This week, Dan and John talk about:

The show title refers to the fact that a banana is only just right for about 6 hours between being too green and too ripe, but many people like their bananas in very different ways, so for every banana there is a person who likes it just like that.

It is freezing almost in Austin. John likes that Dan starts the shows with a little bit of a weather report.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 installing a new gutter at his house because he old one had a ladder-shaped bend in it (RW239)

John’s house is long, but not in the style of a Pacific Northwest long house, it is in the style of a mid-century Rambler and at some point the family got a little bigger and they built an addition, a couple of rooms for their expanding family and rather than put an L into the house or build an addition that went a different direction, they extended the house along a single axis and built the addition down at the end. They did a nice job, it is seamlessly integrated, and the house kind of looks like a train station. It is just long, not wide. If it were 4ft wider across the beam there would be room for a couch in the basement.

On the ravine side there is a very long gutter that runs along the roof that only has two downspouts at either corner. When John moved into the house it looked to him as an investigative reporter that someone along the line had wanted to get up on the roof from the lower side. From the upper side of the house it is easy to get onto the roof, you could just throw a step ladder up, it is a mid century Rambler, but the back side of the house is two stories. It is very common in the Northwest where there are hills that the front door is at the ground level and in the back the hill tumbles down and you got a two story house in the back. Someone, rather than get on the roof from the front, got on the roof from the back, and they leaned a long, tall ladder against the long gutter and they bent it right at the point where it crests.

To put a gutter on a house is skilled work, because in this case with this very long travel that the gutter has to do it has to peak in the middle so that the water runs down to both sides., but it can’t look like it is bent. When Dan put gutters on his house years ago, they had a machine and the gutters themselves were unfolded sheet aluminum that it would shape into the gutter on the fly, curling down the little edges and seaming them together. It was magic!

The machine wouldn’t be able to put in this declination that would happen across the length of the house. It is not like surgery, but it was impressive to watch when John finally called the guys to get a new one of these because it is not repairable when your aluminum thing is bent like that. Some guys came out, home-handyman type guys, they didn’t have a giant machine, they just had a truck, but the truck had some capacity to do this bending that Dan was talking about. It is like the machine that makes a star-bellied sneetch into a regular sneetch, alternatively the machine will take a star off of it.

John had a gutter put on earlier this year because the old gutter when it would rain hard the water would spill over the gutter right in the center of the space and it was digging a hole in the ground it was a big mess. Now it started to rain heavily again, we are in the heavy rain season. The two things spiders and pine needles are why John would recommend that no one move to the Northwest because the spiders for obvious reasons, but when the pines decide to drop their needles, the conifers all decide at the same time, they are evergreen trees, but they do have to get rid of some needles and they drop them all at once.

It forms a beautiful carpet, but it really interferes with the way windshield wipers on your car work and they fill up the gutters. It is really not that big of a deal, it is actually quite beautiful, it is a small thing, hardly a thing to complain about. What kind of a nut is going to say that pine needles are a reason not to move to the Northwest, it is insane, but in this case they have clogged up John’s brand-new gutter and the water is just pouring off the side of the gutter down into the yard, digging another hole, basically. Now John has the experience to know: ”Don’t lean a ladder up against it because it is going to bend!”, as he has deduced from the ladder-shaped bend that used to be in the gutter.

You have to have a ladder that has an extension that allows it to touch either the roof or the side of the wall without leaning against the eave, it has a little U, a ladder with arms! He could get up on the roof quite easily from the other side of the house, but as you go over the crest of the roof and come down on the side with the offending gutter, you are 30ft above the ground on a weird, sloppy rancher roof. He was up on the roof of his mom’s house, which was 40ft above the ground and steeper, but in a way he felt more secure because the angle felt more regular, you knew you were on a steep roof and you knew you can’t monkey around, whereas this roof is shallow and it feels like you could just waltz over there.

It is vertigo inducing and John doesn’t want to be up on the roof, look over the side, and clean out a gutter. He would have to get down on his belly. Now he has a problem because he has a gutter full of pine needles and he doesn’t want to be on the roof and there is no way to put a ladder up there. He will have to get a gutter-cleaning drone. Dan thinks there might be a way to do that from the ground with a hose attachment or something like that.

Dan was looking for gutter cleaners and there are tons and tons of these things, some of them look like they are hoses, some look like they have brushes, and some of them seem to be up to 50ft long. John wants the link to the thing and will buy it immediately. Having a home there is a lot to it in the Northwest. The outdoor faucets you do have to winterize, but there is nothing else that needs winterizing. The windows in this house, some of them are single-pane windows and John feels like that single-pane / double-pane thing is a little bit of a racket. There is obviously a difference, it is not nothing, but it is not a thing that is worth taking all the windows out of your house and putting in new windows.

If you want double-pane windows that are insulated and quiet, then you should buy a newer home that came with those and not take the beautiful old windows out of your old house if you live in an older house. Most of the people who are taking windows out and are being convinced by the weird double-pane window crowd, it is just sales people… Sometimes you go down a block and every single house on the street has asbestos tile or aluminum siding, and you realize there was a really good salesperson that came through here and sold everybody on this block.

Exocomp robots from Star Trek (RW239)

In one episode of Star Trek The Next Generation they had drone things, not flying drones, but they were designed to go inside of tubes in some power station (not the tubes of the Internet) and they became artificially intelligent.

John knows a lot of people with exceptional minds, people that have talent that supersedes talent in a way. A lot of smart people standing in a room, chatting, everybody is real clever here, but then each person has a place where they are just gifted. Hodgman would stand in a room full of very funny people, everybody in there is funny, some of the people are professionally funny, but there would be a place in the relating of anecdotes where Hodgman’s access to the humor of the Gods, and he is very casual, but he would just be sometimes the funniest person you had ever seen.

John was saying to a friend via email that Ken Jennings does this thing where he is a very smart guy and he introduces smart things and he has a lot of information, but he is a regular person, and then he goes on the GOAT show on Jeopardy and he just accelerates the light speed in a way where you start wondering: ”How are you able to be this otherworldly?”

In the case of this conversation Dan is accessing levels of Star Trek The Next Generation that John has no access to. The things Dan was talking about are called Exocomp and he proceeds to read things from the internet about that particular episode (S06E09 The Quality of Life). That particular Exocomp is exhibiting what John was just describing: an exceptional ability to sense whether or not there is about to be an explosion in a tube.

Saying grace at the dinner table (RW239)

They started saying Grace earlier this year, they went to Ken Jennings House for dinner, and they are observant religious and so they said Grace and it was John’s daughter’s real first experience with saying Grace and she liked it. Like John’s sister his daughter is ceremonial. She believes things have import and she wants things marked in time.

She said that they should have a Grace and she came up with one: ”Thank you for this food and drink and everything placed before us!” Because they were watching The Mandalorian John’s daughter concludes their Grace by saying: ”This is the way!” and then everyone at the table echoes: ”This is the way!” and now ”This is the way!” has definitely left the Mandalorian behind and has become a general phrase of Grace in their home.

John’s dad’s 100th birthday, visiting his grave with a banana and chocolate (RW239)

John was at the Cemetery a couple of days ago because it was his dad’s 100th birthday. Normally John’s mom doesn’t go because the Cemetery is where John’s father’s family is buried and the earliest stone in there is from 1885, which is in Seattle terms pretty old. Seattle only really having been settled in the very earliest European times in 1860. 1857 was the first arrival. It is John’s dad’s place, his family used to live just a block from the Cemetery, and John’s mom doesn’t usually go because she is not somebody that is like: ”Let me go stand at your father’s grave!”

Bringing bananas and chocolate

But they were headed down there, it was his 100th birthday, they were going to do their little ceremony on his birthday where they eat bananas and chocolate because he loved chocolate to the point that it was a little bit pathological and he also thought that a banana is a perfect food. If you are leaving the house, he would say: ”Take a banana!”, when you wake up in the morning, you come downstairs, he would say: ”Want a banana?” A Banana is the solution to a lot of problems and the first thought he would have is: ”Maybe you should have a banana!”

That had never occurred to John, but his sister has very different perception about certain things and she noticed this and once she called it out John realized that their dad does apply a banana to almost any problem. It is not like he carried a bunch of bananas hanging from his rear view mirror in his car or something, it was just a regular house with a regular number of bananas, but every time he went to the store he bought a bunch of bananas. John has adopted that and adapted to it, he always has bananas at home. Then ”Have a banana!” became a code between Susan and John where they were definitely doing a head-check to dad: ”Why don’t you have a banana if you are having such a bad day!” or whatever.

After dad died they would go to the Cemetery and Susan would bring bananas, referencing their reference as much as she is referencing him, because if he were there in the Cemetery, sitting on a chair, and Susan showed up with bananas, he would be thrilled, but he would also scowl at the idea that it had become any kind of meme associated with him. Whereas the chocolate, he would like the chocolate, but he wouldn’t know what those bananas were about.

Susan has turned it into a ritual and now John’s daughter surely thinks that her grandfather was some crazy person about bananas. John was about to say: ”Who doesn’t like a banana?”, but he actually knows people that don’t like bananas. They just don’t like them. There are a lot of reasons to not like a banana when you really think about it, they are stringy, they are too green right up until the point where then they are suddenly too brown. There are the perfect 6 hours where a banana is just perfect, but there are this many people that like them green and there are this many people that like them brown. For every banana there is a person.

Going for Mexican food afterwards

They were there at the Cemetery, got the bananas, and John’s mom decided to come because it was his 100th birthday and John had promised everyone that they were going to go out to Mexican food afterwards, they always went to this restaurant on Capitol Hill called El Farol that had been there a long time, and before it was El Farol John used to go to the Mexican restaurant that was there before. It has been there for decades and it was one of those restaurants where hey went as a family. It is a humble Mexican food place, it is not luxurious, but just a regular workman’s Mexican food place in the middle of Capitol Hill. The food is not exceptional, it is is also very workman-like, but they grew to love the proprietors, the wait-staff were all men and they were all funny and charming, local friends. They haven’t been there in a long time because they have all moved south now.

Cemeteries where famous people are buried

When dad died they put what they called a temporary stone, which was a real stone that had his name and the date of his death carved into it, but it was temporary, it wasn’t a headstone, and the Cemetery director explained it to that when you put a headstone in, part of the cost of the headstone is an endowment to the Cemetery that pays for the groundskeeping and the upkeep and the stone is registered then within the Cemetery and becomes part of their operation. This Cemetery is a very large Cemetery, it is the Cemetery where Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee are buried, but also all of the Seattle founders, all the names of the main downtown streets: Belle, Denny, Mercer, Renton, all those original characters are all buried in this one particular Cemetery, and they all have obelisks and whatnot, called Lakeview Cemetery.

The people that run it are managing this property that in many ways is a tourist destination. People come to stand at Bruce Lee’s grave. There is a Cemetery down in Renton where Jimi Hendrix is buried and for years he just had a flat stone on the ground like everyone else there and it became over time a pilgrimage spot, but it is not even in regular Renton, it is in some weird South Renton that is not near anything. You would have to know about it, back in the 1980s where there wasn’t an Internet, you would have to conceive that Jimi Hendrix was even buried in the region. There was nothing about Renton that meant anything to him. It was just his father found a graveyard. It is weird where he is buried, but it was just a flat stone on the ground and you had to walk around this enormous Cemetery in Renton, wondering where Jimi Hendrix might be.

John went there once and they didn’t find it and went home empty-handed. Eventually in the 1990s the legend of Jimi became a big thing to Generation X and pretty soon you could find Jimi Hendrix’s grave because the grass was worn down all around it. Eventually they built some larger thing, they recognized that they needed to have a place for people to go, like Jim Morrison in Père-Lachaise. They have done that with Bruce and Brandon here, there is a fence, it is a selfie-spot now, but it has always been a place for people to go.

The Roderick-name only having a recent connection to Seattle

They were there at the Cemetery and John’s mom was looking down. The Knudsen’s are there, John’s dad’s sister and her husband Cal, and then the Rochesters, who are John’s dad’s mother’s family. They are the Seattle, the ones that have been here for a long time. They lived across the street. They are the founding family here. The Roderick-name came from John’s grandfather who was a second-generation Welshman from Ohio who didn’t come out to Seattle, he met John’s grandmother in France in World War I and they married and all of a sudden he was in Seattle and had no relationship to the place.

The Roderick name does not have any history here. John’s dad was the first Roderick that made any impact in Washington and then of course there is John who has made Roderick a household name in Washington, and the church-bells peel when they say it now, but it used to be there was the Rochester family and so there are all these Rochesters there. John’s mom’s relationship to the Rochesters was not particularly chummy, although she and John’s grandmother were very good friends.

She used to leave John as a toddler with his grandmother and could go shopping or whatnot and one time she came back, John was about 2, and she said: ”Where is John?” and his grandmother said: ”Oh, some little girls came by and took him!” - ”Who?” - ”Oh, some neighborhood girls!” John’s mom went out and went up and down the alleys, 15th Avenue, and eventually found him 2 years old in the company of a little gaggle of 6-year old girls and they were feeding him peanuts and had dressed him me in a bonnet, and from then on she couldn’t leave him alone with Nana anymore, but they were close.

They were standing in the graveyard, they have a banana, they were all a little awkward, John’s sister is the ceremonial one, but they were not going to stand there and speak aloud to the ground. It is very hard for them to do that.

Ridiculous inscriptions on his family's stones, temporary grave-stone

John’s dad’s stone is gone because after he died in 2007 John always meant to go through what seemed a torturous process of picking the right stone, picking the right inscription, and then going around to the relatives, asking who wants to chip in on this: "You don’t have to, but if anybody wants to throw in a couple of $100 on this…” That whole thing just seemed really fraught at the time.

The gravestones in John’s family are ridiculous, there is more than 1 stone that says something, like John’s great-grand-uncle, his stone says something like: ”His worlds, East and West, raconteur, statesman, man of the century!” It has this whole paragraph written on it, all balderdash. He was not a Bon Vivant, his world was not East and West, but it meant that he went back east and he married the woman who was the heiress of the Buster Brown shoe fortune and he spent the rest of his life managing her money.

Everybody agreed that he was a flaming asshole. John only met him one time, he was 95 years old, a tiny shrunken little man in a hospital bed and they took John to meet him at 8 years old or something, and he was terrifying. How can a person get this old?

When thinking about his dad’s stone, is John going to put a sentence on there? Is that the family tradition? If that is the family tradition, then John needs to cut it off. ”Statesman! His worlds: East and West. Connecticut and Seattle!” East and West implies that he spent two decades in China.

John never bought a stone and it has been 13 years since his dad died, but he has been meaning to do it the whole time, talking to relatives, to his sister: ”We got to get a stone for dad!” - ”Oh yeah, we should do that!” and all the relatives have pledged, but it is John’s job. At one point he handed it off to his sister: ”How about if this is your job?” - ”Totally! I am on it!”, but she also made zero progress at it.

Because they haven’t bought a stone and haven’t paid for the endowment, they haven’t mowed around his temporary stone and they have mowed all everywhere else and the grass all went on top of the stone and it became dirt and it grew over and his stone is under there somewhere, but it is gone. The Cemetery was plaited in the 1870s because some of the founders, including the people that got there in 1857, the ones that first washed up on the shore at Alki Beach, some of them are buried there. This Cemetery was out in the sticks at the time.

They have a beautiful map of the Cemetery that has every plot in there and it shows that the original layout had alley roads. The Cemetery itself has a beautiful network of roads, it looks like that one in Park Slope in Brooklyn, a place that you could just go for a lazy walk. It is big enough, the roads twist around, there are hills and dales, it is a big place and a pleasant place to be, but somewhere along the line they decided that they were going to close some of these alleys and sell that land as new graves. Because it is a Cemetery it gets crowded and in the early days Mr. Mercer could build a mausoleum to himself, but later on they had to get more people in here and change the rules a little bit.

These days it is out of fashion and nobody buries a body, or hardly ever, and you can buy a grave and you can fill it up with little canisters, you can put six different people in a little plot. They haven’t changed the rules so they can put 60 people in a plot, even though presumably they would fit, but it would be a mass grave at that point. They have these mausoleums like they have in Los Angeles, a building with a crypt where you put your people basically in a file cabinet drawer.

Having joined a funeral co-op, wanting to watch the cremation

John’s parents in the 1960s when they were still married they joined a funeral co-op (see OM250) as an attempt to get out of the funeral home racket. They said that funeral homes are exploitative and instead they were going to do it as a co-op. John was also born in a co-op hospital. They bought this stuff in 1962 and when John’s dad died it was all still there. The co-op still exists in Seattle and John found these papers and he walked in there and said: ”I think my dad bought something in the 1960s” and they were like: ”Welcome, friend!” and they handled all of his stuff.

John went down to the funeral home, the Crematorium, and said: ”I would like to be there in the room for the cremation!” - ”No, you wouldn’t!” - ”Well, Yeah, I think I would. This is the ceremony. I want to be there when it happens!” - ”You really don’t want to be there!” and John realized that the process of taking a dead person and cremating them is one where you don’t want to be there. He is not in a coffin, you see the ones where the coffin goes in on a conveyor belt, but they don’t do that because when they hand you the ashes, it is not a bunch of wood ash from the wood coffin that they burned.

They put the body on a gurney and that is it. Everything else is just for the movies because you don’t want to see the reality, which is that this person has been dead a few days and there is a funeral worker who is accustomed to dealing with people that have been dead a few days and the body goes into the burner and then it burns. You as a lay person, particularly if you are dealing with somebody that you love, you don’t want to watch it. It was explained to John in very gentle terms, and they said that if after all of this he still wanted to be there, they would have to get a permit that was going to cost $500 extra because they have to build a screen for health reasons or something. You have to be a licensed crematoryist.

John had his wisdom tooth pulled out at one point because he had an abscess, a decade ago, and John wanted to keep that because it was very unusual, but his dentist said it was a hazmat situation. ”It was a tooth that was inside of me 10 minutes ago, I am not asking you to give me my liver!” and she: ”All right!” and she put it in a little plastic bag and let him have it. When Dan had his wisdom teeth out he soaked them in bleach to get everything cleaned off and he had them up until not that long ago. At one point he was inspired of making them into a necklace and he tried to drill through them, but they are surprisingly tough, and he didn’t have a vice. Going around with a necklace of your own wisdom teeth around your neck was pretty badass, this was high school when he was probably 17 years old.

Dan’s phone rang and his ringtone is crickets ever since his first iPhone.

John's dad wanting his ashes sprinkled in many places

John’s family are cremator people and his great-grandfather’s ashes, although they have a stone for him in this plot, it doesn’t say Bon vivant, but according to John’s dad they actually took his ashes and sprinkled them under the Holly tree that was in Volunteer Park across the street from their house. They lived on 15th Avenue and right across the street there was a Holly tree and that became grandfather’s Holly tree and although he had a stone in the neighboring Cemetery and they would go over there and tipped their hat, in reality the Holly tree was where grandfather was and when dad were little boys, they would go over there and stand at attention and salute.

John’s dad wanted some of his ashes sprinkled in the middle of Lake Washington, some of them sprinkled on the top of Mount Alyeska in Alaska, and all these other things, some of them on the top of Mount Susitna, all this stuff, and at some point John’s sister said: ”Dad, do you really want your ashes on the top of Mount Susitna?” It is a mountain that you can see all throughout Anchorage and John’s dad used to have an office where he looked out the window and there was Mount Sue.

Dad had all this: ”I want to be there. I want to be there.” and when John was putting him in the cemetery he actually opened the urn, sensitive to the idea that he was going to put him in Lake Washington and on the top of Mount Alyeska. He actually said he wanted some under the Holly tree where Granddad is buried, but that is 100% illegal to sprinkle your dad’s Ashes in Volunteer Park under the Holly tree. There is no permit they are going to grant you for that, so that would have to be a middle of the night mission.

John took a little urn and put some of his dad’s ashes in the smaller urn, his pilot’s license and a couple of pieces of chocolate, no banana, he sealed that urn and put it in Lakeview Cemetery. The rest of his actions, like Brock Adams’ mother, he still has in an urn because he hasn’t gotten around to taking him up to Mount Alyeska and out on Lake Washington. He should do these things, but he established a precedence with Brock Adams’ mother that it is not a bad thing to have him here. He was under John’s piano for many years, he moves around, he is in the space, he is looking out the window and maybe Mounts Susitna is a little bit further away.

John's dad having bought his own lot on the cemetary

The space in the Cemetery where his stone wants to be is actually in what used to be an alley that they vacated and put in graves because the Rochester family plot fell into the hands of John’s uncle Junius, and although there are many spaces there left for family members, Uncle Junius in managing the space, he is a problematic figure for John, said: ”I need to save that space for my great great grand niece, a person who hasn’t been born yet!”, he is just weird. What the hell is he talking about? He is the son of the younger of the three siblings that had inherited this space. John’s father was the senior, he should have absolutely had control over this, but he wasn’t interested. Anyway, Junius made a fuss and dad, rather than deal with Junius, bought his own plot in the alley.

The alley isn’t an alley, there are stones there, and it is 10ft from the rest of the family plot, 10ft to the west and probably 10ft to the south, somebody can do the math whatever the hypotenuse of that is. They were standing there and John’s mom said: ”You know what? Why don’t I buy the plots next to his, a plot next to that and a plot next to that, and then we can put in a thing, like a bench or something, that says Roderick, and then I can be buried here and you and Susan?” - ”Wait a minute. You who divorced my dad in 1972, now all of a sudden you want to be buried next to him?” - ”Not next to him. He can be over here and we will be over here, and altogether there will be a bench up and over back into the left.”

John’s daughter at that point looks at the alley and notices that every other stone is in Chinese and at the top they have the English translation. There are a lot of Chinese people buried in this Cemetery because the Chinese were very early arrivals to Washington, they were a very large community in Seattle, so this Cemetery is also a big Chinese Cemetery, but the Chinese part of the Cemetery is disseminated widely, there is no corner of the Cemetery that is Chinese, the Chinese people are all throughout the Cemetery. But in this instance it was just one long line of Chinese graves right in the middle of an older part of the Cemetery where there are no other Chinese graves.

They realized when they vacated this alley and made it available for graves, some aluminum siding salesman went to the Chinese community and said: ”Hey! Big opportunity here!” and probably spent a couple of weeks in Chinatown and sold all of these grave sites to Chinese families: ”Hey, the Rodericks are getting aluminum siding here. Do you want to not be in on this great opportunity to be buried in Lakeview Cemetery?” and John thinks nothing pleased his dad more than that not only was he back and to the left of the family, so he could see the family, they were his Mount Susitna, he was there, when you are standing at the Rochesters you can look over and see where the Rodericks are, but they are not quite there, they are over here in the alley with all the Chinese.

How John wants to go out (RW239)

For years John thought that what he was going to speed along Highway One outside of Big Sur, and a certain point failed to make a corner and go off the road, like Alaska Natives who would walk out into the snow and they would never see them again because they knew that it was just his time and he didn’t want to be a burden on the family anymore. There are different kinds of Alaskan Natives, Inuits, Aleuts, Athabascans, and they are distinctive populations and we no longer use the encompassing term Eskimo to refer to everybody as Dan first did.

There are Iñupiats, there are Yupiks, and there are Aleuts and the word Eskimo does not really mean any of those. It means ”netter of snowshoes”. There are a lot of subdivisions of those three main groups, and those are just the coastal people. The Athabascans who live in the interior of Alaska are not even related at all to the seafaring people. The Athabascans are related to the Native Americans that live in Canada and in central United States, they were what had formerly been called Indians and they were very separate from what were formerly called Eskimos. Alaska is very complicated, it is a large area.

John’s plan was always to drive off the edge of the road and fall into the ocean. But recently, there have been a few instances where someone has actually literally gone down there and driven off the road into the ocean, specifically those two women and their five adopted kids, and one of them went and murder-suicided everybody, which has taken the bloom off the rose of that kind of Viking funeral. These days as he is a little bit older and he would rather go peacefully, but without a long illness. Inshallah. John’s family are cremation people.

John’s dad was supposed to sprinkle his friend’s mother’s ashes, but never did (RW239)

He got this idea that he wanted his ashes up there because his childhood friend Brock Adams (it was maybe Scoop Jackson, see RW91 and OM250), when Brock’s mother died, she wanted her Ashes sprinkled on Mount Susitna although they were Seattleites, so Brock Adams’ mother had her ashes delivered to John’s father who was a small plane pilot and he was supposed to get up in his airplane, fly over mountains Susitna and sprinkle Brock Adams’ mother on the mountain, but for years, Brock Adams’ mother sat in an urn in John’s father’s office. She could see Mount Susitna out the window.

As far as John knows he did it at some point, but he didn’t invite Joh, which seems weird because who else is going to do it? He was flying the plane! Who went up with him to dump Brock Adams’ mother out on Mount Susitna? If you open to the door and open to the urn, what is to keep those ashes from just filling up the compartment of the airplane? It is not uncomplicated.