247. Señor Celsius

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann and Alex Cox. This week's challenge, use monodraw to make some ASCII art. check it checka oh hello hello you know what merlin i've decided because like you taught me sitting sitting in kindness wow my voice sounds weird what the fuck was that what's going on with

you what's happening oh no instead of complaining about how long it takes to turn my air conditioning off i'm going to remember that half of the planet is burning oh wow yeah thank you're you know what Yeah, that was very bold and brave. Very bold. Very, very brave.

MerlinHello. Good morning.

AlexIt's noon where you are. It's, oh, oh, God. It's almost 1 p.m.

MerlinIndeed. That's fine. That's fine. Now, what's the metric, Alex? What's the metric hour? I know there's metric minutes. Do you have a metric hour?

AlexWell, okay. Half past the hour, as we know, is 50 after 100. 0.5. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is almost half past the hour where I am. 1147.

MerlinOh, no. The system's breaking down. You've gone partially metric, and that's what's caused all of your concerns. I think, yeah, it's 9.48. This is like me with ounces and milliliters.

Speaker AOh, it's the worst. It's the worst. Imperial units are the worst for everything.

MerlinHere we go. it's gif and jif it's celsius and fahrenheit gif and jif yep gif and jif celsius that's the only

Alexarguments i'm here to have merlin who the fuck is this i'm not done yet don't just don't interrupt

Merlinthe man i'm sorry i'm sorry i have um i have um i i hold an opinion that it's a i think you if not popular at least fairly widespread pseudo nerd opinion which is that metric is superior for everything except for air temperature i think the air temperature celsius is a little silly

Speaker Athat's my feeling on that yep this is the correct opinion this is the correct opinion hold on

Alexwhy is it a little silly because i've just always thought that most of what we do here in the us of a is quite silly and so i have no idea what like 60 degrees celsius is that would be very very warm Right, right, right. So it's like, but like a hundred, you're dead. And so it's like a hundred.

MerlinIt's got half of the, it's got less than half of the subtlety of Fahrenheit.

AlexI mean, yeah. Well, oh, oh, here we go. Here we go. I'm going to, um, I, I don't have a clever name for this, but, but it's, it's the American way of being like, oh my God, it's 98 out. Wow. That's almost a hundred and a bit of an overreaction. like london doesn't have air conditioning why do we need air conditioning that's silly

Speaker Ajust silly oh you sweet summer child see none of you live in a place that actually has summer

Alexso let me assure you you're from naperville you're from naperville yes yes this is true

Speaker Abut i live in a place that has proper summer so it is a feels like temperature of like 105

MerlinAt least my mayor buys clothes that fit.

AlexNot my summer.

Speaker ASo I am going to put a... Let me put this in the super secret chat, which I am so overjoyed that I am a part of, even for just one week.

MerlinYeah, you're in the doc. You're in the text channel. This is exciting. This is extremely exciting. I'm doing a regular old blank check here. Hello, listeners. This is Alexander's nemesis, Casey Liss. Hi. Hi, Casey Liss. And we're very excited that you're here. Do you have a middle name that you like to use?

Speaker AA middle name? No. I mean, I have a middle name, but I never use it. My middle. What would you like to guess my middle name?

MerlinI'd like to say, no, I'm going to tell you what it is. Your middle name is now Alan. Your Casey Allen list.

Speaker AAll right. It has been decreed. Will that work? Will that work for you? That's fine. That's fine with me. Don't tell me the real one. Opsec. Yeah. Opsec. Exactly.

AlexAnd then your initials are Kel.

MerlinKel.

AlexI don't know why that's funny.

MerlinKel.

AlexAll right. Kel, you sent us.

Merlinthey had to change it at ellis island is short for calories yeah right right oh it's calories calories that's true he's from krakow he's krakow cook they call him krakow casey krakow cow i don't even know my own joke i think i just put i just took off all my clothes and put

Alexon three hats that's my goddamn bell oh here i got a button right here way back in the way back here

Speaker Aoh is it injured that sounds like an injured bell oh that's a mutie bell

Alexthere we go okay that's better thank you what casey allen i've thought that it sounded broken too like a half staff bell and then

Merlinoh well yeah man my age you know you don't get the blood i haven't had an erection since uh missing persons i'm so old i fart uh encyclopedias hey guys you know it's crazy is getting old what's the deal with that uh i um let's see we were i think introducing i shot i shot dick van dyke the other day oh my god oh my god you guys it's crazy to get old i got so many

Alexdick and dyke in there huh whoa oh come on i got cocked

Speaker AI have nothing important to say. I was going to continue this diatribe about Fahrenheit and Kelvin and Celsius. And so there's this image that I put in the super secret channel, and it shows the difference between zero degrees and 100 degrees. And in Fahrenheit, it's really cold at zero degrees, and it's really hot at 100 degrees. And with Celsius, at zero, it's cold. And at 100, you're fucking dead. And at Kelvin, at zero, you're dead. And at 100, you're dead. So clearly, if you're going to value ambient air temperature, I'm not talking about anything else, ambient air temperature, Fahrenheit is the one true way.

MerlinWell, it's, you know, I'm thinking of this all in a very silly way. Like this right here, this thing that contains, this is called, this is a beaker. And it's a beaker. And it's a one. That's funny how.

Dr. Bunsen, honey, dude. I can't believe how bad Marco and Tiff massacred so many pop culture facts on that top four. I'm not going to talk about it, but I'm very fucking angry.

AlexOh, oh, spoilers, spoilers.

MerlinBut OK. All right. All right. All right.

AlexSomeone in my household is also upset and didn't even start watching The Simpsons until this year.

MerlinSo you're kidding.

AlexYeah. Or last year, whatever.

MerlinAnd not realizing Frank is based on Jerry Lewis. What is happening with the youth today? Oh, God. Hey, everybody. I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt. My butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt.

When I get a hold of you. Hey, everybody, look at me. I got to get back to my mansion, eat my lobster. OK, OK, OK, let's start the show.

OK, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the problem. OK, so anyway, point is, I got to be I'm sorry, because I'm not awake. I got a beaker. Now, that beaker is, according to the site of this, it's a thousand milliliters or as you say one liter now the amount of liquid i put in there does not change how much it can hold i mean you know what i mean if i put a drop in that doesn't mean i mean it's a little liquid is liquid man you know it's like grass it just grows back my point being knowing that that's a thousand millions now here's the problem what if it's exactly the same volume of beaker but it had three marks on it zero one and two

okay that's not that that useful of a beaker because boy you try and find you alexandra you try and eyeball that meniscus at 1.75 eyeball my meniscus you cannot do it what's the temperature outside uh between one and two i guess it's hot that's the problem with

Speaker Acelsius there's not enough numbers preach it's so true when you have to use a decimal point you've

Alexalready lost i mean oh yeah it's true the incidental math podcast i don't like this in fact i think i like kelvin because yes zero you should be dead a hundred you should be dead that's a pretty name

Merlinfor a girl this is my daughter kelvin and i love her very much dating a man named cal oh oh we

Alexshould actually introduce uh cal oh god we're really sticking to this just for all caps casey list uh i think you've joined us today you agreed for some reason i

Speaker Abecause i was accosted while i was driving my car on the way home from swim lessons

Merlinoh god you were driving when you took a smartphone call with your family in the car

Alexoh my god oh yeah god we oh well and i have to say uh for for folks who don't know in the after show last week i decided you know what i'm going to assault casey list by just calling him do a cold call which is every millennial's nightmare no any sane person's nightmare is getting a cold phone call in the year 2021 everybody everybody except for my mother

Speaker Aand apparently casey allen lists who answered so the thing of it is is i don't know i i feel like it's worse to get a phone call out of the blue from someone i know because if it's just some random number it's it's the eight millionth time i'm being called with deep concern about my car's

Merlinwarranty oh did you did you know about that casey did you know that's running out and you have one

Speaker Alast opportunity oh i i appreciate you telling me to whom do i need to speak in order to extend my

Merlinwarranty you need to speak you need to speak to my to my manager and i have notes here unfortunately like me it comes in white so your warranty your warranty will be bukkake all over your vehicle click to continue if you'd like to be removed from our list touch two live the two lifestyle uh you took what you picked up see i would assume that somebody died

Speaker Awell that's the thing that's the thing is when it's somebody you know and they didn't have the common courtesy of like sending a text in advance i was genuinely worried that like alex is on her on their deathbed and suddenly and suddenly i am the savior that alex needs to turn to which means you are properly fucked if i'm the one trying to save you oh no you're the universal donor

Merlinthat alex needs exactly but but technology with the telephones has come a long way there should be a message and not in a too small font it should say under there oh incoming from alexandra cox you are not in trouble oh my god

Speaker BAlex's dad calling from the grave

Alexoh god now you've turned it into a fun hour of bullying Casey Allen Liss into such a nice thing where my friend picked up the phone in case I needed help

Speaker Aright so I says to Aaron I says Alex is calling me this is unusual but i picked up the phone and next thing i knew i was doing a guest spot on one of my favorite podcasts which was delightful and that's not the way you want it to happen though this is the consolation prize am i right that now you feel guilty i mean like i mean that

Merlinwould be like i don't know like me getting interviewed by ronan farrow because i was discovered to be to be overusing glory holes and be like oh really i really enjoy your work yeah I fucked a bathroom wall. I assume there was somebody there. I don't know. What was it really like growing up with Mia?

AlexYeah. Ronan, Ronan, Ronan,

MerlinRonan. Can I go to that house sometime that you grew up in with Mia? I want to go to the lake house. I'm not going to bring up any W a issues. I'm just saying I want, did you guys see that special? Did you see the house that Mia Farrow lives in? I want to live in that house so fucking much.

Speaker BOh,

Merlinno, I did not. It's what I imagine. Marco's now permanent beach house lifestyle is like, except his is probably like all clean, but it's very, It's like a cluttered cabin. And you can just tell people had nice lives there. You know?

AlexWell, I don't know if people had nice lives there.

MerlinI don't know why I'm laughing. The point is, guys, don't feel bad about fucking a hole in a bathroom wall. It's not bad. You do you. Casey, how you doing, bud? You're in Virginia.

Speaker AIs that right? That's right. I am in Virginia. It is hotter than hell out here, but it is otherwise good. Tell me about your heat in Fahrenheit.

MerlinFahrenheit. They come here. They don't learn the language. They take our jobs. Oh, you want to pick my lettuce? You want to pick my lettuce? Senior Celsius.

AlexI want to wash your toilets, Donald Trump. Was that in Osborne? I just thought it was the view.

MerlinI know. Now I'm imagining it's Bumblebee guy. It's un gato malodoro.

Alexwell now that casey is good and canceled what what's the temperature like over there welcome

Speaker Awelcome what's your temperature it's about 105 outside i think feel me gently are you being serious no i think it's the actual air temperature i think it's 90 to 95 but feels like it's like 105 something like that it is quite toasty out there which is unseasonably warm even for us

MerlinSo how, how, like you live in like a pretty, like a normal house with like air conditioning and stuff, right? Like how prepared are you? Well, you're in Virginia. You've got to be somewhat prepared. Like, you know what I mean? Like, like poor fucking Roderick. We didn't record it on Monday, which is not difficult for us to decide to do, but it was Monday and it was over a hundred degrees at like, at like nine or 10 in the morning. And they're not, what I'm trying to say is they're not set up for that. No one should drive in Atlanta and you should never be hot in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker AThis is like Alex was alluding to this earlier when some of us made the trek to London to go to Mike and Adina's wedding. It so happened that they had a just like record setting heat wave. And I can assure you that London, England is not at all set up for any sort of appreciable heat. I don't care what temperature scale you're using there. They're not set up for it. And so basically the whole of London was one giant armpit for the three or four days we were there, which was super fun.

MerlinI just don't like the thing. Actually, this is so funny. I was talking to Syracuse about this when we recorded last night where he kept bringing up the phrase wet bulb. What? You've got to save it for the show. What I was talking about, I don't think dew points a thing. I think it's like snipe hunting or the clitoris. I think it's one of those things to try to fool us with. But wet bulb is a thing. And that's why it's so uncomfortable everywhere. Go look up wet bulb. It has to do with like the temperature at which sweat can evaporate from your body. And it's why, you know, like they say, oh, it's a dry heat.

Like Las Vegas is terrible, but it is an extremely dry heat. So even when it's 100 there. But I guess I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you're not set up for that, like if you have the Steve Jobs windows that can't open, if you, you know what I mean, live somewhere where normally it's an NBD. we didn't have screens on our windows until two months ago we don't get bugs here i've been in 20 years we don't get bugs but that's just the one example there's all these things where in florida is where this all comes together in completely predictable ways because i mean i don't mean this as the obvious joke but like it's so strange that anyone ever decided to stay there

i can see saying that we really need to bounce like this is uninhabitable it's a it's a mosquito ridden swamp with it's basically australia for retirees that is oh my gosh it makes so much sense where is where is your family is uh looks like fort my somewhere on the west coast right

Alexpart of them is uh part of them are in fort my god they're alive it's not like their heads well they're in florida let's not go crazy i know well that's the thing is we have such different experiences of florida because my experience of florida is like the rich asshole version of you go from your air conditioned condo right off right into the beach back into the air conditioned condo or the air conditioned car and so it's like my dream well my mom would

Merlingo like i gotta go to like um i gotta go to win dixie and eckert like which are next to each other and then i've got to go to my vitamin store she would somewhat understandably get into her automobile and drive across the strip mall i i used to bring two shirts to school every day when I was in high school because you have to change your shirt at lunchtime because even just even if you're like the Goldman Sachs guy and you just go up your 31 floor elevator, private elevator and never have to deal with people. Just that glancing blow of heat and sun in Florida is excruciating.

And my strength tells me my strength tells me as of this past Friday that there is a physiological comp, as you say, components to this, which is that it's not just that I get sun poisoning and I get like I've had second degree sunburns from being in the sun in Florida it's not just that it's also that it can like have an impact I don't know the science of this but it can have an impact on your like mood and personality which explains why I get so fucking batshit insane if I have to be in the sun I have every reason in the world to be mad at this fun no it like in all

Alexseriousness like when I was giving Casey shit like you're from the Chicago area it's when I was in high school we started off with gym classes right and but our we didn't have showers like first period uh yeah no but and that's the thing though like uh you think like sweaty high schoolers like ew gross but it wasn't like it was an air-conditioned gym it was like whatever but by the time we were seniors it had the weather in illinois had changed so drastically that we just didn't have gym classes anymore unless it was the last period of the day because of heat

Yeah, because of the heat. And like now this is the first year Maddie has he got heat stroke and had no idea because like I we do have proper summers in Chicago, but it got so hot. And it was also a dry heat because like yesterday was what, like 90, I think, in Chicago. But it felt 101 because you walk you walked outside and it was like Florida, honestly. Like I was almost nostalgic.

MerlinIt feels like you're wearing a coat. You're like you're wearing a coat of weather. Right. It's disgusting.

AlexI hate it.

MerlinI hate it.

AlexYeah. And it's like, I mean, and I don't want to get all Betty bipolar like I did last week. But every time I go on a vacation, I do like try to adequately prepare myself for the change in weather because it is an air pressure, too, is a thing. It can be the same.

MerlinOh, absolutely. That's why when the weather's nice, it's some people with allergies. Boy, this is exciting.

AlexWell, but people, I thought I was even more crazy. Like, but no, it's a thing.

MerlinPeople with allergies, like high pressure, like a nice day, especially if it's sort of drastic, can make your allergies go completely nuts or your sinuses in general.

AlexYeah, no, climate change isn't real. That's fine.

MerlinThat's too hot, Casey. That's no way to live.

Speaker AI mean, it's unusual and it's not dramatically worse than it normally is here. And so I'm mostly used to it. And obviously, because I make a living in front of the computer, I don't often need to leave the house if I don't want to, which works out okay.

MerlinYeah, I do often think like I'm not like tarring a roof. Exactly. Exactly. Which would be deeply unfun. Merlin. Those guys are crazy. Yes, you there.

Speaker ALet me ask you something. If I had Jewish grandparents, which I do, and if they lived somewhere in Florida, where would you expect them to live? Miami Beach.

AlexOh, absolutely. West Coast. No.

MerlinNot Miami Beach. Miami proper. But they live somewhere below the Treasure Coast. Probably Miami. Oh, hang on. Is it Boca? Boca Raton, Florida, baby.

AlexOkay. All right.

Merlinfair fair that's amazing whoa i know but no see i know the other boca i know boca grande i don't know boca raton well and do they say florida yeah yeah they it's like you know

Speaker Alistening to syracuse which i do weekly uh is is to some degree like listening to my new yorker

Merlingrandparents um i'm pretty sure i caught him saying challenge last night just oh i'll cut

Alexout a d script for you we'll play here a lot god it was like that's like me kissing a boy what the

Speaker AMy favorite, my favorite though has to be Mario. It's not Mario, it's Mario. It's so performative.

Performative is a good word for it.

Speaker BIt's me, Syracuse. Oh God.

MerlinSyracuse a card, I love that game. You just sit around and complain about how you can't get in a stick shift anymore.

Speaker BThat's no good. I want to drive in my car. I don't want to drive in my car. They need my package for this. It's not the time to prepare. You got a sauce of the pasta.

MerlinYeah, I know.

Speaker BNo, you're tossing me wrong.

MerlinYou put sauce on the pasta.

Speaker BNo, that's no good. When you put sauce on the pasta, you put sauce on the pasta. Did you heat it in the bowl? Did I what? Did you heat it in the bowl?

MerlinDid I heat it in the bowl?

Speaker BDid you heat it in the bowl? You know how to do that. Okay, for a fourth a week. Syracuse, I gotta tell you a little bit more about the opasta.

AlexIt's a tiny discrimination in the tier.

Speaker BBut you make a whole bunch of freezes and meals and meals that you're here in the bowl. I don't know if you're here in the bowl. You have to do it again this week. Can you do it wrong? I know you're doing it wrong already. Gotta go.

MerlinTakes off in his super Syracuse card.

Speaker BLet's go. Let's go. I throw a turtle at you. Got to the wings. I keep all my nightgowns in this vault. 256 pieces for where I put my curse and the sword.

AlexYou know, we have Casey on here to bully him, but let's bully all of the ATVs.

MerlinMy God. I could be at home with my family eating chicken. I sit there and listen to that man for fucking three hours. just he just he just like hits my testes like a speed bag he just goes he just goes at it and i'm like look i i like doing this show with you why are you so horrible to me

Alexwhat's well what's worse is i'm truly broken because i choose to listen to this man for like five hours well five hours one week at least like two and a half hours other weeks that's how it

Merlinstarts it seems so simple and then pretty soon you're a flying monkey with one of those cute little hats and you're out there yelling at people and you know john's right about this I have such a sense of experience with people. Unless not descend back into my cave.

AlexWired is better.

Speaker AWe get so much ATP feedback, and it is so remarkable when someone disagrees with John. I almost want to print it out and put it in a binder, because we've been doing the show for eight years. It's probably happened 15 times, something like that, that somebody said, you know, John, I think you're wrong about that. It is phenomenal how enthusiastic John's fans are.

MerlinBut also to your point to tease out the, I feel like anyway, a bigger point is that like, it isn't that often that people go out of their way to contact someone. Spam call. It even says spam risk right on the screen. Just so you know, AT&T call protect does not work on your watch if it's not on your wrist.

AlexOh, nor on the beta. Not that I would run a beta on my main phone.

MerlinOn your watch?

AlexOh, no, no, no. But it's not.

MerlinWill you sleep where your children play with their toys? they massacred my watch um but like it's not it's not that often the people in my experience go way out of their way to contact someone to to very ebulliently congratulate someone on how right they are about something and how much they agree with them i mean it's a very nice kind of live journal era thing to do but with Syracuse i don't know what he's done the brain worms the mind poisoning that he's done to his flying monkeys to make them how they are but they've lost any ability to discern and now they're just pure killing machines

Alexoh god yeah i don't know how it happens syracuse the justice warrior

Speaker Bthis is so stupid let's start the show start the show um

Merlinheat Virginia. Now, are you actually from Illinois, Casey, if you can say for

Speaker AOPSEC reasons? No, no, no, no. So if I were to declare where I'm from, I would say the New York area actually coincidentally. I feel like I should know this. No, it's fine. I'm spacing.

MerlinWell, and I accidentally think I get Tiff and Marco confused. And boy, if you say Tiff's from Ohio, boy, she gets mad.

Speaker AYeah, that's not going to end well for you. So I wouldn't recommend that. She jumps

Merlininto her Syracuse cart and jumps with it.

AlexOh, God. Don't imply that they lived upstate either. Don't do it. Don't do it.

MerlinAre you talking about anywhere above 125th? That's upstate, right?

AlexI don't want to get email.

MerlinBasically, you go straight from Harlem. You go to Harlem to Seth Godin's house to Marco's house. They're basically essentially adjacent. Professor X is placed, the Xavier School. That's right near where Marco Parks' desk.

Speaker AIt's all in the sawmill. It's all one straight line.

Merlinthat it anyway he doesn't get to drive as much as he used to yeah nobody's perfect and then they put that he gets that comedy tire oh gosh the comedy tire thing was so funny to me like i

Alexhey hey pair of house listeners of this show uh what they're no alex why alex don't address i like i like you i like all of you guys and uh i really recommend the series of atp on ATP where, God, what was it? He put, there was an orange tire on a Tesla.

MerlinHis car got hit while it was parked.

AlexOh, God.

MerlinRight, right. And something happened. And yeah, tell the story, Casey, because it's so hilariously, seemingly off-brand for Tesla as a thing. It's such a missed opportunity and so bizarre that there's diversity to the comedy tires.

AlexIt's not off-brand to Tesla, though. Like, this is the reality of what it is to have Libya Because I, unfortunately, as we know, do not have a Tesla. But Casey, please tell us, mask off. What is Tesla really like?

MerlinYeah, what's up with Tesla?

AlexTesla exposed.

Speaker ATesla exposed. You heard it here first. So what happened with Marco briefly is that he parked his car long term in a parking lot by the ferry terminal. And he apparently got clipped by like some pickup with a plow or something like that. And one of the side effects other than body damage was that he had a flat tire. and i guess teslas don't have spares and they don't have like fix a flat or anything inside

Merlinthem so but they have like a service like uh you imagine it would be like a white glove triple a at least in my head i'm imagining it being like extremely high touch like when you get the good support at comcast you know see now we've we've come we've come back around to glory holes just like that but anyway so you know the thing is that's that's the point of a hole the thing about You understand where it opens, at least from your standpoint, but you do not know where it ends. That is true. So that's the danger and the fun. You could end up really, really in a whole different county.

You know what I'm saying? So they roll out, the pros from Dover roll up and are going to help Marco with his situation, right?

Speaker ARight. So they put on a full-size spare tire, you know, not one of those death donuts, as I like to call them. You know, this is an honest to goodness full-size spare. But the thing of it is, is that it's a regular Tesla wheel with a regular Tesla tire on it. And so at this moment, you know, the second that the white glove service person walks away, you know, Marco had what appeared to be the normal setup for his car. There was nothing temporary about it. Right. And so I guess what happened early on with Tesla is that people would just never bother fixing the original tire that, you know, exploded and they would never bother getting their original wheel back.

MerlinThey would never essentially once they got a new tire, they wouldn't return the old one. And because Tesla's, I mean, you know, constantly doubting how successful they are. They're so successful that if you buy one of their relatively costly automobiles, they want to make sure that you don't. It's a lot like, speaking of tires, it's a lot like when they put a hubcap on the restroom key at a bathroom. We don't want you walking off with this. Plus, we want everyone to know you have to shit at a bathroom. So please carry this wheel of shame to the shit hole.

Speaker BIt's like a giant rock. It's so young.

MerlinYou have to drag it.

Speaker AOr like the empty windshield washer fluid container that's, you know, like one and a half gallons or something like that. Anyways.

MerlinThat's a good one. I like that.

Speaker ASo what ends up happening is Tesla has now spray painted the real entire combination that they put on your car as a temporary replacement. So this encourages you. This shames you into taking action and actually going to the dealer.

MerlinIt's sort of a deliberately ugly. Well, I mean, this is the part that blew my mind. Learning about this, I thought was so goddamn funny. But then here, when your listener started sending in photos of these in the wild, there appeared to be it's almost like different kinds of barbecue in the US. South Carolina, it's going to have mustard, you know, and and and that maybe there's regional differences to boys. We need to ugly up them tires more. I want you to make it look more like a I don't know, some kind of a gay Confederate flag.

Make that sort of a pattern.

Speaker ASo goddamn weird to me. It is. It's super weird. And so some of them are like really discreetly done with like a, a stenciled spray painted tea for the Tesla logo. Tea for thief.

Speaker BAnd others.

Speaker AEverybody, I steal tires. Yeah, right. And then there's others that it's like, you know, the dude slicing the pizza for pizza delivery where it's just, I have no idea what the hell just happened, but whatever. It's good enough. So yeah, it's a mess. And it's, and like you said, it's, it's regional. I feel like, you know, we were, we were almost playing our own like really shitty version of Pokemon as we're getting all of these submissions from all over the country oh this one's a tea oh there's a there's a Charmander there's a there's a Pikachu or whatever I don't

Alexeven know what Pokemon are but oh 100% IVs yeah but also then like something just occurred to me

Merlinis that and I don't know what I think about this shit but that would indicate to me that it's while while it might be a corporate national policy it does not have a corporate national implementation which I think is so interesting like if you think about most businesses Like I worked when I was in high school, I worked at a franchise McDonald's like most McDonald's was a franchise. And as we all know from watching videos, McDonald's is mostly a real estate company. It's a real estate company that sells weird food. But, you know, but our place, man, like it was a pretty shitty franchise.

But there was stuff where like the hammer would come down. Like if you did the point of purchase signs wrong, like corporate would freak. You know what I'm saying? Like it's so important, understandably, to McDonald's and their brand. McDonald's brand on the face of it is consistency. sort of like starbucks we're like like it or not you're gonna get mostly the same food and drinks at these different places which is so strange to me that they would leave it to like i don't know uh uh jj and verne to figure out like what the wheels should look like in in virginia or or new york i don't know that's that stuff fascinates me there's a little like the um occasionally

seemingly obvious holes in different cultures where you're like how did that happen it's so odd i like your show casey i listen to it i like i listen to it well that's very kind of you thank you i even pay you technically you work for me

Speaker Bwhat can i do for you sir

Merlincome on into the restroom with me you stay in that side i'll stay on this side listen listen there's oh why are we talking about

Alexyou guys gotta quit talking about glory holes you know what a cuck i am i'm gonna send you a picture of a glory hole i'm wearing oh gosh no that's on the other side of my room um And it's actually a scissor shape.

Speaker BWow. You have a gory scissor?

AlexThat's funny. I was saving it. I was saving it. No.

MerlinHey, don't keep your candle under a bushel basket.

AlexYou know.

MerlinLet those scissors soar.

AlexOh, gosh. For the first time in, oh, God, I don't even remember. I'm wearing a different shirt. And I'm wearing a shirt that actually has something across my boobs. Look at what's on. I promised myself I would never say mommy milk. Oh, look at that. My boobs.

MerlinOh, you're so cute, Alex. I love the way you look. You're so cute.

AlexIf people wanted this shirt that I actually adore, where could they buy it?

Speaker AWell, you can't because it's too late. Oh, no.

AlexOh, no. Wait a minute.

Speaker AYou should have said you were selling shirts.

MerlinI would have bought one.

Speaker AWell, we should have mentioned it, huh? We should have mentioned it. I should have sent you a carrier pigeon, a telegram. I might send you a fuck you right now because I see what you're doing there.

Speaker BI didn't know you were selling shirts. You should have said something.

MerlinOh, whoa. Is this you guys right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just took that.

Speaker BOh, this is so upsetting.

MerlinI didn't know we were doing, wear the same shirt day. Oh, man. Oh, look at Casey. Look how handsome that guy is. My goodness. Yeah. Oh, look at that.

AlexWait, what the fuck is up with that? what's wrong with your microphone the baffling or a light what is oh yes

Merlinthank you i've heard that before you said your microphone is long i don't know if your regular unit would make it through the glory you guys gotta stop talking about glory holes it's not funny it's not funny do you know how hurtful that is to the glory community

Speaker Auh yeah so the uh the the what the hell is this thing that's the spray filtery thing whatever uh is never centered properly. And I've gotten accosted about this twice. Once from Alex just now. And once from Stephen Hackett, who is deeply upset that it wasn't perfectly even on my microphone. That's okay.

MerlinI don't care about so.

AlexI didn't, you know what? I wasn't gonna, it's, it's just, I mean, if you really want to get your mouth around the whole thing, you gotta have it even, you know, don't forget the balls. Why do I keep doing this? Yeah.

Speaker AI'm very intrigued that you're lecturing me.

MerlinWhere'd you, where'd you learn that Alexandra? I don't know.

AlexI don't know.

Merlinit's that thing you read in a read in a book or like like uh you know mexican bible like where

Alexdid you where'd you come up with that these are the tips welcome to the tips oh gosh well i mean i truly was it was it this show where i didn't i didn't realize that uh oh god what was even the body part uh a taint no no i don't have a tank i have a sphincter right no you you're confused

Merlinabout what a taint was and what what a taint is and who could have one i think anything can be a taint as long as it taint this or that exactly that's true that's how it works hi i'm taint self hi hi i'm taint spursley and i represent the taint institute my father hank spursley began the taint institute in 1975 he had no idea no it's 1969 come on 1960 oh sorry on april 20th april 20th

plays it hitler's birthday anyway um anyway i had a funny picture of me in an atp shirt i'm wearing a uh i'm being that guy today i have a ted lasso shirt on oh good for you i'm so excited for next month i wish they'd done it earlier i it sounds odd to say i would have enjoyed it more if it was earlier yeah yeah there's so i agree with mike and jason from the i agree that like what the fuck were they thinking not doing this sooner i know it's not really in like apple's wheelhouse you know i mean if you go back and look at old apple merchandise some of it's a little bit silly

i love it but you know but that's not they're not a merchandise first they're not like you know i have a podcast so here's this t public shirt it's uncomfortable you know it's like what are you saying what's going on with those shirts i'm done with t public i'm here to say i mean

AlexI have a little oh oh they're so bad

Merlinthey're worse Alex you won't know this for reference but when I when I and perhaps Casey were kids you go to the mall and you go to something called like shirt shack and in my case I could get a Star Wars thing ironed onto a shirt

Speaker Aoh yeah yeah right

Merlinlike the famous one of Han and Chewie with the blasters that I had that on a shirt or Superman a Superman logo because I apparently thought a lot of myself but it feels like it really feels like you're wearing a shirt with some kind of bulletproof plastic on it And that's how I feel in a T-Public shirt. I don't like it.

AlexOh, no, no, no. I mean, that's...

MerlinIs it just me? Get my back on this.

AlexNo, no, no. You are absolutely right. I'm thinking of like, you know, the free shirts that you would get it.

MerlinI got the EPM helicopter shirt and I didn't like it.

AlexOh, ooh, ooh.

MerlinI got a helicopter Tony, but I don't wear it because it's uncomfortable. No shade of lemonade.

AlexYeah, well, I mean, that's also the kind of shirts that they give out at like college orientations too. And then it's like your logo.

MerlinOh, usually has Greek symbols on it. Yeah. Yeah.

Alexyou you can like after you wash it you can basically bend it in half and it will break i don't know oh nice yeah yeah yeah yeah a teenager's towel i well actually you because otherwise people will be sad i have some some uh what are they called the wrong thing it's not t-public is it something else no no no um apple doesn't the the hold up in the ted lasso thing was not with the fruits it was with the uh uh the looney tunes fuck what's it oh uh warner brothers

Merlinbecause it's because of the complexity the complexity of all the different deals right

Alexyeah even jason sudeikis has been like uh i don't i don't know and not in like it's just so strange i mean on the one hand though it like makes me happy that you know apple really has its hands off of the stuff that apple tv is making and like because i think mike said they're they're kind of becoming hbo but i mean yeah like old hbo yeah yeah yeah the oh man still haven't finished the Sopranos but I yeah it's sad because you want to give I want to give like APM money and but I don't want to throw

fabric and plastic into the trash I why am I stressing out about t-shirts right now

MerlinI agree with you well sometimes you know you get an enthusiasm about something you want to like fly the colors I mean we went to dinner apropos nothing we went to dinner with family last week and it happened to be not only was it the night of a Giants game but they were staying like pretty much across the street oh you saw that photograph of the table reserve for jonathan gruber that was me and my family um i was on the internet but uh anyhow and it was not only was it a giants game but as a giants versus a's game which is a really big deal because it's the two

you know cities and um i just i i forget how much people are into sports and sports clothes it's such it's so huge how many people and some people in brand new giant stuff some people in giant stuff they've obviously had for years and years and then you get almost into that weird like Disney World vertical where it's like, we got married here and we like to dress as cats and we have that kind of Mickey ears. You know what I'm talking about? You get those weird subcultures and the pins and all that stuff.

AlexDefinitely never done that. Nope.

MerlinWere you a pin day?

AlexI mean, I wouldn't say were. Uh-oh. Did you swap? Did you trade pins? Yeah, that's what you do. You buy a bunch of cheap pins and then you go to the cast members and trade your crappy cheap pins for the nice one. It's kind of a swindle.

MerlinYou start with a bobby pin, you end up with a house. Yeah.

AlexI'm normal. I get it. Well, even, I mean, when I went to the Cubs game a few, like a month ago, I don't know, what is time. And I thought, you know what, as long as I'm wearing like blue, no one's going to look at me funny for not wearing a specific Cubs merchandise.

Speaker BNo, no, no.

AlexI went and purchased a Cubs hat because like pure stairs. Well, the neighborhood is like half boys town, which is all the gays and half Wrigleyville, which is all the sports.

MerlinAnd so it's when you said half boys town. I for some reason I'm thinking of those tie.

Speaker BI thought it was a town for half boys.

MerlinIt's called Lady Boys, right? right is that what the goal is

Speaker Boh no

Merlinsorry go ahead i'm so sorry so you ended up getting that you ended up getting that

Alexoh yeah yeah i i did well i did i i'm just it was one of those things please please don't talk to me and it's a nice like symbiotic relationship really because it's like okay clearly a gay clearly a sport and we live in harmony but uh i i didn't have the symbol you know like it's Oh, my God. They have flagging. It's Cubs flagging. Oh, my God. What's flagging? I don't know. Anyway, I don't know.

Speaker BWhat?

AlexYou know, you put it in the back.

Speaker ACasey, Casey, Alex, Casey, what's happening?

MerlinWhat is Alex talking about?

Speaker AI'm not really sure. And I do understand sports for the most part, but I am deeply lost right now.

MerlinFlagging. Like flag flag football.

AlexDoes Virginia have sport? I'm not feigning anything. No, no, no. What is the sport there? Is that a Patriots town or did I just a million people? Yep, I did. There we go. There we go. God, no.

MerlinThat answers the question. Something called the Jaguars. Are you into the Jaguars there?

Speaker ARight, no. The funny thing about Virginia is for it being a relatively large state. I mean, it's no California, but it's a relatively large state.

MerlinIt's a big-ass state, especially for that side of the country. That's a big-ass state.

Speaker ABut we don't have, of like the normal, you know, like basketball, football, that sort of thing, we don't have any professional sports teams. So we have the Washington football team, formerly known as the Washington Redskins, which is, you know, not actually, no, I think that might, strictly speaking, be in Virginia, but it's considered to be D.C., right? And then there's the Capitals, the hockey team, which is, again, strictly speaking, D.C. I forget where their stadium is.

Who were the I forget the basketball team off the top of my head now. I'm drawing a blank. But yeah. Well, but like, was there a lot of college stuff there?

MerlinYes. For example, coming from Tallahassee, Florida State, and UF Gators are both real big in Florida or the Hurricanes. Do you get a lot of interest in college?

Speaker AYeah, and coincidentally, so I went to school in Virginia Tech, which is way in the southwest corner of Virginia. And there's not a lot going on in southwest Virginia other than Virginia Tech.

MerlinI'm so sorry. I'm so dumb. What's that adjacent to, like Georgia? No, what is that?

Speaker ANo, no. So it's above North Carolina by a teeny bit.

MerlinOh, okay.

Speaker AAnd, uh, shoot, what's the left? Is that Tennessee? No, West Virginia is directly West and I forget what else. Um, but I am terrible at geography.

MerlinWest Virginia is West Virginia. That's a good mnemonic. I'm going to remember. Yeah. It turns out who knew we're righty, tidy, lefty, Lucy, West Virginia.

Speaker ARight. Uh, so anyway, so yeah, there's, uh, there's Virginia tech and then our big, um, our big rivals were the university of Virginia. coincidentally that's where my wife went uh and then we also have there are other uh less big schools but plenty of of schools you may have heard of uh james madison university may or may not be popular outside of virginia but that's a thing uh william and mary is one of the better

Alexschools in the country william and mary that's my friend alex that's where dennis went oh oh i love dennis or i love the idea of dennis you love dennis and and then dennis worked at colonial

MerlinWilliamsburg and he was he was he was a costumed interpreter at yeah yeah and he would do the thing where you say oh what is this odd way you have of listening to sound with your ears uh churn some

Alexbutter that kind of thing did he like translate racism what like how do you not he translated

Merlinracism that's what they do at Williamsburg you gotta try corn hat Alex look it up yeah I know

Alexbut it's like when someone's like oh Duffy you know what's happening right I don't I don't know I've never been to a reenactment. I don't know. I'm also looking at a map of the United States right now.

MerlinYes, this is a dagger I see before me. Yes, yes.

AlexOh, the play.

MerlinAlas, poor Jefferson. I knew him. Thank you.

Speaker ASo to that end, it was very funny watching Hamilton 15 years after everyone else discovered it. And, you know, Jefferson features fairly strongly, particularly in the second act.

MerlinDoing whatever the hell he does up in Monticello. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker AAnd remember that Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. This is where Aaron went. And so Aaron has, well, I don't think Aaron is unreasonable about it, but the stereotypical UVA alumni has very strong opinions about Thomas Jefferson and how amazing he is and so on and so forth. Oh, interesting.

AlexI did not know this. Wow.

Speaker AYeah. And like I've been to Monticello. It's been a long time since I've been But I've been, it's lovely But yeah, so watching the second half of Hamilton Last year after you guys had already seen it Five years ago Five years ahead of me No, I'm making fun of myself You've heard a lot more Dave Matthews band than me

MerlinSo that's a feather

Speaker AThat's true, I'm not sure if that's good or bad But that is probably factual

MerlinOh, you want to hear every Dave Matthews song? Ready? Here we go You're not wrong

Speaker AYou're not wrong Just do that for 15 minutes

MerlinAnd then you bring out that muscle-bound violin man

Speaker AOh, no, he got cancelled He got very cancelled

MerlinDid he have trouble with ladyboys? What was his problem? Did he have a run-in?

Speaker AHe's a fish drummer

Speaker BGone fishing said the sign

MerlinFish drummer and his muumuu And then, so, what's the name of the not UVA Virginia Tech What's the name of that made-up team?

Speaker AThe sports team? the Hokies. H-O-K-I-E-S.

MerlinHokies. And what does that stand for? Hokies, is that like a Native American thing?

Speaker ANo, so you're speaking to a former tour guide, and so I'm resisting going on. You're almost an interpreter. Did you get a tricorn hat? I did not get a tricorn hat. That would look good

Merlinon you. You have a large, tall head, and you would look great in a tricorn hat.

Speaker AThank you. You know what really makes me upset is every time I see friend of the show, Todd Vaziri, wearing his, what are the, a flat cap? I want to be cool and or old.

MerlinOh, like a Donagol, like a taxi driver hat, that kind of thing?

Speaker AYeah, yeah. I want to be cool and or old enough to be able to pull off a flat cap, and I don't think I am cool enough, and I am not yet old enough. And every time Todd posts

MerlinYou've either got to be really sexy or into Ubuntu.

AlexOh, I just looked at what a flat cap is, and no, no. Only Newsies can make... I thought this was a Newsies hat. No, no one should wear

Speaker Athe... Oh, oh, gosh. Oh, no, no, no. Todd makes it... Is it not a flat cap no i do have that right todd makes it look good i'm telling you see now that you're

Alexsaying it you're right you're right he can pull it off okay newsies and todd that and and a very handsome irishman i think and that's about that's about it very you mean like an irish spring man

Merlinmanly yes but i like it too every time i have to do a mac weldon read hello i love mac weldon but every time i get to that there's one word that i have in my head it's so difficult for me to get past this one word because i remember it from an irish spring commercial now this is all before

Alexyour time alex irish spring well my grandpa uses the irish springs but i mean the commercials would

Merlinbe like a guy in a fishing sweater and one of those caps like a big handsome man and i haven't better talk like this like i like the charms and um and but yeah so one of the lines was uh the woman goes manly yes but i like it too and then there's another one there's another one where she goes or he somebody goes antibacterial antibacterial and when they say antibacterial in this phony baloney irish accent every time i have to get to talking about silver underpants and i really want

Alexto go antibacterial do they check because that's a oh boy well oh you you put that in there that's how you how you know if they if they i used to when when in my ad it's a good idea it's like the brown m&ms yeah yeah exactly you just exactly the casey do you know about the brown m&ms

Speaker Ai know about green m&ms i don't think i know about brown this is a good this is a good if

Alexyou know the story tell the story but you you know it turns out right i oh no in fact i didn't know it was a canonical oh go on go on see i always seen it as oh no i don't i'm sorry it's your story i don't want to take it away no i think in the in the comedy world it's actually like a Twix bar. For some reason, it's always been a Twix bar in every

Merlinwriter I've had. Okay, so a story went around, I think as far back as the 80s, about, oh my god, Van Halen, they're such big stars, but they're also such

Speaker Adivas. Oh, yes, it is.

MerlinOkay. So they have a writer in their contract that says, no brown M&Ms. And if you put brown M, if you don't take out all the brown M&Ms, they trash the room. Oh my god, these guys are such assholes. No. That's not how it works. Anytime that somebody is doing that i mean this could be like cheap trick wanted to go like at our local bar where i played in a band with the owners cheap trick the reason they didn't get cheap trick is they wanted a golf cart and like 40 new white towels there's all these things a lot of places you want

like vegan meals or no pizza right and that's the way of saying like dude this is my fucking life like pixies wanted vegetarian food on real plates because they fucking travel and they go places and And if you go with your family or even just you, you don't want to have what always happens, which is the promoter throws a $20 bill and somebody goes and gets a pizza. Do you want that every night before you go on to play at a show? In the case of Van Halen, were they divas? No. They were tired of lighting rigs not working. They were tired of things just fucking going wrong.

And so it was not just brown M&Ms. There were several things that they would put in, including brown M&Ms. and that gave them a fast way to know whether this person had actually read the rider and taken care

Alexof what they needed yep and i well i've been this i have been that jerk too where i and i i totally understand agree and get it especially like i've heard writers where you know they have if again

Merlincomedy i don't know it's all twick if you don't want to do it don't accept the contract it's a contract if you're gonna do it make good on it and don't have the lights fuck up you know what i mean

AlexWell, that's the other thing, too, is as soon as you get to a place and your Twix bar isn't there, then you know to check everything. And now I figured out a way to not sound like an asshole in the back of the days when I stood in front of people. Not stand-up comedy. Oh, Jesus, no. I was always sitting in front of people and doing podcasts and shit. And I would say, hey, I need a USB-C to USB-C cable. And that makes me sound not like an asshole. But it's also something where usually they would be like, hey, so you have this on your writer and I don't really know what that means, which means they probably don't know like the other important things.

MerlinOh, God, no. The way they get out of that, whether it's – I don't want to name names. But one way that they get out of that, I think someone understandably is saying like whatever you need – like we're going to tell you what we have. We have a DVI here. And whatever you need to get to the DVI, bring –

AlexRight, right. Right. And sometimes that sucks, but I mean, oh, try doing a talk at Apple. Woo! That stirred something.

MerlinOh, my God. Apple was pretty good. Google was pretty good. There's a place that makes animated films that was...

Speaker BThat's weird.

MerlinWe're shooting with a 40-millimeter lens from the back of the room. So just stand under this one light at a lectern like you're some kind of discount minister with a stick mic. Try not to move because we're going to Wes Anderson this shit. you know it's like uh yeah anyway anyway so you also back to work on bad presentation culture but um what were we talking about uh yeah you know i do think that's interesting and i that makes a good story and you can have fun with that but i think it's about is i don't know it's why it's like one of those urban myths like rod stewart you know and his thing or like the

spider eggs and bubble yum we're like that gets passed around and people get to like have an

Alexextreme feeling about it but i don't know i well no it's like just don't put it can be as little as man i actually really only want cheese on my pizza up to like don't have like that big like bar nuts and peanuts on there because one of the band like our our main drummer is allergic to peanuts which is something i've also seen like it's it's a i i don't know i i like when people

Merlindo that have i told you the story i feel like i must have told this here so many times but i love this so much have i told you the anecdote about applying for a job at two cats comics 320 west

Alexportal avenue have i told that story yes but please tell it again it's so good have you heard

Merlinthis story casey i don't think so that's okay but this is the kind of thing where like when i when i say to my kid like i know you don't i know i'm not useful but really try to always read the instructions because i mean i know you're not gonna read the whole manual like i read a manual for our cordless drill yesterday like nobody nobody does this stuff but like seriously i mean there's not that many things i can tell you about things about life and test taking in particular but like always read what it says so here's the thing uh two cats comics is it was this great

comic store um i love dearly and they closed down i guess now over a year ago and replaced by a

Speaker Afucking psychic no this is the place this is the place that it was in the basement that they would

Merlindo like you guys would do no that was comedy with scott that was in the death trap with scott simpson this is my comic comic book meetups yes okay yeah yeah but they're like they're i don't know there's there are there are enough stores like this that it's worth mentioning not every store is like this which is they're like they're really into like helping you find something you'd enjoy they're not there it's not like going to a fucking camera store or that kind of thing where you're that's like a test of wills to see like who's the bigger asshole it's like they're really they're very into inclusive comics double clicks played there one time like they've like they're

they want to really make it fun for everybody. It was all owner operated, nice people just in the service of saying that, like, if you work there, it's going to be kind of a big deal. And you're going to, you know, you're going to hustle. It's a fucking comic book store at a terrible time. Like we need people here who are extremely good at this. And so people would come in, like, I don't remember how he announced it. His name is Christian. Hi, Christian. And Christian Nicholson, he, he, you come in and apply and he would say, okay, you can come in and pick up an application. let's say arbitrary between the camp definitely do not do not come in on wednesday because that's

new comics day like you would if you knew this business you would know not to come in come in say thursday from one to three or whatever and pick up an application right so far so good so you had a pile of applications on the counter and a cup full of pens and right and people will come in and say okay well here's the application please make sure to read the instructions and you know just give it back when you're done and it said it's it was not announcing this super clearly but it said at the top the directions were fill out this application completely um

do you have to use blue pen do not fill this out in the store bring it back completed and put it in this area the pens that were in that cup were green so people will come in grab the application go straight to the first blank start filling everything in in the store at the counter with a green pen and he let them do it and the and there's lots of hard difficult questions there were like factual questions but then there was a lot of like yeah i don't care if it's not important whether you think thanos or dark side is more powerful

i want you to tell me why you think that is and i and i like you said like how would you explain at like to somebody's aunt or something like that right but it was just so fucking brilliant he immediately he immediately can look at this and immediately see it's in green and know that this person and is that petty yeah it's petty no i don't think so the point is the point is like i need you to i need you i need to know what i'm dealing with here and if you're applying for a job and just moseying around and coming in at the time it's convenient for you and just jumping

straight into the thing that you want out of this we can find people who will be better at this and like it just it makes me so happy to know there are people out there saying like i don't be a dick about this but i'm gonna reward the people who bring a little more care to this and who do the thing that we talked about doesn't mean you're subservient doesn't mean you're dumb it just means it means you know how to conduct yourself as a fucking adult anyway end of story i just thought that was really clever and it was fun to watch when i'd go in there my kid and i would go in there every Wednesday day to pick up our our box and uh it was just always fun when he

was going through one of those things to watch these poor idiots come in like lambs to the

Alexslaughter read the instructions anybody disagree with that no i had the same version of or my version of it was in school like a teacher one time gave us this really long packet of multiple choice and essay questions i don't even remember what the subject was but the teacher was like okay Now, the most important thing of the like, she was pretty. I had a feeling I knew what was going on. She's like, now it's very, very important that you read all of the instructions from the beginning of the packet to the end.

I know it might take a few minutes, but you really should do this. And at the end, it said you you don't need to answer any of these questions. Just don't tell anybody and doodle on these pages. so the the idea was you know you just you stay in your seat so nobody else realizes what's going on but you didn't have to do like the incredibly difficult questions as people learned later and it was like i don't know i thought it was a really good thing of like not they do that sometimes

Merlini feel like a lot of teachers it's become sort of a quran to do that with something involving the syllabus oh that's similar where they'll say like i'm gonna hand this thing out to you and i'd like y'all to read it thoroughly then of course there's always the stories of like grandma saying you know grandma saying have you been reading your bible and there's actually a million dollars in there or whatever no no they put a put a 20 bill in i don't know fucking galatians probably where would you put a 20 i put a 20 bill i'm if i'm being if i'm being horny on maine i would put a 20 bill into romans or acts and if i wanted to really fuck with them i put them in put it into

one of the lady books in the Old Testament. I put it in a room. Lady books. I'm not putting a Micah. Where would you put a $20 bill? Don't overthink.

AlexOh, I was just going to go straight to Revelations because at that point, okay.

MerlinYou're talking about the Revelation of St. John? Is that what you're talking about?

AlexI would put two bills. It's always $2.20. It's always $2.20.

Speaker BNo, no, no, no, no. No, no, no.

AlexYou put the $20 in Revelations because a smartass is just going to go to the end and check that out, right? But you put $100 bills. Yeah, yeah. You put a $100 bill just somewhere randomly in the middle. Oh, I love this.

MerlinIt's going to be like a Bible escape room.

AlexExactly.

Speaker BYeah, yeah, yeah. It's... Can you crack the code?

MerlinHe did. Now you're Da Vinci. How would you... Where would you put a 20 case? You don't ever think of it.

Speaker AIt's adorable you think I know anything in the Bible at all.

MerlinYou're not... Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Fake Jew. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the fuck up. You were not raised with the Lord?

Speaker AOh, hell no. You're shitting me. No, I'm not. So dad was raised Jewish and was bar mitzvahed, but as soon as he was an adult, he was like, well, the hell with all that.

MerlinWhy do I feel like you have a similar, Middle Eastern is the wrong word for it, but don't you have a background that's partly Jewish? Give me all your rundown. What are you? Where are you from?

Speaker ANo, where's your family from? Exactly. So dad is Jewish. He's full blood Jew. His family, I believe, I think is part Polish, Alex, and and very Russian. If I recall correctly.

And then mom hurt my my grandfather. My mom's dad is like 75 or maybe even 100 percent Italian. And her mom is New York. Yeah. Right. And her mom is my grandma is a mutt. just like all sorts of random European breeds, if you will. And, and so mom was raised Catholic and both like dad, dad, he was like, his circumcision was done by like his uncle, the rabbi, you know what I'm saying?

Like he was super duper, super duper religious family. Right. What, what country? Well, dad, dad's parents, my grandparents were like, I'm sorry,

Merlinlike us or like Europe.

Speaker AYo, U.S. So dad's parents, I think, were the first born in the States, if I recall correctly, on both sides. And then the ancestors beyond my grandparents were.

MerlinDid they come over before the war?

Speaker AYes, I believe so. And so anyway, so yeah, so dad was raised Jewish, mom was raised Catholic, and I was basically none of the above. We celebrated and continue to this day. You know, even Aaron and me will recognize and celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas, which sounds amazing. but at least in the list family hanukkah was one good present and then seven days of school

Merlinsupplies and socks seven days of school supplies i would watch that on homework

Speaker Aand so because of that i was never really raised much of anything okay wow i really got that wrong

Merlinyou feel like you could practically be like a stephen hackett in my head wow really actively not not no i don't mean tennessee i mean that's pro I know what I'm trying to say FedEx I guess is what I'm trying to say you're an observant FedEx

Speaker AI am very observant FedEx okay so but did you go to did you go to did you go to were you bar mitzvahed no no no no which in retrospect I missed out on because I could have made a whole lot of money

Merlinoh yeah and also okay wow way to make it Calo Virginia it also would be an opportunity for you to learn a fucking thing about the sacred text that's right and you'd be able to play with me in this space I know where you'd point the mezuzah to put the $20 bill I'm standing here with my mezuzah in my hand Is that the little finger pointer thing That you use for the Torah? I don't even know I think it's the finger pointer on Methuselah was 969 Nice Methuselah, that's a bible reference Don't pretend Casey It's like being with my goddamn wife My wife is a quatra Jew

And my daughter is an octa Jew There's just a little bit of that And then I'm all I'm basically all the colonial Empires Everything bad everything bad i i got my um i got my uh inflammatory bowel disease uh from i think from uh eastern european jews and apart from that everything in me is a colonialist so you basically

Alexhave a like a bronze stash statue of tennessee like that type of that type of thing well i mean

Merlinlike my mom's so my mom's father uh his family is from london but they worked in the diamond industry in british guyana very near what would become jonestown oh they're total colonialists yeah yeah yeah my um a lot of my family obviously going to my last name you can tell there's some german people in my background mostly we're like we're just hicks we're all like you know uk hicks germans i think we might have some welsh um you know richard burton said if you show if you're sure welshman true doors and one of them says self-destruction you always know which

what he would pick so that's why i drink uh but there's a lot of english and alexandra you're

Alexmostly from half yetis right half yeti town see like and that's the thing is you didn't even get you didn't get catholic or jewish uh valor because i mean at least sure you don't get a bar mitzvah when you're catholic but you you get a party for um not just your i mean you can't celebrate

Merlinbaptism i think i'm circumcised me i'm circumcised mainly probably because of health there was a health concern at the time, real or otherwise. And let's be honest, it's for aesthetics. I did it. It's a good look, I have to be honest.

Speaker BI, oh God.

MerlinYou know the way Todd can wear those hats? Some people look better without hats.

Alexoh god no this this week's challenge i believe was merlin's merlin yeah it's my challenge and

Merlinmostly peanut buttered i've been sitting here like a kid trying to finish his book report in homeroom my challenge um my challenge was to i don't know what the challenge was i think i found out about it or found out about it i had the presence of mind to ask you about it yesterday um uh but no the idea is that um uh i'm not going to be condescending there's a thing called asci art and asci art is this idea that you can use the characters of the ascii set to not simply make words and letters and things but you can um you can make uh stuff out of it whether that's something

like a comment fence that you want in your code like a cool thing but you can you know a bunch of dashes kind of look like a line and you can do this to make that and i know you guys know all these things but it became a very funny thing in the early days of the home computer that you could like make art out of letters as famously we've seen with the the printout of bright truth's face that my daughter has in her room um but uh so there's this really cool app i came across via god damn it fucking todd todd was making todd was there he was making fun of you casey because of a diagram and was this where it came from and he or someone mentioned monodraw there yeah i don't

Speaker Aremember how monodraw entered into our was in a response on twitter i feel i mean i don't recall but i was aware of monodraw even when i made my awful diagram so to go a half step back i was replacing the apple tv in my house and that required a whole bunch of rejiggering of cabling and things and things of that nature and i wanted to explain on atp why it was i was rejiggering the cabling inside the walls and and for whatever reason i wanted to put together like a diagram of the two face plates that we have behind my entertainment center to indicate, here's all the different activity going on behind here,

and this is why I was doing this, that, and the other thing. And so I used an app that I love that I always mispronounce. It's either Linnea or Linnea by the Icon Factory, which is an app on the iPad. I know that. And so that's what I used to make my awful diagram. Now, the reason my diagram was awful was not because of Linnea, Linnea, whatever it's called, but because I have zero artistic talent anywhere in my body. And so we will put in the show notes a link to the original image that I had done using the pencil and the iPad and so on and so forth. And part of the problem with this image is that, especially in the lower right hand, actually, I'm sorry, on the entire right hand side, it looks like it's saying H-O-M-I because I have terrible penmanship.

But what I was trying to say is that is H-D-M-I.

Speaker BI don't know if I ever saw this. It's so bad.

Speaker Aso similarly the lower left it's outdoor speakers not outdoor speckers which is a

Merlinwhich is what my handwriting would lead you to believe oh now it all makes sense yeah the arrangement's very clear now yeah totally HDMI another HDMI this is a quadular glory hole oh boy the one being blue yeah exactly it's uh not a parallelogram what do you call that what do you call that trapezoid Travis Travis Travis Lake Travis it's helpful to me that this one is blue otherwise what gender would it be right we will put this into show notes oh so so so as my

Speaker Achallenge which i i did not want a peanut butter i recreated this very diagram using monitor and the problem with doing this however is monitor does not do diagonal lines terribly well so asci

Merlindoes not do diagonals that's super well you know it's one of those things like um i don't know what would be the ordinals but like cardinals and ordinals of like oh you can do like this angle you're fine like if it's exactly 45 degrees we can fake that right right right right exactly and

Speaker Ai couldn't get it to work quite right but i did i think a a much better diagram and of course i couldn't resist doing the like big ascii fonts for hdmi all over the place because it's so delightful doing that like ascii word art oh my god i love it so much oh oh can we also just quickly quickly

Merlinjust mention a bit about this app and how it's different from other apps yes i'm sorry i jumped i jumped to the chase you're absolutely right no no no no not at all you did great but like this is this is a kind of app that's been around for a while oh my god syracuse and i it was a very fun recording i have to say last night but we ended up talking about um he was contacted spoilers contacted by the guy who wrote the rfc on naming in 1990 he listens to atp and like uh and anyway and he was so we got into talking about that early to me early internet culture like i used to love

looking at things like rfcs and i always wondered like is this like a sad knock thing like how do you get this formatted to look so cool and and syracuse sent me some shit that's like from his youtube site well i don't know if it was links exactly but he had a way of looking at it like in a terminal his old youtube site and i said to john all all honesty the fucking justification that you the full justification you did with pearl in this eight whatever 66 or 80 character width looks better than every kindle book i've ever bought because it's smart enough somebody somebody

thought well we could use a machine to make this better but there's always been some different kinds of ascii art there was an app that was around for a while what distinguishes monodraw to me is it's first of all so fun and it's very it helps you to do things like say draw a box or to say like oh we can treat this almost it's almost like not photoshop exactly more like illustrator in the sense it's like illustrator but with ascii so you can have layers and groups right and so i thought that was such a powerful idea and um what's the word i'm looking for like

layer effects sort of where you could say like this kind of box should have this kind of border and this kind of knockout behind it stuff like that i instantly fell in love with this like you

Alexand just add drop shadow like it's it's super cool but the drop shadow is like uh what's the

Merlinword i want semantic like it's not just if you move it it doesn't fuck up like it remembers oh you want this lower right drop shadow and that could be part of this group and that can be part of this layer that could be hidden or shown i don't know this is one of those apps alex that like this is another one of those that i need a name for of like i have almost no reason to use this ever but i wish i had reasons to use this more because it's so good at this thing i don't

Speaker Aneed very much. It's absolutely true. And it's delightful to use. You'd be surprised how much you can get done with what appears on the surface to be very rudimentary tools and they aren't.

MerlinAnd then intro documents so helpful. The intro document, sometimes we do the onboarding thing. It's a little bit like, here, watch this six part video series. But with this, you just scroll down and go, oh, I like that. I want to make that copy and paste out of the intro doc. And it makes it

Speaker Ait's so makes it so easy to do yep it's extremely extremely cool stuff um did you do anything for

Alexthis alex or no oh totally totally peanut buttered however well that's the thing is i'm playing with this app and like merlin i have no at least right now i have no reason to use this and it did feel like photoshop to me and that like okay i know like there's a blend tool i've got this and i uh am not creative and could not think of anything to do but then i i went down this like whole i went down the glory hole of just like more of the history of plain text because i've been you know

Merlinlike horny for plain texts since oh i saw you talking about that you did one of your really weird probably on edibles tweets where it was about no uh no i would love there's no plain there's no it kind of seemed like that alex it kind of seems like that there's no documentaries about plain text like how like hey dude can anybody make this i don't want to make it but i watch it about markdown and you're like oh oh no not i don't care about markdown like just

Alexeven like field data is something i didn't i didn't know what that was until field data what that means it is the pre it was used in the military and sort of predated ascii and plain text and just uh oh god what's the other oh oh uh bodo code which i didn't i also didn't really

Merlinget into but it was are you talking star wars what no no no exactly exactly that none of i

AlexI didn't know anything. All of the things I'm saying are things like pre-digital computing. And just like the things that have last.

MerlinField code, right?

AlexNo, no, no. Field data. Oh, field data. The Bado code. And I don't know what this. Here, let me get the thingy. No, no, no.

MerlinIt sounds like a Beach Boys song that Mike Love would say. Bado code. Bado code. Mark, Ellen, and Rococo. The set text. The format. Oh, gosh.

AlexAnd I also like thinking, oh, here, let's look at a let me get. Where was it? Oh, Amelia. This is that's a good bus. This looks like the French beard in Syracuse.

MerlinIt's one of those few languages where we try to pronounce something Italian. We end up sounding like we're in a meatball commercial.

AlexCan I tell you a story that might trigger Syracuse? So I hope he's not listening. I think I might have told you this before. But in Mario, Super Mario 64.

Speaker AI'm sorry, you mean Mario?

AlexMario 64, I apologize. Thank you. I'll try to do better next time. I'll take time to reflect. But instead, so Mario, every time that you go into a new level, he would say, let's go. But as a youth who didn't really know any Italian accents, I thought that he was saying Mexico.

Speaker BAnd I thought that he was Mexican.

AlexAnd I just thought that he was Mexican.

Speaker BOh, that's nice.

AlexNone of them talk. And they're both romance languages. Like, I don't know. So I thought it was just really exciting to go to Mexico. To Mexico. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Speaker BYou got a sauce and a pasta. No, you're doing it wrong.

MerlinOh, my word.

Speaker ASo I have one other thing to present to the group. Please do. I apparently needed to make up for you two slack asses peanut buttering.

MerlinI mean, listen. Listen. listen i want to get this out of the way i did play with this a lot and here's my problem my i just sent you the header for my newsletter tbd newsletter i saw it it's called nemesis gendered and it's going to be about all the disagreements that alex and casey have my problem is i got so fixated so i imprinted hard when that phrase first came out of my mouth two or three weeks ago ascii art newsletter i so much and then and then syracuse and i ended up

talking about stuff like infomac and cracks in numbers and stuff from the old days where you would get oh my infomac where you get a text file as a digest that could be distributed on usenet and then you run it in an app cracks in numbers you get all the codes so you can steal the cork but like infomac was i think a daily uh digest from like a you know probably from a mailing list or similar but anyway infomac then you could run it you could take that text file and open it in this app this is talking here in the mid 90s and you would get this like um three panel viewer i

don't know i have such nostalgia for all of this old stuff that i don't really have any reason to have nostalgia for i played with this a lot my problem is i just got so fixated and as i mentioned in our super secret private text channel i did acquire an app for turning images into like actual photos into ascii art but i kept struggling with the peg for the nemesis gendered newsletter was going to be some really good art i was going to make up of you guys based on fake photos and see i i painted myself into a corner but i did play with this a lot and i love it very very very much

Speaker Aso with that in mind i i heard you mention newsletter newsletter newsletter so i have created my own incidental computer newsletter oh my god which is the link publish it's the link i told you not to click yet i'm also putting it in the super secret private text channel okay Now, I only did the above the fold section.

MerlinOh, Casey, we owe you, man. Oh, my fucking God. You piece of shit. You did this better than I would have ever done.

AlexOh, my God. I'm so mad. I'm so mad. I'm so mad. I'm so mad.

MerlinWhat we're looking at here, this is exactly what I wanted to make. You not only did it better, but you did it. Oh, thank you. Casey, we'll find a way to put these in show notes. This is the Incidental Computer Newsletter, which has which has a like a you know like a big new york times style logo at the top that's my favorite part my favorite part is just seeing what everything looks like in different fonts and like seeing what that looks like addition uh oh you're doing a interesting you're doing a twist on iso we should talk about that in the after show i have a date um i love who that who

who i got doing the right voice who the hell is casey that pretty close how does he say it it was

Speaker Ait was reasonably close that's a friend of mine who either did he grow up in indiana i don't i

Merlindon't remember but that was years oh i thought it was i thought it was um i thought it was um you know our friend in uh eastern europe that's the first oh andre no no no no no god i love him

Speaker Aapparently he's tall and good at basketball so i hear um and joseph had visited him years ago um so anyway so yeah so this is the incidental computer newsletter with an article who the hell is casey and then a pet of the day which i know that's god awful but that's supposed to be uh mando band or bando mando i'm sorry oh my god look at that it's got texture yeah it's really not a good conversion i will concede but that's what i said in our channel

Merlinthis would be a killer app a further killer app the things i don't need with features i don't need i do wish it would handle like i think you should be able to drag in a photo what the fuck do i say this is insane who would go no you're alex coxing really hard right now there have been ways to convert photos to ask you for a pretty long time that one i showed you all that I got off the app store is okay, but it's minimally viable ASCII art. I wish there were a way to drag a photo in

and then be able to like resize it and then have it do. And you would accept as part of that drag and drop simplicity that, oh yeah, if this thing's going to be 300 pixels wide, it's going to be like this crazy looking shit. It's going to look like, you know, a pixel vision image or something. But this is so great, Casey. We, God, we owe you. This is wonderful.

Speaker ANot at all, not at all. Anyway, I thought it was a fun exercise and I was trying to figure out an article to write and so we don't have to read it now by any means but you can look at that after the fact and get a good giggle out of it.

MerlinShould we have somebody do a dramatic reading of this?

Speaker AYou should have a guest do a dramatic reading. Maybe we can bring Mike in or something.

MerlinYou know what I'll do? How about I put it into Descript and have Don, not Don LaPrey, the In a World guy. Oh, yes, yes, yes. If you decide to stick around for the F show, Casey, I'll toss this in and we can have it in the after. Hey, Alexandra, as long as I'm interrupting Casey. I agree. Wait, what do people like whatever this is? What if they like it and want to hear more of this? What's the deal with that? Where would it go? Is there any way that they could give us money, for example? Is that a thing?

AlexWell, I'm so glad you asked, Marilyn. I'm Alex and I'm good at answering things. Look at me, I'm awkward.

MerlinNow do it in Mario.

AlexIt's to me, Alex and Marilyn, we have... you give it a month uh we we want we want to do your cash cash dollar bills am i becoming

Speaker Bi like to go to the beach with my costly cameras i need a new backpack uh before i accidentally do

Alexa racist accent uh you can go to patreon.com slash do by friday and just for five dollars a month you can support the show because notice there's no ads we talk about macwell didn't how much we'd like it but but uh typically you guys have a fracture that's here yeah yeah

Speaker Aand and here's the thing i'm a paying i'm a paying member of that very program oh shit you are of course i thought i really had it over on you by being by giving you fuckers money no no see i'm a paying member and uh and i do not receive i do not receive any of the proceeds from this which just bullshit because clearly i'm carrying this episode no here we are you get a free jar of

Merlinpeanut butter a very small and it's like and unfortunately it's one that alex has already opened and started eating because they love about peanut butter oh i tend to be so hard just i love eating it to a dog i love a dog eating peanut butter no hold on you're ruining my pitch

Speaker Ai'm trying to make you all money so here's the thing it's a great it's a great after show you should listen to it every week i i have brought back my podcast listening significantly in the last year because i just don't have time for as many shows as i used to and dubai friday not only not only do i make time for it every week but it is one of just a couple of shows that's in that's in the overcast bring this crap to the top of the list group and so it always gets queued up right at the top both the the main and the after show it is worth your hard-earned money you should you

Merlinshould give alex and merlin your fucking money thank you casey we would never say this on air but off air we talk about how much we like you and think that you're nice. We never do it on the show. No, no, no, because this is a bit. Like, if you know me, I'm not actually fucking like this in real life. Am I? Alex, I'm a little like this. No, no, you're not. Fuck off. My point is...

AlexBitches in real life.

MerlinYeah, glory holes. I don't know if that's a mouth or not a mouth and I don't care.

AlexIf I wasn't like this in real life, I would talk about what an amazing friend Casey is, the kind of friend who would cold just come answer a phone when you know he wanted to make fun of him on a show and is a very good friend to to the cox family and and i just oh god see i don't like how easy i cry in case he's one of those people who also one he he has made me tear up a couple of times with with the things he has said too he

Merlinhe is one of casey has feelings i've listened to his other other podcast where he talks about

Alexfeelings and he's a good hugger i would type and the thing is a usual i typically used to not like hugs and Casey's always been a very good hugger and he doesn't make it weird. Challenge accepted.

MerlinI'm sorry. Okay, challenge next week. Make a hug weird. but normally i would ding this out because i'm so fucking funny but like casey uh i don't know what your deal is uh you have any other questions uh we should we should stop it's been a while oh

Alexthat's right wait that's right casey where can people find you on the internet yeah what's you

Speaker Awhat the fuck man oh right so you can find me on the internet uh you can find me at caseylist.com you can find me at caseylist on twitter and instagram and the thing that's referred to from time to time my it is not an incidental computer show but rather an accidental tech podcast which you can find at atp.fm and uh and the feeling show you can catch at relay.fm slash analog where you can find your normal standard host hosting their other shows.

MerlinYou can always find so many good list puns. You have a list is more, memory serves. That's right. Is that Tumblr? No, where do you list is more?

Speaker ANo, that's my website.

MerlinIs it on Jekyll?

Speaker AHave you deployed it with Pelican? No, I should get on that, right?

MerlinI saw Gabe is moving from Pelican to, I think it's called Hugo. So I want to look at that. Did you roll your own for this? Of course. It's the ATP way.

Alexdo you know how he takes care of his photos like no what did you expect

Speaker Amy goodness oh yeah we gotta talk about we gotta talk about DSM 7 in the after show so we gotta hop to it we gotta talk about your fucking raid problem

Merlinyeah I wanna talk about DSM 7 too if it's raid 0 it's not raid dude that's true you know it's been such a pleasure we all like Casey but we don't Casey you're a delight everyone likes you I like your family and you're all nice we'll cut all of this out now we need to ding out on something say something funny

Alexand end the show someone someone Someone glory hole us. Come on. Come on.

MerlinOh, let's see.

Speaker AYou know, here's the thing, guys. You know why I like Fahrenheit? Because it taint Celsius and it taint Kelvin.

Speaker BOh! Oh! I have. I have! I have! I have! I have!

Show notes

Transcript

247. Señor Celsius

Show notes

Transcript

0:00

0:33

0:49

0:51

0:58

1:05

1:18

1:35

1:40

1:48

1:53

2:12

2:17

2:38

2:42

3:05

3:11

3:19

3:24

3:27

3:29

3:37

3:55

4:00

4:05

4:14

4:18

4:18

4:20

4:21

4:23

4:43

4:51

4:56

5:04

5:34

5:51

6:26

6:40

6:51

6:53

6:55

7:00

7:01

7:03

7:18

7:30

8:07

8:28

8:33

8:45

8:53

9:07

9:13

9:16

9:42

10:00

10:03

10:09

10:33

10:54

11:14

11:17

11:31

11:51

12:09

12:12

12:25

12:25

12:38

12:41

12:50

12:57

13:12

13:19

13:33

13:44