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[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Stephen: Hello, Alan. Yeah, I was waiting like 10 minutes to realize I forgot to hit send on the link.
Alan: Oh, yeah, I’m here. I’m here. I need to get a different background. We’ve already used this one. I don’t want to be boring. Let’s see something to go with yours there. I’ll do an [00:01:00] old doctor who there we go. Perfect.
Stephen: Okay. All right, the wayward wandering traveler
Alan: returns. Exactly. Honestly, that’s like the biggest break we’ve ever had because of my vacation, my crews overlapping exactly with them. We do our usual Tuesday things. So it was fantastic. It I know really,
Stephen: I thought 10 day cruise through European countries and seeing the world would suck.
Alan: It I learned a lot from people who have been on many other cruises that there’s good and bad ways to do it. In brief. We went on excursions every single day, because I don’t want to just be offshore from a cool capital city. I want to go explore the city, but a lot of times the reason I got a lot of things through, we went on Norwegian Cruise Lines, and the reason that I did that is because they guarantee, hey, you’ll get back to the boat, and you won’t be left waving while your ship pulls away.
It turned out that also when you do it through Norwegian Cruise Lines, you get busloads of people cruise I don’t know, tour guides that have done this perhaps many [00:02:00] times before, and so the quality was not high. It was, we love going walking, and usually when we explore a place, we can kind of motor and see as much as we can, or we stop at the things that are most of interest to us.
But That wasn’t the case when you’ve got 30, 60, 90 people, and you’re slowed down by the slowest person in the place, and, a lot of these places Riga and Tallinn old cobblestone cities for the old city that’s part of the capital, and anybody that has any kind of getting around disability, it really slows you down.
I was affected because I didn’t realize how much the cobblestones would have an effect on my left ankle, and so after a while, every night, I had Pop an anti inflammatory and recover and stuff like that. But the people that really are either wheelchair bound or cane bound, they had to really be careful and not go down on well rounded castle steps and all that kind of stuff.
And so having said that, we still saw tons of stuff. But a lot of times what we did was we did the excursion. And then instead of [00:03:00] just going back to the boat, we still had hours in port, so it’s okay, I got my phone gives me maps, we got legs, we can get around, there’s, if not Lyfts and Ubers, there’s always taxis available because they’re big cities, not little things.
So we just kept exploring, and I, we saw so many beautiful things, historic things. One of the joys of going to Europe when you’re from the United States is they don’t have 250 years of history. They have a thousand. And seeing castles, seeing all different kinds of architectural styles, and here’s a river that has been the lifeblood of the city forever, and what have they done with it?
That it’s not just an industrial thing, it’s really beautiful restaurants along it, or walking arcades, and all kinds of wonderful stuff. Yeah. We definitely made the best use that we could at the time. It was very nice to have our little room to go back to on the cruise. We hardly ever, some people really seem to splurge on get a cabin with a balcony and a, that kind of stuff.
The only thing that I was trying for was a bathtub for Colleen, because she really prefers that to a shower. But that [00:04:00] really is Tears up and what do we do? We go to the cabin to sleep. Otherwise we’re out in the town. We’re eating in the buffets where with our friends in the wine bar or playing games, we got a pretty consistent use of one of their conference rooms and I should have started all this off. It was a party at sea organized by Hell’s M’s. So Beth Weiss put together this wonderful tour and a whole bunch of people jumped onto it. And not only from the United States, but from all over the world, Europe and Asia and stuff like that. So it was like, I think there was 51 or 52 of us there, many whom I did not know.
And then we had events that we get a chance to enjoy each other’s company, play some games together, go to dinner together, go on excursions or catch up on what you do today in all those different ways. Transcribed it’s not Mensa Company is the only good company in the world, we have always had a nice time on our music cruises of just sitting down with someone and saying, So what do you think so far?
And everybody starts talking about, all their favorite bands and stuff like that. It was the food was great. The timing of it was great. One of those vacations, you need a vacation when you come back because [00:05:00] in order to see a lot of Klaipeda or Helsinki or Stockholm, you fit out as much as you can in, and then you’re always on purpose with if we’re going to go to this museum and this You just fit in as much as you can.
And then honestly, we sleep between jet lag and how much we fit in a couple of days when we got back, we were like, okay, let’s just keep the world outside and recover a little bit. I’ll go shopping at Costco. That’s about all that I can handle for human interactivity. I’ll do the restock shopping so we can make salads.
Um, I don’t know such highlights. You know what I mean? We went to the Nobel museum. There’s a Nobel. A peace prize is given in Oslo, but the other prizes are given in Stockholm, and they had a museum that had the last hundred plus years of all these incredible breakthroughs in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature.
I don’t know if you call it a breakthrough, but you know what I mean. Like just to be reminded of what humanity is capable of when you like, and then you [00:06:00] come back to the dumpster fire of the U. S. And I couldn’t help but compare and contrast between, here’s these guys that, there’s often been times when science was considered heathen behavior, but you wouldn’t have gotten to x ray crystallography.
You wouldn’t have gotten to understanding the solar system and how it really operates, that it’s not the Earth, it’s the center of the universe and all that kind of stuff. And they’ve only been given since the late 1800s. So we weren’t really battling dark ages type ridiculousness, but in our lifetime, like we are now, it is overall your sweeping statements.
Boy, can we learn a lot from Europe? You know what I mean? Like they have, like people really are decent about how they share space, how they do driving, how they take care of healthcare, how they serve you in a restaurant. It’s so much less the. Not only competitive, and I like capitalism, but the dog eat dog asshole capitalism, that just doesn’t seem to be as much in evidence there.
They’ve long ago learned that the way that you [00:07:00] maintain your police department and your parks and that beautiful river that I talked about, it doesn’t stay that way if you let Mr. Effluent Spewer upriver, keep sending that crap down to everybody else and having everybody get tumors. A lot like Copenhagen.
We had a couple extra days there because we went in early, a beautiful 65 percent of the people in Copenhagen bike commute to work. How cool is that? Then instead of the blight that a lot of automobiles bring, and I know we need automobiles we’ve been all over the United States using ours, but when you get a concentration of people and all the traffic and noise and pollution and all of it, it just is a whole different thing when, the air is clear every day.
There’s never smog haze, or diesel buses, or anything like that. And you had to learn you don’t just watch for cars. You watch for bikes, because they got car laned and bike laned. And they are going, if not 60 miles an hour, they’re going 30. And you can get wiped out by a bike as quickly as easily as you can.
But everybody there is fit. You know what I mean? If you [00:08:00] work a commute that is a workout into your day, then everybody there is like a greyhound, not like a Saint Bernard or like a walrus. The United States is so blobby in comparison to people that work every day, people that eat like smaller portions for food, even though you had a buffet on the cruise.
When you go out and get other meals, it’s just a reasonable amount of food. And I’m sure that these criticisms have been much discussed by others, but when you go and do it and see it for yourself, it’s, we could just learn so much about how to handle living together, how to handle the presence of government, of religion, of industry, and that there’s something to be said for, everybody gets to decide this, not just the pushiest, not just the ones with the most money, not just the ones that are willing to break the law all the time, we so much need that balance that so many cities there seem to have.
Some places that really aren’t there yet, there’s different levels of civilization. Sorry, sweeping statement. Poland was the one where there [00:09:00] seemed to be the most blight. Lots of graffiti everywhere. Maybe because we came into a working port, Gdania, and then went to Gdansk. There’s, it’s rougher there than a preserved older city and where the government is and there’s just a different level of civilization or of people caring.
And but it wasn’t like that everywhere, you could always find pockets of, look at this beautiful park, and it’s been around forever, and the trees are beautifully maintained, and there’s people with their babies in baby carriages, and walking their dogs. And that it doesn’t seem to be like idyllic.
It’s just a practical part of how they do their lives. They know that you get, better health. If you go you take an air bath every day. You know what I mean? The way you keep your stress down is because you walk and see beautiful things and interact with your neighbors instead of being shoved into your car and listening to hate radio and getting your blood up.
You know what I mean? So it, we had a really wonderful time and it really, we came back with all those things of, We have to do that here in the United [00:10:00] States. We have to wake up that Europe has a thousand years experience about how to do this right in their cities and in their countrysides and how to have good bus and train and trolley service and not just be only car culture and stuff like that.
So how long were you gone? 14 days total. 14. 14. Okay. Two days on each end to have a little more time in Copenhagen. And I discovered, by the way, Copenhagen is the way you want to say it. If you say Copenhagen like I always heard growing up, that’s the German way of saying it. And people don’t like to have things said in the German way when it was part of the conquest way, because they still have terrible memories of it.
Evil Germany did when they did those things and and then Stockholm was the other city and just they’re world class. Stockholm has a wor a, a harbor, and instead of being, only industrial and both offloading and stuff like that, you can look across the harbor and see all these beautiful places where people live.
And there’s darkside and just, it’s [00:11:00] so heartening to see this beauty that that every day you get to walk through this beautiful place. Wow, I can’t. I we’ve had this experience in the past. The first time we were over in Calgary, Colleen and I looked at each other and said, how about if we send for our stuff and live here?
It’s just so Canadian, so friendly, so clean. And I know that there’s, you go there at the perfect time of year in September. It’s not clamps down for four to six months, because they definitely have that in Helsinki. I’ll call them that they got snow culture. And that’s what the reason you have hookah is because you have to learn how to deal with, I got to stay inside for four months.
I better be cozy.
Stephen: Sorry. I can’t come into work today. My engine block is frozen. Shut solid.
Alan: Exactly. And the moose will let me out the door. That
Stephen: was growing up. That’s our family joke. My sister, whenever she didn’t want my mother to go to work, she’d say mommy, just call them and tell them there’s a bear in the driveway.
So that became the family [00:12:00] joke.
Alan: Exactly. They have public art everywhere, sculptures and murals and stuff like that. That, I’m sure that I am idealizing. I’m sure there are sections of each of those countries that are not the tourist area. You were more in the tourist areas. Yeah.
Absolutely. And they put their food forward and they painted up really nice and stuff. I know that there’s industrial sections of Germany and of Poland and everywhere really. And yet there’s just, the people have different cultures. Some are quieter, more, there’s, like they talked about how in, I believe it was Norway, that like loneliness, being alone, and not having enough interaction with people is really a problem, and that they have set up things where you can go to the library and rent a person, just have someone to talk to.
I, I. I didn’t mean that by how I said it, taken on don’t let people in Helsinki, like drink alone and be suicidal because it’s got a high,
Stephen: we, [00:13:00] I, I’ll definitely agree with that part. We are very bad in how we handle mental health issues. And I’m not talking about somebody who has some hormonal thing like schizophrenia or I don’t know.
Whatever it’s called now, disassociative disorder, yeah, we don’t handle that. We don’t want to deal with it. We shove them off and even talk
Alan: about it. Exactly.
Stephen: And even the small issues, the anxiety, the depression, like you said, the loneliness. That can lead to such big problems and issues.
People laugh it off, say, Oh, suck it up, blah, blah, blah. I dealt with that with not only my ex wife, but my daughter a lot growing up. And it’s a struggle. It’s very difficult.
Alan: I have friends in my life that regularly have Suicidal ideation. And I don’t have any of those voices in my head. And yet they’re perfectly functioning people, except for that 10 percent of bad chemistry in their body that won’t leave them alone to sleep at night and stuff like that.
So there’s [00:14:00] definitely things like how they handle prisons and prisoners that it really is all about avoiding recidivism and reducing them, reintroducing them into society. And how they can be successfully rehabilitated instead of. They were a bad guy. Lock them up forever. You know what I mean? They don’t, there’s always in their mind, hope for rehabilitation and they, and there’s no homelessness if you make sure that everybody has a place they really, the only people that aren’t housed in Copenhagen, for instance, are really the ones that you give them that opportunity.
And for whatever reason, they really want to be out of mental ill health or out of independence or something like that. They want to be on the streets, but yeah. We don’t just cast them aside. We don’t actually put spikes on our benches so they can’t sleep there at night, and like that, whatever accumulated active cruelty the United States has developed.
It’s not at all there. It’s wonderful to see the level of care and we’re all in this together. You know what I mean? Instead of, Hey, we’re going to find a reason to make you [00:15:00] the other and then punish you for being other. And oh my God,
Stephen: the band I was in high school had a A song we wrote that pretty much did that exact same thing.
We were using big brother, but some people didn’t react well to that. So we changed it to the other. So it’s interesting you say that makes me think of that song for the exact same, that’s the exact same topic. It was about to
Alan: honestly it, I dunno so it really was such a nice vacation and exposure there’s a I really have to memorize this quote so I get it exactly but Mark Twain has a great quote about travel is inimical to pig headedness prejudice, overconfidence over like thinking that.
Because this is only the society that you know, it’s better than everybody else’s. And then you see, no, there really are places that have gone down different paths and decided to do different things and their government and their food and their everything is just as good, but just not here. Whenever we talk about the silent city on the hill, it’s a little bit weird to say, you really think that no place in the world has figured out how to be civilized?
[00:16:00] You know what I mean? It’s weird. I think We have so much jingoism here that it’s crazy. Yeah,
Stephen: a large part of Our culture, I believe, is thinking that everywhere else is a third world backwards country. That everywhere else, that we’re the best technologically, we’re the best, this, we’re the best.
That, and it’s not I just saw a report that out of the nine major countries in the US or countries in the us, countries in the world, they ranked the health care, compared them on multiple factors. We were dead last. We were dead last in health care.
Alan: That’s one of the interesting things that happen when you have local tour guides is they talk about what the local issues are.
Sometimes a little bit too much. That’s pretty
Stephen: cool. That gets away from that touristy a little bit.
Alan: Yeah, I like that. It was, we had people in our tour groups that were Shooting for here’s why America is better and so they would say we [00:17:00] pay so much in taxes in order to get that health care. It’s we pay 30%.
Our tax rate is 28 and 33. We’re getting focus. We’re getting nothing in comparison to the wonderful social safety net that they have for. Healthcare, and housing, and education, like everybody there is educated through college. Not hey, if you grew up out of school in eighth grade, that’s all you get.
And you can tell, the level of intellectualism in conversation. In everybody there is no multiple languages. It’s not only because English wins, it’s because They want to be able to interact with multiple different countries and cultures and when you learn languages, your brain gets rewired so that it really has that wonderful plasticity, that flexibility, that you can then learn another language on top of that much more easily than, we don’t start learning languages until we’re in high school.
No, you gotta start them when we’re like five! And I
Stephen: wonder if the tour guides and some of these tourist places noticed any [00:18:00] difference in the groups with a bunch of mentions there because, mentions will ask a million questions and stuff that you don’t think about and they want to know every little really?
That’s made a calcite. Where’d they get that from? And how much did they use? How big is this? And other people are like, who the hell cares? But that’s just how Basically, our brains are wired. I wonder if they notice like when a big group like that is different or anything.
Alan: I can point to a couple examples that were like that.
In some groups, people really were like, what does it cost to have an apartment here? I’m like, I don’t. And that was like their biggest concern. And to me, it was just that, hey, we’re looking at this old church and so cool. It hasn’t only been a Catholic or Protestant church, it has changed hands.
How did they handle that? Like the king became a Christian, and so everybody else had to become Christian. But then that they got conquered, and somebody else came in and became Protestant, and whatever else it might be, they changed hands. And the way that we fight about religion here is as if it’s a life or death [00:19:00] battle, but multiple countries, multiple cities, everything has had multiple transitions.
And you know what? The people did fine. They have the desire to believe in a higher power, but the particular shade of belief that goes with it, instead of it being just adamant and weirdly Life or death tribal. It was like, okay, we still share 90 percent of the belief. They say the Lord’s Prayer slightly differently.
I get blurred to say that differently. And I shouldn’t paint it too rosy. There have been times when obviously they’re really when the Catholics came in, there was lots
Stephen: of
Alan: Killings? Purges and pogroms and killings because there really is only one true religion. You will say everything just like we want and stop eating that food.
And of course the Jews have had it terribly for many years. They’ve always been a small segment of the population and often been Demonized like just I don’t know because they were the moneylenders and they were somehow the cause of all financial problems not you have no discipline whatsoever [00:20:00] and you’re not taking care of your children, but oh, it’s the Jews that are caught.
So do you know what I mean? Yeah. That, that was interesting to see over the course of history. Like I said, we only got 200, and we haven’t really ever had religious wars here, because they did have religious wars, and they led to no veterans, only rearranging of the pawns on a chessboard, and that the higher ups make decisions that have nothing to do with the regular people and with reality.
They’ve learned to not let the god botherers run things. You know what I mean? And it Wow, they’re still there. It’s not gone. There are still places They’re very much as you know playing to the ultra nationalist or the ultra religious. They’re dealing with it in Poland They’re dealing with Hungary that kind of stuff but the more mature civilizations have learned to be much more diverse and accepting of Everybody has the same rights.
There’s multiple religions It can’t be that there’s only one true God because there’s 3, 000 gods that people fervently believe in and you can’t go to war over and
Stephen: It’s just a shame [00:21:00] that America has never felt that way and never I’m I drip sarcasm. I’m sure if somebody listening to this picks my Quotes out.
It’s going to make me sound way bad if you don’t get the context.
Alan: That’s right. We always have to worry about that. Into our entire podcast, they took the one thing that said, Al doesn’t like the juice. No, I love the juice. You know what I mean?
Stephen: Didn’t you have a couple with, Oh no, Dave and Dave didn’t go.
I thought They were there, yeah. So you had some Jewish in your midst.
Alan: And it’s, I don’t know various different people had some people really wanted to see the history, some the art, some didn’t want to see it. I, churches are beautiful. If you’re looking for something that was usually left alone in the war that wasn’t bombed and turned into rubble, that’s why they still have these beautiful icons and stained glass and all that kind of stuff.
And I am inspired. I am moved by, wow, that someone did a, look at this carving. Look at this sounding board that it’s as, as ornate as it can be to glorify reaching upwards to the heavens. There are gothic churches that, that we saw a couple that were [00:22:00] brutalist architecture. The Russians, if there’s any group that is universally reviled, it’s the Russians having come in and everywhere that they went.
They did not contribute to civilization. They often were only about control and about destroying past culture. And so when you see that sounds
Stephen: like other past cultures, the Romans did that a lot.
Alan: That’s right too. Actually the Romans were better about assimilating instead of just taking over sweeping statements.
They weren’t always. It depends on who was the army that came in and said, we’ve had so much sabotage from these particular people that we’re going to. Crush every place they might hide, and then it really was salted earth level destruction, the way a buddy
Stephen: described. He’s like the Romans would send guys up ahead.
They’d enter the city and say, okay, elders of the city. We have an army of 50, 000 people on the march. So we’re going to be here in a day. You can either. Concede and take over. We take over and you do everything our way or we destroy you. Which would you prefer? [00:23:00] That’s how he described it. I’m like, yeah, okay
Alan: There was you know there they did talk about like of course every time that some new army came in There was a tribute to be paid or there was some looting done and there’s all kinds of stuff Especially these the baltics in particular They were really overrun by both the germans and the russians and they had to deal with occupation for decades And Denmark and Sweden had no less than 38 wars over the years.
It’s they have had for whatever, I don’t know, what is it? Colors don’t clash shades do. So whatever they had as to how they were differently Viking to differently, Nordic culture, that they still had the desire to have more land depending on what king it was. He was more acquisitive or he was more sneaky.
And so that you can see that they, It wasn’t almost peaceful, but far from that, as much as I talk about civilized, they had their share of people getting raped, pillaged, and blundered and, there’s no stave churches. This is an interesting thing. Another thing that happened much over time [00:24:00] was, when you live in a place that the biggest building material is wood, because they have all those vast forests to the north, and not as much rock, stone, cement, etc.,
to build with, you can build beautiful things. But then when the city gets on fire, 30, 70 percent of it burns all at once, and you have to start over. So sometimes that led to let’s put things on a grid instead of the windy, twisty streets with all the, fetid matter coming down when people dump their chamber pots.
But it was also, you’ll lose all that beautiful civilization that was built from the material that couldn’t withstand it. I don’t know, we had I am really happy, especially for Colleen. I had been to Europe a couple times before, but this was an all new experience for Colleen. So for her to take in nine cities in ten days was wonderful, and just, continually, she and I, on many of our journeys, we just paused for a moment And Colleen.
Look where we are. We’re on the top of this mountain.
Stephen: We’re next to this, we’re next to the Hoover Dam. For as many places as you went, that’s [00:25:00] such a sampling, it’s that 10 percent of the iceberg I’d have such a hard time being there for that short of time and then leaving and be like, but I didn’t get to see this or do this or, going on to the
Alan: next one.
Stephen: Yeah, I remember when I was in Jamaica from the cruise ship. We were like, Hey, so where’s a good place to eat? And they’re like no, not the tourist place. Where’s a good mama roses or whatever that you guys like to eat at, the real jerk
Alan: chicken.
Yeah,
Stephen: man. I w I’d have a hard time with just that limited amount of time there.
Alan: It was the big disclaimer was all my impressions were indeed that we had 12 hours in each of these cities. As if that got us to know Lithuanian culture, and we only had three or four days. There’s so much to see there.
We just scratched the surface of all the wonderful museums and all the wonderful districts of the city. We did a running run as much as we could and tried food and all that kind of stuff. Bought some chocolate, whatever, had Colleen had coffee everywhere we went, so she did a good sampling tour.
Yeah, that’s cool. Of all the different coffees. I, yeah. They didn’t have Dr. Pepper anywhere. [00:26:00] What?! That’s not civilization! It would have been without ice in a lot of places anyway. I fearfully confessed online, I really intended to do no Sometimes people write about, hey, I’ve been all these other places.
I so much wanted a Big Mac and so I went to McDonald’s. I never did that. But because if you got ice, it was like two cubes and I just like my drinks frosty. And so a couple of times I popped into either McDonald’s or a Burger King just to get a big old cup of ice so that I’d have the drink just like I wanted it.
My smile. I did. I lost pound. I lost weight.
Stephen: I’m on. Yeah. That’s crazy. Cause you were like, and Marty kept saying how much he usually gains. And then you said you lost six pounds. I did
Alan: on a cruise ship, you really are like, Just wheel me up to the table and I will start shoveling.
You know what I mean? You’ve got unlimited food. They need to put little indents for the bellies in the table so
Stephen: you can
Alan: get
Stephen: closer.
Alan: Exactly. That’s like an old Mad Magazine thing. Indents. Somehow by my, I ate a lot more fish. I ate decently. Oftentimes we didn’t eat [00:27:00] lunch because we were so busy excursing that we didn’t stop and have a two hour lunch or something like that.
So between all the walking, and eating smartly. I didn’t give myself, okay, they have every sweet, so I think I’ll try every single one of them. I usually gave me like one cinnamon roll or one cup of ice cream or whatever else it might be. But most of it, it was all the extra walking around and eating more wisely.
And I just, I can’t believe it, but I really, and the manjaro is working on you. You know what I mean? I think I’ve mentioned before Segway time, what a miracle this drug is. It really turns off the little voice that says, you’re hungry. If you’re a guy who likes food, a big guy, that has had much experience in eating food, that’s been so much behind it, is that when the mealtimes roll around, I really am like, wow, I really should eat something.
I have 100 extra pounds that would let me survive quite a long time without that lunch. Before you start hacking it off
Stephen: to chew on your leg.
Alan: Now it’s down to 80 extra pounds, but you and I don’t know, will I ever be on the height weight chart? Not when I got shoulders as wide as a Viking. And yet, that’s a goal that you want to get.
It isn’t, of course, my body composition [00:28:00] type, I should say. It’s my blood is better. I just went in for my first baseline Medicare physical and I dropped my A1, I hit 8. 1 and that was the absolute alert panic button, get back on stuff that’s going to help you here. I’m now at 6. 2. Wow. And that’s like in four months.
So am I eating healthier here? Am I walking more here? And then doing this there, it really, it slows down your digestion. It turns off that you’re hungry thing. It gets you to satiety very quickly. It’s a miraculous and it helps your entire digestive system and your kidneys. Like it helps them.
to deal with stop letting sugar be the thing that’s flooding your system, making you make decisions, whatever’s going on with your gut biome and how it deals with it. I’m reteaching my body. I’m going to and wonderful because I’m now on good healthcare. It is possible in the United States to get, when you’re on Medicare, when you get to a certain age or when you really want the marketplace, two plans that I had, while I had to buy my own insurance because Colleen had retired two years before I did.[00:29:00]
They did not cover Manjaro, it was like 900 bucks a month. And I guess I should say 10, 000 a year to be healthy? Who wouldn’t pay that? I tried to do it on my own and it sure wasn’t easy. I, now in just a couple months of being on the Manjaro and my, and upping my dose, but it goes, because I seem to be handling it well, maybe you’ve had this experience as well.
While they try to tune, where are you with, insulin or other things that you do for your diabetes? Getting to the right level and then actually if my manjaro gets to a certain point, I won’t take metformin anymore. And that’s one of the few things that, depending on when you take it, it has given me some abdominal distress because it really does work right on the contents of your stomach to make it so that Kind of like Olestra and O Oleum’s chips.
Remember those potato chips and the debacle that was? Combined with the raw. Exactly. I have had only a couple times downside where I’ll have like, when I got back, I had milk, because I hadn’t had it on the cruise ship. That much a little bit of ice cream, but maybe it’s not even real ice cream. It’s soft serve.
So it could be some help based [00:30:00] ice cream substitute. You know what I mean? It’s all agar. It’s all something not dairy. So when I had a glass of milk here, it really was boom. My body was like I don’t, I’ve forgotten how to deal with this. And now I’ve gotten well balanced again in that way. But
Stephen: Cal Dairy is really not good for us.
Not good for our digestives. The more I’ve heard more and more things, which sucks. I love ice cream.
Alan: I still, we, I regularly have milk with my evening meal, not all during the day and I don’t want to only be having diet, Dr Pepper with or without caffeine, but it, whatever that combination is, lipids casein, all that kind of stuff.
My body was used to handling a certain amount of it. And I’ve seen to be back to that. Now, I think you get some things from milk, like fortified milk, especially that are better than, so I’m going to keep doing that, but it isn’t the only way to do it. I guess I sweeping statement.
I’m like, It was so heartening to do the cruise, lose some weight, go to the doctor, be told for 65, you’re okay. You know what I mean? I really am not [00:31:00] debilitated. I have made improvements on my blood work that tells you all about how you’re really doing. Cholesterol is down. Triglycerides are down. A1C is down.
Yay. This stuff really works. If you just have the discipline to not have ice cream all the time, so
Stephen: I stopped eating it before breakfast. I take a big break from nine Oh two to nine. Should be good. All right. All right. So I got two things I got to bring up.
First of all you saw weird Al’s coming back around. He didn’t think he was ever going to do it again. And. He’s gotten so much love in the last couple of years, they’re coming back around,
Alan: right? I honestly, I just this morning, they had pre sale, if you were part of the weird Al.
com club. So I had put in for three different cities, depending on which would go on. I didn’t know if they’d all go on sale. They did. And I have tickets for blossom. And in fact, remember, I sent you the, I didn’t want to post it publicly because there’s a reason that they don’t want the world. But if you It’s a year away.
It’s like September 25th. So it’s a year [00:32:00] away, but I was willing to pony up a hundred dollar ticket. It’s not a cheap show, but from everything that it said, it’s going to be him with four extra musicians, him and his band plus four musicians and all the multimedia extravaganza that we’ve seen in the past with videos and costume changes and all that kind of stuff.
So it’s a show, like people talk about, you go see Barry Mandel and Neil Diamond. It isn’t only about the music it’s because they’re showmen. I’ve seen both of them like that. I’m so happy that he’s still doing it. I’m so happy that he didn’t retire, but that he’s actually, okay, here we go.
We’re getting bigger and weirder. Bigger and weirder, yeah.
Stephen: He’s coming back to Cal, Canton for GalaxyCon, I believe, coming up. They are doing I’m so torn on this one, Al. They are doing a limited amount of people roundtable sitting with weirdo for 30 minutes talking
Alan: the VIP experience.
Oh my, it’s
Stephen: 500 bucks for a half hour. And I’m like,
Alan: [00:33:00] 500 bucks on that really might be a very cool experience. Like I said, I just spent 100 on multiple different concerts. I used to get weirded out by 30 going to 50, 70. I just couldn’t do it. But as I look at we’ve laughed about this.
How much time do I have left? How much money do I have? I really can buy a bunch of a hundred dollars shows and not have it be. And then I didn’t eat that week. We’re safe. And just be like, I don’t know. I hope my car keeps going because 30, 000 thing. And then it would be rearranged for financing, but otherwise.
We can do it. We really can do it. And that’s why I’m very torn. Especially GalaxyCon will be like anybody who’s going to know enough to want to go sit. It’s going to be the real fans. You’re not going to have goons at the table. You’re going to have nothing but cool people with you. That sounds cool.
Yeah, I
Stephen: know. I know. Don’t
Alan: let me be the devil. Don’t let me be the devil. 500 do
Stephen: it. So that’s the good [00:34:00] going on in the world. I’m so glad that’s coming around.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: You’ve been gone for two weeks. Have you heard how Portage County has exploded?
Alan: Unfortunately, couldn’t help but read about it even from far away.
Everywhere. You’ve got to That has been like taking down people’s names where they have a harris waltz sign in their yard and that is classic like macon county line bullshit and
Stephen: not just that but it was like Other normal people were like sending people’s names and addresses to the share marking
Alan: on them to add to the list Germany where they were reporting people to Stasi.
Stephen: Yeah. And we in God damn it. Okay, let me just say I don’t know this guy very close personally, but his son played on the same baseball team as Colin and he was an a hole back then. And when he became [00:35:00] sheriff, me and Colin were like, oh my god, this is horrible. This guy’s going to suck.
Alan: His son learned all that great behavior.
Yes.
Stephen: So his first two weeks in, in the office, suddenly he got rid of all the police cars and buy SUVs for all of his people. And people were like, wait a minute, where’d you get that money? We didn’t have money in the budget for that. And now there’s been calls that they did this drug bust and it was so and 25 guns and however many pounds of whatever drug and this much money, blah, blah, blah.
And
Alan: overwhelming pseudo military craziness. Yeah.
Stephen: And people have come forward and said it’s listed that there were this many guns, but we’ve only got this many in inventory. And this amount of money does not match what’s in inventory. And they’re like, where did this go? And they’re questioning it. And so many people have called the Ohio AG and reported the Republican chair.
For Portage County, step down. He’s I can’t. [00:36:00] I can’t do this is uncalled for. He’s I’m Republican. You should vote for the other guy, and so
Alan: stick around to clean it up, which is its own.
Stephen: It is, but he’s I can’t do this. I’m fighting an uphill battle. It’s I just can’t deal with it.
So there’s all of this. And now that, so that’s all the stuff that. Has come out and he, of course, did a Donald Trump and posted. Oh, it was misinterpreted. How is that misinterpreted?
Alan: Backs over here your blimp statement over here. What do we so are they calling for his resignation? They so
Stephen: the board Met and removed the sheriffs and deputies from security during the elections at the polling booths.
And they’re getting an outside firm to do it. And just in the last day or so an inmate prisoner came forward and said that when he was running for election last time that they had the inmates out there [00:37:00] placing signs and doing work, which is completely illegal. So that’s been investigated now.
Alan: Yeah, sorry that it’s so close to home for you, but it’s really good that it’s all being found out and that the people aren’t saying he’s our boy
Stephen: some are some definitely are there’s plenty at Portage County where I live from what I see is very much Republican Donald Trump thinking.
And when Gina moved here, she said, Oh my God, I didn’t realize you had Alabama and Ohio also. So to her around here was just like Alabama and take whatever stereotype you would like from that.
Alan: Honestly, we’ve talked about this a little bit. We regularly go downstate for various different things.
We go down to do our little mini golf excursions. We just went down to Tis the season to get a whole bunch of advent calendars because that’s the place that has a whole wall of them and we can get them for all of our family. You don’t have to get far outside of Cincinnati to see all the Trump signs up and not just Trump signs but like full yards full of stuff or [00:38:00] someone who’s selling all the MAGA t shirts and flags and machine guns for all it really is there’s some people that are quite fanatic about it and if you’re looking for why we have 88 counties in Ohio but 50 of them continue to vote it’s because they are sparsely populated and the people that are really loud about that kind of stuff there is an intimidation there is a I don’t know, acting as if they’re everybody’s like that and everybody else has to be like we’ll stay quiet.
But you know what? When I go in that voting booth, nobody knows how I voted true. And I’m hoping that we will see a swing away from that craziness, right?
Stephen: And my mother even said that how can they intimidate us? They don’t know what we’re voting and I said But if you have a yard sign, they know who you are They can intimidate you as you’re walking in they can make you feel uncomfortable They can keep you know, they could they may not do anything explicitly maybe you go to a drive pull in and the deputy that’s on Call there, you know Providing security, pulls you over and [00:39:00] says, yeah, you’ve got a problem with your car.
You don’t go write you a ticket and then delays you. So you can’t get in the vote before you have to go to work. Or, just Oh, we can make this ticket go away. Maybe you should just go home and I’ll forget all about, when they’re doing stuff like this. And over the weekend I was at a big foot event that was very fun over in PA and one of the booths had a big.
Sign up that showed Trump like on Rambo’s body with a big machine gun and it said, you know Stop the commies. I’m like, is this the 80s? When was the last time you heard him say the commies are coming to get us the commies are not coming To take over america you idiots
Alan: that thing you just talked about There’s a ton of it out there where they’ve got like donald as the idealized schwarzenegger or yes And of course, he’s the only one that can save You toting his gun, shooting down all the other and stuff like that, the kinds of things you’ve talked about.
There’s all kinds of history, Jim Crow wise and intimidation. They’re doing it in Texas as well. They’re doing it in [00:40:00] multiple places where they get a six o’clock in the morning raid of the woman that’s been organizing people to vote. And like we can’t have that. We can’t have Americans voting and that you’re actively working like because you’re organizing it for women.
We can’t have that you’re organizing for Hispanics. It’s very clear how it’s being targeted that you don’t the that intimidation and especially from public figures, the ones that are supposed to be upholding the law, not abusing it. That’s incredibly corrupt. You want to mean the I have never been able to understand how people deal with.
Yeah. The Caesar’s wife thing, people have to be beyond reproach if they’re going to be in certain positions. You can’t have your sports coach at college, Jim Jordan, be the one that does bad things or that covers up bad things. That’s exactly the guy you need to have that that there’s certainty that nothing is going on.
He has to be the monitor. He has to be the line of defense. And when that becomes [00:41:00] corrupt. What a sign of a sick society. And then it’s that much harder for people to go and I gotta get three layers through all of the people that are hiding this stuff, for whatever reason. Because they believe in it, because they’re getting paid not to do because they themselves have been intimidated.
Hey, Mr. Policeman, your career is at an end, stirpico, unless you go on the take with everybody else. It takes uncommon grit and bravery to be the guy that says, Hey, I will not be corrupt like that because it’s so easy just to go along because, hey, my kid needs to go to college. I get 20k from this. You know what I mean?
I can see how it happens, but exactly. Don’t put yourself in that position where you erode society. Being the corrupt guy where we need the good guy.
Stephen: There’s a lady, I don’t remember her title, position, where she is in this. She’s getting investigated for multiple times, leaving Democrats off of ballots.
She, she has the ballots made with only her candidates that she wants on it. [00:42:00]
Alan: And like, how does people not like, That must be how do you not get found out and then once you’re found out, how do you tough it out? I guess they count on well, too late. It’s all done. We’re not going to hold a special election.
They count on just that the brass of it,
Stephen: letting them get away with it. But that, but also, if the mayor of the town and the sheriff and whoever else are in charge of that area, that region, the S the representatives and stuff. And so if they’re all Republicans. Oh, I can get away with it because they’re going to say don’t do that again,
Alan: right?
The reason that I made the making county line reference before is because there really was a spate of movies that might remember like late sixties, early seventies, where kids going down to Florida for spring break went through a speed trap. And then they didn’t just get a ticket. They got savaged in jail by.
Like you go someone should be able to help me. If I report you to the guy that no, he’s corrupt too. And so is the mayor. And so just like you’ve been saying, and that acceptance of pockets of corruption, where you really can go [00:43:00] places and I have gay friends and they would talk about how they’re going to go to an event in Florida, but they would drive straight through going 55 miles an hour through all those places that had that reputation because they so much didn’t want to live that movie.
And the fact that’s still allowed to exist that we don’t send the National Guard in to say, all of you are out of office, all of you are like, obviously we’ve got more than enough evidence to convict you. They get away with it because they. They’re small enough. I don’t know. I
Stephen: They know how to do it.
So it’s not clear enough that, I didn’t beat him. You had a pillow over it, but you still beat me. It just didn’t leave the mark. Oh so there’s no proof. They have that. There’s not, how many times do you see that stereotype of the bully in playgrounds or in movies or books that they do that stereotype Nicky underhanded behind the back thing and they’re like it wasn’t me.
They’re just accusing me. They don’t like me. I didn’t do anything. It
Alan: just got a little bit out of hand. He came at me. I had to defend [00:44:00] myself.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. I was just walking through. I can’t help it. He fell down the steps again.
Alan: Exactly. You had to defend yourself by. I can’t say it. Yeah.
You know what I mean? Like those that I hope that we will continue to say we as a society just won’t allow that to happen. We might have to be for cleaning out the crap that has managed to accumulate because there’s all there’s multi generational, Buford T. Justice and his son are the sheriff and deputy and I don’t know what it takes to get them out of office if they’re elected and everybody chooses to reelect them.
In the face of you had a couple deaths. We had a couple unnecessary deaths. You’d think that’d be enough to say you aren’t the guy.
Stephen: We do have Taylor Swift on our side and that sounds funny, but dear God, when one woman can raise the gross national product by 0. 5 percent alone, there’s something there.
You know,
Alan: What’s part of the [00:45:00] unjoy, but I’m on social media. I’m on Facebook often and you get to see like the waves of crap come through where just that Taylor Swift declares for Kamala Harris, Trump says, I hate Taylor Swift after he said, Oh, she’s the best, right? All the little stories that come out of, Hey, now Ticket sales have plunged.
All the disinformation, all the bullshit comes out, and it’s I have blocked how many people, because you posted that knowing full well that it’s wrong, that she is indeed the one that makes people, countries GDPs go up, and yet, you can’t admit that she https: otter. ai She’s amazingly successful.
She’s given more money in charity than the next 10 Republican charities down, whatever else it might be. They can’t stand to have even a good person be free.
Stephen: So instead of being good themselves, they spend their time tearing somebody else down and staying with their corrupt ways to make themselves richer, to make themselves more popular, more famous that [00:46:00] I’ve seen that my whole life.
I could name many instances like that. And that’s.
Alan: We people talk about, Oh, my God, whatever you don’t read the comment section, because what I want to see is that 90 percent of the people are saying that’s obvious bullshit. Once you go away, then you said it’s about half and half that people are like, yeah, I read that too, that Taylor Swift is now on the outs because, Donald Trump can make or break careers and no, he really can’t.
She’s more popular and competent and wealthy than he will ever be. And all of that, or even just someone just posted this. And I’ve been saying this, honestly, for 40 years. Yeah. When you’ve got fringe candidates, like criminals, or demented, or truly evil, that they’re the ones that threaten to throw the other candidate off a balcony, how did that not make the election 90 10?
Anybody who would read that kind of evil, intimidating, nuts, bullshit, would be like we can’t vote this guy in, 51 49!
Stephen: Let’s just go
Alan: back!
Stephen: Let’s go back! And I was talking to some friends about this. We had a [00:47:00] really long great trip down to PA, me and Reece to do a talk for the horror podcast. So we had this really long trip with some friends I hadn’t spent that much time with in a long time.
So it was a good time. But I said, If For no other reason. I don’t care if you could say this, that, the other thing is good about what Trump’s policies are, which you can’t, there isn’t any whatever, but just the fact that this man stood on a podium and went, Oh, look at him in the wheelchair right there should be enough for everybody to go.
You need to go away. We’re voting. I can’t accept anything good that he may have. But the problem, the thing is not the problem. The thing is, I don’t see anything good he’s really done other than things to help himself and the kiss asses that are with him. That’s his only focus. And the people that don’t see that, I’m like, I can’t talk to you.
You’re too stupid.
Alan: We laughed earlier about is there a different quality of like [00:48:00] Mensa questions on an excursion compared to regular people. This isn’t Mensa level stuff. Anybody with any kind of Functioning sense of fairness and justice would be able to say that’s not how you talk about veterans.
That’s not how you talk about the handicapped. That’s not how you talk about women. It, all those things are absolute basics for any thinking person, any decent person. You don’t have to be in the brain trust to say that isn’t right.
Stephen: We’ve got a little drama in the family cause I won’t say who, but I have a family member that is a big Trump supporter.
And I said I don’t care to talk to them and I don’t want them around for the holidays. And I got arguments from other fans. Just because they have different policies, I’m like, no, you can’t support, you can’t have somebody go over to my neighbors, Shoot them in the head and then come over here and sit down and say, Hey, let’s have breakfast.
Yeah, sure. No problem. That’s all forgotten. You can’t do that. He is that [00:49:00] vile. If it was even Nixon with him being impeached with his recording and all that. That’s not even as bad as what Trump is and that’s, and I argued this over and over. I’m like, fine, if they’re going to be around, I’m going elsewhere.
I will go sit down in the parking lot of our local park rather than be here. I don’t even want to be around it.
Alan: Here’s hoping that they hear that and they say, we ought to make a choice. And that they choose you. They choose decent. They choose people that won’t accept. That’s not just a, oh, he’s got some odd ideas.
Different policies. He, I, I don’t know. There must be multiple families that have that either generationally or depending on what’s behind it, whether they’ve been had more schooling or not, depending on whether they’ve had bad run ins with government or with, there’s reasons that you’re there just
Stephen: easily swayed by simple rah [00:50:00] mechanics.
Alan: They don’t handle critical thinking. They don’t take in information and say maybe I should check as to whether that’s true. And maybe I should find a reliable source and all that kind of stuff. I have your blood up.
They’re more than happy. Some of these
Stephen: same family members. Will tell me all the time. Oh, yeah, my doctor told me I should do this that but he’s a quack But I found this cure that said it would fix all of it. I’m like you’re a moron. You’re just a complete idiot
Alan: I Terrible thing to say. I, some of that stuff is self correcting.
I’ve often used the term self correcting, that if people are really not going to believe in vaccination, eventually it’ll catch up with them. If they’re not going to believe in every man gets a vote, like everyone, that eventually the system will turn against them. And then they’ll wonder, why do I have no allies?
Because you were the one of the ones that set this system up to allow people to be disenfranchised and now you’re one of them instead. There’s the famous poem about, they came from the trade unionists and all that kind of stuff. And like [00:51:00] I, anybody who reads that poem, they should get the idea of the only way to have justice is to have justice for all.
And equally not to have, I know a guy and he can get rid of that ticket for me. All I have to do is, the level of corruption that people are willing to do. That’s how many, I’ve been saying this for all my life, not even just like the last 40 years. There’s a whole biblical thing about, Judas, 30 pieces of silver.
When I find out what 30 pieces of silver are for various different people, the tiny thing that they’re willing to take in order to be corrupt. It breaks my heart. You know what I mean? The favor of the bully, the it’s, I, All the examples that I could name of it’s not only that you sold out for nothing.
Don’t you have any stubbornness in you? Don’t you have any integrity? Don’t you have any I’m worth more than that? Where do you start that you would let that happen?
Stephen: Weird Al turned down like a 5 million beer commercial because he said he had too many kids. I didn’t check that one out, but I’ve heard it before.
So [00:52:00] I’m going to assume it’s true.
Alan: I’m willing to believe it because that sounds like weird. That sounds like, Hey, he drinks for all the time. He just gets, upright for his shows. That doesn’t sound like weird. I’ll not at
Stephen: all.
Alan: It’d be something where your reputation. Does indeed work for you. If you’ve been a good guy all your life, then people should expect the next minute of your life to be pretty good.
Exactly. So
Stephen: real quick, before we go give you an update that whole historical AR project I’ve been working on. I keep making steps on it. So I have a presentation ready with samples to show. This is what it would be like, and I’m getting some calls for a request I have out to meet with some developers and say, okay, look, here’s what I want to do.
Here’s questions. I have tell me the answers. I’m not doing the project yet. But I want to know these answers so I can tell the money people. So I get when I’m sitting down with the guys, have the checkbooks, I can say, this is what we can and can’t do. And this is what it’s going to take and blah, [00:53:00] blah, and have those developers in my pocket.
Yeah. So it’s steps, little steps closer. I’m so excited because it’s such a cool thing.
Alan: I honestly, I hope that proceeds. And if there’s any, I’m not actively doing those kinds of things, but I can help you out in all the ways that you don’t have to go to the money guys and say. I got this 65 year old guy who’s still got one or two tricks up his sleeve.
Maybe he can help out, I still I passed the cognitive test as part of the Medicare thing. I was really able to like name objects in the room. Yeah, but were
Stephen: you the best they’d ever seen and better than anyone has ever done it in the world ever? That’s the goal to shoot for.
If you can’t be the best that they’re so amazing. Then you’re
Alan: just nothing.
Stephen: Exactly. My. Ex wife used to talk like that about everything. And you notice she’s my ex wife,
Alan: right? I have a quota saying for everything, wouldn’t the forest be a quiet place if only the best birds sang, the world has room for all of these good things. I want the good things to get a chance to be heard, not shouted down by the bad [00:54:00] things, but by the low quality stuff. That’s always been is how do you get the good money to Go to the good things, instead of it being the bamboozlement or the greed or whatever else it might be.
Okay, I know that our next bunch of these are probably going to be about the issues of the day, because you have to. And I hope Hey, listeners, I don’t think that we are fanatics. I think that we’re just trying to take the relentless geekery approach to how do you get to the truth? How do you know don’t you want facts?
Don’t you want to make decisions based on facts? Don’t you want a person that is going to do that, too? And the more that we see, the more that we see. What the various different candidates are doing and that they really are not only liars, but like shameless forever liars. They don’t even attempt to say a truthful thing.
They don’t try to get, I, there’s got to be value in bickery that says, What are the numbers? What’s the reality behind this? The universe doesn’t make room for stupid. It punishes you. [00:55:00] You know what I mean?
Stephen: The smart should be filling that vacuum, right? Isn’t that how the law works? Exactly.
Alan: And like I said, it doesn’t have to be smart.
It just has to be someone that doesn’t buy into the foolishness from the word go. There’s got to be something. You just tilt your head and go, That doesn’t sound like other things I’ve learned up until now, the world hasn’t totally changed in terms of how gravity works, how evolution works.
It hasn’t. You know what I mean? There’s skepticism that people should have instead of the blindness, the following of the worst in us instead of the best. The reputation thing. I have people that I trust their judgment because I’ve seen their good judgment a hundred times before. The people I haven’t seen that from, it’s wow, trust but verify.
How about that? You know what I mean? I’ll try and
Stephen: keep it geeky with the whole historical project. Cause there’s a lot of geekiness going on there. There’s some, I’m trying to pull off some things that I’m not even sure if can be done yet and [00:56:00] trying to figure out how to do it. So that’s pretty geeky.
Alan: Without you giving up great secrets and stuff like that, I’d love to geek it up and have you I love finding out how things work behind big technologies, cool breakthroughs, it’s I just respect so much, like I mentioned, man, the Nobel Prize Museum, when you see the breakthrough, the thought that someone had that they just looked at the world in a different way and tested it and it proved to be correct.
They must have just
Stephen: Yeah you’ll probably understand this. I don’t say this to a lot of people, but the gist of the project, I don’t know if you’ve seen those places where you can get go with friends and put me on VR and go zombie hunting, They’re big warehouses. They map out the warehouse.
So if there are steps in the game, it’s a ramp to walk up. If there’s a building in front of you, it’s the real wall in the real world. They map it
Alan: out where they match it out and map it. Exactly.
Stephen: Yeah. So what I’m proposing to do is that same thing for a whole city and then put a R Another AR city over top of it in precise GPS locations.[00:57:00]
Alan: It takes you back to this is where the military was the furrier and that, I’ll throw out all my, old Gettysburg type names. If you’re going to recreate that, it would be really cool to be able to. lose yourself in. I really feel like I’m there. Not, Oh, there’s glitches and this isn’t right.
This doesn’t matter. Okay.
Stephen: I’ve started to call it time travel for everyone. Sounds great. And I’m thinking of putting a blue police box hidden somewhere in every city.
Alan: That would be a nice homage. Exactly. They’re not copyrighted. All right. Very good. Talk to you later. All right. See you in a week.
All right. Good. Bye bye.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
