anymore as a 20 year old straight out of college and expects to work for IBM for 40 years, but everybody’s career path is a game of Frogger where they are hopping from log to lily-pad and they don’t see a clear path and feel underused from the beginning and when they get to be 27-28 years old and there is still no path developing they have a crushing futility, not that they don’t want to work, but they want to do valuable work, but they have no idea how to get there and they have a college degree in something they don’t care about and all around them they perceive incorrectly people doing fun things, but there is only one Paul F. Thompkins and not everybody can be a Banjo player.

Follow-up: Not understanding culture anymore, the war in Bosnia (RL68)

After their last episode (see RL67) John got an email from a researcher at the International Court in The Hague and for the last years his job has been to sit in a room and go over evidence from the Bosnian genocide. They want him to find a certain person’s name in an archive of 1 billion documents while the people to the left and the right of him that he is working with are reading the autopsy reports of their relatives. They had a little email exchange around the fact that although we have become obsessed with searching for meaning in these senseless acts we feel like if we just watched one more holocaust documentary or read one more book about Bosnia or Rwanda we are somehow going to unlock it and find the missing puzzle piece that explains how normal human beings working in an office are now chewing on the shinbones of the children next door.

After all these years of reading this documents he came to the same conclusion as John: You can learn all there is to know and there is no sense you can ever make of it, you never find a key, you just keep watching holocaust documentaries. John wanted to know how in the fuck did he get that job and he told his story that he was just a guy who needed a job and was talking shit out loud in a bar about the world and some guy sidled over to him and said: If you really feel that way you should do something about it and you should work for this or for that, and he had a job initially sharpening pencils and now he found his way into this room where he got headphones on and is listening to people testify about massacres. They shortly talk about if that is a good job or if it is the worst job in the world.

Why the holocaust is still so present in our culture, The Passion of Joan of Arc, genocides that nobody talks about (RL68)

The horror of history is so muted. World War II and the war in Bosnia are still so horrible because they are still reverberating in living people, but John cannot find a single person who is really horrified by the events of the 30 Years War, although that was a terrible holocaust all over Europe. Merlin’s problem with becoming an Agincourt buff is that there is no reenactments, there is the speech (by Henry V), and that is about it. There were people who died at Agincourt because they were just buried under dead bodies and they couldn’t move because they were in armor.

Terrible things have happened there, but over the course of time they just become history, we write them down on 3x5 cards, file them away, and we no longer have an emotional attachment to them. Slavery in America was 150 years ago, but it is still very present because the cultural memory continues to be passed down and reinforced, but there are a lot of other terrible things that happened in 1860 that have just passed into the ether and nobody is still mad about them.

Merlin really wants to talk about the holocaust, but they might want to save it for Hitler ’N Stuff. Merlin doesn’t think people would tune in if that was its own property. It is going to be like every other holocaust podcast on iTunes. John doesn’t want to profit off the holocaust any more than Merlin does. Merlin thinks that the holocaust is special compared to other wars because it is relatively recent and it represents our idea of how awful it can really get, and no matter how far you dig you are going to find two things: Something that is increasingly more horrific and disturbing and challenging to your idea what makes us human, and it becomes weirdly compelling, like looking at autopsy photos.

Merlin watched the 1928 movie The Passion of Joan of Arc the other night, which is really good and well-done, although you know how it turns out. It is really moving because it is a testament to a 19 year old woman who isn’t going to back down, but also doesn’t want to fucking die at the stake. There is an amazing scene at the end of her being burned at the stake that is pretty well done from 1928 and very hard to watch, and what ultimately makes it interesting because she did that in spite of her fears, but because of her faith, and it would not be interesting without the 30 old guys staring at her laughing.

The thing about Joan of Arc or any prior time in history was that there was opportunity for individual acts of heroism and for people who stood on their principle. You wonder if Galileo had allowed himself to be burned at the stake what we would think about him now. One of the reasons why the holocaust is still on our minds all the time is that we are still navigating not the horror or the inhumanity, but at that moment in time in 1938 around the world there was a sense that democracy was an archaic form and that technological bureaucracy was going to free us from the messiness of the mob and that we finally had the machines and the paperwork to live in a technical fashion, and we are still navigating those ideas now, that if you can just get the apps on your phone into the right order that your life problems are going to go away.

The idea that all of our messiness and all of our crimes against humanity were just a product of our ungovernableness, and the fact that we now had systems in place where we all could be monitored, everything could be catalogued, that we ultimately could be governed, and the fundamental mistake of naziism is the idea that if we just got rid of those people then everybody else was going to live peacefully and comfortably with one another. All we have to do is start with a clean slate, erase these villages and build new villages in their place.

The United States was engaged in the same process, they were erasing the Lower Eastside or Central Detroit and building Highways. All they needed to do was get rid of the ghettos and build big apartment buildings, and through technology and bureaucracy we were going to eliminate all this messy human suffering. The holocaust still rings in John’s head because every day he walks out the door and he sees the world still grappling with the fact that the messiness of democracy is the only chance we have, the only check and balance is other people’s voices, the mixing and disagreement and the goodwill of trying to arrive at a consensus, rather than the goodwill of saying: ”I am going to impose this for your own good!”

John is more and more convinced that the chaos is the key and the code is the mess, not the order, and that anything that looks for answers in order is ultimately going to uncover a new brand of horror, ones that we can’t even picture yet. If you look at any science fiction that prognosticates future horror, it all comes as a result of some attempt of creating a new order. What none of us can handle is that the mess is the plan or the mess is what protects us and the process is the end.

Part of what Merlin finds so great about the 1985 movie Brazil is how wonderfully in marries two things: It is heavily influenced by the book 1984 (by George Orwell, and everyone should read his essay Politics and the English Language) and The Castle by Kafka. 1984 has a sense of stasis, that this is not going to change, you are always going to be scared, we are always going to be at war with Eurasia until somebody comes down and throws a hammer at the big screen and that is why we have iPhones. The scene when they are in the restaurant and there is a bombing and they bring up folding screens to cover up the area where people are horribly injured is very Marx Brothers. Merlin never finished his thought what this had to do with Kafka.

The following 5 songs…

  • Can You Feel the Love Tonight by Elton John from The Lion King
  • All I wanna Do, the first major hit for Sheryl Crow
  • Loser by Beck
  • Stay (I Missed You) by Lisa Loeb
  • Whoomp! There It Is by Tag Team

(All I wanna Do is basically a note-for-note production remake of the song Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel. In the same way you can put up Steven Malkmus’ Jenny and the Ess-Dog against Say Yes by Elliott Smith: ”Jennifer dates a man in a 60s cover band” Joanna Bolme from the studio where this was recorded played in Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. Beck quit Scientology and is trying to play it off legit.)

… all seem old, but not super-old and they are all from the same year 1994 when there was a 100-day genocide in Rwanda. We are not talking about Horst-Wessel-Lied, but stuff that you could hear at a wedding that you would remember from when you were in Junior High, and they were not out there with rapidly increasingly technologies, but there was a lot of legwork involved in doing what they were doing during those 100 days. For example in the movie The Pianist these people had lives and fancy clothes and the Weimarer Republic was really fun and you see color footage of World War II and it is as fresh as Vietnam and completely brings it up to date.

Kids in John’s neighborhood bouncing a basketball (RL68)

See Neighborhood!

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