This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Stop using magic on Daddy, referring to his daughter when she is reading a fantasy book that contains magic always trying to use that magic on Daddy.

The show title refers to the comic book Omaha the Cat Dancer that John misremembered as Omaha the Sex Cat or Oklahoma the Sex Cat, and which he thought about when they were talking about how elves are sex fantasy creatures.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 computer having reset all of his settings and having him log in again, security questions (RL193)

John has fixed his settings. There was no reason that they should have changed, but that is no explanation. The computer decided to change the settings, and it has more information than John does because it is drawing from a lot of sources in real time, showing you things you didn't know you needed. It determined that everything needed to be reset, and John needed to log in again using his secret password.

25% of what John does is logging in, but now he forgot which one of the three passwords he uses is the one that he used for that. What was your first pet? What was your mother's maiden name? That stuff is hard to find out! What is your Social Security number? It is right there on your College application!

Their friend John Siracusa gives Merlin a little bit of jazz because Merlin doesn’t actually help John with these things. There is an application that would save John a lot of aggravation with these things. In situations like that what John needs is to download another app, but he is missing the point: The security questions are going to bite you in the ass!

Merlin asked John to ask him a security question: ”What was the first time you masturbated?” - ”Lovingly!” - ”Who is your least favorite relative?” - ”Gleefully!” You pick a part of speech and use that for your security questions and then record them in this secure app. Never use an actual noun! Never answer with a noun! Answer with a different part of speech! Merlin goes with adverbs, he tries to minimize his use of adverbs wherever he can and then you can use that for security questions. The other trick is: ”That is not my actual security answer!”

John’s understanding of the problem is that no-one is actually sitting down and trying to figure out your security question, it is just some computer algorithm that is going to go through every possible combination. Merlin explains that when you call Apple and say: ”Hello, I am definitely John Roderick’s whatever and I am having trouble getting into his thing!” John argues that nobody is doing that, nobody is fishing actually what was Merlin's childhood address. Merlin says he will not talk about this online, but he will discuss it with John offline. It is a harrowing problem. Harrowing is a kind of fish. There is also the comedy duo Stewart Lee and Richard Harrowing (Herring). You can have all kinds of different fish!

John’s relationship to email being like his relationship to regular mail, throwing 90% of it away (RL193)

This morning John has been checking his emails. Merlin has been getting emails for 23 years, John for at least 16, and he was checking his email this morning, realizing now that he has the exact same relationship to email that he has to real mail, but he is sitting in his virtual front yard and he is virtually sorting through a bunch of flyers for grocery stores and stuff from the six colleges that mistakenly think he wants to go get a degree in IT. He throws 90% of his email immediately in the garbage and that is after spending probably 10.000 man hours meticulously adjusting his spam filters and sending unsubscribes every time the University of San Francisco decides that he is an alum again.

One of the universities in San Francisco decided eight years ago that he had gone there and they cannot be put off the scent. He spends all this time unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, ”Please unsubscribe from the thing that I didn't subscribe to!” and still 80-90% of the emails he gets he just throws in the virtual recycling bin without even going through the gate into his house, he just stands by the mailbox. It only has taken 23 years for the new technology to become a completely obsolete technology. How many emails does Merlin answer every day? Merlin looks at his email, and a lot of days he answers less than one email a day. He has so many thoughts about this!

Merlin’s daily routine (RL193)

This morning Merlin was getting ready for the day, getting ready for the things he needed to do today and thinking about the things he needed to do today. On a day when they are recording, isn’t the recording of this podcast such a bright sun that you can't even see the other stars? Probably 4 out of 5 of them, but there is the ones they can't put out, although actually they put out almost all of them now. They haven't not put one out in a long time.

There was a time when it seemed like every other one they weren't putting out, and when they get to minute 80 something special happens in John’s mind, some unconscious gateway where he can either start winding things down or triple down. In those moments in every tone in Merlin’s voice he is just saying: ”No, no, no, just wind it up! We are at minute 80! This is already a good episode! Give me any kind of bell! Give me something funny I can end on!” - ”Did I ever tell you about Hitler's sex dungeons?” - ”Nooooo!”

Merlin has been working on sleep again and has been a bad dad where he sleeps in later than he should in the mornings and his wife ends up doing a lot of heavy lifting in the morning. He is trying to work on that and he is trying to adjust to going to bed earlier, which is difficult because he has fallen back into a pattern of really enjoying the time after his kid goes to bed where he can watch movies, and he is very selfishly watching movies and TV shows. If he doesn’t keep an eye on that he will do that very easily until 1am, and he is trying to get to where he is going to go to bed before midnight, ideally 10:30pm.

Today he slept his way through the morning with the family, he didn't really do anything of consequence, and he has to get ready for the day. He has to record two podcasts today (he wouldn’t say what the other one is), he has to get the sponsors ready for their show, he has to do the reads for that, he has to do the sponsor reads for the third program that he does, he does five programs in total. It is nothing difficult, but it is all stuff that has to be done, like the television program Lost: There is a point when the show still made a modicum of sense, where a guy sits in an underground cavern in an underground lair, and every few minutes he has to type a sequence of numbers into a computer. For a while all we know is: ”Boy, he really has to get those numbers punched in or there is going to be problems!”

Liking movies purely on technicality even if the story and the acting was bad (RL193)

This is an argument that John and Sean Nelson used to have a lot. They would argue sometimes, but they never took it all the way to having a podcast, which is what you should do when you have disagreements with somebody. They would go to see the movies, and Sean was a cinephile and studied movies, and they would go see a film and John would come out of the film and would say: ”That movie had no redeeming qualities. It was a garbage movie!” and he would sigh and then they would start arguing and he would say:

”No, it was a great movie!” - ”Not only can you not defend the statement ’It is a great movie!’, you can't even defend my assertion that that movie should be burned in the public square!” - ”What about that one tracking shot? In one long view they took in the whole army marching through the valley, it panned over here and then settled on an Eagle in its airy and then there were some clouds and a rainbow!” - ”Seriously, you are going to defend this movie based on the technicality of one long tracking shot?”, but he was seeing the trees for the forest. It didn't matter to him that the plot was garbage, the dialogue was garbage, the acting was garbage, because they had this tracking shot and he was seeing all these other elements that he was appreciating, he was almost watching a different movie.

It is not that he doesn't also know that dialogue matters and script matters, but he decides at a certain point in the film that that is not what he is looking for anymore or that this is a valid enough movie on some technical basis that it is in the category of good movies. John had a lot of people say about Lost to him that even now knowing that it is gibberish they still recommend that John should watch it because it is such a fun watch, and John pulls his hair out and he almost shouts at them.

There is too much media to consume it all, people recommending John things to watch all the time (RL193)

Life is short enough! If you are only queuing up to watch just the things that everyone agrees are brilliant, why would you subject yourself to hours upon hours of watching a thing that makes no sense, that has no point other than that some people had a lot of money and didn't think a thing through? It feels like a worldview difference where maybe John doesn't understand. If someone put him in a room that, one of those silent rooms that makes you insane.

It is like people like William Hurt freaking out in the relaxation tub (in the movie Altered States). It seems to John that one of those isolation tubs ticks 6/7 boxes for him. Merlin counters that it is little, dark, wet, which is a lot of things that John doesn’t like. He doesn’t mind it being wet if it is an open tub, that would be something he would look forward to and possibly bring a sandwich and a desk. He also doesn’t mind it being dark although he wants to be able to banish the dark and let in the light on his terms.

If John was in an isolation cube and he was going crazy from lack of stimulus, and someone said: ”Here is some relief. You should watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer!”, John would still not want to watch it. People in John’s inner circle are loud proponents of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all of the spin-offs.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer came on at a time when Merlin was very into music on many levels and spending a lot of time on music. The TV that he was into was probably still The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Mr. Show, but the idea of being a 30-something year old man and watching a show about a teenager who kills vampires was very unappealing to him. He also didn’t see the movie and John says that the movie was good, he must have seen it ironically, just like everything they did in the 1990s was ironic.

Merlin felt like he should watch it, but then he also got the vibe from people that it gets a lot better in later seasons and you got to go through. Today that is difficult because there is so much stuff. Stuff will drop on Netflix where every episode is so good! Merlin is not going to find an hour to go watch one episode of Daredevil. You are in for a dime, in for a dollar, you are probably going to watch that whole thing. Netflix has gotten rather canny about being able to determine how successful something will be based on what other people watched, how much of it they watched, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They are using science on people’s television. They are peeping at you and then they are using that to sell things to you.

Merlin carries around a certain amount of background baseline guilt. There is always also the thing with age, where if you missed your window for something you are going to have to go back and mop up. It is hard to tell an 80-year old man he should listen to ELO, even though ELO is an unimpeachably great band with at least a dozen terrific Classic Rock songs, but he missed his ELO window.

How did Merlin feel about The Dukes of Hazzard? He was a massive fan and dressed like Bo Duke to the extent that his budget would allow, but it was super gay and it looked really stupid. He was a fat kid wearing a turtleneck with a flannel shirt over it, he looked like he was producing something off of Broadway. The like ”I looked like Bo Duke to the extent that my budget would allow.” actually would fit into the Waylon Jennings Dukes of Hazzard theme. One time John was in a Country bar in Belgium and the band was playing The Dukes of Hazzard theme. After the show he went up and said: ”That was great! You guys did a great job playing the Dukes of Hazzard theme!” and none of them spoke English, they were just singing it phonetically.

Nobody can listen to all the media, there is too much media, and you end up having to find Rabbis and Sherpa who are able to guide you with taste and interest. Merlin increasingly finds it not that helpful when someone says: ”Oh my God! You should totally watch How to Get Away with Murder!” - ”What is that?” This is 70% of the conversations John has in the world, or any of the other Shonda Rhimes properties, none of which Merlin has ever seen because he doesn't watch that kind of television. He is not racist, he just doesn’t watch network television as a thing, he doesn’t have appointment viewing, he doesn’t have cable. That is part of his ELO window: He missed that window.

Did he watch Making a Murderer? He watched all but the last episode. He couldn't do it because it made him genuinely very sad to watch that show. Black people have known for years that maybe the justice system doesn't work so much like a Swiss clock as so much as a Swiss cheese.

Merlin missed his window! For example Star Trek New Generation came on almost precisely as Merlin was starting college, and even if he did have a TV that he could watch, it would be extremely low on his list to set aside time in the evening to watch a Star Trek. Nothing against the Star Trek properties. He has seen three full episodes of the original series, possibly maybe ten, he has seen maybe 2-3 of The New Generation, which is what it is called.

Merlin does not know about the sexism of the Ferengi, but he knows there are 4 lights because he heard that in one of John’s songs where he referenced Star Trek, but John did not reference Star Trek. Merlin explains that John does terrible awesome puns in his songs, like the line ”Angels, Russians, where I fear to tread” (from the song Shapes), and Merlin enjoys that in his songs, he was a fan of John before anybody knew who he was! Sean Nelson yelled at John about that line and finds it corny. Merlin loves that line and the whole song and one day he is going to ask John what that whole song is about.

Somebody asked John the other day what he thought about the grand sweep of Mad Men, and he was chagrined to say that at the end of the first season of Mad Men he found it to be so nihilistic that he never watched it again. He only watched one season of Mad Men because Nihilism is not the thing that he is consuming media for. He has enough of it! He can read a Cormac McCarthy book and be in for the Nihilism on this one, but then he will close the book and look at another thing.

That was Merlin with The Walking Dead, which is now one of his favorite shows and he really looks forward to it. His wife has been in it from the beginning and he couldn’t watch it, it was too much, and now it is really surprisingly realistic, very grim, and like all these great things it is kind of about zombies, but it is really about the people and how they react in the aftermath. But that took him a long time because it was impossibly nihilistic. The problem for John is that he is disinterested in zombies. The only thing he is less interested in zombies is people. Merlin thinks John should watch the movie Predestination, it has some good scenes in it.

Desmond had a volley in the market store and bought a 20 carat diamond ring. His job on his island (Desmond Humme in Lost) is to sit in this hole and every 108 minutes has to retype this series of numbers, otherwise something bad happens. It sounds like a story that some kids are making in a cardboard box that they cut windows in.

That is an analogy for Merlin’s life. His life is not difficult at all, basically he just has to type something every 108 minutes, but if he doesn’t typically every 108 minutes, there is going to be problems. This is why he tends to say that he doesn't think of himself as busy, but as time constrained. He got to be at the keyboard to type every 108 minutes. It is a condition of a lot of people today. You don't have to mine coal, what he is doing is not difficult, but there is a certain schedule and regularity to it.

Merlin listening to the first 20 seconds of every song of John’s new album (RL193)

John slept in Merlin’s house in his underwear so many times! John remembers sitting in the other room and listening to Merlin listen to John’s second record, and Merlin listened to the first minute of it. John took Merlin into the dining room with probably a Walkman, and said: ”This is something extremely special! These are rough cuts of our next record, and it is a really big deal!” They were early songs, some of which made it onto the record, some of which didn't, some of which became the theme song for their program, which Merlin happen to love and Josh (Rosenfeld) is wrong, it is a fantastic song.

This was great and Merlin sat there with John’s Walkman and he listened to the first 20 seconds of a song, and then he fast forwarded to the next song to hear the first 20 seconds of the next one, then he went back to the first song, then went to the third song, and he listened to 20 seconds of them at a time. John was incredulous and horrified! ”Merlin, these songs are meant to be listened to all the way through. You don't skip around!” And Madeline grabbed him by the arm and took him into the kitchen and said: ”Listen, this is how he does it. I am sorry!” So many apologies she has made on his behalf!

John had to leave him alone and stand on the back porch and smoke cigarettes because he could not a) fathom or b) endure this process by which Merlin consumed his baby, his new child. Merlin thinks the streaming age must be tough on John, but he has no idea how to use it because it is all on the cloud.

Medicine Cabinet Pirate (RL193)

John does talk about the Romulans in Medicine Cabinet Pirate to describe a certain kind of hipster of the time that look like Romulans. There was a whole era in the early Emo days where Romulan fashion was what the Uber-hip kids were into. When John said Romulans he was just making a dig at those people, which he of course otherwise never does, there are no digs in John’s songs, he is the all seeing eye, the musical panopticon, the (Jeremy) Bentham of Indie Rock who has stopped and is sitting in a box somewhere, the head of St. John.

Merlin finds John’s songs so interesting: ”New morning you lazy-eye / Two Romulans over / Cruel laughter when Katie died /
Duel over my cold shoulder” Chris Walla played the drum machine on that, Sean Nelson doing Yamaha keyboard and harmony, and someone called Robbie Lodermeier is playing drums, it is a great drum part! They had the drum machine, and then Robbie played to the drum machine, which is the first time that happened on one of John’s records, and John was very interested in it.

Merlin thinks that is a terrific song and The Worst You Can Do is Harm is a terrific album, one of the greatest Indie Rock albums of the last 20 years. That song strikes Merlin as a particularly wonderfully manic Chris Walla produced songs and his sound really worked on that one. John said they had a lot of disagreements about it. It has some weird Eno-esque gating things going on, it has a really weird sound to it, and John played the bass on it, which is additionally weird. There is some flanges in that song that was a result of a very old Ibanez flanger petal called the Frying Pan, which is super-vintage.

John had these pedals like an Electro Harmonix Black Finger and an Ibanez Frying Pan, they are pre-Tube Screamers, they are the size of a box of chocolates, it looks like Soviet technology. They were gorgeous, and this flanger had a sweep that even modern digital flangers that have 1000 parameters you can change, John still never heard a flanger that had the sound of this Frying Pan, going all the way from the lowest notes and up, it was really analog, this beautiful piece of gear.

He used it on that song and you can't replace it. You can't go buy some modded Line 6 things to accomplish this sweep. John sold that pedal because even at the time in 2001 it was worth $350. It is a dumb thing to have kept in a closet all these years, but when you find a piece of something that can actually do something that nothing else can do, those are the ones that you don't sell! John is priced out of the Frying Pan market now.

John wishing that the day had 4 extra hours (RL193)

Most of John’s time crunch problems could be solved if there were 4 extra hours in a day. He wants to sleep for 8 hours, but he also wants to stay up until 4am because that is what his body says, and he also wants to get up at 8am so that he can join the world and be with other people. He needs 4 extra hours that are reserved for the additional 4 hours of sleep he needs.

Merlin is in a similar situation, he actually wants to be 3 different people. There is the person who likes to stay up late. He has for most of his life been somebody who likes staying up late and he likes to go to bed at 3am, but he also wants to be the person who gets up early, which is the ultimate aspirational personality. Then to going to bed early person in some ways is the real Monk, the personality who sets all those things aside and says: ”I just go to bed at 9:45pm because that is what I do!”

John’s mom only needs 4 hours of sleep because that is what happens apparently when you get to be an elderly person. But also when the sun goes down she starts to wind it down, it is like farm people. When the sun gets up you are burning daylight. As soon as the sun goes down she thinks that the oil in these lamps isn't free. Keep burning this oil and especially burn the midnight oil. If your work is done outside, it is completely daylight dependent, your interaction with the world is so much different than John’s. Nothing he does is daylight dependent and it is even much better done cloaked in darkness.

On a Monday morning Merlin knows there is stuff that has got to happen. They have an Orthodontist appointment today, so he has to remember to put the retainers in his backpack because he is going to take her after school and needs that with him. His whole thing of walking through the day. ”Do I have the ad-spots ready?” and so on. None of these things are difficult, but it is fault intolerant. If he does something as simple as forget to put the retainers in the backpack, that really screws up this one part of the day, not irretrievably bad, but even when everything runs perfectly, it is still a pain in the ass.

Scam phone calls, websites requiring you to put your phone number in the form (RL193)

Merlin hates when his phone is ringing in the morning because it can only be bad news. That is how they get you. It used to be when you got unwanted calls it was almost always from unknown or from blocked or from whatever, which he felt perfectly fine to just ignore and let go to voicemail. With the new technology Merlin gets a call from a 415, which is shockingly close to his own phone number and he is like: ”Oh, God!” This is Lucy and the football all over again: He knows it is going to be a robocall about credit cards or mortgages or whatever, and he fights himself, but now his heart starts beating.

He lets it go to voicemail and then he googles the phone number, which is always the first thing he does before he picks up any call, and it is a fake credit card scam thing. But now he is already a little bit off his game because he had to stop what he was doing, stare at the phone, get anxious, and then go search Google. This very clearly illustrates what a fragile person he is. It is not dissimilar from the mail or the email, and this does shade into his former profession as a retired productivity guru. As long as there is anything anywhere that you might need to know about you got to fret about it a little bit. Every afternoon, early evening, he goes down and there is a giant pile of Safeway Flyers by their mail slot, and he has to pick up and look through every Safeway Flyer to be sure there was not a piece of real mail that got fanned into the Safeway Flyer.

Every year the degree to which John is just slightly over his yearly budget is down to the fact that he threw away a couple of really big checks that were tucked into a Safeway Flyer. If he just had $10.000 more dollars… and it was probably just in there with the cheap steaks and went right in the garage.

For a long time John didn't ever put his phone number and address in any kind of form. If he was at the doctor, the pharmacy, or the airline, and they said: ”Put your name and address and phone number!” he would always try to not, but increasingly websites are like: ”That is required! We need your phone number because what if the reservation changes?” and if you don't fill out their things it won't let you go to the next page, but it bounces a little arrow there pointing at where your phone number needs to go. John would rather drive to the airport and find that his flight had been canceled and turn around and go home than give his phone number to the airline, but they require it and he puts it in. Eventually he stopped being such a stickler about it because he started to feel like this was just a new thing that you have to do.

It used to be Social Security numbers, when that was your student ID, or you had to log in using your Social Security number. John hasn’t put his Social Security number in anything for years, he used to do it all the time! It was on Merlin’s student ID and when he had to clean up some stuff from his mom's house a few years back it was on pretty much every sheet of paper that his college gave him. It was how you proved who you were.

John got a prescription filled in New York or in Baltimore or something like that at a Walgreens, and they wanted his phone number, and now every month he gets a robocall from a New York area code. Generally anybody that is calling him from New York on the phone is somebody that is calling to say: ”Hey, we got an opportunity here for us to use one of your songs in our Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin off and we just need your approval right now because it is going to be $150.000. Please call me back!” It got him six times when he picks it up and it says: ”Hi, it is time to refill your prescription at the Brooklyn Walgreens!” Die 1000 deaths! John doesn’t know what, how, who he could ever do to get this to stop doing this. How can he unsubscribe? He can’t!

John getting a flyer for a good deal to fly to Maui and he can’t figure out the catch (RL193)

John has been getting a thing lately in the actual mail: Heavy bond, beautiful photographs, it is not from the Hilton Hotel because he is on their permanent blacklist (see his tweet-storm), but it might be the Sheraton, some legitimate enterprise, something genuinely nice, you are flipping this around, reading the fine print very carefully to see where it says that he is going to have to sit for an hour in a Timeshare meeting, but he doesn’t see any of that, and basically it is airfare and hotel to Maui for seven nights and eight days all in for the low price of $795.

This is insane, this seems like a really good deal, and he is turning it over and over, looking at it, ”What is the catch?”, and at every point, even the little micro wording of things where a catch could be hidden, this thing is worded in such a way that there is no catch there. Either they are just bald-ass lying, and you show up and when you are standing at the front desk they do that thing where they are like: ”Oh, I'm sorry, there are no double rooms available!” - ”Now, wait a minute!” - ”Sorry, the only rooms that apply to this plan are one full size bed!” - ”I am here with three people!”

John cannot figure it out, it is driving him crazy, this seems like a good deal, but he doesn't want to be the 75 year old who is: ”Sounds like a great deal!”and you buy it and then they are taking $400 a month out of your account. When he really looked at it he realized that this is still $120 a day. Someone was actively trying to get Merlin on a cruise for people who are somewhat notable with regard to a certain computer platform product, his family was going to get to go and it was going to be amazing, but when he did the math on it, it would have cost him about $10.000 to go on the cruise once he figured it all out.

John still has this brochure on his table, even though it expired on March 15th, turning it over and over in his hands. Did he miss an opportunity here, or is this such a great screw job? You don't want a situation where here is this big hotel in Maui, and they are just under capacity, and they are just trying to do this to get rid of these excess rooms, and the rooms are just as beautiful as they are shown to be on this brochure.

People bragging about their cheap Economy Comfort tickets (RL193)

This is a real phenomenon when it comes to flight, where every person on that plane paid something different. One person on that plane paid 1/10th of the price for a coach ticket than somebody else did. That is a real thing involving capacity, supply and demand, so it doesn’t seem out of the imagination that this would be a real thing.

When John was flying back from the JoCo Cruise there were some people in the economy comfort area, and John is not above saying that he flies economy comfort when he can. There were a couple there coming back from the cruise, and they in their loudest voices were: ”Oh my God, we had no seat assignment until we got here at the airport and then they just put us here in these chairs in the front row!” Their economy comfort seats were even better than John’s. ”We only paid $125 for this whole flight from Expedia.com.org!” Everyone else in the plane had Tom and Jerry knives coming out of their eyes at them: ”Okay, great for you! Shut up! Sit down! Stop it! You are making me feel awful!” - ”Weee, we paid $120 and they just put us right here in seats 1A and 2A!” Not cool! Not cool!

Reading fairy tales to your kids, John’s daughter only wanting stories with princesses, children’s TV (RL193)

How does Merlin feel about the Big Bad Wolf? It became a trope where all of a sudden there are big bad wolves everywhere, separated from Red Riding Hood. That is an important story for lots of kids to hear, but when you get a little older and think about it, you realize it is probably about sexual assault. Then you get cartoons where there are a lot of wolves. You got a certain kind of wolf in a Zoot Suit who is checking out ladies, whose tongue and eyeballs come out of his head like a Chuck Jones wolf, the same kind of Wolf that might think you look like a pork chop.

Merlin doesn’t have a super-strong feeling about it. They have not been a big fairy tale family, which has been a little bit of a failing. There is a beloved Reader's Digest book of fairy tales that Merlin grew up with that has little pencil check marks next to each one that they had read, but his daughter wasn't into it.

John feels the same obligation. His mom is just close enough to the generation, and his dad obviously was for all intents and purposes of Victorian, where the only entertainment you had was reading Rudyard Kipling and Grimm's Fairy Tales because it was still plausible that nobody knew how the rhinoceros got his scales, but also that there were still women who would bake you into a cake just in your neighborhood.

John has started to read some of that stuff to his daughter, the other day he was explaining The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and very quickly she became known as the girl who cried ”Ow!”because they had a real escalation lately in the word: ”Ow!” Somebody pulls out a hairbrush and she is going: ”Ow!" and falls to the floor. Her eyes light up because she understands The Boy Who Cried Wolf and now she realizes they have changed it into a metaphor and she is the girl who cried: ”Ow!” John has actually found it to be very effective in diffusing these ”Ow!” storms.

Merlin has heard people say similar things in a contemporary context with the movie Inside Out. It is the beauty of a fable. The Scorpion and the Frog is one of the greatest stories of all time. Nothing describes that situation better than the Scorpion and the Frog. John has no idea and thought Merlin was making it up. The Scorpion says: ”Hey look, I need to get across the river. I won't sting you! Give me a ride on your back!” - ”If I put you in my back, you are going to sting me!” They get halfway through and the Scorpion stings the frog, they are going to die. ”You said you were not going to sting me!” - ”What do you expect? I am a Scorpion!” In Alaska that was the Moose and the Peregrine Falcon or something. They didn't have any scorpions and frogs, so it didn’t make any sense to them.

John buys most of their books at the thrift store. They go over to the children's book area and she plops herself down and immediately starts pulling out every book that has a huge, alien-eyed garbage-princess. ”Look, it is Dora! Look, it is Cinderella! Look at all this stuff!” Dan and Merlin refer to Dora simply as The Yelling Show. Here is a girl with a wedge haircut that is going to yell at you and then stare at you. She pulls this stuff out of the shelves because it is exotic to her.

This isn't stuff that she is allowed to have: ”Oh my God! Look at this! It is so amazing. It is like a comic book where Barbie talks about products that you can buy!” Those Barbie books where it is like: ”Oh, I didn't know what to do about a computer so then Ken came, and I was busy repairing my broken fingernail while Ken solved my problem!” John would rather put his daughter in an isolation tank and play her the first episode of Lost than buy any one of these garbage books!

She is down on the floor, pulling this stuff out like she has been lost in the desert her whole life and someone is given her a glass of cold water. She is consuming this as fast as she can because she knows that it is not going to last, while John is still in the children's book section, thumbing through them, looking for titles he recognizes from his own childhood: ”Oh, look here Marlo! The book about You Are Not My Mother where the little bird loses its mother and decides that maybe a steam tractor is their mom!”, and by this drawing we can clearly tell that this book was made in 1940 and it was already anachronism when John was reading it, and he shows it to her, but there are no princesses and therefore there is nothing fun about this book.

Which book goes into the shopping cart? Daddy's book about… he bought a book for her the other day, which is a cartoon book, but it is a story of a little girl whose Rabbi in Poland gives his ticket to her to put her on the boat to go to America, and she goes to America and works as a seamstress in order to save up enough money to buy a ticket for her aging grandmother, who is still living in Poland and who is milking a horse in order to survive.

John was reading this story to her and tears are streaming down his cheeks, because it is a beautiful book, it is the story of America, the illustrations are good, it is very touching, and she loves the book now because it is a book that every time daddy reads it he starts crying about the diaspora, but there is obviously no magic in it and no princess. The Princess is basically in a Lower East Side sweatshop sewing wedding dresses in order to get the 40 shekels to go buy a trip on the Lusitania for her grandmother so she doesn't have to drink horse's milk anymore.

And there is no Nickelodeon show for that right now. There is not a single song in it. This is the culture that John is inflicting on her. They went to a Pho restaurant last night, and they had a big screen TV on the wall, and it was playing the latest iteration of the TV Bloopers show (now called America’s Funniest Home Videos), a show of home videos of people getting kicked in the crotch or balls getting shot into their crotch. The host of it is the smarmy guy from Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Alfonso Ribeiro), the rich son, who has not aged a day and looks incredible.

You could have put firecrackers in her ears and you wouldn't have gotten any response from her. She was just completely in the world of bloopers, and a lot of them didn't even get the blooper. Somebody just got hit in the crotch. She was like: ”I don't get it, but this is incredible!”

The Princess properties are extremely attractive to kids because: Science! They are using all of the means, all the same way that they would try and make Don Corleone's son look better for the funeral, they are calling upon all their powers to make this as appealing as possible to little kids. When Merlin goes out to eat at that little diner by their house, and of course it is usually Premier League, Soccer, Golf, or an infomercial channel on she is wrapped the entire time. It is the equivalent of headline news for children. It is the same concept. Why do adults stare slack-jawed at that screen in the airport? It is the transitions, the music, the noise, it is all the little stock market crawl at the bottom that no-one knows what it means. They know that this is extremely attractive to a certain kind of feeble mind and that is what they do with children with these programs.

How baseball was invented to defeat the Catholics (RL193)

Merlin’s mom was a rainbow girl (International Order of the Rainbow for Girls) and her ”boyfriend” was in DeMolay. All of that stuff was just to keep the Catholics out. The Knights of Columbus was the Ku Klux Klan of Catholics, even though the Ku Klux Klan was the Ku Klux Klan of Catholics. It is like having the YouTube of dance videos (see RL336, M.C. Hammer wanted to create the YouTube of dance videos, but that is already YouTube).

KFC always had a hell of a baseball team, they were always the toughest opponents for everybody. Baseball is how you defeat the Catholics, that goes as far back as the invention of baseball. That is why they invented it. The ball is the Pope. There is only one, it is white, and it does not ever get thrown out of a game, it is infallible. The ball just keeps going around and around and around, and every once in a while, the umpire, who is the College of Cardinals, takes a dirty ball out of play.

When you are watching a baseball game, look for the white smoke! If it is gray smoke you still have time to go back and get a hot dog. Usually around the 7th inning you can't get a beer anymore. Also, most people aren't doing anything hardly at all, and then sometimes one person moves a little bit. There are a lot of kids at the game, too. Tradition and family! This is crack for Catholics! John is not sure how Pete Rose factors into it either. Merlin met him twice and he signed stuff for him. It was circa 1976 in the Big Red Machine era when Merlin was in Ohio and you would just see The Reds around town.

One of the times Merlin saw and briefly met Pete Rose at a restaurant called Johnny Bench's Home Plate, right over there at the Northgate Mall in Colerain Avenue. Merlin doesn’t want to retell his whole Pete Rose story, but the punchline is when Pete Rose says: ”Oh yeah, he is the one with the daughter that don't got no arm!” (see RL118 for the whole story). Of all the things you could say in your restaurant that you own called Pete Rose’s, you would be sitting there at the table, a little boy would come up, of all the things that would come out of your mouth! His file card on that Scout for the A's was that his daughter had a birth defect. Different times. He was a simple man.

A lot of the baseball players nowadays come from Central and South America, which are very Catholic countries. It used to be a game against the Catholics, but they are taking it back. What are you going to do about it, DeMolay? They only had the one Catholic President, though (John F. Kennedy)! In retrospect, that was an incredibly big deal at the time. When was the last time you heard of The Knights of Columbus? Not since 1978 when they would paste their ass every Saturday in baseball!

John’s daughter claiming that her favorite sports is hockey (RL193)

John and his daughter go to an Irish restaurant every once in a while because Daddy likes corned beef and cabbage, and an Irish restaurant has very little appeal to children because everyone else in there is red-face drunk, which is racist to say, but you used to be able to be racist against the Irish. It is the whole premise behind DeMolay and The Knights of Columbus.

They have TVs all around and John supports this, actually. Each one is tuned to a different sport. There is basketball TV, there is a curling TV, something to distract everyone, and you pick where you want to sit in this restaurant based on what sport you want to be assaulted by. John’s daughter is just looking around, her head spinning, all these sports, none of which has Daddy made any attempt to explain. And at one point John was like: ”You are watching these games so intently, what is your favorite sport?” and without even a moment of hesitation she said: ”Hockey!” - ”Hockey? Whoa, I am raising a hockey fan? I can't think of a thing that would have surprised me more! Are you sure you don't like curling?”

The pace and the fact that hockey players are so elegantly skating has an appeal to her. John is not sure if she is aware of the violence. For her birthday he bought her a full suit of armor because she keeps picking up swords at thrift stores and saying: ”My sword is ready to kill!”, but whose fault is that? He got her a breast plates, a shield, and a helmet. Merlin wonders if that isn’t something she should have to earn on her end through campaigns, but she has campaigned an awful lot. The big takeaway for her of Kung Fu Panda 3, which is one of four movies she has seen, was that you use Kung Fu on Daddy.

Every takeaway of a story where there is magic involved is that this now is magic that you can use on Daddy, and between using magic on John and kung-fu-ing him and killing him as every single dragon or baddy he realized that she had a bloodlust and he wanted her to start killing people that aren't Daddy, by which he means orcs. A Bugbear is a good place to start, too, they are a first level dungeon kind of thing. They continue talking about Orcs, Bugbears, and Uruk-Hai and they continue to go down The Lord of the Rings and who has rings and who doesn’t, they talk about Dwarfs and Thorin Oakenshield.

Merlin not having read all the classic books (RL193)

John has not read The Silmarillion all the way through. There are three people in Merlin’s household, two of which have read The Hobbit. There are two people in his house that have read a Tolkien book and Merlin is not one of them, and he likes one of the movies. Merlin is normally not that guy, this is a fun outlier for me, just as he is not super-familiar with Star Trek. He tried a little bit of Hobbit, but the language stuff throws him off a little bit. He might try the actual Hobbit book, which is easier. You don’t want to start with The Silmarillion, that is their metal machine music.

John says you don't ever want to read The Silmarillion, you just want to have Ted Leo read it to you aloud (as he did on the JoCo Cruise, see RL190). The Hobbit is a children's book. The Lord of the Rings is a masterwork. Merlin also didn’t read all 40 Dune books, he read Slaughterhouse-Five (by Kurt Vonnegut) a couple of times, he started reading Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller), he skipped a lot of books. Then there are some things he read many times because of his interest in short fiction. There are many short stories that are his version of famous novels because he reads them so many times.

Merlin did read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (by Ernest Hemingway), he also read the abortion one (Hills Like White Elephants). He read the one where they throw the rocks. There is the one with the Misfit (A Good Man Is Hard To Find, by Eddie Green) where they kill the family at the end, and that is how Merlin’s daughter got named. Her middle name comes from that: ”She'd have been a good woman if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life!” (is the name he is referencing June Star?)

What about The Rat That Gets Really Smart (Now they are just talking about Disney movies)? The movie with a Michael Jackson song in it? No, John is talking about the cockroach man, The Rescuers, where they fly on the back of a seagull, and The Great Mouse Detective! Merlin has read so many of those, classics that today it is difficult to put your hand on because you got to stream it and it is hard to find. You have to get it on your Kindle and that requires that you upgrade the amount of stores you have on your Dropbox, and you have to make sure you are still signed in (see beginning of the episode).

Merlin learned about bugbears and orcs through Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax's masterwork. He stole a lot from The Lord of the Rings, so much so that they filed an injunction. Merlin is the worst kind of weirdo because he got all the Arthurian stuff, not all of it, and even though he is not a big (H. P.) Lovecraft reader, he was more familiar with the concept of Cthulhu. A lot of his friends played The Call of Cthulhu, which was from the books, but Merlin didn't realize how much of D&D, maybe even near the majority of D&D, comes from The Lord of the Rings.

John had his cough button on when he was trying to talk. He was hoisted by his own petard.

Just like all Led Zeppelin lyrics are derived from The Lord of the Rings, so too is all Dungeons and Dragons. Honestly, 80% of post-Tolkien fantasy is just… a lot of people read The Lord of the Rings and what they really wanted was fanfic of elves having sex and being naked. That is basically all fantasy writing: the desire to watch Elves have sex. Elves are unattainable and also willowy, which is a high beauty standard. Willowy, slender hipped, sort of androgynous, unattainable, and they also never die. There are a lot of people that want to be that. It is basically Los Angeles, which is about people who want to be elves. Aimee Mann is basically an elf, and she is only here with us… Merlin was describing her to a friend as being a gorgeous bird, but elf might be better! She is here to retrieve some ring that was given to the dwarves, but she can't reveal it.

Oklahoma the Sex Cat / Omaha the Cat Dancer (RL193)

There is the book Oklahoma the Sex Cat, no it was Omaha the Sex Cat, no it was Omaha the Cat Dancer (John also misspoke in a similar way in OM95 where he called it Dakota the Sex Cat). John left Merlin in the dust right there. It is a Fritz the Cat spin-off, except Fritz the Cat was like Howard the Duck, but Omaha the Sex Cat is a Furry thing, but really early in 1978 before Furries had been identified. It is anthropomorphic cats who had good haunches. For centuries there have been people sitting in their comfortable chair made out of antlers or whatever it was that people used to sit in, and a cat would walk by all proud, tail in the air, and the prehistoric person would say: ”I wonder how hard it would be to fuck a cat! It would probably be pretty hard!” It is hard to even pick up a cat and pet it!

You are out hunting and gathering, and it comes as an intrusive thought. You got a spear in hand, here comes a Musk Ox, but your mind is somewhere else, thinking: ”How hard would it be to fuck a cat?” and you missed the shot. It is disadvantageous! So over the course of time how do you deal with that problem? If you want to try and fuck a horse, you can probably get away with that. A horse will take it, but a cat is probably not going to take it. We arrived at a place in 1978 where all these things had converged and it was finally possible for somebody to draw pictures of cats that you could fuck.

It was a transformative moment, a lot of people were liberated, and there were Comic-cons then, they passed this stuff around, and George RR Martin was there and they were like: ”Look at this! You can fucking cat! What do you think about this?” and then a whole world exploded and pretty soon you got Syrian kids in a hotel in Vancouver, and they are dancing with a bunch of people dressed like fuckable cats. Who could have predicted that? Is that in the Bible? Is that a video? A whole bunch of refugee families from Syria arrived, they went to the Furry festival, and the furries came out and danced with the children in the lobby (see here and here). What a magical adventure! None of that would have been possible without Omaha the Sex Cat.

Some made their outfits in a way that accommodates the idea that they might want to have intercourse with each other. There are some people who want to have sex with people in underwear, some people want the people to wear underwear, then take the underwear off, and then they have sex with a person with no underwear. Merlin is not going to go any further with this because if he asks people will tell him. John believes that a greater percentage of people want to have their cake and eat it, too, in the sense that they want the other person to keep their underwear on, but also be able to have sex. That is why all of this complicated underwear exists. If you just took the underwear off, then all underwear would just be bloomers. You get the complicated underwear and then you get this "cake and eat it too" situation.

But if you want to be a cake that somebody could eat, you are going to have to come up with some kind of cleft or something. You are going to have to come up with some way to have a slice cut out of the cake where somebody could get to you in a way that they could eat. Merlin is talking about a workaround. Increasingly, modern underwear is just a workaround.

Garter belts only being used as sex devices these days (RL193)

You get something as clunky as crotchless panties, which is a terrible idea, but you can also got something like the Garter belt. The Garter belt is a way to have fancy underwear that is only kind of really underwear. It is not like you are wearing a swimsuit or something. A Garter belt is a way of holding your weird pantyhose that was invented before elastic. That was a functional thing that became increasingly fetishized, it went from being a girdle to being a weird set of ropes, and now who wears a freaking Garter belt except as a sex device?

Garter belts are very confusing for people because they are very confusing to wear. John has seen people, he has known a lot of people, who believe that the Garter belt is meant to be fastened above the belly button somewhere at the narrowest part of the waist, which is not where they belong and they look very much more like a girdle or bloomers, they look like tripods from the book Tripods: The White Mountains (by John Christopher). Basically all of contemporary Science Fiction comes from the book Tripods. Garter belts, in John’s estimation, are meant to be worn down on the hip.

Merlin gave a Garter belt as a gift once. She was a real good sport about it, but it was before he learned about people and women in particular, and he might as well have gotten her a penis pump. Happy Valentine's Day! It is like going into a store and buying your girlfriend Spanx. Just get her a broom and some diet pills! John was in a store around Christmas time and asked: ”What about these Spanx?” and every woman in the store, six different people, two of them working in the store and four of them just customers, all turned around at once and said: ”Do not buy anyone Spanx!” - ”Really? I keep hearing about it. They are on TV!” and they all agreed: ”Listen, Spanx are things that a woman buys herself!”

Merlin’s wife, one time the mother of a boyfriend of hers gave her towels and soap for Christmas, and to this day they continue to argue about whether that was a passive aggressive gift. Merlin’s wife is very clean and you would only do that to be cruel. She says they were really nice soaps, but still: Merlin would never give anybody soap and a towel for Christmas! It is the towel that turns it into an insult. For the last several years John has been buying $24 bars of soap that smell like France and if you know what people like that can be a nice gift.

Merlin enjoys the smell of Lemon Verbena and if you give him something that smells like Lemon Verbena he is a happy camper, but don't give him a towel! The thing about Lemon Verbina is that it makes it seem like you are camping because it smells like mosquito repellant. It is so nice. Now put on a Carter belt!

The number one confusion about Garter belts is: ”Do you wear the panties on the inside or do you wear the panties on the outside?” Panties on the outside looks dumb, but you can take the panties down to go to the potty. Panties on the inside look better, but in order to get the panties off, you have to have a master's degree in engineering. There are lots and lots of people in the Garter belt community that say you got to wear the panties on the outside, otherwise it is not functional.

If you are a person who is wearing the Garter belt because it makes you feel sexy and it makes you want to do sexy things while you are wearing it, then you could choose to have the panties on the outside and that is a very forward thinking decision. Giving somebody too many notes, especially as your partner, on the order in which they should put on their underwear, you can run into trouble! If you are seeing sexy undergarments for the first time and the first thing out of your mouth is: ”How do you go to the potty?”, that is not a mood enhancer, unless you are from Germany. Merlin has avoiding that topic this entire time because everything they are saying here goes triple for Germany. It is a low hanging fruit, which is another thing in Germany they are very interested in. They call it a lemon party! They call it a Lemon Verbena, but they say it with a German accent.

John in his Grunge years having overdyed jeans, seeing a woman in a short pencil skirt wearing stockings (RL193)

When John was very Grungy back in the 1990s all of his jeans were overdyed. You would take a normal pair of jeans, put them in the washing machine with a canister of Rit Dye and they came out green or blue. You put some green Rit Dye in with your Levi's, and then somehow you had green Levi's, and that was a cool thing. John had a lot of overdyed clothes, like a jean jacket that had a bottle of brown Rit Dye. You can get yourself some killer Hige from it.

John had a pair of Levi's that lasted him 20 years because they had been overdyed, even though the dye made no difference, but he was convinced that the fact that these had been overdyed somehow had some effect on them so that they lasted for 20 years, which a pair of jeans should not. He was schlepping around and his overdyed jeans and his big Carhartt jacket and his hoodie on top of a hoodie and at that point his soul patch was dragging on the ground like Thorin Oakenshield.

On time he was walking up a hill in Seattle and there was a gal in front of him at his age, 25 years old, and she was dressed impeccably Downtown business, and her pencil skirt in gray flannel pinstripe is business, but it was one quarter of a millimeter too short for business, not too short for John, just right in the zone. She looked amazing and she was walking ahead of him up this hill: In what world does a person like this exist? John was down there shamalamahe, and he was thinking that he was at the top of the game of being 25. How much more top of the game of being 25 is there? But she was in this other world!

They were walking up the hill, and she was in high heels, obviously, and she increased her pace just a little bit, completely unaware of him, and he caught a glimpse of the fact that she was not wearing pantyhose, but she was wearing stockings that had little clips on them. There was a time in Merlin’s life when that would have taken him down for a couple of weeks. It is not like her skirt hiked up or anything, it was just the slightest glimpse. You see the dark band of the top of the stocking and then just for a second, and John had to stop walking, he took a knee, and here it is, 20 years later, he is still talking about it!

Who is she? What other world was she living in? He looked down and his overdyed jeans and they just turned to ashes. She was Konrad Lorenz and John was the freaking duck.

One time in the same era John was standing on a street corner and a guy walked by him, a handsome guy about his size, and he was wearing some sort of perfume and John caught a whiff of it and he thought: ”I want to fuck that guy!” and he didn't know how to process it, so he started following him and was: ”All right, I don't know what to do now. I really want to have sex with this guy, which isn't typically my sex pointer, but there is something about his perfume!”

It is like Equus: Moments snap together like magnets. John was planning on following him until some rendezvous could be arranged, but then it was obvious that he was just following him and that seemed weird and he veered off and disengaged. He flew back over Libya and John had to avoid the airspace and went back and did a flyover and spilled the coffee of the guy that was driving the boat. He said: ”Damn it, Maverick!”