Show 867: Beyond Here Be Dragons, Signed The Colonel

This is being recorded. The last day of the first quarter of the century. A century in which some of you were born. Some of you were born in this century. There's walking, talking, living, adult beings. who did not exist in the 1990s, but they exist just as much as you or I, and they're going around, some of them are listening to this. Very few of them. To be fair, the vast majority from that segment of the population are probably just watching five seconds of this on TikTok and then skipping.

I've come across one of my little videos where I put a minute of content from this show and try to compress it into a tight subject thing and go, oh, look. You're the post-MTV generation. You need everything boiled down to five seconds with a little animated thing that I made in Microsoft Paint of my head. Except it's not my head.

The new logo for this podcast, regrettably, I only realized this after I'd made it and I'd already put it everywhere and started using it in very amateurish animated form. in my TikTok and YouTube videos. I started using this. This podcast is called Into Your Head. So I made a logo of a head, an open head.

To signify that's the listener having stuff pumped into your head by me. The top of the head is open like a lid. But when I use this animated head, it's suggested that the head signifies me speaking. that I'm the one speaking. But why would my head be open? I'm not the one receiving stuff into my head. That's a problem. And it's too late to do anything about her because I've made like 50 videos now using that animation.

I know it's not really an animation. It's not frigging Pixar here. I know, I know. It's just a thing I made in paint with a head where it blinks. and moves a bit left and right. So it looks like there's something on your screen other than a picture. Makes no sense. You're looking at the Into Your Head logo that's supposedly you, the listener, your head because I'm putting all this shit into your head. Why would my head be open when I'm speaking?

Maybe some sort of vent. Underground train systems, you always have a vent somewhere. You'll be walking along the city someday, you'll come across a kind of grill in the basement and you see a load of steam coming up out of that. That's basically everyone's farts. And when you're walking over that grill, you're walking over some segment of remote underground railway line.

two miles from central station and a mile from whenever the next station is and that's basically exhalations from the train halfway along that tunnel if that didn't come out there the whole system would explode Maybe when I'm in that animated logo, maybe I'm venting because there's so much stuff coming out of... Oh no, that doesn't make sense either. Why would I be venting if I have an outlet through my mouth? So why would I also need to vent through my head?

Maybe it signifies that I keep an open mind even while I'm talking. While I'm saying stuff like this, I keep my head open because I keep an open mind. I'm open to new information. I'm open to having my mind changed even while I'm speaking. So that just means I have to change the name of the podcast into my head, which I'm not going to do. That's ridiculous. They did once make a spin-off called Over Your Head. It was just this, basically. I called it Over Your Head.

Here's a new thing I made. It's not like the old thing. There's a thing they used to say, the emperor's new clothes. And I didn't understand that as a child. Here's this thing, the emperor's new clothes. One day I'll grow up and find out what this means. I spent my childhood thinking that. One day I'll find out what the emperor's new clothes is in reference to.

It turns out there's a reference to the emperor coming out naked and saying, oh, look, I have new clothes. And he didn't have new clothes at all. It was a new look, to be fair. He's offered a new look. Clothes brand came out of, I wonder. Do they sell transparent clothes? Maybe they do. Is that even what the Emperor's new clothes was a reference to? I'm not even confident that I know that for sure now.

I think young people go in there and they buy clothes. And they say, oh, look, I'm getting my new look. I'm changing my whole look. You're no more changing your whole look than when someone goes on Star Trek playing an alien. They still have to have two hands and two legs and a head and stand upright and be pretty much in portrait mode.

You're not changing your look at all. Changing your look would be if you turned into the shape of a zebra or a horse. You had four legs instead of two. You had a head at one end and a tail at the other. That would be a new look. You're not even changing shape.

Still sore. For reasons I refer to elsewhere in the program, I keep doing that. Saying, oh, I refer to such a thing later in the program. This is turning into one of those old choose-your-own-adventure novels where you have to flick... back and refer to other parts that might come later you get to the end of a chapter and it says continue to page 24 and then it goes to the end of that he say if you want to choose yes

go to page five to choose no go to page 21 you'll know where you are i know it's not exactly the same as that i'm not giving you options I'm doing a lot of this thing where I say, oh, I refer to this later in the program, so I don't want to go back over it now. Don't worry, don't worry. The passage of time and the order of time doesn't really matter very much.

in this podcast because it's all nonsense and shit and tripe and meaningless it's not going to be a test you don't have to worry if i say oh i refer to this later in the show just take my word for it And if it turns out that it's wrong, it's not like you've done anything important based on what I've said. No, hopefully you haven't. Suffice to say, this has been recorded on the last day of 2025. By the time you hear it...

You'll be back at work or whatever it is you do other than work. Perhaps you're retired. Perhaps, I don't know, perhaps you're like me. You make a podcast every two weeks or so and then you spend the rest of the time. talking to cats and I don't know what else you spend the rest of your day doing but I know I spend the rest of my day talking to cats oh actually no what do I do all day

That's an interesting question, don't you? You probably don't know what I do all day. It's not like I talk about my work on here. I don't talk about what do I do when I'm not doing this. No. Oh, when I'm not doing this.

or when i'm not making crude dialogue heavy cat comics when i'm not recording this shit or when i'm not trying to edit this shit into something listable or when i'm not sleeping or when i'm not trying to cross the road and not get run over what do i do with the rest of my time that's probably what you're wondering i probably think i wonder is he uh what does he do for a living is he uh is he working in a factory

Is he working one of those weird Canadian bear food factories? You're probably wondering what that is. I went to Canada, went into a gift shop where they sell all sorts of shit to gullible tourists. I got a thing called canned beer, a beer in a can. It was a soft toy inside basically a food can.

And you open up with a tin opener. And once you do that, it's lost all of the value, of course. But you open it up and there's a soft, high bear inside. So maybe you think I'm working whatever the Irish equivalent of that is. Which is interesting, as I did once set up a website called Irish Misery, and I was going to start selling bottled Irish rain. I was also going to do another one called goldenshirebottle.com.

I don't go in that domain anymore. I'm also not a dentist. I'm not a mouth health expressive hobby. wondering about that because you hear me later in this show or earlier depending on where I've put it you've heard me talking about the fact I have a sore mouth which hopefully has not reflected itself too much on the quality of the output today.

Most of my day is not taking up with having a sore mouth, that's a temporary thing. Even though it's the second time in the last year or so that I've reported having a sore mouth, but no. I think it's more injury to the mouth rather than germs or disease or anything like that. It's more injury. I'm not sure, but I think it's possible I injured myself using the jagged edge of a tooth.

That's still in my mouth, all set up and connected and didn't use as a tooth in the back of my mouth. But I think I might have scraped my tongue with that. I don't know. How does that work for animals that need to have sharp teeth? Because they basically... capture all their food and start chewing it before it's even dead some of these animals they start eating their food while it's still alive before it even knows it's being preyed on they find some animal that's walking along

mining its own business, and they wrap their jaws around it and start eating it straight away. And your teeth have to be pretty sharp for that, I assume. Or else they have to be not sharp, they have to be dull but very heavy and dense, like a hammer.

maybe there's that i don't know that seems impractical in terms of doing anything else other than being a predator in the animal world so if you're in that line of animal species and you're all set up with the ability to chomp down on something that doesn't even know it's your predator yet you start chewing it you barely caught it and your first contact with it is with your tooth that's chomping into it

then it's probably nothing much else you can do with your time because you're all set up for that. It's like if you're a bus driver and you're glued to your bus seat, you can't leave the bus, you're somehow attached to it. some sort of semi-robotic thing where you're a half man half boss and some terrible awful future where Man and machine have half merged. You pick a career at an early age and then you're merged with a bus. That's a problem as well.

You're a robotic thing and you're merged with a bus because you've taken up a career as a bus driver, man and machine, or woman and machine, whatever. Vehicles don't last for 70, 75 years, so... Every 10 or 15 years, they're going to have to have a module that they remove from this bus, which will include you and the driver's seat and however part of the interface can be updated via software.

But they brought you into a new bus body. And you still have your old body. You keep that until you're dead. And you're still connected to this thing. So if you're like Dash, and that's your career, you're half man, half bus.

You clock off every evening, you go home, you're still attached to this bus. You can't do very much else with your day and it's like that if you're one of these predators whose teeth are all set up for... bearing down on animals and killing them there's very little else you can do with that setup in your spare time your hobby is basically going to have to be eating animals you eat animals at work

animals at home. It's like a busman's holiday. That's no way to live, is it? I don't think that's any way to live. You think that's a way to live? I don't think it is. But that's our future now.

Hopefully that won't happen until the third quarter of this century. We're entering the second quarter of this century now. It's not when they usually have their second world war in most centuries that I've lived in. Their second world war is usually during the second war. And then around the 50s, the music starts getting a little less uptight.

But the parents are still pissed off about her because they've just lived through a war. They see their kids starting to have fun and enjoy music and loosen up. They say, excuse me, we've just lived through a war. How dare you have fun? But your Elvis and your Eddie Cochran. Eddie Cochran was a American singer in the 1950s. He was going around having fun.

And it was too soon after the war. It was the first generation of rock and roll pop music in the 1950s. And the parents were still going, excuse me, we just finished Second World War 10 years ago. We've just gotten rid of sugar rationing. The biggest novelty now is having sugar puffs for breakfast. We have sugar. Eddie Cochran was quite early. He came along with his two-minute pop songs.

He listened to his best of. There's about 30 songs on one side of a cassette tape and they're all two minutes long. They're all Tim singing about some girl in his class because she was about 12 when he did this. And he ended up dying in his early twenties in a car crash.

because it was too soon for everyone they thought it's only the early 50s at the beginning of the third quarter of the century give us a ball wait till you're up to about 1960 before you start doing any of that wild shit and then the Beatles came along that was either 1962 or 1963 I think Elvis was around before them I think was he he was on another continent

They kept Elvis geographically confined to the North American subcontinent. That was more to his manager's visa status, allegedly. Elvis was never toured abroad. supposedly because his manager was very controlling. He said, no, there's nothing beyond that border. It's like that Jim Carrey movie. What's that movie? There's a movie with Jim Carrey in it. He's raised from a child in a... television set, basically. He doesn't know he's on a television programme.

Whole world is watching him grow and have his first job and live in this town that he's never able to leave. He goes eventually, he gets in a boat and he goes out to the horizon and finds that the horizon is the wall of a studio and he escapes. That's what I was like for Elvis Presley, except Elvis Presley, for some reason, didn't have the wit or wisdom to go up to the horizon and say, right, I'm going to see what's outside here. No, he just read a sign that his manager had put up.

what's his name el was his manager he had some sort of weird military first name what was it wasn't sergeant colonel colonel something or other was his name i don't know if that was his first name or if he was self-styled colonel, but not a real one, or was he a colonel in the military? I don't know. Elvis would get up to the horizon and say, oh, this thing up here, there's a nose stuck to the wall here that just says, dear Elvis.

Beyond here lie dragons. Go back to safety. Go on your armbands and swim back to safety to the beach there and we'll put you on some movie. where you play a singer. It'll be very exciting for you. We'll put you in the movies where you're playing a talented singer and you sing stuff. And he says, oh, I better go back then. This is a sign by the colonel. It says, the colonel says no.

Nothing beyond this point except dragons. Of course, you know curiosity, this Elvis. What would I want to see dragons for? You can see dragons on television any day. No, so he swam back to shore and he wasn't even in the water. It was all metaphorical. He didn't even go anywhere. If he had swam out to the horizon, that would be further than anywhere he actually got physically in real life.

your head. Once upon a time, there was a dog. A dog. A dog. A dog. Dog. A dog. A dog. Basically a dog. And this dog. He was walking along the street one day. Minding his own business. Watching out for somewhere where he might be able to take a drink of water. That's a problem if you're a dog. In this world, we're living in a society where if you want to drink some water, the most natural resource known to man, you have to have access to somewhere the water was officially dispelled.

It doesn't just appear in the streets in the form of a stream anymore. No, even if it does appear in the street in the form of a stream, that's an overflowing drain or something. You don't want to be drinking that, or else it's a sewer. If it does appear in the street in an actual natural stream of the type that water originates from, supposedly, comes out of nowhere and it just appears at the top of a stream in the middle of the mountains, that's what we're supposed to believe.

All this water, this H2O, it's made up of oxygen and hydrogen and hydrogen again. The H2O means it's oxygen plus hydrogen plus hydrogen again. It's double hydrogen. You're supposed to believe that at the top of every hill is a little tap and out of that comes a couple of drips of water and they flow down, down, down, down the hill, down the hill towards the coast.

And by the time they get to the coast, where conveniently there happens to be a sea, it gathers in a huge, massive river. And by the time it gets to the huge, massive river in the sea... It's too late then, because it's nearly at the sea. The city is built there at the estuary usually, so by the time the water gets to the city, it's nearly in the sea. So instead of getting the water from this river that flows right into the middle of the city,

You're supposed to get from a tap where it's been piped from halfway up the mountains. They have a spot halfway up the mountains, so they say. This is the sweet spot for getting water out of the natural water system. When it's halfway down the mountains. Build a dam and we put a reservoir in here where we can hold back some water just for long enough for it to become stagnant. It's exactly the same as drinking out of a puddle in the ground.

If you stopped and drank out of a puddle in the ground, you'd be worried about the fact that your dog doesn't seem to think that's a problem. You think, why isn't my dog trying to stop me from doing this? Next time you're out walking your dog. Test your dog. Stop and just start drinking from a puddle in the ground, just like your dog does. If your dog has any sense, has any training of any kind, the first thing it'll do is say, oh no, there's something wrong with my odour.

Stopped and resorted drinking water from a puddle in the ground and he's not even a dog. What's that about? There's something wrong here. I need to alert the authorities. If your dog doesn't do that, then something wrong with your dog. Or maybe you have a dog that's not an assistance dog, I suppose, and you're just bringing it as a friend for a walk. And I suppose that's possible. Someday I may need an assistance dog.

The first thing I'm going to ask if that happens is can I have one who will stop me if I start drinking out of a puddle in the ground? I'll say, oh, he's drinking out of a puddle in the ground. That's his dog. I should have intervened before this. I should have noticed that he was so thirsty that he needed a drink first of all. If I were so thirsty that I needed a drink, I would expect my owner to stop at a puddle. But if he's so thirsty that he needs a drink...

Not that there's anything wrong with drinking out of a puddle, a dog will think. I think there's nothing wrong with drinking out of a puddle, but I can't be seeing allowing this human who I'm supposed to be looking after drinking out of a puddle in the street. Because that reflects badly on me, supposedly. Society has decided that if an assistant dog stops and allows its owner to drink out of a puddle in the ground, something's gone terribly wrong. It's all wrong.

No, nothing wrong with that at all. I suppose if we all start getting our water out of a river, the river that happens to flow through the center of every major city... You say, no, don't drink out of that. It's disgusting. That's city water. Don't drink out of that. No, we'll break off a stream of it halfway up the mountains.

You build a dam, hold the water back for long enough, and then that means it's there long enough to overflow into your taps or something. I don't know, something along those lines. How this works, I don't know, because you're delaying the water from getting there. The water's just gonna take longer to get to the sea. You're holding it back for a while. You're delaying water using a dam.

That's the equivalent of the people who run your city high-speed rapid underground transport system that says, oh, our trains normally run every five minutes, but due to an issue, all services are running five minutes late. Our trains that run every five minutes are running five minutes late. We apologize for any inconvenience. And everyone goes, how would that inconvenience be in any way? Unless they're taking five minutes longer to get somewhere.

If they're able to say that they're all running five minutes late and they run every five minutes, that means they're still running. They're not taking five minutes longer. If they're all taking five minutes longer to get there, then there'd be a problem with the regulation. Eventually, they'd start being... six minutes apart and seven minutes apart at eight minutes apart. But no, they're all running five minutes late, but they're still able to run every five minutes. That's not an issue at all.

Except maybe for overtime. Perhaps they're worried that all these drivers are going to claim five minutes overtime perpetually until Christmas Day, which is the next time they close down the whole system for a day. And then they'll be able to catch up and get back to normal time. But until then, every train operator is going to be getting five minutes overtime at the end of their shift every day until the system corrects itself. Maybe that's what they're worried about.

For a river, it'll lay a river using a reservoir. You hold it up by a few minutes at this reservoir using a dam. And then eventually it gets going again. It's just less of us because we've extracted it from the river. Now put it into our drinking water system as you can. This is water. We're going to drink it from here. This is the right place to drink your water from. We'll drink it from here.

But this isn't a good place to live, so we'll send it through these pipes, we'll distribute it down to the city, so they won't be drinking out of pools of water or out of the river like dogs.

The dog has to look upon all this and think, what does this say about me and my species? Well, it doesn't really say anything. We're not responsible for the running of the public transport system or the... distribution of drinking water. So if I stop in the street and this man is here needing a drink of water, which apparently I failed to notice until now. I've only noticed because he stopped and started drinking from a puddle.

That's going to reflect badly on me, rightly or wrongly. It shouldn't reflect badly on me, but it will. It'll be seen to reflect badly on me. The people who train me and the people who handle me and the people who use an assistance dog. will be judged and they'll be judged harshly and that'll be because of me so i'll have failed i'll have failed as a dog well i'll have failed in my job i'll still be an effective dog

You're an assistance dog. People are all looking upon you and they're judging. They're maybe not judging you because they think they're being enslaved or something into this servitude. They think, oh, that poor dog. He's being enslaved as an assistance dog. How he behaves here will reflect on his owners and the people who captured and trained him and the people who employ that dog.

Took him out of the normal dog society and put him into this indentured servitude. Is that what they call it? Is that a thing? Indentured servitude? I'm not sure. It's hurting my mouth to say it. I have a sore mouth again. I did something to the... back of my tongue. Hopefully the drugs will kick in shortly and it won't be hurting me while I sit here saying stuff using my mouth. Because if it does, that's going to be a problem.

It's going to get sore and sore with every dog story I tell. That's going to be a problem. I have to curtail it. I'm recording this on New Year's Eve. It's the afternoon. There's something like 10 hours left this year. At least in my time zone. If you're in another time zone, you may have up to another... Let's see. 10... Up to another 22 hours, I suppose. Is that be right? Oh, no. Wait. No, that's not right.

Either way, you're listening to this next year anyway, because this won't be going out today. Well, not unless you're listening to this from outside this room somewhere, but near enough to the room to hear it. In which case, you're one of my cats. You're one of my cats. Go and hang out with your mother in the, well, she's not your real mother. Anyway, this dog, he's walking along the street.

Minding his own business insofar as a dog can mind his own business when he's forced to live as part of an advanced society where there's roads everywhere. He has to watch out for trafficking. Watch where the traffic is going and not get run over. He has to watch out for a suitable place to piss where he won't get arrested and put some early into some jail.

where he's held and then executed using lethal injection or whatever they do to dogs when they catch them. What did they do with the dogs when they catch them? I've never seen a dog warding patch a dog. I've had a dog warden used to come round to my house every year and he'd say, hello, I see you have a dog. You have a dog license. That's great. Well done. Would you like to tell me what other...

Neighbours you know around here who own dogs. I said, oh, I don't know. There's no dogs around here. Well, except the one in here who's barking at you right now because he's behind the gate. Oh, no way. That's not right. The dog warden started coming after I stopped being a dog owner. I wasn't a dog owner for very long. He had a dog for a while. He was unsuitable for a residential neighborhood setting, so the dog had to be rehomed.

And then the dog wardens started turning up every year because they had a dog license at one point. They say, oh, this brother had a dog license at one point. I'm going to find out why he hasn't got one now. He let that expire. Did he let the dog expire as well? Or what happened? Or is he just not renewing his dog license? The same with the television license. People like to go on about the television license inspector like it's some sort of mythical figure.

I've met a television licensing inspector in person at my door in the death of night. I think it was either a Friday night or the night before a bank holiday. Either way, it was a Friday night during... Peak television viewing time, which admittedly might be slightly earlier in my house than other houses, but peak television viewing time, where I'm sitting there watching television and a license inspector comes to the door.

They come to the door. They ring the doorbell. And they say, hello. I'm surprised they don't ask you for a license for your doorbell. That's a broadcast system. You have this thing on the outside of your house that anyone can press. And it sends the communications to another part of the house that could be going anywhere. Surely that needs to be regulated. He can't just set up a broadcast system.

I know, you have television coming into your house from someplace up the arse end of Dublin. We were probably watching TV3 at the time. That's broadcast from the arse end of Dublin. From the western suburbs. From some... godforsaken hellhole of a modern studio that they built somewhere for you this thing in the past we have oh no wait you're not this thing in the past

I'm confusing myself now with this year thing, because you're listening to this next year or later. This is the last day of the year. I'm recording this on the very last day of 2025. And there's absolutely no chance that you're hearing this, at least not the finished product, unless you've time-traveled, which you haven't. The only way you're listening to this, as I tried to say earlier, was if you're one of our cats out in the hall.

As soon as I said that, a text message came true about an unrelated topic. So that whole thing went awry. Completely lost my train of thought. I was in the middle of saying something very important. What was it? Oh, something about cats, was it? Oh, yes, I was addressing my cat, saying, if you're listening to this out in the hall, I've explained this to them before via this same medium, and they don't seem to have heeded me. I remember a year or two ago stating on the podcast,

If my cats are listening to this out in the hall, it's really not intended for you. You should wait until the finished edited product comes out. It's not meant for a live studio audience. It has to be edited and worked on. And the... superfluous mouth noises that are recurring as a result of my sore mouth will have been dealt with as well. Or else they'll be left in for a colour. Can you do that? Can you leave in mouth noises for a colour? I don't think you should.

I know a lot of people like to have noises left in for colour. They have the sound of themselves eating. They might be eating a packet of crisps and they say, oh, I'm going to leave in the sound of the... Eating of the packet of crisps for colour. A new colour. It'll make people know there's more to me than podcasting. I also eat... I also eat potato snacks. You see these potato crisps? I don't know if you have them abroad.

These noisy potato crisps, they peel a potato and then basically they keep peeling. So you're basically peeling the whole potato and not just the skin. And you're treating the whole potato as... individual slices like you would slicing an apple for a child. You slice up this potato and then you fry it up. Exactly like you would if you're making a McDonald's apple pie. These things, they have these apple pies. It's basically apple in a pastry that you can deep fry. Maybe I'm assuming.

I've been assuming for my whole life that the McDonald's apple pie dessert is deep fried. That it's basically apple in whatever they put stuff in to deep fry it. If you were to get a battered burger or a battered sausage somewhere. whatever the batter is that's the same thing that's around the apple pie I've always assumed that I don't wish to have that assumption taken away from me or tested today I'm quite happy to continue with that for the rest of my life

I've got you almost half a century now under that illusion. Although, to be fair, I didn't go to a McDonald's for the first eight or nine years of my life at least. For a long time, there is only one branch in this country. We went to Dublin one day and we decided we have to show them what a McDonald's is. It's a horrific place. We're going to show them what really goes on in this factory that's portrayed on TV. It was run by a cheerful, creepy clown.

who was friends with a burglar for some reason. The Hamburglar is clearly a rip-up of Popeye cartoon. It's been around since the 1920s or 30s. This guy, Popeye, he's a sailor and he has a weird mouth. In fact, he probably had a sore mouth like I have right now, did he? He probably did. We all mocked him for it. He had some sort of impediment anyway. An over-muscular face that was distorted from trying to...

Hold on to a pipe that he was always smoking. We've had a career as a sailor as Popeye did. Oh wait, did he have a career as a sailor? Maybe not in the military. Worked as a sailor of some sort. I think so, anyway. Oh, yes, I wrote it was. The song. He wants you to song your head. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. There you go, the very first line. The clues in the lyrics there. It goes, Popeye the Sailor Man.

I live in a caravan, so if he is a full-time sailor, he's coming home at night every day to this caravan. But would the caravan be on the ship? Would it be on a big boat that he puts his caravan on? I suppose that's possible.

Why not? They have car furries. They have boats, fishing boats, that are owned by one or two sailors or fishermen. They can be quite big. I'm sure there's ones where you can fit a car onto it. Why wouldn't they? You never hear much about that, about fishermen going off for a couple of nights and bringing the car with them. We're completely appropriate in this part of the world. We have the Irish Sea right beside us. We go into a fishing boat in that...

Within a few hours he could be over to the east coast of England or Wales. He'd spend a couple of nights over there and then come back. He could easily be on a business trip as a fisherman fishing and bring your car with you. One stoward spot for a car. Does a fishing boat have an underground car park like they do on car ferries? I haven't been on a car ferry. At least not in a car since I was...

five or six years of age, we went on two holidays on cow fairies. One when there was four or five, and another when there was five or six. And the first time we went to Wales, and the second time we went to Scotland. I remember this thing. You drive onto this boat. There was queues and queues of traffic. Put the whole family in the car. My father was driving. He'd have luggage in the booth.

And this father would direct you up. He'd say, drive up behind that car there on the big narrow thing. He'd say, keep going, keep going. You'd be within half a millimeter of the car in front and you'd still be telling my father to keep going. You don't want to waste a single. centimeter of space at least lengthwise on this car storage system on the car ferry. You drive this car up into a corridor and then somehow you get out of the car.

If you're in a narrow car, you're at a great advantage here. The corridor that you park in is the same width all along. If you're in a wider car on one of those things, if you're one of these Americans coming over here with your... big wide cars that you used to have until the 1990s. You'd never fit on one of these things. You'd drive up onto that. He'd try to open your doors and he wouldn't open because he'd be jammed in against the walls of this parking corridor.

And everyone else would be annoyed. There's exits along this corridor where you get out of your car and then go up into the part of the ship where you reside while you're in transit. You don't sit in the car, you get out of the car. You go up to this kind of lounge thing, or you go up on deck, or you go up and spend money in the bar for three hours, whatever it takes to cross the Irish Sea. So you go up on this thing.

Your doors don't open so you can't get out. Presumably you have to climb out through the booth. Now, if you're in a very wide car, you probably can't do that. You're not in a hatchback car. You're in a, what do you call those ones? It's a saloon. For the trunk, the boot at the back is a separate outhouse. It's like a coal cellar, but you can't get into your basement through it. You can't get into the main part of the house through it. It's separate. If you have a hatched back car...

Maybe an estate, I suppose. You can climb out of the booth. You're in business. You can go everywhere you want. There's doors every now and then along that corridor. You have to find the nearest doors and walk through them to get to the... Lounge, where you spend the journey on this ship. You have to go to the ones that are aft rather than forward of wherever you've parked. And the same is true for anyone who's parked behind you. They can't get past your car either.

Maybe they have a separate area for any Americans who bring their 1990s cars over. Ryder had one of these Cadillacs. In fact, he had two of these Cadillacs, and they were fucking massive. He sat in the passenger seat. I was the passenger. I'd be in the front passenger seat and he'd be over there. I'd be sitting here and he'd be over in the en suite on the toilet there. That's how far away he was and that's a long way.

I know you can't tell how far away that is, but imagine the master bedroom, but it's the spare room because it's not all that mastery. We don't really care enough about it to use it as a master bedroom. We'd rather use it as an extra bathroom access.

That's not the point. The point is, he'd be over there on the ensuite toilet, which obviously if I'm in this room and I'm pointing over there, so I wouldn't be able to point if it was any closer than an arm's length, because then I'd be... bending my arm that doesn't count as pointing using your common sense you can imagine that the en suite i'm pointing out is at least one arm's length away because if you think about it if i'm pointing at it as i'm doing now

I wouldn't be pointing at it with my arm folded. If you have something in your hand, you don't point at it. You already have it. You say, look at this thing here in my hand. I suppose you could point at it using the other hand. But still. Standing there pointing at your other hand, you look ridiculous doing that. Suffice to say, if I tell you that I'm pointing at the ensuite bathroom over there, it's a good distance away from where I'm sitting.

And that's how far the driver's seat was from the passenger's seat in the front of that 1990s Cadillac. Well, 40-year-old Cadillac or something. So maybe 1950s Cadillac.

There's an awful lot of space. There's not a continuous seat going along the front. You see this on road movies. There's a big seat going all the way along the front of the car. You only need a gap between the seats if you're going to have a gear stick. You don't have gear sticks over there. You have all these automated cars. I presume someone invented gear shifts because some driver got sick to death of sharing the front seat with two other passengers.

Having to share my seat with someone, that's ridiculous. There's a pilot on an aircraft. There's two sets of controls. And if you're on the same seat as the co-pilot... You both have access to the two sets of controls. That doesn't make sense. I want my own separate seat as the driver. So I'm going to find a reason to have a gap between the seating positions. So they invented the gear stick.

And they put that there. They made a gap between the two seats. So it wasn't all one continuous seat. And there was still a lot of space because it's American and everything's wide. So everything was wide. I think you've... made your car smaller now have you i'm not sure because i went back a few years later and cars seem smaller i'm not sure you made your car smaller or has everything else just got bigger Was I in some isolated...

Corn Utopia where everyone happened to own a 40-year-old Cadillac that was the size of a concert hall and most normal people were driving around in a Toyota Starlet. I don't know. Did you even have Toyota starlets over there? You probably had something else. I thought, oh, we have a compact version of a Toyota. It's only 15 feet wide instead of 18 feet. That's probably what you had. Then upstairs on it.

She thought, oh, if her car's going to be narrower and shorter, we need to add an extra level. So in where you usually have the gear shaft, you put a little spiral stairs in there. If you have more than two children in the back of the car, then you have to have a two-story car if you're going to insist on having these compact hatchback cars that don't take up so much road space.

And then, of course, you have the height clearance thing. If you all know from buses and lorries, you don't have as many double-decker buses over there. Over here, sometimes the bus will... accidentally drive under a bridge that's not high enough for a double-decker bus to drive under, and that's a problem. That's a problem, especially if you're on the Upper Saloon. Anyway, this fella who... McDonald's...

clearly stole the concept of burglary from in terms of cartoon characters well understandably they're not a cartoon organization they're a fast food organization They can't be experts at everything, so you have to borrow or steal. So they literally steal the idea of having a cartoon burglar from Popeye. I'm sure they paid for their rights, or if it was...

out of copyright or whatever the issue was. Perhaps there was a Creative Commons license on it. I'm sure it was all above boarding legal. But we all know the original concept of having a burglar in a... cartoon was in Popeye. There was one of Popeye's associates was described who would go around saying, I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Now I never told you what day.

This was happening on. He was led to assume that she was talking about next Tuesday. He's always in need of a hamburger, this fella. Now I know that's not the same as being a hamburglar. You're not stealing hamburgers. And was the hamburgers stealing hamburgers in the McDonald's cartoon commercial material? He probably wasn't. Surely they wouldn't have someone in a McDonald's cartoon.

who was involved in stealing the hamburgers from which they seek to make their business. No, that would be ridiculous. No, so presumably the Hamburglar was into burgers, but he was also a burglar. Perhaps. Or maybe you're trying to say, this fellow is a thief and a scumbag and he's not into hamburgers. Maybe they never depicted him eating hamburgers or expressing a desire for them.

As they said, we don't want this sort of riff-raff associated with our customers, no. We've served a hundred million burgers. I can tell you, there's one million people in this country who we haven't served. One or two percent of the population is in prison at any one time. They used to keep count to say, one million burgers served, whatever. I presume they got to some point where they said, wait, what's the population of America? Say it's 52 million. We've served 50 million customers.

They stopped saying the number then. They don't want to be associated with that million who are in prison because they're burglars and scumbags. They've served 51 million burglars. but not necessarily all to different people, and they go 52 billion, 53 billion burgers, and eventually they get to a point. We've served 5 billion burgers, and anyone who can do the maths.

We'll say, oh, that means everyone who's been part of the American living population, let's say in the last half century, has eaten on average 100,000 of your burgers. That doesn't sound right. Are you serving them to criminals as well? Because that's the only way you could make up the numbers. And they'd have to say, well, no. Or they'd say nothing.

Anyway, this hamburger fella in Popeye was portrayed as a loser because he was always asking for a loan. He was looking for a loan to invest in capital in a burger. which you'd pay for next Tuesday, because that's when the man is paid. That's how you start a business. That's how you get your first house.

You have to borrow. It's a perfectly normal part of our economy. Now, admittedly, it gets out of control sometimes. Interest rates get out of control and there are subprime mortgages and all sorts of shit. I don't think there's ever being a subprime mortgage on a burger that you're going to pay for next Tuesday, has there? No. So leave that man alone. He's perfectly reasonable.

He smelled burgers. We all know you smell a burger, the first thing you want to do is eat a burger. Someone else beside you on the bus eating a burger. It's hard to get that out of your mind. You think I'd love a burger now. I'd gladly pay for next Tuesday for it. This is back in the days of bus conductors. Bus conductor will be around. They say, I'll gladly pay you next Tuesday for this ticket. If I can have a hamburger today, I'll pay for that instead.

And of course the bus conductor, unless he's very dodgy, he's not going to go along with that. He is not. Well, he said to Popeye or someone instead. I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. I remember as a child thinking, are we supposed to think this man is a failure or something? And he's been very positive. He says, I'll gladly pay you. That's entrepreneurial spirit and positivity.

Nowadays, you put that on television and you call it Dragon's Den or Shark Tank. You say, oh, look at these people trying to set up a business. Let's laugh with them. Let's go ha ha ha ha. While we sit on our sofas at home. Hiding from the television license inspector and cramming burgers down their goods that have been delivered on a bicycle. Absolutely appalling. When you're craving the burger, that's the time to have it.

You probably won't be craving it next Tuesday. You have already enjoyed it, and then you get to pay for it, and you get to think while you're paying it, oh, I remember that burger. It was a great fun. I enjoyed that. Quite happy to pay the bill for it now. That's great. Even the most basic of charge cards. It doesn't even have to be a credit card. An American Express card on which you have to pay off the balance every month.

The full balance is not really a proper credit card. Even on that, you get further than next Tuesday to pay. If you buy today, then it's on your bill that comes at the end of the next calendar month. Possibly. Or something like that. It's not like he's asking for some huge big credit extension. No, it's perfectly reasonable. Next Tuesday. Next Tuesday is never far away. It's never far away. Well, except at Christmas.

If Christmas has the misfortune to fall on a Saturday and then Sunday is St Stephen's Day then Monday and Tuesday are both public holidays in lieu of Christmas Day and Stephen's Day respectively. So then there's basically no Tuesday at all that week. So I suppose there's that. And no, most of the time, Tuesday is not far away at all. So it's not a big thing. Leave that man alone. And he's well-dressed as well. He wears this brown soose thing.

And a hat. Some sort of felt hat. It looks like it's made of brown suede or something. The kind of stuff your parents buy you when you're nine years of age and you say you love a leather jacket. or Levi 581 jeans, wherever the current craze is, and instead give you either a suede jacket or a corduroy trouser. Now, admittedly, the corduroy trousers are very, very comfortable. I had them as a child. They used to get corduroy trousers. Very comfortable corduroy trousers.

Every time you fell or scraped your knee off something, you got a huge tear. The knees used to come apart at the seams. And within a month, every part of your trouser had to be replaced by a sew-on patch. And ironically, they were made of leather. So if you played your cards right, you wanted leather trousers or a leather tracker and you're fibbed off with some corduroy or suede thing. Wait, there's corduroy and suede, two different things. Maybe they are.

And now that I think about it, suede jackets are not the same as corduroy trousers. Is that a different type of material? Who cares? I'm surprised to say I'm having a memory. Having a nice memory of these corduroy trousers now that I wore. In my pre-teen years, they get ripped to shreds, especially during the school summer holidays. They just be slit like letterboxes on your knees. Well, eventually you get these leather patches.

And if you do that for long enough, eventually more than 50% of the trouser is leather. And then you've got your leather trousers. It's great. Absolutely fucking great. That's what it is. That's what it is.

I always assumed as a child until I saw it written down somewhere that it should be spelled A-E-R-N-A-L. Oh no, it's C-O-L-O-N-E-L. Let's see. C-O-L-O-N-E-L written down and I assumed that was colonel. I thought there was a military thing called colonel. So all this reading did me no good until I heard it somewhere. Until I heard...

Colonel spoken somewhere and even then I probably didn't even make the connection for many years until at some point perhaps I was watching some sort of multimedia presentation and it finally clicked somehow. Have we even got that right now? I don't know. Maybe colonel and colonel are two different words. I don't know. Well, you don't get to tell me that reading comics was going to make me any less literate.

I was reading books. I was reading comics, but I was also reading books. I was watching quite intelligent television. I used to watch children's BBC in the afternoon when everyone else was watching either Zig and Zag. or whatever was on children's ITV, which was usually more playful and less educational. I'd watch educational programs. I used to watch that Johnny Ball fella. He was this kind of science teacher type.

He used to go around doing educational stuff about history and science. It was like watching school on TV, except if you had the good fortune to have a teacher who was entertaining and funny. Which I did at some point. I did have an entertaining and funny history teacher at one point. But then that kind of ruins television for you.

Because then you go home, you watch something on the television and you say, oh, this isn't as entertaining as that teacher I had last season. It was a history teacher. He'd come on and he'd say, hello, we're going to study the War of Independence or something, or the Easter Rising, whatever shit went on. His country has a short history, but there was stuff in it that happened.

I know you Americans think you're the only ones who had history and founding fathers and stuff. We had founding fathers as well. They're all very tall. Oh, you had your man with the glasses for one thing. You went on to become the first president. You had your man who's in the movie, Michael something or other. Was he in the IRA? I'm not sure.

If I was, there was a different other way to the one you know about today. And it certainly wasn't the, oh no, that's IRS. You Americans have a thing called IRS. which I first became aware of through WWF Wrestling, which is now called WWE Wrestling so as not to be confused with the World Was Life Foundation. But no, it was called WWF wrestling in those days. It had Hulk Hogan and it had this guy who was some sort of IR wrestling specter character. He'd come on in a suit.

with a briefcase and he'd talk about inspections and then he'd beat the shit out of other wrestlers presumably for not paying their back taxes or whatever his he do over there so that was my introduction to the IRS, but was there an IRA as well over there? That means something very different to what it means over here. We also have something called an IRA. Was that a pension investment or something? I don't know, a pension fund? I think he had an oil raising. I don't know.

What's going on about you Americans? I'm obsessed with you Americans because you're everywhere. You're everywhere. Everywhere I look, I look over there. Well, it's just the blank wall. So there's nothing to look at. So I just see whatever I'm talking about at the moment. And at the moment... I'm talking about you Americans. So I see you. So now I see Americans. I'm looking at the wall and I'm picturing Americans that I know.

What Americans do I know? Well, I'm not going to name them. They're ordinary members of the public. They're ordinary private individuals. They don't need to be named on podcasts. I do know Americans other than the famous ones who are on TV and in history books.

It's not all Abraham Lincoln and Colonel Parker, whoever the Elvis fella was, and the other colonel. Was the colonel fella for KFC real? I don't know. Is he just some fella who worked in the... Horrible military canteen. It's called a mess tent. Worked in the mess tent making chicken. Decided, oh, this chicken is gross. I need something done with it to liven the hub.

I'm going to dip it in breadcrumbs and then put spices on it and then serve it in a bucket and then pour sauces on it because it's too dry for the human mouth. And then I'm going to serve half a gallon of cola with it because it's still too dry for the human mouth. And then I'm going to offer it with French fried potatoes with all them fries.

Calling them fried potatoes is too confusing. We have to call them fries. When I was a child, a fry was something you had for breakfast. If you were lucky, on a Sunday morning, someone would make you a fry. And a fry... You may know it as a fry up. We knew it as a fry. It'd basically be sausages and rashers and eggs, black pudding, whatever else you had, maybe tomorrow's, maybe bananas. Apparently fried bananas is not part of a normal childhood here. I assumed it was as a child, but no.

First time I introduced the concept of fried bananas to another adult as an adult, I said, wait a minute, where are you getting that from? Fried bananas, what the fuck? But no, fry up some egg. and fry up some sliced bananas and serve them together on toast. It's fucking delicious. Bananas and egg. There's a thing for you. Whoever the next colonel, what's his name, is trying to invent the next fast food. Banana and egg.

That's what you do. Because Americans, you have this dish called chicken and waffles. And I don't know what it is. I just saw it hung. master chef or somewhere they did a whole big deal of coming up with this dish called chicken and waffles they look very involved they spent hours making it chicken and waffles and sauce or something i don't know but that's been done and

Burgers have been done and tacos have been done. So your next big fast food franchise that you're trying to set up from scratch with a new idea, try doing fried eggs and bananas. That's what you do. Now fried eggs and a banana, because a banana is usually enough, especially if it's a plantain. It's like a banana, but it's much bigger, and for some reason it's considered a separate species.

I'm your standard banana. But no, a plantain, as I understand it. It's just a big banana. It's another member of the banana family. So one of them and two fried eggs should be enough for you. And two slices of white bread. Butter the bread, put the sliced banana on the bread and then put the fried egg on top of that. Put the other slice of buttered bread on top and cut it in two and you have a delicious sandwich for your breakfast.

And that'll do you. I think we're approaching the end of this episode. So before my mouth falls off, I'm going to stop. Goodbye.