– By William Cooper

I recently stumbled upon more proof that throughout history, humans have always had great goals and clever ideas, but often lack proper follow through.

Numbers from one to ten are uniquely named, mainly because of how special our ancient digits were to us as our first wearable technology. And then you reach eleven and twelve. What’s up with that? There’s a hot and searing debate in the etymological community about those numbers. I won’t say how hot and searing, but suffice it to say, it’s not a topic of conversation you should raise during your next etymology dinner party. Words like “discredited” are bandied about in haughty English accents by eyebrow-raising academics in smoking jackets.

At any rate, allow me to summarize a conglomeration of leading theories. When primitive human counted to ten and noticed there was still counting to be done, there arose a real Y(-2)K situation. “I’ve counted ten,” says primitive human, “but I haven’t counted all of what I have!”. So some early nerd came up with a system hack. Eleven is “one left” after ten. Twelve is “two left” after ten. Fantastic. Seems like you might have a system that would last you quite a while, primitive human.

But then things get lazy. The theory goes that primitive human barely counted over twelve. But why? Lack of follow through. Anything over twelve was considered “many” with a wave of the “I can’t be bothered with this anymore because I have some mammoth thighs to chew on” primitive hand. Much later, somebody applied a patch to the system that was called “teens,” a barely-thought-out, slacker kludge that is also characteristic of most teens I know today.

Sharp readers might notice that this is the same approach taken with months. You get all the way to August and things are rosy, creativity just oozing out of every Greek and Roman pore. But then, it’s time for arguing with Plato or sticking a feather down your throat, and we end up with the “ember” months. “Yawn, where did we stop?… Sigh. I don’t care, just fill out the rest however you want, how about Number and then… dunno… Ember?” Just lazy if you ask me.

Our episode this week is about dreams. What? Yes, the previous story has nothing to do with dreams – I just wanted to keep you engaged for a while to illustrate a point. Follow me here. The average person has three to five dreams a night. Let’s say that half of the world slept as you took the time to appreciate this post, more of course if you yourself fell asleep during it and just woke up. That’s around 3.7 billion people. But hey, maybe some of them couldn’t sleep, or maybe they work the night shift, or maybe they woke up to get a drink of water. Cut that conservatively in half again, round it up a bit, and you get 2 billion people. How many of them were dreaming during this? Let’s say a fourth.

So while you read my post, five hundred million dreams were being dreamt, five hundred million dreamscapes were being created and played out across the mind, five hundred million unique experiences were scripted by the unconscious or the subconscious or by whatever dreaming force is responsible for scheduling such performances. It’s an endless system of creation that has continued from the first time primitive human dozed off during counting.

In this episode, we dream a little dream called podcast. Still feeling the sting of our Twitter-bot smack down, we lament the bizarre narrowcasting that we’ve come to as a society in the Age of Correction, and then immediately yearn for the Twitter-bot-bump. It’s a complicated relationship. The Mound of Doom takes revenge on Scott with an itching, burning plaque of “poison something” while William expresses sympathy with a story of his own backwoods betrayal. We greet a new listener baby, who arrives in this world with an entourage of community-sponsored dinners, which is enough to set William’s stomach scheming. William then takes on the mantle of Mr. Raw Deal, first losing a battle of common sense with his wife, and then at the Edge of Disaster, gaining moral superiority with Apple as level-1 support turns out to be as level-1 as you might expect. Dreams are next as William rearranges his into neatly-aligned packages, while being chased by jaguars. Brain-fed by podcasts (the natural sleep aid), Scott executes a unique body subroutine that is responsible for saving many a dream child. William shares his experiments in lucid dreaming, which are actually twisted sleep studies in repeated lucid wakings. Is NyQuil actually peyote? Do cats dream of coyotes? Why is William screaming? Why is Scott falling down? This whole sleep thing is dangerous. We take welcome refuge in the familiar musical arms of Stereophonic Sound with Sugar, Spice and Rudolph Friml and the world’s first stereo-scored orchestra, complete with a Westrex cutter head system with a scully lathe! We demonstrate our expert foreign language skills, debate cheesecake and beefcake, and through the waterfall of entwining lines of sound, visit both Julie Newmar and Nigel Tufnel. Luxury!

Links:
Far Cry Primal
Silent LucidityDiscogs: 101 Strings Play The Sugar And Spice Of Rudolph Friml – 1959
eBay: LP – Rare Julie Newmar Cheesecake Cover
Julie Newmar
Rudolf Friml
Nigel Tufnel

– By William Cooper

For those of you over the age of, let’s say 35, you should ask yourself, now… yes, put down your soup for a moment… what it means that you are no longer a spring chicken. I’ll tell you what it means. It means that your meat is no longer as tender and attractive to some nameless carnivore (mountain lion), and so you are less likely to be suddenly eaten by something higher than you on the food chain. Springers are chickens clucked, er, plucked from chicken life shortly after being hatched, broiled in the fires of hell, and served up in various sauces probably for pudgy tourists to slaver over as they finger glossy travel brochures with their pudgy, greasy fingers. What a way to go. One moment you are scratching at the ground and wondering about the meaning of it all, and the next moment you are tits up next to a potato.

This is, therefore, a public service announcement. Be proud that you are now less likely to end up on somebody’s plate tomorrow and more likely to live until you slip into an endless sleep while sitting atop your egg.

The idea of Spring means different things to different people. Here in Seattle, one of the things it means is the start of the annual crow dive-bombing convention. I have a front-row seat from my window at work, which is also my window at home, and look forward to this competition every year. The rules are simple. Unsuspecting person walks down the street, ignoring all of the corvid cacophony because crows are experts in being so prominent that they end up being ignored. Some magical boundary is crossed. There’s a blur of black wings and the top of said person’s head is lopped clean off. Okay, maybe it’s not that extreme, but it certainly puts the sudden fear of aerial attack into those hapless humans who squawk and flail their arms and run, alarmed that they’ve been betrayed by the normally passive Z-axis.

A few years back, hikers were warned at this time of the year to keep off a certain hiking trail because a solitary owl had taken a particular interest in stealing hats. The official story was that from the air, the hats looked like small, tasty animals, but I don’t buy it. I think there’s a sub-Reddit somewhere where the finer points of cranial attacks are discussed by users like ImNotABirdReally32 and OwlBeTakingYourHat65.

To sum up, welcome to spring, be glad you aren’t a chicken, and for the love of Pete, watch your heads our there.

In this episode Spring has sproinged for both of us. William celebrates hawt toilet paper couture with a hefty deposit to his Daylight Savings Account, and then reveals that he was the classic-computer-using prodigy behind some of the most inane afternoon television promos of the early 1980s. Scott confirms the clueless husband bias, even if you happen to be Jack Ryan, and provides some much-needed wife-annoyance advice. Then it is time for comparative bird studies featuring the noisy bird brigade of Washington versus the elusive red-winged blackbirds of Ohio, who we are pretty sure have been hired as the muscle in a protection racket (rabbit). Bitten by the seasonal clearing bug, Scott heads JUST beyond the porch to the Mound of Doom, which claims the life of a hedge trimmer, but yields an important archaeological discovery. It’s a real bonfire of the Insanities. Buoyed up by his success, Scott takes a trip to a flea market, which as it turns out is named exactly for what you’d think it would be named for, but holds many priceless treasures of a long-forgotten age, all for under two dollars admission. We end with a visit to an Irish Spring as the Skip Jacks tell us how things are in Glocca Mora. Turns out, things are full of Stereophonic sound dating back to the 1880s and heavily researched by Googling. But wait, there’s more. What begins as a Skippy Jacky ditty turns into an in-depth literally critique of a Longfellow poem. Who could see that coming? Bells are Ringing for both Dean Martin and Bing Crosby, who as it turns out, are not the same person. Sweet? Hot? Blue? Triple check!

The MOUND of DOOM:

Links:
The Apple Lisa
Patriot Games Movie Clip
Spring Birds
The Skip-Jacks – Sweet, Hot and Blue
How are Things in Glocca Morra?
The Courtship of Miles Standish – Longfellow

– By William Cooper

My father was a died-in-the wool, WW2-vet patriot who used to get me out of bed at the crack of dawn on national holidays to help him hang the flag outside our house. With his guidance, I’d sleepily lean over and steady Old Glory into one of those aluminum holsters that was attached to our aluminum-siding-covered residence. Aluminum was all the rage and my father probably owned half of the country’s stock.

This whole waking me up nonsense had started at a young age when in 1969, three years since I had been thrust into this bright, new world, I was torn from my drooly slumber and propped up in front of the television to watch Apollo 11’s Eagle land on the moon.

I have no actual memory of this event. I say no actual memory because the story of my father and the moon landing was a story that was told and retold in my family for so may years that I think I have acquired a second-hand memory of it.

Point is, I didn’t sleep much as a child. I’m making up for it now.

Regardless of the toll on my REM states, I believe this event raised in me a certain fascination or maybe just a deep, deep respect for space and space travel. What little kid doesn’t want to become an astronaut? Sadly, this was not to be the case for me. I have horrid eyesight. My endurance is not, what you might call, endurant. And the thought of going into space fills me with the urge to defecate and throw up in equal and perhaps alternating measures.

What I did want to be and could have been was a technician at NASA, one of those guys who fiddle with knobs and get to say “Go!” or “No Go!” very confidently at certain times. I followed this dream for about as long as a teenager follows anything, probably until I found out I’d have to move to Florida (had I done a bit more research and discovered JPL, things may have turned out differently). Then girls came along, and then video games, and the rest is history.

Instead, I became a podcaster, which honestly is about the same thing, right? And even though I don’t wake up now until noon on national holidays, I still try to watch every spacecraft’s launch and landing.

In this episode we get the GO for manned podcast flight. William blasts off into a hair-singeing story of his burning undercarriage, explains the convoluted and time-intensive process of quality podcasting, and learns the hard truth about husbands. Scott reveals the identity of a hardcore fan who leaves us our first Fanbook facepost. Then we slingshot around the topic of Mythbusters and edutainment programs as William struggles with denial and endings and Scott rankles at rusted logos and announcersplaining. We settle in for a long orbit around the Word of the Week of “hobbies,” covering the distance from the world’s hardest card game to slot cars dreams and hot wheel afternoons to the inevitable avocation vocation. Then it’s suddenly all about sine waves, meter bands, and megahertzes as, armed with an ancient Radio Shack instructional clay tablet, Scott plans his trip to Hamvention, with acres of tables of old computer crap and vintage video games. At the end of our journey, we do reach the moon – “Music Out of the Moon,” to be exact, a 1957 gem that served as Neil Armstrong’s road trip mix tape and sneakily introduced the Theremin to the wider populace, whether they wanted it or not. FIDO! It’s a Go No!

Links:
The Glory of Love
Mythbusters
Flying Wild Alaska
Hamvention
Music Out of the Moon

– By William Cooper

I was pretty blasé about the darkness and the night until a singular momentous event in a parking lot in Morgantown, West Virginia. As I sat there after a long drive, getting ready to go inside and greet my friends, a mountain lion walked in front of my car, gave me a sidelong glance and then slowly crept into the bushes. I’d still be in that car now were it not for my need to urinate. What is the line between fear and bodily evacuation, you ask? Make sure you can run before your bladder gives out is the answer.

I was lucky that night in both my ninja-like speed and my iron urethra.

But this is not that story. This is the story of two sleepy guys with no power outs who would be fat and juicy targets for any large predatory cat. Yes, I realize I just brought it back to the mountain lion, but I’m a bit freaked out now. For all I know, that thing has followed me waiting for JUST the right moment. I’ll let it go now, I promise.

Anymeow, the reoccurring theme of this episode is darkness. We hope you enjoy it, if you can see it. Listen with a nightlight. You’ll thank me later.

In this episode, we fight off sleep by delving into some dark areas at the edge of the map. After some late night galumphing, William discovers a possible intruder and he and his wife find that they have very different views on how to resolve the situation. We discuss security and the effectiveness of flashing criminals your naughty bits as a means of determent. Scott, on the other hand, is busy serving other people’s agendas from dawn to dusk while mulling over how to avoid becoming physiologically damaged by any and all levels of parenting quality. Somebody needs some ShornTime™, stat! Then it’s back into the darkness as William is obligated to have a “unique dining experience” by dim candlelight with a GPS-tagged wait staff, some blunt instruments and some questionable traditions. We venture into the strange, shadowy past of bands who make movies, save theme parks, and star in video games, struggle with our own relevant knowledge of music, and then quickly turn to horror as a last resort. Yes, it’s Five Nights at Freddie’s and the FNAF fan music, which brings us murderous robot bears, dubious advice for both today’s youth and the impressionable William and a visit from some old friends. William is a delicate flower. Scott is already asleep. Get listening before the sun comes up!

Links:
Being a Good Parent will Physiologically Destroy You
Eyebrow Fashion Trends
HELP! – The Beatles
Kiss meets the Phantom of the Park
Journey video game (1983)
Die In a Fire (feat. EileMonty & Orko) The Living Tombstone Die In a Fire – Single
It’s Been So Long The Living Tombstone It’s Been So Long – Single
Our Little Horror Story Aviators Flying Under the Radar: The Singles
You Kill Me with Silence Duran Duran Paper Gods